Author: Filippo Focardi Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526157128 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
In the Axis War on the side of Germany, Mussolini's Italy was responsible for serious war crimes, especially in Yugoslavia and Greece. This 'dark side' of the fascist war, however, is not present in the national memory built after 1945. To distinguish Italy from the former German ally and avoid a punitive peace, the monarchist and anti-fascist ruling classes elaborated a master narrative that highlighted the opposition of the Italian people to Mussolini's war and the humanitarian behavior of Italian soldiers, depicted as saviors of Jews. All responsibility for the crimes committed in the Axis war was placed on the shoulders of the Germans, who thus became a convenient alibi for the national conscience.
Author: MacGregor Knox Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781139432030 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
Fascist Italy's ultimate defeat was foreordained. It was a pygmy among giants, and Hitler's failure to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941 doomed all three Axis powers. But Italy's defeat was unique; the only asset that it conquered - briefly - with its own unaided forces in the entire Second World War was a dusty and useless corner of Africa, British Somaliland. And Italy's forces dissolved in 1943 almost without resistance, in stark contrast to the grim fight to the last cartridge of Hitler's army or the fanatical faithfulness unto death of the troops of Imperial Japan. This book tries to understand why the Italian armed forces and Fascist regime were so remarkably ineffective at an activity - war - central to their existence. It approaches the issue above all from the perspective of military culture, through analysis of the services' failure to imagine modern warfare and through a topical structure that offers a social-cultural, political, military-economic, strategic, operational, and tactical cross-section of the war effort.
Author: Mark Sullivan Publisher: Lake Union Publishing ISBN: 9781503902374 Category : Germany Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
A teenage boy in 1940s Italy becomes part of an underground railroad that helps Jews escape through the Alps, but when he is recruited to be the personal driver for a powerful Third Reich commander, he begins to spy for the Allies.
Author: John Gooch Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 164313549X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
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.
Author: Hans Von Luck Publisher: Dell ISBN: 0804151970 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
A stunning look at World War II from the other side... From the turret of a German tank, Colonel Hans von Luck commanded Rommel's 7th and then 21st Panzer Division. El Alamein, Kasserine Pass, Poland, Belgium, Normandy on D-Day, the disastrous Russian front--von Luck fought there with some of the best soldiers in the world. German soldiers. Awarded the German Cross in Gold and the Knight's Cross, von Luck writes as an officer and a gentleman. Told with the vivid detail of an impassioned eyewitness, his rare and moving memoir has become a classic in the literature of World War II, a first-person chronicle of the glory--and the inevitable tragedy--of a superb soldier fighting Hitler's war.
Author: Simon Levis Sullam Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691209200 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
In this revisionist history of Italy's role in the Holocaust, the author presents an account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy's Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini's collaborationist republic was under German occupation
Author: Jörg Echternkamp Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1845459881 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 311
Book Description
Modern military history, inspired by social and cultural historical approaches, increasingly puts the national histories of the Second World War to the test. New questions and methods are focusing on aspects of war and violence that have long been neglected. What shaped people’s experiences and memories? What differences and what similarities existed in Eastern and Western Europe? How did the political framework influence the individual and the collective interpretations of the war? Finally, what are the benefits of Europeanizing the history of the Second World War? Experts from Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, and Russia discuss these and other questions in this comprehensive volume.
Author: Anthony McElligott Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719067334 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
Covering issues such as the legacy of the World Wars, the female voter, propaganda, occupied lands, the judiciary, public opinion and resistance, this volume furthers the debate on how Nazi Germany operated. Gone are the post-war stereotypes--instead there is a more complex picture of the regime and its actions, one that shows the instability of the dictatorship, its dependence on a measure of consent as well as coercion.
Author: Robert M. Citino Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700623434 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
Throughout 1943, the German army, heirs to a military tradition that demanded and perfected relentless offensive operations, succumbed to the realities of its own overreach and the demands of twentieth-century industrialized warfare. In his new study, prizewinning author Robert Citino chronicles this weakening Wehrmacht, now fighting desperately on the defensive but still remarkably dangerous and lethal. Drawing on his impeccable command of German-language sources, Citino offers fresh, vivid, and detailed treatments of key campaigns during this fateful year: the Allied landings in North Africa, General von Manstein's great counterstroke in front of Kharkov, the German attack at Kasserine Pass, the titanic engagement of tanks and men at Kursk, the Soviet counteroffensives at Orel and Belgorod, and the Allied landings in Sicily and Italy. Through these events, he reveals how a military establishment historically configured for violent aggression reacted when the tables were turned; how German commanders viewed their newest enemy, the U.S. Army, after brutal fighting against the British and Soviets; and why, despite their superiority in materiel and manpower, the Allies were unable to turn 1943 into a much more decisive year. Applying the keen operational analysis for which he is so highly regarded, Citino contends that virtually every flawed German decision-to defend Tunis, to attack at Kursk and then call off the offensive, to abandon Sicily, to defend Italy high up the boot and then down much closer to the toe-had strong supporters among the army's officer corps. He looks at all of these engagements from the perspective of each combatant nation and also establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt the synergistic interplay between the fronts. Ultimately, Citino produces a grim portrait of the German officer corps, dispelling the longstanding tendency to blame every bad decision on Hitler. Filled with telling vignettes and sharp portraits and copiously documented, The Wehrmacht Retreats is a dramatic and fast-paced narrative that will engage military historians and general readers alike.
Author: Marcella Simoni Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030986578 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
This volume represents one of the first extensive studies that investigates the persistence of questions of race and racism in Italy from the liberal age to the present, through colonialism, Fascism and post-war Italy. It adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the intertwining of the cultural, social, legislative and political dynamics of discrimination in Italy’s past and present. Drawing upon the expertise of historians, political scientists, sociologists, scholars of literature and experts in cultural studies, the original essays collected in this volume show a remarkable continuity and the persistence of racism in the Italian cultural and political discourse, in society and in the representation of Others. They also speak of the shifting of practices of Othering from one group to another in different historical contexts.
Author: Filippo Focardi
Author: MacGregor Knox
Author: Mark Sullivan
Author: John Gooch
Author: Hans Von Luck
Author: Simon Levis Sullam
Author: Jörg Echternkamp
Author: Anthony McElligott
Author: Robert M. Citino
Author: Marcella Simoni