Hitler's Italian allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist regime, by Knox, MacGregor.

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Italian navy frogmen took revenge for Taranto, temporarily sinking Britain's last two Mediterranean fleet battleships at Alexandria a bare week after Japanese aircraft had destroyed the Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya. Rommel, his fuel, ammunition, and armored vehicles replenished, struck British 8th Army a series of terrifying blows, seizing Tobruk, the key port in eastern Cyrenaica, and preempting any discussion of strategic alternatives such as a landing on Malta by dashing for the Nile delta.

9±10. S. National Archives 208-N-12303-FA). 3 Its ``total industrial potential,'' the primary measure of latent military-economic might, amounted by 1938 to scarcely more than a fifth of that of its German ally, and a bit over half the swiftly rising potential of Imperial Japan. 1. 2. Per capita levels of industrialization (as a percentage of Britain in 1900) Italy Germany Japan France Britain Russia/USSR USA 2. 1913 1928 1938 26 85 20 59 115 20 126 39 101 30 82 122 20 182 44 128 51 73 157 38 167 B.

The Duce himself reiterated in his war speech of 10 June the aim he had held since the mid-1920s. ''29 Within six months the independent Italian war ``parallel'' to that of Germany that Mussolini had projected from January 1940 onward was in ruins. A fleet encounter off Calabria in July and the sinking of three Italian battleships at anchor at Taranto in November confirmed the British Royal Navy's tactical and operational superiority ± a lesson driven home by the destruction in night action of three heavy cruisers, the pride of the fleet, at the battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941.