Regio Esercito: The Italian Royal Army in Mussolini's Wars 1935-1943

My father was a medical orderly in the Italian Army in North Africa. For decades, I have wanted to find out as much as possible about Italy's military during the war. Unfortunately, there is very little written from an Italian perspective available in the English language. The author, Patrick Cloutier, does a very credible job of describing the actions of the Italian Royal Army (the Regio Eserito) from the Spanish Civil War to the Army's surrender in WW II. The depth of detail sometimes even goes down to the battalion level. The appendix contains a moderate Order of Battle and the book contains numerous illustrations and maps.Unfortunately, though there are, as I said, numerous maps of each engagement, they are often located pages away from the written description of events, making it tough sometimes to track what is going on. All maps are in grayscale which sometimes make it hard to discern the nationalities and composition of the involved units. Worse, the author has, to some small extent, succumbed to the current tendency of a number of the latest generation of authors to provide a different, softer, more favorable light to the equipment and actions of the RE in general and the Black Shirts in particular. Political Correctness strikes again.Unfortunately, people like my father are no longer here to provide a solid grounding (what I call Ground Truth) for what really happened. All I have left are the few stories he told me of what he experienced and I guess this tendency is only going to get worse as time goes by... Still, this book is a welcome addition to my collection.

There isn't too much hard knowledge or details available on the Italian army. This book addresses some issues but leaves others unexplored. The lack of adequate heavy weapons isn't really covered-Italian industry was poorly organzied and under developed yet Japan on approximately the same level produced about 5 times the war material. Italy with few exceptions had the worst infantry weapons of WW2, beating out the Japanese for that honor. Their machine guns jammed and were too heavy. Their mortars were inferior to their counterparts. Aircraft were outmoded and inferior in every respect to their British counterparts. Their fleet was useless although it had good material and excellent human material.Italian motor vehicles were excellent but their armor was terrible. The organization, training and logistics of the military was an after thought. Numbers were more important than how those numbers functioned, as a result numbers counters believed the Italian military was large and well equipped. They were in fact hollow legions.The book should explore this, and it does so in a limited fashion. Why were some Italian units outstanding while others less than suitable? Why were numbers so important if a smaller but better equipped force would have done far better? Why were Italian troops to display such poor motivation?A descent book and a useful addition but I would have hoped for more.

The large format book helps with reading and enhances the history being shared.Much of what I read in this book I have read elsewhere, but this book in this format is very readable.The topic, the Italian Royal Army of World War 2, is covered on all the fronts where it fought from 1935-1943. Given that range of dates to cover do not expect in-depth coverage of major battles; most topics are covered in a page or two, maybe three at most.There are some pictures I have not seen elsewhere. The maps appear to be hand-drawn, but adequate relative to the text. There are some interesting comments by the author inserted at various points. Those "Author's Comments", if you know this history, are enlightening and sometimes presents thought-provoking questions.

When will a dispassionate military historian write a book about the Italian military participation in World War II? Too often the Italians are dismissed as buffoons . Many books on the North African front barely mention them as if the Germans were the only troops fighting from 1942 thru Torch. Yet the revisionist histories such as this seem to err the other way, trying to paint the Italians in the best light possible to counter Allied wartime myths. Actually Italy's military participation was much like many countries on either side. Some brave and professional units some outclassed with low morale and worse equipment poorly led. Musssolini like Stalin and Hitler and even Churchill made severe tactical and strategic mistakes costing the lives of thousands .This book is basically a summary cobbled together from secondary sources many in English. Good for what it is, but certainly the participation of Italy , Romania and the other Axis allies deserves a hard authoritative study. The full history of World War II is still incomplete in English.

Very happy to have bought this book as it was endorsed by John R. Griffin , Colonel (retired) US Army Special Forces.Although not super in depth, it does give enough valuable information and facts about the Italians in WW2 that have been till now deliberately left out in English books. Buy a copy, it really will complete your ww2 history and give you accurate insights and factual events you could only previously read in Italian and Russian.Definitely a 5 out of 5 in my book!

This army get bad press during WW 2, but after reading the reader get the notion of continues combat but a not so well equiped army makes these army worth studing in more detail. The organization and campaign fought by this army is covered in great detail. The equipment and uniforms are also mentioned. One interesting aspect covered is the campaigns before WW2. East Africa and Spain shows the italian army at its best.

Unknown facts about the Italians at war.

Before I did any reading about secondary powers during WW2, most of what I learned about that conflict came from books that gave a more general summary of WW2 or books that were written by people who tried to present themselves or their subject as superior. In most of these the Italians are labelled as worthless or useless and their performance described with 'and they dropped their pants and ran'.I found such pieces to be rather ridiculous, as if that country did not have any good soldiers or officers. As if that country completely failed to produce some proper tactics and weapons. I am glad that some authors actually try to give you a bit of reality rather than the nonsense we see so often. This is one wuch work that tries to tell you about the Italian performance between 1935-1943. But dont get carried away, the author sometimes does his best to convince you that they were the best. The Italians were good soldiers, but so were their allies and enemies.The Italian army that entered WW2 was simply not prepared for a world war, because it lacked the industrial capacity to supply its army with weaponry and because it was trained and equipped for a different war. One has to remember that Italy fought on the allied side during WW1 and expected to fight another war just like this, with the threat coming from Austria, Germany and even Yugoslavia. As a result, the infantry remained the 'Queen of the battlefield', tanks had to be light for transport over smaller roads and bridges, they had to be kept small for use on mountain paths.And tanks remained infantry-support, a way of thinking that would only change late, a few years before WW2 broke out. Italy produced some fine specialists like Douhet in the airforce but in the area of tank warfare they did not have any Hart, Fuller, De Gaulle or Guderian to propose a wholly different application of armour.As the enemy could not bring its own armour into the battle in the Alps, the Italians simply did not even have any decent anti tank weapon up until the late 1930's when they adopted an Austrian design (the 47mm Bohler gun).When they finally started to realize that they would end up on the other side, they quickly had to rearm completely to fight of the allies in the meditteranean. The navy and airforce received priority now and the army had a hard time acquiring new weaponsystems. Never the less, Mussolini chose his moment well and his army could have done some real damage as this books shows, only to see those opportunities squandered and the war in the meditteranean lost.I would definitly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject as long as you keep that little pinch of salt nearby. The author doesnt use many Italian sources but that should not always be seen as a flaw. A Russian or Allied work on the Italian army is usually based on experiences gathered when fighting them, sometimes resulting in praise(which also came from a few German commanders). It is easier to accept such words when they come from an enemy.

The Italian campaigns are detailed and just what I was after. The diagrams are simplistic and the photos grainy but they still work.However...... the author's fanciful statements and conclusions can be hard to swallow at times. I have personally researched the Italian campaigns in the East to some depth and I know the Italian reputation has been unfairly smeared regarding their fighting ability, but some of the nonsense in this book goes well beyond any sort of positive discrimination.Many of the sections are in italics as if they're quotes but no source is given and it soon becomes apparent that these are the author's words. Things like comparing the potential fall of Tobruk to the British disaster at Yorktown in the American War of Independence is so wide of the mark it's almost laughable. Stating that it could have caused the fall of the British government and peace terms is flawed beyond logic. There are other instances such as speculating why the Alpini weren't used in Case Blue and then there's things like this:"The loss of Egypt or Sudan would have severely affected the perception that Britain could win, and the loss of both might mean a total loss of confidence in an English victory. To help Freemasonry at this critical time, Graziani would only have needed to delay the invasion of Egypt long enough, for the English to receive enough reinforcements to prevent Italian success."So Graziani was a Freemason? Complete conjecture and utter nonsense.Ignore the passages in italics and the ramblings contained within and you have a very good informative book. If the author had stayed objective rather than wallowing in subjective claptrap, this book would have got 4 or 5 stars from me.

An excellent overview of the Regio Esercito under Mussolini. Well laid out with maps and photographs, this book was exactly what I wanted. My only quibble is that I would have liked some of the maps and photographs to have been in colour.

Very general and rather poor account of the Italian Army during WW2.

Good general summary of the Italians in all theaters in WW2.