WINNER OF THE 2021 DUKE OF WELLINGTON MEDAL FOR MILITARY HISTORY A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 From an acclaimed military historian, the definitive account of Italy's experience of the Second World War While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. Then, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies in the hope of making territorial gains in southern France and Africa. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties and an Allied invasion in 1943 which ushered in a terrible new era for the country. John Gooch's new book is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight. Everywhere - whether in the USSR, the Western Desert or the Balkans - Italian troops found themselves against either better-equipped or more motivated enemies. The result was a war entirely at odds with the dreams of pre-war Italian planners - a series of desperate improvizations against Allies who could draw on global resources and against whom Italy proved helpless. This remarkable book rightly shows the centrality of Italy to the war, outlining the brief rise and disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign. 'It is hard to imagine a finer account, both of the sweep of Italy's wars, and of the characters caught up in them' Caroline Moorhead, The Guardian

How did Benito Mussolini come to fascism? Standard accounts of the dictator have failed to explain satisfactorily the transition from his pre-World War I 'socialism' to his post-war fascism. This controversial new book is the first to examine closely Mussolini's political trajectory during the Great War as evidenced in his journalistic writings, speeches and war diary, as well as some previously unexamined archive material. The author argues that the 1914-18 conflict provided the catalyst for Mussolini to clarify his deep-rooted nationalist tendencies. He demonstrates that Mussolini's interventionism was already anti-socialist and anti-democratic in the early autumn of 1914 and shows how in and through the experience of the conflict the future duce fine-tuned his authoritarian and totalitarian vision of Italy in a state of permanent mobilization for war. Providing a radical new interpretation of one of the most important dictators of the twentieth century, Mussolini in the First World War will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about the roots of fascism in modern Europe.

The first study of Mussolini as war leader. Focus is the disastrous performance of the Italian army and its consequences.

This book explores the motives, preparation, objectives, contact and consequences of Italy's war of 1940, which ended the country's role as a great power and reduced it to the status of first among Germany's satellites. What Professor Knox demonstrates is the limits of Mussolini's power. In particular, thanks to exhaustive research in the relevant archives, he has been able to throw important new light on Mussolini's relations with his military advisers and commanders.

The dramatic story of Mussolini's fall from power in July 1943, illuminating both the causes and the consequences of this momentous event. Morgan shows how Italians of all classes coped with the extraordinary pressures of wartime living, both on the military and home fronts, and how their experience of the country at war eventually distanced them from the dictator and his fascist regime. Looking beyond Mussolini's initial fall from power, Morgan examines how the Italian people responded to the invasion, occupation, and division of their country by Nazi German and Anglo-American forces - and how crucial the experience of this period was in shaping Italy's post-war sense of nationhood and transition to democracy.

Regio Esercito: the Italian Royal Army in Mussolini's Wars, 1935-1943. A history of the Italian Army's campaigns in Ethiopia, Spain, North Africa, Greece, Yugoslavia, Russia, and Sicily. The Italian Army's Wars are examined from Italian, Russian, and German perspectives, among others. Includes translated Russian passages. Mr. Cloutier brings attention to Italian battlefield successes; he examines a few strategic situations of World War 2, and holds that Italian forces were at times a key asset, whose misuse by the Axis cost them important victories. 178 pages, 77 maps, 34 photos, numerous illustrations, and appendices.

Describes the life of Benito Mussolini, from his modest beginnings as son of a village blacksmith to his rise in the fascist movement and his leadership of Italy during World War II.

By the 1930s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini reached the conclusion that Italy faced a clear choice: expand its power at the expense of the British and French Empires or face stagnation and decline. He believed that the regimes in the democratic West would not be able to contain their inherent hostility toward fascist dynamism, while their demographic and political weaknesses provided the opportunity for the younger, demographically virile fascist Italy to carve a new empire in the Mediterranean status quo. Through his intervention in the Spanish Civil War and his attempts to challenge French Power in Europe and British imperial domination of the Middle East and East Africa, Mussolini sought to decisively change Italy's long-standing position as the least of the Great Powers. Although the Pact of Steel did not always function smoothly, Mussolini remained loyal to its principles, eventually throwing Italy into the Second World War, where he would belatedly discover that his regime had signally failed to prepare his legions for fighting in a modern war.

Among the great misconceptions of modern times is the assumption that Benito Mussolini was Hitler's junior partner, who made no significant contributions to the Second World War. That conclusion originated with Allied propagandists determined to boost Anglo-American morale, while undermining Axis cooperation. The Duce's failings, real or imagined, were inflated and ridiculed; his successes, pointedly demeaned or ignored. Italy's bungling navy, ineffectual army - as cowardly as it was ill-equipped - and air force of antiquated biplanes were handily dealt with by the Western Allies. So effective was this disinformation campaign that it became post-war history, and is still generally taken for granted even by otherwise well-informed scholars and students of World War Two. But a closer examination of recently disclosed, and often neglected, original source materials presents an entirely different picture. They shine new light, for example, on Italy's submarine service, the world's greatest in terms of tonnage, its boats sinking nearly three-quarters of a million tons of Allied shipping in three years' time. During a single operation, Italian 'human torpedoes' sank the battleships HMS Valiant and Queen Elizabeth, plus an eight-thousand-ton tanker, at their home anchorage in Alexandria, Egypt. By mid-1942, Mussolini's navy had fought its way back from crushing defeats to become the dominant power in the Mediterranean Sea. Contrary to popular belief, his Fiat biplanes gave as good as they got in the Battle of Britain, and their monoplane replacements, such as the Macchi Greyhound, were state-of-the-art interceptors superior to the American Mustang. Savoia-Marchetti Sparrowhawk bombers accounted for seventy-two Allied warships and one hundred-ninety-six freighters before the Bagdolio armistice in 1943. On 7 June 1942, infantry of the Italian X Corps saved Rommel's XV Brigade near Gazala, in North Africa, from otherwise certain annihilation, while horse-soldiers of the Third Cavalry Division Amedeo Duca d'Aosta defeated Soviet forces on the Don River before Stalingrad the following August in history's last cavalry charge. As influential as these operations were on the course of World War Two, more potentially decisive was Mussolini's planned aggression against the United States' mainland. Postponed only at the last moment when its conventional explosives were slated for substitution by a nuclear device, New York City escaped an atomic attack by margins more narrow than previously understood. It is now known that Italian scientists led the world in nuclear research in 1939, and a four-engine Piaggio heavy bomber was modified to carry an atomic bomb five years later. These and numerous other disclosures combine to debunk lingering propaganda stereotypes of an inept, ineffectual Italian armed forces. That dated portrayal is rendered obsolete by a true-to-life account of the men and weapons of Mussolini's War.