Mussolini's War

Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse: 1935-1943

De: John Gooch

Narrado por: Bruce Mann

While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. At that moment, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies in the hope of making territorial gains in Southern France and Africa. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties, and an Allied invasion in 1943 that ushered in a terrible new era for the country.

John Gooch's new history is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership, and too many fronts on which to fight.

Everywhere - whether in the USSR, the Western Desert, or the Balkans - Italian troops found themselves against either better-equipped or more motivated enemies. The result was a war entirely at odds with the dreams of pre-war Italian planners - a series of desperate improvisations against an allied force who could draw on global resources and against whom Italy proved helpless.

©2020 John Gooch (P)2021 Tantor

Detail but no story

Lots of fine detail about Italy in WW2. If your an avid reader of WW2 history this book might actually make sense to you. There is no attempt by the author to weave all of these details into a compelling story. Worse yet, the reader sounds like a British twit. Very boring to listen to.
Skip this book and find something better to listen to.

Not Bad

So the narrator is a little British that doesn’t take away from the information in the book. There are so many parallels to today. Megalomaniacs not seeing armies as people but toys to used for personal aggrandizement.

Nice detailed account of Facist Italy during WWII.

The narrator’s pace was quite slow. I listened to this book at 1.3X speed; whereas, I almost always listen at 1.0X. The narrator was very clear spoken but too deliberate in his pace for me personally.

the worst narrator you could ask for

The voice of the narrator is the worst you would ask for it sounds like he's trying to replicate the robotic voice of siri with the style of reading a bedtime story to 4 year olds. The information may be good but I absolutely cannot even finish the book as it's just insufferable to listen to. Please listen to the sample before you buy.

Difficult read

This book was narrated pootly and was slow in develop. I found it a labor to listen to.

Reads like an undergraduate term paper

Take my review with a grain of salt. I only made it through about 90 minutes of the audiobook before stopping. I was looking for a biography of Mussolini and not finding a good one, decided to give this a try. It's definitely not a biography. It is an account of Italy's wars in Africa in the 1930s, and then, I assume, the rest of WW2. It went into excruciating detail about every general involved on both sides of every battle, how many men were under the command of each, how many deaths, the dates of the battles, etc. Of course, Mussolini was involved in making decisions, approving military actions, giving instructions, etc., but only briefly, without an in-depth discussion of his thoughts or actions. It was all about the battles and the major players in them.

So if you are looking for insight into who and what kind of man Mussolini was, I don't believe you will find it here, at least not without pushing yourself through hours and hours of battle minutia. There may be some insights sprinkled in there but I'm not going to invest that much time in looking for them. I'll look elsewhere.