Italy and the Second World War

Italy and the Second World War
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2018-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004363769

Italy in the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives stems from the necessity to write an important page of Second World War history, by focusing on the Italian war experience, which has been overshadowed in international research by the attention given to its senior Axis partner. Drawing extensively on material from Italian and international archives, a team of Italian and international historians, led by Emanuele Sica and Richard Carrier, offers a broad-ranging volume on the war seen through the lens of Italian soldiers and civilians, and populations occupied by the Italian army. Contributors are: Luca Baldissara, Cindy Brown, Federico Ciavattone, Nicolò Da Lio, Paolo Fonzi, Francesco Fusi, Eric Gobetti, Federico Goddi, Andrea Martini, Niall MacGalloway, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Paolo Pezzino, Matteo Pretelli, Nicholas Virtue.

Italy In The Second World War: Memories And Documents

Italy In The Second World War: Memories And Documents
Author: Marshal Pietro Badoglio
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786257416

Marshal Pietro Badolgio was involved in the highest levels of the Italian political hierarchy ever since his early successes in the First World War, for which he was promoted General. He was head of the Italian Armed Forces from 1925 to 1940, and did his best to raise the military to a level that might match the expansionist views of Mussolini. He presided over the brutal invasion of Ethiopia, but nationally he acted as a counter-balance to Mussolini’s pre-World War II schemes. Unable to stop the inevitable disaster following the Italian-German Pact of Steel and the onset of war, he resigned as Chief Of Staff after the humiliating reverses of the Italian invasion of Greece. He was brought back into the political spotlight in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, and was named Prime Minister of Italy during the turbulent months of their volte face change of sides. His position was unenviable, caught between the Italian people who cried out for peace and the Allied powers who pursued German defeat in Italy by armed force. In this fascinating book he recounts his memories and recollections of Italy during the Second World War, particularly focussed on his attempts to hold the country together in 1943 and 1944.

Monte Cassino

Monte Cassino
Author: Matthew Parker
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2004-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0385513399

Monte Cassino is the true story of one of the bitterest and bloodiest of the Allied struggles against the Nazi army. Long neglected by historians, the horrific conflict saw over 350,000 casualties, while the worst winter in Italian memory and official incompetence and backbiting only worsened the carnage and turmoil. Combining groundbreaking research in military archives with interviews with four hundred survivors from both sides, as well as soldier diaries and letters, Monte Cassino is both profoundly evocative and historically definitive. Clearly and precisely, Matthew Parker brilliantly reconstructs Europe’s largest land battle–which saw the destruction of the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino–and dramatically conveys the heroism and misery of the human face of war.

A Travel Guide to World War II Sites in Italy

A Travel Guide to World War II Sites in Italy
Author: Anne Saunders
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2016-12-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9781540566041

THE BOOK SHOWN ON THIS PAGE IS THE UPDATED AND EXPANDED SECOND EDITION, published in December 2016. This new version adds tours of WWII sites in Sicily/southern Italy, and updates the descriptions of WWII sites in central and northern Italy. It also adds locations along the Adriatic coast, where the Eighth Army fought many battles. Altogether the new edition describes almost 200 sites. The guidebook closes with excerpts from the journal of a prisoner of war who spent months in Italian POW camps. Please note that book reviews prior to December 2016 refer to the FIRST edition, published in 2010 and no longer in print (although some first-edition copies are still for sale on the Amazon website).

Our Darkest Night

Our Darkest Night
Author: Jennifer Robson
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062674986

To survive the Holocaust, a young Jewish woman must pose as a Christian farmer’s wife in this unforgettable novel from USA Today bestselling author Jennifer Robson—a story of terror, hope, love, and sacrifice, inspired by true events, that vividly evokes the most perilous days of World War II. It is the autumn of 1943, and life is becoming increasingly perilous for Italian Jews like the Mazin family. With Nazi Germany now occupying most of her beloved homeland, and the threat of imprisonment and deportation growing ever more certain, Antonina Mazin has but one hope to survive—to leave Venice and her beloved parents and hide in the countryside with a man she has only just met. Nico Gerardi was studying for the priesthood until circumstances forced him to leave the seminary to run his family’s farm. A moral and just man, he could not stand by when the fascists and Nazis began taking innocent lives. Rather than risk a perilous escape across the mountains, Nina will pose as his new bride. And to keep her safe and protect secrets of his own, Nico and Nina must convince prying eyes they are happily married and in love. But farm life is not easy for a cultured city girl who dreams of becoming a doctor like her father, and Nico’s provincial neighbors are wary of this soft and educated woman they do not know. Even worse, their distrust is shared by a local Nazi official with a vendetta against Nico. The more he learns of Nina, the more his suspicions grow—and with them his determination to exact revenge. As Nina and Nico come to know each other, their feelings deepen, transforming their relationship into much more than a charade. Yet both fear that every passing day brings them closer to being torn apart . . .

World War II Partisan Warfare in Italy

World War II Partisan Warfare in Italy
Author: Pier Paolo Battistelli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472808940

When Italy surrendered in 1943, it sparked a resistance movement of anti-German, anti-fascist partisans. This book explores the tactics, organizational structure and equipment of the brave Italian resistance fighters. Beginning with low-level sabotage and assassinations, the groups continued to grow until spring 1944 when a remarkable, unified partisan command structure was created. Working in close co-ordination with the Allies, they received British SOE and American OSS liaison teams as well as supplies of weapons. The German response was ferocious, and in autumn 1944, as the Allied advance stalled, the SS and Italian RSI looked to eradicate the partisans once and for all. But when the Allies made their final breakthrough in the last weeks of the war the partisans rose again to exact their revenge on the retreating Wehrmacht. From an expert on Italian military history in World War II, this work provides a comprehensive guide to the men and women who fought a desperate struggle against occupation, as well as the German and Italian fascist security forces unleashed against them.

The Fall of Mussolini

The Fall of Mussolini
Author: Philip Morgan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2008-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191578754

The dramatic story of Mussolini's fall from power in July 1943, illuminating both the causes and the consequences of this momentous event. Morgan shows how Italians of all classes coped with the extraordinary pressures of wartime living, both on the military and home fronts, and how their experience of the country at war eventually distanced them from the dictator and his fascist regime. Looking beyond Mussolini's initial fall from power, Morgan examines how the Italian people responded to the invasion, occupation, and division of their country by Nazi German and Anglo-American forces - and how crucial the experience of this period was in shaping Italy's post-war sense of nationhood and transition to democracy.

Mussolini's War

Mussolini's War
Author: John Gooch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 164313549X

A remarkable new history evoking the centrality of Italy to World War II, outlining the brief rise and triumph of the Fascists, followed by the disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign. While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. At that moment, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies in the hope of making territorial gains in southern France and Africa. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties, and an Allied invasion in 1943 that ushered in a terrible new era for the country. John Gooch's new history is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight. Everywhere—whether in the USSR, the Western Desert, or the Balkans—Italian troops found themselves against either better-equipped or more motivated enemies. The result was a war entirely at odds with the dreams of pre-war Italian planners—a series of desperate improvisations against an allied force who could draw on global resources, and against whom Italy proved helpless.

Fascism's European Empire

Fascism's European Empire
Author: Davide Rodogno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2006-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521845157

This 2006 book is a controversial reappraisal of the Italian occupation of the Mediterranean during the Second World War, which Davide Rodogno examines within the framework of fascist imperial ambitions. He focuses on the European territories annexed and occupied by Italy between 1940 and 1943: metropolitan France, Corsica, Slovenia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Western Macedonia, and mainland and insular Greece. He explores Italy's plans for Mediterranean expansion, its relationship with Germany, economic exploitation, the forced 'Italianisation' of the annexed territories, collaboration, repression, and Italian policies towards refugees and Jews. He also compares Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany through their dreams of imperial conquest, the role of racism and anti-Semitism, and the 'fascistization' of the Italian Army. Based on previously unpublished sources, this is a groundbreaking contribution to genocide, resistance, war crimes and occupation studies as well as to the history of the Second World War more generally.

A House in the Mountains

A House in the Mountains
Author: Caroline Moorehead
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062686380

"Dramatic, heartbreaking and sweeping in scope." —Wall Street Journal The acclaimed author of A Train in Winter returns with the "moving finale" (The Economist) of her Resistance Quartet—the powerful and inspiring true story of the women of the partisan resistance who fought against Italy’s fascist regime during World War II. In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese women—Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca—living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women—like this brave quartet—who swelled its ranks. The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolini’s two decades of Fascist rule—with its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitism—was unrelentingly violent and brutal. Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.