Hendaye, France · October 23, 1940 In late November 1939, shortly after the start of World War II, the nominally neutral but fascist government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco ratified a pact with Germany in which Spain promised “more than favorable” neutrality. On this date in 1940 in Hendaye, a town on the Franco-Spanish border, Adolf Hitler…
Rome, Italy · October 8, 1941 Two months before Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on Japan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini chose to use this date in 1941 to blast the Japanese for not carrying their weight in the Tripartite Pact, a political, economic, and military agreement that Italy, Germany, and Japan…
Brenner Pass, Italy · October 4, 1940 On this date in 1940, at a border crossing between Germany and Italy, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met for the seventh time. (The two would meet seventeen times.) The Brenner Pass meeting of the two dictators followed on the heels of their June 18 meeting in Munich, which…
Rome, Italy · October 3, 1935 On this date in 1935 Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded the northeast African Kingdom of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) without a declaration of war, and for doing so the League of Nations instructed its member states to impose limited economic sanctions on Italy. (Neither the U.S. nor Germany were members of…
London, England · October 1, 1938 The storm clouds of war in Europe seemed to have parted on this date in 1938 in London, one day after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from his triumph in Munich. Three visits to Germany had been required to part the clouds: the first to Berchtesgaden in the…
Munich, Germany · September 25, 1937 On this date in 1937 Italian strongman Benito Mussolini paid his first visit to Germany, meeting Adolf Hitler in the Fuehrer’s private residence in Munich. During the visit Mussolini made Hitler an honorary corporal of the Italian Fascist militia, while Hitler conferred the Iron Cross of Greater Germany on…
Cairo, Egypt · September 13, 1940 On this date in 1940, 250,000 soldiers of the Italian Tenth Army under the command of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani crossed from the Italian colony of Libya into Egypt (see map), where British troops were protecting the Suez Canal, the vital waterway to the Middle Eastern oilfields and beyond that…
Fuehrer HQ, Rastenburg, Germany · September 12, 1943 On September 11, 1943, imprisoned in the Hotel Campo Imperatore high in the Apennine Mountains, deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini learned of the terms of the “long armistice” the Allies had presented to Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s new Italian government. (A “short armistice” had been signed in Sicily…
Salerno, Italy · September 9, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Italy, the Allies from their strongholds in North Africa and Sicily invaded the Italian mainland at Salerno south of Naples (Operation Avalanche), with diversionary landings at Calabria (Operation Baytown, September 3, 1943), which lay on the “toe” of the Italian Peninsula, and Taranto (Operation…
Salzburg, Austria · August 11, 1939 On this date in 1939 near Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, about Hitler’s decision “to set Europe on fire.” “We want war,” Ribbentrop said to Ciano, though he omitted saying that Hitler had just signed the…
