The Italian Navy of World War II: The definitive history of its rise and fall

Drawing on a lifetime’s scholarship, and featuring hundreds of rare photos, this is a revelatory history of the wartime Regia Marina, the least-known of the major World War II navies. In 1940, Italy’s Regia Marina had risen to become the world’s fourth-largest navy.Despite financial, strategic, and political challenges in the 1920s and 30s, and despite losing the struggle for its own air power, it had a powerful battle fleet, one of the world’s biggest submarine forces, and an ambitious strategic role. Yet until now, few books have attempted a comprehensive study of the Italian Navy of World War II, and many of those relied on limited or biased sources.In this book, Dr Enrico Cernuschi, one of Italy’s pre-eminent naval historians, presents a definitive, superbly illustrated and myth-busting history of Italian seapower from Mussolini’s ascent until 1945, drawing upon Italian, British, German, French, and US primary sources, and on high-level papers unique to Dr Cernuschi’s collection, i