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 str...