Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-1943 Paperback – 14 May 2009

This book is a must for anyone interested in the Italian military's development between the wars and it's subsequent disastorous combat record in WW11. The author attributes the Italian military's debacle of miserable combat performance in WW11 to be a long term failure of the Italy's political, social and militay establishments going back to before the Italian state's unification of 1859 - 1872.

This book is relatively brief but is chock full of information and interesting details not normally touched upon. For example: Italian Soldiers in North Africa being denied regular mail service because their famillies wrote nothing but "nonsense" that was not worth them reading - so their senior officers reasoned "Why bother to send it to them"? Or that the the WW 11 Italian conscript soldiers rations were more deficent in nutritenial value than the rations that WW 1 Italian soldiers received and that {overwhelmimgly} Italian officers thought it beneath them to eat in the company of their troops - and {of course}officers received far superior rations!! Or the fact that Italian rear echelon /service troops were not trained, equipted or even expected to fight in crisis situations which meant that all {in effect} they could do was run away or surrender if attacked!!

From it's unification, Italy never possesed the human or industrial resources to claim status as a "Great Power" yet it's political establishment always had pretensions that it was and needed to be a "Great Power". So during the interwar period and despite Fascist Italy's belicose posturing the Italian state fashioned a military that was lacking in every category of what a modern 20th century military would need to be effective - modern aircraft, artillery, and tank technology, increased steel, energy and munitions production, the education and training of her officers/troops, a coherent tactical doctrine and a combined arms/services long term Strategic Planning.

The Italian industrial and technological base for modern weapons and necessity for continual retooling/upgrading for new innovations was limited and futhur hampered by layers of bureracracy. A self serving and incompetent officer corps had a almost pre-industrial belief in that massed foot slogging infantry committed to frontal attacks, Mules for transport!! and a belief that modern technology was overated - massed infantry and the will of their commanders to commite it was the receipt for victory ? The naval staff had a resolute belief that aircraft carriers were nonsense and unnecessary. The Italian air force persisted in accepting delivery as late as 1943 of Fiat CR-42 bi-plane fighters with no radio communication, a top speed of 265 mph and armed with only two 7.7 millimeter machine guns being pitted against monoplane 330 -390 mph Hurricanes, Spitfires, Bristol Beaufighters, Curtiss P-40 Warhawks and P-38 Lighting fighters armed with 6 -8 machine guns, 20mm and/or 40 mm cannon. This lack {and disdain} of modern technology and rigorous troop training would be in stark contrast to modern mechanisation, tanks, trucks, aircraft, superb communications networks and the coordinated, combined operations of all arms that would be practiced so successfully by their German Allies.

In his world view, it seems that "IL DUCE"- Mussolini was stuck in a "time warp" thinking that the easy European conquests for the rampant imperialism of the 1880's and 90's could somehow be transferred to the 1930s for Italy to extend her colonial empire in Africa without British and French aquiesence and without building the economic supports for an effective military machine and failing to mobilize resources and popular support for a better military establishment. Also, Italy was never a truely unified country despite it's nominal uniification in 1870 and it remained {right into the 1950s} a deeply divided country with a population more loyal to region and village than to the nation -state and the scars of the sacrifices of the 1st World War and the 1917 Caparetto debacle had never fully healed - the Italian people were in general indifferent if not outright hostile to military service.

The northern Piedmont generals, the clique that ran the army were in equal parts incompetent and duplictious in their deceiving Mussolini and each other about their military's true ability to fight and win a war in the Mediterrianian against France and /or Great Britain. The navy and airforce had equally severe problems. The navy's outward appearance of a large fleet of fast modern warships was undercut by numerous problems including techical issues with their fire control systems, the shells and firing charge supplied to the navy having wide ranging quality control and tolerance issues {that made it almost impossible for their ships guns to track and consistantly hit a moving target} and a lack of officers and sufficent crew training. Mussolini was ignorant in the larger sense of military matters on every level and deferred to his senior military in most strategic and technical issues because inhis ignorance of larger military issues - he had no choice !!

Mussolini and his military chiefs inability to forge a unity of command, a coherrent strategic plan / doctrine, concentration of resources at an agreed /decisive point and consensus for action is manifestly detailed by the author. Thus, the litany of Italian defeats from 1940 -43 on every front was pre-ordained by the Fascist state's military / industrial complex's total failure to adaquently prepare for war at every conceivable level. Italy lacked resources, but were obtainable in the Middle East {oil!!}

For a brief period of opportunity in 1940 -41 if Mussolini had the where-with-all to crack the whip on his military,commanders, concentrate all avaliable naval, air force and army resources for a combined operation to attack the weakened British in Eygpt there might have been a major Italian victory - at least temporarily. But due to a critical lack of higher level leadership, nerve, coodination of the Army, Navy and Air Force and poor logistical support once this brief window of opportunity passed - the limited Facsist resource base, the entry of the U.S.A. into the fight and scattering of the Italian Army forces from Yugoslavia, Greece, Libya to Southern Russia could only have one outcome - defeat everywhere !!

The myriad of disaster and defeat on every battlefield had such a corrosive effect on the Italian army that most of it's forces did not have the will to defend their homeland against the 1943 allied invasion. The lack of motivation and fighting spirit exhibited by Italian Army's officers and men when the majority of it's 40 divisions barely made a token effort to defend the Italian mainland and allowed a few German divisions to disarm and scatter it - this is a trully appalling inditement of the Fascist State and it's army. By contrast, one cannot conceive of the Imperial Japanese Army throwing it's weapons away and failing to fight "tooth and Nail" {in 1945} when the Japanese home islands were threatened with invasion. And while the Japanese Army was almost as poorly equipped as the Italians, their fighting spirit and training greatly compensated for it's lack of material resources and as a result it was an extremely formidabile fighting force.

The Italian armed forces were dismissed by it's enemies {and German Allies} as a "joke force" and this book gives considerable validity to that view and it more than explains how and why the Italian Armed Forces performance in WW11 was so wretched. The used copy that I received from Amazon was in very good condition - no complaints. This book is well written, with a lively text that is lucid, well researched and brutal in it's final conclusion. I give it a 4 1/2 star rating - Highly reccommended.

Book was OK. Arrived on time.
Lots of behind the scene facts for those interested in the details of WWII in general, and Italian/German relationships in particular.

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 was rare.

Zeb Kantrowitz

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 fought determinedly the only type of warfare which they could fight - non-mobile defence (Cheren, Gondar, Bir el Gobi, El Alamein, Tunisia); moreover, and more importantly, he points out that "units in north africa, Albania, and Russia held together in conditions (...) that would have caused soldiers of the industrial democracies to quail". Another theory is that the Fascist regime was responsible for the disastrous planning and conduct of the war. The book makes it abundantly clear that the regime did have major responsibilities in sstrategic blunders, but they compounded, rather than cause, the faults within the armed forces.
Finally, I would like to note that the book is a valuable case study of an army that prepared for "the previous war" (or even the one before...). As such, it provides general lessons that can have universal validity and transcend the specific case of Italy in WW2.

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.