Mussolini’s Hawks. The fighter units of the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana 1943-1945

Up to relatively recent times, the commonly accepted number of air victories gained by the ANR fighter pilots was between 239 and 240 planes shot down as well as another 115 unconfirmed between January 1944 and April 1945. However, a re-examination of both British and American operational reports led to reconsider those numbers, showing how the air victories actually gained by the Republican fighter pilots probably totalled in truth one quarter of the figures accepted for decades. With this fact we don’t want to accuse the Republican fighter pilots in any way of having deliberately exaggerated their scores. Moreover,we don’t mean with this either to be little or put into perspective the contribution of the ANR to the war effort of the Axis, or to minimize their moral motivations and their great personal courage. On the contrary the latter two aspects had been shown to be fundamental in continuing with the fight in a situation of complete material and numerical inferiority, but not in morale. This has been fully proved not only by the hard air battles and by the grave losses sustained by “Mussolini’s Hawks” in a year anda half of war, but also by the insignificant number of desertions in their ranks. There were only two RSI fighter pilots who voluntarily handed themselves over to the enemy, while a third had himself interned in Switzerland. In fact it is as well to remember that there were many more crews of other belligerent nations that sought safety in flight to Swiss territory. At the end of the war numerous American aircraft were parked at Swiss airports that could be compared to just one Macchi 205 ofthe ANR, this fact in itself was indicative of the devotion to duty of the pilots of the Aeronautica NazionaleRepubblicana.