Vast numbers of Russians surrendered to the Germans on various occasions too...when the battles went against them. Vast numbers of Germans surrendered to Allied forces when the battles went against them. There's a closing stage in a campaign or battle when there's not much point for the people on the losing end of it to fight any longer, and that's when a lot of them will surrender. (unless it's the Japanese!)

It's not an indication of cowardice when the soldiers on the losing side of a battle surrender, it's an indication of ordinary common sense! But when the Italians did it, it was usually strongly implied in Allied propaganda that they were a cowardly army.

Some people have depicted the French Army in 1940 as cowards too, due to Germany's quick victory in the Battle of France, when new German tactics secured an astonishingly quick and total victory.

The label of "coward" was an unfair one to apply to those men, but it's a label people will freely stick on other people if it suits their chauvinistic political bent in some way and makes them feel superior. Handy propaganda, that's all...it's rooted in a deep lack of respect for people from another community and a desire to imagine that your own community is innately superior to them in some fashion.

And that sounds a bit like the old Master Race philosophy to me. Hitler made good use of that kind of superiority-based thinking. All aggressive empires try to instill a culture of "we're better than they are" in their troops. And people fall for it.

Note: I'm not Italian or French. I'm from the Anglo culture. This isn't a case of me defending my own "tribe"...that being exactly what most people do most of the time. They toot their own tribal horn and they disparage most of the others. This enables political leaders to easily lead them off on crusades to destroy other people.

I'm not defending my own tribe or nation here. I'm defending the equal humanity of all the tribes and nations. Wars are won not by people who are "better than" the people they are fighting against, but by people whose forces are better positioned at the time, better armed, better led, and most of all....better supplied!

In the end, the Germans, Italians, and Japanese were beaten because they simply could not possibly match the Allies when it came to the production of war materials and the delivery of those materials to the battlefield. Superior Allied logistics and a larger Allied industrial base brought inevitable doom to the Axis.

My father fought on the Allied side, and he said the sheer amount of equipment and other supplies available on the Allied side, particularly for the Americans, made the defeat of the Germans a foregone conclusion...though by no means an easy one. He said he saw thousands of Allied aircraft overhead in '44 and '45...never saw a single German plane in the air while he fought all the way from Normandy to Prague. Saw a few German tanks (and feared them). Saw thousands of Allied tanks.

By '44 the Germans were running out of men, petrol, war equipment, and most other basic resources, and were hugely outnumbered in the air and on the ground and at sea. So were the Japanese. The Italians had had the weakest industrial base of all the major combatants, so they were the first ones to crack, and they were finished by '43.

You can't win a long drawn out war with an economy that is considerably weaker than that of your primary opponent(s).