"With victory Mussolini became a prisoner of his own propaganda and believed that under his leadership Italy had created ‘an army of five million men with a forest of bayonets, an airforce so large that it would blot out the sun over Italy'. By 1938 he boasted of an army of 8 million ‘bayonets', whereas in reality the Italian Army was at best 1.5 million strong. Similar exaggeration surrounded Italy's much-publicised drive for autarky with statistics for industrial and agricultural production that were far in excess of Italy's limited resources."
-- The Second World War: Ambitions to Nemesis / Bradley Lightbody