An excerpt from my book “Montgomery vs. Rommel at El Agheila 1942,” in which I discuss the crumbling Italo-German alliance and how media coverage contributed to the breakdown of political ties.

Axis military fortunes in North Africa had taken a decisive turn for the worse in the winter of 1942. The ripple effects this had on politicians and the media naturally influenced the decisions that Montgomery and Rommel would make on the battlefield…

Mussolini remained invidiously competitive with his German allies…Mussolini had desired success in North Africa, but the hero of this dramatic performance was originally supposed to have been an Italian. That had been the whole point of Mussolini’s attacking the British in Egypt in the first place. Since Hitler and Goebbels couldn’t resist a chance to boast of German victories, North Africa inevitably transformed into a prime venue for positive Third Reich military publicity with every success of Rommel. This rubbed salt in the wound for the already slighted Mussolini. Opening the door of opportunity even just a crack to Hitler had led the Germans careening into view and stealing the whole show.

Mussolini stewed. Everything had gone quite backwards indeed from what he had originally intended. He blamed everything on his reluctant dragon, Graziani, whose failure to conquer Egypt he never forgot and was prone to rant about even years later. Following Rommel’s triumphs in the summer of 1942, the Duce continued to fume about Graziani who he said ‘had always been seventy feet underground in a Roman tomb at Cyrene while Rommel knows how to lead his troops with the personal example of the general who lives in his tank’.

Many other high-ranking German military officials treated the Italians with open contempt, and opportunities for goodwill were lost. This became worse over time as Italy’s military prowess decreased to practically subzero levels on the stage of global perception.

The North African campaign contributed significantly to the deterioration of the Axis alliance. An atmosphere of resentment boiled among Italian officials in Rome at the increasingly condescending behaviour of Hitler’s emissaries. Rather than thinly concealing their contempt as in the past, many German officials became more overtly disrespectful…

Goebbels’ Nazi publicity machine also successfully drowned Italy out of the global view of the Axis alliance. Nazi propaganda flooded the airwaves as did its films and images methodically scattered all over the world. Germans were portrayed as winning everywhere while Italians fighting alongside them on various fronts were practically non-existent. The Allied press regularly reported about Italy – losing…

As the public mood soured, the Duce came under increasing criticism. There were whisperings among government officials, intrigues at the Vatican, surreptitious meddling by Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, rumours of all kinds and a general sense among members of Mussolini’s fascist government that all was definitely not well. One of Mussolini’s former hardcore Blackshirts, Giuseppe Bottai, formerly a strong admirer of the Nazi regime for its racial policies, turned against the Duce over the misfortunes of the war…

Even the Germans started to sense a change in the air. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, leader of Hitler’s Gestapo and security forces to whom Ciano referred as a ‘spider’, started sniffing around, appearing in Rome at odd times and asking some apparently harmless but unusual questions. It didn’t take a secret police chief to know that Italy was getting fed up with the way the war was going for them. Rommel himself had noticed it early on. ‘Many Italians felt that the Axis alliance was a sham’, he wrote, adding that it had become clear to him by then that most Italians wanted out of the war.

Rommel believed corruption and backbiting in Italy’s military and government were working against Mussolini. ‘Now the Duce was seeing his dreams crumbling’, he wrote of the period of Axis decline in North Africa in the aftermath of El Alamein. ‘These were bitter hours for him, and he was certainly in no condition to bear the consequences. Maybe at the end I should have behaved differently towards him, but I was so angry about the endless glossing over of everything that I really could just not do it.’