In war as in every other human endeavor, the influence of human feelings, perceptions, and attitudes is an ever-present undercurrent. While on the surface, military alliances are made for logical and strategic reasons, under the surface are real people whose responses to each other can work at cross-purposes to what might otherwise be a successful military strategy. In the German-Italian alliance of World War II, these human factors played a significant role in undermining the Axis strategy. Although allies in name, the Germans and the Italians found themselves at cross-purposes ethically, theologically, and philosophically because their cultures were so divergent. Moreover, since these considerations were inextricable from their military strategy, they were at least covertly, if not overtly, conflicted over strategy. As Abraham Lincoln (1858) famously stated in a speech to the President and the Convention, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." This brief but pithy statement could serve as the epitaph for the Axis alliance. Although the Axis strategy seemed destined to succeed, it failed, and it was not military tactics or high-level analysis that doomed it, but the simple disconnect between the Axis powers' cultural values. This paper will examine in particular the alliance between Germany and Italy, articulating the underlying human factor mismatch this is so often overlooked in explicating the failure of the Axis powers in World War II.
Germany's strategy in the war was straightforward and uncomplicated; it was to defeat the Allied forces before the United States could mount a military defense sufficient to shift the balance of power to the Allied side. In order to achieve this objective, Germany needed its own allies, so it magnanimously overlooked Italy's conquest of Ethiopia and joined forces with Italy, forming an alliance called "the Axis" (Heinrichs & Heinrichs 1990, 5). As the leader of th...