ON THIS DAY ·
Battle of Taranto
11–12 Nov 1940 — Twenty-one biplanes off HMS Illustrious cripple three Italian battleships in harbor with torpedoes in shallow water. Naval attachés from Tokyo study the charts closely.
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The moment in context
Italy’s failed attacks in Greece and North Africa forced Germany to come to the rescue, sending an expeditionary force to the desert and conquering Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941. Historians still debate how far this Balkan campaign delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union, since an unusually wet spring and the sheer scale of logistics also governed the date. Whatever the cause of the delay, the far larger project was already fixed.
From Road to Operation Barbarossa, chapter 11 of The Road to War, 1931–1941 (1941).
The place: Battle of Taranto — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The program had always pointed east. Whatever tactical opportunism governed 1936–40, Lebensraum in the East was the fixed star — in Mein Kampf, in the Hossbach conference (Ch. 5), in…
- The turn — Berlin, 27 September 1940. The chapter’s pivot is not on the battlefield but at the signing table where the ● stands in Berlin: the Tripartite Pact, by which Germany, Italy…
- What it changed — The Holocaust enters its most murderous phase. Behind Barbarossa’s arrows, mass shooting became system: by the end of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police and local auxiliaries had murdered on…
Then ask the room: Could Barbarossa have succeeded — and what turns on the answer? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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