The Mediterranean war lasted from Italy's 1940 leap to 1945
World War II's Mediterranean and Middle East theatre linked land, sea, and air fights for the sea, North Africa, and approaches to Asia from Italy's 10 June 1940 declarations until Axis surrender in Italy on 2 May 1945—the conflict's longest theater.
Mussolini had been building toward it for years. In the late 1920s he argued that Italy needed room for surplus population and sought dominance from the Danube and Balkans to an empire running from Gibraltar to Hormuz. Speaking to the Fascist Grand Council on 30 November 1938, he named Albania, Tunisia, Corsica, Switzerland's Ticino and the French coast east of the Var as targets, calling Italy a prisoner in its own sea. Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, intervened in Spain, seized Albania in two days from 7 April 1939 and joined Germany in the Pact of Steel that May.
Britain read the signs. At the Nyon Conference of 1937 both countries disavowed designs on Mediterranean sovereignty, yet by July of that year London had concluded that Italy was no reliable friend. In June 1939 it set up Middle East Command in Cairo, responsible for a sweep of territory from Greece and Libya to Kenya, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and in October it signed a mutual assistance treaty with France and Turkey.
Once fighting began, the campaigns spilled everywhere. Italy invaded France, bombed Malta and attacked Allied shipping, then stalled in Greece until Germany completed the conquest in April 1941, the same month Axis forces overran Yugoslavia. Axis meddling pulled Palestine, Iraq and Iran into the fighting, and German planners even imagined swinging through the Middle East to strike the Soviet Union from the south.
After the Axis collapse in North Africa, the long Italian campaign pitted the Allies and the royal government in the south against Germany and the Italian Social Republic in the north, ending with the surrender at Caserta. Britain counted around 300,000 killed, wounded or captured and the United States about 130,000, and the Greek Civil War and early Palestine War grew from events in this theatre.
Source: Mediterranean and Middle East theatre of World War II
