re: #96 Nojay UK

They still managed to design and build some very good warships. The Littorio class battleships were excellent although meant to fight in the Mediterranean rather than more open water like the Atlantic so they had less range than their counterparts. They also had some very good destroyers although again they were range-limited since they didn’t travel far from friendly ports.

But warship production came at the expense of tank and aircraft production. We’re not talking the US or USSR which had (comparatively) unlimited supplies of steel, Italy’s wartime steel production was a fraction of what the Allies produced and what they had was of lower quality overall. For the cost of even a single destroyer, they might have had hundreds of tanks and tankettes which might not have been that impressive but whose absence was definitely felt when the Army took losses on the battlefield that they could not quickly replace.