Patton's Seventh Army entered Palermo to an enormous celebration by the residents of the ancient city. Two captured Italian generals, in turn, claimed to be happy about the event because "the Sicilians were not human beings but animals" ("i Siciliani non erano esseri umani ma animali").
Seventh Army staff aboard SS Monrovia, en route to Sicily, June/July 1943.
The Italian fascist government had held anti-Sicilian views due to Sicily's long peculiar history.
The island has been inhabited since ancient times and was a destination for Italic and Phoenician colonists as far back as 1200 BC, who displaced the already existing Sicilian population. Greek colonization commenced around 750 BC. In antiquity, it was contested by the Greeks and Carthaginians, both of whom conquered it at different times. The Romans conquered it and displaced the Carthaginians and declared that the island should be latinized, although its culture remained, at the time, Greek. With the fall of the Roman Empire, it fell to invading Germanic tribes, with the Vandals taking Palermo in 440. The Byzantine Empire then retook it, as the Eastern Roman Empire, and ruled it from the 550s to the 960s, during which time the Arabs began to attempt to take it. From the 820s through the 960s, it slowly fell to Muslim invaders.
The Normans arrived starting in 1038, around thirty years prior to their invasion of England, and began to take it from the Arabs. They formed a Norman kingdom that lasted until 1198, becoming part of the typical drama of European kingdoms at the time. The Normans imported European settlers to the island, which went from being 1/3d Greek speaking and 2/3s Arabic speaking to being latinized once again. It went back and forth to varying European households until 1860, when the Italians conquered it. It became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
During the fascist period the island was subject to unwelcome attention in part because Italians have never really regarded Sicilians as Italians, given their multi-ethnic heritage, and part because the strong local character of the island was unwelcome. Also, unwelcome was the fairly strong local Communist Party and the Sicilian Mafia. The fascist nearly crushed the Mafia during their period in power.
A general strike was called in Athens over Bulgarian intentions to annex Macedonia, which resulted in a massive protest in the city over the same thing.
The protests were successful in that they postponed the Bulgarian plans to the point that they were never carried out.
The SS executed all of the remaining 2,500 inmates of the Tarnopol concentration camp.
US infantry during the battle.
The Battle of Munda Point began on New Georgia. The object was the points' airfield, in what would become a hard fought campaign.
The U.S. Navy raided Kiska.
.jpg)
_in_action_during_the_Battle_of_the_Komandorski_Islands_on_26_March_1943_(80-G-73827).jpg)
