Hitler's Italian Allies

MacGregor Knox has served as Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science since 1994. He was educated at Harvard College (BA, 1967) and Yale University (PhD in History, 1977), and has also taught at the University of Rochester (USA). His writings deal with the wars and dictatorships of the savage first half of the twentieth century and with contemporary international and strategic history, and include Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941 (1982); The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (edited, with Williamson Murray and Alvin Bernstein, 1994); Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2000); The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (edited, with Williamson Murray, 2001); and To the Threshold of Power: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships (2007). Between his undergraduate and graduate studies he spent three years in the US Army, and served in the Republic of Vietnam (1969) as rifle platoon leader with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

• Introduction: defeat - and humiliation; 1. Fascist Italy's last war; 2. Society, politics, regime, industry; 3. Men and machines: the Armed Forces and modern warfare; 4. Strategy; 5. Operations; 6. Tactics; Conclusion: the weight of the past.

"This book is important to an understanding of how and why Italy collapsed during World War II." -Washington Post