Instead, Italy's invasion of Greece was to have serious consequences for its ongoing campaign in North Africa. Moreover, Italy would have been in a better position to execute its North African campaign had it initially occupied Tunis and Malta. In the preface to the collection of documents published in 1965 by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the historian and diplomat Mario Toscano summed up the war as follows: "As we all know, the campaign against Greece ended in total failure. This was due, as the published material confirms, to Mussolini’s conviction, based on indications he received from his colleagues, that the campaign would be decided in the political rather than the military sector. The consequences of this error were so serious as to bring about Italy’s complete subjection to Germany as far as the political and military direction of the war was concerned." This has been echoed by other writers since: Gann and Duignan regarded that the fighting in France, Yugoslavia and Greece reduced Italy to the status of a [German] satellite, while Ian Kershaw considers that the Greek failure, the Battle of Taranto (11–12 November 1940) and the loss of Cyrenaica (9 December 1940 – 9 February 1941) served to end Italian aspirations to great power status. Other authors have been critical of the Italian leadership's handling of the operation. Jowett wrote in 2000 that Mussolini's "quick and relatively easy victory" turned to defeat and stalemate, which exposed the incompetence of the Fascist government and its war machine. Italian soldiers suffered great hardship in the Albanian mountains, "due to the incompetence and unforgivably bad planning of their leaders". In 2008, Paoletti wrote that the Italian army fought in difficult terrain, was short of clothing and equipment and units were split up as they arrived and used piecemeal. Mussolini was guilty of "criminal improvidence", in causing the great number casualties of the Italian army. The German invasion "went smoothly, because the Greek army was concentrated against the Italians". In 2009, Mazower wrote that the Italian invasion of Greece was a disaster and the "first Axis setback" of the war. Mussolini had sent troops to attack Greece, over some of the worst mountain country in Europe, at the beginning of winter. The Greeks repulsed the invasion, to the surprise of enemies and Allies alike, an event made worse for the Fascist regime because of the attack on Taranto and the disasters in Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Several military historians have blamed the poor performance of the Italian Army in Greece, as well as in France and North Africa, on "innate defects" that had been evident already during World War I but were consistently ignored due to institutional indifference.