Defeat was inescapable. Mussolini's associate and senior partner, Adolf Hitler, challenged by December 1941 the same world of enemies that had destroyed his royal predecessor, the Emperor Wilhelm II. For all its operational-tactical brilliance, stunning initial victories, and plunder, the Axis coalition of National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan possessed less than half the economic power of its enemies. Barring improbable levels of incompetence or irresolution in Britain and the United States, that crushing imbalance doomed the Axis in the intercontinental war of attrition that emerged from Hitler's failure to destroy Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Führer's immediately following and wholly eccentric declaration of war on the United States.

In that global struggle, Hitler's Fascist allies were a pygmy among giants. The fatal consequences of the miscarriage of Nazi Germany's “global Blitzkrieg” would have destroyed them whatever their level of military and military-economic effectiveness. Yet Italy's record of defeat in 1940–43 was peculiarly humiliating. It had little in common with the heroic disasters of Benito Mussolini's German ally, whose Götterdämmerung was worthy in its pitiless and gleeful destructiveness of the Wagnerian myth its leader so admired. And Italy tasted defeat from the beginning; no years of striking victories delayed and cushioned its sting.

The sources of the military misadventures that destroyed Fascism's prestige and internal cohesion, determined its bloodless collapse in July 1943, and foreshadowed the disintegration of the Italian armed forces that September have largely escaped comprehensive analysis. Partial answers, such as Italy's dependence on foreign energy and raw materials, the dictator's sovereign fecklessness, and the alleged absence of popular support for war, still dominate the field.