(April 9, 2021) This week, 80 years ago, five Axis armies, from three countries, attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
On Oct. 28, 1940, the German dictator arrived in Florence, Italy on his personal train, the Amerika. As he alighted from the Amerika, the Italian Duce bounded forward and gleefully exclaimed, in German, âFührer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albania frontier at dawn today!â
Twice the Italians had been specifically warned by their German allies not to undertake such an adventure. Hitler knew that this adventure would probably end badly.
He could not allow his Italian ally to go down to defeat to the Greeks, because, 1) it made for poor publicity and 2) it put the Romanian oil fields of PloieÅti within range of British bombers based in Greece. Now, that bill was coming due. But the Germans needed a land route to Greece.
World War II History: How the Soviets Failed at Operation Gallop
The combination of Soviet ambition and von Manstein’s brilliant handling of the battle culminated in a bloody defeat for the Red Army. The stage was now set for one of von Manstein’s greatest accomplishments the recapture of Kharkov which would take place in mid-March.
As Adolf Hitler’s vaunted Sixth Army lay in its death throes in the ruins of Stalingrad, German forces to the west of the city faced their own kind of hell. The inner ring of the Russians’ iron grip at Stalingrad was tasked with the total destruction of German and other Axis troops within the city, but Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted more. In conjunction with the Soviet High Command (STAVKA), Stalin set forth an ambitious plan designed to liberate the Don Basin from Kursk in the north to the Sea of Azov in the south, bringing the vital agricultural and mineral-rich area once more under Russian control.