The Fall of Mussolini by Morgan Philip;

Author:Morgan, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2007-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

6

The Invasion and Occupation of Italy, and the Kingdom of the South, 1943–1945

IN spring 1943, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, commander of the British Eighth Army, gave an order to the head of MI9, the military intelligence service responsible for escaped prisoners of war in Axis-occupied Europe, which in turn was to be communicated secretly to the camps in northern and central Italy which were holding over 85,000 captured Allied servicemen. The instruction was to the effect that in the event of an Italian surrender, Allied POWs should ‘keep fit and stay put’ and await the arrival of Allied troops.1 In the actual event of the Italian armistice of 8 September 1943, and in light of what happened afterwards, this was rather stupid advice. But at the time it was made, the order reflected a confidence among Allied military commanders that Italy could be easily and rapidly conquered and occupied. Apparently, their military plans anticipated that after crossing from Sicily to Calabria on the mainland in September 1943, the Allied forces would take the Italian capital city by Christmas 1943 and the rest of the country by the summer of 1944.

In the event, Allied forces spent the Christmas of 1943 stalled at the first of the Germans’ major defensive lines, the Gustav Line, straddling south central Italy from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, which protected Rome and prevented the Allies from relieving the beleaguered Allied bridgehead south of Rome, at Anzio. Rome was not liberated from German occupation until June 1944. During the summer of 1944, Allied forces liberated much of central Italy. But the advance was already slowing down again by the autumn before the Gothic Line, another German fortified defensive line thrown across Italy from near Pisa, on the Tuscan Mediterranean coast, to near Rimini on the Adriatic coast. There were advances, but no complete breakthrough, in the ensuing battles on the Gothic Line, and Allied forces spent another winter in neutral gear, this time south of Bologna and the Po valley. The rest of central and northern Italy was liberated in the spring of 1945.

There were political, strategic, and military reasons which explain why Italy, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the soft underbelly of the Axis’, turned out to be a ‘tough old gut’, in the words of US General Mark Clark, commanding the American Fifth Army in Italy. Churchill, already thinking of the political shape of post-war Europe, was all for pushing hard in the Italian war and getting Allied troops into central and south-eastern Europe to pre-empt Soviet armies advancing from the east. For President Roosevelt, however, and his military commanders, the only ‘second front’ which would satisfy Stalin and the USSR and win the war against Nazi Germany was the invasion of continental Europe from the west through France. While never losing his enthusiasm for the Italian campaign, Churchill was obliged to recognize that the Allied priority was the planning and implementation of the Normandy landings in France, which took place in June 1944.

Certainly, after the Allied

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