HONOURS MODERN
HISTORY
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 General Patton moved east and linked
up with Montgomery’s forces in Tunisia in May, 1943. 275,000 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 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).
*By the end of 1943, the Allies controlled much 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.
*It took the first half of 1944 for Allied forced to break through 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.
*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 longer in Yugoslavia that anywhere else—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.