Paolo Crippa

Italian armored units in the Balkans 1941-1945 Paolo Crippa

The Kingdom of Italy had already possessed the Dodecanese Islands since 1912 and it had the protectorate over Albania since 1926 and, with these assumptions, after the occupation of the Kingdom of Albania in 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War the following year, Mussolini concentrated his efforts against Greece, starting in October 1940 a disastrous military campaign, which forced the German Reich to a massive intervention in support of the Italian Armed Forces in the Balkans. The Italian military weakness thus transformed what could be considered for Italy a "parallel" war to secure control of Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia, in a war subordinate to Germany.

This volume analyzes the history of the armored units engaged in the Balkans by the Royal Army and, after 8 September 1943, by the units of the Italian Social Republic, by the German, Croatian, Slovenian and partisan units, which after the Armistice recovered a large part of the abandoned armored vehicles of Italian Army.