At any time over the last thirty-or-so years I could have read this book, but having finally done so I can say that it's still worth your time if you're a student of military history. What Sweet really did well was to examine the organizational politics and culture of the Italian army, and the constraints that limited their embrace of motorization and then mechanization. While there are times when this monograph reads like the doctoral thesis I presume it was, and I think that there was less of a dichotomy between motorization (the replacement of fodder with petrol) and mechanization (the embrace of the armored fighting vehicle as a determinate factor of operational warfare) than the author argues, one regrets that Sweet died in the line of duty, thus cutting off a potentially great career as a historian. ( )

I’ve been reading books on the development (as opposed to the implementation) of armored warfare; this one describes Italian armor doctrine in the years leading up to WWII. The Italian army is doesn’t get much respect in the catalog of WWII books; author John Sweet notes the difficulty he had in collecting reference material. The Allied air forces did a pretty good job of destroying records of the Fiat and Ansaldo plants, and when Italy surrendered much of the military went out of the way to eliminate evidence that they were ever connected with the Fascist armed forces.


Nevertheless there’s enough for some intriguing reading, and it’s well presented. The Italians had the same problem with their armor as other WWI victors; they had accumulated a huge stock of tanks and were unwilling to invest in new designs. The Italians did modify their Renault FT tanks (as the Fiat 3000 and CV 1929) to triple the top speed while increasing armor and armament, but were still using a WWI tank well into the 1930s. They were also handicapped that until the formation of the Axis they expected their wartime opponents to be one or more of France, Switzerland, Austria or Yugoslavia, none of which has armor-friendly territory on the Italian border. Thus the new tanks Italy did develop were very small “tankettes” based on interwar Vickers designs, since it was thought these would be the only sort of armor capable of operating on mountain tracks. They also tried integrate cavalry, armor, motorcycle and bicycle troops into fast divisions; although these had a reasonable degree of success against Ethiopians they were abandoned by the start of the European war. (The bicycle troop’s organization actually made quite a bit a sense; the bicyclists would ride to the battlefield, dismount, deploy, and advance as infantry – sort of bicycle dragoons. A bicycle doesn’t need forage or fuel, is relatively easy to repair in the field, and can be carried over places where it can’t be ridden. One of those “what-if” questions.)


After the Pact of Steel, of course, the whole strategic situation went haywire. Italy was now confronted with a North Africa war where mechanized troops would be the decisive arm, and had next to nothing to fight it with. The Italian dilemma was their industrial base was too small to adapt to other countries rapid armor developments; the M11/39 and M6/40 were not all that bad at the time they were proposed but by the time they made it to the battlefield they were hopelessly outclassed. Italian industry did eventually develop a very effective self-propelled “assault gun” and had designs for competitive main battle tanks, but they were too little, too late, and outside the chronological scope of this book.


Iron Arm relates in an odd way to another book I’m reading – Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. One of Goldberg’s points is that it was characteristic of Fascism to extol action for action’s sake – not all that dissimilar to the “Politics of Change”. Various Fascist bureaucrats therefore made conflicting decisions in the name of “action”; for mechanization, the most telling ones were one policy encouraging Italians to buy automobiles in order to increase the country’s base of drivers and mechanics, while another policy discouraged Italians from driving in order to conserve fuel. It reminds me of the seemingly countless Best Management Practices, Standard Operating Procedures, and Emergency Plans I have to write for various environmental laws; many of them have contradictory specifications.


I would make a final note – there’s practically nothing in Iron Arm about the actual use of Italian armor – if you’re looking for descriptions of North African tank battles, this isn’t for you. Nevertheless, it makes what might seem to be a dull subject – the development of armor doctrine and economics by a lesser WWII power – engagingly interesting. ( )