![]() On July 24, 1943, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was deposed and arrested. Jarred by the Allied invasion, the Italian fascist regime fell rapidly into disrepute, as the Allies had hoped. On July 10, 1943, Operation Husky, the code name for the invasion of Sicily, began with airborne and amphibious landings on the island’s southern shores. Churchill argued that as long as the Allies maintained the initiative, these troops could battle their way up the Italian peninsula relatively quickly and benefit the Normandy operation in the process. But Italy lay just across the Mediterranean from the North African theater where plentiful Allied forces could be redeployed. ![]() Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) had long been clamoring for the other Allies to relieve his armies fighting Germany in the east by undertaking an Allied invasion from the west, and American commanders were reluctant to divert any resources away from Normandy. ![]() ![]() The decision to attack Italy was not made without debate. In Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, Allied leaders decided to use their massive military resources in the Mediterranean to launch an invasion of Italy, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) called the “soft underbelly of Europe.” The objectives were to remove Italy from World War II, secure the Mediterranean Sea and force Germany to divert some divisions from the Russian front and other German divisions from northern France, where the Allies were planning their cross-Channel landing at Normandy, France.ĭid you know? Among the British and American Allied troops fighting in the Italian Campaign were Algerians, Indians, French, Moroccans, Poles, Canadians, New Zealanders, African Americans and Japanese Americans. ![]()
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