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

As is usual in a stalemate, there was much of criticism of these operations, especially from the Allied side. It was suggested that the German success in holding the Rapido was due to the accuracy of their artillery fire and that this was being spotted from the ancient monastery (founded by St. Benedict in a.d. 529) on the top of Monte Cassino. It was further suggested that General Clark should have obliterated the monastery with aerial bombardment but had failed to do so because he was a Catholic. After February 15, 1944, General Clark did destroy the site completely by Air Force bombs without helping the situation a bit. We now know that the Germans had not been using the monastery; but, once it was destroyed by us, they dug into the rubble to make a stronger defense.

The stalemate on the Gustav Line was broken in the latter half of May 1944. By that time French, Polish, and Italian units were fighting on the Allied side, giving twenty-seven Allied divisions against twenty German. On May 16th a French corps crossed the Garigliano River, and three days later, after terrible casualties, a Polish division captured Monte Cassino. Kesselring sullenly withdrew northward, followed by the Allied forces. The latter were greeted with hysterical enthusiasm by the liberated Italians. On May 25th contact was made with the Anzio forces, and, on June 4, 1944, the American 88th Division, an all-selective-service unit, entered Rome.

As the liberating forces came in and the Germans hurriedly withdrew, Rome was little short of a madhouse. Hundreds of prisoners held by the Germans and neo-Fascist secret police were murdered in their cells, and helpless civilians were murdered as hostages or in reprisal by the retreating German forces. Guerrilla bands behind the German lines performed good services to the Allied cause, harassing communications, assisting Allied intelligence, and helping escaping prisoners. Many of these guerrillas were fighting for social revolution as well as for the liberation of Italy, and there was a good deal of rivalry and even of violent conflict among them. The dominant influence was that of the Communists, who were more highly disciplined and more closely controlled than the non-Communist units.

The fall of Mussolini gave a considerable impetus to postwar planning within the Allied camps. There had been a certain amount of this during the dark days from 1939 to 1943, but on the whole the Allied leaders were reluctant to commit themselves to any projects which might restrict their freedom of action in conducting the war or in manipulating its diplomatic and propagandist background. The collapse of one of the enemy states, however, made it necessary to devote some serious attention to postwar plans. At the same time, experiences in Italy showed that the problems of the postwar era would be much broader than merely political or diplomatic, and would include social, economic, and ideological problems on a scale never experienced previously. It was clear that the poverty, confusion, and human suffering found by our advancing armies in Italy would be increased tenfold when the much more bitter resistance of Germany had been overcome.

In order to avoid any repetition of the widespread Allied “deals” with Darlan and other “Vichyites,” the occupied areas of Italy were subjected to a completely military Allied government, although, to obtain legal continuity and legal justification for this government, the various agreements were signed by Badoglio. Even this small amount of contact with ex-Fascist leaders aroused adverse comment in certain circles in the United States, although at the same time and, usually, in the same circles, there was objection to the use of a purely military administration as an alternative. The only other possibility would have been to turn the newly liberated areas over to the local anti-Fascist native groups. This last solution was out of the question, for these groups were generally so determined on social and economic revolution that they would have created conflicts and disturbances which would have jeopardized the position of our armies of occupation and would certainly have increased the social and economic problems which most Americans were eager to reduce. These social and economic problems were mostly of a very practical nature and were concerned with starvation, disease, public order, and the care of displaced persons.

All these problems were drastically increased by the ruthless destructiveness of the German forces as they withdrew toward Germany itself. Food supplies were taken away or were destroyed; millions were left homeless, many of them far from their homes and in pitiful conditions of semistarvation and disease. These conditions, which became steadily worse as the war drew to its close, made a great appeal to the humanitarian feelings of Americans, and presented problems with which American generosity and organizational efficiency were well able to deal. On the other hand, Americans had weak political interests and narrow ideological training and were eager to avoid problems such as forms of government, patterns of property distribution, or nationalistic disputes. It is, then, not surprising that American postwar planning and the behavior of American administrators neglected the latter kinds of problems to devote their energies to the more practical tasks of material survival. On the political, legal, or ideological problems the American “liberators” had little to offer beyond rather vague and idealistic praise of democracy, private ownership, and freedom.

While the military efforts of the Anglo-Americans were, in full public view, passing from victory to victory in the early months of 1943, a very ominous situation had arisen behind the scenes in respect to their relations with the Soviet Union. We have already mentioned the evidence that quite incompatible decisions about the postwar world had been made in Washington and Moscow at this time. The decision in Washington seems to have been that every effort would be made, through wartime concessions to the Soviet Union, to obtain Russian cooperation in a postwar international organization and that all territorial problems should be left to the postwar period. The decision in Moscow seems to have been that the Anglo-American Powers could not be trusted and that the Soviet Union must seek to ensure its postwar security by creation of a series of satellite and buffer states on its western frontier. The incompatibility of these points of view gave rise to the Polish crisis of May 1943.

After the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland in September 1939, a Polish government-in-exile was established in France and later in London, with General Wladyslaw Sikorski as prime minister. This government, although recognized as the successor to the defeated Polish government by most of the world, was not recognized by the Axis Powers or by the Soviet Union. These pretended that Poland had ceased to exist. Russia, which had received half of Poland, with 13.2 million of Poland’s 35 million inhabitants, incorporated these areas into the Soviet Union, imposing Soviet citizenship on the inhabitants, and forced over a million of them to go to other parts of Russia to work in mines, in factories, or on farms. Most educated or professional persons among the Poles were arrested and put into concentration camps with the captured officers of the Polish armies. In the meantime the portions of Poland taken by Germany had been divided into two parts, of which the western (with 10.5 million inhabitants) was incorporated into Germany, and the rest (with 11.5 million inhabitants, and including Warsaw) was organized as the government-general of Poland under German administration. The Nazis sought to force all ethnic Poles into the government-general; to exterminate, either directly or through the exhaustion and malnutrition of slave labor, all the educated elements among the Polish people; and to murder without compunction the country’s large Jewish population.