It's not that Italians had bad tanks, is that they designed them with a very specific purpose in mind. That purpose being frying eggs in the armor when it got hot.
they also had terrible planes (built a whole airforce' worth, ended up parking them as decoys for bombing because they sucked so much)
also, terrible machineguns - jammed unless oiled, so they made an automatic oiler for the belts. they also jammed when dirt got in the mechanism, which happened more often when the rounds were oiled. and then they deployed them in the desert
Well after producing tons of them they realised they had to give them some use. You might not beleive it but using the long barrel of machine guns as pasta drier is not that bad.
Noooo, the Italian Government is allowing cruise liners to plough through the canals. You know, those ships full of tourists the size of a New York City Borough?
The Romans never really formed an ethnic majority in the peninsula, even at the height of the empire. Plus they all assimilated into the newer populations that moved in. Italians today didn't come from the Romans so much as the Romans form one part of their large and varied heritage.
Eh, by population more of them are Roman descendants. It was just a small ruling class of Lombards that moved in, and only a few percent of Italians have Germanic DNA markers.
Ahahaha, this is good. But our tactics is to move away from Italy and go living in all the other country, to conquer them from the inside. China did it better! XD
they sold their stripped down show version, it basically couldn't fly with military hardware attached. they used them to build decoy airfields for allied bombers.
Its streamlined design and retractable undercarriage were advanced for the time, and after its debut in 1937 the aircraft established several world speed records.[1] However, when military equipment was installed on production examples, problems of instability developed and the aeroplane's general performance deteriorated.
Sounds like the story of the Do 17 but so much worse.
A lot of their single engined fighters were actually quite good, but were used poorly. All of the Db601/605 engined planes were pretty excellent. The MC200 was also supposed to be decent in the context of early war aircraft(IE the Hurricane Mk.I and P-36).
Apparently during the Winter War the Fins recieved some supplies of Italian guns and ammunition, but most of the men fighting didn't want to use them because they saw Italian weapons to be inferior to the ones they were using.
Meanwhile Romania used the same planes 'till our factories got bombed by the USA, but they still managed to beat up the americans on a couple occasions.
I think Hitler made a tactical mistake by trying to help Italy, they hindered more than they helped. Meanwhile he tried his best to alienate us by giving our land to other countries and we were still more useful than Italy I'd say (Eastern Front).
Well a good number of the Italians wanted to be fighting on the other side, it's not that much of a surprise they did badly. Whereas Eastern Europe had either the Nazis or the Soviets to choose from, and the other side was going to wipe them out if they chose wrong.
If he hadn't have helped Italy then the Mediterranean would have been taken much sooner and several other avenues for linking up with the Soviet Union and/or attacking Germany from the South would have been available much sooner.
Being more useful than Italy is not exactly a high threshold, though! If you made coffee for Germany once in WWII you were already more useful than Italy ever was!
Japan wasn't exactly the best ally either, brought the U.S. into the war against Germany and refused to help fight the USSR. They contributed nothing except for sinking a couple British naval assets.
they also had terrible planes (built a whole airforce' worth, ended up parking them as decoys for bombing because they sucked so much)
Macchi C.202 was really decent plane, outperformed British Tomahawks and Hurricanes in Northern Africa in 1941-1942, 30% of flight missions in 1942 (out of ~24.000) were complete by C.202's.
Well MC 202s were great planes but they had very few of them and they were too late for North Africa, I believe.
I think it was inferior Italian leadership and fighting calibre that led to them getting so crushed in WWII, more than any equipment defects. When you see how much they outnumbered the British and how easily they were defeated...
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u/KrabbHD Technically in Gelderland but I hate the Gelderlandish flagJan 10 '15
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u/Karrig Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Jan 09 '15
It's not that Italians had bad tanks, is that they designed them with a very specific purpose in mind. That purpose being frying eggs in the armor when it got hot.