Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–1943

Could the Italian Armed Forces and the Generals who were in charge be any more inept if they tried. From 1922, after the 'March on Rome' to the 'Forty-Five Days' in 1943; Mussolini and his Military did everything they could to build a strong armed forces, but ended up building a Camel. (A camel is a horse designed by a committee.) From what Knox writes, the three branches of the military spent more time fighting over money and prestige than training and building an effective offensive power. In the seventeen years leading up to 1939 (versus six years for the Germans) they spent billions of lira on military hardware that didn't work and never created the necessary 'links' between the services that would allow joint efforts. The Air Force still relied on a bi-plane as it's main fighter and had no airlift ability to bring in supplies or support paratroops. The Navy built Battleships that didn't have enough destroyers to protect them, ineffectual guns, no ability to fight at night and catapult launched floatplanes that couldn't be recovered at sea. The Army depended on Tankettes and a medium tank that had such a small main gun that it was useless outside of four kilometers. Over the years the Air Force had so many prototype planes that they had few squadrons that were homogeneous. There was no effectual anti-tank squads or guns, and logistics were so bad that most soldiers received mail only after three months. The inability to feed and cloth soldiers on the move in Africa meant that some didn't have hot meals for months on end. The Air Force and Navy seldom worked together because their was little or no communication between them. So was this endemic to the Italians. In a word, Yes. Unlike Germany, there was no history of prestige for being in the military. Unlike the British, this is where the nobility sent their sons only as a last resort. Cheating the military on quality and quantity of goods was looked at the same way as cheating on your taxes. The Italian 8th Army in Russia received boots that had soles made out of cardboard because no one checked the consignment. The Italian Navy tried to keep out of harms way in order to protect the few ships they had been able to build and knew they couldn't replace. Mussolini spent most of the late 20s and thirties as his own supreme commander, placing his Fascist cronies at the head of the different branches of the military. (As ineffectual as Goring was, the Luftwaffe had good officers and equipment.) The Italian military built more for prestige and looks than effectiveness. The Italian Navy had over 100 submarines by 1939, but few were ocean going and easily found by sonar used by the British in the Mediterranean. According to Knox, if your looking for an example of how NOT to run a military; the Italian Armed Forces was a sterling example. It should be noted that when Italian troops were well trained and armed they were able to acquit themselves well; unfortunately this wa

The book is well researched and documented and presents myriads of facts regarding the deficiencies of Italian war planning and fighting. Italy was totally unprepared for entering World War II and Musolini's megalomania ruined her in the most devastating way. I really enjoyed the numerous references to the state of the Italian Armed Forces and the incredible problems that the top leadership left unsolved, only to face them with disastrous consequences later in battle. I wish only that Mr Knox had also presented the good side of the Italian war effort, taking into account the important works of some "revisionist" historians, like James Sadkovich.

In MacGregor Knox's Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, And The War Of 1940-1943, the military buff and the student of World War II military history is provided an informative descriptive history and analysis of why the Italian Fascist regime was so basically ineffectual in conducting the war. Author MacGregor Knox offers an innovative analytical cross section of the Italian war effort in a broad spectrum of perspectives, the ineptitude of Italian military leadership, and why the Italian armed forces dissolved prematurely and almost without resistance -- especially when compared with the diehard and suicidal resistance of German and Japanese armed forces in their respective theaters. Hitler's Italian Allies is an impressive, unique, and highly recommended contribution to World War II studies and reading lists.

That the Italian Army does not have a good reputation for military valor, honor or even competenece is no suprise. After all this was an army that lost to Ethiopia at the battle of Adua. And never has this army been less successful than during the Second World War. Mussolini could not beat France after it had been defeated by Germany. He nearly lost to Greece before the Germans helpfully intervened. From its cowardly attack on France at the moment of her defeat to the cowardly evacuation of its elite from Rome before the Nazis handily occupied half of Italy, the Italian military effort was one of shame, incompetence, dogmatism and fatuousness.Knox's book provides a succinct account of an army that failed almost every conceivable measure. There are exceptions of course; the Italians had some good intelligence measures and some of them occasionally fought hard-fought battles. What went wrong? Few will disagree with Knox that Italy was poor, had limited resources, that Mussolini's leadership was disatrous. But Knox puts special emphasis on Italy's military culture. Looking at area by area, Knox starts with politics and industry. War industries were inefficient and bureaucratically complex. Overall tax yields actually decreased 20% in the three years of the war, and draft deferrments allowed people to stay in college until they were 26. The Italian state gave monopoly support to industries which made "perhaps the worst monoplane fighter of the Second World War." In machinery the Italian Army, despite 30 years of desert warfare in Africa, could not produce proper compasses for their desert trucks. In emphasizing the propaganda value of numbers, Mussolini and the army created a logistical nightmare of insufficently motorized divisions. The navy foolishly decided that it did not need aircraft carriers until it was too late, nor did they understand the value of torpedo bombers, while innovative research on radar stayed in the lab until it was also too late. The air force leadership failed to demand proper high-octane fuels and many of their planes had to run on castor oil.Strategically the Italian military failed to recognize the full economic weight of the Allies. They failed to appreciate the coming of Barbarossa or the supreme ideological importance it had for the Nazis. Mussolini dissipated Italian forces on half a dozen fronts. By contrast much of the army and navy were unhelpfully passive and unimiginative, moving with little daring or even proper plans. Military operations were slow, with poor coordination, over-complex structures and officer heavy staffs that all made for poor mobility. Commanders badgered their subordinates with obsessively and unhelpfully detailed orders, while buck-passing was the order of the day. Promotion was slow and unmeritocratic, and three were so few motorized vehicles soldiers often had to walk on foot. The supply services were uniquely unhelpful, working in such a centralized manner that divisi

This book is the much expanded version of an essay which appears in the book "Common Destiny" by the same author. It fills an important gap in English-language history of WW2. The Italian participation in WW2 has been minimized, misunderstood or plainly ignored by many English and American historians. There is no shortage of books that lead readers to believe that Rommel had only (or mostly) Germans under his command in North Africa, when in fact they were the smaller part of his troops. Similarly, crude jokes on the Italian army in ww2 have been all too often the substitute for serious analysis. This book has a rigorous, analytical, well-documented approach to the problem of explaining the extent Italy's defeat in WW2. A defeat that was so comprehensive in spite of the fact that the Fascist regime had regarded war as central to its objectives for 20 years. The author has drawn extensively on a vast number of high-quality, specialized studies by Italian historians (generally not available in English), and this alone would be enough to make it unique. However, the author ties together all the documentary evidence in a convincing thesis.Basically, the main conclusion is that Italy's defeat was made inevitable by the failure of its "military culture", a concept that encompasses not only the strategic/operational/tactical spheres, but also the relatiosnhip regime-armed forces-monarchy, the military/industrial complex, and the cohesion of society as a whole.The author's analysis is extensive and multi-faceted; for example, he covers in detail the obtusity of the top brass (and its reverence for the infantryman-mule combination), the neglect and contempt of the rank and file by the officer corps, the inefficiency of the cartelized arms producers, but also the basic cultural deficiencies that made it difficult to turn Italian recruits into cohesive, motivated units. In short, the author shows that the extent of Italy's catastrophic defeat was made inevitable by intellectual failure -many of the armed forces' shortcomings were, quite simply, self-inflicted, and even the meager industrial resources were squandered by incompetent management. I might add that these mistakes were bound to be penalized devastatingly in a war like WW2, which required outstanding managerial skills at all levels. Indeed, people familiar with Italian history (whether military, economic or social) will recognize the pattern in which, as the author says, "collective inadequacies in research and development cancelled out individual skill and valor": invariably this country, so skilled at brilliant improvization, has found itself ill at ease with long term planning, objectives prioritization and resources allocation.The book deserves its 5th star for redressing some of the mistaken theories "explaining" why Italy's defeat was so total. The first theory, or I should say prejudice, is that Italians were not willing to fight. The author mentions several occasions when the Italians foug