Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In spite of Soviet scorn, the military operations in Africa and the Mediterranean were major efforts for the inexperienced forces of unmili-tarized nations, although they obviously could not compare to the Nazi-Soviet deathlock involving hundreds of divisions on the plains and in the forests of eastern Europe. The victory in North Africa was completed in May 1943. Two months later came the invasion of Sicily. The attack on this strategic island was the greatest landing-assault of the war, eight divisions coming ashore simultaneously side by side. The island is almost a right-angle triangle, with its right angle in the extreme northeast, separated from the Italian mainland by the Strait of Messina, only three miles wide. The landings were made on the opposite side of the island, on the hypotenuse of the triangle, where the coast faces southwestward toward Tunisia. The British Eighth Army, under General Montgomery, with 250,000 men in 818 ships and escort vessels, landed on the southeastern point of the Sicilian triangle, while the American Seventh Army (General George Patton), with 228,000 men and 580 vessels, landed on the British left on either side of Gela.

The defensive forces of four Italian divisions and two German panzer divisions were widely scattered on the island, and the Allied landings were skillfully executed against light resistance (July 10, 1943). Once ashore, however, the campaign was ineptly carried on because occupation of territory was given precedence over destruction of enemy forces: Patton drove northwestward to seize Palermo (July 22nd), and then followed the enemy forces eastward to Messina along the northern coast; Montgomery, moving slowly northward parallel to the eastern coast, made a detour to the west of Mount Etna.

No efforts were made to close the Straits of Messina; as a result, the Germans were able to send almost two divisions as reinforcements from Italy and, later, when the island had to be abandoned, they were equally free to evacuate it, carrying almost 40,000 troops with 9,650 vehicles and 17,000 tons of stores over the Straits of Messina to Italy in seven days without loss of a man. At the same time, in a separate operation, 62,000 Italian troops also escaped to the mainland. By August 17th Sicily had been conquered, but the evacuated enemy forces were reorganizing to defend Italy itself.

The Italians had no taste for the defense of Italy. They had been dragged into the war by Mussolini’s action and against their own desires, in June 1940, and by 1943 they were heartily sick of the whole thing. This discontent was fully developed long before the attack on Sicily in June. In February the Duce had dismissed Count Ciano, his son-in-law, and Count Dino Grandi from their posts as ministers of foreign affairs and of justice because of their defeatism and opposition. But these qualities continued to spread, even in the innermost circles of the government. The invasion of Sicily gave the final spurt to this development. On July 24th the Fascist Grand Council passed a motion calling for the restoration of the constitutional functions of all agencies of the government and the restoration to the king of full command of the armed forces. This motion, carried 18-8, was essentially a vote of no-confidence in Mussolini. The following morning the king demanded the Duce’s resignation and, as he was leaving the palace, had him arrested.

The fall of Mussolini, on July 25, 1943, after being in power for over twenty years, did nothing to improve Italy’s position. The king, who was opposed to the establishment of a parliamentary regime or a responsible government, put Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, in as head of the government but would not allow him to establish a Cabinet of non-Fascist leaders. The Fascist Party was abolished and the Fascist Militia was incorporated into the regular army, but it was impossible to get rid of Fascist sympathizers from either the administrative system or from the armed services. On the whole, the fall of Mussolini was welcomed by the Italian people, not because of any political ideas but simply because they believed that it would lead to the end of the war and the end of food rationing. It achieved neither of these, because the powers of contending forces were too evenly balanced in Italy to allow any decisive outcome to be reached.

The history of Italy in 1943 is a history of lost opportunities, perhaps necessarily lost, but, nevertheless, a disappointment to everyone concerned. If events had turned out favorably, Italy might have got out of the war in the summer of that year and the Germans might have been ejected from the peninsula shortly afterward. Instead, Italy was torn to pieces; its peoples and the invading Allied troops suffered great hardships; and the country got out of the war so slowly that Germans were still fighting on Italian soil at the final surrender in 1945.

These general misfortunes of Italy were the result of a number of forces working together. One was the military weakness of Italy in respect to Germany; this made it impossible for Italy to end the war, or even to surrender to the Allies, because any effort to do so would lead to an immediate German seizure of the whole country and of its leaders, the exploitation and devastation of the one and the massacre of the others. Italy was far too weak to hold the Germans back long enough to permit an Allied occupation of Italy. A second factor was the weakness of the Allies because of the diversion of their power to Britain in preparation for Overlord : this meant that the Allies lacked the strength to move quickly into Italy to protect it from complete German occupation, even if Italy could surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with their entrance. A third factor was the complete mistrust of the Italians both by the Germans and by the Allies. This mistrust, for which the political conduct of the Italians, both foreign and domestic, over at least two generations, was responsible, provided the key to the whole situation. The only way in which the fighting in Italy could have been ended quickly would have been for Italy to surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with them in an immediate large-scale invasion of northern Italy, but the Allies were too distrustful of the Italians to cooperate with them in a project such as this or even to accept a secret surrender. And, finally, a fourth obstacle was the wooden and inflexible Allied insistence on unconditional surrender which, meaningless as it might have been, nevertheless made it impossible for the Badoglio government either to cooperate with the Allies as co-belligerents against the Germans (as it wished to do) or to keep the surrender secret from the Germans long enough to forestall their violent reactions. Not only did unconditional surrender exclude both co-belligerency and secrecy; it also left the Italians helpless to resist the Germans. Above all, these four factors made it impossible to prevent a German seizure of Rome, which was, in some ways, the center of the whole problem.

The Germans, who had eight divisions in Italy, doubled this number as soon as they heard of the fall of Mussolini. They refused a request from the Badoglio government to allow any of the fifty-three Italian divisions in the Balkans and Russia to return home, thus holding them as hostages. When the Badoglio government made contact with the Allies through Madrid on August 16th and offered to join them in fighting Germany, all it could obtain was a demand for unconditional surrender. After days of discussion, an armistice accepting the Allied terms was signed on September 3rd, with the understanding that it would be kept secret until the Allies had troops ready to land in force on the mainland. Three days later, the Italian government discovered that the Allied landing operation, already in progress, was only a small force and was headed for Salerno, south of Naples, where it would be no help to the Italians in resisting any German efforts to take over most of Italy. They insisted that the publication of the armistice and a tentative Allied paratrooper “drop” in Rome must be put off until sufficient Allied forces were within striking distance of Rome to protect the city from the German troops near it. Eisenhower refused, and published the Italian surrender on September 8th, one day before the American Seventh Army landed at Salerno.