In June 1940 Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini formally declared war on Britain and France, thinking that the conflict would be over quickly and sensing easy pickings, telling the Army’s Chief of Staff “I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.”
As it turned out Italy lost about half a million of its citizens in the conflict, as well as suffering tremendous destruction and hardship. As far as predictions in warfare go it’s up there with Sedgwick’s estimations of effective rifle range. Mussolini himself came to a sticky end, strung up by partisans at a petrol station. I’ve heard that later, Milan being Milan, they played football with his head.
I know what you’re thinking - surely Hitler is the biggest idiot of the 20th Century. However, for Germany the conflict had been set in motion by events he had no hand in. Italy, on the other hand - couldn’t they have sat the whole thing out and avoided a whole world of pain? How does the conflict turn out if Benito gets a vision of his future hanging from a meat hook and decided that Italy, like Franco in Spain, will simply remain neutral (or, like Spain, secretly think of joining on the Axis side once Britain is defeated)?
Yup - he was an idiot. He had a history of rash decisions and bad planning. Like Hitler, he often tended to go with plans from the day’s favourite buddy. I believe he also had a knack for ignoring the most talented members of his staff, almost proportionally to their talent - the better you were, the less you were listened to.
Now, if you wanted to mull over some alternate history, think about this: Mussolini doesn’t enter the war and sits out, Italy profits mightily from it, and maybe intervenes later, when the war is nearly over, to support the Allies (totally in keeping with Italian approach to foreign relations, I’m afraid). Furthermore, if at some time he retires, or has a stroke, or what have you, you could end up with Italo Balbo, who was republican, pro-Allies and actually competent (not greatly competent - just the best of a sorry lot, arguably) in charge.
That would have been interesting to say the least.
Indeed, I honestly wonder how much this would really have changed anything. The African and Italian campaigns were a wasteful, horrible mess for both sides. While the Allies would definitely have been better off not having to fight much in the Mediterranean at all, the Germans would have been equally better off not fighting there and would especially have saved themselves a lot of troops not fighting in Italy, which ties up a number of excellent divisions better used elsewhere.
It seems to me, anyway, you still end up in the summer in 1944 in the same place, with a slightly stronger Germany facing a slightly stronger Allies in Normandy, and the Soviets still launching Bagration. If at that point Italy declares war on Germany, that’s a big problem for Germany but they were at that point pretty much screwed anyway.
Churchill was correct in his assessment of him as a jackal, but that’s also a valid defense: England would be finished in a few weeks, so why not tear some strips off the British Empire? A lot of tinpots took the same opportunities: in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, quite a few did throw in with Hitler. Franco’s ability to resist temptation was the exception, not the rule.
For biggest idiot of the 20th century, I propose someone who didn’t jump into a bright shiny new war, but instead kept feeding his country into the same meat grinder that cause his predecessor’s ruin; and didn’t take some basic steps to crush the competition, resulting in millions and millions more deaths that Mussolini’s incompetence caused: Alexander Kerensky.
Yeas, Mussolini was a fool. His generals warned him that Italy could not carry out a long war (they imported all their oil, most of their coal, all of their iron ore). Plus, his conquests were mostly worthless desert lands. Invading Greece was the height of idiocy-not only did the (tiny) Greek army beat the carp out of the Italians, the Italians were stuck in the freezing mountains-without winter gear. the Italian army was equipped with (mostly) 1920s vintage gear, and the navy (stuck in port because of no fuel oil) was little better.
I’m confused by this statement as well, the conflict was entirely set in motion by Hitler.
Lack of an effective cadre of NCOs to close the gulf between officers and the enlisted was a problem, but while there were some good Italian officers as a whole they were anything but world class, oftentimes being pampered and incompetent. Other problems in the Italian military was lack of motivation in the soldiers, lack of equipment, poor equipment and poor training and an awareness of the incompetence with which they were led going all the way up to Il Duce himself. For example, just before invading Greece Mussolini had ordered the demobilization of 600,000 men to help with harvest season. Italian artillery was too light by the standards of the day; the infantry division had 12 100mm howitzers and 24 75mm guns at time when other armies were using weapons in the 150-155mm range in heavy batteries and 88-105mm range in standard batteries in their infantry divisions. Italian tanks were far too light, and most ‘tanks’ were obsolete tankettes, the most numerous Italian armored vehicles in the war was the L3/35. There were only ~100 ‘medium’ M11/39 tanks (in fact a light tank) in the entire Italian army when it entered WW2; the standard tank even of its armored divisions was the turretless, machinegun armed paper-thin armored tankette. The army was also not well structured, in 1938 it had adapted the binary infantry division, so named because it consisted of two infantry regiments as opposed to the three used in triangular divisions by pretty much everyone else.
I think the sentiment is that, after the crushing terms of the treaty of Versailles after WWI, Germany would be itching for another war to shake off the allied ‘oppressors’, and so conditions were that Germany would be going to war in the 1940s no matter who was at the helm or what the motivating spark was. (Much like WWI was mostly predestined well before Gavrilo Princip took a pistol to Archduke Ferdinand).
Italy, by contrast, did not have political or economic conditions that were pushing them towards war, and could probably have sat the whole thing out, much like Spain did.
Poor timing. Mussolini took power in 1922 and build up the Italian military through the twenties. Around 1932, the Italian military was at its peak and probably as powerful as any country in Europe - but there was no major war in 1932.
When Hitler took power and began rebuilding the German military, this worried other countries like France, Britain, and the Soviet Union and they responded by their own military build-ups. These countries developed military forces that were equal in size to Italy’s but were generally better in quality because technology had kept advancing and Italy’s equipment was now ten years old. When the war started in 1939, Italy had a military that was mostly outdated.
The irony is that Italy had access to a huge supply of oil and didn’t know it. Libya had been an Italian colony for years. But the oil fields in Libya weren’t discovered until the fifties.
Would you want to die for an idiot Italian Fascist who was in cahoots with a crazy German Fascist? Really, you’re better off at home chasing babes in the warm sunshine.
[rimshot]That’s the difference between chasing Italian babes and German babes [/rimshot]
Although seriously, there are some hot German babes out there, but that doesn’t make the joke work
Mussolini was the first fascist leader. After years of propaganda, could he have backed out? And if he did, could Hitler arrange for a replacement? Though I bet he was saying what he believed in the quote, since he was an idiot.
Franco was far more isolated and had the effects of the Civil War as an excuse for not getting involved.