Italian issues

I had issues with finding a topic for this week since most of the time I was either renovating the roof with the family or been playing a game which isn't really interesting enough to bother with so I came up with something else.

I taught about holding a presentation about it but changed my mind due to the very difficult language use it would have required. Today's topic is about why many people consider Italy of the second world war incompetent.

First of all its clear to all who has a little idea ww2 that Italy wasn't all that successful, that is true but it wasn't because the italians were idiots but due to numerous problems, many of those weren't the fault of the commanding officers, soldiers, civilians or political leadership.

Italy even though leaving the great war as a victor did not received the lands they claimed and suffered the war greatly, losing men numbering in half a million and making it worse it happened on one short frontline. Due to these italians felt betrayed by the entente forces which gave way to Mussolini and his ambitions of reforming the Roman empire (which still a dream of many italians even after one and a half thousand years) and slowly mobilized the populace for the cause.

Carro Armato M13/40 a tank obsolete even at its introduction

(due to it was designed to operate in the Alps)

Meanwhile the military understood the mistakes made by the army back in the great war and set out to modernise the army and the air force. A lesson of the great war was that army must be prepared for the environment it will be deployed in and since Italy is a mostly mountainous country and will probably just defend its borders from outside threats they settled their war doctrine around Mountainous warfare. A theater where the defender has the high ground making artillery ideal while limiting the amount and size of amour capable of entering it, also greatly limiting the number of airfields and with the aeroplanes of the time which were very short ranged, speaking of short range, in the mountains it is harder to command large unit formations so they reduced the size of units (while having the amount of experienced personnel in the staff) which led to over promotion. all they had to worry about is replacing the losses or so they thought.

The offensive minded politicians and defensive doctorined high command led to many fault of Italy`s unpreparedness despite at the outbreak of the war they had as many planes

as France and the United Kingdom together and twice as many armoured units then France (which was considered one of the biggest tank users at the time) half of those planes were aeroplanes mainly suited for reconnaissance missions (this was due Italy expected the artillery to be its main fire power and those planes were meant to spot enemy units in the mountains where it is difficult to notice them) also all most all

Fiat Cr.32 a recon plane which had to enter dogfights

of those tanks were small with underpowered guns and armour protection since they expected them to operate in the mountains where you don't have to be the best tank if you are the only tank around.

Carcano modello 38

During the invasion of Abyssinia (1935-36) the Italian army tested its strength and found out they were not prepared enough, it is true that they won but with the use of chemical weapons on both soldiers/warriors and civilians. From this conflict the army learned that their rifle cartridge (the 6. 5x52mm Carcano) was too weak and saw to replace it with the  7. 35x51mm Carcano but due to their rifles were using the old ammunition they first had to either replace or rechamber the rifles so they created the Carcano modello 38 even though the rifles made it to the frontline even the war break out they dont had the proper ammo for it yet. Forcing the italians to either use the older rifles or the older ammunations which greatly decreased both the range and accuracy of the Carcano 38.

This may seem very odd but Mussolini didn`t planned engaging in a world war and Italy was at the time a “poor” agricultural country with limited industrial power and resources.

The italian army on paper looked very strong, like mentioned the number of tanks and planes were scary and some of those planes very the fastest at the time but here comes the problem, those were designed to fly fast without their payload but armed the performance was poor. Is it getting bad? oh it's about to be worse, remember when I talked about over promotion? due to that most of the army staff was “incompetent” since they had enough experienced NCOs and even worse suddenly they had to adopt from the Trench warfare they been trained in to mobile warfare, an area where Italy had little experience.

Given all the circumstances the Italian army wasn't all that horrible if we count together they were fighting a 3 front war in 1940 with France, Greece and Great Britain. and examining their equipment, for the purpose they were designed they were not only fine but many times even better or the best around but due to their low industrial power and differences in tactics and goals their resources were not managed properly. While under German command italian units achieved their greatest successes as german general Erwin Rommel made sure his units were deployed with proper support, the german-italian armies almost made it to Cairo but the Reich`s oil shortages cut the hopes short. After the defeat in Africa, the king Victor Emmanuel the third saw to overthrow Mussolini but he was rescued by the waffen-ss and the germans occupied Italy. Now the italians stuck between the allies and germans, two powers that would only exploit them gave up on fighting, resisting little both their invaders. on the final note when germans were short on manpower they took italian volunteers to the waffen-ss forming the 29th (1st italian) waffen-ss grenadier division, which achieved good result, defeating even the best american units deployed in Italy. (note that only a handful of divisions [usually counting about 10 000 men] were deployed with italians and the fact partisans captured and hanged Mussolini is only his bad luck as italian partisans were scares)