The Second World War

signature in November 1936 of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan

On 17 April, the Yugoslavs surrendered

Hitler urged the Belgrade government to join the Tripartite Pact, and on 4 March he and Ribbentrop put heavy pressure on Prince Paul.
The Yugoslav government delayed, well aware of growing opposition within the country, but the demands from Berlin became too insistent. Finally, Prince Paul and representatives of the government signed the pact on 25 March in Vienna. Two days later, Serbian officers seized power in Belgrade. Prince Paul was removed as regent and the young King Peter II placed on the throne

Formations of the Twelfth Army under Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List moved through Hungary into Romania. Both countries had anti-Communist regimes and had become Axis allies as a result of energetic diplomacy. Bulgaria also had to be won over so that German forces could cross its territory. Stalin watched these developments with deep suspicion. He was not convinced by the Germans’ assurances that their presence was aimed only against the British, but he could do little.

By the time of Hitler’s invasion of Greece the following April, the Italians had lost nearly 40,000 dead, and 114,000 casualties from wounds, sickness and frostbite. Italian claims to great-power status had been utterly destroyed. Any idea of a ‘parallel war’ was at an end. Mussolini was no longer Hitler’s ally, but his subordinate.

Pétain greeted Hitler as though they were equals, which did not endear him to the Führer.

prompting Hitler to say later that he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled than go through another conversation with the Spanish dictator.

Hitler greatly overestimated Italy’s fighting strength. Mussolini had famously boasted of ‘eight million bayonets’ when he had fewer than 1.7 million soldiers, and many of them lacked the rifles on which to place a bayonet. The country was desperately short of money, raw materials and motor transport. To increase the number of divisions, Mussolini reduced them from three regiments to two. Out of seventy-three divisions, only nineteen were fully equipped. In fact Italy’s forces were smaller and less well armed than they had been on entering the First World War in 1915.

On 27 September 1940, Germany signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan

Inevitably some cracked under the strain