On March 23, 1919, but four months after the armistice that ended the Great War—100 young toughs, ex-Italian Army war veterans, former socialist politicians, and newspapermen met in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolchro in industrial northern Italy to form a new political party. By the fall of 1922, the Fascists numbered over 300,000 members.

Dissatisfied with the territorial gains gleaned from Liberal Italy’s participation in the war on the Allied side during 1915-1918, these angry young men, typified by 39-year-old Benito Mussolini, formed the Fasci di Combattimento, which their leader [Il Duce] himself defined as “The Bundles of Battle.” He was referring to the ancient Roman Imperial symbol of an axe surrounded by rods bound together, as their past and present symbol of authority and power.

Audacious Men

Mussolini had served in World War I as a combat-wounded Bersaglieri, a member of one of Italy’s most elite formations. Other members of the new Fascist Party included the Alpini, mountain troops, and also the more renowned Arditi, assault soldiers, who mimicked the famed German storm troopers of 1918.

Recommended: The Colt Python: The Best Revolver Ever Made?

Recommended: Smith & Wesson 500: The Gun That Has As Much Firepower As a Rifle

Recommended: Smith & Wesson's .44 Magnum Revolver: Why You Should Fear the 'Dirty Harry' Gun

The Italian versions of these shock troops, however, were far more colorful than their German cousins, reportedly going into battle armed with daggers in their clenched teeth and grenades in both hands on the very heels of artillery barrages, so as to take the unsuspecting Austro-Hungarian enemy by total surprise. More than half of the Arditi’s members were tough peasant boys, while the very meaning of the word Ardito was “audacious man.”

Formed in June 1917 as special forces, they ran on campaign rather than marched, and one of their commanding officers asserted, “You are the first, the best … the future owners of Italy … the new Italian generation, fearless and brilliant. You will prepare the great future of Italy! The smile of the beautiful Italian woman is your reward!”

This was pretty heady stuff for the young soldiers of that era. The Arditi wore the fearsome skull and crossbones on their caps, gave stiff-armed Roman salutes with unsheathed daggers, and chanted, “To us!” Not only did Mussolini, then the editor of the fiery newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), adopt all of these martial trappings for his new Fascists, but 25 Arditi soldiers guarded his offices in Milan, and four times they burned down those of the rival Socialist paper Avanti! (Advance!).

Fearing these very soldiers, traditional, Liberal Italy had disbanded the Arditi in December 1918, within a month of the end of the war, but Mussolini promptly reorganized them into Fascist squads, roving bands of men wearing black shirts and trousers and red fez caps, who terrorized their political opponents all over Italy with physical violence.

Avenging Italy’s “Mutilated Victory”

They shared the anguish of what poet, war pilot, and political activist Gabriele D’Annunzio defined as Liberal Italy’s “mutilated victory” in World War I that denied it the fruits of victory. One of these was the Adriatic seaport city of Fiume in the new state of Yugoslavia, which all Italians felt should rightly become the spoils of victorious Italy.

On September 12, 1919, D’Annunzio led a small force of former Arditi in a swift occupation of Fiume in opposition to the Italian government of King Victor Emmanuel III, who had been on the throne since the assassination of his father in 1900.

Secretly, both the king and the regular Italian Army favored the occupation, but it also put them in direct confrontation with their fellow Allied victors of World War I—France, Great Britain, and the United States. “Where an Arditi is,” the occupiers boasted, “there is a flag. No enemy shall pass. The Arditi are the real vanguard of the nation,” they proclaimed.

Nevertheless, it was imperative that the king, who at 5 feet, 3 inches in height, was nicknamed contemptuously as “Little Sword,” reassert his authority, as among both the ranks of the Arditi and the other Fascists were many republicans who wanted nothing better than to see the antiquated, 900-year-old ruling House of Savoy swept aside as it finally was by a popular vote after World War II. The king’s most ardent supporters were the royalist officers of the Italian Army, but even many of these had Fascist sympathies.

Benito Mussolini: From Socialist to Fascist

Initially, ex-Socialist Mussolini had been one of these fiery republicans, asserting, “The king is nothing more than a useless citizen,” and in 1912 he even made the antinationalist proclamation, “The Italian flag is fit only for a dung heap!” He had also opposed Liberal Italy’s imperialist war of aggression in Libya against the Turks in 1911 that witnessed the first usage of aircraft in modern warfare.