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…
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, luxurious 9‑room apartment in Munich, 10 minutes away from the Brown House, Nazi Party national headquarters, and the Fuehrerbau, where Hitler had formal offices. During the visit Mussolini…
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…
Cairo, Egypt · August 5, 1942 On this date in 1942 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, flew into Cairo. They arrived in the Egyptian capital 44 days after the British garrison at Tobruk in Eastern Libya had fallen to German Gen. (soon Field Marshal) Erwin…
Lisbon, Portugal · July 21, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Lisbon, delegates of Italian King Victor Emmanuel III met with the head of neutral Portugal to explore strategies for extracting Italy from the war. The Crown had begun searching for an exit as early as late 1942. After Allied landings in Axis-occupied North Africa…
Berlin, Germany · July 19, 1940 Military operations between France and the Axis powers—that is, Germany and Italy—ended on June 25, 1940. Three and a half weeks later, on this date in 1940 in Berlin, victorious Wehrmacht troops marched through the Brandenburg Gate for the first time since Kaiser Wilhelm I’s victory over France in the Franco-Prussian…
Kursk, Soviet Union · July 13, 1943 On this date in 1943 Operation Citadel (Zitadelle), Adolf Hitler’s gambit to retake the important Soviet rail hub of Kursk, south of Moscow, and straighten the German line on the Eastern Front failed with devastating losses on both sides, but especially to German strategic armored reserves. A day earlier…
