Italian Troops

I'm a Chinese.What do you think of Italian troops in WW2?Is there anything else they did except running away and surrendering?What do you think the reason is?

 

Hey zheng,

welcome to this forum, hope you will enjoy ya time with us. Italian soldiers suffered under a weak economy, poor equipment (look at tha tanks M13/40, L6/40, lacking of a powerful engine, protection and armament), the same goes for the Air ( Fiat CR.42, MC.200 etc), despite that they had of course fine a/cs as well, like the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 or the MC202, but Italy never produced enough of em. Italian soldiers (tried to) fought as good as those of teh Wehrmacht, I guess, however they suffered under their training and lacking of motivation.

Would like to write more Zheng, but I´ve no time anymore, I will post more tommorrow, the reasons I metioned above are those I thought of at first, don´t have to be 100% right, you know

Best Regards,
Che.

 

Thank you.But they had the same equipment as the Japanese soldiers,at least I think.I guess that goes into the difference of ethnicity.Japanese people have a single ethnicity,which isn't like the Italian who have a mixed one.The history of a whole Italy isn't very long.Yup,as you said,they had a lack of motivation.That is the reason I think except the materials and the training. :roll:

 

zheng:
Yes, welcome to the forums.

Personally, I don't think the Italian populace really bought into the whole "Fascist Future" that Il Duce painted for them.
The Germans didn't think much of the Italians' fighting capabilities or their equipment. Exceptions might be the Italians' armored cars--in North Africa--and some of their best fighter aircraft... which was quite good.
The Italian Navy was an impressive force, but it was never able to hand the RN a solid drubbing. Seemed the Italians always got the short-end of the stick in any encounters. The Raid on Taranto Harbour was a serious setback to both the Italian navy and it's morale.
Their battleships were quite pleasing to the eye, but lightly armored and not equipped with the best radar nor night-fighting abilities. I've also read that their gunnery ranging and accuracy was not the equivalent of the Royal Navy.

Tim

 

Welcome onboard Zheng, always good to have a new member and another perspective.

Not really, the Japanese airforces were far more capable at the very least in terms of aircraft and most likely training, and I would bet probably numerically superior too compared to the Italians.

In terms of training, the Japanese were well trained, particularly in the environments they found themselves fighting, and thoroughly indoctrinated. They believed in what they were doing and were trained and equipped for the task.

Their armour, like the Italians was weakly armoured and armed in comparison to their Western, Wehrmacht and Soviet contemporaries, however unlike the Italians it was in the initial stages at least adequate for the opposition (i.e. in China practically no modern armour at all) and environment it faced, largely close quarters where good armour penetration at long range was not important.

In the sea, the Italians were dually hamstrung by a lack of carriers, a lack of radar and at best indifferent leadership, the Japanese at the same time were almost completely at the other end of the spectrum, well trained and led and embracing carrier aviation in a way the Italians never did and only really lacking in terms of radar.

Overall, the Italian military was not terribly well trained, poorly equipped and indifferently led and, unlike the Japanese, not indoctrinated into the idea of sacrificing themselves for the glory of a new Roman Empire (Which IIRC is what Mussolini had delusions of creating), fought in an environment which emphasised their weaknesses rather than complimented them and against opponents who from a fairly early stage were of pretty high calibre whereas early on (At least in the air, I'm not so sure of on the ground), the RAF crews sent to the far East were supposedly basically second rate and equipped with obsolescent types.

For the Italian perspective, I can only strongly recommend the following site. http://www.comandosupremo.com/ It is naturally biased towards the Italians, but it does go someway to dispelling the enduring and unfair myth that all the Italians were good at was surrendering or running away, some units fought remarkably well considering their material deficiencies.

I mean no disrespect here but that is utter, utter, crap. The ethnicity of the soldiers is completely irrelevant. Consider the Ethnicity of the Waffen SS which is widely regarded as being amongst the hardest fighting military forces in the ETO and which included divisions drawn from all over Northern Europe. Consider the widely diverse Ethnicity of the US armed forces which also fought well and hard, even when outnumbered in the far east initially by their "Single Ethnicity" enemy. Consider the wide diversity in Ethnicity of the Commonwealth forces that eventually fought the Japanese to a standstill in CBI. The huge diversity of the Ethnicity of troops that fought for the Soviet Union... I could go on, there are sure to be numerous examples outside of WWII where "Single Ethnicity" was not a great consideration.

Really, I would have hoped that this "Racial Superiority" BS would have gone the way of the Dodo a long time ago.

The cultural differences do go someway towards explaining the dedication, self sacrifice, ruthlessness and yes, touching on an unpleasant side of that part of the war, the sheer sadistic barbarism enjoyed by the Japanese military. But this isn't a matter of Ethnicity IMO.

Actually if anything Germany as a nation is younger than Italy, and they didn't seem to do too badly initially did they...?

 

Was this a problem when much of the Med' was within reach of their land airfields ?

 

It seemed to help the Royal Navy and despite the presence of land air strips and long range torpedo bombers like the Sm.79 the Regia Marina still tried to convert some carriers (Too little, too late and not completed).

Even in an area as relatively cramped and contained as the Med carriers are an advantage; they give you a mobility of your airgroup (Especially escorting fighters) and perhaps more importantly give you a defensive group that can go anywhere your battleships can providing you with on-call interceptors against any bombers that come your way on a 24/7 basis.

 

Italy wasn't prepared for a modern war when Il Duce decided he wanted to be the next ceasar. However, since their early targets of expansion didn't have much of a military the Italians figured they could pull it off. Then the alliance with Hitler came about and that probably did more harm than good.

The Italian military had good soldiers and sailors but the lack of enough modern equipment and little faith in the cause pretty much limited the effectiveness of the Italian military.

 

Here's a great site on the subject -

http://www.comandosupremo.com/

Anyone who thinks the Italian military was useless should pay particular heed to this bit -

http://www.comandosupremo.com/Decima.html

The Decima Flotilla Mas were the original naval special forces - the British SBS was modelled on them and all other look back to them too.

:smok:

 

Y'know someone might just have mentioned that one in an earlier post on this thread...

 

When Italy joined the second world war, more then 200 merchant ships were not in the Med area and so intercepted by the RN or interned in neutral harbors, this was a heavy loss for the italian merchant navy right at the beginning of the war. The strategic viewpoints were formed by the Operations between Italy and England to protect tha convoys; Italy: Convoys to Lybia and Greece, England Convoys from Gibraltar to Alexandria and of course to Malta. The Defeat of Italy at Sea rested on problems in a tactical and strategic way. Some negative factors were the splintering of their shell salvos, the missing training of the gunners for the fight at night, as already mentioned missing aircraft carriers, no radar, missing Navy Airforce and the capability of the british to decode the italian radio messages. In the strategic way Italy lost the war as they joined our sides, coz the whole war was a logistical one. To win the war you have to support ya troops and to countervail your casualties asap. But the Industry/Economy of Italy wasn´t able to keep up with the industry of England or hardly ever with the one of the USA.

You know, I don´t want to sound to respectless to the Italian contribution of the war, but if you have a look to the lost british cruisers in the MTO (as example) the italians did not sunk one of them, of course they damged two of them, so they had to be scuttled but their contribution to defeat the Rn was not so overwhelming. But even this is a two-edged sword if you consider the sinking of the HMS Valiant and Queen Elisabeth by italian frogmen. BTW considering the pretended weakness of the Regia Marina, I wonder why the joined the Battle of the Atlantic with 32 subs ?


HMS Bonaventure, Dido-class AA-cruiser, Versenkt 31 März 1941

HMS Fijii, Crown Colony-class cruiser, Versenkt 22 Mai 1941

HMS York, York class heavy cruiser, Selbstversenkt 22 Mai 1941

HMS Gloucester, Town-class cruiser, Versenkt 22 Mai 1941

HMS Southampton, Town-class cruiser, Versenkt 1 November 1941

HMS Galatea, Arethusa class cruiser, Versenkt 14 Dezember 1941

HMS Neptune, Leander class cruiser, Versenkt 19 Dezember 1941

HMS Naiad, Dido-class AA-cruiser, Versenkt 11 März 1942

HMS Hermione, Dido-class AA-cruiser, Vesenkt 16 Juni 1942

HMS Manchester, Town-class cruiser, Selbstversenkt 13 August 1942

HMS Spartan, Bellona-class AA-cruiser, Versenkt 29 Januar 1944

HMS Penelope, Arethusa-class cruiser, Versenkt 18 Februar 1944

Regards,
Che.

 

zhengboyang777 wrote:
Thank you.But they had the same equipment as the Japanese soldiers,at least I think.

What I meant was on the land...

 

Have you ever read 'the Rommel Papers' ?Yes,sometimes Italian Army performed quite well in that book in Northern Africa.Actually Rommel's boss in NA was Italian,which limited him.In fact I do think Italian should have done a better job,but...

 

Sorry,I tried the websites you provided for me but it said it couldn't find the service...Perhaps it's the problem of my network.

 

Must be, the links work fine for me. Comandosupremo is probably the best website relating to the Italians in WWII, I'll see what else I can dig up if anything later.

 

Italy's major problem was their economy. Mussolini joined the war against France and England because he thought both nations would be defeated in a couple months. Mussolini knew that he his economy couldn't hold out much longer then half a year.
Further more, Italy had no resources. It had to import iron ore and other valuable resources from overseas. With Gibraltar in British hands, no merchant could break through in order to get these supplies. Most problimatic was the oil. Italy had a couple oil fields and imported some oil of Albania but that was of a low quality. The lack of oil prevented the navy to sail out (although the losses they suffered at Matapan would be the real reason why they didn't like to sail out.)
So Italy had to count on germany for supplies and Germany needed the resources for their own economy.

Then there was also the weapons problem. In order to keep his economy going on, Mussolini had sold his best weapons to foreign nations like Turkey and Spain. This lead however to the fact that his army still used vintage guns from WW1, weak tanks and bad planes. It was only after the Italians recieved the more powerful Daimler Benz engine from Germany that Italian fighters became some of the best.

And last, but not least, weapon evolution. Italy's changes started to decrease further and futher whenever the British develop more powerfull weapons. The only thing the Italians could do was to improve their armor on their tanks (M13 to M15 tanks) but they gun reamaind the same and was to weak to do damage to the British tanks.
The P-40 tank (a medium tank equiped with a 75mm gun) was planned to arive in the field around '41 but it was only until '43 that it was builded and by then it was already underclassed by the newest allied tanks.

So, as you can read, Italy's problem was it's economy. Italy was already running behind on Germany and the British when the war started and there was no way that they could change that (unless in the air => Veltro, Fiat G.55)
As for the Italian soldiers. Erwin Rommel once said: "Good men, bad officers". The problem there lays with bad leadership and officers that easly paniced. Marshall Grazianni thought he was attacked by 17 British divisions during operation Compass at the end of 1940. in reality, it where only 2. Gives you a clue how much they enlarged the facts.
But once again, the soldiers did a very good job. Men died at their cannons, defending the position untill their lost shot/breath. Some men jumped out of fleeiing trucks to rescue men who fell of, this while beeing shot at. At the battle of Beda Fomm, Italian tanks kept on attacking in order to break out.
Personnaly, i think the Italians where sometimes amoungst the bravest soldiers. I mean, their M 13-15 is no match at all against British tanks and still the crews jump in those tanks and engage the enemy, knowing that they need to get close in order to pierce the enemies armour and knowing that they are easely outgunned and one hit kills everybody inside.

 

zheng;
Maybe what you are thinking of about comparing Italy to Japan in the way the armies were equiped possibly comes from the fact that Japan bought some rifles made by Italy, so there is a slight military connection. Whether or not Japan had other Italian equipment is hard say.

In some ways their armies were similar. Both used WW1 era rifles and handguns. They both had only light tanks and amored cars and never fielded these in great numbers. They also had quite a bit of light artillery.

 

Thank you!I've got new perspectives...
But I didin't know that Japan bought some rifles made by Italy...

 

Zheng may have a point. Many foreign units fought well, especially the scandinavians and the french, but the german units had the best "combat" records. Not including massacres, which happened invariably

 

If anything this only disproves Zheng's point even more, since as I've pointed out as a nation Germany is younger than Italy, a unified Germany was only formed in 1871 from a collection of many much smaller states and Principalities.

As for the German units having the best combat records, can you back that up? Even if this is so, it is worth pointing out that many of the international SS units were only formed once Germany started becoming increasingly needy of troops, the quality, competence and experience of the opposition had improved dramatically so it shouldn't come as a surprise that those SS Divisions formed later had a harder time.

I used the SS to illustrate the point that having a multi-ethnic combat force does not lead to that force being weak, ill-led or underperforming. You can try to hide that by cherry picking out the German divisions but that doesn't change the fact that the multi-ethnic SS overall fought extremely well and hard. I'm sure you could do something similar with Italian units recruited from single locales which were on the whole of a far more single-ethnicity than even German units of the SS but failed to fight anywhere near as hard as them.

The point is that this notion that an armed force of single ethnicity is somehow ethnically or racially superior to a multi-ethnic armed force and will fight harder and better as a result is just so much Bovine Crop Enhancer. Leadership, training, equipment, indoctrination and cultural differences play a part, but the ethnicity of soldiers on the whole will not.

Editted to correct quote tags.