Allies and Italians under Occupation

Sicily and Southern Italy 1943-45

I. Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230359284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Using original documents, the Allied Occupation of southern Italy, particularly Sicily and Naples, is illustrated by examining crime and unrest by Allied soldiers, deserters, rogue troops and Italian civilians from drunkenness, theft, rape, and murder to riots, demonstrations, black marketeering and prostitution.

Part I

Occupation

1

Introduction

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland; on 3 September, Britain came to its ally’s aid and declared war. Nine months later, in June 1940, Benito Mussolini, having seen Hitler’s swift success, joined his fellow Fascist as an Axis partner in what he assumed would be a short and triumphant war for Italy. This was not to be, and by the end of 1942, Allied success in the North African campaign looked increasingly near, with only the battle for Tunisia left.¹ The question for the Allies, then, was what to do next? The eventual answer lead to the invasion of Sicily and Italy, and brought war to the doorsteps of 40 million Italians.

It not only brought war, but also a vast conscript army of motley men to fight it and a considerably smaller cohort of men to manage the citizens attempting to live in the midst of it. It is the occupation that is the focus of this book, more particularly the question of public safety, encompassing both crime and law and order.

On the whole, the Allied occupation of Italy has not been regarded favourably by historians and while there are the official British and American histories, both essential reading, it is, relative to Nazi Germany, a less researched area. Much of the criticism has been from the political perspective, emphasizing that the occupation left a nation less than purged of its fascist past, and supported a system of government that left most of Italy’s ills intact, the overriding consideration being Italy’s importance to the West as an ally in the Cold War that immediately followed the Second World War.²

More has been published in the recent past on other aspects of the occupation such as prisoner-of-war experience, soldier violence, the experience of women and war atrocities, among others, particularly in Italian.³ Many of these centre around oral history and memory. John Foot addresses the merits of memory studies relative to the more traditional methods of studying history in Italy’s Divided Memory, taking issue with those who say the ‘truth’ is found in documents ‘held in dusty archives’, as those documents themselves have oral origins and so are as subjective as oral history itself. That may be so in some cases, and memory studies certainly have value and interest, but documents have certain advantages over oral testimony. The information they contain, whether true or not, remains fixed, it does not change with age or life experience. It is not influenced by its neighbours, political correctness or the desire to make things a little more interesting. Additionally, trawling through the archives, generally no longer dusty but modern and computerized, will yield a variety of documentation from different sources, sometimes in different countries, to corroborate or throw doubt on an event, a giant treasure hunt that results in knowledge that is probably as good as it is going to get. Interestingly, there will often be conflicting eyewitness statements taken in the immediate aftermath of an event. ‘I was there’ is not enough. Do we see what we want to see, tell what we thought we saw, or tell as we wished it had been in testimony fifty or sixty years later? Oral history cannot stand alone as the sole truth and is not a substitute for traditional history, but is a useful adjunct; there is no need for an either/or scenario.⁴

Much memory-based investigation focuses on individual and community experiences during the war and occupation, and that experience was, not unexpectedly, generally bad; there is little good about a war for the civilian. Many Italian histories in the 1980s, such as Bedeschi’s Fronte italiano, were of this type, and reflected the still prevalent feeling that Italy was a hapless victim of the war, what Philip Morgan calls ‘blameless victimhood’, rather than a full and voluntary member of the Axis. Gribaudi picks up on this tendency in Guerra totale, the story of Naples from 1940–44, which takes oral history further, supplementing it by analysis, diaries and documentation.⁵

There is also a tendency to portray Italy as a victim of an inefficient and uncaring Allied occupation. Is this a valid portrayal, given the suffering, some of it extreme, of much of Europe, including central and northern Italy, under German occupation during the period? The popular, rather than academic, English-speaking view, such as is found in Richard Lamb’s War in Italy, and, more especially, Norman Lewis’s oft-quoted Naples ’44, certainly has very little good to say of the Allied occupation.⁶ How true is the general perception that the Allied occupation of Italy was not a success? While the joint and equal Anglo-American occupation was the first and last of its kind in the Second World War, it could be argued that the Italian occupation was the first of a more modern style of occupation. After the Armistice, a war between two external forces was fought to liberate the country, there was never an intention to colonize, and the Allies’ main occupation aim was to turn over the country to a democratic Italian administration as soon as possible, even while fighting continued.

All historical accounts have to begin somewhere. This one begins with the outcome of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. Was the invasion of Italy the only option after the success in North Africa? No, but it was the one chosen, and thus the starting point for this work.

Determined not to have his troops sitting idle after the North African campaign, with other options discounted and the time not yet right for an invasion through northern France, Winston Churchill resolved to invade mainland Europe through Italy. This in turn would lead to the first Allied occupation of an Axis partner country in the Second World War. Churchill’s plan was to

Make this wide encircling movement in the Mediterranean having for its primary object the recovery of the command of that vital sea, but also having for its object the exposure of the underbelly of the Axis, especially Italy, to heavy attack.⁷

It was this view that he shared, in his usual forceful manner, with both the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations (SACMED), US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in January 1943 when the Allies met at Casablanca to discuss future lines of attack. Although Churchill and Eisenhower shared a mutual respect, senior military staff on both sides often displayed a mutual antipathy which increased the difficulty of devising strategy.

The conference began on 18 January 1943. While there was quick agreement on several issues, such as the need to bolster the army of the third major ally, the Soviet Union, two issues caused discord. One was the relative deployment of resources between the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific. The other was where the next big push in Europe should take place. By this time, the options under serious discussion had come down to two. Roosevelt and his generals favoured an invasion through northern France, but agreed that the German presence in France was then too strong to permit an invasion in 1943. British General Sir Alan Brooke pushed Churchill’s plan, pointing out that Sicily had plenty of undefended coastline for amphibious landings, and reiterating Churchill’s opinion that Italy would capitulate if Sicily fell, giving valuable Mediterranean access back to the Allies. The British believed that Germany would abandon Italy, leading to a quick and relatively easy push up the peninsula; American experts believed Hitler would send reinforcements to Italy to stop the Allies, given that the shape of the country made for easy defence, a belief that proved to be true. The British believed that it was vital to defeat Germany first because then Japan would cave in. The Americans believed that the British desire to invade through Italy had much to do with British postwar imperial ambitions. And so they argued. Eventually, because it could not be denied that the Channel invasion was not viable in the near future, or that after Tunisia there would be an entire army sitting on its hands, the decision was made to invade Sicily and its surrounding islands. Planning for Operation Husky was to start immediately, and to be implemented as soon as Tunisia had been liberated, which Eisenhower, when pressed, estimated to be by May 1943. One other thing came out of Casablanca which would have important consequences for Italy: Roosevelt announced, at the post-summit press conference, that the only acceptable end to the war would be the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan and Italy.⁸

There was at that stage neither a commitment to push on to mainland Italy after Sicily, nor consensus as to whether Italy was the right area for a major invasion. In fact, at the time they agreed to Husky, the Americans thought that the British had no interest in occupying Italy.⁹ Churchill, however, firmly believed that the military route to recapturing mainland Europe was through Italy, striking swiftly and suddenly, and then advancing rapidly towards the north.¹⁰ He was determined that the huge army waiting in North Africa should not sit idle until the cross-Channel invasion. The Americans were not so sure – Italy’s paunch might prove to have ‘chrome steel baseboards’.¹¹

Major discussions continued at Churchill and Roosevelt’s next meeting, the Trident conference in Washington five months later, in mid-May 1943.¹² There were many factors to be considered, such as whether the invasion would detract from the force being prepared for the cross-channel route, whether Germany would defend Italy, and whether a defeated Italy would be a drain on resources. Churchill not only believed that Italy wouldn’t, but also that ‘no occupation of Italy would be necessary’.¹³ He noted that ‘somewhat sharp discussions’ took place as the old arguments resurfaced. General Eisenhower still felt that invading Normandy was tactically the best military course, and the two sides wrangled again. Eisenhower resented having to commit his troops to Italy, and for that reason under-committed early in the campaign and later depleted them still further.¹⁴ This, along with subsequent other factors such as the ‘leaked’ Italian Armistice, which enabled a rapid German response, and Hitler’s decision to retain and maintain Italy as an ally, led to disastrously slow progress northwards through Italy and ensured that Churchill’s swift advance never materialized. Although a compromise agreement was reached, which enabled the invasion of Italy after Sicily, the military disagreement had a cumulative effect on the subsequent occupation. Allied occupational responsibility lasted for much longer than was initially anticipated, and Italy had to be maintained materially for longer, resulting, for example, in the exacerbation of supply shortages and consequent economic difficulties, which, as will be explained, all had their effects on law and order.

This brief overview of the negotiations that led to the invasions of Sicily and Italy highlights the fact that the two major Allies were at odds over the whole exercise. This did not augur well for the particular style of occupation that was decided upon for Sicily, which was to be a very different proposition from that of the recently liberated North African territories, most of which were pre-war colonial territories. These administrations had fallen into regions of either British responsibility or American-influenced French. For the first major invasion of an Axis homeland, Eisenhower suggested that there should be equal and combined responsibility for administering occupied enemy Sicily.¹⁵

Eisenhower was well aware of the friction that existed between the senior British and American military staff, and of the differences of opinion that had emerged over Husky. He was also well aware that Sicily would be America’s first occupation of enemy territory of the war, and Britain’s first that did not involve former colonial countries. He proposed the reconciliation of ‘American and British joint policy toward Italy in order that there may be a joint and single attitude with respect to the civil and military authority and the civil population of the territory occupied’.¹⁶ Rather than an arrangement whereby each British administrative officer had an equal and opposite US officer, the system was to have an equal but alternate mixture; if the head of a section was British, his deputy would be American, the deputy’s subordinate would be British and so on down the chain of command. These administrators would be in charge of civil affairs, rather than military matters.

Eisenhower considered early on ‘what kind of Military Government was to be set up in the island? And who was to be responsible for this function?’ He concluded that ‘the institution of a Military Government in the occupied enemy territory was clearly unavoidable, and the political repercussions of its character would obviously be far reaching. […] The precedents established […] would set the pattern for later operations in Europe.’¹⁷ In this he would subsequently be proved both right and wrong. Although by the time of Operation Overlord – the invasion of northern Europe – there was an established working system of military government and civil affairs in Italy, which could indeed have provided a precedent for the occupation of both friendly European countries, and enemy Germany and Austria, it was rejected. Indeed, it was rejected almost before it was implemented, as the training for the subsequent occupations, using a different system, was well in place before the invasion of mainland Italy. This, although it did not encompass many of the flaws of the Italian pattern, failed also to replicate some of its strengths and learn from its mistakes.¹⁸

The occupation of Sicily and Italy was therefore a unique and experimental affair at the time, and the alternate administrative structure means that the examination of the administration includes both British and American aspects. There is also a frequently overlooked third perspective, that of the occupied – the Italian civilian.

Fascism in Italy has been examined extensively but a very brief overview of 1940–43 is useful. Italy had entered the wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Images
• Acknowledgements
• Explanatory Notes
• List of Abbreviations
• Map of Southern Italy
• Part I Occupation
• Part II Allied Crime
• Part III Italian Crime and Law and Order
• Part IV Collaboration
• Part V Assessment
• Appendix I: Foreign and Other Terms
• Appendix II: Allied Proclamation No. 2: Articles I and II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index