Did Italy do anything wrong in WW2? You always see people talking about German, Soviet and Japanese war crimes...

Gassed Ethiopians too. It was a retaliation for Ethiopia using hollow points, but still.

Yeah. They joined.

>Did Italy do anything in WW2?
Fixed

Became the pussies of Europe in 1943

Most of their worst crimes were pre WW2 in Libya and Ethiopia, but they did still get up to nasty shit in Yugoslavia and Greece.

Italy preformed to badly to commit any huge crimes, they invaded Greece and got pushed into Albania by an unprepared defensive force. Italians just didn't have that same brutal spirit and drive like the Japanese or Germans to commit any major atrocities. Using chem weapons against Ethiopians was pretty bad but still Italy was pretty tame.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_war_crimes#World_War_II

During the 22-month existence of the Province of Ljubljana, Roatta ordered the deportation of 25,000 people, which equaled 7.5% of the total population. Biroli in Montenegro executed 50 civilians for every Italian killed, 10 for wounded. There was the Ardeatine massacre. Banda Koch, and well pretty much the Republican Police Corps in its entirety.

As for the reason why less emphasis is given. Part of is that a lot of Italian war criminals were never tried because the US and Britain wanted to help keep Italy not going to communism. Also the Germans and the Japanese just out performed them.

>These people supposedly built the Roman empire

They drastically underperformed, but they did do stuff. Their main contributions were naval. The Regia Marina tied down a lot of British assets in the Med which contributed quite a bit to early German naval successes. The following numbers, per Vincent O'Hara's "On Seas Contested: The Seven Great Navies of the Second World War" are helpful:

-Between June 1940 and September 1943, in the Mediterranean:
>British sank 161,200 tons of warship tonnage
>Italians sank 145,800 tons

-The Italians managed to successfully keep supplying the Axis armies in Africa until Rommel's defeat in Tunisia despite facing increasing opposition and a chronic lack of fuel, while the British were all but forced to sail around Cape of Good Hope.

-The only non-inconclusive squadron-sized engagements between RN and RM in the Mediterranean theater were Cape Matapan (British victory) and Operation Vigorous (Italian victory). If we just count all actions in which major warships took part, then there are Taranto (British victory) and Alexandria (Italian victory).

-During day battles, the Regia Marina inflicted more damage than it suffered.

-Through the entirety of 1942, the Regia Marina inflicted more damage than it suffered.

-Up to August 1943 the 32 Italian submarines that operated in the Atlantic sank 109 merchant ships of 593,864 tons, for 17 subs lost in return, giving them a subs-lost-to-tonnage sunk ratio similar to Germany's in the same period, and higher overall.

The Italian Navy also handled all the logistics for the North Africa Campaign. Per O'Hara again, Italy material shipments to North Africa amounted to:

530k tons in the Jan-Jun 1941 period - of which 94% (497k tons) arrived

487k tons in the Jul-Dec 1941 period - of which 73% (356k tons) arrived

And the Italians dragged their feet a lot when it came to deporting Jews for the Germans. The Italians administered part of the south of France for Germany and were very inefficient when it came to the Jewish solution.

cont.

Onto the Italian Army. Their main theater was the North African one. Contrary to what the British would like to believe, the forces under Rommel's command in North Africa, which inflicted many defeats on the British and kept them locked in a campaign for three years despite numerical inferiority, were majority Italian. German participation was it its highest in the Tunisian Campaign, during which they were (according to Samuel Mitcham's "Blitzkrieg No Longer: The German Wehrmacht in Battle, 1943") about half of the combat troops in Army Group Afrika and 1/3 of the non-combat troops. Also, as mentioned earlier, the Italians took care of the logistics for the campaign, the most critical part of any war effort.

Past the initial humiliation of Compass, the Italians performed decently in North Africa. They played a key part in many of Rommel's victories. Most notably Kasserine Pass (where the Italians broke through the American lines and caused the rout, after the Germans failed to take Sbiba Pass) and at Gazala. Rommel himself was of the opinion that the elite Bersagliere were better than most of his own German troops. Though of course they eventually lost, and this was always a small theater to begin with.

Next up, the Eastern Front. Italy dispatched three divisions via the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia to aid the invasion, consisting or 62,000 troops and 5,500 mortar vehicles. Despite being very short on armor and artillery, they performed pretty well and made a good impression on their German allies, capturing the cities and garrisons of Stalino, Gorlovka, and Petrikowka, among others. They also repulsed a Soviet counter-attack with the help of the Germans during the Christmas Battle.

Past that point they were subsumed into a larger formation, the Italian Army in Russia. They managed pretty well throughout most of 1942, holding their sector and defeating several Soviet attacks.

They ultimately met their end at Stalingrad though, where their near-total lack of proper AT capability began to tell. The Soviets basically steamrolled them with tanks. But even then, their resistance was as stubborn as it could possibly be, and they even pulled off an insane breakout that saved both them and a few German and Hungarian divisions. Still though, this battle broke them, and they were withdrawn soon after.

Finally, the Balkans. Italy gets a lot of shit for bungling their invasion of Greece, and rightfully so. But the magnitude of failure is somewhat exaggerated. Their casualties up to the German and British interventions were 13,755 killed, 50,874 wounded, 3,914 missing, 21,153 POWs, and 12,368 seriously frostbitten, a total of 102,064 casualties. Greek losses were 13,325 killed 42,485 wounded 1,237 missing 1,531 POW, and 25,000 seriously frostbitten, a total of 83,578 casualties. In other words, an exchange ratio of 1 : 1.25.

Italy outnumbered Greece to such a great extent that had this exchange ratio continued (and it had improved since the earliest days to get to that point), they surely would have conquered Greece. More importantly the Greek Army had pretty much run out of ammunition by the point the Germans and Brits intervened (one of the latter's main objectives was to get supplies to the Greeks). Finally, the reason Germany was able to roll over Greece so easily was that, when they invaded, literally 15 of their army's 21 divisions were arrayed on the Albanian front- leaving the rest of their country a clean sweep.

The Italians did better when they invaded Yugoslavia, which unlike Greece was mostly not mountainous and stubborn. They suffered a setback when the Yugoslav Army attacked northern Albania, but overall they still captured all of their objectives plus 30,000 POWs, inflicting on their enemies many times the losses they took. They also destroyed most of the Yugoslav Air Force on the ground and captured most of its navy.

>read article
>every sentence ended with "... and the Italian garrison surrendered"

edge

They were stupidly spread throughout static forts in the middle of the desert without sufficient ammunition or water, what'd you expect?

How can something be a war crime if there was no law regulating it?

If you read enough about the Italian army in WW2 you come across lots of examples of orders from the high command to be ruthless that are simply disregarded by the troops. Instead, you find examples of Italian soldiers helping Jews in Yugoslavia or being received with relief by Soviet citizens. They did commit war crimes (like most nations), but Italian soldiers were seemingly pretty humane throughout.

No. Meds dindu nuffin. We were just pretending to be on the G*rms side to fuck them over later. It worked.

Here
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_war_crimes#World_War_II
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rab_concentration_camp
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monigo
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenikon_massacre

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_concentration_camps

the only bad thing Italy did was pick the wrong side, discrediting fascism.

>Christian artifacts
I think you mean heretical artifacts

Because the only reason why Italy joined the Germans, after years of saying race was irrelevant, that racism was ridiculous, that there was no one racially pure in the world, that Jews were an important part of Italian - Mediterranean - European culture, making fun of the German Nazis for saying they are the mustard race while the only contribution of the Germanic peoples to the world is the constant destruction of Europe, etc, was because Mussolini was losing power and the only way he found to hold to it was making an alliance with Hitler who would come to his aid if he was deposed. Not only they failed at everything they were supposed to do in WWII, but they were saw as a Germany's puppet and nothing else.

Also, the Italians were the ones who killed Mussolini and revealed against their bullshit.

OH HES DONE YOU!