~.《》~ Chapter 617 Mussolini

"Gentlemen, please pay attention to the telegram I just received. This morning, a coup occurred in Rome. Mussolini, the head of Italian fascist, has been under house arrest. The new Italian government announced a unilateral armistice and invited allies to immediately send armed forces to Italy. The Italian naval fleet will provide maritime alert missions for this operation."

Before the translator of various countries translated the contents of the telegram to everyone present, President Truman had already stood up and informed all the heads of allies in English with a loud voice.

Soon, the news was translated into various languages, and the scene immediately became noisy. The heads of various countries were very happy, and Churchill was the same. However, unlike others, he had begun to plan the next step of action at this moment.

When the war reached this point, a small character like Italy could no longer hold on. Not to mention Italy, even the German Empire, which once dominated Europe, was almost out of reach.

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This is a continuous mountain range, which is the Apennines that runs across Italy. The highest peak of the entire Apennines is called "Great Sasso Mountain", located 160 kilometers northeast of Rome.

A hotel called "Campo Impaleta" is built on the hillside of the Greater Sasso Mountain, at an altitude of more than 2,000 meters. Next to it is a winter ski slope.

During peacetime, every tourist season, the hotel is always full, but now it is a war period. In addition, it is not the ski season yet, there are no tourists in the hotel, and there are not even staff in the hotel itself.

But this does not mean that there is no one in the Inparetta Hotel now. On the contrary, there are many people in the hotel, all of them are soldiers and Italian soldiers. Their main task is to "protect" an important figure, and this "important figure" is Mussolini, the leader of the Italian fascist movement.

It is said to be "protection", but it is actually surveillance and control. The Inpaletta Hotel is now a high-level prison for house arrest by Mussolini, and those Italian soldiers are the prison guards.

Now Mussolini is standing in front of the window of one of the luxurious rooms in the Inpaletta Hotel and looking at the steep hillside. Although there is no expression on his face, his mood is hard to describe at this moment.

If you have to find a word to describe Mussolini's current mood, perhaps the most appropriate word is "anger", and the one that causes anger is "betrayal".

Not only did the Italian king Emmanuel III betray Mussolini, but also a large group of people, from Marshal Bardogrio to most members of the Fascist committee, and even Mussolini's son-in-law Earl Ziano...

It turns out that Mussolini can no longer gain the trust and support of most Italians, and the root cause of all this seems to be continuous military failures.

From the southern Russian grassland to the North African desert, all the battlefields that the Italian army entered were defeated frequently, which caused most Italian citizens to completely lose their confidence in victory, and a defeatist sentiment spread among the Italians.

In the eyes of the betrayers, perhaps Italy should not have been involved in this "German War". Although Italy was doing well with Germany in the early stages of the war, and its domestic economy also became prosperous due to victory.

But at that time, how many people could guess that when the war entered a stalemate, the United States suddenly joined the war?

If the United States does not participate in the war, then fascist Italy will likely follow Nazi Germany to win the victory of the war and share some of the fruits of victory.

But history has no assumptions, and the cruelty of reality lies in the fact that the relationship between countries is not transferred by the feelings or private friendship between heads of state.

The fundamental reason for determining the relationship between countries is national strategy. When the US government realized that Germany and Italy were about to achieve the victory they wanted, this world war without Asia had finally evolved into a real global war.

When North America joined the war that had reached a deadlock with a whole force, the balance of the war quickly tilted towards the allies, it was no surprise that the Axis powers had successively defeated.

The terrifying industrial capacity, superior geographical location, rich natural resources, and large population make this country almost impossible to defeat.

In fact, this is the case in the region. The only one who defeated Americans on the battlefield is the Chinese because they have a larger population base, natural resources, and the sudden rise of technological power.

Italy's military power is far inferior to Germany. With Germany's continuous defeat, how big can Italy's military machines do?

Therefore, defeat is inevitable. At least in the eyes of those betrayers, if Italy cannot take the initiative to truce and seek peace with the Allies as soon as possible, then it will be more than just ordinary aviation bombs that come to Italy.

China dares to throw atomic bombs at Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Why does the United States, which also has nuclear weapons, dare not throw atomic bombs at Rome, the capital of Italy?

It was also in the face of the domineering nuclear blackmail of the United States that many senior Italian government officials and military generals were timid. After careful consideration, they were surprised to find that if Italy was to avoid becoming the second country in the world to eat atomic bombs, the easiest way was to let Mussolini get out.

Because it is this Mussolini leader who has been claiming that Germany is studying secret weapons. Once Germany's secret weapons are successfully researched, the situation of the war will immediately change. Then, Italy can restore the glory of the ancient Roman Empire and turn the Mediterranean into the Italian inner lake again, so the Italian people will not have to worry about the Allied atomic bombing.

Although Mussolini has always insisted that Germany will soon have new weapons, others don't think so, they insist.

If there is no stop to fight, Italy will be hit by nuclear strikes from allies, and that kind of nuclear strike will completely destroy Italy. The fear of the atomic bomb is the background of the "Roman coup", and the direct inducement is Mussolini's tyranny.

It was Mussolini's will that triggered the "Roman coup". A group of people who betrayed the leader instigated this bloodless coup, and took Mussolini out of the political center in the name of "protection", and placed him under house arrest in several secret locations, and finally brought Mussolini to the Inparetta Hotel.

The specific coup process is actually not important. The bloodless coup was dull. The coupers cleverly used the war-weariness of the Italian people and deliberately exaggerated the power of the atomic bomb, thus ensuring the rapid resignation of Mussolini.

To Mussolini's expectations, since the coup, the Italian people did not express any nostalgia for the leader. Almost overnight, the Italians forgot Mussolini's existence and began to look forward to the negotiations between the new Italian government and the allies.

The Italians hope not to appear on the post-war international political stage as a "defeated country". At the same time, they also hope to continue to retain the territories that were "recovered" during the war.

The Italian people's desire for peace is understandable. Since the German and Italian troops were defeated and retreated to Algeria, Allied bombers began to use airports along the coast of North Africa as advance bases, crossing the Mediterranean under the escort of fighter jets, bombing Italian cities and transportation hubs indiscriminately.

Participating in this strategic air strike was not only the US strategic bombers, but also the Royal Air Force long-range bombers. These bombers used high-explosive bombs and incendiary bombs to turn Italian cities into ruins and destroy the Italian people's confidence in victory.

Since the beginning of the strategic bombing, the prices of food in Rome have tripled, which directly led to riots among the residents of Rome. As it turns out, when the citizens began to worry about whether their next meal of bread would still be available, anyone who continued to clamor for war would be abandoned by the citizens, even if he had led the citizens to brilliant victories.

The people were always forgetful, and Mussolini hated the conspirators who used these nationals who were indistinguishable from right and wrong. He cursed the Italian king and all the betrayers of the Italian fascist cause.

In fact, Germany is similar. Many people do not understand why Germany, which originally had considerable war potential and industrial capacity, gradually fell at a disadvantage after the United States joined the war.

This involves the three most important tactical theories of World War II: armored clusters, aircraft carrier formations and long-range strategic bombing.

Although Germany's tank and armored groups have powerful tactics, they are far behind the Americans in the two fields of aircraft carriers and strategic bombers.

The US fighter fleet could unscrupulously bomb German territory and its affiliated occupied areas, destroying a large number of German factories, and production was severely restricted.

Speaking of strategic bombing, Britain dispatched 687,000 bombers and 1.695,000 fighter jets in five years from 1940 to 1945, losing more than 11,900 bombers and more than 10,000 fighter jets, killing 79,000 pilots, and leaving 1.3 million tons of bombs, killing 360,000 to 370,000 people.

This even includes the Americans' achievements. The strategic bombing offensive launched by the Allies against Germany, which originally had great hope, but the effect was extremely small at first, which shows that confidence greatly exceeded common sense.

The continuous increase in the sense of reality is reflected in the sudden change from daytime bombing to nighttime bombing, and then the policy of regional bombing was adopted - from many aspects, this policy has become a problem.

Before 1942, for Germany, bombing only caused some trouble and did not cause any danger. This might stimulate the fighting spirit of the British people, although even this is questionable.

In 1943, thanks to the increasing aid of the United States, the bombers of the two allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, caused even greater damage to Germany. However, in fact, it did not have much impact on Germany's production or the fighting spirit of the German people.

It was not until the spring of 1944 that a truly decisive change occurred, mainly because the Americans used long-range fighters to escort bombers.

The actual situation is that the strategic bombing implemented by the UK 44 years ago can only use night bombing due to the lack of escort methods. Because the accuracy of night bombing is too low, it can only choose city-scale targets for bombing.

During this period, the British bombing was entirely a "terrorist bombing" targeting civilian facilities.

After the United States joined the war in 1942, the 8th Air Force of the United States has insisted on daytime bombing with fighter escort, while the target of strategic bombing is military and economic goals, such as factories and military-industrial enterprises.

Instead of learning from the British civilian goals, the bombing philosophy of the 8th Air Force is different from that of the British. It insists that bombing should target economic and military goals rather than blindly blowing up.

Moreover, the Eighth Air Force did not have night bombing equipment and related training, so it did not adopt night bombing. During this period, the Americans also tried several long-range day bombings on Germany, but due to the lack of long-range escort aircraft, the loss was huge, and this problem was not solved until the Mustangs were put into service.

After Italy was occupied by the Allied forces, the 16th Air Force also joined the bombing of the German-occupied area with Italy as its base.

After 44 years, due to the change of air supremacy and the improvement of German night combat equipment and the improvement of methods, Britain also began day bombing. The center of gravity of its strategic bombing targets was mainly focused on bombing military facilities, transportation roads and railway hub equipment in France, Belgium and other places in the spring and summer of 44.

In order to support the Normandy landing, after the landing was completed, the Allies continued to turn to air strikes on factories and facilities in Germany. During this period, both British and American air strikes tended to be consistent.

In this space and time, the Normandy Landing Plan is already under preparation. After all, the strategic choice will not change due to the slightest passage of time.

After providing great support to the "Overlord Operations Plan", the Allied bombers turned to the German factory and achieved greater success.

In recent months of war, the success of Allied bombers has mostly relied on new developments in navigation equipment and bombing technology and the weakening of Germany's air confrontational power.

In 1944 alone, the Allies threw more than one million tons of bombs on Germany's mainland. During the entire war, Britain and the United States consumed 2.77 million tons of bombs in the German-occupied area!

What is this concept?

The total number of ** produced in Germany in 1944 was only about 400,000 tons! This also includes the part used to produce other gunpowder weapons such as bullets!

Germany only has 5 million tons of fuel production a year, which depends on the face of the Allies. If they are unhappy to blow up German refineries, then some of the 5 million tons will be reduced.

Germany's national strength was not enough to support a strategic air force at that time. When Germany entered World War II, only a few thousand aircraft were available. Even if it later occupied most of Europe, this situation did not improve much.

The huge disadvantage in the air force caused Germany to almost lose air supremacy, and replaced by the Allied forces' continuous bombing of Germany's mainland, especially the Ruhr area. This alone made people desperate.

Italy, which is weaker than Germany, has less say in the air force, and is simply a sandbag that gets beaten.

It has been four days since he was taken to the Inpaletta Hotel. Mussolini has been waiting for rescue. He believes that not all Italian people will abandon their leaders. The people will always wake up. All this is just a scam.

The atomic bomb is also a scam, which is a psychological war between the allies. Once the people wake up, the fascist movement will re-lead the Italian people. What's more, the German Nazis will not sit idly by and watch their allies be in danger. Mussolini believes that the Head of State Hitler will definitely send troops to rescue him and will definitely eliminate those betrayers.

Standing in front of the window of the hotel room and looking at the valley and peaks, Mussolini stood for an hour, and then he saw some small black dots appear in the sky, getting closer and closer, and soon he could see the outline clearly, which was some transport planes.

Listening to the roar of the sports machine, Mussolini finally smiled. He knew that the rescue he had been waiting for had arrived.

Soon, the transport planes passed through the valley near the Inpaleta Hotel, and before flying over, the transport planes had already sprinkled many parachutes in the sky, that is, paratroopers, who would land on the valley and hillside near the hotel, and then reach the hotel through a cable car connecting the valley and the hotel.

Mussolini has even begun to plan routes for escape. It is impossible to go to southern Italy, but can only go to the northern region. Not only is it very close to Germany, but there are also many German army troops stationed there.

Relying on those German troops, Mussolini could not only ensure his safety, but also command troops loyal to him, and staged a good show of "marching into Rome". He was fully confident that he would lead Italy to a true revival again.

Of course, there must be a prerequisite, that is, Mussolini can survive until the rescue troops find him, because it is hard to say that the coup group will not be in a hurry and execute Mussolini before the rescue troops arrive.

So, after seeing the transport planes, Mussolini immediately began to look for a hiding place. The door of the guest room was locked from the outside. There was almost no other furniture in the room except the bed and table. Where could Mussolini hide?

After searching it, Mussolini found nothing. He could only sit by the bed with a backrest chair in his hand. As long as the situation was wrong, he would smash the chair at the guards and soldiers who broke into the guest room.

However, beyond Mussolini's expectations, the door of the room was locked, and no soldiers or officers rushed in and shouted at him. In fact, the outside of the hotel was terriblely quiet. Since the transport plane flew away, it was as quiet as if no one was present.

Finally, Mussolini heard the sound of the cable car moving. He walked back to the window curiously and looked towards the ski slope. After a few minutes, he saw the cable car's car arrived at the hotel cable car station.

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~.《》~

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