Fascist Warfare, 1922–1945

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction

   • Miguel Alonso, Alan Kramer, Javier Rodrigo

   Pages 1-23

3. From Great War to Fascist Warfare

   • Alan Kramer

   Pages 25-50

4. National Socialist Assessments of Global Fascist Warfare (1935–1938)

   • Sven Reichardt

   Pages 51-72

5. Civil War, Total War, Fascist War: Rebel Violence and Occupation Policies in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

   • Miguel Alonso

   Pages 73-95

6. Fascist Civil Warfare: Mussolini’s Wars in Spain and Italy, 1936–1945

   • Javier Rodrigo

   Pages 97-118

7. Cultures of Total Annihilation? The German, Italian, and Japanese Armies During the Second World War

   • Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi

   Pages 119-142

8. Technology and Terror in Fascist Italy’s Counterinsurgency Operations: Ethiopia and Yugoslavia, 1936–1943

   • Nicolas G. Virtue

   Pages 143-168

9. The Impact of the ‘China Experience’ on Japanese Warfare in Malaya and Singapore

   • Takuma Melber

   Pages 169-193

10. Fascist Warfare and the Axis Alliance: From Blitzkrieg to Total War

    • Daniel Hedinger

    Pages 195-220

11. The German War in the East: The Radical Variant of Fascist War

    • Jeff Rutherford

    Pages 221-240

12. The Evolution of Ustasha Mass Violence: Nation-Statism, Paramilitarism, Structure, and Agency in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941

    • Lovro Kralj

    Pages 241-268

13. From the Milizia Fascista Albanese to the SS Division ‘Skanderbeg’: Between Imposing Fascist Ideology and Adapting Local Warfare

    • Franziska Anna Zaugg

    Pages 269-293

14. Back Matter

    Pages 295-336

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This groundbreaking book explores the interpretative potential and analytical capacity of the concept ‘fascist warfare’. Was there a specific type of war waged by fascist states? The concept encompasses not only the practice of violence at the front, but also war culture, the relationship between war and the fascist project, and the construction of the national community. Starting with the legacy of the First World War and using a transnational approach, this collection presents case studies of fascist regimes at war, spanning Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Croatia, and Imperial Japan. Themes include the idea of rapid warfare as a symbol of fascism, total war, the role of modern technology, the transfer of war cultures between regimes, anti-partisan warfare as a key feature, and the contingent nature and limits of fascist warfare.

• history of conflict
• fascist regimes
• perception of war
• national identities
• history of genocide
• Franco
• Nazi Germany
• Fascist Italy
• fascism
• Imperial Japan

“A valuable contribution not just to comparative fascist studies, but to our understanding of the state violence that fascism unleashed on a world still reeling from the Great War. With its blend of sophisticated conceptualization and historiographical detail across an impressive geographical scope, it casts a powerful, baleful light on the fusion of advanced technology with Manichaean ideologies of hatred that characterize the modern age.” (Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University, UK)

“The age of extreme violence in the 1930s and 1940s is seldom explained in broad theoretical terms. Fascist Warfare presents a stimulating and challenging thesis that fascism, broadly defined, possessed a dynamic of total violence that ended in imperial war, genocide and terrorising strategies of counter-insurgency. This will prompt a lot of hard thinking about the way such warfare has been treated historically and has the added virtue that it is treated comparatively. The volume forces us to reconsider the way mid-century violence has been presented and understood.” (Richard Overy, University of Exeter, UK)

“By enquiring whether a particularly fascist form and understanding of waging war existed in the 1930s and 1940s, this excellent book offers an intriguing new approach to the history of conflict in early twentieth-century history. Co-edited by three eminent scholars in the field, and with contributions from leading historians of fascism and conflict, the book brings together fresh perspectives on the nature of the wars unleashed by Franco's Spain, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and even Imperial Japan and the Independent State of Croatia.” (Robert Gerwarth, University College Dublin, Ireland)

• Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

  Miguel Alonso, Javier Rodrigo

• Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

  Alan Kramer

Miguel Alonso is a researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.


Alan Kramer is Emeritus Fellow and Professor of History, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.


Javier Rodrigo is ICREA-Acadèmia Reseach Fellow and Associate Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

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