CHAPTER 18
THE allied victory in North Africa was only the half close of the Mediterranean campaign. Africa was not an end in itself but a part of a struggle for control of the Mediterranean and one way of getting back onto European soil. An invasion of Sicily was a logical sequel, for it could be argued that without Sicily and its airfields the free passage of the Mediterranean had not been unquestionably secured. At Casablanca in January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the forces which they had assembled in North Africa should be used to invade Sicily and so re-open the Mediterranean. They had not, however, taken any further decision. Whether Sicily, besides being a sequel to Africa, was also to be a prelude to mainland Italy was as yet unresolved, although studies were put in hand for crossing the Straits of Messina, landing in the heel of Italy as well as the toe, and taking Sardinia and Corsica. Nor was the purpose of a possible landing in Italy settled. If it led to the fall of Mussolini and the end of Italy’s part in the war, the allied armies might either press northwards in a major attack into Austria or even Germany itself, or alternatively their task might be to draw German forces into Italy in order to weaken German resistance to an allied invasion of northern France. These two strategies were incompatible since the second would be best served if the allied armies made no rapid progress up the peninsula. On the whole the Americans (and Montgomery) saw Italy in this second light, whereas the British – or at least Churchill and Alexander – were intermittently seduced by the prospect of a major rather than an ancillary campaign in Italy.
The invasion of Sicily was launched on 10 July. The small island of Pantellaria had been easily captured a month earlier, but in spite of this pointer the Germans were preoccupied by a cover plan designed to make them fear a landing in Greece and wholly taken in by a piece of deception indicating an attack on Sardinia: a dead body with bogus plans was put in the sea in such a way that it would be washed up in Spain and in the justified belief that the Spanish authorities would hand the papers to the Germans. A genuine attack on Sardinia had been vetoed by Eisenhower.
Mussolini had no faith in the Sicilians. He did not dare to arm them and he had long since ordered all Sicilian-born officials to be transferred from the island to the mainland. The allies had command of the air. They landed at half a dozen points along the eastern half of the southern coast and along the east coast below Syracuse. An American plan for additional landings at Palermo and Catania was abandoned, largely at the instance of Montgomery, who had been impressed by the quality of German and Italian resistance in Tunisia and did not in any case want to see the allied forces spread too widely. The allied force, which sailed from American and British ports as well as North Africa and Egypt, consisted of a modest invasion force with very powerful naval and air cover. One hundred and sixty thousand men were put ashore in the first wave, with 600 tanks and 14,000 vehicles. They were supported by a fleet of 750 vessels and by over 4,000 aircraft. The British landings were completely unopposed and the Americans almost so, although there were 230,000 Italian and 40,000 German troops in the island. The first counter-attacks, which were directed against the Americans and almost dislodged them, were broken with the help of naval gunfire, and thereafter victory was swift. General George Patton’s Third US Army, which had landed on the left flank of the combined force, reached Messina on 17 August by a round-about route which took his men swiftly across the centre of the island to the north coast and then eastward. They arrived just ahead of the British coming up by the shorter but more difficult east coast route. This was the end of an operation which, although successful, had again – as in Tunisia – been rendered costly and protracted by determined German intervention. It had also generated some blatant Anglo-American ill-will in the field. The Germans got away.
A military government was established in Sicily. In practice the island fell once more into the clutches of the Mafia. Mussolini, who understood gangsterism, had been the one ruler of Italy to get the better of the Mafia. His disappearance was the signal for its revival. Mafiosi from the United States, where they had been keeping their hands in, got themselves attached to the American forces because they could speak Italian and soon, partly by graft and partly from the need to fill local posts vacated by refugees, occupied most of the positions that mattered. Within a few months they were the government of Sicily. Later on, after toying briefly with Sicilian separatism, they entered into an alliance with right-wing politicians in Rome to defeat the Left and keep Sicily corrupt and miserable.
The conquest of Sicily spelt defeat for Italy but did not give the allies victory over the Germans in Italy. So far as it represented a way of defeating the Germans it left open the question whether a campaign in Italy was a worthwhile adjunct of the campaign in northern France which, everybody agreed, was to be the main blow. Italy itself, as a fighting force and as an independent sovereign state, was finished for the duration. It had undertaken a war for which it was neither equipped to fight nor willing to fight. Mussolini’s Italy was hardly ready for any war in 1940, certainly not for a long one in two continents, but after attacking France and Greece it had become involved in wars in North Africa and East Africa and in the USSR. By the beginning of 1943 the Italians were not only dismayed and angered by the consequences of these gigantic miscalculations but were saying so. Strikes, beginning at the Fiat works in Turin, protested against rising prices and harsh working conditions and disclosed the workers’ basic demand for peace. These strikes succeeded the defeats of the Italian armies on the Stalingrad front and were followed by the defeats in Sicily. Mussolini had already realized in 1942 that the war could only be won by negotiating a peace in the east but Hitler refused to consider such a thing. In February 1943 Mussolini in a general re-shuffle hedged his bets by demoting Ciano and Grandi, who were anti-German (and credibly rumoured to be plotting against him); he also appointed a new Army Chief of Staff who was suspected by Kesselring and Hitler of being ready to switch sides at the first opportunity. Ten days before the Sicilian landings Mussolini received Mihai Antonescu, who had come to suggest that Italy, Rumania and Hungary should all leave the war together and hoped that Mussolini would give the lead. After the Sicilian invasion he found himself compelled to fight on Italian soil with a million Italian servicemen engaged outside the country – 580,000 in the Balkans, 217,000 on the Russian front and 200,000 in France, not to mention those killed or taken prisoner in the Western Desert and Tunisia, who numbered at least 200,000 more. The defence of Italy required not only the recall of the Italian troops in the USSR (for which the landings in Sicily provided a welcome excuse) but also German reinforcements which would turn Italy into an occupied country.
Mussolini had no doubt what he ought to do but he did not dare to do it. In order to spur him on to ask for an armistice his advisers grossly exaggerated the size of the invading armies, which they represented as initially twenty-five divisions when they knew it to be eight. On 19 July Hitler and Mussolini met at Feltre, but Hitler did not allow Mussolini to get a word in and Mussolini’s nerve, none too good by now even when Hitler was not around, failed him. After listening to one of Hitler’s long disquisitions on the way the war was going, which included some very rude remarks about the Italians, he took refuge in silence. This failure sealed his fate.
The fascist chieftains or gerarchi feared for themselves and their régime. Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler had proved a disaster. It had led to war, humiliation and defeat which, by 1942, were threatening the survival of Fascism. To save Fascism the alliance had to be broken. But Mussolini, who had made the alliance, was incapable of unmaking it. Moreover Italy was in no position simply to back out of the alliance unaided. It must change sides and make a new alliance in order to be rid of the old. There was no reason to think that this could not be done, although there was a question whether Mussolini himself might not have to be jettisoned in the process. The king might, if pressed by the anti-fascist members of the royal family, demand in a crisis the Duce’s removal but he was very unlikely to insist on forming a government without any fascists at all. Similarly the allies would probably accept a partly fascist government. During the war they had made statements about the total overthrow of Fascism, but Churchill had also said that Mussolini was personally to blame for everything and until 1940 neither he nor Roosevelt had been notably anti-fascist. Both Great Britain and the United States had lived with Fascism for twenty years, for much of that time amicably enough.
The gerarchi therefore wanted a reversal of alliances, by and with Mussolini if possible, without and against him if necessary. After the Feltre meeting they knew that they must proceed the second way. On 24 July the Fascist Grand Council met for the first time since the outbreak of war. Twenty-eight men attended. Grandi proposed that the king should be restored to his post (taken from him in 1940) as Commander-in-Chief. He delivered a strong attack on Mussolini’s conduct of the war. He spoke for over an hour and so impressed wavering members of the Council that when a pro-Mussolini resolution to adjourn was moved it was lost. There was a short pause during which Grandi and others moved around taking soundings. Mussolini himself seemed listless. Although only sixty, he was a sick man, his mind sluggish and his judgement gone. Upon the resumption Grandi’s proposal was approved by nineteen votes to nine. It was a vote of no confidence in the Duce. It was now two o’clock in the morning. The members of the Council dispersed without any very clear notion of what their vote portended. During the morning of the 25th Mussolini worked as usual in his office. In the afternoon he went to the Villa Savoia for a private talk with the king whom he still regarded as an obedient puppet. But, if only out of self-interest, the king had become as dissatisfied with Mussolini as the fascist gerarchi and when Mussolini arrived the king dismissed him from the office to which he had appointed him over twenty years earlier. It is not known whether Mussolini argued in his own defence. The interview lasted only twenty minutes. As the ex-Prime Minister emerged he was politely arrested and driven away in an ambulance. He showed no fight and seemed to have no stomach for the stirring events which lay ahead.
Mussolini was succeeded as Prime Minister by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a soldier who for twenty years had lent his prestige to the fascists in return for places and titles but had been dismissed in 1940 during the fiasco of the Italian attack on Greece. Upon succeeding Mussolini, Badoglio played an inglorious role, swearing loyalty to the Germans while negotiating with the allies. He and the king wanted to get out of the war but they did not see how to do it without turning Italy into one more German-occupied country, unless the allies could be persuaded to cut off and overwhelm the Germans. Badoglio was willing to capitulate to the allies but he wanted to make conditions: he would capitulate if the allies landed on the mainland, the farther north the better. He tried to persuade them to land at Genoa. If they would not venture so far he argued for a parachute operation to seize Rome; all the airfields round Rome were held by the one Italian division indubitably loyal to the House of Savoy, the Piedmontese Grenadiers. In addition Badoglio, while publicly professing loyalty to the German alliance, had circulated instructions for action against an assumed communist plot which he intended to put into operation by a pre-arranged code word, accompanied by the simple instruction to substitute ‘Germans’ where the original plan said ‘communists’.
The discussions between Badoglio and the allies were protracted. They were conducted in secrecy in Lisbon and then Madrid and were complicated by the fact that the allies conceived themselves to be negotiating a surrender whereas the Italian emissaries considered that they were discussing joint action against the Germans in Italy. The Casablanca declaration had expressly committed the allies to demanding the unconditional surrender of Italy as well as Germany with the result that much time was spent in negotiating the conditions of a surrender which was none the less to be made to appear unconditional. Moreover the allies were divided about undertaking a major campaign on the mainland. They were tempted by the ease of their conquest of Sicily and by Mussolini’s fall. An occupation of southern Italy would give them air bases for bombing Germany and would force Hitler to choose between abandoning Italy altogether or reinforcing it at the expense of the western front which the allies were about to attack. Naples, with its prestige and its capacious port, was a prize worth having and, unlike Rome or Genoa, was within the range of allied air cover. The Americans, in accordance with their broader strategy, had been reluctant to lodge large armies in a new Italian theatre but an attack towards Naples could be represented as no more than a variation on the operations which were in the planning stage and so half-way to being acceptable. They overcame their hesitations. The allies decided to cross from Sicily into Calabria, to land in the heel as well as the toe of Italy and to mount a third operation to land at Salerno, thirty-five miles short of Naples. From there, in some as yet undefined way, a road to Rome would be opened.
As the first troops were crossing into Calabria the negotiations with Badoglio were finally concluded. An act of surrender was signed on 3 September. It was to be disclosed on the 8th, the day the allies landed at Salerno. Badoglio asked that publication should be delayed to enable him to redispose his forces. Eisenhower, who distrusted Badoglio, refused and had the news of the surrender broadcast on the appointed day. Badoglio was obliged to follow suit and later accused Eisenhower, incorrectly, of having promised not to invade before 19 September. The Italians were caught unprepared, the Germans immediately occupied Rome and its airfields, and a promised allied airborne coup against these airfields had to be cancelled. The king and his government fled to Brindisi. The Italian fleet, which put to sea and made for Malta, lost the battleship Roma – sunk by a new kind of bomb, controlled after release by radio by the pilot who dropped it. The formal Italian surrender was completed at Malta on 29 September and a month later, on 13 October, Italy declared war on Germany. Badoglio’s flight from Rome to Brindisi committed Italy to civil war.
The Germans had expected an allied landing from the sea near Rome combined with a parachute operation and they proposed to withdraw all their forces south of Rome. This strategy was that of Rommel, who had been put in command in northern Italy. But Kesselring, who commanded in Rome and southwards, had other ideas. Decisive as ever, he believed that more of Italy could be held than the Lombard plain and circumstances helped him to wean Hitler away from Rommel’s plan. For a time Rommel’s plan prevailed and the Eighth Army was unopposed when it began to cross from Sicily into Calabria on 3 September. Montgomery proceeded sedately northward, the Germans withdrawing with equal circumspection. A separate landing at Taranto was similarly unopposed. In the early hours of 9 September the main assault on the Italian mainland was made at Salerno by an Anglo-American force of three divisions under the command of General Mark Clark which had sailed from ports in Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania. This landing was not unopposed. The defences, which had been manned by Italians, were in the process of being taken over by the Germans, who had just learnt of the Italian capitulation, and as they moved into their new positions they found themselves immediately in the path of the allied invasion. Their commander had no instructions covering this situation and he took it upon himself to resist. He was aware that the Eighth Army was advancing up the coast from Messina and he planned to throw the main invading force back into the sea before the Eighth Army could arrive. He nearly succeeded. After initial successes in getting ashore the invading force was thrown onto the defensive and Clark took preliminary steps for an evacuation. But the allied units held their ground and by skilful use of parachute units Clark was able to check his antagonist, who broke off the engagement and withdrew northwards upon the approach of the Eighth Army.
While the invaders were struggling to keep their grip on the beaches at Salerno the people of Naples rose against the Germans and fought them savagely for three days, suffering terrible reprisals before the allies reached Naples on 1 October, their first staging point in a long slog to the north.
Hitler was now converted to the strategy of holding central Italy as well as the north. A new German line was formed along the Volturno thirty miles beyond Naples. The allies had added southern Italy, Sardinia and Corsica to their conquest of Sicily (but allowed the Germans to remove all their troops from Sardinia and Corsica); for anything more they would have to fight. Hopes of easy victories in Italy were becoming dampened. The allied armies moved from their landing places into the mountains and valleys where they were to spend long months toiling, fighting and sitting in the rain with the occasional respite provided by leave in towns where they could rest and revel and where – as Curzio Malaparte’s La Pelle (The Skin) has most dramatically recorded – liberation became shoddily confused with corruption.
Hitler made political as well as strategic redispositions. Perhaps he had never intended to allow Mussolini to be kept in prison. He retained some respect for his fellow dictator and forerunner and he hoped that, with Mussolini as a mascot, he could re-establish a fascist régime, keep Italy true to the Axis and so protect his southern flank. After his arrest in July Mussolini had first been held for ten days on the island of Ponza in the Gulf of Gaeta and then for three weeks on the island of La Maddalena between Sardinia and Corsica where he passed the time translating Carducci into German; but in neither was he judged secure from a possible attempt at rescue. At the end of August he was moved to the Gran Sasso, where he was considered entirely safe. But two weeks later, on 12 September when the battle on the Salerno beaches was still undecided, he was kidnapped in an operation of uncommon skill and daring by the German SS officer Otto Skorzeny and flown in a small aircraft into which he barely fitted to Germany and thence to northern Italy where he was established as the head of a new government which never attained either power or dignity.
The restoration of Mussolini to the political stage and the flight of the king and Badoglio to Brindisi were minor episodes in the campaign joined in Italy between the western allies and Germany, but in the history of Italy they had greater significance for there were many Italians who wanted neither Mussolini nor the king and Badoglio. The appointment of Badoglio to succeed Mussolini sufficed the allies, who had no particular animus against the monarchy and were well enough suited by any government which was prepared to turn against the Germans. Churchill was by temperament a monarchist of a traditional and sentimental kind; like most conservatives he tended to think of society as a number of applecarts which must not be upset; he had not been among Mussolini’s enemies until Mussolini attacked France and declared war on Great Britain, he was prepared to see some fascists in Badoglio’s cabinet, he believed that Italy’s choice lay between king and communism, and he feared a second ELAS in Italy if anti-fascist elements forced the pace of political and social change. But Italians wanted change, more change than was involved in a palace revolution effected by the Fascist Grand Council and the king and his entourage. If and so far as Italy in 1943 could be likened to an applecart, the apples in it were rotten. Italians were not concerned, as Churchill was, simply to undo what had happened since 1940 and chase the Germans out of Italy; they wanted to undo everything that had happened since 1922 and destroy Fascism. Anti-fascists had existed in Italy before Nazis had been heard of. To them Mussolini’s dismissal was no more than a cabinet re-shuffle, an acknowledgement that his foreign policy had failed and been discarded. But they were more concerned with internal than external affairs.
The anti-fascists were the inheritors from the Risorgimento of a successful tradition of resistance and conspiracy within the country and by exiles. Both the exodus and internal resistance had begun immediately after the March on Rome, exiles and anti-fascists in Italy regarding themselves as true Italians whose mission it was to destroy Fascism in the same way as their grandfathers had been dedicated to the destruction of Austrian, Papal and Bourbon tyranny. Inside Italy anti-fascist groups formed, notably in universities. A clandestine press flourished as it had in the days of the carbonari. So did mural graffiti – slogans on walls played a prominent part in the struggle between fascists and anti-fascists. The Communist Party, well organized, covering the whole country and driven underground, managed to preserve some of the structure of the banned trade unions, organized strikes and other demonstrations (on May Day for example), displayed red flags and maintained active contacts with Italians and other sympathizers beyond the frontiers. Outside Italy the exiles spread over many countries from France, Switzerland and Belgium to Latin America and the United States. Many of them were comparatively humble people who were used to seeking seasonal work in other parts of Europe or who maybe had relatives more permanently settled in the New World, but they included also men who had made names for themselves in politics or the literary world. They too formed groups, issued newspapers and kept resistance alive.
In 1929 Carlo Rosselli made a dramatic escape from prison on the Lipari Islands and formed in Paris a movement called Justice and Liberty (with a paper of the same name) which brought anti-fascists of different political persuasions together and gave the anti-fascist crusade a distinctive flavour. For Rosselli and his friends it was not enough to be anti-fascist or to put the clock back to 1922. There must be a positive programme for putting the clock forward. These men not only hated Mussolini for his brutalities, especially after the murder of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924; they also regarded the Risorgimento as unfinished business and proclaimed once more the Mazzinian aims of democracy and a republic which had been submerged in Cavour’s monarchist, bourgeois and capitalist Italy; and they added socialism to democracy and republicanism. They did not win the adherence of all anti-fascists. The more conservative of these formed a National Alliance which hoped to persuade the monarchy and the papacy to turn against Mussolini – but the Duce kept the king securely by his side and negotiated in 1929 a concordat with the Pope. The National Alliance issued pamphlets and disseminated them by getting each recipient to make six copies, of which at least two were to be sent to fascists. Its most famous exploit occurred in 1931 when the young poet Lauro De Bosis, taking off in an aircraft from the south of France, circled Rome for half an hour at dusk on an October evening and scattered 400,000 leaflets from 1,000 feet over the centre of the city before setting course for the sea, where, having run out of petrol or lost control of the aircraft which he had only just learnt to fly, he died.
Repression became severer as opposition persisted. Something like a small war developed between the fascist police and their enemies. Police agents followed the exiles abroad and this Italian civil war spilled over into foreign territory, particularly France and then Spain, where another civil war gave the anti-fascist exiles a chance to fight against Mussolini’s fascist troops. In France consulates and other public buildings belonging to the Italian state were attacked. Men were killed on both sides. In 1937, on the thirteenth anniversary of Matteotti’s murder, Carlo Rosselli and his brother Nello were murdered near Paris at Mussolini’s bidding. When war came in 1940 the struggle, nearly twenty years old but still alive, was intensified. Mussolini now had fresh enemies and was beginning to lose some of his friends. The German alliance was unpopular; the Roman Catholic church was shifting away from Fascism. In August 1942 a conference of free Italians at Montevideo, presided over by the pre-fascist statesman Count Carlo Sforza, drew up a programme for a democratic and social republic of Italy. The next year the allied invasion of Sicily was regarded not as a conquest but as the beginning of liberation.
For thousands of Italians therefore, with all this behind them and within them, the Badoglio government was unacceptable. The government itself realized the precarious nature of its authority. It equivocated. It freed political prisoners and banned the Fascist Party, but it retained the censorship and the black-shirted fascist militia. Party politics were not resumed and all party politicians were kept out of the government. The war went on. Ordinary people were confused and then became angry. German troops began to pour in – and were resisted by Italians at three or four points along the frontier. Rome was hit by the allies from the air and suffered 1,000 casualties and the king’s car was stoned when he visited the scene. Outside Italy local commanders and troops did not know whom to fight, if anybody; some of them turned against the Germans and on Cephallonia in the Ionian Islands 8,400 Italians were killed. By September when the king and Badoglio fled from the capital and Mussolini was carried off by the Germans to create a second fascist state in the north and two thirds of the country was under German occupation, the new government had disappointed the hopes and forfeited the respect of a great part of the population and was only sustained by the allies, particularly the British.
This period of uncertainty and disenchantment between July and September 1943 was followed by a second period, stretching from the events of the latter month to the German evacuation of Rome in June 1944. After its declaration of war against Germany in October 1943 the Badoglio government devoted much of its constricted energies to re-orienting the Italian army; by the end of the year regular Italian units were fighting in the Anglo-American forces, which also included French, Polish, Greek, Indian and New Zealand contingents arid even Japanese from California. Allied generals were not enthusiastic about Italian help, but after Montgomery’s departure the Eighth Army helped to train and equip a number of volunteer brigades which showed that Italians could fight as well as anybody when they wanted to. The Americans refused to copy the Eighth Army’s example and the war ended before it got very far. Had the war gone on longer the Eighth Army would have fathered a first-class Italian army – composed chiefly of communists.
Owing to the slowness of the allied advance up Italy most Italians found themselves in German-occupied territory. They could not join Badoglio’s forces even if they wanted to. Disbanded soldiers and released prisoners-of-war – impelled by anti-German patriotism or fearful of being put to work or thrown into prison by the Germans or of being transported to forced labour in Germany – took to the hills. These men had not for the most part been anti-fascist but their defeats had caused a revulsion of feeling against Mussolini’s senseless policies and a certain sympathy therefore for Mussolini’s domestic enemies. These groups were at first small and basically anti-German; they were aware of the existence of other similar groups but not coordinated with them; they had no doctrine or political aims. But they grew. Where Germans were present in ordered strength and fixed positions they were obliged to coordinate their ventures in order to survive (many of them did not) and be effective. They needed the support and cooperation of the settled population and gradually became an adjunct of something quite different, the anti-fascist popular movement which had a political, as opposed to a merely anti-German, purpose and was planning a national uprising.
The term Resistance was not used in Italy during the war. (It was adopted after the war by extension from other parts of Europe.) This is indicative, because Resistance implied resistance to the occupier; the Italian movement which developed from 1943 was not primarily concerned with the occupation. It was an attempt, which ultimately failed, to make a revolution and take over the government of the country. It included republicans, socialists, communists, liberals and those left-wing Roman Catholics who looked backwards to pre-fascist Christian Populism and subsequently became a section of the Democratic Christian Party. Their common watchword was Renewal. They created a joint committee – the Committee of National Liberation (CLN) – which they regarded as the future government of Italy and, like Charles Albert of Savoy one hundred years earlier, they relied on themselves and not on foreigners: l’Italia farà da se. Two groups were particularly prominent: the communists with their Garibaldi brigades and the Action Party, the heir of Justice and Liberty, with similar brigades.
On the political front old parties reappeared and new ones were formed. Exiles returned. Barred from the government by the king and Churchill, they held a congress at Bari in January 1944 which demanded the immediate abdication of the king. Publicly and privately Churchill resisted them, speaking in the House of Commons against any change in the Italian government and instructing his representatives in Italy to support the king and Badoglio; but the British on the spot, more alive than Churchill to the trend of events, fostered the revival of democratic politics. Ironically the monarchy owed its reprieve not to the British but to the communists against whom Churchill was trying to protect it. The communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, returning from eighteen years in the USSR, joined in the demand for a new government but argued, on Stalin’s instructions, that the fate of the monarchy should be deferred until the end of the war. The upshot was the withdrawal of the king from public life with a promise to instal his son Umberto as Lieutenant-Governor of the realm as soon as Rome was recovered. Badoglio remained Prime Minister but took representatives of six anti-fascist parties into his government. For the first time in history socialists and communists joined an Italian government.
When Rome fell the king transferred his powers to his son and Badoglio resigned. (The king still did not abdicate. He did so, belatedly, in 1946 when Umberto became king for a month. A plebiscite then abolished the monarchy by 12 million votes to 10 million.) The new Prime Minister was Ivanoe Bonomi, the penultimate pre-fascist Prime Minister and a respected figure acceptable to all anti-fascists in the short run. His government lasted until the end of the year when it was replaced by a narrower coalition, still under Bonomi. Another transient anti-fascist coalition was formed before the end of the war and lasted a few months after it. It was followed over the next twenty years by an unbroken series of Right-Centre governments. It is, however, tempting to see some consequences of the partisan movement in the post-war politics of north central Italy where much of the partisan activity took place. This part of the country has a tradition of opposition dating from at least the anti-Papalism of the Risorgimento; it has also a significant proportion of landless rural labourers. Since the war Emilia at its northern and Umbria at its southern end have given the communists their strongest base and their only popular majorities over the Christian Democrats, and between these two extremes the area, if less ‘red’, has still been consistently red with the exception only of a dent in Romagna where the radical but anti-communist Republican Party has been traditionally strong.
The attitude of the allies to the partisans was mixed. Churchill was in favour of guerrillas who harassed Germans. Most professional generals were hardly even that and all of them – generals, Churchill and other political leaders – were opposed to a national rising amounting to a civil war. Even in the midst of a Great War the idea of civil war was peculiarly repugnant with its moral implications of fratricidal strife and the special degree of unregulated cruelty which civil wars have evoked from early times down to the war in Spain still vivid in many minds. The allies looked with a favour which was exceptional on the national rising in Yugoslavia because it was successful and directed against their enemies and because they themselves were not there; but in Italy it was not so clear to the allies that the partisans were fighting against a common enemy and, besides, their activities might get in the way of allied military operations. The allies also, perhaps consequently, underrated the Italian effort. They were used to thinking of the Italian army as bad fighters and could hardly imagine that guerrilla forces might fight better than regular ones. Nevertheless allied aid, mainly British, was bountiful. It included 3,000 tons of supplies dropped by parachute – about half the partisans’ total requirements.
After the fall of Rome partisan warfare in the countryside was intensified. So was sabotage by special action groups in towns. A series of strikes in northern cities in 1943 was capped in March 1944 by a general strike called by the CLN throughout the north. A million men and women responded and the strike lasted eight days. The Italian partisans became as numerous as any Resistance movement in Europe. By mid-1944 they numbered about 100,000 and were on their way to double or treble that strength before the war ended. Partisans killed, wounded or captured at least 50,000 Germans. Their own losses were heavy, particularly in areas where they assembled in large numbers and exposed themselves to organized German attack and also when the allied pressure was taken off the Germans and their northward advance blocked after the withdrawal of forces to France. Thirty-five thousand partisans lost their lives and another 20,000 were wounded. Another 10,000 civilians were killed in fights with the Germans or in reprisals. In addition 9,000 Italians were deported during the two years of direct German occupation, very few of whom were ever seen again.
As the winter of 1944 approached it became clear that the war would last into 1945. When General Alexander decided in November that he could undertake no further operations that year he advised the partisans too to suspend operations and go home. His message was broadcast en clair, so that it was received and read by German commanders who happened to be engaged at the time by substantial bodies of partisans. The partisans were infuriated by the message for many reasons. In the first place they could hardly go home without being arrested and shot. Further, they suspected that the allies wanted to deprive them of any share in the ultimate German collapse and make sure that the Germans should surrender to the Anglo-American command and not to any representatives of democratic Italy; they regarded the allied command as covert allies of the Right and knew that the popular rising with which they were preparing to end the war and inaugurate the new Italy was feared by the allies as a bloody communist revolution. They also resented the tone of the advice, which seemed to them too close to an order, and they had occasion to rue its consequences when the Germans, relieved of the necessity to bother about the allied armies, concentrated on the partisans and succeeded in killing thousands of them. Even Mussolini took heart and appeared in Milan and made a speech there.
The weather added to the stock of partisan troubles. The winter of 1944–5 was severe and the partisans suffered from it more than the German regular troops. But they were determined not to cease from their operations or to forgo their claim to be the liberators of Italy. They survived and, as the overall position of the Germans became more and more hopeless, they were able to renew the offensive in the spring. In April, when the Fifth and Eighth Armies launched their final attack, the northern cities rose; in Genoa 9,000 Germans surrendered to Italians and other great cities were captured by partisans. So was Mussolini who, politically, had survived the king after all and was trying in these last days to come to terms with the allies behind the backs of the Germans and through Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, the Archbishop of Milan. At a meeting in the archiépiscopal palace of Milan on 25 April Mussolini learned that the Germans in Italy were negotiating with the allies behind his back and he thereupon dropped his own negotiations and set off for the Swiss border. He was captured and then recognized by partisans on 27 April and was shot the next day with his mistress Clara Petacci outside a small village. Their bodies with those of other fascists were displayed a day later upside down in front of a filling station in a square in Milan. They were suspended by meat hooks.