How did they get btfo so hard in WW2? Literally how hard would

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>>33962437
It was the Italy's leader Mussolini (I cant spell his fucking name) They werent ready for war. Half of their planes weren't operational, all of their divisions lacked supplys, I heard the carcano rifles had accuracy problems and the Italians really don't know how to wage war just look at the ww1 battle they had with the Austrians . Their army was a big bluff and the leadership was worse. They do know how to make god tier food and good pistols and shotguns though.

>>33962708
i now want to see Italian shotgun merc squads for hire that come with complimentary dinner

>>33962437
>tfw their main tank had more reverse gears than forward...

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>>33962437
The Italians are not to be trusted. They were useless in WWI as well.

They're Italian, led by Italians.

>>33962708

Listen to this anon OP

But to deepen the topic, Italy suffered from an endemic dicease and has kept Italians in the mud ever since the unification: poor political will and cultural disunity.

Consider the reunification of West and East Germany, and how one side was radically more wealthy and developed than the other. When Italy reunified, it was the same but to a degree so extreme, some parts of Italy(North mostly) were all but ready to be an industrial power, while others were Russia-levels of poor, miserable and backwards. This was NEVER fixed, no matter how much the centralized Italian governments tried, and is still a topic to this day. The country is strongly divided, and so are it's institutions including the Military. The Italian Officer corps was usually staffed by aristocrats and pampered assholes who hated their enlisted more viciously than you could ever imagine. In WWI, despite the suicidal bravery of Italian soldiers(literally) their officers were incompetent fuckwits stuck in the last century but paying absolutely no consequences or learning from their mistakes like French and German ones, like Luigi Cardona.

now, WWII? The deeply entrenched Italian aristocracy was replaced with something even worse: Fascist appointed morons trained to be more loyal than useful, Arab-army tier incompetence was par for the course. To be fair though, Mussolini KNEW this, Mussolini knew the trains weren't actually running in time and his army had fuck-all logistics and absolutely nefarious command, but Hitler was not gonna take no for an answer, and so they went to war.

>>33962437
>announce war out of the blue without really telling any of your advisors
>most of italys merchant fleet is in foreign ports at the time
>lose half of your merchant fleet in a single day

BRAVO IL DUCE

>>33962708
>Accuracy problems
That's because they were mixing the machine gun ammo with the rifle ammo, and the machine gun ammunition (Which had a heavier projectile weight) didn't agreed well with the Carcano's progressive rifling

>>33962437

Teext dump incoming. Let's start with WW1.

WW1 for Italy was shit. Born of a muddy diplomatic deal with France and Britain, it was a deeply unpopular war. The traditional problems of shitty equipment, lack of common language and the shittiest officer class you can think of made the Italian front the mockery it's known as. It was also an incredibly lethal enviroment, imagine fighting in sub-zero temperatures with crap uniforms and your officers are more bent on killing you than the enemy. Caporetto, the great defeat, was a textbook example of the failures of the Italian leadership. Italy won because the Austria-Hungary collapsed by itself.

Fascism. Ohhh, Fascism. I could write a 50 pages paper on fascist and warfare. Italy won the campaign against the British in Somaliland. Italy lost on all other fronts. The problem was, at the basic level, that Italy was a piss poor country with shitty industrial capacity, a good infantry tradition, and hilariously terrible commanders and leadership. Again, we can talk endlessly how Mussolini in reality had little control on his own country, how the industrial output was worse than WW1 levels, how propaganda was an abject failure, how the officer class was STILL a bunch of spiteful dumbfucks (at lower levels, Italian soldiers fought, often quite well. Matters little when the overall situation is a shitstorm, though). The Navy was.... terrified. Think that no one wanted to engage the British because they were scared as fuck to get sacked if they lost a ship: so they never dared to act aggressively, even when they HAD THE FUCKING ADVANTAGE. The Air arm was a mess of glory hounds, shit training and good designs without the industrial capacity to build them.

Strategically, Italy blew a ton of money in Spain without gaining anything of value (no political or economical advantages), blew a ton of money in utterly useless colonial adventures. They started WW2 already undersupplied and short of everything.

>>33967574

Let's start witn infantry problems. Italian infantry had problems with weapons, training and officers. Weapons were subpar (the Carcano is barely good for what it is, even if I like the sights a LOT), support weapons wee dreadful with an insane amounts of different calibers and they were very difficult to mantain properly, a problem with the mostly uneducated Italian conscripts. It's like reverse SU: the Italians had simple people and they gave them complex, over-engineered weapons that required a lot of man-hours to build. The true problem however was the dreadful level of AT weapons and tactics, the Italians simple failed to get basic AT infantry tactics going without going dangerously on the "suicide" side of things. A common thing was that training focused on aggressive (thus, "manly") attack even if by nature the Italian Army was more suited to defense. Good luck attacking superior enemies.

Logistics were very bad for the common infantryman, thanks to a lack of lorries and awful coordination with the homefront: replacements and R&R were nightmarish (in a very Italian way some infantrymen did years of frontline service without R&R while others did nothing thanks to political connections). Officers had an insane opinion of themselves and, like the Rumanians, lived in another world.

Morale, as you can guess, suffered heavily, as the common Italian fighting man felt betrayed by the State (that gave him shitty weapons for a war he did not understand) and by his officers. Those who kept fighting did it mostly for "comradeship spirit" or in the case of supposedly elite units for unit pride. No one was too keen to die for Fascism.

MVSN units were a mess, think sending overweight untrained 40-years old to war. After some heavy attrition, only the M divisions (younger, more motivated) managed to get a hold of themselves.

>>33962727
pastaniggers can't be mercs while retaining citizenship, sorry

>>33967603

Artillery. Outdated. Tons of Austrian captures. Good designs weren't built in sufficient numbers. Ammo quality problems. Italian artillery officers were probably the greatest asshats of the entire Italian army (historical tradition, that one).

Tanks. Books can be written on the subject. In short, developed for a war in the North, built by a country with bad industrial capacity, doctrine was outdated (T-26 tanks in Spain destroyed Italian tanks, think about that for a moment). That didn't mattered a lot for an infantry-focused army that planned to fight in the Alps, it mattered a lot for a country that wanted to fight world powers. Tankers perceived themselves as somewhat of an "elite", but after a while they went more on the "borderline suicidal". Their memories are moving, we're almost on Soviet airmen "we're already dead when we start the engines" level.

Colonial troops in North Africa were Lybians, I never got much info about them.

And thus we have the land forces: thus you have insufficently trained, badly motivated and badly equipped troops with terrible strategical mobility, and their high-level leadership was often indecisive, craven, and worried mostly to avoid political fallouts instead of, well, winning. it's no surprise that even the mediocre British under a somewhat competent leadership managed to defeat them in detail.

Italians, truth be told, from the miltiary point of view share more with the Russians and the Japanese than with the Germans: Infantry focuses, poor education, somewhat poor industrial capacity. Japs and Soviets managed to truck on thanks to their peculiar societal model, Italians went "fuck it I'm not gonna die for this shitty government" and that was it.

I could dump stuff about the Navy (it's bloody hilarious) and Air forces, but, meh, effort. This is enough to explain why the Itas Itas collapsed as they did?

>>33967629
>I could dump stuff about the Navy (it's bloody hilarious)
Pls do? Especially the torpedo defense system.

>>33965750
>tfw WWI Italian army were basically ill-equipped Imperial guardsmen
I don't really know what to think of this

>>33965750
Italy joined the war because they thought the Germans had pretty much won already and that they need to jump on the winning side. I don't think they expected the British to hold on.

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>>33967651
Its insulting to Guardsmen, that's what I think.

>>33967629
>T-26 tanks in Spain destroyed Italian tanks
T-26 was a good tank though. The tank even manages to become a concern among German tank specialists.

>>33967574
>>33967603
>>33967629
How would they hold up against a war with Japan?

>>33967737
well, not exactly
the higher-ups knew the military was unprepared, and actually proposed to modernize it at some point before the war started, but the officers were such hateful assholes that rejected the idea to avoid losing their privileges
also the propaganda backfired so hard that remaining neutral would have meant a change in administration with someone who would have joined the war anyway
add that to several instances of corporate fuckery with government contracts and you have a nice recipe for sure failure

>>33967638

That would require me of writing about Taranto. Ffffuck. Too much effort.

>>33967764

I agree. Honestly, I find conflicting data about Italian tank evolution, some authors mantain that the war in Spain was ignored by the authorities while others suggest that the change in designs in the late '30ies ("Medium" tanks instead of tankettes) was influenced by foreign developments. Who knows.

>>33967773

Alt-history wankery? Hearts of Iron style, in a void where we can place both nations?

Badly. Japs were incompetent in some regards, but they were better in the same areas where Italians had their strengths.. Jap air designs were better, national morale was higher, leadership was far more capable. Italy was, in the great scheme of things, far more akin to a Balkan country than a Great Power (I am not being dismissive, it's simply how it was).

Fun thing is, as one author said, "Italy lost the war but won the peace". No European country managed to get so rich and developed in the Cold War as Italy, managing to balance a shitton of US economical help with a ton of Soviet cooperation programs (from cars to movies!). The end of the Cold War was a tragedy for Italy (even if the Italian Cold War-era Army was laughable).

>>33967629

Thanks for the read, Anon

>>33967843
I always assume Italy would come out on top when fighting the Japs. (Battered and Bruise aside.

>>33967843
>>33967629
>I could dump stuff about the Navy

Wasn't there a point at Crete where the Germans requested, and you could argue needed, the help of an Italian Destroyer that was in the area. But they just out right refused and sailed away despite being right there and able to give support?

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>when you design such a horrible plane the german inspector nearly executes you for sabotage
[spoiler]I can't remember what plane it was but it was a glider meant to attack gibraltar [/spoiler]

>>33965750
I don't think you really know what you're talking about

>>33967903

If Italy had been actually fighting a desperate war for its own survival, maybe they'd have incentive to get their shit together.

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