The First Formulations of British Strategy and the Role of Italy, “The Weakest Link of the Axis” (1940–41)

Italy entered the war in June 1940 at a time of intense stress for Great Britain, as the defeat at Dunkirk and the fall of France exposed it to a possible German invasion. Over the following months, British strategy was based on mobilizing existing resources, which were inadequate for offensive operations against the Axis powers and barely sufficient for maintaining a defensive position. In this situation, Great Britain attempted to create conditions for weakening the Axis countries, focusing on eroding their will to fight and undermining their morale by various means such as propaganda aimed at showing the inevitability of an Axis loss, air raids on their cities and naval blockades of their coasts. In this first phase, the British also relied on plans developed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British secret service, to “set Europe ablaze,” that is, to foment resistance and opposition movements within German-occupied countries by sending volunteers and weapons that were later to assist British liberating armies. The British placed enormous trust in the destructive effects of aerial bombardments, to the point of imagining the collapse of Germany and Italy, which would have made direct military action unnecessary. This optimistic view was expressed by Churchill in a July 1941 letter to Roosevelt, in which he described future British plans: