I understand that Italy got strong allies, with big, mighty militaries. What did Germany get out of Italy’s participation?
A buffer zone that would not present Germany’s underbelly to an allied invasion. While in our past, the Allies did invade Italy and marched north, it took a conciderable amount of time, and was concidered by some as a waste of time.
Had Italy gone to the Allies, it would likely have been invaded by Germany for that exact reason. Germany would have had to divert troops to bolster the border area, and their air defence grid would have been changed alot earlier due to bombers and fighters staging out of Italian bases.
Due to El Duce’s invasion of Ethiopia, I think Italy’s fate was sealed and Germany was one of the few friends that they had, so there was no real hope of swinging to the allied side, until what happened in real life.
Declan
A really really bad ally, but like Declan says, cover for their southern border.
Another big consideration was the ability to to threaten the Suez Canal and Britain’s supply lines to its Asian colonies. In addition to being able to threaten shipping in the Mediterranean from the Italian mainland and Libya, at the beginning of the war Italy controlled the Horn of Africa.
As it turned out, they lost the east African colonies very quickly and the Germans had to step in to hold on to the north African ones. But had the Italians actually been able to defend their possessions or even take Egypt, it could have helped starve out Britain faster.
Payback? It may be apocryphal (everything gets attributed to Winnie) but Churchill is reported to have said on the subject “It’s only fair. We had to have them in the last war.”
The Italians fought with the Germans on the African and the Russian fronts. While an Italian soldier may have been a poor substitute for a German one, he stopped a bullet equally well.
And while the Italian army wasn’t very effective, Italy’s at least nominal control of several strategic points in the Mediterranean was a constant threat to British supply lines in the first years of the war.
Entertainment
I thought the alliance was not so much about what Germany would gain but ideology. Hitler was inspired by Mussolini and thought he was pretty cool at first, although I have no idea if that opinion changed later when Hitler turned out to be more successful.
This was a big part of it – Hitler admired Mussolini.
Strategically, one big attraction to the alliance was the Italian navy. The Regia Marina was significant, both large and relatively modern (several new battleships were coming into service), and it was positioned in the middle of an area strategically critical to Britain.
In the course of events, the British beat the Italians lopsidedly twice (Battle of Cape Matapan and Taranto), but we have the advantage of hindsight, they seemed formidable before these battles.
It’s my opinion that, in general, the poor performance of the Italian forces in the war reflects not so much on the bravery of the Italians as on the fact that the average Italian did not want to be in that war. They were longstanding admirers of the United States (since so many had immigrated) and were horrified to find themselves at war with the US, and they rightly judged the idea of invading the Soviet Union as crazy, but in both cases were dragged into it by their German Allies. I imagine that finding they would have to fight a total war against the UK, the US, and the USSR all at the same time would have disheartened any sane Italian.
I always had the impression that much of the problem was terrible leadership, from Mussolini on down. Poorly equipped, poorly led soldiers don’t do too well regardless of their own abilities.
They did have more than their share of bad leaders. But, particularly in the case of their performance against Americans, their heart wasn’t in it, generally speaking – America was quite popular in Italy at that time. And of course they (rightly) dreaded fighting the Soviets.
And pizza. What a combo! 
I can see why they’d perform badly against the USSR and the US. But why did they have such trouble with Ethiopia?
Also, didn’t Italy have to be helped by Germany when it invaded Greece because the invasion was floundering?
Have you seen pictures of those spears they were using? More than enough to cause any Italian armed with only a puny machine gun to flee in terror!
And yet the article you link to goes on about how outdated, poorly equipped and poorly led they were.
Royal Italian Army (1940 to 1946)
“The Italian Royal Army remained comparatively weak in armaments. The Italian tanks were of poor quality. Italian radios were small in numbers. Much of the Italian artillery and weapons dated from World War I. Most important of all, the Italian generals were trained to the trench warfare of World War I and were not prepared at all for the new style of mechanized war based on the German “lightning war” model (blitzkrieg).”
this in 1940, when also;
“Impressive on paper, most Italian divisions did not have the full complement of men or materials when war was declared in 1940. The armored divisions had lightly armed “tankettes” instead of tanks”
Wikipedia article on the “Second Italo-Abyssinian War”
Looks like it took them a year to conquer the country.
More than you ever needed to know about the WW2 Italian Army. And still more!
It looks like Italy’s joining in the war was to a large extent a result of events overtaking Mussolini. Like many others including pros in the German military he had not expected the Big One to start in '39 and thus was only just starting to apply lessons learned from Ethiopia and Spain and planned upgrades including not just new gear but a new doctrine of mobile tactics; like many other countries their forces on the field at war’s start were nowhere near their “paper” strength in numbers or equipment.
Once war was on, again following conventional wisdom he had expected the campaign in France to be a slower grind so he could be a valuable asset by merely threatening a southern front. But then France began collapsing fast and Italy was faced with a “now or never” choice to enter the war as an active combatant on his own initiative and be on Germany’s good side as a reliable ally in his own right. Now that the smart money flipped to expecting that Germany would just roll over everyone relatively quickly, Mussolini risked having been a mere spectator at the critical point and Italy becoming just an accessory satellite subject to being itself preyed upon in due course. (Franco at least had the excuse of a nation in ruins to argue he was in no position to formally join the fight.) Once he was in, though, he was in for the whole calzone.
On paper the Italian military was a strong force, and specific units and pieces of equipment were up to the task so they could be an asset for specific operations. But as a whole it needed upgrading, had poor leadership (too much political and “social” promotion) facing an unfamiliar change in tactical doctrine, defective attention to training and morale, and lacked depth to sustain extended (in range and in time) fronts, not only militarily but also industrially. And yes, a lot of the force and the people, even from the start and increasingly more as it went along, grew to feel they were fighting in the wrong war. That really saps your effectiveness, and eventually his own government and army got sick of it and booted Mussolini from office in '43.
Perhaps I’ve misread but I got the impression that when Italy invaded Greece, it tried to do so from the North. To do that, it had to go through the Balkans and the north of Greece. Those areas are heavily mountainous and are great for defensive warfare.
Is there a reason Italy chose to invade Greece that way? Wasn’t an amphibious landing on the southern and/or western parts of Greece possible?
Italy had previously taken over Albania in 1939, it was from there they attacked through Macedonia and Epirus. If you can attack across the land border it’s usually simpler than doing an opposed landing and the Italians lacked in amphibious assault capability. There was some extraordinary degree of planning flubs apparently due to overconfidence (or more likely to nobody wanting to be the bearer of bad news) and on top of that the weather turned bad.
A goofy sidekick, and an easy path to Vatican City, in the event they ever decided to carry out their plan to kidnap the pope.