It seemed that whenever Mussolini acted on his own, it was bad news
for Hitler. Indeed, the Fuhrer's relations with his Axis partners
were fraught with an almost total lack of coordination. Compared to
the Allies, the coalition was hardly an alliance at all. Focusing
on Germany's military relations with Italy, Romania, Hungary, and
Finland, Richard DiNardo unearths a wealth of information that
reveals how the Axis coalition largely undermined Hitler's
objectives from the Eastern Front to the Balkans, Mediterranean,
and North Africa.
DiNardo argues that the Axis military alliance was doomed from
the beginning by a lack of common war aims, the absence of a
unified command structure, and each nation's fundamental mistrust
of the others. Germany was disinclined to make the kinds of
compromises that successful wartime partnerships demanded and,
because Hitler insisted on separate pacts with each nation, Italy
and Finland often found themselves conducting counterproductive
parallel wars on their own.
DiNardo's detailed assessments of ground, naval, and air
operations reveal precisely why the Axis allies were so
dysfunctional as a collective force, sometimes for seemingly
mundane but vital reasons-a shortage of interpreters, for example.
His analysis covers coalition warfare at every level, demonstrating
that some military services were better at working with their
allies than others, while also pointing to rare successes, such as
Rommel's effective coordination with Italian forces in North
Africa. In the end, while some individual Axis units fought with
distinction--if not on a par with the vaunted Wehrmacht--and helped
Germany achieve some of its military aims, the coalition's overall
military performance was riddled with disappointments.
Breaking new ground, DiNardo's work enlarges our understanding
of Germany's defeat while at the same time offering a timely
reminder of the challenges presented by coalition warfare.
General
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