The Campaign of Italy
1943-1945
Introduction
War in Italy 1943-1945
Here is the tragic story of modern Italy in her saddest hour. In 1940 Mussolini and the King plunged Italy into war with France and Britain, believing that a few days' fighting would earn her a victor's seat at the Conference table.
After three years of war, the King overthrew Mussolini, hoping for a separate Armistice with the Allies and freedom from the Germans. These hopes were illusory. All went wrong. From September 1943 until the end of April 1945 Italy suffered the disaster of being occupied by two conquering armies at war with each other, and the peninsula became a battleground. Moreover, Italians, until then united in war against the Allies, divided in Fascists supporter of Germans and Badogliani ( from Marshal Badoglio, the new Prime Minister) supporter of Allies.
Unfortunately Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, nourished a hatred for Italy dating from 1935, when Mussolini humiliated him in Rome by rejecting out of hand British proposal for concessions to Italy at the expense of Abyssinia. When Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosvelt agreed at Casablanca in January 1943 on the "unconditional surrender" formula for Germany and Japan, neither wanted to apply it to Italy. But Eden railroaded the War Cabinet into insisting on the inclusion of Italy.
The demand of unconditional surrender sapped the morale of anti-Fascists. When Mussolini was toplled on 25 July 1943, no plans had been made to land Allies troops in Italy before the Germans were strong enough to repel them.
During Badoglio's forty-five days of rule in Rome there where a series of lost opportunities. The most poignant was the rejection by General Carboni (commander of the strong mechanized forces defending Rome) with the vacillating Badoglio's approval, of Eisehower's offer to land 82 US Airborne Division on the airfields around Rome. Convincing evidence that this operation ("Giant Two") would have been a success can be found in Italian and German sources, as well as American. If Rome had been taken in the first wave of the Allied onslaught on Italy, the German Army would have had to withdraw to the north; and if Italy, at the moment the news of the Armistice hit the world,could have been seen fighting side by side with US troops to defend Rome and drive the Germans out of Italy, her prestige would have been high and her subsequent treatment by the Allies more generous. As it was, Badoglio and the King gave up the fight and fled ignominiously to Brindisi, so that the Italian Army, without any form of leadership, disintegrated all over the homeland, and the units who stayed intact were bundled off as prisoners to Germany.
It is difficult to explain why the Italian Army on the peninsula and abroad disitengrated on 9 September, while the Navy and the Air Forceobeyed orders and escaped to Allied bases... Hitler ordered that all Italian troops fighting against the Germans were to be treated as francs-tireurs and shot as they surrendered, in order to minimize Italian military co-operation with the Allies; his generals obeyed these criminals orders. Generals Lanz and von Weichs bear the main responsability for the horrifying massacres of surrendering Italian soldiers in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and the Aegean; they must be rated among the worst Nazi war criminals, but their Nuremberg trials have been overlooked by historians.
Mussolini was fully informed of the details of the massacres of the surrenderind Italian soldiers. To his eternal shame he made no protest to Hitler. Mussolini too must have felt wholesale massacres were the best way to prevent Italian forces fighting with the Allies against Germany.
In this work, I wish draft the Campaign of Italy, the long and heavy fighting along the Italian Peninsula from the Salerno Landings ( September 9 th 1943 at the surrender of German and fascist forces May 2nd 1945).