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This is proving a dense but informative read. It really is amazing how much gets glossed over in the American story of these events.

As much as I’m enjoying this, I’m getting a little too bogged down in the stories of the various states, so I’m skipping ahead to get to the chapters on unification. It feels like cheating, but I do need to move on.

Reading about Mussolini’s April 1943 meeting with Hitler is interesting, as Mussolini’s focus on empty trivialities foreshadows Hitler’s own behavior in the face of impending defeat two years later.

This is the book in a nutshell: Mussolini was desperate to copy German success, only to come up repeatedly against the fact that Italy wasn’t Germany and didn’t have the manpower or resources to equal their accomplishments. The result is an overstretched and under equipped military that increasingly can only play second fiddle to Hitler’s tune.

And now an overstretched Italian military commits several divisions to the war in the Soviet Union. Absolute madness.

Now Italy’s fighting a total war that they don’t have the capacity to wage. Mussolini’s inability to decide where to concentrate his limited resources isn’t helping matters, either,

It’s an inescapable conclusion from Gooch’s account that Italy had no business going to war in June 1940 and everyone knew it.