AHC: American Army has Italian levels of competence in WW2

With a POD no earlier then 1934, make it so that when the United States enters into war against Nazi Germany they have levels of military competency comparable to Fascist Italy.
 
You would need a distant POD to pull it off reasonably. One country is highly educated and has boatloads of money, the other is poorly to moderately educated and had little to moderate wealth by European standards. Which one is almost certainly going to do better?
 
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The POD makes this highly unlikely. After 1934 means the major sources of societal stress (Great Depression) that could lead to an ineffectual military have been or are being addressed.
 

Ian_W

Banned
With a POD no earlier then 1934, make it so that when the United States enters into war against Nazi Germany they have levels of military competency comparable to Fascist Italy.

It was.

The American performance at Kasserine Pass was up to general Italian standards.

Similarly, the performance of the well-equipped parts of the Italian Army - Im thinking of the Bersaglieri here - was as good as anyone else in the War.

The issue for most of the Italian Army is their equipment was generally at 1939-40 standards while everyone with an industrial base was getting more and better tanks and more and better anti-tank weapons - they had seven million bayonets, but they didnt have the modern tanks, artillery, air force, supply trucks and anti-tank weapons to back up said seven million bayonets.

Historically poor armies like the Brazillians - who were equipped on entering the war in August 1942 to roughly the standards of 1939 Poland - turned out to be pretty good in 1944 when equipped to 1944 standards.

Therefore, to drop the performance of the US Army, you need them to somehow be equipped with not enough and outdated equipment. And for the biggest industrial power in the world, thats quite a combination.
 
It's not that the Italian fighting Man was incompetent, but the upper leadership was...
not so good.

They had Binary Divisions in part that the Moose would be able to have more Generals.

Also, the Enlisted Man wasn't exactly sold on trying to kickstart the Roman Empire, Pt.2 Electric Boogaloo.


Now over to the USA, it's not that hard. Have more corruption in the Brass, and have more Political Generals as in the Civil War.

For taking the fight out of the enlisted Man, have no Pearl Harbor, but USA is in the War in 1939. No-one is really fired up on going to War

The Army is tiny, just under 190,000 men, the M1 is still just getting over the initial gas trap bugs, and there are only around 50,000 of them, and most of them jam on the 7th round fired

Most of the Army's Tanks are these

The M2A2 'Mae West'
id_m2_light_01_700.jpg

And there is only 72 of these MG armed tanks to go around

Early combat would result int Italian like results
 
How did the Italian performance on the Eastern Front stack up to the other Axis powers? A lot of US incompetence in North Africa was simply a lack of experience, to which I would also ascribe the Italian performance in Libya in 1940. However, the US was able to fix the glaring problems before the invasion of Italy and had a fairly effective force ready for Normandy. The Italians would have had more time to learn from their mistakes but nowhere near the industrial capacity to fix equipment problems as quickly as the US.
 
It was.

The American performance at Kasserine Pass was up to general Italian standards.

.

Bad, but not quite that bad. It was the first major battle of the war in for the US while the Germans had years of experience and had what was probably the best troops in the world at the time. It should be expected that they would do rather poorly.

Italy pretty much did poorly everywhere and did not improve. Albania, Greece, North Africa, it did not matter and it did not improve with time.
 
The meme that the Italians were really bad needs to die.

That isn't going to happen as they WERE bad. They needed the Germans to bail them out against the Greeks. They had their butts handed to them by the badly outnumbered British military. Basically, they spent the entire war losing, badly.
 

Ian_W

Banned
How did the Italian performance on the Eastern Front stack up to the other Axis powers?

The Italian flank at Stalingrad collapsed in the same way the German line collapsed in Bagration - and for exactly the same reasons, which is that forces with inadequate anti-tank capbility and inadequate armored reserves do really badly when crunched by Tank Armies.
 
I think this video is pretty good.

A TL where the Us army has the same level of incompetence as the Italians and stretches it throughout the entire war is...pushing it, to say the least.
 

Deleted member 1487

How did the Italian performance on the Eastern Front stack up to the other Axis owers?

They did quite on the offensive; their problem seemed to have been poor equipment when defending the Don around Stalingrad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_participation_in_the_Eastern_Front
In its early encounters it was successful, taking a number of towns and cities and creating a favourable impression on its German allies.[2] Its most notable early victory came at the Battle of Petrikowka in September 1941, where the Italians encircled some sizable Red Army units, inflicting unknown combat casualties on them and capturing over 10,000 prisoners of war as well as significant numbers of weapons and horses.[3] This cost them only 291 casualties of their own: 87 killed, 190 wounded, and 14 missing.[4] On October 20, the CSIR together with the German XXXXIX Mountain Corps captured the major industrial center of Stalino (now Donetsk) after heavy resistance from the Soviet defenders. While the CSIR did not participate in the siege of Odessa, Italian troops assisted in the occupation of the Odessa area after the city fell on 16 October 1941. Units from the Pasubio motorised division attacked the neighboring city of Gorlovka on November 2.[5]

The Capture of Gorlovka (a city of 120,000 inhabitants) was preceded by the "Pasubio" division carefully clearing out the minefields around the city's outskirts in the previous week. The "Duca d'Aosta" cavalry division meanwhile captured the industrial town of Rukovo after heavy fighting. On November 2, the "Pasubio" division threatened Gorlovka from the west, while the "Duca d'Aosta" division threatened the southeast. The city's defenders included the Soviet 296th Rifle Division. The "Pasubio" division's 80th Regiment engaged in close house-to-house fighting with the defenders, while the 79th Regiment (supported by "Duca d'Aosta" artillery units) swept through the downtown district with little resistance. Soviet combat casualties were unknown, but about 600 soldiers were taken prisoner. The Soviet 296th Rifle Division withdrew, and fighting continued for the next few days as the Italians cleared enemy remnants from the city and the surrounding area.[6]

With the onset of winter, the CSIR units began consolidating their occupation zone and preparing defensive works. In the last week of December, the "Duca d'Aosta" division was hit with a fierce counterattack by Soviet forces. They managed to beat back the attacks long enough for the German 1st Panzer Army to provide back-up to their sector and subsequently defeat the Soviet offensive. The "Christmas Battle" was hailed as a great victory back in Italy, though the division likely would have fallen without German support. It subsequently weathered the 1941-1942 winter quite well in its relatively quiet occupation zone.[7] Up to this point, the CSIR had taken 8,700 casualties.[8]
......
The ARMIR advanced toward the right bank of the Don River which was reached by July 1942. From 17 to 20 July 1942, the Italians fought for the possession of and captured the important coal-mining basin of Krasny Lutsch (southeast of Kharkov) with a rapid enveloping maneuver.[10] This cost the army 90 dead and 540 wounded, while inflicting over 1,000 combat casualties on the Soviets and taking 4,000 Soviet troops as prisoners.[11]
......
Also on August 24, 700 Italian horsemen of the Savoia Cavalleria routed 2,500 Soviet troops of the 812th Siberian Infantry Regiment near Isbushenskij. While taking 84 casualties (32 dead, 52 wounded), the Italians inflicted 1,050 casualties (150 dead, 300 wounded, 600 captured) on the Soviets, and captured 14 artillery pieces. While overall a minor event in the ARMIR's participation, the cavalry charge had great propaganda resonance back in Italy.
 
That isn't going to happen as they WERE bad. They needed the Germans to bail them out against the Greeks. They had their butts handed to them by the badly outnumbered British military. Basically, they spent the entire war losing, badly.

They actually weren't, which is why so much cherry picking tends to occur and is a relic of wartime propaganda.

You always see the Greek or 1940 examples cited, but the specifics of both get overlooked while the entire course of the war gets ignored. The vast majority of Rommel's combat power, for example, was Italian and Western commanders actually rated the Italians a good as or even better than the Germans going into the Tunisia campaign. Going back to Greece in particular also show how much of that is misconstrued, in that by the time of the German entry the Greeks had already overextended themselves beyond their defenses, were taking losses they had no ability to replace and were within a handful of weeks of running out of munitions. Germans get the glory because they came in after the Italians had already done the hard work. Even after the Italians surrendered in 1943, the RSI troops gained a reputation as some of the premier Anti-Tank experts of the conflict as well as some of the hardest fighting troops.

Fun fact: the last Axis victory in Europe was won by the RSI.
 
I think this video is pretty good.

A TL where the Us army has the same level of incompetence as the Italians and stretches it throughout the entire war is...pushing it, to say the least.

I saw the video and agree with it. It wasn't that the Italians were cowardly or stupid, it was that they were so far behind it was hopeless. The US had a far better educated population and was far wealthier , it is difficult to see how the US military could be as inept as the Italian one. After all it had boatloads of money the Italians didn't.
 
Some ideas.

America joins the Allies in 1939 and sends a poorly trained and ill equipped AEF to France under the expectation that they will not see significant combat until 1941, but during the Fall of France they hundreds of thousands of underprepared American troops get captured.

An Anti-War or flimsy President is elected in 1940 which causes weakened morale.

The US tries defending Greece with Britain, but gets driven off the continent with lopsided casualties and a huge number of troops captured.

Japan launches a surprise attack that has similar short term success to the OTL, perhaps even more so at a place like Midway.

America gets sidetracked and invades Brazil, resulting in a substantial waste of resources and a large number of casualties to disease.

America/Britain decides attack Spain or the Balkans as their perceived soft underbelly at some point, resulting in getting bogged down in the mountains.

America decides to fight a direct overland battle with Japan somewhere impractical like New Guinea where the environment can cause mass US casualties.

The Soviets are defeated or completely crippled (compared to OTL) and America has to do substantially more fighting than the OTL against the Germans and do a poor job of it.

America sends a large number of troops to fight Japan in South East Asia and/or China.


These could make America look a lot worse, maybe?
 
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