Good analysis from this post of
Dayyālu at the forum rpgcodex :
So, the age-old question of why Italy sucked in WW2. The question must be approched properly, because the reasons where many and interlocked.
First of all, there is a huge tradition of mostly anglo-saxon propaganda that has to be reconsidered: the Italian fighting man was on the level of most soldiers in the conflict, and when in a proper situation with proper support managed to push his weight. Italians weren't worse at war than the Rumenians, the Greeks or even the British (early war),
if we consider the individual soldiers. It's simply that the single soldier was put into the shittiest situation.
Let's start with the basics: Italy was a poor country, only barely industrialized. Even
Germany wasn't well-industrialized compared to the US or even the Union: Italy was an agricultural country with no natural resources , ferociously dependant on foreign import for most of the needs of modern industrialization and with a population that was mostly illiterate. Recruits with technical aptitude were rare. This means that Italian weaponry was more expensive, slower to produce and often of inferior quality if compared to others. But we'll discuss the equipment later.
One thing that the backwardness of Italian society worsened was a clear
social divide between the ranks. Italy has never been good in being "unified", and it has been even worse at being a coherent Nation State. There was, and there still is, a ferocious sense of local belonging amongst most Italians: and the Italian officers had in most cases nothing but contempt for the "country bumpkins" that were in the ranks. Italian officers developed into a system that richly rewarded "office warriors", meaning Italy had a shitton of administrative officers and lacked trained field officers and NCOs, and the reserve dumped people unfit for service. This meant that for the field officers you had people that lacked training, grit and sense of responsability: and the higher ranks were mostly promoted out of family connections or political support. Furthermore, they were a
different social class: Italian officers enjoyed the perks of their rank, had different food and lodgings, and that caused negative morale consequences for the rank-and-file. R&R instead for the common ranks was atrocious (some men in North Africa or in the Balkans fought for
three years straight with no relief or pauses). In short, Italian officers were badly trained bourgeoisie that often lacked the loyalty of their own men if not for military discipline, a thing harshly enforced. Furthermore, Italian society, despite twenty years of Fascism, utterly lacked the motivation for "total war" and openly despised the Germans: OVRA reports are an amusing read as the common view of the German Ally was terrible. Admired for their technical prowess, considered brutal barbarians in all other regards. With such allies...
Wait, you can ask, how the heck Mussolini in TWENTY YEARS failed to build enough support for a good war and for his regime? The thing is two-fold: first, the Fascist Regime had the support of the population in a very.... Italian way, so as long as the population got enough gibsmedat everything was good. When that failed to keep up only the True Believers stuck with the Duce, a stunning minority. Second, the Fascist Regime was outwardly powerful: in reality, Mussolini had a stunning amount of problems caused by opposing powers inside Italy: the King himself, the Church, the industrial powers, his own party organization.... the propaganda painted the Duce as an all-powerful figure, but in reality you had this schizophrenic situation where
everyone technically followed Mussolini but at the same time the
real power of the Fascist State was limited. Lemme explain with an example: tank production. Italian tanks were shit. FIAT-ANSALDO , the main industrial conglomerate that built Italian tanks, managed for more than 15 years to keep an iron grip on Italian tank production sinking all opposition, be it Czechs, other italian designers or even German models: the Italian leadership
knew that the product was shit, but "nothing could be done" as you could not directly oppose FIAT-ANSALDO because if you bought other tanks then FIAT would have closed their factories and you would have gotten strikes and a loss of popularity that Mussolini could ill-afford. Yes, i'm literally telling you that the fascist State bought shitty weapons because it was hostage of corporate interests. Same applies with the Navy and the Air Force, with a bunch of hilarious examples of subpar prototypes or corruption scandals.
It's weird, but ... Mussolini was the
main power everyone referred to (the biggest strategical mistakes he did single-handedly) but at the same time his power to
really influence the Italian society was incredibly limited, propaganda boasts aside. Furthermore, the fascist party had never managed to do a proper "revolution" despite claims: until 1943 and the RSI, Fascism pretty much protected the old elites, worsening the traditional italian problems of backwardness, corruption and nepotism. Scientific research and weapon development were secondary to political and family considerations: for example, Italy threw out a shitton of bomber prototypes, most of them
clearly unviable, just to give chances for embezzlement. You can say that all countries had such things (the "feudal" industrial system of Nazi Germany or even the initial crony corruption inside the SU) but the problem in Italy was so common that it actively fucked up weapon design and production.
Furthermore, Italy lacked resources or stockpiles for a modern war. Italy in 1940 had already burned considerable resources into colonial expeditions (Ethiopia) or in the Spanish Civil War, with thousands of trucks and hundreds of artillery pieces sent to fight campaigns that had little impact for Italy itself. The commercial blockade that the Allied powers forced on Italy started strangling the war economy almost immediately, and the Fascist State was ill-organized: they
failed to plan for such a blockade, and if someone planned he wasn't heard because no one wanted to tell Mussolini the bad news. This takes us to another peculiar thing: Mussolini had a lot of
limits, but in the end everyone deferred to him for the ultimate decisions, and Mussolini utterly lacked a trained cabinet, being surrounded by self-serving sycophants that inevitably failed to tell him the truth of the situation.
So, for the basics, you had a poor country with no resources , shitty allies, and a schizophrenic political system. That can't go wrong, no?
If we want to 'sperg on equipment, the Italian Army had
hilarious problems with their equipment. Their logistics were a mess, meaning the troops were often underfed, under-equipped and under-supplied: not particularly their fault though, as the ammunition needs of italian weapons were a mess, with five to nine
different calibers employed by a stunning array of borderline-functional weapons (the infamous Breda 30 LMG or the Brixia mortars).
Grain loads for the guns could not be trusted (as the ammo factories had shitty checks), meaning that the already underpowered Carcano rifles had unrealiable performance. Sure, Italy had some great guns, like the MAB SMG, but this takes us to another of the basic problems of the Italian industry: it was underdeveloped. Let's take the MAB. It's a great SMG, sure, if we compare it to a PPs-43 or something. I am going from memory here, so the true data is probably different: a single MAB required more than
forty hours of work done by a skilled artisan, while you could equip a
squad with the same man-hours for PPs SMGs: Italian production was badly organized and tragically slow, meaning that even
good designs could not be produced in numbers or replaced fast enough (case in point, the Royal Air Force). And often you had
shitty designs that were kept into production for political or "Whatever we don't have anything else" reasons.
Tanks were developed by a single guy. I am not joking. All the Italian tanks were developed by a single man in a single office at the FIAT-ANSALDO, and whatever he made got okayed because reasons, fuck performance. Sum that with subpar tech and you had those beautiful riveted tankettes with the worst engines you can think of. Sure, Italian doctrine didn't focus on tanks much (it was commonly believed that the war would have been fought like in WW1, mountain front) but they were still crap.
Navy was borderline adequate (good training, some good units) but the command (SUPERMARINA) was scared of
everything and lived under a costant psychological inferiority against the British. Think of..... I dunnow, Navy depression: "We can't win we can't even try if we try we're gonna lose" and thus they lost or did atrocious mistakes or suffered hilarious reversals like Taranto. The only bright spot for the Italian Navy were the frogmen, but that's a desperation weapon.
The Air force would require several paragraphs, so whatever. Let us say that it wasn't terrible, but it lacked staying power, Italian training wasn't adequate, and the Italian machines were often horribly under-armed. Go play War Thunder or something, and check how many machineguns the Italians get. Two at best, and with shitty fire rates and ammo loads. And the Italian air industry could not replace combat losses.
Do you know that Italy had an equivalent of the SS? The MVSN "Milizie Volontarie per la Sicurezza Nazionale", or commonly known as the "Camice Nere". Most of them had horrible equipment, terrible logistics, and were composed of old men that performed horribly under fire. There was a reason Hitler purged the SA as "unreliable", but Mussolini could not afford such things, so he got the shit-tier of political military units. Some of 'em weren't bad (youth units in particular) but pearls before swine.
And at last, the strategical problems. See, now we have a poor country with bad industry. What we are going to do, focus on a few theatres were we can leverage our limited strength?
No, we're Fascist Italy, we're going to send troops randomly around in Africa, in the Balkans and in Russia in a desperate attempt to ape the Germans to mantain internal support and international legitimacy. And thus you get from waging a parallel war (Greece and Africa) to be a subordinate of the Germans (Africa and the Balkans) to be a
slave of the Germans (Russia, Italy, RSI). Because you sent your troops into situations they could only lose, and thus you start a negative spiral of self-crippling choices and political disasters. Italy in WW2 is the direct opposite of the concept of "concentration of forces": it was literally "dispersion of forces" at its best.
Now I'm fucking tired and I've sperged enough on the subject. If you have specific questions, go wild, if I can I'll reply. All typos and mistakes are mine.
I tried Italy in HoI2 and the result was... 1. I killed French fleet without significant loses all BB survived, French Richelieu survived as well, but French fleet stopped to play any factor. 2. I lost 5 battleships in first year. 3. I lost tree TAC squadrons in first year. 4. I lost all NAV...
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