A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (73 page)

People poured onto the streets of Rome, overjoyed that the nightmare of fascism was over. Their joy was premature. The Badoglio government maintained its alliance with Germany for another month while it undertook secret negotiations with the Allies. In the meantime, it used force to crush demonstrations, shooting 23 people dead in a Bari square. Its behaviour gave the German army time to pour troops into Italy. When Badoglio finally announced an agreement with the Allies, Germany was able to occupy the country north of Naples and force his government to flee Rome. German paratroops rescued Mussolini and set up a puppet government (known as ‘the Republic of Salo’) in northern Italy.

The German occupation provoked the growth of a massive resistance movement. It had three components. There were groups of armed partisans in the countryside—9,000 at the end of 1943, more than 20,000 by the spring of 1944, and 100,000 a year later. There were underground armed ‘patriotic groups’ in the cities, which assassinated officials and blew up German troops. And there was a growing movement of resistance in the factories, with a major strike in Genoa after the shooting of political prisoners in January 1944 and a strike by 300,000 in Milan in March which spread to the Veneto, Bologna and Florence. Lower paid and women workers were in the forefront of these strikes, to which the German forces responded with arrests and mass deportations.

The three strands came together in August 1944, when the resistance seized most of Florence from the German army before the Allies arrived. They came together again spectacularly eight months later to take control of the country’s three major industrial cities—Genoa, Turin and Milan. In Genoa a rising led by the armed urban groups seized the city’s public buildings, surrounded the German troops, captured a barracks and then, aided by partisans from the countryside, forced the surrender of the German general and 15,000 troops. In Turin:

In Milan the armed groups stormed the fascist barracks. There was fighting around the major factories, especially Pirelli, and then the armed groups, the partisans and the workers took over the city, moving in from the outskirts.

The first resistance groups had often arisen spontaneously, their growth fuelled by the brutality of the German occupation and the hardship which followed it. Many young men took to the mountains to escape conscription or avoid forced labour in Germany. But the sheer fact of resistance drove them to left wing politics. Everyone in Italy knew that the ruling class had backed Mussolini. Everyone knew that the industrialists were collaborating, to a greater or lesser extent, with the German occupation. And everyone had witnessed the failure of the king and Badoglio to do anything to prevent the German occupation in the summer of 1943.

There was a near-unanimous feeling among those who chose to fight back that Italian society had to undergo fundamental change. This was common to the forces which dominated the resistance politically. The Communist Party grew from 5,000 members in June 1943 to 410,000 in March 1945, attracting vast numbers of people who knew little detail of the party’s ‘line’, but wanted revolutionary change in Italy and identified with the success of the Russian armies after Stalingrad. Alongside it was the old Socialist Party—smaller, less well organised and still containing groups of timid reformists but, as in 1918-20, using revolutionary language. Finally, there was the ‘Party of Action’, led by members of the middle class and with a heterogeneous membership, but insistent that there had to be a radical break with the past. It was hardly surprising that Winston Churchill was worried about ‘rampant Bolshevism’, and saw the king and Badoglio as the sole barriers against it.
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France differed from Greece and Italy in one respect. The first call to build underground resistance had not come from the left, for the majority of Socialist Party MPs had voted for the Pétain government, and the Communist Party—following orders from Moscow during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact—opposed resistance until the summer of 1941. The call came from a representative of the old ruling class, a middle-ranking army officer, Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped to Britain. But de Gaulle’s British-based ‘Free French’ forces were small, and the US would not recognise him, trying right through to the end of 1943 to do a deal with the pro-German Vichy government. Once Germany had invaded Russia, the Communist Party set up its own resistance organisation, the FTP. It soon outgrew the Gaullists, since resistance had a class character for most people. The old ruling class had half-welcomed the German forces in 1940 and was collaborating wholeheartedly with them. As in Greece and Italy, it was the lower classes who bore the suffering of the occupation. Some 88 percent of those arrested in the Pas-de-Calais and Nord were from working class backgrounds. While railway workers made up only 1 percent of Brittany’s population, they provided 7 percent of its resistance members. When the resistance seized Paris from the German army in advance of the Allies in 1944, everyone knew that the key controlling force was the Communist Party. The only question—as in Greece and Italy—was whether it was going to use its position to push for revolutionary change or do a deal with de Gaulle to keep capitalism going.

Hope strangled again

In a famous passage, Winston Churchill recalled how he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 and said to him, ‘So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 percent in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?’

Churchill wrote down a list of countries with the appropriate percentages next to them, and Stalin wrote a large tick on it.

It was not the resistance fighters in Greece, Italy and France who decided Europe’s destiny, but meetings such as this. At conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt to divide Europe into spheres of influence. The US was not happy with this division at first. It hoped to use its massive industrial superiority to transform the whole world into a single US sphere of influence, free trade providing it with open markets everywhere.
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Churchill, committed as ever to maintaining an empire run exclusively from London, would not countenance this, and neither would Stalin, who had the sheer size of Russia’s army to counter US economic power. Between them they persuaded Roosevelt to accept the division they wanted.

The deals were a death blow to the hopes of the resistance movements. They gave Stalin’s armies a free hand in Eastern Europe. Stalin was not going to let Communists elsewhere upset the arrangement by attempting to lead revolutions, however favourable the mass of people might be. His former foreign minister Litvinov spelt it out bluntly to US representatives in Italy in September 1944: ‘We do not want revolutions in the West’.
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This was not just a matter of words. In the spring of 1944 the Italian Communist leader Togliatti had returned to Italy from Moscow. He announced that his party was joining the despised Badoglio government and was prepared to leave the monarchy untouched until the war was over.
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The French leader, Maurice Thorez, insisted from Moscow that the biggest resistance group, the Communist-led FTP, should integrate into and accept the leadership of de Gaulle’s smaller FFI. After his return to Paris in January 1945, Thorez called for militants to abandon all resistance to the institutions of the old state. He insisted that there had to be ‘one state, one army, one police’.
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In Italy and France the restoration of the old order occurred more or less peacefully. In Greece the eventual outcome was civil war, although this did not result from any serious attempt by the resistance leaders to carry through revolutionary change.

The retreat of the German army at the end of 1944 left EAM-ELAS in control of virtually the whole country. It would have required minimal movement on the part of its forces to occupy Athens. It knew that Britain’s intention was to impose the old monarchy and a government run by politicians from the old discredited ruling class. Britain had already used force to break an attempted mutiny against this arrangement by thousands of exiled Greek troops in Egypt. Yet it allowed British troops and the new government to take over the city.
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The only forces the government could rely on were the police and right wing groups, which had collaborated with the Nazis and were intent on humiliating the resistance. Early in December the government demanded the immediate disarming of the resistance throughout the country, and its forces opened fire with machine-guns on a huge protest in Athens, killing 28 and wounding many others.
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EAM-ELAS had no choice but to fight back, and the British generals found themselves hard-pressed. Field Marshal Alexander warned Churchill that he would not be able to reconquer more than the Athens-Piraeus area.

Churchill had already told Anthony Eden, ‘I hope the Greek brigade will not hesitate to shoot when possible,’ and he ordered the British commander on the spot, Scobie, ‘Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in process’.
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At this point Churchill flew to Athens to announce that the British operation had ‘the full approval of President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin’.
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The EAM-ELAS forces withdrew from the capital, and formally disbanded a month later in return for an agreement which the government had no intention of keeping. On 8 March Stalin told Churchill at Yalta, ‘I have every confidence in British policy in Greece’.
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Soon government forces were hunting down anyone who had been part of the resistance. At least 50,000 EAM-ELAS supporters were imprisoned and interned during 1945, while right wing paramilitary groups operated with government protection. C M Woodhouse, a British representative who was to become a Tory member of parliament, later wrote, ‘Up to the end of 1945…the blame for bloodshed lay primarily on right wing forces’.
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Many historians argue even today that the leaders of the resistance organisations in all three countries had no choice but to accept the restoration of the pre-war ruling classes. If they had tried to overthrow these, it is argued, they would have been crushed by the might of the British and US armies. Paul Ginsborg accepts this in the case of Italy, and Eric Hobsbawn insists more generally, ‘The Communists…were in no position anywhere west of Trieste…to establish revolutionary regimes’.
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Yet as Gabriel Kolko rightly argues, such judgements ‘entirely disregard the larger context of the war with Germany, the purely military problems involved, as well as the formidable political difficulties that sustained counter-revolutionary wars would have encountered in England and the US’.
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The popular mood in Britain and the US in 1944-45 was not such that it would have been easy for them to mount massive repression. The British actions in Greece caused major political storms both in Britain and the US, and there was massive desire in the ranks of their armies to return home as soon as possible—a mood which was to find expression in mutinies among British forces stationed in Egypt. Above all, it is highly unlikely that a revolutionary movement would have been confined to a single country. Churchill’s great fear was that revolution in Greece would inspire moves in the same direction in Italy—and if that had happened it is hard to imagine France would not have been affected. Indeed, even in Germany, the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945 saw workers flocking to their old socialist and Communist allegiances, setting up popular anti-Nazi committees and taking over the running of factories from which pro-Nazi managers had fled—until the occupation armies restored ‘order’ with the help of politicians who had returned from exile with them.

The re-establishment of the old order in Greece, Italy and France meant that those who had prospered under the fascist and collaborationist regimes were soon back to their old ways. In Greece the ‘truce’ between the government and the resistance fighters was soon forgotten. Fascist sympathisers and former collaborators were to be found at every level of the army and police, and they began systematic persecution of the left until open civil war broke out. US arms ensured that the right won the civil war, governing via rigged elections through the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in 1967, the fascist sympathisers and former collaborators in the army seized power through a military coup rather than risk an electoral victory by left of centre politicians. Not until after the military regime collapsed in the mid-1970s did anything like a normal capitalist democracy exist in Greece.

In Italy genuine parliamentary institutions were established, but beneath them the composition of the state machine remained very much as before. This was shown vividly in the early 1970s, when sections of the secret services and the armed forces worked with fascists to plant bombs in the hope of providing a pretext for a coup.

In France the continuity of the state machine was exposed in the mid-1990s by the trial of the former Vichy police chief in Bordeaux, Papon, for deporting thousands of Jews to the death camps. After the war he had been able to rise to the position of police chief in Paris and order a police attack on an Algerian demonstration which killed more than 100. However, the real horror to arise from the continuity of the French state came outside France. On VE Day (marking the defeat of Germany), Arabs took to the streets of Setif in Algeria waving the green and white flag of resistance to French rule. French police opened fire, and in the subsequent fighting at least 500 Algerians and 100 French settlers were killed.
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The French state’s determination to keep the colony was to cost a million lives over the next 20 years. In Vietnam the Communist-led nationalist resistance movement, the Vietminh, had taken control of the country when Japan surrendered. British troops commanded by Lord Mountbatten landed in the southern city of Saigon, armed Japanese prisoners of war and used them to disarm the Vietminh, and then handed the city to the French colonial authorities. After a brief lull, during which the Communists tried to implement Stalin’s general line by cooperating with the French, a war broke out which was to last for almost 30 years and cost more than two million Vietnamese lives.