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Dates Covered: 1870 - 1943
ISBN: 0521790476
HH Rating: 
Our Take
Mussolini once famously banned pasta from Italy, claiming that the carb-heavy culinary delight would make his people too indolent for war. His armed forces created a bomber so badly designed that bombardiers had to crawl through the plane to request a bombing pass, leading an entire bombing wing to drop its bombs on the Italian Navy, rather than the more appropriate British targets. MacGregor Knox draws on a formidable array of economic statistics and personal archives in a short, scholarly and very readable book to draw what now seems an obvious conclusion. The Italians were not ready for a war on the scale of World War Two - their institutions were too weak, their economy too anemic, their rural society too distrustful of leadership, and their leader too mercurial to effect real change. Perhaps they should have stuck to eating pasta. Read More at Amazon.com
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