Italy Since 1800 by Roger Abaslom

Author:Roger Abaslom [Abaslom, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General
ISBN: 9781317901228
Google: Tnx_BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-11T01:24:18+00:00

For the next 19 months Italy became a field of desperate and muddled struggle between armies, classes, and ideologies in many perversely paradoxical combinations which added to the complexity of a situation whose outcomes no one could foresee, far less command.

On the battlefield itself the contending forces were unusually heterogeneous. On one side the forces of the German Reich, an ‘alliance’ between Germans, Austrians (the latter only incorporated in the Reich for four years), and a motley collection of Czechoslovaks, Russians, Ukrainians and Cossacks were joined, within a few weeks of the Italian surrender to the Allies, by the armed formations of Mussolini’s born-again Italian Social Republic, an equally uneasy mixture of reluctant conscripts and élite Fascist units.

Fighting its way northward against these defending forces was an even more heterogeneous army, officially known as the United Nations. The British contingents within the Allied Armies in Italy consisted of units drawn from almost every ethnic group then within the British Empire, while the US units included a segregated Negro Division and a Combat Group of Japanese Americans. Other contributions, of various magnitude and at different times, were made by Free French units (mainly Senegalese, Algerians and Moroccans), General Anders’ Polish Corps, Royal Hellenic Greeks, a Brazilian Expeditionary Force, and a Palestine Jewish Brigade. After a few months the Allies grudgingly allowed an Italian contribution to be made, in the form of Combat Groups equal to some six divisions, drawn from units of the Italian army reconstituted in the south of the country.

These Italians were at least as ill-assorted as their countrymen fighting with the Germans. As well as being merely ‘co-belligerents’, insult was added to injury by the powerful anti-Italian stereotypes persisting among the Allied military and occupation authorities whose distrust and contempt were expressed at every level.

For the same 19 months, between these fires, the Italian people experienced the traumatising impact of a modern war, whose weight and extent in terms of explosives rained upon the infrastructures of the economy and of civil society, was unprecedented, and far beyond the imaginative capacity of a population whose experience of modernity had not gone beyond the superficial effects of Fascist modernisation. This experience, too, both compounded and contradicted that of the preceding 21 years, adding new polarisations to old cleavages.

The Royal Italian government in the south, though recognised as the signatory of the instrument of surrender, had virtually no influence upon Allied occupation policies at this stage. Until March 1944 the six anti-fascist parties which had emerged in Rome in September 1943 to form a Central Committee of National Liberation claiming to represent the true Italy, refused to have any dealings with it. No one would take an oath of loyalty to the monarch, Vittorio Emanuele, who was almost universally blamed for both the advent of Fascism and the bungled manner of Italy’s change of sides, but it was not at all clear whether the Committee’s bickering members (dubbed ‘political ghosts’ by Churchill) could command any added measure of popular support, not to mention enthusiasm.

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