Talk:Military history of Italy during World War II
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One of the most interesting counterfactuals emerging in World War II history is what would have happened if Italy had been engaged earlier. The tantalizing prospect glimmers that if Britain and France had been able to declare war on Italy as well as Germany in 1939, Mussolini's house of cards could have been torn apart before Germany could have intervened [and German intervention itself would have been a distraction from the upcoming campaign in the West].
There is an even more compelling counterfactual: the British and French gave way to Italy in its Abyssinian adventure, partly, it seems, because they were genuinely impressed by the evident power of Fascist Italy. But it was a sham then, just as much as it was a sham later. One can argue that the history of the 20th Century would have been radically different [for the better] had Fascist Italy been suppressed in the middle of the 1930s.
From this counterfactual comes a significant question: we know now how feeble Italy was, but why did the military advisors of the day not realize this? The answers to this question have the potential to illuminate not only past history, but also many of the perplexing military questions we face today.
- Well, everybody miscalculated the international situation in the years before the war. The British were paralysed by fear of the Italian Navy throughout the '30s, but they discounted the small and apparently weak German fleet: a serious error
- Mussolini and Stalin also underestimated German power: they were expecting Germany vs. France/Britain to be another slow war of attrition which would take years to decide. If they had foreseen the rapid German victories of 1940 they would have stayed away from Hitler and supported the Allies.
- And of course, Hitler in turn seriously miscalculated Russian power...
- The lesson of the whole sorry episode is "expect the unexpected"