The Second World War

by John Keegan

  There was the rub. Italy had won its place among the victors; but, although 600,000 young Italians had given their lives to the Allied cause, neither Britain nor France would allow Italy the spoils it felt it had won. France and Britain divided between themselves Germany’s colonies and Turkey’s Arabian dominions, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. All Italy got was a small slice of former Austrian territory and a foothold in the Near East which proved untenable. Moreover, when the United States and Britain decided in 1921 to fix treaty limits on the size of fleet which the Allied powers were to be allowed to operate, Italy was obliged to accept constraints which effectively set its naval strength at the same level as the Royal Navy’s in the Mediterranean – a sea in which it reasonably felt it had claims to be predominant.

  The disparity between Italy’s entitlement, as Italians perceived it, and her post-war inheritance lay at the root of the fascist revolution which overwhelmed established order in the kingdom in 1922. Mussolini’s appeal to the Italian working and lower-middle class was only partly economic; it was equally that of a veteran to veterans. At a time of recession, unemployment and financial turmoil, he not only offered work and security of savings but also promised honour to ex-servicemen and the territorial recompense to the nation that it had not received at the peace conference. The transformation of Libya, annexed from Turkey during the Balkan wars of 1912-13, into an overseas ‘empire’ was followed by the conquest of Abyssinia in 1936 and the annexation of Albania in 1939. Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War was part and parcel of Mussolini’s assurance to Italians that their country would cut a figure on the world stage; and that was ultimately the motivation also for his decision to enter the Second World War on the German side in June 1940. His efforts to build an alliance centred on Austria, as an alternative to the Italo-German Axis, had collapsed when Austria was incorporated into the Reich by the Anschluss of 1938, which automatically devalued his bilateral treaties with Hungary and Yugoslavia. The Anschluss determined that Mussolini should become Hitler’s partner in the Second World War.

  Circumstances dictated, however, that Italy should never be an equal partner, hard though Mussolini strove to make himself one. It was not only that Italy’s economy could support only one-tenth of the military expenditure met by Germany (Italy $746 million, Germany $7415 million in 1938); it was also that Italy’s military strength had declined absolutely during the inter-war period, so that it was less a match for Britain and France in 1940 (as long as the war with France lasted) than it had been for Austria in 1915. Italian divisions were weaker in infantry and artillery than twenty-five years earlier, partly because numbers were diverted, entirely for Mussolini’s political conceit, into the Fascist Party’s dubiously valuable Blackshirt formations. Italian manpower had continued to decline through the surge of emigration to the United States. Italian equipment, though elegant and brilliantly engineered, was produced by artisan methods which could not match the output of British – and eventually American – factories working to volume demands. The Italian services also suffered from the disadvantage of having been driven by Mussolini’s urge to national aggrandisement into rearming too early. Italian tanks and aircraft were a whole generation outdated by their British equivalents; when confronted by American equipment, which reached the British in 1942, they appeared antediluvian.

  There was a final and ultimately disabling impediment to Italy’s effective commitment to war on Germany’s side: the Italians harboured little or no hostility towards the enemies Hitler had chosen for them. Mild Francophobia may be an Italian sentiment; but the Italian upper class is notably Anglophile, while Italy’s peasants and artisans have high regard for the United States, whose known hostility to Nazism influenced the national outlook from the start – and decisively so after the American entry into the war. Consequently it was a half-hearted Italian army which crossed swords with the British in East Africa and the Western Desert in 1940-1. Its confidence had not been improved by its poor showing against the Greeks in October-November 1940. It was severely shaken by Wavell’s counter-offensive in December and, despite the arrival of the Afrikakorps to its assistance in February 1941, it never really recovered. Brilliant though Rommel was as a general, and notably simpatico though the ordinary Italian soldiers found him, their commanders could not but remember that the origins of his reputation lay in his exploits at Caporetto in November 1917, when he had captured several thousand Italians at the head of 200 Württemberg mountaineers.

  By the end of the campaign in Africa in May 1943, the total number of Italians who had become prisoners of the Allies – in East Africa in 1941, in Libya in 1941-2 and in Tunisia in 1943 – exceeded 350,000, more than the number of those who had garrisoned Mussolini’s African empire at the start of the war. Even before the Tunisian débâcle, the Italian army, which Mussolini had been planning the year before to raise to a strength of ninety divisions, had equipment for only thirty-one. The loss of so many of the best divisions in Africa, so soon after the catastrophe suffered by the Italian Eighth Army (220,000 strong) at Stalingrad, reduced it to a shadow; and these twin crises drove the Italian high command to examine the wisdom of continuing to lend Mussolini and the fascist regime its support. Italy’s generals were disproportionately drawn from the northern society of Savoy-Piedmont, seat of the royal house where their loyalty ultimately lay. They had acquiesced in fascism as long as it favoured the monarchy’s and the army’s interests. Once it became clear that it was failing to do so, they began to reconsider their position. During the summer of 1943, and particularly as Italian cities began to feel the weight of Allied air attack, they were driven into plotting Mussolini’s removal. The trigger to action was the appearance of Allied landing forces on the southern coast of Sicily on 9-10 July 1943.

  The decision to invade Sicily after the expulsion of the Axis from Tunisia had not been taken without disagreement between the British and Americans. To the Americans, Husky, as the operation was to be known, risked diverting forces from and even setting back the Second Front. To the British it seemed to promise highly desirable if intangible benefits: the domination of the central Mediterranean, from which threats could be levelled at the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis in southern France and the Balkans; the humiliation of Mussolini, perhaps leading to his downfall; the acquisition of a stepping-stone towards the location of the invasion of Italy itself, if that subsequently proved easy, desirable or necessary. The British eventually had their way, at the Trident conference in Washington in May 1943, but then only because the changing circumstances persuaded the Americans that a Second Front could not be opened that year. In the event, the invasion took Hitler even more by surprise than Mussolini – or his Italian enemies. Hitler harboured no illusions about the sympathies of the Italian ruling class. On 14 May he had told his generals:

  In Italy we can rely only on the Duce. There are strong fears that he may be got rid of or neutralised in some way. The royal family, all leading members of the officer corps, the clergy, the Jews [still at liberty; for all Mussolini’s faults he was not anti-Semitic] and broad sectors of the civil service are hostile or negative towards us. . . . The broad masses are apathetic and lacking in leadership. The Duce is now marshalling his fascist guard about him. But the real power is in the hands of others. Moreover he is uncertain of himself in military affairs and has to rely on his hostile or incompetent generals as is evident from the incomprehensible reply – at least coming from the Duce – turning down or evading [my] offer of troops.

  Hitler had just offered Mussolini five German divisions, to join the four reformed in Sicily and southern Italy from the rear parties of those lost in Tunisia, but his offer had been refused. As a precaution, plans had been prepared for the occupation of Italy (Operation Alarich, so named after the fifth-century Teutonic conqueror of Rome). However, although Mussolini warned that he expected the Allied army released by its victory in Tunisia to attack Sicily, Hitler insisted that the island was too heavily def
ended to be taken easily and that the Anglo-American descent would fall on Sardinia, Corsica or the Greek Peloponnese. The spectre of a landing in Greece aroused Hitler’s worst forebodings; it threatened not only the opening of a ‘third front’ in the rear of the Ostheer but also the interruption of supply of Germany’s most vital raw materials, bauxite, copper and chrome from the Balkans and, most precious of all, oil from Romania’s wells at Ploesti.

  Operation Husky

  A remarkable Allied deception plan involving the planting of a corpse bearing fabricated top-secret papers had further helped to convince Hitler that any enemy invasion fleet detected in the Mediterranean would be heading for Greece, Corsica or Sardinia, not Italy. Even when an earthquake bombardment of Sicily’s offshore island, Pantelleria, forced its commander to capitulate to the Allies on 11 June, he still refused to consider the possibility of an invasion of Italy. Hitler, moreover, was distracted by events elsewhere – by the intensification of the combined bomber offensive against the Reich, by the worsening of the German situation in the Battle of the Atlantic and by last-minute decisions over the launching of the Kursk offensive (Operation Citadel) in Russia. He had also just changed headquarters again. Since March, after a prolonged sojourn at his Werwolf headquarters in the Ukraine, he had been at his holiday house, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. He left there only at the end of June for his gloomy forest retreat, Wolfschanze at Rastenburg in East Prussia, and was re-established there a bare four days before Citadel began on 5 July. Since it was on the outcome of Citadel, designed to destroy the Red Army’s offensive potential, that the course of the war on the Eastern Front in 1943 depended, it was understandable that his attention should have been divided at the moment when Patton’s and Montgomery’s divisions began their descent west and east of Cape Passero on 9 July.

  The Allies had brought eight seaborne and two airborne divisions to the assault – an armada which greatly exceeded not only OKW’s forecast of their amphibious capability but also the Axis force deployed on the island. Alfredo Guzzoni, the Italian general in overall command, disposed of twelve divisions, but of these six were static Italian divisions of negligible worth; four other Italian divisions, though capable of manoeuvre, were no match for the Allies; only the 15th Panzergrenadier and the newly raised Hermann Goering Panzer Division (the elite of the Luftwaffe’s ground troops) were first class. Despite the disparity in strength and the surprise the invaders achieved, however, Operation Husky, as the Sicily landing was codenamed, went less smoothly than planned. The Allied airborne forces, drawn from the US 82nd and British 1st Airborne Divisions, suffered enormous casualties when inexperienced pilots dropped them into the sea and nervous anti-aircraft gunners shot down their aircraft. A key operation by British paratroopers to seize the Primosole bridge south of Mount Etna on the fourth day of the invasion proved particularly costly when the German 1st Parachute Division counter-attacked.

  However, the seaborne landings mounted against Italian ‘coast’ units were uniformly successful, and some of the ‘defenders’ even helped unload the invaders’ landing craft. On 15 July Major-General Sir Harold Alexander, Patton’s and Montgomery’s superior, was able to issue a directive for the final elimination of Axis forces on the island. While Patton occupied the western half, Montgomery was to advance each side of Mount Etna and secure Messina at the north-eastern tip, thus cutting off the Axis garrison’s line of retreat into the toe of Italy. In the event, Patton made rapid progress against light resistance, but Montgomery, opposed by the Hermann Goering Division, found it impossible to pass east of Mount Etna on the short route to Messina and was forced to redeploy his divisions to pass to the west. On 20 July Alexander accordingly ordered Patton to delay his assault on Palermo and Trapani and instead turn eastward to drive along the coast road to Messina. Hitler, who had sent a German liaison officer, Frido von Senger und Etterlin, to oversee Guzzoni’s conduct of the battle, and five German divisions as reinforcements to the Italian army, now ordered two of them, the 1st Parachute and the 29th Panzergrenadier, into Sicily to stiffen the defence.

  Confronted by these forces, the Allied advance slowed. It was not until 2 August that Patton and Montgomery had formed a line running south-east and north-west between Mount Etna and the north coast of the island. Even then they moved forward only by using seaborne forces in a series of amphibious hooks (8, 11, 15 and 16 August) to unseat the enemy from his strong defensive positions. Nevertheless, Guzzoni had accepted as early as 3 August that his situation was ultimately indefensible and had begun to evacuate his Italian units across the Straits of Messina. The Germans began to evacuate on 11 August; sailing at night, they largely evaded Allied air attack and were even able to save a large portion of their equipment (9800 vehicles). The Allies made a triumphal entry into Messina on 17 August; but the enemy had escaped.

  Although Operation Husky failed to inflict much damage on the enemy’s troops, it had indeed secured the Allied line of communications through the Mediterranean to the Middle East; but, since the wars there and in North Africa were now over, that was a hollow achievement. It had not by any visible sign brought Turkey nearer to joining the Allies; it had not diverted German divisions from Russia, since all those sent (after 24 July) to Italy, the 16th and 26th Panzer, 3rd and 29th Panzergrenadier and 1st Parachute Divisions, had come from the west. It remained to be seen whether it would exert sufficient pressure on the anti-fascist forces in Italy to bring about a reversal of alliances.

  The Americans, as represented by General George Marshall, the chief of staff, in any case doubted the value of a reversal of alliances. As always they held to the view that direct assault into north-west Europe was the only quick and certain means of toppling Hitler. They had been deflected from this position by practicalities in 1942 but had never been converted to it by argument. They suspected (in retrospect, rightly so) the logic of Churchill’s commitment to a ‘peripheral’ strategy against what he called the ‘soft underbelly’ of Hitler’s Europe, better seen as its dewlap. Hitler valued Italy because its loss would be a blow to his prestige and because it offered flank protection to the Balkans, where he had genuinely vital economic and strategic interests. However, if he had been able to eavesdrop on General Marshall’s assessment of Italy as a secondary front where operations would ‘create a vacuum into which it is essential to pour more and more means’, he would have wholeheartedly agreed.

  A reversal of alliances was nevertheless at hand. The arrival of the Allies in Sicily and the incontrovertible evidence of how limply the Italian forces in the island had opposed them now persuaded Italy’s ruling class that it must change sides. Churchill, in conference with Roosevelt at Quebec (Quadrant, 14-23 August), remarked when he heard the first news of approaches from Mussolini’s enemies: ‘Badoglio [the senior Italian general] admits he is going to double-cross someone . . . it is . . . likely that Hitler will be the one to be tricked.’ Hitler himself had formed the same impression on 19 July. While the battles of Sicily and Kursk were both in progress, he had made the long flight to Italy to see his fellow dictator and assure him of his support, in a form of words intended to disguise his intention of neutralising the Italian army and seizing the defensible portion of the peninsula with his own troops at the first sign of treachery. On 25 July a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council requested Mussolini’s resignation as Prime Minister. When he meekly obeyed a summons to the royal palace by the king, he was arrested and imprisoned. King Victor Emmanuel assumed direct command of the armed forces and Marshal Pietro Badoglio became Prime Minister.

  The new government publicly announced that it would remain in the war on Hitler’s side but secretly entered immediately into direct negotiations with the Allies. The first meeting took place in Sicily on 5 August, the day before Raffaele Guariglia, the new Italian Foreign Minister, gave the German ambassador his word of honour that Italy was not negotiating with the Allies. Eisenhower was soon afterwards empowered by Roosevelt and Churchill to conclude an armistice, but on terms m
uch harsher than Badoglio expected. While the Italians quibbled, preparation for a landing on the mainland went forward. The Italians hoped that the Allies would land north of Rome and seize the capital by parachute landing, thus forestalling the moves they guessed Hitler had in train to occupy the peninsula himself. Eventually, on 31 August, they were presented with an ultimatum: either to accept the terms, which were in effect unconditional – as Churchill on 28 July had told the House of Commons they would be – or to suffer the consequences, which meant German occupation. On 3 September the Italians signed, believing that they were being given time to prepare themselves against the German intervention they knew must follow as soon as news of the armistice became public. Only five days later, however, on 8 September, Eisenhower made the announcement, just a few hours before his troops began landing south of Naples at Salerno.

  Hitler’s counter-measures

  The Salerno landing (Operation Avalanche) was not the first by the Allies on the Italian mainland. On 3 September Montgomery’s Eighth Army had crossed the Straits of Messina to take Reggio Calabria as a preliminary to the occupation of the toe of Italy. Hitler had nevertheless decided to discount this move as unimportant, a view shared by Montgomery, who was disgruntled at being shunted into a secondary role. The Salerno landing, by contrast, stirred Hitler to order Operation Alarich to begin. Although he failed to prevent the sailing of the Italian fleet to Malta as required by the armistice terms, the Luftwaffe did succeed in sinking the battleship Roma en route by release of one of its new weapons, a guided glider bomb. In almost every other respect, Operation Alarich (now codenamed Achse) worked with smoothness.