The maxim that victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan applies only imperfectly to the fate of the Fascist movement and regime – even if all concerned hastened to deny responsibility. Italy's catastrophic defeat in the great war that Mussolini sought for twenty years and finally found had many fathers. Society, industrial establishment, regime, and armed forces all contributed in vital ways.

The regime inherited a society poor both in relative terms and in the aggregate. By the late 1930s Italy was thirty to fifty years behind its German ally in becoming an industrial society, a gap overcome only during the long peace after 1945. Virtually all adult Germans were literate by 1900; illiteracy and a semiliteracy that entailed mutually opaque dialects embraced perhaps a third of Italy's population in 1940. The Italian economy by 1938 had a total industrial potential slightly over a fifth of Germany's and half of Japan's. Italian society's peasant base, an industrial sector employing less than a third of the workforce, and a narrowly selective educational system (85,535 university students, of whom only 13.6 percent were studying engineering, out of a total population of just under 44 million in 1939–40) meant a pervasive shortage of technical talent. And a parochial, cartelized, and in some cases corrupt industrial establishment was incapable of designing, much less mass-producing, effective armored fighting vehicles.