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warspite1 -> RE: The question to ask about The Italians (10/24/2020 9:11:19 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
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ORIGINAL: warspite1
Almost finished Mussolini Unleashed. This has been such a good read and really brings home the true nature of the German/Italian relationship in the early years of the war (and of course the total basket case that was Commando Supremo). If anyone has found this thread interesting I would thoroughly recommend buying this book.
Forgive me mate, but I've been away from the forum and certainly this thread for a time. Is this a serious positive book review of which you speak or is this an inside joke based upon the unread body of 1398 previous posts on this thread?
warspite1
Welcome back!
Yes, this is a serious comment on the book Mussolini Unleashed 1939-1941 (Knox)
The thread started off as an question of whether better equipment would have resulted in better Italian performance, and then morphed into a “staff study” that suggested a war winning strategy for Germany would have seen them postpone Barbarossa for a year and adopt a Med first strategy.
I suggested that anyone who found this thread of interest should read this book. The reason for that concerns one of the central components of this “staff study”. What was being put forward was that the Italian – German relationship was one of perfect harmony and total trust, in which the Italians were quite happy for the Germans to take the lead in the Mediterranean. The Italians were happy to play nothing more than a bit part role – the Italian army’s sole purpose was limited to conceding the whole of Cyrenaica and large parts of Tripolitania and merely defending Tripoli from British attack - while the Germans took Gibraltar (invading Spain in the process and creating a German puppet regime). The Italians were also equally happy that the Balkans came under the German sphere of influence, leading to a German invasion of Turkey and the Middle East and ultimately Suez. The “staff study” also claims that the Italians would be happy, post the fighting, for their army to be merely used for occupation duties in countries that they never defeated and/or no longer were even in Italy’s sphere of influence.
It was argued by a number of people that this was frankly absurd for any number of reasons, and this book makes clear that those arguments are fully supported by the facts. The “staff study” treats the Italians as mere puppets or extensions of Germany and suggests that Italy, Mussolini and the Italian military would have been happy to be treated in that way.
Simply put, it ignores real life. It ignores the personalities involved, it ignores the comments and actions of those involved – comments and actions that are superbly brought to life by Knox. We see periods of time in which Mussolini was actually hoping for a German defeat, and other times, hoping for at least a German reverse to give Italy time to win her own battles, we see Mussolini desperate for Italian victories, scared witless that the Germans and British (or at other times, the Germans and Soviets) would come to a deal. Importantly it also shows that Mussolini feared swapping the jailers at Gibraltar and Suez (the British) for another (the Germans).
Mussolini was in a horrible position of his own making – and he knew it. He didn’t like the Germans – or at least he certainly distrusted them, but he needed them if his dreams were to be realised. He hated being the junior member of an alliance in which Hitler never told him anything and presented him with ‘fait accompli’. He knew full well (and the defeat of France confirmed it) that Italy would need her own victories, failing which, Italy would simply be the lap dog, feeding off German scraps, a lap-dog that the “staff study” suggests they would have been happy with – but of course was something Mussolini wasn’t going to allow (at least until defeat after defeat made that inevitable).
But life isn’t simple (as if the above wasn’t complicated enough for Mussolini). He also had his subordinates going off and doing their own things. Again the book brings out just how often Ciano, Badoglio, Graziani and Cavagnari were either ignoring Mussolini or even actively working against him (often with good reason). About the only thing that united them was that they didn’t want the Germans encroaching in their preserve.
This, very readable book, is very useful as part of understanding why the war developed in the way it did post the fall of France.
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