The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  The nazis’ rapid conquests of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 convinced some waverers that Germany would win the war. Yet Mussolini continued to hesitate until France was close to collapse in June. Believing that Italy would somehow gain prestige as well as territory by defeating an already defeated enemy, he then announced a ‘lightning war’ against France and Britain to a crowd in Rome which, as leading fascists admitted, showed little enthusiasm for the enterprise. Many Italians were undoubtedly embarrassed about joining a war after Paris had fallen and the British army had scuttled back across the Channel. Yet a large majority did not want to fight anyway: even Victor Emanuel later claimed he was against the war although, as in May 1915 and October 1922, he did not try very hard to make the right decision.

  On 17 June the French asked Germany for an armistice, and three days later Mussolini ordered an attack on them. An Italian army was dispatched to the Alps, where it suffered many casualties and failed to defeat a far smaller French force that suffered hardly any. Once France was out of the war, the Duce made territorial demands in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, but the Germans told him to curb his appetite until Britain had also been defeated. In the meantime they suggested he used his huge army in Libya to attack the British in Egypt and capture the Suez Canal. Yet Mussolini was now more interested in conquest close to home and, instead of attacking an enemy power in Africa, he wanted to invade a neutral country in Europe, Greece. In October 1940 a large Italian army duly assembled in Albania and invaded Greece, where it was stopped by numerically inferior opponents and forced to retreat. By then the Duce had at last ordered an attack on Egypt, but the results were even more disastrous. Graziani’s army of over 250,000 men was defeated in a series of engagements by 36,000 British troops, and 135,000 prisoners were taken. The Italians fared no better at sea: after defeats by the British at Taranto in November 1940 and at Cape Matapan the following spring, the navy remained in harbour and played little further part in the war.

  Hitler had made an offer of German tanks for Italy’s Egyptian campaign, which Mussolini had rejected because he wanted his troops to win glory on their own. As a result, the Führer had to send an army under Field Marshal Rommel to defeat the British in north Africa and regain the initiative. The Italians also had to be rescued in Greece, which the Germans quickly overran in an operation that delayed their invasion of Russia and thus contributed to their later defeats on the Eastern Front. This series of military failures reduced Italy to a very subordinate role in the Axis. It had already lost Addis Ababa and Italian Somaliland, and the main task of its armies was now to garrison the Balkans while the Germans and later the Japanese did most of the fighting. The behaviour of their forces in south-eastern Europe rivalled the savagery of their allies and buried the myth of ‘the good soldier Gino’. After provoking guerrilla warfare from partisan groups in Yugoslavia, Italian troops carried out extensive reprisals against civilians. In the province of Ljubljana alone, a thousand hostages were shot, 8,000 other Slovenes were killed, and 35,000 people were deported to concentration camps.39

  In July 1943 Anglo-American forces invaded Sicily, landed a few weeks later on the Italian mainland and spent the next twenty months slogging their way north through the Apennines against a German defence brilliantly conducted without air support. Soon after the landings in Sicily, the Grand Council in the presence of Mussolini approved a motion to return military command to Victor Emanuel, a move that led to the dismissal of the Duce and his eventual imprisonment at a skiing resort in the Apennines. He was replaced as prime minister by the vain and elderly Marshal Badoglio, a disastrous choice.* Together with the king, this former chief of staff dithered for six weeks, remaining in the Axis, until the imminence of the Allied landings at Salerno forced them to accept Anglo-American terms for an armistice. They continued to dither even after that, failing to do anything to prevent German reinforcements from rushing south to occupy the peninsula as far down as Naples. Although they had promised to help the Anglo-American forces, the two changed their minds and even cancelled an Allied attack on Rome, which Badoglio himself had requested, on the very day it was planned to take place. Fearful for their personal safety, premier and sovereign fled across the peninsula to Pescara and, accompanied by hundreds of courtiers and generals, took ship to Brindisi, far from the threat of the Germans. It was a very thorough abdication of responsibility. Badoglio did not even inform his fellow ministers he was leaving and gave no orders to his troops except to tell them not to attack the Germans. Left on their own in increasingly chaotic circumstances, Italian forces offered little resistance to the Germans in Italy or the Balkans, and nearly a million of them were quickly captured; on the island of Cephalonia, where Italians did resist, 6,000 soldiers and prisoners of war were murdered by the nazis. In mid-October, from the safety of Apulia, Victor Emanuel declared war on Germany, a move that gained Italy the status of ‘co-belligerent’, eased the country’s post-war relations with the victors and enabled hundreds of men to avoid trials for war crimes.

  The collapse of the state made it easier for the Germans to rescue Mussolini from his mountain prison and install him as their puppet ruler of the Republic of Salò, a new fascist state based on Lake Garda in the nazi-held north. Many young men volunteered to fight for this new entity, which intellectuals such as Gentile, Papini and Marinetti were also prepared to support. Mussolini himself returned to the beliefs of his youth, insisting once more that fascism was a revolutionary ideology and that industry should be nationalized. Yet he was too demoralized and too powerless to do much except whine about the defects of his countrymen. The chief significance of Salò was that it encouraged the growth of the Resistance, the Italian partisans, and within a short time led to a civil war in the north marked by terrible atrocities, most of them committed by the republic’s ‘black brigades’.

  Even in his impotence Mussolini deluded himself with the thought that he was a great man, comparable to Napoleon, and that he had been brought down by the character of the Italians. Even Michelangelo, he had earlier pointed out, had ‘needed marble to make his statues. If he had had nothing else except clay, he would simply have been a potter.’ At Salò Mussolini grumbled that he had tried to turn a sheep into a lion and had failed; the beast was still ‘a bleating sheep’.40 Yet he himself did not die like the lion he had pretended to be: in April 1945 he ran away to the north, disguised as a German, with wads of cash in his pockets. Captured by communist partisans on the western shore of Lake Como, his final moment may have been slightly more impressive. According to one report, he opened the collar of his coat and told his executioner to aim for the heart.

  The flight of Badoglio and Victor Emanuel marks one of the lowest points in the history of united Italy. The nation dissolved: all real power was now in the hands of the Germans, the British and the Americans. Italy might be built anew, but it could never be the same Italy.

  Both Italians and foreigners have liked to think of fascism as an aberration, as an unlucky and almost accidental episode in the history of a constitutional country. Sforza regarded ‘the vain show of the fascist years’ as ‘only a brief interlude of unreality’,41 while Croce described the dictatorship as a ‘parenthesis’ in his nation’s story, implying that it was not closely connected with what happened before or after. The genuine connection, so it was claimed, was between the regimes that preceded and succeeded Mussolini. The young liberal Piero Gobetti may have got closer to the truth when he observed in the 1920s that fascism was part of Italy’s ‘autobiography’, a logical consequence of unification’s failure to be a moral revolution supported by the mass of the people. That fascism was ‘the child of the Risorgimento’ was also Gentile’s verdict, a view much derided in the years to come but supported intrinsically at the time by the fact that so many liberal fathers had fascist sons without having family ruptures.

  Fascists liked to present themselves as a continuation of the Risorgimento but at the same time as a breach with its liberal heirs. The exercise
was never very convincing because, apart from the abolition of parliamentary elections, the fascist ‘revolution’ changed little of substance, certainly in comparison with the French Revolution of 1789 or the Spanish Revolution of 1931. It retained the monarchy, protected private property, exalted the family and established good relations with the Church. Abroad its policies were aggressive and avaricious but not so very different from those of some preceding governments. Both Crispi and the earlier Victor Emanuel had wanted war in Europe and colonies outside, and they and many others had spoken in tones almost as bellicose as those of Mussolini.

  The real break in Italy’s twentieth-century history came not in 1922 but at the end of the Second World War. The essence of Risorgimento thinking, which had been liberal, nationalist and anti-clerical, evaporated after 1945 and was replaced by the anti-nationalist ideologies of communism and christian democracy. At the same time Italy abandoned its pretensions to become a Great Power and concentrated, with far more success, on achieving prosperity for its citizens.

  12

  Cold War Italy

  CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS

  In Verona’s Piazza Brà, beside the great Roman amphitheatre, a small patch of ground contains four commemorative images of united Italy. Two of them are by now familiar and obligatory: a statue of Victor Emanuel II on a horse waving his sword, and a marble tablet on a house recording the window from which Garibaldi had sworn ‘Rome or Death!’ The third, a rarer species, is a bronze sculpture of a woman representing Italy, surrounded by a marble memorial listing the names of young Veronesi who were sent to kill or be killed in Africa: ‘To her sons who died heroically in Libya’. Close to the equestrian monarch is another unusual statue, that of a young fighter of the Resistance, handsome and fearless, a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscription with the words, ‘To those who died for Liberty’. This fourth memorial is the significant one for modern Italy because it represents atonement for fascism, it symbolizes the rebirth of the nation in 1943, it tries to assure those who observe it that the country was in essence anti-fascist. Yet like the other three, it is representing something that is at least partly a myth.

  After the armistice in 1943 Italians joined the Resistance for a variety of motives. Some were anti-fascists who wanted to defeat fascism, some were patriots who wanted to expel invaders, and more were communists who aimed for both of these things and a political revolution as well. Many, however, simply drifted into it because they were on the run from German and fascist forces. Although they were unskilled in open combat, the partisans proved to be effective in guerrilla warfare: they blew up bridges and killed fascist officials, they helped liberate the cities of the north from the German occupation, they punctured the credibility of Salò and they signalled the redemption of Italy. For some twenty months they fought courageously, and about 40,000 of them were killed. Yet there were never very many of them, perhaps 9,000 at the end of 1943, some 80,000 at the end of 1944, and about 100,000 by March 1945, when victory was certain.1 Comparable numbers had volunteered to fight for the Republic of Salò even though most of them must have known that defeat was inevitable. The Resistance was thus not the nation in arms: it was about one-third of 1 per cent of it in arms, roughly the same proportion that had volunteered to fight the Austrians in 1848. Nor were its achievements of the magnitude claimed on its memorials, which sometimes leave the impression that the partisans ‘vanquished the nazi-fascist tyranny’ by themselves. At the entrance of the town hall of Bologna photographs are still displayed of partisans liberating the city without giving a hint that Allied forces had helped them to do so.

  Official Italy has liked to claim that, even if the Resistance was not numerically large, it was supported by the bulk of the population. This again is not true. For reasons of self-preservation many Italians preferred to remain neutral in the fratricidal war between the partisans and their fellow countrymen who fought for Salò. Many feared the partisans because they stole food and money, shot suspected collaborators and left villages vulnerable to reprisals from German and fascist forces.2 More than 10,000 civilians were executed in revenge for attacks on nazis and fascists. In March 1944 communist partisans detonated a bomb in Rome’s Via Rasella and killed thirty-two policemen who had been recruited by the nazis in the province of Bolzano (which Germany had seized after the armistice) and a couple of civilians as well. Hitler was so enraged by the event that he demanded an instant reprisal, and a decision was made to kill ten Italians for each dead policeman, which meant at first 320 executions, then 330 when one of the wounded died, and finally 335 after a counting error. They were murdered in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in retaliation for a terrorist attack that had no impact on the course of the war but caused 370 deaths as well as misery for the dead men’s families. Some Italians took the view that the communist perpetrators should have given themselves up for execution and thus spared the lives of at least a few innocent people.

  It used to be joked in Italy and outside that on 25 July 1943 – the day Mussolini was arrested by the king – the Italian people had gone to bed as fascists and woken up as anti-fascists. While this was of course an over-simplification, there was some truth in the jibe. After the Second World War Italians consistently underestimated the numbers of them who had been fascists just as they exaggerated the strength and importance of those who had been anti-fascists. For them the Resistance became a sacred experience which could not be profaned because it represented reparation for fascism and credibility for the future. It was the true successor to the Risorgimento. In the words of Carla Capponi, a partisan and a future communist member of parliament, ‘In the Resistance each of us found our mother country. We felt [our] country was the country of the Risorgimento; of democracy and liberty.’3 The moral sense of the Resistance was succinctly expressed in a poem by Piero Calamandrei, which was later reproduced in an inscription on the town hall of Cuneo: ‘This pact of free men who joined voluntarily out of dignity, not out of hatred, determined to redeem the shame and terror of the world’.

  In September 1943 the Italian government had been forced to accept an armistice that was in effect a surrender. Yet the king’s later declaration of war on Germany, and the ‘co-belligerency’ thus acquired, convinced many Italians that they were Hitler’s victims rather than his allies and that they were in fact ‘co-victors’ in 1945. This feeling was brazenly reflected in Italy’s attitude to Austria after the war. There were plenty of foreigners, including nearly 200 British MPs, who believed that the Alto Adige, the former South Tyrol, should be given to the newly independent state of Austria. Italy was adamant that it should not, retorting that the scheme was iniquitous because Austria had fought with the nazis from beginning to end and had not even produced a resistance movement. The Italian position thus implied that there was a wide moral gap between a nation that had been invaded and annexed – and thus forced to fight for the Reich – and one that had voluntarily joined Hitler even if, as a result of military defeat, it had only stayed the course for three and a quarter years.

  Nearly two years of war on Italian soil had left the country a battered and unhappy place, much of it in ruins after the Allied bombing campaigns. Food shortages were everywhere, and so was the black market, flourishing in the trade of items such as salt and tobacco. The hunger and poverty in Naples shocked outsiders who went there. Little girls gathered cigarette butts and sold them on trays in the street; over 40,000 women worked as prostitutes; even ladies of elegance went to the San Carlo in coats made from stolen army blankets. Much of the population survived on bowls of maccheroni which were distributed both by nuns and by volunteers of the Salvation Army.

  Retribution may not have been so extensive in Italy as it was in France because the fascist regime had not excited as much revulsion among Italians as the Vichy collaboration with Germany had among the French. All the same, some 12–15,000 fascists were pursued and killed at the time of liberation, and thousands more perished over the next couple of years. Bombs were thrown
by extremists on the Left and the Right, and communists murdered the editor of the Milanese newspaper that had revealed the name of the partisan who shot Mussolini.* Some fascist leaders, such as Starace, Farinacci and Gentile, were captured and shot, but other senior figures of the regime, including Badoglio and Grandi, died peacefully as prosperous octogenarians. Graziani, who had been defence minister for Salò, was tried and imprisoned but released after a few months, after which he became honorary president of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the neo-fascist party sometimes known by its members as Mussolini sempre immortale.

  There could be no real purge of the administration without destroying it altogether: the civil service would have had no civil servants because all of them had been obliged to join the Fascist Party, and the universities would have had no professors because all these had sworn an oath of allegiance to the regime. In 1946 the government thus issued a general amnesty for former fascists and at the same time permitted the MSI to operate, a move convenient for the other parties, which could now demonstrate their anti-fascism by scorning it. So lenient a policy left former fascist officials in control of local administration as well as the civil service: as late as 1960 all the police chiefs, all their deputies and all but two of the provincial prefects had been functionaries under Mussolini.5 The easiest form of epurazione (purging) was the time-honoured one of changing street-names, erasing those associated with the regime and replacing them with victims of fascism, so that almost all towns soon acquired a Via or a Piazza Matteotti and many had a Via Amendola as well. New boulevards often received more sonorous names. In Modena the Viale Martiri della Libertà comes from the Viale delle Rimembranze and passes into the Viale dei Caduti in Guerra.