Can I get a reasonable explanation as to why Italy did so poorly in WWII? The meme that Italians are just naturally cowardly and lazy can't be true, look at other battles and wars they are involved with and it just doesn't hold up. Where they just not interested in fighting another country's war? Inadequate supplies and weapons? What caused this?
>>911424
Italy suffers from unifying late compared to other powers and having a largely rural south which drags down the entire country.
The simple, but inadequate reason is that Italy lacked the industrial base of any of the other major European powers.
>>911438
But why were they victorious in WW1? You just don't see the mass amount of surrendering in that war that you do in the 2nd.
>>911424
Both those were serious factors. Another was the internal politics of the army.
See, the Italian state formed out of the kingdom Piedmont acquiring all of Italy, in the same way that Prussia acquired all of Germany. But there were significant differences.
Prussia was significantly more invested in the German project, represented a much larger share of Germany, and was much more willing to share control over the Army.
The Italian Army, by contrast remained the refuge of Piedmontese nobility, and officers who kissed up to Piedmontese nobility, and above all the King. Now, obviously this is likely to prevent meritocracy and therefor actually good officers in command.
But it also meant that the officer corp, and control of the army, was a last bastion of an elite group that was otherwise politically negligible. The result is that the officer corp regarded their troops as worse enemies then the other armies.
Remember, this is a conscript army: a decent chunk of your enlisted men are communists, and in the eyes of these officers, all of them might as well be. You don't trust them with initiative, with independent expertise in weaponry, etc. That shit is dangerous. Your job as an officer is to treat them like beasts of burden, and make sure they fulfill exactly what you tell them obediently.
Italy joined the war believing an armistice would be reached immediately after France's surrender. They made no long term plans, no preparations whatsoever. This isn't an interpretation, point of view or opinion, it's fact, Mussolini himself said "I just need a few thousand dead to sit at the negotiations table". Because of this, there was no surprise assault on Malta, no attempt to sabotage the Suez canal, no attempt to mine the Red Sea, no italian planes stationed in Somalia or Eritrea to bomb allied shipping, no railroad connecting the Libyan ports to the border with Egypt, troops had to be supplied with trucks, there were so many men stationed there they couldn't even transport enough food to the front to feed them, etc.
It's also important to keep in mind that Italy was extremely poor compared to countries like Germany and France. The percentage of military aged males working in farms and agriculture in general was extremely high, about 50% I believe (more or less the same proportion as Yugoslavia) meaning the country lacked enough industry to sustain a war effort. to make matters worse Italy depended on energy imports (coal mostly) from germany and had very few if any natural resources of its own.
>>911457
The other powers won the war for them to be honest. Italy held its own and stalemated against AH but AH wasn't exactly impressive at that point. Was there mass surrendering in Italy before the invasion of Sicily?
fascism is a huge meme that has nothing to do with reality
when the nazis were talking about invading the ussr the logistics people were like "that's impossible you idiots" but they just straight up ignored them
>look at other battles and wars they are involved with and it just doesn't hold up.
wut? WW1? Ethiopia? Afghanistan?
Italy has always been rather impressively bad at warfare. It probably just has to do with its lack of military tradition.
>>911795
>Lack of military tradition.
The Italian city-states had been fighting wars for hundreds of years.
>>911438
Didn't they unify the same time as Germany though? Germany did okay for unifying late
>>911845
Germany is more an exception to the rule than a standard. Germany has the benefit of having a quasi unification under the HRE along with most of the states bringing benefits to the table. The concept of a "German" leader existed long before Germany actually unified and this is important from an institutional perspective.
>>911457
>Italy victorious in WW1
Italy is the real sneaky Jew bastard of WW1 not Austria-Hungary
>break alliance then join war against alliance members to get muh land
>fight like shit against the only country that's about on their level
>let bongs and frogs win the war for them
>act smug as hell as they take land that Italians don't even live in
>still get pissed and adopt fascism
Italians major enemies from basically 476 to the 1860s and 70s were other Italians, and the south of Italy, where a lot of the people live, it basically a shit hole compared to northern Italy.
>>911882
Sure looks like a shithole to me.
>>911424
Solid soldiers
Shit officers
Atrocious generals
Nightmare Fuel War Industry
>>911850
More like
>Continue fighting after lunatic general Cardonna basically refuses troops to eat.
>Execute every tenth man if a group under performs in battle.
>Fight in the worst conditions of the war, freezing with shit food 10,000 feet above sea level.
>Finally defeat the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto but le Italy is a meme country so who cares?
>>911957
South Italians are barely homo sapiens after being colonized by practically everyone in the Mediterranea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_%28Italy%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_'Ndrangheta
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21651261-north-limps-ahead-south-swoons-tale-two-economies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy#North.E2.80.93South_divide
>>911970
>Execute every tenth man if a group under performs in battle.
Well decimation seemed to work for the Romans. Why not today?
>>911424
Italians are smart
They were smart enough to not get rused by 'die for your country' meme like faggot americans or germans and they chilled and ran from bullets
Be like them
>>911457
>Victorious
They were merely on the winning side. There were like 12 battles in Isonzo, and it was against the absolutely most incompetent enemy army.
>>912016
Not him bit decimation was a disastrous policy for the Italian army because they killed 1 in 10 whenever one soldier did something they didn't like. At the end of the war they had probably killed more of their own soldiers and they did Austria's.
>>911424
They liked to surrender very quickly
Poor training (in some cases), supply issues, bad equipment, very bad leadership. Italian performance was drastically better with German leadership most of the time.
>>911424
Absolute lack of preparation for basically anything. Settling in for sub-par equipment just to please free mason controlled military-industrial complex and other "pretty" things.
>>912016
Because Romans did it to maintain discipline, Italians did it to save face from performing shoddily-planned offensives.
NSGWP would be the direct English translation this n**i is a dehumanizing word.
They had shitty equipment and the army was too large. I read somewhere that they didn't had enough rifles and equipment to support that army. A smaller army could have gotten better stuff.
>>911424
>look at other battles and wars they are involved with and it just doesn't hold up.
I'm really drawing blanks here.
but still, the Italian soldier fought as hard as he was able to do. If they had better officer and better weapons and more, they would have been more effective.
>>913148
>if they weren't shit they would have been good
>>912062
pic related
>>913294
AHIDF again...
Italy post-unification is nothing but a giant stretch of utter failures
>>911424
Because Italy was a fucking mess. The government was both incompetent and unstable; Mussolini's grip on power wasn't absolute like a lot of his fellow dictators (and would in fact eventually be dismissed by the king as opposed to facing some kind of popular revolution), and tried to keep his various government functionaries weak by arbitrarily reassigning people frequently. This worked about as well as you might expect.
Pretty much every aspect of the war (as well as everything else) was mismanaged. Troops weren't trained or equipped well, even when the infrastructure to train/equip them existed, and it often didn't. Strategic decisions were made without strategic thought. Everyone remembers the Greek debacle. Most people forget that one of the reasons it was so bad is that 2 weeks prior, Mussolini decided to demobilize half the Italian army and was sending people home.
True, you probably needed a couple of decades more industrialization before Italy could even begin to compete with the big boys, but Mussolini's awful government deserves the lion's share of the blame.
>>911839
More like they've been the battleground of real warrior countries like Spain, France and the HRE
Fucking italians
>>912005
topkeking
>>911424
That fucking terrone in the picture, looks almost like a peruvian
I love the poster tho, but they could had pick an alpini
>>913499
I never understood why 4chan hates this war. It makes perfect sense, and the only jews here are the pope and the emperor, not the italian states.
>>913499
That's a lot of republics, are they merchant aristocratic republics or your more modern republic
>>913846
All aristocratic republics.
>>911424
At the beginning people thought /his/ would quickly become /hitler/, but it seems to me like it's becoming /mussolini/ instead. Fascist Italy has to be a top 5 board topic.
>>911457
>But why were they victorious in WW1?
They weren't. They failed to make any meaningful progress at all over 11 battles on the same front against Austria Hungary (despite the Austrians fighting on three other fronts and being Austrians).
Once the Germans on the Eastern Front were freed up, they swung down and shattered the Italian Army, pushing the frontlines all the way to Venice and forcing the Entente to funnel troops in to Italy to prevent the front from collapsing.
They only "won" so much as they were on the winning side.
Someone wrote this on /k/ a few months ago.
>>911424
>>911424
They weren't really trained or equipped that well. Lazy isn't fair, apathetic is more like it, they weren't really into the war at any level of the military except the top.
>>913183
officer != soldier
the latter shouldn't get all the blame, soldiers can't win battles without a good/smart/not-completely-retarded leadership
>>913294
Luigi "I stopped giving a fuck in 1910" Cadorna is the common denominator.
>>911850
>break alliance then join war against alliance members to get muh land
For fuck's sake. I thought /his/ was 4chan's board about history, but just like /ck/ doesn't know shit about cooking, you guys don't know shit about history.
Italy was in a DEFENSIVE PACT with Austria and Germany. Therefore, Italy wasn't forced to join the war on their side, since the Central Powers delivered the first blow.
In 1915, Both the Entente and the Central Powers tried to convince Italy to join the war, cause they knew that another front would have been a huge blow to the resoruces of the enemy. So everyone made proposes to Italy so that it could join one side or the other.
At that point, Italy made a proposal to the Central Powers: Give Italy the territories they felt like they were theirs, and Italy will join. Austria refused, and since England agreed to give them those territories after the war, Italy joined the Entente.
>let bongs and frogs win the war for them
Nobody in the Entente won the war on its own. WW1 was a war about resources, and every single front opened that could tie up troops and supplies contributed greatly to the effort. Italy tied down all Austro-Hungarian forces and some German divisions too that could have been employed in the western, or the eastern front.
>>914410
>England declares war on Germany
>but we're not gonna help because :)
>>911424
>Can I get a reasonable explanation as to why Italy did so poorly in WWII?
>Mussolini takes control of Italy and wants "muh roman empire" again
>doesnt really have some super empire planned, just wants ethiopia to connect Italies already existing African territories
>takes it, but the war was more brutal than expected. Also caused a major finacial strain on the economy
>All this while, Hitler is building up a super army and has his eyes set on Poland
>Mussolini tells Hitler he will back them up, but he just needs some time to build up his military
>Hitler invades the next day while Mussolini still has his pants down
>plays catch up for months, doesnt even do shit until 9 months later, in the last two weeks of the German invasion of France, when his army takes some shitty little section of France while they are dealing with a real military
Thats it basically. Italy wasnt ready at all for the war, yet projected they were SUPER BADASS BETTER WATCH THE FUCK OUT! because Mussolini couldnt stand some autstic faggot like Hitler having a better army than him
>>914665
From what I've heard their intervention in the Spanish Civil War was a big drain on them too.
>>914208
This. Just consider that to this day, there's an Italian dialect for each of the 20 regions, and within each region there's a lot of small subdialects, one for every city; fuck, our rival city is 1km away from us and their dialect sounds nothing like ours!
Also, the process of the unification of Italy was just Piedmont plundering the whole Boot to build factories up north and let the rest of the country to starve, obviously this kind of behaviour exacerbated the infighting between North and South instead of building a sense of wholeness.
>>913294
The joke is that Cadorna was really the one stereotypical lazy coward italian, who sent the braver ones to die in stupid attacks just so he won't lose "muh noble honor".
>>911845
Hitler and his officer corp were much !more competent in general than Mussolini. He was an idiot.
didnt italy fail vs greece in ww2 and had to unify with germany to send 1 million troops to fight 300,000 greek troops or something
>>913487
Don't go denying the strength of venice senpai
Afaik the only front where they performed reasonably good were the little-known colonial east african theaters. But beating those coons must've been pretty easy i reckon
