Target: Italy

The Secret War Against Mussolini 1940–1943

Roderick Bailey

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571299201
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Drawing on long-classified documents, Target: Italy is the official history of the war waged by Britain's Special Operations Executive on Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy. It is the first full account of SOE's clandestine efforts to strike at Italy and sever its alliance with Nazi Germany, uncovering missions as remarkable as a plot to assassinate Mussolini and plans to arm the Mafia.

It is also the first in-depth history of SOE's attempts at causing trouble inside an enemy country as opposed to an enemy-occupied one, issuing a sobering reminder of the terrible dangers that foreign agencies can encounter when trying to encourage resistance to powerful authoritarian regimes.

This is a compelling tale of desperate daring and sacrifice, climaxing in one of the most extraordinary episodes of the war: the delicate and dramatic dealings between the Allies and the Italians that led to Italy's surrender in 1943.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Map
• Prologue
• 1: ‘Useless wishful thinking’
• 2: ‘Pottering about’
• 3: ‘Garibaldi’s curse’
• 4: ‘Desperados’ and ‘Thugs’
• 5: ‘A mass of difficulties’
• 6: ‘More or less a suicide job’
• 7: ‘Rather a scatterbrained project’
• 8: ‘An ideal subversive organisation’
• 9: ‘Things seem to be going according to plan …’
• 10: ‘As much alarm as possible’
• 11: ‘The Explosive Topo Lads’
• 12: ‘Big and serious stuff’
• 13: ‘The man who fell from the sky’
• 14: ‘Inglese Ignoto’
• 15: ‘Foreign agent’
• Acknowledgements
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright