Restored operational Italian preWar or WW II AFVs

[John Kettler]

One of the guys on the CoC boards posted this little marvel. There seems to be a disagreement (see Comments there) as to the correct identity of the larger AFV, but regardless, it's a joy to see them, having only even B/W somewhat blurry wartime footage. These tanks are acoustically stealthy, shockingly so. Like that they're fully kitted out and the crews are, best I can tell, in proper uniform.
 

Regards,

John Kettler

[Warts 'n' all]

A nice find, John. Thanks.

It also features a nice piece of parking.

[Erwin]

Didn't realize how SMALL those tracked recon vehicles were.  In CM1 they seemed to be larger.

[Trooper117]

Good stuff!

[SimpleSimon]

On 10/15/2018 at 2:39 PM, Erwin said:

Didn't realize how SMALL those tracked recon vehicles were.  In CM1 they seemed to be larger.

They are kind of anemic aren't they? Symptom of insufficient material wealth I think. Gotta make the most with the least. Every kg of metal has got to count when you're a tiny nation fighting a big war. 

[John Kettler]

Three years ago, the Canadians loaned the Austalians a trophy CV L/33. The museum already has an even rarer Japanese Ha-Go tankette.
 

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited October 18, 2018 by John Kettler

[StieliAlpha]

On 10/17/2018 at 8:20 PM, SimpleSimon said:

They are kind of anemic aren't they? Symptom of insufficient material wealth I think. Gotta make the most with the least. Every kg of metal has got to count when you're a tiny nation fighting a big war. 

I guess it was more a question of motor power. 50HP were a lot in those days. And that is, where every kg counts...

Plus, of course, Italian armour was not designed for large tank battles. I would think, the design brief asked more for  “riot control” in Ethiopia or North Africa. And narrow Balcan roads, probably. 

Edited October 26, 2018 by StieliAlpha

[SimpleSimon]

HP is kind of a misleading value in tank engines though. The Panzer IV was only supposed to run on 300HP but tank engines have enormous displacement. The cylinders are huge because the engine needs to make lots of torque, not necessarily a lot of power. If you want constant high power output you want RPM, like an airplane engine. 

In all cases the relationship between power and weight was well understood, what was not well understood was how quickly expenses went up for increasingly heavier chassis and the engines to move them. This is why tankettes were so popular in the 1930s. You could build lots of them on a budget the bean counters wouldn't surely veto, and few countries had anything to stop them with. Additionally they look good for your annual military parade and the public can't tell that they're cheap. 

The L3 and other Italian tanks were designed for practicality in Italy's mountainous terrain good roads were infrequent and heavy bridges even less common. They also suffered from Italy's completely dysfunctional military bureaucracy which was both aimless and unassertive. Private manufacturers had just about no oversight and were incompetently managed. Machine tools in Italy were generally of poor quality and much of the population lacked technical skills. I just finished "Mussolini and his Generals" and really the problems with the Italian military were so clear but also very nuanced. I still find it difficult to describe exactly what the problem was, but I guess overall it was a lack of the sort of all-level cooperation and communication that made the other industrial powers so much better at waging "World" war.

One could point out that the Italians did on occasion make some very good, very competitive weapon systems, like the Beretta Modello 38, the Macchi C.205, or the Cannone da 90/53 which may well have been the best AAA gun of the war. You had some of the world's most prominent figures of military thinking like Giulio Douhet, Italo Balbo, and Pietro Badoglio all of whom had impressive talents and keen foresight, yet when at the helm of their respective services proved little better at leadership than the old conservatives they had replaced. So in the end, one could also point that the Italian Army that went to war in 1940 was actually inferior to the one that it went to war with in 1915...

[DerKommissar]

Fantastic video! 5 tankers on a M13/40, the crew actually had 4 -- I was bewildered, thinking that trash can could accommodate 5.

On 10/17/2018 at 2:20 PM, SimpleSimon said:

They are kind of anemic aren't they? Symptom of insufficient material wealth I think. Gotta make the most with the least. Every kg of metal has got to count when you're a tiny nation fighting a big war. 

I believe manufacturing was a big bottleneck. Italy was a rural nation and did not have the production infrastructure or know-how for good quality AFVs. Notice that these tanks are riveted, and riveted construction requires more kgs of steel than welded armour. This is because armour is riveted onto a frame superstructure inside.

I thought the L3/33 had welded construction, the one in the video looks riveted to me. I don't see any problem with this tankette in 1933, most nations at that time fielded similar vehicles. The M13/40 though? A new design that just entered production in 1940? I guess they were expecting their enemy to lack any sort of anti-tank capability -- let alone tanks of their own.

[SimpleSimon]

It was a crippling bottleneck. Italy was indeed a rural nation known for its citrus and wine production. On the one hand, some of the world's most famous automotive, arms, and aero firms were there. Maserati, Beretta, Fiat, Ansaldo, etc were world wide brands and made considerable profits on international sales. Italian industry was capable of making high quality products, it just clearly was not capable lots of quality products. All of Italy's best hardware was generally limited production run stuff, and manufacturing was always slow. Even small orders were ridiculously expensive owing to the need for them to import raw materials, and because the Italian government would generally take private firms on their word that they were getting the best deal. 

There were some silver linings. Italy had a large population for its size and could put millions of men in the field, but arming all these men was problematic due to the industrial bottlenecks and even cases of corruption. Many men in the Italian Army never got uniforms or boots, much less weapons or rations. The Italian Army's ration during the war was of such notoriously bad quality that Italian troops referred to it as "dead donkey". 

The Italians inherited lots of weaponry from the defeated Austo-Hungarians in the last war. Much of which were quality artillery tubes by Skoda works. In fact Italy's artillery may well have been its most functional arm during the war and both World Wars were artillery wars. However it had the classic limitation of needing to rely on pre-planned fire missions because radios and field telephones were so scarce. The Italian Army did not have enough trucks or movers for all of them and i'm sure there weren't even enough horses to meet the artillery's requirements for mobility. Even if there were, ammunition shortages had to be frequent events because of the next major issue, the Italian Navy.

On paper the Italian Navy looked very impressive. Lots of relatively modern capital ships with impressive throw weights. I believe the most modern of which the Littorio class actually overmatched the most recent British and German designs in firepower at least until HMS Vanguard appeared. In many ways German capital ships were markedly inferior to Italian ones, and it was in Regia Marina the Germans placed the most hope in an Italian partnership by far. The Italian Navy also had impressive sealift capability, operating a large merchant fleet. However, the Italian Navy was remarkably deficient in escort vessels, the lack of which was so egregious that when the Italians launched Littorio and Vittorio Veneto  in 1940 they had to withdraw ships from outposts like the Dodacanese Islands to protect them. This meant that the safe perimeter the Navy could operate within got that much smaller leading to an overall decrease it capability. The Italian Navy actually lost effectiveness by having too many capital ships since it had to shut down bases without so much as a shot being fired. Since the Navy was pressed to protect its own assets from destruction it's natural to imply that they would find it extremely difficult to protect Italy's communication lines to its Empire and all those issues caused by industrial bottlenecks are now magnified tenfold because what little they do manufacture is unlikely to end up anywhere it will have an effect on the war. 

That last bit really sums up the whole war effort. Everything in the Italian war effort was a circular mess of self perpetuating failure. The failure of one element led to the failure of the others and then vice versa. 

Edited October 26, 2018 by SimpleSimon

[DerKommissar]

Then Taranto happened -- uh-oh, spaghettio!

[Erwin]

Informative and succinct summary - Thanks SSimon.

[Warts 'n' all]

8 hours ago, DerKommissar said:

uh-oh, spaghettio!

That should be "uh-oh, spaghetto!" The singular of spaghetti.

[SimpleSimon]

I think no single event proved more catastrophic for Italy than the Invasion of Greece, a campaign which goes to show victory can be a defeat all its own. Despite eventually succeeding (with German assistance) the complete debacle it degenerated into confirmed OKW perceptions that Italy was an inferior, and thus they were entitled to whatever they needed from it. Being a junior partner to Nazi Germany was always bad for your health, because at their best the Nazis weren't going to help and at their worst they would cannibalize nearby allies when they were weak. Without any political or military currency to influence Germany, Mussolini was doomed to become "Our Gaulieter in Italy"  in the words of German troops and Italy another expendable Axis pawn.

The irony is Italy possessed a number of assets Germany ended up badly in need of, a navy, large manpower reserves (!!!!), bases with close proximity to vulnerable British ones, etc. Of course converting a lot of these things into useful tools for the Axis war effort was just completely beyond the Frat-Boy Prussian Officers of the OKW, who revealed on multiple occasions that coalition warfare and all of its importance completely eluded them. They simply assumed that Hitler was managing Germany's allies and in turn Hitler assumed they were working up plans all the time to incorporate those allies into Axis strategy. For how well this was working reference: Operation Uranus. 

Edited October 28, 2018 by SimpleSimon

[Warts 'n' all]

Not forgetting their stuffings, at the the hands of British, and Colonial troops, in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Egypt in 1940/1

[SimpleSimon]

Anybody in Libya in 1940 would've found it difficult to repulse the British. The British force in North Africa had an enormous number of artillery tubes for its size and they had the 7th Armoured Division. The Italian Army was widely spread out because it had to protect both borders (the French overseas territories were still a big unknown) and deal with Libyan rebels, and the single highway/railway combo it had for supply, the Via Balbo, was exposed along its entire length to British naval gunfire. I know the loss figure of around 150,000 men is usually thrown around but it's sort of misleading. The British didn't envelop the entire Italian force all at once and much of that force was composed of Libyan locals. Operation Compass was a major victory to be sure but not one that Italy couldn't rebound from. The British didn't have a way to follow it up and much of the Italian Army in Libya remained at large. 

The other major catastrophe for Italy was Malta. It's a little lesser to me because it would've taken someone very perceptive to predict the British would fight so hard for the island, sending whole convoys over and over again to be massacred as long as a few ships made it was very uncharacteristic for them. Still, its position on the Axis supply route should've made an invasion a no brainer and it would've been well worth losing ships over. 

What bothers me about Greece is that there was just no excuse for it. The more you learn about it the harder it is to understand how it fell out. Other Italian screw ups have reasonable enough explanations 

[Michael Emrys]

7 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:

What bothers me about Greece is that there was just no excuse for it. The more you learn about it the harder it is to understand how it fell out. Other Italian screw ups have reasonable enough explanations 

Mussolini was suffering from conquest envy. Hitler had been going great guns all over the map and Italy was seeking a piece of the pie. France had turned out pretty much of a flop for Italy and the Battle of Britain was a disappointment too. Greece looked like easy pickings, which was a false perception but not that far off. Greece turned out to be pretty tough after all, but was almost on the point of collapse when the big boys got involved. If Britain had done the sensible thing and stayed in NA to finish the job there, then if Germany had also stayed home, Greece might have had to ask for terms by the summer of '41. There was still a considerable army available in Italy, but Greece was nearing exhaustion. Mussolini's blunder was the same as Hitler's in the USSR: thinking all he had to do was march into the country and it would fall into his lap like a ripe plum.

Michael

Edited October 29, 2018 by Michael Emrys

[Warts 'n' all]

8 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:

What bothers me about Greece is that there was just no excuse for it. 

There were no excuses for any of their invasions, before or during the war. One wonders how the Italians could have ever followed a bloke who looked like a novelty condom. 

[Michael Emrys]

Populations do all sorts of massively irrational things. I don't need to look across oceans to find recent examples, I'm sad to say...

Michael

[DerKommissar]

6 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

One wonders how the Italians could have ever followed a bloke who looked like a novelty condom. 

Aye, a dude who was both put in power and deposed by a monarch in the mid 20th century. And when the Germans broke him out, in a bombastic Hollywood fashion, he went to Rome -- against all reason, and got himself hanged.

Not the smartest despot, I'll say that much.

15 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:

What bothers me about Greece is that there was just no excuse for it. The more you learn about it the harder it is to understand how it fell out. Other Italian screw ups have reasonable enough explanations 

Italy was one of the many offenders of not heeding the lessons of WW1. Ironically enough, turning themselves into Austro-Hungary 2.0 in the Balkans. Through out the 30s, most of their military aspirations were colonial, in nature. Many generals, like Graziani that would go toe-to-toe with conventional armies, were still thinking in pre-world war colonial concepts. Spreading too thin being one of the consequences. Illustrious battleships on the bottom of Taranto, another.

A big number of Mussolini's own Blackshirt buddies opposed getting involved in something they had planned on avoiding. Explains why Italy was so eager to get out of the war -- I remember hearing a story about Italian sentries helping the US invaders of Sicily out of the water. I guess Mussolini started getting high on his own supply and gambled resources (political and material) that a pre-modern Italy did not even aspire to.

 I always wanted more AFVs for the Italians in CM:FI. However, whenever I read up on the history -- I start to think FI was being generous.

[SimpleSimon]

3 hours ago, DerKommissar said:

Italy was one of the many offenders of not heeding the lessons of WW1. Ironically enough, turning themselves into Austro-Hungary 2.0 in the Balkans. Through out the 30s, most of their military aspirations were colonial, in nature. Many generals, like Graziani that would go toe-to-toe with conventional armies, were still thinking in pre-world war colonial concepts. Spreading too thin being one of the consequences. Illustrious battleships on the bottom of Taranto, another.

They certainly did not appreciate the fundamental elements of the era's fighting. Ironically Badoglio and a number of other Italian Generals had great foresight in predicting that developments in armor and mechanization would make motorized tank armies the way of the future. What they failed to understand or maybe just internalize was such developments were beyond Italy's capability to emulate, and as a result they neglected to reinforce the Italian military or operate in a way that played into the strengths it had. They wanted the Army to learn how to run before it knew how to walk. 

The Binary Divisions, light tank hordes, bi-plane fighters with superchargers, etc were all the products of a force trying to keep up with the Joneses, but on budget. In fact if they stuck to thinking like 1918 they may well have been better off. Fighting conventional trench-artillery wars with big infantry divisions, cavalry, sieges, etc was seen as unimaginative and wasteful and Fascists don't like that. They see themselves as clever revolutionaries subverting convention and achieving surprise victory through ruthless pragmatism not fighting gritty protracted campaigns over hilltops and road junctions. 

A proposal did exist for Italy to operate a motorized expeditionary force only up to the headcount it could reliably equip and deploy. This would not have amounted to much more than a pair of motorized divisions though and Mussolini would've had no use for such a small force in his grandiose plans to reorganize the Balkans into Neo Illyria. 

Quote

A big number of Mussolini's own Blackshirt buddies opposed getting involved in something they had planned on avoiding. Explains why Italy was so eager to get out of the war -- I remember hearing a story about Italian sentries helping the US invaders of Sicily out of the water. I guess Mussolini started getting high on his own supply and gambled resources (political and material) that a pre-modern Italy did not even aspire to.

 I always wanted more AFVs for the Italians in CM:FI. However, whenever I read up on the history -- I start to think FI was being generous.

Indeed. Many of Mussolini's subordinates were well aware of the challenges Italy faced, but board meetings between himself and the military never failed to be bizarre events. Mussolini was always being given feedback along the lines of what the Navy/Air Force/Army might be able to do instead of what they could do. Probably because what it could do against the targets Mussolini always had in mind wasn't much. Africa is within Britain's sphere of interest and the Balkans were a French interest. 

Ironically the Italian military was a powerful card in Mussolini's hand in international negotiations, and as long as nobody knew what shape it was in he was able to wield it effectively. Mussolini's greatest achievements were diplomatic, not military. In the end him and Hitler shared the apocalyptic worldview that diplomacy was only the lead up to an unavoidable confrontation and it would not have been very in character for either of them to stay out of war for much longer. 

Edited October 29, 2018 by SimpleSimon

[Warts 'n' all]

17 hours ago, DerKommissar said:

Aye, a dude who was both put in power and deposed by a monarch in the mid 20th century. And when the Germans broke him out, in a bombastic Hollywood fashion, he went to Rome -- against all reason, and got himself hanged..

He didn't go to Rome. In fact him and his bit on the side went in the very opposite direction. They were hanged in the small town of Giulino, north of Milan.

[SimpleSimon]

Mussolini was an easy scapegoat who rightfully deserved much of the blame. If justice was a natural law though then Badoglio, Graziani, De Bono, and the rest of the Piedmontese Generals would've been arrested and locked up after the war. These are men who signed off on unprovoked bombing raids against Spain and commanded gas attacks against Ethiopian villages. Because they cooperated and then proudly characterized themselves as anti-communist after the war the Allies rewarded them with leniency they most certainly did not deserve. They should've all ended up in Spandau Prison along with Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer. This is just what happens when leaders substitute bluster for policy and violence for competence. The lesson of the 20th century to me is that war truly solves nothing, and is the last resort of stupid, irresponsible leaders. 

I kind of left out the Italian Air Force too. Regia Aeronautica was an interesting little organization (emphasis on little.) It utterly embodied the Italian military's problem of only being able to grasp at the straws of the future rather than to fully hold it. Whereas the Luftwaffe only lost its supremacy after its enemies beat it out them the Regia Aeronautica arguably never held any to begin with. Against France or Britain it was hopelessly outmatched and against Yugoslavia it had nothing to bomb. Douhet was the ultimate proponent of the Strategic Air Offensive the USAAF and RAF so loved except that those two both had the resources to make it a reality and Italy did not.

This was certainly not for incompetence, Italian Aero Firms were industry leading and built all kinds of excellent airplanes. One must remember pre-war the Italians were fierce competitors with Britain over the Schneider Cup and the Italians designed and built some of the most powerful engines in the world in the 1920s. The Sparviero and SM81 were successful but expensive 3 engine aircraft and Italy built the only successful Strategic Bomber the Axis had at all during the war, the Piaggio P.108, but they only built 24 of them. 

Making enough engines to equip fleets of fighters and bombers proved impossible for Italy and in the end they had to import German DB 600 engines frequently. As a result, the Regia Aeronautica could never form itself along the Douhetian lines it so revered and crucially this left it nearly bereft of the less ambitious but more attainable airplane designs that the Luftwaffe and Soviet Union loved so much, dive bombers, tactical bombers, and ground attack aircraft. These would've been absolutely crucial airplanes for making up the Italian Army's deficiencies in tactical artillery and anti-tank weaponry.

The CR32 and CR42 were the two best (and last) biplane fighters ever built and they could be surprisingly dangerous even to much newer designs. (A pair of P-38s were likely shot down by Fiat CR42s in 1944!) British pilots defending Malta remarked that getting into a dogfight on even terms with either of them in the Hurricane was a fatal mistake, but that as long as pilots took advantage of their speed they were better off. Bi-plane fighters were the product of a mentality that reflected the lessons of the last war. The belief that aerial battles were fought out in single huge furballs rather than an affair of drawn out attrition between airplanes that were incrementally outperforming and outnumbering each other with each new model. The later idea did not favor the capabilities of Italy and so of course it was not pursued but the former idea only worked as intended if your enemy played into it. This last thought returns us to the fundamental problem of Italy's thinking. Italian strategy would've worked flawlessly if all her enemies behaved exactly as she hoped they would 100% of the time...

Edited December 4, 2018 by SimpleSimon

[Michael Emrys]

Indeed. Italy was so completely outclassed in so many areas that it has often amused me to think that if the war had been exclusively between Italy and the British Empire and Commonwealth it would have been settled in two years with defeat for Italy.

Michael

[SimpleSimon]

Probably, but it's ironic that during the 1930s Britain assessed its stance against Italy with great pessimism. Unwarranted pessimism but nonetheless the British were really insecure about their dispositions in the Mediterranean. Malta and the Suez were not highlighted as assets but as vulnerabilities (the war would show both of them to be the former) but some of the depression in British military circles might also just have been British Generals pushing the government to spend more on them. I'm reading Fighters over the Fleet now and Friedman is inadvertently highlighting in the first chapter how poorly the British had assessed Italian capabilities. It seems as if the Italian military's bluster and boasting was successful, unfortunately for Italy, Mussolini also seems to have bought the rhetoric. He did internalize many of the facts too, but he was still very overly-optimistic in the sort of way someone with a self righteous fantasy of great destiny would be. It should've been obvious after Ethiopia that he intended to apply the Italian military to his problems but the Piedmontese Generals were more concerned with career advancement and winning peer rivalries than responsibly performing their duties as the regime's advisers. That right there is a lesson I think...