When & where did the Russians fight the Italians?
The Italians came to Russia together with Napoleon and Hitler, but there were battlefield encounters in other countries, as well.
The Patriotic War of 1812
Parade of the Italian troops before Eugene de Beauharnais 1812.
In June 1812, Napoleon's ‘Grande Armée’ officially invaded the Russian Empire. About half of it comprised allied foreign contingents, including Italians.
Almost 34,000 inhabitants of the Apennine Peninsula took part in the campaign, mainly from the Kingdom of Italy, which was subordinate to France. They were commanded by Napoleon's stepson, Viceroy of Italy Eugene de Beauharnais.
The Italians showed themselves well in the military campaign, including the ‘Battle of Borodino’. "You have Roman blood in your veins… You must never forget this," the emperor praised them.
Despite this, the Italian contingent almost entirely perished, along with the ‘Great Army’. Only a few thousand managed to return home from Russia.
Crimean War
Bersaglieri at the Battle of Chernaya.
In 1853, the Crimean War broke out, in which Russia confronted a coalition of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia.
Sardinia had no reason to fight against Russia, but the kingdom sought to become the center of the unification of Italy and, by entering the war, it was trying to raise its international authority and strengthen relations with the British and French.
The Sardinian contingent in Crimea amounted to about 24,000 men, but practically did not participate in the battles. The most striking episode was the battle on the Black River on August 16, 1855, when the Franco-Italian forces defeated the Russian army. Several dozen Italians died in the fighting, but more than 2,000 died of typhus and cholera.
The Spanish Civil War
CV-33 tanks of the Italian Corps of Volunteer Troops in the area of Valencia, June 1938.
The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936, became a kind of rehearsal for World War II. It was on the Iberian Peninsula that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy first clashed with the USSR on the battlefield.
Mussolini sent an expeditionary force of 50,000 men to Spain, including his personal guard, the “Blackshirts”. The number of Soviet troops did not exceed 2,000 men, but it was largely thanks to them and Soviet weapons that the republic managed to hold out for so long.
In the sky, Soviet I-16 fighters skillfully shot down Fiat CR.32s and, on the ground, Soviet tankers smashed their Italian counterparts. Thus, on October 29, 1936, near Madrid, Lieutenant Semyon Osadchy carried out the world's first tank ramming, pushing an Italian Ansaldo tankette into a ravine.
Unfortunately, the Francoists and their German and Italian allies ultimately won the Civil War.
World War II
Soviet troops in the Don Valley with the captured standard of an Italian regiment.
On the day ‘Operation Barbarossa’ began on June 22, 1941, there were no Italian soldiers in the invasion army. Hitler decided not to involve his main ally in the "crusade against Bolshevism", since Rome was having enough problems in the Balkans and Africa.
However, Mussolini convinced the Fuhrer to give his troops a chance to prove themselves in battles against the Russians. By the summer of 1942, the number of the 8th Italian Army on the Eastern Front reached 230,000 men.
The Italians experienced major problems with supplies and weapons and demonstrated rather low combat effectiveness. The most effective were the elite Alpine riflemen and the MAS special purpose torpedo boat divisions on the Black Sea and Lake Ladoga near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
After the catastrophe of the German troops at Stalingrad in late 1942, the Italian troops followed, falling under the steamroller of the Soviet offensive on the Don.
“The exhausted men fell in the snow, never to rise again,” recalled Eugenio Cort, an officer of the ‘Pasubio’ division, the retreat of the troops. “The most stubborn crawled along the road for a long time, until the strength finally left the unfortunates.”
In Spring 1943, Mussolini withdrew the remnants of the defeated 8th Army from the Eastern Front. This catastrophe deeply shocked Italian society and became one of the reasons for the subsequent fall of the Duce regime.
