Folgore Paratroopers at El Alamein, 1942 (XX0027)

Folgore! — Italian Paratroopers in the Desert at El Alamein

The Folgore was raised as a parachute division and never made a combat jump. It was committed to the North African desert as infantry, and it is there — holding the southern sector of the El Alamein line in the autumn of 1942 — that it earned the reputation it still carries.

A parachute division without an airborne operation

The 185th Division “Folgore” was formed in 1941 and trained for an airborne assault on Malta, an operation repeatedly planned and finally cancelled. Its men were volunteers, selected and trained to a standard well above that of the ordinary line divisions, and then deployed to Egypt in July 1942 to fight on foot in a role for which their light equipment made them structurally unsuited.

Light infantry against armour

Airborne troops carry what they can jump with. In the desert this meant the Folgore faced British armoured formations with almost no anti-tank capability of its own: a handful of guns, hand-placed mines, and improvised charges used at very close range. The division compensated with prepared positions, carefully sited defensive works dug into the sand and rock, and fields of fire coordinated between strongpoints.

The southern sector, October 1942

During the second battle of El Alamein the Folgore held the southern end of the Axis line at Deir el Munassib. The sector saw repeated attacks and, in the diversionary operations mounted there, the division’s positions held. The wider battle was decided elsewhere and by other factors — material superiority, fuel, air power — but the sector itself was not broken by assault.

What the desert actually did to the division

The Folgore was destroyed by the retreat, not by the battle. Cut off without transport when the Axis line collapsed, its men walked; most who did not fall were taken prisoner. Of roughly 5,000 committed, a few hundred reached the Axis lines. The division was formally dissolved in November 1942.

Reputation, and how to read it

The Folgore is one of the very few Italian formations of the Second World War to be praised in British accounts of the fighting, which is part of why its memory has been preserved so carefully in Italy. That reputation rests on a real record of defensive fighting under impossible material conditions — and it is worth reading precisely for those conditions, rather than for the rhetoric that has sometimes been built on top of it.