How I feel about the Italians

Mess Room
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Before the Merge Italy was joined with Germany in the Tunisian campaign. They both had fought together all throughout the North African theater. Once we entered the new Merge era Italy and all its squads would have free reign of the entire game. Now in some ways this would be immersive in that Italy participated in the Battle of Stalingrad so we’d finally be able to use those units on the Eastern Front.

However it got complicated when we have the Royal Italian army defending the beaches of Normandy or the Reichstag. Italy had surrendered in 1943. For a long time it bothered me seeing Italian soldiers running around in Normandy, Hurtgen Forest, Berlin. I know this isn’t the most realistic game and it’s not 101% historically accurate, but I at least like some standards

But up until recently I started to really think about it. Italy withdrew from the Eastern Front in 1943 after the Battle of Stalingrad but there were some thousands of Italians that remained and continued to fight alongside Germany. Following Italy’s surrender Germany set up the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state, in Northern Italy led by Mussolini and it fielded its own armies and units alongside the Germans throughout the fight for Italy. Even some various Italian units abroad Europe had chosen or in some cases coerced to continue fighting with Germany. Even the SS had an Italian division among all their other various foreign units

Hey, now we can say maybe those Italian units defending Normandy are Italian volunteers. Even in Germany’s final stand there were various foreign units helping to defend Berlin. So now I see there are various ways we can reconcile seeing Italian units all across the game. Heck even now I’ll gladly use Italian units in my lineup when I feel like having them

And I’m just sayin can we get some more Italian customizations. I will say that now I don’t mind that we have some Italians with German gear because it did happen in some instances, but it would be nice to have some more actually Italian customizations as well

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I can’t find anywhere on the net where it confirms this :thinking:

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8th army of Italy search it
here

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Italy shows up everywhere haha. I didnt realise till recently their airforce was in the battle of britain, bombing the uk

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It really does put the whole “world” war into perspective.

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Surprisingly, many people are unaware of the sad fate of thousands of Italians in Berlin, they were sent as “internees”, without the nickname of prisoners of war and forced to work in slave conditions to “help” build the German defenses, these men werent even allowed to take refuge because they were “cowards” when they surrendered in the bomb shelters and they were placed in small concentration camps in various places in the city. They were also tried to force them to fight, but from what I read only a 10 % of these soldiers entered into real combat, so although it sounds stupid, there WERE Italians in Berlin as well as in the North in a city far from the hand of God a small remnant of the Spanish Blue Division fought until they were forced to surrender, With all this I want to say that there were “mixed” units and it is not stupid to think that one day they will be put in the game

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Darkflow is yet to touch customization and based on James’s answer it seems like they don’t even acknowledge that it needs rework.

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As with many things we can just say hopefully one day……