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aspqrz02 -> RE: Logistics - Mountain vs Infantry Corps (1/15/2020 3:58:35 AM)
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Interestingly, Italian ARTILLERY units fought incredibly well in the Western Desert, often to the point of being destroyed ... or all their officers being killed, anyway (especially at Tobruk ... at least two Italian Artillery units at each end of the breakthrough had to be literally overrun before they gave in ... one by an Australian Infantry attack with fixed bayonets, IIRC, and the other by being overrun by tanks ... IIRC).
The thing was that being posted to the artillery meant you had to be literate and numerate at at least High School level ... so the gulf between the Officers and the men was much less than in the Infantry.
Evidently as late as the 1960s (early, I suspect) the average Italian conscript (from the South and from Sicily) basically got taught to read and write and something of a High School level education as part of their conscript service. Pre-war is was much much worse, and the conscripts in Infantry units were seen to be (and often were) *peasants* by the Officers, who treated them as such.
That and, as with many pre-WW2 armies, becoming an Officer was much more a matter of social status and political connections than of ability ... more so in the Axis Allies, Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria ... hence their often very poor performance over and above what their relatively poor levels of equipment might have indicated.
Phil McGregor
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