Introduction

Italy's armed forces entered the Second World War with trepidation and left it in humiliation. In between, Italy fought at least three wars. The first was Mussolini's attempt to conquer the Mediterranean basin by Italian arms alone. That enterprise, which the armed forces had initially resisted and in which they only half believed, collapsed in the fall and winter of 1940 with the failed attack on Greece, the naval disaster at Taranto, and the British destruction of Italian Tenth Army in the Western Desert. The war ‘parallel to that of Germany to reach our [own] objectives’ that Mussolini had proclaimed in the spring of 1940 was over. Only German help could end Italy's Balkan campaign and save Italian dominion in North Africa, and nothing could save the isolated Italian forces that held Mussolini's East African empire. German help for Italy's Mediterranean war – the Luftwaffe, Rommel, and the Wehrmacht's thrust through Greece and Yugoslavia – brought German strategic direction in its train.

This new war was a guerra subalterna in which Mussolini followed in the wake not merely of Hitler, but of lesser Germans delegated to guard Germany's soft southern flank. Italian forces, at Mussolini's insistence, also operated in the Ukraine until their destruction in the winter 1942–3 Soviet counteroffensives west of Stalingrad. By spring 1943 even German help in the Mediterranean was no longer enough to stave off defeat.