The “soft underbelly” is a reference to what Winston Churchill described Italy as during WW2, when the Allies were choosing from where to invade Nazi-occupied Europe in 1943. What he was clearly seeking was the Achilles Heel; a kink in the armour of the Axis Powers, where they would have weaker defences. The success of this strategy in WW2 meant that Italy was disabled and Germany weakened by the time the Allies invaded France in 1944. The rest is history.
Embraer too has new battlefronts opening up. We have already delivered 1,400 E-Jets, which in itself is a significant milestone. Not only because we have been delivering on average some 100 a year since EIS in 2004, but also since 1,400 is approximately the number of A319s produced by Airbus. In fact, it was Airbus’s 2nd most widely produced narrowbody until overtaken by the A321 in 2016, despite the latter entering service over two years earlier.
Why is Italy called the soft underbelly of Europe?
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Italy-called-the-soft-underbelly-of-Europe?
The soft underbelly is an anatomical metaphor for Italy which the British used to promote their strategic vision in WWII. The soft underbelly is the vulnerable part of the abdomen of an otherwise shelled animal (or maybe the vulnerable groin of an otherwise armoured knight. I’m not sure); in the context of WWII the meaning was that the easiest way to liberate France and defeat Germany was by invading Italy from the Mediterranean (a sea over which at that point the Allies had supremacy, after expelling Axis forces from Northern Africa and through the Naval bases in Malta).
Why the soft underbelly? First of all, the southernmost part of Italy (Sicily) was close to Northern Africa and Malta, almost as close as England and Normandy (but with better weather, at least in the summer). Second of all, Italian army was poorly trained and equipped in comparison to German troops patrolling Northern France, and the following of Mussolini by the Italian society was (rightly) considered less fanatical at that point. Third of all, with more than 7000 kilometres of coast to defend, there was no way that an amphibious assault could be rejected by land without knowing in advance the site of the invasion.
All these considerations were true (the Fascist Regime melted like butter under the sun after the invasion, and the landing was techincally successful) but the Italian campaign was a strategic failure. I’m not a military historian (nor any kind of historian), but I think that these two elements played against Allied success:
- Axis forces used Italian geography (the peninsula is run by the Appeninin mountains) to slow down Allied advance
- When the Italian Kingdom, after deposing Mussolini, signed an armistice with the Allies, the King and the new Head of Government (the infamous Badoglio) left Italian troops at the mercy of Germans stationed in Italy; Northern Italy was seized by the Nazis and put under the control of a fascist puppet states, where Italian recruits and volunteers acted as political police, fighting against anti-fascist partisans (and rounding up Jews for deportation), and German troops firmly defendend southern borders
If you have heard the expression ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’ in a contemporary context, it was probably referred to the fraility of Italian debt, banking and economic fundamentals situation. The loaning of this metaphor implies that the fall of Italian economy (one of the biggest of EU and euro zone) could have way more catastrophical consequences than the crisis of Greece.
This is a name created by the British during WW2, because they believed that invading Italy and use it to advance to Germany would have been easy.
They were wrong: the Italian campaign was one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war, with the Axis using the Italian mountains as effective defensives positions, and the Allied generals creating a great show of incompetence (like Montecassino). The fact that the last German and Italian units surrendered after the battle of Berlin already started proves that the Italian campaign was the greatest Allied strategic failure of the war.
