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German aircraft plants are, unlike the British, well-camouflaged, frequently set down in evergreen forests. Duplicate facilties for German plane manufacture exist underground. When a bombing attack threatens, movable machinery from the surface plants can be lowered by elevator into the underground and hooked up to duplicate heavy machinery that is already in place.
The German navy, consisting of four or five battleships, three "pocket" battleships, 15 cruisers and close to 100 submarines, cannot hope to engage British (or even French) headon. But its submarines can threaten Britain's food-line, and if the battleships and cruisers can scatter over the high seas before war breaks out they can do considerable damage as commerce and convoy raiders.
German military tradition goes back to Napoleon as interpreted by Clausewitz and made "totalitarian" by Ludendorff, who believed in the nation-in-arms theory and the war of extermination. Its weakness is a traditional reliance on Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness) which—though it won at Munich—is apt to backfire by stiffening instead of breaking opponents' morale. The modern German theory of victory by Blitzkrieg (lightning war) is untried and, in the opinion of many experts, unsound. Further, if Germany plans to carry war deep into Russian territory in case of Soviet participation, old Moscow Generals January and February (alias Cold and Hunger) will probably ruin Chief of High Command Wilhelm Keitel's reputation even as they ruined Napoleon's in 1812. But whatever their failings in grand strategy, the Germans are among the world's greatest technicians in the art of war.
Italy. Like Mussolini, Italian soldiers are pouter pigeons, wear caps eight inches tall to make up for their short stature. But in the hard school of war they have learned to fight as well as strut. For the modern Italian army (900,000 men) is the only important European military machine with recent war experience. So its junior officers are apt to know more about fighting than junior officers of other nations.
Italian Alpine troops are among the best mountain troops in the world. Italians are good at engineering, transportation, supply, sanitation. Italian planes are good, their pilots well trained in Ethiopia and Spain, but production is handicapped at all times because of lack of raw materials. On sea, Italy has cruisers (21 in commission, twelve abuilding) that are among the fastest in the world, a big destroyer and submarine fleet, plus mosquito-boats manned by daredevils, all of which makes Italy an ugly foe to fight in the western Mediterranean. Hero of the Italian navy is Rizzo, motorboat commander who sank an Austrian dreadnought in the World War 21 years ago. June 10, the anniversary of that day will be celebrated throughout Italy as Navy Day.