Military history of Italy during World War II | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 2018-11-28

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Military history of Italy during World War II

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SUMMARY
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The participation of Italy in the Second World War was characterized by a complex framework of ideology, politics, and diplomacy, while its military actions were often heavily influenced by external factors. Italy joined the war as one of the  Axis Powers in 1940, as the French surrendered, with a plan to concentrate Italian forces  on a major offensive against the British Empire in Africa and the Middle East, while hoping for the collapse of the UK in the European theatre. The Italians bombed Mandatory Palestine, invaded Egypt and occupied British Somaliland with initial success. However, German and Japanese actions in 1941 led to the entry of the US and the USSR in the War, thus ruining the Italian plan and postponing indefinitely the objective of forcing Britain to agree to a negotiated peace settlement.The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was aware that Italy (whose resources were reduced by pre-WWII military interventions, albeit successful, in Spain, Ethiopia and Albania) was not ready for a long conflict against three superpowers  but opted to remain in the war as the imperial ambitions of the Fascist regime, which aspired to restore the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean (the Mare Nostrum), were partially met by late 1942. By this point Italian influence extended throughout the Mediterranean. Libya had been pacified under the fascists and was undergoing Italian settlement. A friendly Fascist regime had been installed in Spain, and a puppet regime installed in Croatia following the German-Italian Invasion of Yugoslavia. Albania, Ljubljana, coastal Dalmatia, and Montenegro had been directly annexed into the Italian state. Most of Greece had been occupied by Italy following the Greco-Italian War and Battle of Greece, as had the French territories of Corsica and Tunisia following Vichy France's collapse and Case Anton. Finally, Italo-German forces had achieved large victories against insurgents in Yugoslavia and had occupied parts of British-held Egypt on their push to El-Alamein after their victory at Gazala. 
However Italy's conquests were always heavily contested, both by various insurgencies (most prominently the Greek resistance and Yugoslav partisans) and Allied military forces, which waged the Battle of the Mediterranean throughout and beyond Italy's participation. Ultimately the Italian empire collapsed after disastrous defeats in the Eastern European and North African campaigns. In July 1943, following the Allied invasion of Sicily, Benito Mussolini was arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III, provoking a civil war. Italy's military outside of the peninsula itself collapsed, its occupied and annexed territories falling under German control. Italy surrendered to the Allies at the end of the Italian Campaign. 
The northern half of the country was occupied by the Germans with the fascists' help and made a collaborationist puppet state (with more than 500,000 soldiers raised for the Axis), while the south was governed by monarchist and liberal forces, which fought for the Allied cause as the Italian Co-Belligerent Army (at its height numbering more than 50,000 men), helped by circa 350,000 partisans (mostly former Royal Italian Army soldiers) of disparate political ideologies that operated all over Italy. On 28 April 1945, Benito Mussolini was executed by communist partisans, two days before Adolf Hitler's suicide.