AlbertN wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 3:38 pm
May I ask the source, because right now the alpini divisions are 9000 or 10000 personnel already.
I somehow am extremely, EXTREMELY skeptical there are 6500+ personnel just to handle packmules, not counting what in the 10000 currently present are already support squads.
Several very good resources were posted in the original thread dealing with this topic, including the US War Department Handbook on Italian Forces from 1943, as well as an image of a 1942 German Kampfstarke document for the Julia Alpini division, which shows a war strength of 11,000 men MINUS all of the support elements.
Here is the link to the relevant war department handbook, which puts the regiments at around 4500 men each (three large battalions with service elements down to the company plus what was essentially an entire dedicated service battalion). Just those two regiments would therefore total 9000 men.
https://archive.org/details/TME30-420/page/66/mode/2up
It also notes that the battalion is the highest alpine unit with a fixed organization, pointing to the fact that each battalion of the regiment had to have sufficient support personnel (and mules transporting equipment, gear, food) to operate more or less independently in mountain conditions.
This also comports with the KStNs of the German Gebirgsjager, which similarly were two-regiment divisions but with total manpower around the same level of a German three-regiment infantry division. Most of that is support personnel. Mountain divisions/regiments are a lot larger than one would think just from an org chart, and it is for sure mainly because of the pack mules and logistics elements. They are larger and exist in strength much further down the chain.
However, adding to this, niehorster notes that in 1942 at least, the Italian divisions serving in Russia had a lot of non-standard units added on a permanent basis for Russian front duties: the Alpini divisions appear to have had a whole extra Alpine company in each of the six battalions across the two regiments (an Alpine company, according to the War Department document, totaled 330 men or so, so that's another 2000 guys roughly right there, putting the full-strength total for JUST the two regiments at over 10,000 guys), plus two AA and three AT companies (probably around 120-160 guys each), plus an extra artillery battalion of 700 men. So that's the extra 3400 men that make up the difference of the standard 13k-to-14k-or-so men in the 1940 division TOE (the artillery regiment, the engineer battalion, the service elements) found in niehorster, and corroborated by this War Department source.
The niehorster and nafziger material for Italian units is generally pretty janky. Niehorster doesn't include any manpower numbers for the most part, just weapon counts and internal organization. I think most of the nafziger sources on WWII Italy also deal with internal organizations (i.e. how many weapons per company, and how many companies of what kind were in each subunit, but not how large the companies actually were or what jobs the soldiers within them had). It can't be too tough to find online Italian sources which outline these details more clearly: I remember coming across a very good website on the North African TOEs for both Italian and Libyan colonial divisions a while back (though I don't remember how to find it again). The original thread had some Italian sources that seemed good. Consensus seemed clear across all provided sources that the divisions should be much larger. 16,000, with the additions coming mostly in support squads, sounds right, although some attention should be paid to those extra AA, AT, and mountain guns too, as well as the six extra Alpine companies. Those additions would add significantly to combat strength.
