"Here's Why Everyone Wants To Forget Italy's Poor" Topic

…World War II Tanks

"Key point: Italy had not deployed any tanks into combat World War I, but in 1919 it acquired a license to build a domestic spinoff of the ubiquitous French FT-17 light tank called the Fiat 3000.

Mussolini entered Italy into World War II on June 1940, hoping to ride on the coattails of Nazi German conquests. Il Duce had grand visions of a Roman Empire reborn, but his clumsy opportunism would result in the destruction of his Fascist regime in three blood-soaked years…"

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Armand

Tanks were very interesting in the immediate pre-war years.
Italian tanks were, IMHO, about average compared to the average tank making nation in the world.
If Italy were fighting Japan or perhaps France, how bad would Italian tanks have been? They seemed to have suffered the same problem the US did in the interwar period, they just failed to spend enough money to have a truly modern force despite having reasonable technology available to them.
Then it takes a couple years to get a decent stable of tanks, but then Italy was invaded by the Allies and time was up.
Bunkermeister

Given Italy's pre-war industrial base it was almost a miracle that they built what they did – they did produce some excellent aircraft and some decent surface ships and the Semovente SPG was a very effective assault gun

Part of the problem is that the Italian general staff expected to fight a war in the mountains and deliberately kept their tanks small and light to accommodate the expected battlefield.

Many thanks

Armand

Italy may be one of the few European countries that could say the war started too late. The Italians had a fairly modern mobile force in 1936. However it lacked the resources to continue updating that force to reflect developments elsewhere in the later 1930s.

Thanks also…

Armand