Historical Events
Italy · Events 9
The Spanish Civil War
The military rising of July 1936 was checked not by the government but by the arming of the unions, and in Catalonia and Aragon that response became a revolution in which factories and land passed into the workers' hands. While the Non-Intervention Agreement pushed by Britain and France blocked the legal government from buying arms, Germany and Italy armed the rebels, and in practice only the Soviet Union and Mexico would sell to the Republic. Soviet intervention kept the Republic standing, but it also sharpened the quarrel between those who held that the war had to be won before the revolution and those who answered that stopping the revolution would remove the reason to fight, until in May 1937 the argument broke into street fighting in Barcelona.
The Fall of France and the Vichy Regime
This event covers Germany's conquest of France from 10 May 1940 through the 1944 liberation, the collapse of the Third Republic, and rule from Vichy. French commanders combined Maginot Line defence with an advance into Belgium, but German forces broke through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse, and raced to the Channel. German troops entered Paris on 14 June; despite the Dunkirk evacuation, organized French resistance collapsed. Philippe Pétain requested an armistice on 17 June, and the agreement signed on 22 June left the north and Atlantic coast occupied while the south remained under Vichy. On 10 July the National Assembly granted Pétain full powers. Vichy then collaborated through antisemitic laws, police roundups, economic extraction, and labor mobilization. German and Italian occupation of the southern zone in November 1942 ended its limited autonomy; liberation in 1944 ended the regime.
Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain was the air campaign fought from July 1940 to May 1941 between Germany's Luftwaffe and Britain's Royal Air Force for control of the English Channel and British airspace. After France and the Low Countries fell, Germany sought either to force Britain into negotiations or to invade it, which required destroying RAF Fighter Command and gaining air superiority to protect a cross-Channel operation. In July the Luftwaffe attacked shipping and ports, in August it concentrated on airfields and radar, and from 7 September it shifted to large raids on London and other cities. Britain combined radar, observers, a command network, and Hurricane and Spitfire fighters to prevent German daylight dominance, while Germany postponed an invasion indefinitely in September 1940. Night bombing continued until May 1941, but it did not drive Britain out of the war.
The Great Patriotic War
The Great Patriotic War, opened by Nazi Germany with a surprise invasion in June 1941, was the largest land war in human history. Recovering from the catastrophic losses of the first year, the Soviet Union moved its industrial base bodily eastward and rearmed, reversed the tide at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, and drove on to Berlin in 1945 to bring down Nazi Germany. Roughly 80 percent of the ground combat power of the Wehrmacht was destroyed on the Eastern Front, and it was the multinational Soviet people who bore the overwhelming burden of defeating fascism.
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was the major engagement fought from July 17, 1942, to February 2, 1943, around Stalingrad and the lower Don and Volga rivers in the Soviet Union. Germany launched Case Blue to seize southern oil and communications, but Adolf Hitler turned the capture of Stalingrad into a separate priority, dispersing the offensive. The German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army reached the city in late August and attacked its ruins, while Vasily Chuikov's Sixty-second Army held a narrow strip along the Volga, reinforced across the river and relying on close combat. From November 19 the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, broke through the German army's Romanian-held flanks from north and south, and linked near Kalach on November 23. The encircled German force survived failed relief and inadequate air supply only briefly, began surrendering in January 1943, and capitulated on February 2.
The Italian Campaign and the Fall of Mussolini
The Italian Campaign was the Mediterranean theatre of the Second World War, beginning with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and ending with the surrender of German forces in Italy in May 1945. After defeat in North Africa and sustained bombing, parts of the Fascist regime and the monarchy concluded that continuing the war would destroy the state, while the Allies sought to remove Italy from the war and tie down German forces in the south. After Sicily fell, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Benito Mussolini, and Pietro Badoglio's government signed the Armistice of Cassibile on 3 September. When announced on 8 September, German forces occupied central and northern Italy and rescued Mussolini, who established the Italian Social Republic. Allied troops landed at Salerno and Taranto, but the Apennines, Gustav Line, Anzio, and Monte Cassino made the advance costly. Rome fell in June 1944, yet fighting continued at the Gothic Line. In April 1945, the Allied offensive and a partisan uprising broke the northern front. Mussolini was captured and executed, and German Army Group C surrendered on 2 May.
The Yugoslav Partisan War
The Yugoslav Partisan War was the Communist-led armed struggle fought from the Axis invasion and partition of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941 until 1945. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia organized a nationwide rising against the occupiers and their collaborationist regimes. Led by Josip Broz Tito, the Partisans grew from guerrilla detachments into a regular army while competing with the royalist Chetniks and fighting a civil war inside the wider anti-Axis conflict. They survived major Axis offensives, especially the battles of the Neretva and Sutjeska, won Allied support and recognition in 1943, and liberated Belgrade with Soviet forces in 1944. In March 1945 the army was reorganized as the Yugoslav Army, and the Partisan victory made possible a socialist federal state in place of the monarchy.
Greek Resistance and the Dekemvriana
Greek Resistance and the Dekemvriana was a resistance struggle and power conflict that began with Axis occupation in 1941 and led to the Varkiza Agreement in 1945. Against the occupation by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria, the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) and its Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) became the largest forces through work in the countryside and cities amid famine and collaboration. When German troops withdrew in October 1944, EAM controlled most of Greece, but Britain sought to preserve the monarchy and a non-EAM government, while the Soviet Union effectively accepted Greece as a British sphere of influence. On 1 December, General Ronald Scobie ordered the resistance forces to disarm. EAM ministers resigned, and police fire at a demonstration in Athens on 3 December began 37 days of fighting among British and government forces and ELAS. British reinforcements and firepower forced EAM to withdraw, and on 12 February 1945 the Varkiza Agreement accepted ELAS dissolution and disarmament.
The Marshall Plan and the Cold War
When the United States proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in 1947, the Soviet Union cast it as an attempt to subordinate Europe to American capital. Molotov broke off the Paris talks, and Stalin blocked the Eastern European states from taking the aid. With Zhdanov’s declaration of “two camps” and the founding of the Cominform, the world hardened into the two blocs of the Cold War.