War and American Society

The War in the Mediterranean

*Following Mussolini’s invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece in 1940, Hitler was forced to send troops to support Italy (and Bulgaria and Romania took the opportunity to invade Yugoslavia and Greece as well) while Britain tried to help the Greeks. 

*Although the Axis occupied most of Greece and Yugoslavia, it tied down many Germany resources and eventually resulted in the destruction of the Italian navy, with Britain’s greatest victory won in the Battle of Taranto in 1940 when carrier-based torpedo planes sank three Italian battleships in a manner that would help suggest the attack on Pearl Harbour to the Japanese.

*Hitler, though, said that of all the nations Germany fought, the Greeks were the bravest and most gallant, and out of admiration he ordered the release of all Greek POWs as soon as they were disarmed.  Winston Churchill said, 'Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.'

*When France fell, Britain hoped the French would turn their navy over the Britain, or at least scuttle the ships so the Nazis could not use them.  The French refused to do either, so the British attacked a major French fleet in North Africa, destroying one battleship and badly damaging 6 other ships.  Later, however, when the Germans tried to force the French to turn over other ships to them in 1942, they did scuttle them rather than surrender them.

*When the British began beating the Italians in Lybia, Hitler sent Erwin Rommel—the Desert Fox--and the Afrika Korps to fight back.  They did well in their push to the Suez Canal until General Bernard Montgomery stopped them at El Alamein in Egypt in October 1942, and then slowly pushed back.

*By this point Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, and although General Winter had slowed him down, it had not stopped him as it did Napoleon, and by early 1942 he was pushing deeper into Russia.  Stalin begged United States and Britain to invade France to relieve the pressure on the USSR, so the US and UK invaded Africa.

*This was known as Operation Torch, and involved American and British troops under General Eisenhower landing in Vichy French Morocco.  They expected to be greeted as liberators, but in fact the French fought back, killing about 500 British and American soldiers and losing about 1,400 of their own (in addition to about 2,700 wounded on both sides combined).  Eventually members of the Free French Resistance led a coup and ended Vichy French resistance to the Allies.

*From there American forces under moved east until being defeated at Kasserine Pass in February, 1943.  To improve the capability of US forces, George Patton was promoted to command the American II Corps, and linked up with Montgomery’s forces in Tunisia in May, 1943 and trapped most of the Afrika Korps.  275,000 Axis POWs were captured and all Axis colonies in Africa were conquered (Italian Somaliland, Eritrea, and Ethiopia having already been taken in 1941), but Rommel managed to return to Germany before being captured.

*Now that the US and UK had secured North Africa, Stalin again begged them to invade France and take pressure off the Soviet Union.  Therefore, they invaded Italy.

*Winston Churchill believed that Italy was the ‘underbelly of Europe,’ and that attacking the Axis there would allow the Allies to fight the Italians, who were regarded as weaker than the Germans, and let the Allies work their way up into Germany from the south.

*Before invading the boot of Italy, the Allies decided to create a base of operations in Sicily, invading the island on 10 July, 1943.  Patton and Montgomery quickly took over the island; the last Italian forces withdrew on 17 August, 1943, by which point the Allies had already begun bombing Italy, even Rome itself.

*Even better, or so it seemed, the Italian Fascist Party voted Benito Mussolini out of office on 25 July, 1943, and King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed him and had him arrested.  The king then appointed a new Prime Minister (Pietro Badoglio) who dissolved the Fascist Party (despite being a member of it), and he and the king began secret negotiations with the Allies.

*The Allies began invading Italy on 3 September, and won small battles in the toe of Italy from which the Italians retreated.

*On 8 September, Italy surrendered to the Allies and on 13 October, joined the war against the Axis.  This would seem like a great Allied victory in and of itself, but in the short run it meant that Hitler would divert Germany forces to Italy where they would prove much harder to defeat than the Italians.

*Furthermore, on 12 September, elite Germany paratroopers rescued Mussolini from prison and forced him to create a new fascist Italian Social Republic.  Although by this point Mussolini expected Italy to lose and wanted to retire, he felt he could protect Italy somewhat from Hitler’s oppression if he was nominally in charge of Italy (Hitler had threatened to blow up several major Italian cities if Mussolini refused the job).

 

*On 9 September, 1943, the day after Italy surrendered (but as the German army continued to fight), the Allies landed at Salerno, near Naples and south of Rome.  The landing was fairly easy, but for weeks the Allied forces were trapped and nearly defeated by the Germans.

*By early October, 1943, the Allies controlled most of Southern Italy, but could not get all the way to Rome, although they often bombed it, eventually even bombing the historic monastery of Monte Cassino which they feared was a lookout post.

 

*To distract the Germans and provide relief to Allied forces South of Rome stuck at the Winter Line, Allied forces landed at Anzio in January, 1944, but were bottled up on their beachhead, providing little assistance.

*It took the first half of 1944 for Allied forced to break through the Winter Line--the fortifications south of the City of Rome.  The Germans abandoned Rome and the Allies occupied it on 4 June, 1944.

*As the US, UK, and the Kingdom of Italy fought in the mountains south of Rome, the Soviet Union still suffered from partial German occupation, and Stalin again asked Britain and the US to invade France, and this time they did so, invading Normandy on 6 June, 1944 and taking many of the best troops away from Italy.

*Nonetheless, fighting continued in Italy until the spring of 1945. Italian Royalists and communists fought against fascists (and sometimes each other), giving the Italian campaign aspects of a civil war. 

*On 27 April, Mussolini and his mistress were on their way to Switzerland from which they planned to escape to Spain when they were captured by communist partisans.  The next day they and several others travelling with them were executed—Mussolini’s last words were supposedly ‘aim for the heart.’  On the 29th Mussolini’s and his mistress’s bodies were hung on meat hooks from the roof of a gas station where passers-by threw rocks at it. 

*His body was buried in an unmarked grave, but later dug up by post-war fascists, hidden by them, re-captured by the government, held for ten years, and then reburied in his home town in a marble crypt with fasces on the sides and a bust of Il Duce on top.  The National Fascist party was outlawed in the Republic of Italy after the war, but many neo-Fascist parties still exist, one of them under the leadership of Il Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini.

*The German Army in Italy surrendered on 29 April, 1945, and the monarchy was restored, although in 1946 the Italian people voted to end the monarchy, and Italy became a republic.  Between 1948 and 2002 all male members of the House of Savoy were banned from Italian territory.

*The Germans had already left Greece in October of 1944, as had the Bulgarian Army (which had undertaken a process of Bulgarisation, deporting all Greek officials in Thrace) when it was threatened by the Red Army.  Greece even managed to take some Mediterranean islands from Italy during the War.  However, the different groups who had fought against the Axis—royalists and communists—fought each other after World War II ended, plunging Greece into a civil war which King George II's forces won with the help of the UK and USA, which was one of the major causes of the Cold War.

*World War II lasted later in Yugoslavia that anywhere else in Europe—the last land battle in Europe ended on 15 May, 1945, eight days after Germany formally surrendered.  Fighting between different ethnic groups (many of whom had been given their own pseudo-independent nation-states by the Axis) and between royalists and Communists lasted until 1946 when Yugoslavia became a Communist country under Josip Broz Tito, who would run the country until his death in 1980.