ABSTRACT:The Italo-French armistice of July 1940 brought an end to the brief period of conflict between Italy and France that had taken place after Mussolini's declaration of war in June of the same year. Disappointing Italian military performances left Italy with only a small strip of territory on the Italo-French border to occupy until the expansion of the occupation zone in November 1942. This article will explore urban planning projects in the largest of the Italian-occupied towns, Menton. It will argue that Italian urban planning projects formed a crucial layer of the long-term Italianization of the town and were indicative of wider Italian plans in the event of an Axis victory. It will demonstrate that hitherto underexplored post-war plans reveal not only how Italian planners hoped to reshape the region, but also how planners hoped that these changes would bind territories physically to Italy.
The scuttling of the French fleet in November 1942 brought an abrupt end to a political tug of war which had been ongoing since the Italian occupation of France began in 1940. The seizure of the French fleet had been explicitly forbidden by the Italo–French armistice, which represented the cornerstone of all Italo–French diplomatic transactions. This research note seeks to demonstrate the role played by the French fleet and its use as a political pawn by both sides to change the existing political structures. For France, the overhaul of the Italo–French armistice would offer greater political power and status, whilst for Italy a more encompassing agreement would allow greater exploitation of France both in a political and an economic sense. This research note argues that the status of the French fleet represented a crucial and often overlooked aspect of this struggle.
The subject of air attack is one of the most widely explore aspects of the Second World War, with studies concentrating on the multiple themes of morale, aims, effectiveness, and legality, to name but a handful. Despite this, focus has overwhelmingly fallen upon the Blitz and the Allied bombing of Germany. Baldoli and Knapp have succeeded in shifting attention away from the traditional centres of London and Dresden, and instead explored the relatively ignored and often forgotten subject of Allied air attacks on France and Italy.The authors should be lauded for the multifaceted content of the work, which manages not only to introduce the aims and purpose of the Allied air attack from the outset, but also engages with how populations coped with bombing, and how governments in Rome and Vichy responded. While the work is inevitably comparative to some degree, the authors have designed the chapters in a way that discusses situations in France and Italy simultaneously, rather than through distinct sections, which might have otherwise made the study appear stilted. As a result, events such as preparation for civilian protection from aerial bombardments, and the actions of governments as the war went on, though very different in France and Italy, are discussed from a continually comparative outlook. Also of particular noteworthiness are explorations of the relationship between civilians under aerial attack and their would-be liberators, as well as to what extent aerial attack conditioned relationships between local populations and the resistance. The authors successfully explore the often murky and contradictory ideas that those whom the civilian population supported in the war were those who bombed them on a regular basis.Perhaps one of the most interesting discussions is in the conclusion, where the authors turn to the questions of morality and legality. While arguments on this topic have been debated vis-à-vis Dresden, the question of whether Allied forces may have committed war crimes by bombing European civilians outside Germany has rarely entered Englishspeaking discussions. The question has often found a cold reception in the United States and Britain in particular, where bombing was considered a 'second front' for much of the war. Baldoli and Knapp, using post-war definitions of war crimes and the laws of war, conclude that it is indeed extremely plausible to define the bombing of civilians as a war crime. The successful contrasts made with Vietnam and more recent bombings in Iraq and Libya help reinforce and inform this debate. The conclusion will no doubt provoke discomfort from many both within and outwith academic circles; however, it is an important contribution not only to the study of bombing in Western Europe, but to the evergrowing study of aerial bombing as a historical discipline.
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