But if Italy had remained strictly neutral, they would not have invaded Greece in the first place, therefore Germany would not have stepped in to support them, therefore Germany would not have invaded Yugoslavia to get there, and therefore the German invasion of the USSR might have been able to start as early in 1941 as originally planned for, with no diversion of troops to occupation duties in Greece and Yugoslavia… and what consequences might have ensued from that?
On the other hand, strict Italian neutrality would have made transport across the Mediterranean to and from the Suez Canal that bit safer, though whether enough to have made a significant difference to British supply chains I don’t know.
Brought to mind by this thread: Dennis Wheatley’s series of Gregory Sallust thrillers, which I have read with considerable enjoyment (and much necessary suspension of disbelief): the eponymous GS being an extremely audacious British secret agent in World War II, who performs derring-do feats in all of the parts of Europe affected by that conflict.
As Wheatley tends to do, in what I gather is a deliberate “history without tears” ploy on his part: there are built into the Sallust books at regular intervals, passages in which characters in the books discuss the war and its conduct, and good and bad decisions therein. (IMO this stuff can, for readers who are not keen military-history buffs, get wearisome – we Philistines become impatient to get back to the exciting action.) Anyway – in such discussions in the books: more than once, the “discussers” remark on what a stupid bugger Mussolini was to enter the war at all, particularly on the Axis side. They ponder on how much better he would have done, to stay neutral: his country and people would be spared death and destruction, and could have got rich from selling stuff to both belligerent sides. Impression received here, is that these wise folk are of the opinion that the Allies will ultimately win the war – what Italy does or doesn’t do, is basically irrelevant to the final outcome.
It’s not an outlandish hypothetical. Mussolini was originally very worried about Hitler’s expansionism, and in particular the Anschluss. A British-French-Italian front against Hitler was a very real possibility, and I suspect that it was prevented more by the lax attitude of France and even more so Britain than by Italy’s stance.
Whoops, totally forgot that the reason the Germans were in Greece in the first place was to pull Italy’s feet out of the fire. Would Hitler have had a reason to invade and occupy Yugoslavia/Greece absent an Italian involvement in the area? Other than, y’know, being Hitler.
Several nations were studying the problem of how to attack a ship in shallow water. The Japanese developed a wooden frame they could attach to torpedoes which kept them from sinking too far when they were dropped from a plane. After the Taranto attack, they sent people to the site to study how the British had done it. They found that the British had developed a different method; they attached a barrel with a wire to the nose of the torpedo and this made the torpedo hit the water in a horizontal position, which again kept it from sinking too far. The method obviously worked but the Japanese decided to stay with the method they already had. So while the Japanese studied the Taranto attack, they didn’t get vital information from it.