Sebastiano Visconti Prasca (23 January 1883-25 February 1961) was the General of the Army Corps of the Royal Italian Army who led the initial offensive of the Greco-Italian War in 1940. In 1943, he joined the Italian Resistance after being fired from command, and he fought in the Battle of Berlin in 1945 on the side of the Soviet Union.
Biography[]
Sebastiano Visconti Prasca was born on 23 January 1883 in Rome, Italy to the noble House of Visconti, and in 1904 he graduated from the Military School of Infantry and Cavalry in Modena with the rank of Lieutenant. He fought in the 1911 Italo-Turkish War and then in World War I, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1917. In the Interwar Years, he served as military attache to Yugoslavia and was an attache to France after supervising the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Visconti predicted that the Axis Powers would lose World War II after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and his words were prophetic when he was given command of the Royal Italian Army during the Greco-Italian War of 1940. He commanded the first offensive of the war, which ended due to bad weather and Alexander Papagos' Greek counterattack, destroying the Italians. Ubaldo Soddu took over his command, and in 1943 he joined the Italian Resistance against Benito Mussolini. He was sentenced to death by Nazi Germany, but he escaped and fled to join the Red Army, fighting at the Battle of Berlin in April 1945. He died in 1961 after the war.