Pictured: Fascist politicians (notably Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop) signing the Pact of Steel in Berlin.
Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, pages 157–158:
After a fortnight, Ciano and Ribbentrop signed the treaty in Hitler’s presence on 22 May 1939 in the Reich Chancellery. Mussolini was absent, as another trip to [the Third Reich] within a short time would have further undermined his domestic reputation. In fact, the location of the signing ceremony reinforced the view that [the Third Reich], not [Fascist] Italy, was the senior power.
The name of the alliance, Pact of Steel, displayed the aggressive and supposedly robust foundations of the alliance, which was implicitly unlike the pre‐1914 secretive alliances. (Mussolini had initially preferred the term ‘Pact of Blood’, reflecting his belief in the transformative quality of war.) A propaganda pamphlet issued by the Ministry of Popular Culture insisted that this was an alliance that departed from earlier pacts.
The pamphlet located the history of the pact in 1935–6, when [Berlin] had supported [Rome] in the Ethiopian campaign, and presented it as historically inevitable. Documents, including Hitler’s and Mussolini’s various pro‐Axis declarations, alongside bulletins from the Stefani news agency, were used to illustrate this point. Crucially, the pamphlet reprinted the king’s endorsement of the pact and included his telegrams to Hitler and Ciano in which he had congratulated them on the occasion of the signing of the pact.
This was a strategy to represent the pact as the fulfilment of the desires of the Italian nation as a whole and not just of the Fascists. Hitler and Mussolini were given ample space in the pamphlet. Hitler had emphasised the ‘unbreakable commonality of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany consecrated in a solemn treaty’, while Mussolini, echoing a similar sentiment, had insisted that there was ‘the unbreakable union of our will’. As usual, these declarations remained vague and lofty.123
Other propaganda messages went even further. For example, the Italien‐Beobachter titled a cover story ‘Linked for Life and Death!’, giving the pact an existential meaning. The cover story of Il Popolo d’Italia emphasised the military strength of the Italian Empire and menacingly insisted that ‘against the power of the Axis, there is nothing to do’. Goebbels, still doubtful whether the Italians would honour the treaty, observed Hitler’s joy at having sealed the alliance with [Rome].124
If the style of the propaganda on the pact had emphasised unity, so did the substance of the treaty. The pact prescribed mutual consultation of foreign and military policies. This [might have been] wishful thinking, given the [sometime] mistrust that characterised the relationship between both countries and their leaders, who had failed to consult each other on several previous occasions such as the Anschluss and the invasion of Albania.
At Mussolini’s behest, this clause was superseded by a paragraph which committed both allies go to war if either of the signatories found itself involved in war‐like conditions. This clause went way beyond other defensive military treaties and reflected the aggressive nature of the Axis.125
Through a combination of Mussolini’s boasting and Ciano’s incompetence at the negotiations, [Fascist] Italy had effectively given carte blanche to the Third Reich.126 For Hitler, the pact gave him backing for the planned invasion of Poland. Although Mussolini and Ciano later claimed that they had not known about [Berlin’s] plans for an attack on Poland, Ribbentrop’s briefing notes for his conversation clearly discuss a possibility of war with that country.127 Yet, days after the signing of the pact, Mussolini panicked.
After seventeen years of Fascist rule, Italy was not ready for a modern war, not least because of its lack of equipment and insufficiently trained troops and officers. The Duce thus sent General Ugo Cavallero to [the Third Reich], with a memorandum stipulating that [Fascist] Italy needed peace for at least three years.
The myths of a peace‐minded Duce and a secret clause to the Pact of Steel committing [Fascist] Italy and [the Third Reich] to a period of three or four years of peace became part of the Italian political and diplomatic élites’ wider strategy after 1945 to dissociate Italy from responsibility for the Axis alliance and the Second World War [in Europe].128
(Emphasis added.)
Click here for other events that happened today (May 22).
1896: Hubert Lanz, Axis commanding officer, existed.
1901: Jef François, another Axis commanding officer, stained humanity with his presence.
1933: The First Battle of Hebei ended as Chinese and Imperial representatives commenced negotiations for a truce.
1939: Kurt Frike received the Sudetenland Medal as Myoko, flagship of Vice Admiral Koichi Shiozawa of Japanese Navy 5th Fleet, arrived in Xiamen, China in response to recent British, French, and Yankee troop arrivals in the international zone.
1940: In Northern France, Rommel held his ground at Arras as he mistakenly believed he was facing five division of Allied troops when he was only facing two divisions and two tank battalions. Nevertheless, Guderian advanced toward Calais, Dunkirk, and Boulogne, and Imperial bombers attacked Chongqing.
1941: H. Himmler formed a Norwegian SS organization, modeling it after the German counterpart, and Erich Raeder responded to Berlin’s inquiry regarding a Wehrmacht occupation of the Azores islands as long range bomber bases (although the Reich had no such bombers at that time) as difficult, as the Kriegsmarine was not strong enough to guard the islands should they be taken. Axis submarines U‐111 and U‐103 both sank British vessels, and twenty‐five G3M bombers of Mihoro Kokutai (based in Tainan, Taiwan) with A6M Zero fighters in escort attacked Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China.
1942: In Ukraine, the Reich’s 14th Division and 16th Panzer Division occupied Chepel and Bayrak, while the 3rd Panzer Division and 23rd Panzer Division reached Chervonyi Donets and Krasnaia Gusarovka, closing the gap on the Soviet forces near Izium. That evening, Axis submarine U‐588 sank Yankee freighter Plow City east of New Jersey, and Comandante Cappellini sighted an aircraft in the Atlantic Ocean at 2116 hours; she submerged to avoid detection.
1943: Adolf Schicklgruber, Erhard Milch, Adolf Galland, Willy Messerschmitt and others previewed the Me 262 jet fighter at Lechfeld, München‐Oberbayern. Schicklgruber liked the jet and demanded that it be used as a bomber. As well, the Axis launched an attack toward the region west of Yidu, Hubei Province, and as Axis submarine Wolfpack Mosel of twenty‐one boats continued its attack on North Atlantic Convoy ON‐184, several aircraft flying from USS Bogue executed five different attacks against different submarines and damaged U‐569 so severely that her crew later scuttled her. U‐305 also took substantial damage. Shigeru Fukudome became the chief of staff of the Japanese Navy Combined Fleet and Shokaku joined a large fleet for the Aleutian Islands, but somebody canceled the sortie as the Allies reclaimed Attu.
1944: U‐530 departed Lorient, France for Trinidad. Aboard, she carried a Naxos radar detector to be given to the Eastern Axis when she was to meet with fellow Axis submarine I‐52.
1945: The Axis forever lost its landing ship № 173 in the Ryukyu Islands to Allied firepower, and it also lost SS Lieutenant General Bruno Streckenbach while he was in Latvia. (He would remain a prisoner in the U.S.S.R. until October 1955.)
1946: The Axis lost its police general Karl Hermann Frank to Czechoslovak hangmen.