All things Mussolini claimed he'd fix, and had twenty years to do so. South Korea and Singapore are much smaller nations that accomplished far more in half the time- these excuses are simply pathetic, especially for an ideologue whose political structure rested on authoritarianism. For fuck's sake, it took Hitler less than ten years to consolodate the nation, expand industry, and prepare the military for WWII. The fact that Italy made no advancement between WWI and WWII is a testiment it's own worthlessness, and to the perversion of Mussolini worship.
All that has to be said on this front, I said already- Italian-Americans were ten-fold as valiant as Italians
The situations in Germany and Italy were not even comparable. In Italy, Italian nationalists were bitter about the British and French reneging on the Treaty of London and giving Fiume (now the Croatian port city of Rijeka) and parts of the Dalmatian coast to the newly created Kingdom of Yugoslavia after Italian soldiers got stuck on one of the most difficult fronts of the war and sacrificed so much. Given the threat of socialist and Communist revolution in the interwar period many became ambivalent toward the liberal establishment and the House of Savoy's ability to protect them and establish a positive vision.
In Germany, the country was absolutely devastated and torn to pieces as a result of Versailles and what came after. Money was so worthless couples would pay for their meal in a restaurant before eating, because the price would jump three or four times before their meal was finished. Restrictions on the military turned the state into a vassal. French colonial Senegalese troops were occupying the left bank of the Rhine and raping German women. Culturally and socially the Weimar Republic was an opportunity for every European freak to show up in Germany and realize their most hedonistic and base of desires. It was hell on Earth and anarchy.
My point is that the NSDAP was starting from what can almost be considered a "blank state". Millions and millions of Germans came to despise the society around them during this period and wished for everything to be torn down around them and something glorious to be built on its ashes and debris, though they didn't know quite what yet. In Italy, centrist factions had more influence as can be evidenced by the initial tolerance of even the socialist Matteoti's protests against Mussolini and Fascist governance. Political "moderates" (know-nothings) were not disaffected with liberal rule to the extent that this occurred in Germany, and Mussolini still had to contend with, initially parliament, later King Victor Emmanuel III and the church.
I suppose my point in bringing this up is that it's clear when one gives a more introspective look to both Fascist Italy and NS Germany that Hitler had far more of a mandate to effect radical change.
Perhaps even more to the point, I don't believe assigning leadership to "fix" a country in a certain time period in the sense of irrevocably altering its social structure which spans millenia is usually possible unless certain conditions are met. Germany was always more efficient and organized than Italian society. It wasn't just true in the Second World War. It's indeed still true today. Travel to Italy and hire a tour or a driver. They will arrive two hours late and are confused when you question them on it. What people fail to understand about great leaders is that men are not gods. Every great leadership in history, and I would include Hitler as one for instance, is made up of two parts: great skill as fighters/intellectuals/men and the conditions and people which exist around them. Hitler was a visionary, a fantastic thinker, writer, speaker, and fighter for the German people, but the conditions that were granted to him were near-perfect for the complete demolition of a society and establishment of a greater vision. Would he have fared as well in Afghanistan, Bolivia, or the United States? Would Stalin?
The bottom line in all this is that Italian performance in the war with notable expections - terrific men such as Italo Balbo and Rodolfo Graziani, the Decima Flottiglia MAS frogman unit of the Regia Marina, the paramilitary resistance until death in defense of the Salo Republic, Italian infantry who fought house to house in Eritrea against British forces and Ethiopian guerrillas (a British author remarked these men were some of the toughest of the war, fighting every bit as fiercely as the Germans at Stalingrad), etc. - was disappointing, but this failure does not erase nearly twenty years of Italian progress for which Mussolini was praised, as I mentioned, by figures as diverse as Hitler to Gandhi. No, the Battle for Wheat, the taming of the Pontine Marshes, the eradication of the Mafia, the creation of a level of economic indepedence in Italy, revolutionary art and architecture, and the return of ethnic Italians to areas they hadn't trod since Roman times cannot be erased.
Mussolini was fine as a domestic ruler, but he was no warlord, having little clue about military matters. Truth be told Hitler wasn't that much better, but he had clued-up deputies like Goering and Himmler.
Indeed, nor were Churchill or Stalin. Churchill without his later career would still be remembered today for the disaster of the Battle of Gallipoli thrown together with poor logistics and complete underestimation of Turkish resistance. He would probably be likened to Douglas Haig. And Stalin almost single-handedly lost the war for the Soviets until his own men essentially told him to sit down and shut up. Once Stalin stepped down and Zhukov stepped up, Soviet fortunes improved.
"I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work" - President Vladimir Putin
"Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin." - Muammar Qaddafi