| As were the other arms of the Italian armed forces during WWII, so were the armored formations desperately inadequate next to their enemies. Italy entered the war with a large number of obsolete tankettes equipping its forces. The many inadequacies of these vehicles had been fully exposed during the Spanish Civil war, yet Italy had not enough tanks of other marks so the tankettes soldiered on for the entire war. The replacements for these early vehicles were hardly up to standards when they arrived. When the main Italian medium tank entered service in 1940, it was roughly comparable to Soviet and German light tanks. As the war dragged on Italian tanks were terribly outclassed by all of their enemies. Work was in progress on a new medium tank, the P40, which would have been more of a match for allied tanks like the Sherman, but Italy�s withdrawal from the war in 1943 left only a few P 40 tanks in German hands to soldier through the rest of the conflict. |
