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Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-1943

by MacGregor Knox

Cambridge UP - PDF - English - 224 pages - ISBN-10: 0521790476 - Size: 5.1MBDescription:

"War, a very great war, was from the beginning the essence of Mussolini's program..."This "academic novella," as Knox calls his narrative study, is strongly committed to the "argument from stupidity": the assertion that ineffective or unsuccessful war efforts reflect not merely institutional weaknesses but culpable and comprehensive incompetence. In discussing Italian Fascists, KnoxAa chair of international history at the London School of Economics and Political ScienceAdescribes not merely armed forces but a government and a culture programmed for defeat. Italy's administration was unable to mobilize the country's manpower, to say nothing of its material resources. Its industry, Fiat in particular, was corrupt and incompetent, Knox demonstrates. At strategic levels, the Duce and the generals refused to set priorities or cut losses. As a result, Italy's already limited strength was dissipated after 1940 in theaters from Tunisia to Stalingrad. Logistics, communications, armament, doctrine, trainingAall were not merely inadequate but, Knox finds, seriously defective. Officer corps more concerned with securing the proverbial "good plate of pasta" than with developing the effectiveness of their respective services substituted vitalist rhetoric for objective analysis. Army leadership virtually ignored the connection between training and performance until 1941. Courage and intuition were expected to compensate for discipline and instruction. Until early 1943, virtually all Italian fighter pilots communicated with each other by hand signals, as in the days of the Red Baron. The list goes on and on here, and the result was best expressed by American war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Italy, he mused, was like a dog hit by a car because it tried to bite the tires. Knox's cool, matter-of-fact narrative evenly traces the ensuing tangle.This somewhat scholarly but still readable monograph on the Italian war effort 1940-43 dissects the reasons why that war effort was so singularly unproductive. Mussolini himself never had really centralized control over the largely monarchist armed forces, and kept trying to make himself indispensable to the Germans by overextending his military commitments. Italy's industrial base was inadequate, the training of its soldiers even more so, the designs of most of its weapons were either inefficient or obsolete, and its navy was handicapped by disastrously inaccurate heavy guns. Nor was there sufficient enthusiasm for Italian participation in the war to generate the kind of reorganization that both Germany and Japan undertook when their flaws showed up under Allied pressure--and then in 1943 it was all over for Mussolini's Italy. Knox largely cites Italian sources, but there is enough in English, and Knox provides enough background, to make this a valuable introduction to a neglected aspect of World War II.DownLoad:

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