Children’s cut-out of a “Blackshirt” unit of the XXIII Division

Fascist militants from Italy began arriving in Spain to fight alongside the rebels in July 1936. One of them, Arconovaldo Bonacorsi, who called himself “Count Rossi”, became notorious for leading the repression on Mallorca that was described by the French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos in his book Great Cemeteries Under the Moon. When the 40,000 men of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie (CTV) arrived between the end of 1936 and the beginning of 1937, the pretense that they were volunteers was kept up as a way of getting around the Non-Intervention Agreement, but the truth quickly became known. They were followed by thousands of “Blackshirts”, after the colour of their uniform, belonging to the Voluntary Militia for National Security (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale) that had been created in early 1923.

As official propaganda claimed, many of these men were motivated by the Fascist faith and the desire to fight those they considered enemies of Catholicism. Many others, however, mostly peasants and day laborer from the south and the islands, were driven by necessity, to escape unemployment and provide food for their families. (The median age of these men was thirty.) This meant that economic incentives, such as generous wages, and professional opportunities for the officers, played an important role. As well as making it possible to maintain the appearance of neutrality, the fiction that they were volunteers also fed the Fascist myth of the “citizen soldier” who fought for political ideals. Even so, the Militia and the Royal Army had to resort to forced recruitment to find enough men to send to Spain.

The prospect of fighting in a distant land, even when accompanied with promises of jobs or - as in Ethiopia – land, did not encourage spontaneous mobilization. Unlike in World War I, imminent danger or a threat to the nation’s borders could not be invoked. The war in Spain was presented as an ideological undertaking, an opportunity to create a “new order” in Europe. However, when the onerous human and economic cost of intervening in Spain became known after the defeat at Guadalajara, even Mussolini admitted the difficulty of waging a “war of doctrines” in the absence of the motivation to defend the national territory, or one’s own home.

FJMS