Alfredo Bennicelli

Alfredo Bennicelli and the unfinished birth of the Italian tank arm

1. A pioneer

In the military history of twentieth-century Italy there are men who change the way an army ought to think about battle. Count Alfredo Bennicelli belongs to this second group. A reserve artillery officer, a mechanic by vocation, a farmer of large estates, an observer on the Western Front, later lieutenant colonel, colonel of the reserve, brigadier general, Senator of the Kingdom and Papal Secretary of Embassies, he is remembered by the historians of the speciality as the first Italian officer to be formally and systematically tasked with studying the tank and, ideally, as the founder of the Italian tank troops, the carristi.

His story is not just a biography. It is the story of a foresight that, between 1917 and the early 1920s, clashed with financial caution, the jealousy of the traditional corps and a strategic culture still nailed to the Alps and to the infantry. That clash, documented in the chronicles of the tank veterans’ association and in accounts of the birth of the speciality, would weigh for a long time on the motorisation of the army.

The historian Mario Picone Chiodo, in “In nome della resa” [In the Name of Surrender] (Milan, Mursia, 1987), put it bluntly: the only person in Italy who understood the importance of the tank was Count Alfredo Bennicelli, head of the assault-tank office at the Commissariat for Arms and Munitions. He would have liked to pursue his studies after the war, but was dissuaded by a government that feared such conspicuous machines as a provocation to the social order, and was «neutralizzato del tutto» [“completely neutralised”] by his appointment as senator in 1934.

2. A technical vocation before a military one

Alfredo Bennicelli was born in Rome on 19 February 1879, the first-born son of Count Achille and Elisabetta Martinori. The Senate record lists his siblings Filippo, Riccardo and Maria Antonietta.

He belonged to a wealthy Roman family with close ties to the Papal Court, which it served without interruption under seven popes, from Pius IX to Paul VI.

He grew up in Rome, studied at a boarding school in Florence and went on to the University of Agriculture.

He learned French and English, languages that would serve him on his missions to the Allies. From a young age he was passionate about mechanics and the mechanisation of agriculture.

At eighteen he obtained a licence to drive automobiles: the family was among the first in Italy to own one. At twenty-six he came into possession of his first car, a 1905 Benz, which — like all those that followed, and like clocks and other mechanisms — he repaired and tuned himself.

At the beginning of the twentieth century he did his military service as a reserve second lieutenant in the 13th Field Artillery Regiment in Rome. It was a family tradition: many of the Bennicellis passed through one branch or another of the artillery. He was not a career officer in the strict sense.

Once discharged, he devoted himself to running his farming estates in Lazio and Umbria, more than five thousand hectares, improving their management and starting their mechanisation.

He married Rosanna dei marchesi Spinola, of the family of the Marquesses Spinola. Their son Alberto was born of the marriage.

His great-nephew Filippo, interviewed by La Stampa in 2017, would remember him as «un gigante che ci aiutava a riparare i nostri giocattoli» [“a giant who helped us repair our toys”], an authoritative figure who was at the same time «dotata di una particolare dolcezza» [“gifted with a particular gentleness”] with children. The image is no mere footnote: it speaks of a man able to hold workshop and family together.

Personal and institutional profile

3. Requisitions, Fiat and the prelude to the tank

When Italy entered the war on 24 May 1915, he was recalled and assigned to the office requisitioning motor vehicles for military use. At first he had authority over the provinces of Rome, Terni and Perugia; then over Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto as well. He stood out for his mechanical competence and was posted to Fiat in Turin, where he organised the repair and conversion of damaged vehicles and supervised the construction of cars and lorries built to military specifications.

In particular, he followed the development of the vehicles for towing heavy artillery: Fiat 20B, Fiat 30, Pavesi-Tolotti A and B, with special attention to their use on mountain roads, typical of the Italian front. The work did not stop at procurement.

He trained «autieri esperti» [“expert drivers”] and gathered from the units and depots the modifications to be introduced into production. His visits to the front were intense and continuous. This commitment earned him promotion to captain.

That spell in Turin is the true prelude to the Italian tank arm. Bennicelli learned to think in terms of engines, logistics, wear and industry, not only of textbook tactics. When the Ministry of War decided to investigate the new weapon that had appeared on the Western Front, it already had the right man.

4. In Flanders: seeing the future in the mud

Italian interest in tanks came late and cautiously. The first British Mark I tanks appeared on the Somme on 15 September 1916.

The Royal Italian Army, according to the account established in the encyclopaedia entry on the carrista and in Maurizio Parri’s chronicle, approached the vehicle «con molta cautela» [“with great caution”]: enormous costs, specific training, the absence of logistics and maintenance specialists, the lack of a doctrine of employment and «una diffusa diffidenza circa le loro reali possibilità d’affermarsi sul campo di battaglia» [“a widespread mistrust of their real chances of proving themselves on the battlefield”].

With the appearance in France and Britain of the first armoured machines, on 2 January 1917 the Ministry of War issued Alfredo Bennicelli a diplomatic passport for France, where the first tank units were being formed. The assignment came directly from the minister, Lieutenant General Vittorio Italico Zupelli. Bennicelli wrote in his reports that the adoption of those «formidabili macchine» [“formidable machines”] could help to break the deadlock of the Western Front.

Through General Alfredo Dallolio, head of the Franco-Italian commission, he visited the Schneider works, the Grand Quartier Général at Bragance and the training centre at Marly.

He met the French generals Estienne and Dupont to negotiate the transfer of a Schneider tank to the Royal Army. Amid hitches and obstacles, and thanks to the personal commitment of the ambassador in Paris, the Marquis Salvago Raggi, he managed to examine the French and British tanks deployed on the Ypres front.

The family memoir records an episode that the open-access summaries phrase differently: on 17 August 1917, the first and, as far as is known, the only Italian to do so, he took part in a live-fire attack at Poperinge, personally driving a Renault FT.

On that occasion Bennicelli tested the French tanks in combat several times and became convinced that the tank best suited to the Royal Army would be the Schneider.

The encyclopaedia entry moves the British attack to 9 August 1917 and places his admiration for the Schneider in a later French action on the Somme.

The two versions must be kept distinct: the chronology of the memoir is consistent with the passport of January 1917 and with an action in Flanders in the summer; the attribution to the Somme, also repeated by La Stampa in 2017, is incompatible with the debut of tanks on that river, which took place in September 1916, before his mission.

He also studied a captured German A7V and was not impressed by it.

From the mission he obtained a concrete and rare result: a Schneider, serial number 212, transferred to Italy for evaluation. The trials at Tricesimo were positive: the tracks worked on Italian terrain too, at least in principle. Italy then asked for more vehicles. The report he submitted led Dallolio to order 100 Renault FTs and 20 Schneider CA1s from France.

The diplomacy of machines

On 10 October 1917 he was issued a new diplomatic passport. With the engineer Lieutenant Pasqualini he returned to France to negotiate the supply or, failing that, production under licence. They visited armament factories and the Renault and Peugeot proving grounds, noting strengths and weaknesses. During this mission Bennicelli was promoted to major and strengthened his connections in the French and British armies, among industrialists, technicians, politicians and statesmen.

The military situation of the Allies was far from brilliant: the Germans and Austro-Hungarians were advancing, and France and Britain refused supplies to Italy in order to reserve them for their own armies. Through stubborn mediation, and despite French resistance, he nevertheless obtained four Renault FTs, to be evaluated in Italy with a view to national production.

La Stampa, in 2017, summed up the outcome curtly: against a request on the order of more than a hundred tanks — the memoir speaks of a hundred FTs and twenty Schneiders — the «cugini d’oltralpe» [“cousins beyond the Alps”] were «avarissimi» [“extremely stingy”].

In the meantime, news reached Bennicelli that his brother Riccardo, an artillery captain decorated with three silver medals for military valour, had been killed by a sniper on the Tolmino front during a reconnaissance, two days before the great Austro-Hungarian offensive at Caporetto.

For Alfredo the loss was a terrible grief. Years later, at his own expense, he had an elementary school named after his brother built on the Solfagnano estate in Umbria. In a photograph of the Fiat 2000 trials, shown below, he appears with a mourning band on his arm.

The point must be held firm. Bennicelli did not invent the Italian tank in a laboratory: he saw it in war, measured its limits, understood that Italy could not depend on its allies and pushed national industry to produce its own. At the end of 1918, according to Parri, there were seven tanks in all on Italian soil: two Fiat 2000s, one Schneider and four Renault FTs. That was the minimum stock from which a modern army should have started. It did not start.

Churchill, the Légion d’honneur, the Mark IVs

On 28 July 1918 a telegram from Minister Zupelli to General Nicolis di Robilant, head of the Italian delegation at Versailles, reported that Italy was prepared to produce the FT for its French ally as well. In exchange, at the direct request of General Armando Diaz to Generalissimo Foch, it asked for the immediate supply of «almeno» [“at least”] twenty-five tanks for the imminent surprise offensives on the Italian front, and some modified medium Schneiders.

The mission continued with high-level meetings. On 15 August, at the Ritz hotel in Paris, Bennicelli saw Winston Churchill, then British Minister of Munitions, who had taken over that ministry in July 1917 after supporting the Landships Committee from which the first tanks had sprung.

The archive telegram, reproduced here, is an invitation to dinner at 8 p.m.

In September the French Ministry of Armament ordered the major’s appointment as a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and the award of the Croix de guerre with palms, for the courage he had shown at the front driving tanks and for his commitment to championing the use of tanks in Italy.

In October Churchill personally considered the possibility of supplying Italy with fifty Mark IVs and of sending Italian personnel to France for training as soon as possible.

To these Allied honours the memoir adds the Belgian Croix de guerre, the British Distinguished Service Cross and a citation in the orders of the French army signed by Pétain.

5. Two ideas of the tank, one industry

5.1 The Fiat 2000: mobile fortress and dead end

Italy had begun its studies in 1916, when the French and British projects were still unknown in the country. Between 1916 and 1918 Fiat, building on an impetus already set in motion by a 1915 contract and with design contributions from Giulio Cesare Cappa and Carlo Cavalli, produced the first entirely Italian heavy tank.

The prototype was presented to the authorities on 21 June 1917: the mechanics were final, while armour and armament came later, together with the trials near Turin. Only two were ever built, one in 1917 and one in 1918.

In April 1918 Major Bennicelli was sent to Treviso, to the Campo Esperienze Z testing ground, to attend the first acceptance trials and to write a technical report based on what he had seen in France.

He wrote that the great tank had been conceived to «costruire una macchina blindata con trasmissione a cingoli, potentemente armata e blindata, che potesse con facilità manovrare sui terreni pietrosi del Carso, quale base di numerosa squadriglia di altre macchine, più leggere e rapide» [“build an armoured machine with tracked transmission, powerfully armed and armoured, able to manoeuvre easily over the stony ground of the Carso, as the base of a large squadron of other machines, lighter and faster”]. He praised the mechanical structure, the armament and the armour plating made by Ansaldo of Genoa-Sampierdarena, and its ability to cross rivers, knock down obstacles and cross trenches.

On the other hand, he pointed out the open problems: machine guns that needed ball mounts; a single exit hatch for the crew; the impossibility of firing the gun at a steep angle of depression, which made it useless at close quarters; dimensions that ruled out rail transport unless the tank was dismantled into two parts; armour, on-board weapons and lines of fire not yet tested, as Fiat itself admitted.

He suggested reduced propellant charges for the 65 mm gun. In the discussions on armament he also pressed for a 75/76 mm piece in the turret; the 65/17 mountain gun prevailed.

For its time it was not a crude vehicle. It was a colossus of about 40 tonnes — the technical data sheets give 38.78 t, 7.40 m long, 3.20 wide, 3.80 high — with 15-20 mm armour, a six-cylinder Fiat A12 aero engine of about 250 hp (some association chronicles mistakenly say 600), a speed of around 6-7.5 km/h, a crew of 8-10 men, a 65/17 gun or howitzer in a revolving turret and a ring of Fiat-Revelli machine guns.

The Tank Encyclopedia describes it as a well-conceived heavy tank, with an engine compartment separate from the fighting compartment and a top-mounted turret that anticipated solutions destined to become standard.

Its operational fate confirmed the doubts about its mobility.

At Bennicelli’s suggestion, the only superior who backed him — General Zupelli — took the matter up with the Minister of the Colonies. Approval came: two Renault FTs and one of the two Fiat 2000s left for Tripoli. The vehicles arrived in February 1919. The Libyan experiments were interesting.

The tanks moved over sandy and stony ground, but were far too slow: the slowness had already been reported by Bennicelli, who had commissioned studies of tanks capable of twice the speed and with more powerful armament.

The psychological effect against the guerrillas was strong; the ability to pursue fast-moving formations in the desert was not. All trace of the African example was lost. The second remained in Italy for demonstrations; it was modified in 1934 with Vickers-Terni 37/40 light guns in place of two front machine guns, exhibited on 3 September 1934 at Campo Dux in the Parioli district, ended up as a monument at the Corrado Mazzoni barracks in Bologna, home of the 3rd Armoured Infantry Regiment, and is still recorded there in 1936. It was later scrapped. No original Fiat 2000 survives.

5.2 The Renault FT and the light-tank route

Aware that the 2000 was too slow and cumbersome, designers and commands turned to the Renault. To increase the interest of the armed forces, politicians, industry and the press, Bennicelli quickly organised a demonstration. On 2 August, as the Tank Encyclopedia reports, the four Renault FTs that had arrived were, by May, ready for the command.

The substance of the display, on the ramparts of the ancient walls of Piacenza: under Bennicelli’s guidance an FT overcame steep drops and trenches, a ditch 5 metres wide and 2 deep, heaps of sand and large boulders, a car, and climbed over a 4.5-metre embankment.

The display was convincing. The Arms and Munitions Commission issued an order for 1,400 Renault FTs to be produced in Italy. That same evening, armed with his credentials, he left for Paris with orders to negotiate the licence.

On 25 September Fiat and Ansaldo informed him that they had organised the forthcoming production of 400 assault tanks, modified according to his instructions so as to ford watercourses 1.20 metres deep.

In October he prepared a budget estimate for 1,400 tanks, divided into lots among the manufacturers and to be delivered in the first six months of 1919. Along with them: 60 radio tanks («carri d’assalto con telegrafo senza fili» [“assault tanks with wireless telegraph”]), 150 trailers for road transport, 100 seven-tonne lorries, 37 mm light guns, machine guns and the type of ammunition required.

In that same year, 1918, he prepared the technical study Artiglieria e carri blindati cingolati [Artillery and tracked armoured vehicles], which envisaged converting the FTs into self-propelled mounts for 75 and 105 mm guns, simply by removing the turret and a few other parts.

One of these self-propelled guns was built by Ansaldo of Genoa immediately after the end of the war. It would appear at the Stadio Nazionale.

The Fiat 3000 was born nonetheless, the first Italian series-production tank: about 150 built between the Model 21, armed with machine guns, and the Model 30, with a 37/40 gun; it was faster than the FT thanks to a 50 hp Fiat engine and Italian design solutions.

It entered service in 1921-22 and remained in the line, incredibly, until 1943.

It was the backbone of the first battalions. It fought in Libya at Giarabub in 1926, in Ethiopia and, by then obsolete, on the Greek-Albanian front and in Sicily, where some were used as fixed pillboxes.

It was the most that Italy had managed to derive from the impetus of 1917-18. It was not yet an independent armoured force.

Brief comparison

6. The end of the war and the stocktaking of 27 December

The great Italian and Allied offensive on the Piave, and the capitulation of the Austro-Hungarian armies, ended the war on the Italian front.

Shortly afterwards the German Empire capitulated too. Within a few days, on the orders of the head of the Commissariat for Arms and Munitions, His Excellency Conti, the construction of the 1,400 tanks was suspended.

On 27 December 1918 itself Bennicelli wrote to his superiors to take stock, so as not to waste the experience, the designs and the money already spent by the State and by the companies to start production. He suggested gathering the procured materials, engines, armaments and components in a single military arsenal, so as to complete at least the tanks that could still be built.

His hope was that the authorities would follow the example of the Allies, who, once the war was over, continued to develop their armoured arm.

Many of the senior officers did not believe — wrongly, as the Second World War would show— in the use of tanks on the Italian fronts.

The demobilisation of the army and of the colossal industrial apparatus was considered a priority. Almost no one listened to him.

7. The apotheosis of 1919, and the discharge

Stubbornness did the rest. He organised one last coup de théâtre for the benefit of the Italian Red Cross. On 5 April 1919, at the Stadio Nazionale in Rome, in the presence of the King, the Crown Prince, the entire royal family, the political and military leadership, the press and a huge crowd, onto the field came an FT with a machine gun, the 105 mm self-propelled gun, the 40-tonne Fiat 2000, two Ansaldo armoured cars and an Itala mountain lorry. The Schneider stayed offstage. One of the FTs was driven by Bennicelli, who was slightly injured by a pole that entered the cab through a small hatch left open, while the tank climbed over and demolished an old horse-drawn omnibus.

Tanks and armoured cars performed manoeuvres and climbs, crossing ditches, trenches and barbed wire. At the end, amid the cheers of the crowd, all the vehicles left the stadium through a breach made by the Fiat 2000 in the perimeter wall. In his own words: «Lo spettacolo, che consisteva nel mostrare che cosa fossero i carri d’assalto e che cosa potessero compiere contro qualsiasi ostacolo, riuscì benissimo, perché l’incasso per la Croce Rossa fu molto ingente, il pubblico si divertì assai e perché molti, ancora increduli, dovettero convincersi che quelle potenti macchine avevano in sé possibilità di impiego superiori al previsto» [“The show, which consisted in demonstrating what assault tanks were and what they could achieve against any obstacle, was a great success, because the takings for the Red Cross were very large, the public enjoyed itself greatly, and because many, still incredulous, had to admit that those powerful machines held possibilities of use greater than expected”].

Following the event he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and awarded the silver medal of the Italian Red Cross. On the evening of 7 May 1919 the officers of the assault tanks celebrated their newly promoted commander. Lieutenant Faustini delivered the speech in homage to the man who had been the first to understand the importance of the arm, and closed with a toast and the words «Evviva i Tankisti Italiani!» [“Long live the Italian Tankmen!”].

During 1919 he took part in trials and evaluations of the Fiat 2000 and of an unspecified armoured car intended for the reconquest of Libya.

In August he was again seconded to Fiat, to continue the work interrupted in 1917. The Great War, though won, left Italy in precarious economic and social conditions.

The crisis held back the development of tanks; the hostility of part of the senior officers and of the political world hardened. Bennicelli was left alone and unheeded. He was discharged in 1920 and returned to civilian life, while continuing to act as a Fiat consultant on tanks.

8. The post-war wall: why he was not heard

Once the war was over, interest in armoured vehicles gradually waned. The show of 5 April was not enough to turn the intuition into a programme. The sources on the birth of the tank troops — in particular Parri and the overview of the speciality — make it possible to isolate three structural reasons, which cannot be reduced to a single personal enemy.

The budget jealousy of the traditional corps

A new arm takes funding away from the infantry, the artillery and, above all, from a cavalry jealous of its primacy in manoeuvre. Introducing the tank meant admitting that the horse and the foot soldier were no longer the centre of warfare. No corps was willing to pay for an unknown quantity that had yet to be assessed.

The dogma of Alpine warfare

The General Staff remained anchored to the idea that the defence of Italy would be decided on the mountain peaks. A 40-tonne tracked vehicle seemed absurd among the rocks. What Bennicelli had seen in Flanders and tried to show at Piacenza and in Rome was underestimated: light tanks could operate in valleys, plains and colonial theatres, and the war of the future would not be merely a replay of the Carso. The April 1918 report had already said so: the heavy tank as the base, the light squadron as the instrument.

The absence of technical culture and doctrine

There were no specialists, no field workshops, no schools, no regulations. The commands, the tank-corps tradition writes, lacked a precise idea of how to employ tanks in combat. In France and Britain people were beginning to think in terms of independent armoured masses; in Italy the vehicle was progressively relegated to infantry support.

In fairness to history it must be said that not all the reservations of the top brass were mere pretexts.

The Fiat 2000 was too slow for many theatres; Italy had a real problem of terrain; the post-war budget was starved.

The short-sightedness does not lie in having rejected the 2000 as a series-production tank.

It lies in having drawn the wrong conclusion from that rejection: that the tank as such was a luxury, an accessory, a parade-ground curiosity.

Bennicelli was asking for something else. He was asking for mass production of the light type, the study of a national breakthrough vehicle, schools, inter-arms cooperation, industrial independence from France. He obtained fragments. Not a doctrine.

In the 1930s the choice would take concrete form in the preference for the ultralight tanks of the L series, the three-tonne «carri veloci» [“fast tanks”], at the expense of a credible line of medium and heavy tanks. This is not the whim of a lone, unheeded Bennicelli: it is the outcome of a cultural and industrial delay that he had been the first to denounce.

9. His last creation: the Fiat 3000, then agriculture

In 1923 the commander of the Voluntary Militia for National Security, Italo Balbo, tried to involve him — drawing on his knowledge and connections — in creating a tank establishment for the new force, founded at Mussolini’s behest on 1 February of that year. The attempt did not succeed.

Also in 1923, although discharged, on 23 April he was called by the director-general of artillery construction, General A. Torretta, to join the commission responsible for the trials of the Fiat 3000 prototype.

He had the satisfaction of seeing his creation born, an evolution of the Renaults that brought together many of the ideas he had advocated years before. He also collaborated on the development of the Ansaldo Mod. 28 wheeled tank, which did not go beyond the prototype stage.

From 1924 he no longer dealt with tanks and returned to his Umbrian estates. In the same year he joined the National Fascist Party.

In 1933 he took up posts at the University of Agriculture in Perugia; the Senate record specifies the office of president of the Cattedra ambulante di agricoltura of Perugia.

On 26 October 1933 the Prefect of Perugia proposed him for the Senate, in the category of the largest taxpayers. Victor Emmanuel III appointed him on 23 January 1934; his appointment was validated on 2 May and he took the oath on 3 May.

He was on close, long-standing family terms with the royal family. In the Senate he sat on the Agriculture Committee, from 17 April 1939 to 14 April 1941, and then on the Committee for the Corporative Economy and Autarky, until 5 August 1943. He was also Secretary of the Senate from 15 April 1939.

Meanwhile, on 1 October 1927, the Tank Regiment had been formed, based at Forte Tiburtino, the first organic home of the speciality. It was a belated recognition, and still on a small scale. Bennicelli was not its commander: years before, he had been its technical raison d’être.

Appointed colonel of the reserve, in 1935 he took part in the great manoeuvres in Alto Adige with the Trento Motorised Division. Afterwards he wrote a critical and severe report on the insufficient motorisation of the armed forces. His observations were dramatically confirmed in the Second World War.

10. The bill came due in Africa

The Second World War did not punish Bennicelli. It punished the tankmen, who fought with undeniable heroism. When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, the bulk of its armour still consisted of obsolete light tanks, with a few medium tanks that had only just appeared and were inferior, in gun and armour, to the British Cruisers and Matildas.

The Fiat 3000s, conceived in the wake of the 1918 demonstrations, were still fighting in 1943. In Sicily some were dug in and used as bunkers. It is the cruellest image of the delay: the late fruit of the foresight of 1917 used as an immobile strongpoint against an amphibious landing.

The tragedy of the gap in military equipment, and at the same time the heroism of the first Italian tankmen, are well summed up by what would, not by chance, be the last message of the 132nd Armoured Division Ariete during the Second Battle of El Alamein, quoted in the memoirs of Erwin Rommel: «Carri armati nemici fatta irruzione a sud Divisione Ariete. Con ciò Ariete accerchiata. Trovasi circa 5 chilometri nord-ovest Bir el Abd. Carri Ariete combattono!» [“Enemy tanks broken through south of Ariete Division. Ariete thereby encircled. Position about 5 kilometres north-west of Bir el Abd. Ariete tanks fighting!”].

The chronicles of the speciality and the memoirs on North Africa insist on a point that is not rhetoric: the individual valour of the Italian tankmen was often greater than that of the vehicles under their tracks.

The motto «Ferrea mole, ferreo cuore» [“Iron hull, iron heart”] — later also the title of English-language studies of the Italian armoured arm — lies exactly in this gap: the steel was lacking, the heart was not.

To attribute that whole gap to a single act of ostracism towards Alfredo Bennicelli would not be correct.

To credit him with having seen the problem twenty years earlier, and to lay on the institutions the burden of not having tackled it, is consistent with the facts.

In 1940, recalled to the reserve as a brigadier general, he was given a non-operational post in Rome. He was also assigned to the editorial committee for the history of military motoring, tank section: the committee never met. As a senator he worked on the committees for agriculture and the war economy.

11. The man behind the general

During the war he began to distance himself from Fascism because of clashes with the party secretary, Achille Starace.

To show his disagreement he refused, among other things, to accept the ban on wearing decorations from foreign countries — French, British, Belgian — at official ceremonies.

At the same time, after the fall of Fascism, he was sidelined by the Badoglio government because of his Fascist past.

After the armistice of 8 September 1943 he withdrew to his country residences near Perugia, and at Solfagnano he was arrested by the Germans as a monarchist and for not having joined the Italian Social Republic.

He was held hostage and imprisoned for several months in the political prisoners’ wing of Regina Coeli.

From there, through the intercession of Pius XII, his friend since childhood, and of Marshal Graziani, with whom his nephew Francesco Bennicelli was on very cordial terms, he was released, escaping worse persecution.

In 1944 he was nevertheless referred to the High Court of Justice for Sanctions against Fascism, in the group of senators charged with having kept Fascism in power and made the war possible.

The application to strip him of his seat was rejected on 21 October 1944: acquitted, in the memoir’s words, of all charges.

After the war and the fall of the monarchy, in 1950 Pius XII appointed him Secretary of Embassies in the Vatican, the third most important lay office in what was then the Papal Court.

Until his death in Rome on 30 May 1960 he devoted himself to that office and to his Umbrian lands.

The office dealt with foreign missions. On 13 April 1951 Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were received in private audience by Pius XII; the following day their suite and the Court posed with the Swiss Guards.

In St Peter’s Square he is immediately recognisable, because he is the only dignitary in cape and sword looking at the camera, in the centre of the procession, in front of the sedia gestatoria. The same cape, the same white lace, the same high forehead as in the other two plates. Around him, Swiss Guards, the Noble Guard and the crowd; the Pope gives his blessing from the throne.

Honours, as recorded in the memoir

12. What remains

Today the memory of Bennicelli and of his foresight lives on above all in the remembrance of the Associazione Nazionale Carristi d’Italia (the Italian tankmen’s national association) and of military history enthusiasts.

In this regard, mention must be made of the work of those who, since 2017, have built with great skill a working replica of the Fiat 2000 from period photographs, a few drawings and a scale model.

The project, greatly appreciated by the Bennicelli family in memory of their illustrious relative, has physically brought back to life a vehicle of which not even the hull survived.

On its own it does not convey the political and military lesson of the story, but it embodies its pioneering intuition.

The physical construction, begun at the end of November 2018, used a petrol engine, an inert 65 mm gun donated by the Museo della Guerra in Rovereto, and the modelling work of Mario Italiani.

A worthy replica of the original.

Alfredo Bennicelli saw in the mud of Flanders what much of the Italian General Staff would accept only after paying for it in human lives: that modern war would be motorised, that armour could not remain an accessory of the infantry, and that a country without its own tank industry would remain backward on the battlefield.

He obtained one Schneider, four Renaults, two Fiat giants never produced in series, an order for 1,400 tanks cut the day after victory, a 105 mm self-propelled gun, a commission, a few parades, the ideal birth of the Fiat 3000, a regiment in 1927.

He did not obtain a doctrine. His defeat was not personal. It was the symptom of an army that, coming out of the Great War, preferred to read victory as confirmation of the existing order rather than as an obligation to change its weapons.

When the Italian tankmen, years later, went into the line repeating «Ferrea mole, ferreo cuore», they were also honouring — without always knowing it — the captain who had been the first to ask for the iron hull, and who had been left, above all, with the heart.

13. Sources and lines of verification

These statements rest on the family memoir, on the illustrated essay and on the papers and studies listed below.

Archival work remains to be done on Bennicelli’s original reports to Dallolio and on the records of the Arms and Munitions Commission of 1918-23.

The family photographic material may not be reproduced without prior permission.

Archive and writings of Alfredo Bennicelli

• Bennicelli Family Archive. Photographs of the Fiat 2000 trials; Winston Churchill’s telegram of 1918; photographs of the Papal Court with the Count in the dress of a Secret Chamberlain of Cape and Sword.
• Alfredo Bennicelli, Artiglierie su carri blindati a cingolo, 1918. Technical study cited in the text: conversion of the FTs into 75 and 105 mm self-propelled guns.
• Alfredo Bennicelli, I primi tanks o carri armati, in Realtà, 1936.
• Alfredo Bennicelli, Cenni sui primi tanks o carri armati, Officine tipo-litografiche I.G.A.P., 1936.
• Alfredo Bennicelli, A Regina Coeli. Con i politici del terzo braccio, self-published, 1945.

On the Count and the origins of the speciality

• Nicola Pignato, Nel centenario della nascita. Il conte Bennicelli, pioniere italiano dei carri armati.
• Nicola Pignato, Le origini del carrismo in Italia, Rivista Militare, year C, no. 5, September-October 1977, pp. 89-93.
• Pierfranco Malfettani, Alfredo Bennicelli, «padre nobile» dell’arma corazzata italiana, Storia Militare, no. 319, 2020.
• Filippo Cappellano and Pierfranco Malfettani, Carri armati per la Milizia?, Storia Militare, no. 359, 2023.
• Rodolfo Ballardini, Alfredo Bennicelli, il padre del carrismo italiano, Rivista Italiana Difesa, no. 3, March 2009, pp. 85-97.
• Filippo Cappellano and Nicola Pignato, Il carro armato e l’Esercito italiano nella Grande Guerra, Storia & Battaglie, no. 79, April 2008.
• Maurizio Parri, Storia dei carristi e del 32º Reggimento carri, self-published edition.
• Senato della Repubblica, record of Alfredo Bennicelli, https://notes9.senato.it/web/senregno.nsf/
• Andrea Cionci, La Stampa, 12 September 2017, and the 2020-2022 reports on the Fiat 2000 replica; testimony of Filippo Bennicelli.
• Associazione Nazionale Carristi d’Italia, remembrance of the speciality, motto, support for the replicas.

Vehicles, industry, employment

• Bruno Benvenuti, Il carro armato Fiat 2000 e le prime tanks italiane, Storia Militare, no. 12, 1994.
• Storia Militare, Carri armati nella Grande Guerra, no. 285, 2017.
• Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, Ufficio storico, Gli autoveicoli da combattimento dell’Esercito italiano, vol. 1, Dalle origini fino al 1939, 2002.
• Lucio Ceva and Andrea Curami, La meccanizzazione dell’Esercito fino al 1943, Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, Ufficio storico.
• Alessandro Gionfrida, L’Italia e il coordinamento militare interalleato nella Prima guerra mondiale, Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, Ufficio storico.
• Various authors, Fronte terra. Carri armati in servizio fra le due guerre, vol. 1, Edizioni Bizzarri, 1973.
• Ugo Barlozzetti and Alfredo Pirella, Mezzi dell’Esercito italiano 1935-1945, Editoriale Olimpia, 1986.
• Bruno Benvenuti, Cesare Falessi and Bruno Pafi, Storia dei mezzi corazzati, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1976.
• Bruno Pafi, Cesare Falessi and Giuseppe Fiore, Corazzati italiani 1939-45, D’Anna, Rome.
• P. E. Papò, Mezzi corazzati italiani. I primi quarant’anni, IBN Editore.
• Nico Sgarlato, I carri armati leggeri italiani dal 1919 al 1970, IBN Editore.
• Nicola Pignato, Motori!!! Le truppe corazzate italiane 1919-1943, GMT.
• Nicola Pignato, I mezzi blindo-corazzati italiani 1923-1943, Storia Militare.
• Vincenzo Meleca, I carri armati poco conosciuti del Regio Esercito, Tracce per la Meta Edizioni.
• Antonio Tallillo, Andrea Tallillo and Daniele Guglielmi, Carro Fiat 3000. Sviluppo, tecnica, impiego, Gruppo modellistico trentino di studio e ricerca storica.
• J. J. Timothy Sweet, Iron Arm. The Mechanization of Mussolini’s Army, 1920-40, Stackpole Military History Series.
• Tank Encyclopedia, entries Fiat 2000, Fiat 3000 and Renault FT in Italian Service.
• Mario Picone Chiodo, In nome della resa. L’Italia nella Seconda guerra mondiale (1940-1945), Mursia, 1987.

The context plates — office, Flanders, Schneider, 1917-1927 diagram — were created to accompany the essay and make no claim to accuracy.