Why Italians Fought So Terrible During The War?

I don't know about the reasons in WWI, but this is a WWII group anyway, so here are some WWII reasons, in subjective order:

1. Poor leadership. The Italian generals were really a bunch of incompetent fools. They lacked imagination and logical thinking, but most importantly they did not have the trust of their men. When discussing the Italian WWII generals, the usual question is: 'Which of them were *not* incompetent?'

2. Poor weapons and equipment. The Italians had worse equipment than any other major power. The best parts were the airplanes and the ships, but the army equipment was mostly inferior. The tanks were OK at the beginning of the war, but by late 1942 already hopelessly obsolete, despite the upgrades. The infantry weapons were also bad. The Finnish Army, which usually tried to use obsolescent weapons to their best effect, found the Italian 6.5mm rifles almost unbearably unreliable and tried replace them with better rifles (i.e. almost anything else) as soon as possible. The artillery pieces were apparently the best part of the army equipment; there are less horror stories about them than from the rest of the Italian army weapons...

3. The Italian soldiers were generally not so enthusiastic about the war. This naturally lowered the morale. It is also notable that the morale was lowest in the branches which had the worst equipment, i.e. among the infantry. Some armored units managed fairly well and the artillery was usually considered to be the best part of the army. The air force had many good pilots. The navy wasn't that bad either, even though it was no match for the Royal Navy in the end.

4. The Italian industry could not produce even the inferior equipment fast enough, the Italian production numbers were almost pathetic. The Italian automobile industry was among the first in Europe to adopt Henry Ford's mass production techniques, but ironically that did not seem to help the Italian wartime production.

Tero P. Mustalahti

The Italian Army had some rather crippling flaws.

1)Equipment. The Fascists instituted a massive rearmament program as soon as they got into power. This gave them the best Army money could buy, with the finest equipment available. In 1935. By 1940, most of their aircraft and AFVs were obsolete, but continued to be manufactured. And there wasn't much of that happening either

: Romel once said that italians are NOT very good soliders. any reasons for : that? please post.

I remember scanning through a book on the Italian Navy in WWII, and it fought well against superior number of Allied ships. Then again, IIRC, the book was written by an Italian historian...

That's news to me. I seem to remember hundreds of thousands of Italians who fought in Africa surrendering to British troops 1/4 their number. From what I've read, dealing with every single aspect of WW2, the Italians were defeated every time. Italian armies couldn't even deal with the French in June 1940, after the French were practically defeated.

Actually, he did. In 'The Rommel Papers', he complains at one point that the Italians had a tendency to run away at the first sound of a gun shot, and surrender at the site of the first British soldier. In fact, at one point, the Brits had to turn away surrendering Italian soldiers - they had too many Italians in the PoW camps, and couldn't handle any more!!

Still, Rommel did depend heavily on a few italian units (the Ariete, the Littorio) and had very high praise for them. So it would appear their performance was extremely varied, probably more so than any other country.

The Italian navy and air force did, however, have decent sailors/pilots, but the leadership and equipment was generally quite bad... (although Italian ships were a bit faster than their british counter-parts, but then Italy is the country that brought us Ferrari automobiles...

YOU try fighting well in M13 ('Self Propelled Coffins' tanks, no medium or heavy artillery, and an incompetant high command...

-Timberwolf

Italinas may have fought badly under the fascist banner yet Italian peasants under the guide of communists held down several German divisions during the war. In fact, it was these Italians who captured and killed Mussolini.

As for the WWI Italian Army, this is not true. They had to hold the worst front line in the world - the Alpine one - and did it rather well, even putting the Austrians with their back to the wall and forcing them to ask for German help. Caporetto was a tragedy of course and Italian troops couldn't be a match for German Stoss units (but there were interesting 'stand-and- die' defensive battles during the retreat to the Piave River): however, see the tactical outcome of the 1918 Ludendorff Offensives on the Western Front... how many Allied troops surrendered? How many square miles of French territory were lost? The initial blows were devastating for Anglo/French troops too.

As for the WW2 Italian Army, this is only partially true, for reasons already excellently stated by other people in this NG. The dreadful Allied war propaganda got loose against the Italians, even looser than against the Germans, and in some books we can still see the result of that propaganda. Even the few Italian successes - the Bir el Gobi battle, the Tunisian defensive campaign 1943, various minor fightings, etc. - are minimized or simply neglected, or ascribed to the Germans (these often ascribed them to themselves very willingly...).

In return, the Russians at least were not unfair. In their battle reports, they usually praise Italian stubborness and fighting spirit.

There's a curious parallel to this in the first Burma campaign. The Chinese army of WWII was universally scorned, but to read the Japanese monographs (written by demobbed Japanese officers mostly and published by the U.S. Army in the 1950s) it is clear that they regarded their most fearsome foe as the Chinese, especially when holding a strongpoint to the death (the same tactic that so baffled Americans later in the war, fighting diehard Japanese). They are not nearly so complimentary about the British Commonwealth troops, who were mostly Indian.

- Dan (http://www.concentric.net/~danford)

Flying Tigers / Brewster Buffalo / Germany at War / Japan at War

That is true, but you have to remember that the those units also had generally much worse equipment and weapons than the Germans. Probably they had worse leadership and fighting skill too, but some at least some Italian units performed well in the Eastern front.

Tero P. Mustalahti

They were 'easy' in the sense that the language barriers made it difficult for them to call on support and that they were relatively poorly equipped compared to German formations (especially in tanks, which tended to be a generation behind the German ones). It's certainly recorded that the Italians had a better fighting record in Russia than they were given by the Allies in Africa.

Jay

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