A World at Arms (96 page)

The privations of war thus came to a society that saw little purpose to the sacrifices being imposed on it; the air raids, though small at first,
significantly affected morale; and the casualties had a double sting.
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As if this were not sufficient cause for dissatisfaction, one of Mussolini’s favorite devices for running the country, the periodic replacement of incompetent ministers and Fascist Party officials by others who were usually even less qualified, hollowed out the Fascist Party in the very years when it was most needed if the country were to be held together in the war.
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The astonishing thing under these circumstances is not that the Italian people failed to live up to the martial standard which Mussolini set for them but that the home front held together as long as it did, and that elements of the armed forces often fought valiantly and effectively.
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Three essentially simultaneous disasters: the loss of the last portion of Italy’s North African empire, acquired by the parliamentarily governed Italy of the pre-Fascist era, the disastrous losses of early 1943 of the Italian forces on the Eastern Front and in Tunisia, and the stepped up bombing of Italy by Allied planes from North African bases, provided the final push. Shortly after the successful Allied landing on Sicily the actions of dissidents among the leaders of the Fascist Party coincided with the plotting of a group of court officials and military men around the King. The July 25, 1943, vote in the Fascist Grand Council precipitated not only the resignation and arrest of Mussolini, but the swift collapse of the Fascist Party and system in Italy. In a few hours, it turned out that whatever earlier gains Fascism might have made among the population, there was practically nothing left of it after three years of war.

The extraordinary incompetence with which the Badoglio government made its exit from the war left Italy, like Caesar’s Gaul, divided into three parts. The southern portion was occupied by the Allies who slowly fought their way up the peninsula. The central and northern part was occupied by the Germans who also quickly seized Albania and the Italian islands on the Aegean as well as the Italian occupation zones in France, Yugoslavia and Greece. The third part was the saddest: it constituted hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers who were carted off by the Germans to forced labor, a fate from which thousands never returned alive.
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In the portion of Italy which remained under German control, the latter exercised effective authority. They ran the area as an occupied territory and, now free to act as they wished, did what they could to round up Jews for deportation to murder centers, always their first
priority. In this they were aided by some old Fascists who had long wanted to emulate the Germans in this regard, but they were hindered by other Italians who hid or in other ways protected their fellow citizens.
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Murdering Jews, shooting civilians, and deporting captured Italian soldiers to slave labor were not the only German measures certain to alienate the Italian population. During the years of war since late 1940, the planned resettlement of the people who identified with Germany from the South Tyrol to other portions of German-controlled Europe had ground to a halt.
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Now that the Germans could do whatever they wanted, they took the first steps toward annexing huge portions of northern Italy. Not only the South Tyrol but most of northeast Italy, including the ports of Trieste and Fiume, were designated as “Operational Zones” and placed under complete German contro1.
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The new rulers began the process of annexation to Germany in many fields; and since the overwhelming majority of the population was Italian, contributed to ever greater resistance not only there but in the rest of German-controlled Italy.

If Hitler restrained his own inclination for openly annexing parts of Italy, and the even more fervent anti-Italian enthusiasm of some of his associates like Joseph Goebbels, it was because of regard for his old friend Mussolini. The Duce was rescued from Italian captivity by an airborne coup and installed in northern Italy. There he and a group of Fascist fanatics attempted to establish a new Fascist regime under German auspices. They tried hard to raise a new army to fight alongside their Axis partner,
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and to court public support by a variety of semisocialist measures.
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This shadow system, officially called the Italian Social Republic, and often referred to as the Republic of Sa16, may have been a reflection of Mussolini’s dreams of earlier years, but it was too obviously a client of the hated Germans; and the Duce himself was no longer the rousing speaker of earlier days. Among squabbling would–be born-again Fascist leaders, Mussolini had a few of those who had voted against him in the Fascist Grand Council-including his son-in-law Count Ciano-shot, but otherwise could rouse himself from a lethargic somnolence only for his mistress. The Germans who held the real power in northern Italy, the military and police commanders, negotiated in 1945 with the Western Allies for a surrender in Italy without informing Mussolini. As the German hold on the area behind the front line collapsed, the partisans there not only seized control of ever greater territory but caught Mussolini and his mistress and shot both of them.

These partisans were a portion of a large resistance movement
which blossomed in the part of Italy which remained under German control after the front line stabilized between Rome and Naples in the late fall of 1943. Including both parts of the rural population based in the villages and sometimes protected by the mountains and also the urban resistance drawing especially from the factory workers of northern Italian cities, the resistance as a whole came to constitute a major menace to the Germans and a point of reference for post-war Italy. Here, in the opposition to German occupiers and their Italian stooges there grew up a coalition of a broad range of people from Communists through Catholic political leaders to conservative nationalists who learned to work together and respect each other, at least for a while. These groups cooperated effectively with secret emissaries from the Allies and paved the way first for the latter and eventually for the restoration of Italian self-government. Some of their exploits were exaggerated in the heroic literature of the post-war years, but a major portion of the recovery of Italian self-confidence and revival in the years after 1945 can in fact be attributed to the fact that the extremes of disaster in war were accompanied in their last stage by a second national revival in the resistance.
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At least a minimum of cooperation between the various elements of the resistance in the north was made possible not only by their common enmity to the Germans and to Fascism, but also by the temporary restraint which appears to have been urged on Italy’s Communist Party by the Soviet Union.
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This also facilitated their working after a fashion with the government of King Victor Emmanuel and General Pietro Badoglio in the south. There the British and Americans sponsored the reestablishment of the regime which had ignominiously fled from Rome. The most obvious disadvantage under which this government labored in its efforts to reestablish a semblance of Italian sovereignty and self–respect under the shield of Allied military power was that it steadily inherited precisely those portions of the country which had been most ravaged by the fighting as the Allies pushed north. The disruption and suffering caused for Italians by the advance of battle could be and was alleviated somewhat by the relief efforts of the Allied military government.
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But the greater problem was an internal one. The discredited men around Badoglio and the King were under pressure to open the government to representatives of anti-Fascist parties. In the struggles which followed, the British and Americans increasingly took opposite sides. The British, with Churchill’s personal and constant pressure, feared that new elements would bring about an end to the Italian monarchy while the Americans were uninterested in the fate of the monarchy but wanted more liberal elements included in the government.

The difficulties were partially resolved by a promise to hold a plebiscite on the monarchy after Italy was completely liberated–and which produced a majority for ending the monarchy–and by the increasing inclusion of new elements in the govemment.
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Even Churchill’s firing of the chief British representative, General Mason-Macfarlane, the former governor of Gibraltar, for siding too closely with the wrong Italian party leaders could not halt the drift toward a truly new system in the country after the liberation of Rome in June, 1944.
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Liberation not only brought changes in the Italian government, it also changed the situation of the Vatican which had operated under Axis pressure until this point. The Allies had been unhappy about the Pope’s silence on German atrocities and his welcoming of a Japanese embassy.
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Pius XII, who had not been unduly worried by the actions of German occupation forces in Europe, now asked that Black soldiers not be included among the Allied units stationed in Rome.
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The Allied commanders had other worries. As their troops drove north in 1944 and 1945, the liberated areas came under the control of the restructured Italian government. The resistance formations were disarmed and new political parties came to the fore. The Communist Party came to inherit a large part of the working class and many former Fascists-no European proved as adept at recruiting a mass popular following for communism as Mussolini. On the other hand, as a successor of the “Popular” Party of the pre-Fascist era, the Christian Democrats became the mass party of the center and moderate right. They played a major role in the resistance; and the moderate left new government of the resistance hero Ferruccio Parri which began in June 1945 was succeeded by the first of a long series of Cabinets led by a Christian Democrat in December.
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As the situation in the war-torn country began to stabilize, the internal and international position of its government very slowly began to regain the status of an independent country which the Fascist regime had sacrificed to German over lordship in the hope of imperial expansion.

The state which participated in the war longer than any other–from the beginning in September 1939 to the end of August 1945 -was Great Britain with its colonies and those Dominions which entered the conflict. It should, under these circumstances, not be surprising that the home front, especially in the United Kingdom, was affected by the war in
innumerable ways. The direct impact of bombing was dramatic in 1940 and 194 I; it resumed in the “Baby Blitz” of the early months of 1944; and then began again in June of 1944 with the German V-1 and V-2 weapons which in many ways had a morale effect out of all proportion to their actual destructiveness. This impact on British morale was related to the very length of the conflict and the disappointing reality that early victory had not followed upon the successful defiance of the German onslaught of 1940.

The exhilaration of standing alone in the face of a dictator who had overrun Western Europe after all British efforts to avoid war altogether had failed cemented a temporary political alliance of all political parties, other than the Communists, behind a coalition government led and inspired by Winston Churchill. Subsequent years brought new allies but also, especially in the spring and last month of 1941 and the first half of 1942, a series of setbacks and defeats. Disaster in Greece and on Crete, the total collapse of Britain’s position in East Asia followed soon after by stunning defeats in North Africa and accompanied by steady losses at sea–with a humiliating dash of three major German warships the whole length of the English Channel–came closer to upsetting the Churchill government than many realized at the time or since.
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As the tide began to turn in ways visible to ordinary Englishmen with the victory at El Alamein and the landing in Northwest Africa, there was a sense of relief; but the very length of the road to victory, coming after long years of sacrifice and defeats, made for a brittle home front. It was in this context that the enormous concern over the impact of the new German weapons launched against English cities in 1944 and 1945 must be seen. The drop in morale affected most and led to serious consideration of the use of poison gas in retaliation.

In the background of all British life was the high level of mobilization. Out of a total work force of about 22 million in 1944-45, 5 million were serving in the armed forces; almost a third of the men from 14 to 64 were in uniform.
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The military and merchant marine casualties of about 800,000 were very much lower than those of World War I; but their impact was very great all the same, not only because the numbers were still very high indeed, but because the memory of the enormous casualties of the preceding conflict weighed heavily on a country now also suffering over 33,000 civilian deaths from bombing attacks.
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With most workers not in military service involved in war production of some sort, with tight rationing in effect for years, and with very high levels of
taxation, life became and remained dreary and difficult for most. Obvious to those in the government but not as clear to the public was the fact that even at this extremely high level of manpower, industrial and financial mobilization, the country could carry on the war only because of massive assistance from the United States and large lending by the Dominions and India. Even with British factories producing vast quantities of equipment and munitions, the armies Britain put into the field depended heavily on supplies from others; for example, by 1942 more than half and in 1943 two-thirds of the tanks turned over to the British army came from overseas.
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While Great Britain, in turn, sent a substantial volume of supplies to the Soviet Union, assisted the building up of the armed forces of the Commonwealth, and provided what was called “reverse Lend-Lease” to the United States, the basic balance was the other way and reversed the old pattern in which during coalition wars Britain had helped finance her allies. Now only the aid of her allies enabled the country to continue in the war.