Pinned post for Q&A :)

Welcome to axis naval club!
We have:
Germany, the confused one.
Japan, the overconfident one.
And Italy, surprisingly competent one.

In the battleships vs carrier s debate you also have to remember that the Med is entirely surrounded by land and almost entirely within the range of land based air power. Why spend money on floating airfields when you can defend your battle fleet with fighters that take off from airfields on land and attack the enemy's battle fleet with bombers that return to airfields on land?

Someone should make one of those average enjoyed memes with “average kriegsmarine fan vs average Regia marina enjoyer”

My Father was in submarines (10th  flotilla ) out of Malta for ww2. He had the greatest respect for the Italian ships and crews. He said they had good ships, good crews who where very professional. He used to get very angry when just because they were Italian people used to say they were cowards. Not in his experience, and he very verbally used to put those people in their place.

Oh boy, almost an hour and a half about the Italian Navy. Thanks, Drach and Mr. O'Hara

My grandfather served in the Luftwaffe as a recon pilot. He was serving in the africa korps. Also operating out of Zagreb. One time he was heading from there to africa. While doing so, he crashed into the mediteranian with his plane one time. He flew solo i guess. Why my grandmother did not tell. And there he was in his life raft for three days, drifting away from the coast into the open sea, drinking his own urin until a italian destroyer saved him. By pure luck. They said he was lucky because his rescue party was looking for him in a completly different place.

Having known Italian soldiers who fought and surrendered in North Africa as a young man , I asked about their eventual surrender.  Their attitude was they fought when they had too but why fight for people who didn’t give a damn about them or their people.  They were very good , honest , brave men who I feel honored to have known.

Until I began watching your channel I knew virtually nothing about the Regia Marina in the 20th Century.  Your research on the subject over the years and the co-ops with scholars like Vincent have increased my knowledge hugely.  Thank you again for your consistently excellent output!

From an Italian, thank you very much for this video.
Now, a little point to the question: Italy didn't stand a chance to win WW2 allied to the Germans.
Since the end of WWI and the end of Italy's historic enemy - Austria-Hungary - Italian high command saw the possibility of a war against the new nation born on the other side of the Adriatic Sea (the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and his "big brother", France. Never, even in their worst nightmares, Italian admirals saw the British Empire as a possible enemy, but all changed with the Ethiopian war 1936-1939. Despite all the odds, Italy was able to maintain a bloody balance in the Mediterranean Sea against the Royal Navy (thanks to the demise of France) until US firepower was able to overwhelm any resistance: first in the air, then on the sea and at last on the ground.
The co-belligerant phase was able only to relive a little stress from the subsequent pace treaty.

17:44 all the Italian naval guns were made for cold barrel swap. So their barrel life was 1/2 of the others, but the time needed to change the barrel was 1/30.
It only needed a pair of days of work in port without any special facility to change the barrels of all the main guns of a ship while, for who didn't design his guns that way, it needed to remove the armor of the turret, remove the guns from the cradle, file the barrels in a gigantic lathe, put the guns in a specially built vertical furnace, insert the new internal barrel, etc...

That comment about the resilience of the Regia Marina and how they came back from Cape Matapan actually sounds a little better than the US response to Savo Island. The speed with which both navies developed night battle doctrine seems comparable (a few months) but the Italians figured out the British used radar and had their own counter in testing within a month. In contrast, almost five months after Savo Island the USN was still insisting that the Japanese had a magical fleet submarine that was intervening in battles because "torpedoes with speed-range characteristics comparable to our own" could not possibly reach the cruiser line at Tassafaronga.

When i think about the Regia Marina i can't help think about the heavy cruisers at Cape Matapan without radar, the Italian sailors fought bravely and well despite the limitations placed on them by the higher-ups.

Italian here and former Marina Militare officer myself, my grandad (mom's dad) served as CO in the Regia Marina and later Marina Militare, at home I jealously keep safe the original "brogliacci di bordo" (logbooks) of some of his escort missions to Libya. It is something impressive to read in modern perspective. As a former professional military personnel I hold but respect to anyone, regardless the nation, who served in the war. Also let me thank you both for this amazing and, finally, historical accurate video about what actually was the Regia Marina.

46:52 This one line and the discussion at 1:03:03 - 1:06:49 is one of the other major thing in the dismissal of the Italians, is code breaking, if the Germans were as good as the Italians at code breaking there would be movies about the rivals to Bletchley Park, they would be heralded as this amazing elite unit (which the Italian code breakers were), that the history channel would fancifully claim almost won the war for the Germans.

"Not only should Tunisia have exploded the myth of Hitler's military acumen, it should have discredited the idea that Germans fought better than the Italians, since Messe's 1st Italian Army held out longer than Arnim's 5th German Army and the DAK, even both groups had about six divisions and faced roughly equal Anglo-American forces. Indeed, Hermann Goring division was the first to be scattered on 7 May, DAK the next to break and surrender on 9 May, with the Italian Spezia division closing the gap created by the German collapse and watching still combat-efficient German units march off into captivity on 11 May. Whether it is significant that the German 90th Light division was the first to collapse in Messe's 'Italian' Army, there is no doubt that the Italians fought well and held out longest in Tunisia." (The Second World War: The German War 1939-1942, Jeremy Black, Page 265, Ashgate, 2007)”

Perhaps the most egregious example of a lack of balance is C.S. Forester's "The Ship", a contemporaneous (1943),very loose version of the Second Battle of Sirte which portrays the Italian Navy as utterly feckless, emotional and incompetent, when in fact the Italian Navy accomplished its primary mission of jeopardizing the British convoy.  If one analyzes the number of actions and the behavior of the Italian ships involved, one can note that they fought more often than the Germans and often with greater valor, and at least as effectively as the Germans.

the real problem with understanding the Italian armed forces is that there generals and admirals were not hired by the US military to "help write" the history.  From a purely military perspective, the Italian armed forces did the best they could on behalf of a nation that never had the industrial, material, or political capital to succeed.

Fabulous hour and a half on the Regia Marina - I have always believed that the Italians have been massively underrated in the history books. Loved every minute!

When I was growing up the italians had a tiny navy the RN kicked around like puppies, the Kriegsmarine was Bismarck, Tirpitz, and a metric fuckload of U-boats, and the IJN had a dozen carriers and Yamato. The last 20 years especially the narrative has changed but even allied side I heard equally absurd shit. I am so glad there seems to be an onslaught of reasoned arguments against the absurdity.