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The Best They Could Do: Italy July 1940
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Could they have done it? How long would it have taken? Alternate History Miscellaneous Challenges
Could you do better than the Japanese leadership? POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue. Here are some of my general-interest ones. |
Italy
has
joined World War II. Benny the Moose is no longer with us and you’re in
charge of his ramshackle, poorly trained and equipped armed forces.
Let’s assume that your goal is to get the corrupt and nasty Fascist
regime through the war in as good a shape as possible. (not exactly a
task most of us would want to take on for moral and many other reasons,
but let’s assume that for some reason you want to do it).
Italy is in awful shape for a war. It lost about a third of its merchant marine as soon as it declared war because it didn’t give merchant ships enough time to get to home waters. Its reasonably modern navy doesn’t have enough fuel to operate its fuel-hungry battleships for more than a short time. After that it will be dependent on drips and drabs from fuel-starved Germany. Italy has enough heavy industry to supply maybe 20 of its 90+ divisions with reasonably modern weapons, but is dependent on foreign supplies for much of the raw material to run those industries. The Italian navy is reasonably modern, but the airforce is still trying to make the transition from a mid-1930s bi-plane based force to modern low-wing monoplanes. The modern fighter planes coming into service in the Italian airforce are hampered by bulky and underpowered engines, and are not really a match for modern British or German fighters. Italian artillery and infantry weapons are mostly old and not particularly well designed. Italian tanks were for the most part mid-1930s era tankettes armed with machineguns, though a few cannon-armed tanks were going into service. The Italians had too few trucks and radios to operate as a modern military force. Like Japan, Italy didn’t have time on its side. It was at war with Britain. If the British survived the summer, by October the worsening weather conditions in the English Channel would make a German invasion impossible. When that happens, the British would be able to bring a portion of its considerably more modern army south to North Africa, and the Italians would be in trouble, as they were historically. The Italian window of opportunity to do anything significant on their own was essentially from July to October or possibly November of 1940. After that the overwhelmingly superior equipment of the British would force the Italians to play second fiddle to the Germans in the theatres they considered their own. Also, the Italian forces in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somaliland were isolated and would wither on the vine unless the Italians were able to find a way to resupply them. That meant taking Egypt, which was probably beyond Italian capabilities under normal circumstances, though the extreme weakness of the British in July and August of 1940 made it somewhat more feasible. British control of Malta was also a problem for the Italians. If Britain managed to build up Malta it could do a lot toward cutting the Italian armies in North Africa off from Historically the Italian frittered away the summer and autumn months of 1940. Mussolini saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grab territory, and prestige. He spread the already weak Italian war effort in a variety of ways, sending 170 planes to fight in the Battle of Britain, though they didn’t actually get there until October 1940. The planes didn’t have much impact in the Battle of Britain, but they might have made a difference in North Africa. Through the summer of 1940, the Italians concentrated over half of their supply efforts on getting ready for a late summer invasion of Yugoslavia that Hitler then vetoed. After the German veto of the Yugoslav invasion, the Italians actually demobilized 500,000 men. The Italians also toyed with grabbing Corsica from Vichy France and wasted time and resources getting ready for that offensive (which they actually implemented in November 1942 in conjunction with the German occupation of Vichy France). Then in October, the Italians attacked Greece at the start of the rainy season, with less than half of the divisions the Italian army said they needed, and a few weeks notice rather than the three months they would have needed to build up adequate supplies. Low Hanging Fruit: I’ve already talked about some of the no-brainer things the Italians could do, but here are a few others: (1) Deploy the reasonably advanced radar system that had been developed locally and then ignored. (2) No attack on Greece, at least not in October 1940. (3) Don’t send troops to fight against the Soviet Union or planes to fight in the Battle of Britain. The Italians were outclassed in both arenas, and had little impact while frittering away resources that could have been useful somewhere else. (4) License German aircraft engines earlier to make their planes competitive. (5) It might be useful for the Italians to try a reapproachment with the Soviet Union in the summer and fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941. The Soviets had been selling Italy oil for their navy until the Italians sent weapons to Finland during the Winter War. Stalin might have been open to an arrangement sending oil to Italy for industrial goods. The Soviets accounted for 37% of Italian oil in the mid-1930s. (6) Not declaring war on the US or the USSR might also be good ideas. Those last few paragraphs point in some directions I would go to do better, but they probably aren’t enough to do much more than make Italian defeats a little less humiliating. So what would you do in that position?
Posted on March 26, 2010.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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