Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse (Modern War Studies)

It seemed that whenever Mussolini acted on his own it was bad news for Hitler. Indeed the Fuhrers 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 Germanys military relations with Italy Romania Hungary and Finland Richard DiNardo unearths a wealth of little-known facts that reveal how the Axis coalition largely undermined Hitlers 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 nations 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. DiNardos 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 bilingual 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 Rommels effective coordination with Italian forces in North Africa. In the end while some individual Axis units fought with distinction - if not on par with the vaunted Wehrmacht - and helped Germany achieve some of its military aims the coalitions overall military performance was riddled with disappointments. Breaking new ground DiNardos work enlarges our understanding of Germanys defeat while at the same time offering a timely reminder of the challenges presented by coalition warfare.