Hitler's Italian Allies : Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-1943

Rating:
Summary: Turgid Prose
Review: "Hitler's Italian Allies" by MacGregor Knox. Subtitled, "Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime and the War of 1940-1943." Cambridge University Press, 2000

I am sorry to say that the prose in this book is absolutely turgid. Swelled up. Remember grammar school, where you were taught about a simple declarative sentence? The book's author, Professor MacGregor Knox, would not (could not?) stop with one thought or one idea per sentence. He swelled up each sentence, such as,

"Hitler's ensuing visit to Rome, Naples, and Florence in May 1938 therefore did not
produce the military alliance that the Germans offered and at which Mussolini still aimed."
Page 13.

and: "Fear of offending constituted interests was characteristic of the war effort as a whole." P. 35.

As I attempted to read this book, I found myself parsing or mentally diagramming the more complex sentences.
Page 53: " Machines were low on the army's scale of priorities, and the machines it commissioned were correspondingly inadequate". To what does the pronoun "it" refer? You have to read and then re-read, to see that it is not back to priorities nor is it back to machines, but refers back to the army.

The book simply does not flow. Then, the author, not content with the thoughts in a single long sentence, often begins the next sentence with, "And..." and adds even more.

When I was working on my MA in History, we were required to read books on how to write History. For example, there is Barbara Tuchman's "Practicing History". In one of that book's essays, Ms. Tuchman makes the point that good History should be good literature, well written with skill. The book, "Hitler's Italian Allies", fails, in my opinion, to be good literature.

Rating:
Summary: Turgid Prose
Review: "Hitler's Italian Allies" by MacGregor Knox. Subtitled, "Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime and the War of 1940-1943." Cambridge University Press, 2000

I am sorry to say that the prose in this book is absolutely turgid. Swelled up. Remember grammar school, where you were taught about a simple declarative sentence? The book's author, Professor MacGregor Knox, would not (could not?) stop with one thought or one idea per sentence. He swelled up each sentence, such as,

"Hitler's ensuing visit to Rome, Naples, and Florence in May 1938 therefore did not
produce the military alliance that the Germans offered and at which Mussolini still aimed."
Page 13.

and: "Fear of offending constituted interests was characteristic of the war effort as a whole." P. 35.

As I attempted to read this book, I found myself parsing or mentally diagramming the more complex sentences.
Page 53: " Machines were low on the army's scale of priorities, and the machines it commissioned were correspondingly inadequate". To what does the pronoun "it" refer? You have to read and then re-read, to see that it is not back to priorities nor is it back to machines, but refers back to the army.

The book simply does not flow. Then, the author, not content with the thoughts in a single long sentence, often begins the next sentence with, "And..." and adds even more.

When I was working on my MA in History, we were required to read books on how to write History. For example, there is Barbara Tuchman's "Practicing History". In one of that book's essays, Ms. Tuchman makes the point that good History should be good literature, well written with skill. The book, "Hitler's Italian Allies", fails, in my opinion, to be good literature.

Rating:
Summary: An informative descriptive history and analysis
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: How not to run an army.
Review: That the Italian Army does not have a good reputation for military valor, honor or even competenece is no suprise. After all this was an army that lost to Ethiopia at the battle of Adua. And never has this army been less successful than during the Second World War. Mussolini could not beat France after it had been defeated by Germany. He nearly lost to Greece before the Germans helpfully intervened. From its cowardly attack on France at the moment of her defeat to the cowardly evacuation of its elite from Rome before the Nazis handily occupied half of Italy, the Italian military effort was one of shame, incompetence, dogmatism and fatuousness.

Knox's book provides a succinct account of an army that failed almost every conceivable measure. There are exceptions of course; the Italians had some good intelligence measures and some of them occasionally fought hard-fought battles. What went wrong? Few will disagree with Knox that Italy was poor, had limited resources, that Mussolini's leadership was disatrous. But Knox puts special emphasis on Italy's military culture. Looking at area by area, Knox starts with politics and industry. War industries were inefficient and bureaucratically complex. Overall tax yields actually decreased 20% in the three years of the war, and draft deferrments allowed people to stay in college until they were 26. The Italian state gave monopoly support to industries which made "perhaps the worst monoplane fighter of the Second World War." In machinery the Italian Army, despite 30 years of desert warfare in Africa, could not produce proper compasses for their desert trucks. In emphasizing the propaganda value of numbers, Mussolini and the army created a logistical nightmare of insufficently motorized divisions. The navy foolishly decided that it did not need aircraft carriers until it was too late, nor did they understand the value of torpedo bombers, while innovative research on radar stayed in the lab until it was also too late. The air force leadership failed to demand proper high-octane fuels and many of their planes had to run on castor oil.

Strategically the Italian military failed to recognize the full economic weight of the Allies. They failed to appreciate the coming of Barbarossa or the supreme ideological importance it had for the Nazis. Mussolini dissipated Italian forces on half a dozen fronts. By contrast much of the army and navy were unhelpfully passive and unimiginative, moving with little daring or even proper plans. Military operations were slow, with poor coordination, over-complex structures and officer heavy staffs that all made for poor mobility. Commanders badgered their subordinates with obsessively and unhelpfully detailed orders, while buck-passing was the order of the day. Promotion was slow and unmeritocratic, and three were so few motorized vehicles soldiers often had to walk on foot. The supply services were uniquely unhelpful, working in such a centralized manner that division and corps commanders would sit still in fear that if they moved they would be cut off from their supplies. Italian codes were easily available to the allies, the Navy made insufficient preparations for fighting at Night, and when the German left the siege of Malta back to the Italians in 1942, the Maltese declared "We felt that our prayers had been answered. God has sent back the Italians."

Tactics were unhelpful. NCOs had no hope of promotion, officers had a caste mentality which separated them from their solidiers, and there was a corresponding failure of initiative and tactical rigidity. Ultimately Knox is right to say this was a failure which transcended Mussolini's own megalomania. If there is a flaw in this book Knox perhaps overstates Italy's lack of modernity and lack of civic cohesion. Greece and Russia were arguably even less modern. And while the Soviet Union was arguably more brutal than Italy, it also faced in 1941 an infinitely more severe challenge than Italy. And besides brutality, as Nicholas II and Mussolini himself would learn at their cost, is not everything. Nothing so clearly represented the emptiness of his claims to modernize Italy than his failure to change an army that was the very opposite of a meritocracy. This was an elite that combined an unusual lack of scruple with an unusual lack of competence.

Rating:
Summary: How not to run an army.
Review: That the Italian Army does not have a good reputation for military valor, honor or even competenece is no suprise. After all this was an army that lost to Ethiopia at the battle of Adua. And never has this army been less successful than during the Second World War. Mussolini could not beat France after it had been defeated by Germany. He nearly lost to Greece before the Germans helpfully intervened. From its cowardly attack on France at the moment of her defeat to the cowardly evacuation of its elite from Rome before the Nazis handily occupied half of Italy, the Italian military effort was one of shame, incompetence, dogmatism and fatuousness.

Knox's book provides a succinct account of an army that failed almost every conceivable measure. There are exceptions of course; the Italians had some good intelligence measures and some of them occasionally fought hard-fought battles. What went wrong? Few will disagree with Knox that Italy was poor, had limited resources, that Mussolini's leadership was disatrous. But Knox puts special emphasis on Italy's military culture. Looking at area by area, Knox starts with politics and industry. War industries were inefficient and bureaucratically complex. Overall tax yields actually decreased 20% in the three years of the war, and draft deferrments allowed people to stay in college until they were 26. The Italian state gave monopoly support to industries which made "perhaps the worst monoplane fighter of the Second World War." In machinery the Italian Army, despite 30 years of desert warfare in Africa, could not produce proper compasses for their desert trucks. In emphasizing the propaganda value of numbers, Mussolini and the army created a logistical nightmare of insufficently motorized divisions. The navy foolishly decided that it did not need aircraft carriers until it was too late, nor did they understand the value of torpedo bombers, while innovative research on radar stayed in the lab until it was also too late. The air force leadership failed to demand proper high-octane fuels and many of their planes had to run on castor oil.

Strategically the Italian military failed to recognize the full economic weight of the Allies. They failed to appreciate the coming of Barbarossa or the supreme ideological importance it had for the Nazis. Mussolini dissipated Italian forces on half a dozen fronts. By contrast much of the army and navy were unhelpfully passive and unimiginative, moving with little daring or even proper plans. Military operations were slow, with poor coordination, over-complex structures and officer heavy staffs that all made for poor mobility. Commanders badgered their subordinates with obsessively and unhelpfully detailed orders, while buck-passing was the order of the day. Promotion was slow and unmeritocratic, and three were so few motorized vehicles soldiers often had to walk on foot. The supply services were uniquely unhelpful, working in such a centralized manner that division and corps commanders would sit still in fear that if they moved they would be cut off from their supplies. Italian codes were easily available to the allies, the Navy made insufficient preparations for fighting at Night, and when the German left the siege of Malta back to the Italians in 1942, the Maltese declared "We felt that our prayers had been answered. God has sent back the Italians."

Tactics were unhelpful. NCOs had no hope of promotion, officers had a caste mentality which separated them from their solidiers, and there was a corresponding failure of initiative and tactical rigidity. Ultimately Knox is right to say this was a failure which transcended Mussolini's own megalomania. If there is a flaw in this book Knox perhaps overstates Italy's lack of modernity and lack of civic cohesion. Greece and Russia were arguably even less modern. And while the Soviet Union was arguably more brutal than Italy, it also faced in 1941 an infinitely more severe challenge than Italy. And besides brutality, as Nicholas II and Mussolini himself would learn at their cost, is not everything. Nothing so clearly represented the emptiness of his claims to modernize Italy than his failure to change an army that was the very opposite of a meritocracy. This was an elite that combined an unusual lack of scruple with an unusual lack of competence.

Rating:
Summary: A much-needed study on WW2's most understudied participant
Review: 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.