MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · November 12 · 1940
ON THIS DAY · 12 NOVEMBER 1940
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.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
First, the sideshow that rearranged the calendar. Mussolini’s “parallel war” — the arrows into Egypt and Greece — was supposed to give Italy conquests of its own; instead, by early 1941, the Greeks have thrown the invaders back into Albania, the British have destroyed an Italian army in the desert and — the ✕ at Taranto — crippled three battleships at anchor with twenty-one biplanes flying at night, a raid naval attachés from Tokyo would study torpedo by torpedo. Germany must rescue its ally twice: the Afrika Korps to Libya, and in April 1941 a Balkan campaign that turns Yugoslavia and Greece red on your map in three weeks. Whether the Balkan detour fatally delayed what came next is a genuine historians’ argument — the spring of 1941 was also exceptionally wet, and the panzers waited on the ground as much as on the calendar.
From Chapter 11 — Barbarossa: The Gamble That Ends the Gambles of The Road to War, 1931–1941 (1941).
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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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