WW ll Question

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Why did Mussolini's armed forces perform so poorly and did their poor effort contribute to the defeat of the AXIS powers since Hitler had to divert resources from other fronts to rescue Mussolini's armed forces from losing battles they were engaging in?

[Postman]

1. Hitler lost because he invaded Russia.

Period.

[tnlurker]

12. He was delayed several months in starting the Russian campaign

Because he had to bail out Mussolini in Yugoslavia I believe. If he had started the Russian campaign on time (April 41 I think) he might have defeated Russia the first year before winter set in. That gave the Russians the breathing time to regroup and mount a defense.

[Toots]

23. IF the rabbit hadn't stopped to snooze he would have beaten the turtle..

If is a big little word..

[dipsydoodle]

27. Yes

Period

[Stella_Artois]

2. Industry

The Italian industrial base was insufficient to meet the demands of industrialised warfare. They were unable to sufficiently equip their services with the right equipment in the right numbers.

Tactically, there are many occasions where Italian troops were at least the equal and somtimes the better of the Russians and British. There are at least as many occasions where ineffective leadership at the local level meant they came off very much second best.

Overall, i'd say that their contribution was neutral. I'd say the physical geography of Italy from 1944 onwards consumed more Allied resources than the actual Italians.

[Joe Chi Minh]

13. I think the 'ordinary' Italians also have more sense than the peoples of the

post-imperial European powers. They were providing cannon fodder for deranged, psychopathic, imperial leaders, while we Brits were running around daubed with woad. As big Bill once said, the people get it in the end.

No, I think Omar Khayyam's philosophy would have been greatly preferred to Mein Kampf. If it comes to that, Hitler was never elected by a majority of Germans.

[ProfessorGAC]

19. We Have A Winner

The "trains ran on time" thing is a bit of a myth. The productivity gains during Duce's tenure were mostly window dressing.

The per worker productivity in Italy during the facist time was <60% of the United States and only about 70% of Germany or England. And unemployment was just as high there as it was everywhere else.

Given their propulation, they simply didn't have the industrial capability to engage in foreign adventures of conquest.
The Professor

[DemocratSinceBirth]

22. Thank You

I learn a lot here; especially on "non-political" topics which are subject to spin...

[Captain Hilts]

3. The performance of their navy was astonishingly bad.

They learned few lessons from their incursions into North Africa before the war.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. I Was Reading An Account Of WW 2 By A Marine

A Marine who was renowned for convincing some Japanese marines to surrender, despite their strong proclivity not to, by a combination of guile and empathy...

Anyway he said the U S Marines won every battle with the Imperial Marines after the shock of the initial attack of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines wore off... Was he correct or is that just Marine chauvinism?

[PDenton]

10. I believe that is true

Japanese were, despite their Bushido bravado, bound to loose. Americans practiced a materiel war strategy against the Japanese. And the US had a huge economy to support that sort of strategy. The Japanese strategy was trying to shock and bleed the will out of America, by expending their own scant resources in the process- namely human lives in the form of strategicly futile but scary human-wave and suicide attacks.

The Japanese, like the Italians, also had junky tanks. Japanese also had almost no effective infantry anti-tank ability during the whole war. The best they could hope for was using satchel charges or human suicide bombers against tanks. Their armed forces spent as much time fighting themselves as they did fighting their enemies, with each branch wasting money and resources building up their own resources. The navy had its own army and the army had its own navy, that sort of thing.

In terms of naval warfare the Japanese were way behind the other powers too. They didn't really understand the role that submarines could play in naval warfare (they used them mostly for resupply of islands), and they had weak convoy doctrine. With a theater that was heavily dependent on supply lines going across oceans, relinquishing the ability to interdict and protect your own naval convoys spelled doom for them in the end.

[Stella_Artois]

25. "In terms of naval warfare the Japanese were way behind the other powers too"

Not sure i entirely agree with this assesment, in the early part of the war. Obviously they understood that airpower spelt the end of the battleship, since their airpower saw to the end of many US and British battleship in the first months.

Their tactics, ships, gunnery, night tactics and above all the infamous "long lance" torpedo were very advanced. They went to war with working torpedoes and the US did not.

Their problem was one of production, much like the Italians. They just were buried under an avalanche of jeep carriers and liberty ships.

[Captain Hilts]

17. Yes, I believe that is true also. I can't think of a losing campaign. nt

[Joe Chi Minh]

14. I thought they dealt a heavy blow to the British navy on at least one occasion.

[Captain Hilts]

18. Yes. Very early. I think that might have been when Dickie Mountbatten's Kelly was sunk...

out from under him.

But the Italian Navy rolled over and sank shortly thereafter.

[Stella_Artois]

24. A few times i think

They sneaked some human torpedoes into Alexandria harbour and blew the bottom out of a pair of Queen Elizabeth class battleships that were there at the time.

Both only sank a few feet though, due to the shallow water and were repaired. Both were also obsolete WW1 types that would have been scrapped by then anyway if WWII had not started. They were only based there anyway due to the low capabilties of the Italian navy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Valiant_%281914%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Queen_Elizabeth_(1913)

By contrast the RN had the measure of the Italian navy throughout the war, not least at Toranto where RN aircraft attacked and disabled 50% of the Italian battlefleet in a few minutes. This attack, incidently, was a full year before the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbour. Quite why the American navy thought that a torpedo attack by aircraft while in harbour was impossible escapes me to this day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto

[slackmaster]

4. Italian forces were (in general) poorly organized, lacked training

Fighting in places like Northern Africa left them unmotivated. They new tere wasn't really anything in it for them.

[tech3149]

5. You should be watching Ken Burns The War

Episode two was on last night and there were some insights. As the US forces were moving north into Salerno,I think, the Italian forces pretty much surrendered without much of a fight. They arrested Mussolini and installed a new government and immediately surrendered and started fighting with Allied forces. This tells me the Italians weren't too fond of the fascist government or world domination. As mentioned in another post, they weren't as well equipped or trained.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

8. I Have Seen About Seventy Five Percent Of It

Wow...

Daniel Inouye's account of his last words with his father before enlistnent were really moving....

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. It Didn't Seem Like Their Hearts Were Ever In It...

eom

[Joe Chi Minh]

16. A veteran British war correspondent, called Alan Wicker, was a young war photographer in Italy

during WWII, when the jeep he was in with colleagues chanced upon a coulmn of Italian soldiers.

Deciding the best thing to do in such circumstances was to bluff. There was no need to, they all wanted to surrender there and then and go back home. But not before he'd taken photos of them! Combs out, preening themselves for the camera and beaming broadly. My kind of peole! Unfortunately, it wasn't to be, and somehow they ended up in North Africa. Of course, Wicker wasn't able to accept their invitation as they were on another mission.

However, he was later dragooned into accepting the surrender of SS troops in Rome, I think, who were very lucky to escape being torn to pieces by the civilian population. If you ever get the chance to see the cable film of his war days, don't miss it. It's priceless.

He commented how the most extraordinary unsung heroism took place, with only a bystander, or perhaps no-one else to witness. On one occasion, he overheard a young fellow-ossifer on a stretcher, very badly wounded, who'd evidently been waiting a long time without being taken in for surgery. As one of the medics went passed, the line of stretchered wounded, the young man, aware that triage would be the order of the day, called out softly to him and asked him if he thought his turn might be coming soon. The medic looked at his injuries and replied, "I don't think so..." or words to that effect. To which he replied, "I quite understand...", and died soon after.

The heroism of the civilian resistance in Northern Italy in the fiercest of fighting and terrible weather was apparently second to none, according to a British sergeant major who liaised with them. A task he'd performed in every theatre of the war.

[Aristus]

28. I agree with that assessment. The Italians can be a tough fighting people

when they want to be. In WWII, they didn't have the same overarching thirst for Lebensraum and revenge for the Treaty of Versailles that Germany did. The Germans embraced Hitler for many reasons, not least of which was their desire to end the political and economic chaos of the 1920's. Italian politics and economics have always had an element of, usually benign, chaos. And the people were able to deal with it to a great extent. As long as Giovanni on the Strada could get through the day with enough to eat and a glass of wine at the end of it, he was okay. Mussolini was Italy's George W. Bush (except he actually had war service, however undistinguished, to his credit) and wanted to be a war leader, regardless of what it would cost Italy in lives, treasure and international esteem.

[PDenton]

7. poor quality weapons, weak leadership

Italian weapon systems were on the whole junk compared to what the Germans were fielding. Also, the Italians did not have the same zest for Fascism that the Germans had. Even Italian Fascism itself was somewhat softer than German Fascism, unlike German Fascism it wasn't specificly anti-Semitic until the Nazis stepped up pressure on Italy to be a team player, and later, after Germans grabbed control of parts of Italy. In the end the Italian government was brought down by Italian socialist partisans who had alot more support than socialist in Germany.

[taterguy]

11. Fiat vs Mercedes

Does that explain it?

[JVS]

15. Yeah but Fiat vs. Yugo says something else and the Yugoslavs were kicking Italian ass.

[Captain Hilts]

21. Fix It Again, Tony! nt

[cobalt1999]

20. Germany would have been better off without any allies in WWII

Japan didn't provide any help and just dragged the US into the war with Germany by attacking Pearl Harbor. Without that alliance, the US would have been focused only on the Pacific.

If Italy had stayed neutral like Spain, then the Allies wouldn't have been able to use that route into Europe and without the US would not have been able to replicate a D-Day invasion of France.

Russia would have gotten the full brunt of the German army and gotten it earlier.


Germany would have been much better off without any axis allies.

[dipsydoodle]

26. In amongst the world's thinest books

along with "Famous Belgians" is the one titled " Italian War Heros".

[Xithras]

29. Motivation.

Hitler had spent many years preaching his philosophies to the German people, and his invasions and economic changes brought real prosperity to Germany for quite a while. His arguments about reuniting the lost Germanic lands and tribes struck a chord, and touched on that universal desire to bring back "the good old days". In other words, the Germans were really into it and WANTED to win.

In contrast, despite Mussolini's talk about a new Roman Empire, his government hadn't done much for the Italian people. There were no lost Italian lands to reconquer, and no Italian diaspora to reunite with their homeland. He was talking about reconquering lands that had never been there's in the first place, and which had been independent of the empire for almost 2000 years. His economic changes didn't improve life for the average Italian, and both unemployment and inflation remained real problems.

The Germans supported their government, while most Italians were indifferent to it. When your government asks you to DIE to protect it, little things like motivation become big factors in the effectiveness of your military forces.

[cobalt1999]

30. Some Italian cities even welcomed the allied troops. n/t.