Benito Mussolini

Nick “Cooky” Kukich: Covert Operative in Albania

On the morning of April 7, 1939, Albania, the smallest of the Balkan countries, was invaded by Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Army. Read more

Benito Mussolini

RMS Queen Mary’s War Service: Voyages to Victory

The late summer of 1939 saw Great Britain teetering on the brink of war with Hitler’s Germany. The years of appeasement and vacillation, of meekly acquiescing to Hitler’s insatiable territorial demands, were over at last. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The Fieseler Storch Fi 156

On March 12, 1939, Heroes’ Memorial Day (or Veterans Day) in the Nazi Third Reich, the thousands of onlookers at the giant annual parade in Berlin were treated to an unusual sight as a small monoplane landed on the Unter den Linden between Hermann Göring’s State Opera House and the Neue Wache (New Guardshouse). Read more

Benito Mussolini

German Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Franz Canaris

In most popular spy thrillers, secret agents are tall, handsome, virile, and irresistible to women. Whether their name is Dirk Pitt, Jack Ryan, or James Bond, all are hard-drinking, well-tailored ladies’ men. Read more

Benito Mussolini

“Do You Recognize My Voice?”: The Question That Ended Operation Valkyrie

At 12:40 PM on a hot, sultry July 20, 1944, German Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, 55, was seated on a wicker stool in a conference hut at his principal Eastern Front headquarters at Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, East Prussia, for the mid-day wartime map meeting. Read more

Benito Mussolini

Operation Long Jump: The Nazi Assassination Attempt on the “Big Three”

In German it was called Operation Rösselsprung, which translates to “Long Jump.” Its goal was to kill or kidnap the Allies’ “Big Three” leaders––Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston S. Read more

Benito Mussolini

South Africans in the Breech: Expelling Mussolini From Ethiopia

Boarding a train at the famous station built by the French as a terminus on the line from Djibouti, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Ras Tafari, Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia left his capital Addis Ababa on May 2, 1936. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The Largest Plot to Kill Hitler? – Operation Valkyrie

For Nazi Party Führer (Leader) and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, July 20th, 1944 dawned as a routine working day at his principal wartime military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Fort Wolf) in the East Prussian forest of Rastenburg, some three hundred air miles from Berlin, in what is today Poland. Read more

Benito Mussolini

Axis Powers: The Infamous Tripartite Pact

On the evening of September 26, 1940, American radio announcer and journalist William L. Shirer noted in his later famous Berlin Diary that the next day Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano would arrive there from Rome, adding that most people thought it was for the announcement that Francisco Franco’s Spain was entering the war on the side of the Axis. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The Strange Death Of Air Marshal Italo Balbo

On May 26, 1940, as the armies of Nazi Germany roared across prostrate France and the British Expeditionary Force was in the midst of its evacuation by sea from the European continent, Italian Army Marshal Pietro Badoglio, 69, was in the waiting room of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Read more

Benito Mussolini

How Did Benito Mussolini Die? The Story Behind Il Duce’s Last Moments.

It was shortly before seven o’clock on the rain-drenched morning of April 27, 1945, the day before the death of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Read more

Benito Mussolini

V-E Day: Victory at Last for World War II’s Allies

Within his reinforced concrete bunker, 50 feet below the garden of the New Reichs Chancellery on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, German dictator Adolf Hitler, his soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, and several hundred friends, SS guards, and staff members could feel the concussion and hear the unending drumroll of thousands of Soviet artillery shells reducing the already-battered capital city of the Third Reich to unrecognizable rubble. Read more

Benito Mussolini

WWII Tanks: Italy’s Failed Iterations

Although it suffered, like all combatants, from the costly stalemate and horrendous casualties of trench warfare during World War I, Italy never used tanks during that conflict. Read more

Benito Mussolini

Duel in the Desert: Operation Crusader’s Battle of Bardia

The desert sky lit up like a summer lightning storm on the night of December 31, 1941. The distant thunder of hundreds of guns rolled across the sandy, stony ground. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The Fairey Swordfish Torpedo Bomber

Radar, atomic bombs, jet engines and early cruise missiles were among the numerous technological advances of World War II. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The Nazi Invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler’s First Gamble in the East

By Christopher Miskimon

Historians often compare Adolf Hitler to a gambler. He kept making risky bets that paid off time and again—until they didn’t. Read more

Benito Mussolini

Italian War Criminal Rodolfo Graziani

The town of Affile in Italy’s Lazio region erected a mausoleum to Italian Army Marshal Rodolfo Graziani in August 2012. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The Real English Patient Behind the Ralph Fiennes Film

On the morning of May 15, 1942, a strange motorcade rolled out of Campo Four, located 170 hot, dusty miles south of the Italian base at Jalo oasis in northeast Libya. Read more

Benito Mussolini

Operation Strangle: The First Great Air Interdiction Campaign

Following the spectacular success of the Allied air campaign against Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and against the Serb forces in Kosovo in 1999, the value and efficiency of utilizing air power to shape or forgo the need for a ground battle has been taken for granted by military planners. Read more

Benito Mussolini

The EUR: Mussolini’s New Rome

Visitors to a certain part of Rome today may not even be aware that they are walking in an area that came about because of an architectural vision of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s infamous fascist dictator. Read more