re: #63 No Malarkey!

That is surprising, since the Italian military was so terrible in WWII. I didn’t know about their good aircraft.

The Italian military was terrible because their economy was terrible. Think China for much of the 20th century: Their R&D was heavily dependent upon outside help, domestic sources of raw materials were woefully inadequate, most of their workforce were uneducated peasants, and their production facilities were small automakers whose annual production numbered in the hundreds of handbuilt cars and trucks. And all of this in a country that was largely mountainous and dirt poor, which meant their biggest tanks still had to be small enough not to imperil the structural rigidity of backwoods bridges that strained to allow two fully-loaded 1/2 cargo trucks to drive side-by-side.