Video: 'Britain Votes to Leave - WW2 - 042 - June 15 1940' (June 10, 1940, at 0:50)

(Monday, June 10, 1940, 6:00 p.m. Central European Time; during the Italian Invasion of France, part of the Battle of France, part of the Western Front of the World War II) — With the fall of France imminent, Premier Benito Mussolini appeared tonight on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to announce that in six hours, Italy would be in a state of war with France and Britain.

After a speech explaining his motives for the decision, he concluded: “People of Italy: take up your weapons and show your tenacity, your courage and your valor.”

Video: 'The World at War: The Desert: North Africa - 1940-1943 (8 of 26)' (June 10, 1940, at 1:45)

Convinced that the war would soon be over, with a German victory looking likely at that point, Mussolini had decided to enter the war on the Axis side.

Mussolini regarded the war against Britain and France as a life-or-death struggle between opposing ideologies—fascism and the “plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west”—describing the war as “the struggle of the fertile and young people against the sterile people moving to the sunset; it is the struggle between two centuries and two ideas”, and as a “logical development of our Revolution.”

Video: 'World War II - Blitzkrieg to the Bomb Documentary' (June 10, 1940, at 16:33)

Italy joined the Germans in the Battle of France, fighting the fortified Alpine Line at the border.

Meanwhile, in Africa, Mussolini’s Italian East Africa forces attacked the British in their Sudan, Kenya and British Somaliland colonies, in what would become known as the East African Campaign.