It was 75 years ago today that the man who had once ruled Italy with an iron fist was captured as he tried to escape to neutral Switzerland.

Benito Mussolini had been Italy’s fascist leader, known as Il Duce, for more than 20 years. In that time he took his country, effectively a police state, into the Second World War as part of the Axis alliance with Germany and Japan.

It proved to be a disastrous move for Italy and Mussolini. By May of 1943, the Italian’s main army in North Africa had been roundly defeated, and on July 9 that year the Allies invaded Sicily. Italy’s government, the Grand Council of Fascism, voted to oust him and the king, Victor Emmanuel III, and name General Pietro Badoglio as prime minister in Mussolini’s place.

Read more here...

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18406999.looking-back-death-benito-mussolini-75-years-ago-today/