i think a lot of the italian failures in the second world war can be chalked up to treason. people blame mussolini for the debacle in greece but in fact it was pietro badoglio. this is the same badoglio who later organized the coup of july-september 1943 and had been carrying on negotiations with the british and the americans for who knows how long. he didn't want italy to be involved in a european war and he was anglophile and hostile to germany.

back in 1940 badoglio was running the entire italian army. like the anti-hitler german officers who had been plotting for hitler's removal since at least 1938, badoglio probably wanted to engineer a military defeat that would topple the fascist government and bring in a military-managed monarchist parliamentary democracy. so badoglio told mussolini everything was ready for the greece campaign, that it would be no problem, over quickly. in fact he didn't do shit and set them up to fail. i believe that later in the war he was responsible for the quick surrender of italian positions in the mediteranean and sicily. he was probably feeding information about supply shipping to the british to sabotage the north african campaign, and all that shit. i have yet to read a good revisionist work on the italian side of ww2 but these are my conclusions and expectations.

RT: https://poa.st/objects/5b8f9313-b55e-49e7-90e2-7978452c95d3