Axis (1936-1943)

FOREIGN NEWS

ITALY

Over the North African radio came a Texas soldier's voice:

This is General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces.

The Italian Government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally. . . . I have granted a military armistice, the terms of which have been approved by the Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. . . . The armistice . . . becomes effective this instant.

The "instant" was 6:30 p.m., Sept. 8, 1943. All that day the wave lengths down the Mediterranean from Rome had be rated the Allies, promised a big battle against their invasion armies. Now General Eisenhower and his staff listened for a proclamation of surrender from the Italian Government. The minutes slipped away to 7:30 p.m. Then spoke the Piedmont soldier's voice of Premier Marshal Pietro Badoglio:

The Italian Government . . . with the object of avoiding further and more grievous harm to the nation, has requested an armistice from General Eisenhower. . . . This request has been granted. The Italian forces will therefore cease all acts of hostility against the Anglo-U.S. forces. . . . They will, however, oppose attack from any other quarter.

Thus death came to the Rome-Berlin Axis--six years, ten months, 14 days after it had been born. For Italy's 45,000,000 people, surrender came as a national shriving, a chance for national redemption. For the United Nations, Italian surrender brought an hour as high as the hour of French surrender at Compiegne had been low. They had ripped the southern rampart of a Festung crumbling in the east, flung the certainty of defeat at Adolf Hitler and his panicky satellites, put themselves a long stride toward the heart of Europe and final victory.

Parleys, Part I. The Badoglio regime made a first cautious approach for terms at the beginning of August, shortly after Benito Mussolini's downfall. In Lisbon five Italian envoys gave Allied representatives this message: Italy was "desperate"; the time had come to discuss "possible" armistice conditions. The Allied answer: "unconditional surrender."

The issues then rested, while Italy stewed. There were reports of comings & goings between the Quirinal and the Vatican, where the U.S. had Harold Tittmann, a foreign service veteran, and Britain had Francis D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Leeds. Papal Envoy Enrico Galeazzi showed up in Lisbon, said he was bound for the U.S. to buy supplies for the Vatican. Financier Giovanni Fummi registered at London's Claridge's; presumably he was executing a mission for the Vatican.

Parleys, Part II. In mid-August an Italian officer, presumably General Castellano, aide to Marshal Badoglio, dropped in at Madrid, ostensibly on a mission that had nothing to do with surrender. Secretly he called on British Ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare. Next day the Italian officer appeared in Lisbon, called on British Ambassador Sir Ronald Hugh Campbell.

To Sir Samuel and Sir Ronald, General Castellano tendered a message from Marshal Badoglio: "When the Allies land in Italy, the Italian Government is prepared to join them against Germany."

London and Washington accepted this as a "serious proposal." Moscow was kept posted. A few days later the Allied armistice terms reached Lisbon. In the British Embassy, with U.S. Charge d'Affaires George Kennan present, the terms were given to General Castellano. Not long afterward several high officers flew up from North Africa, talked long and earnestly to Marshal Badoglio's colleague at a dinner that coursed through a whole night and into the dawn.

General Castellano set off for Rome by a devious route. But the Badoglio Government, worried over his failure to report promptly, had sent out another mission to Lisbon. Again an Italian general was chosen, but now, as evidence of good faith, a captured British officer accompanied him. The officer was red-faced, one-armed, one-eyed Major General Adrian Carton de Wiart, one of the Empire's famed warriors, who had been captured by the Italians in 1941. London's Express called General de Wiart a "real-life, elusive Pimpernel." Not obliged to return to Italy, he turned up in London, while his Italian traveling companion went on to General Eisenhower's headquarters in Algiers.

Parleys, Part III. General Castellano, meanwhile, had reached Rome. He quickly left again, this time for Sicily, where he met General Eisenhower's staff and the second general sent out by Marshal Badoglio. Presumably in Palermo, the parleys entered their final phase. In that city, on Aug. 29, American ack-ack gunners received startling orders. A Savoia-Marchetti bomber headed for the airfield was not to be fired on. The big plane slid down, and two Italian officers stepped out. On the 30th it took off again, escorted by three U.S. Lightnings. On the 31st it was back again and the same officers deplaned.

A last-minute misgiving by the Badoglio Government almost snagged the parleys. The Marshal wanted no announcement of the armistice until after the main Allied landing in Italy. General Eisenhower replied with a 24-hour ultimatum: the Allies must fix the timing of the announcement, or Italy would suffer the full shock of Allied air power. The Marshal bowed. On Sept. 3, while Generals Eisenhower and Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander looked on, the Armistice was signed by U.S. Major General Walter B. Smith for the Allies, by General Castellano for Italy.

Terms. The full text of the armistice of Sicily embraced many thousand words. An official summary showed that the Italian capitulation was as sweeping as the German surrender of 1918. The Badoglio regime agreed to:

> Cease all hostile activity.

> Withdraw its armed forces from France and the Balkans.

> Turn over all Italian territory and French Corsica for Allied military purposes.

>Deny to the Germans the use of facilities that might be turned against the United Nations.

> Grant to the Allies the use of airfields and harbors.

>Hand over all warships, merchant marine and planes.

> Return all Allied prisoners of war or internees.

> Accept political, economic and financial conditions to be imposed at Allied discretion.

The People's Role. In the agony of revolution, in the process of becoming a battlefield, a battered and buffeted nation might be finding its soul. It might be reaching back across the years to pick up again the democratic thread woven in a history of foreign oppression and domestic tyranny. Before Magna Charta and King John, Italy's northern cities had won self-rule from the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Florence and Venice had once borne the title of republic. But the trend had been beaten down through the centuries when the peninsula served as the cockpit of Guelph and Ghibelline, despot and noble, rival Spaniard, Frenchman and German. In Milan, in 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself with the iron crown of Lombardy. In Milan, in 1848, the Habsburg General Count Joseph Radetzky had smashed the people's barricades. But the day of Italy's Risorgimento (resurrection) came. In 1870 the poor, frugal, industrious country of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour ceased to be a geographical expression, attained nationhood under Vittorio Emanuele II, Re Galantuomo (the Honest King). It was the shame of the Savoy dynasty that Vittorio Emanuele III helped Fascismo destroy the democratic constitution his grandfather had upheld.

When the test of World War II came, the little people of Italy helped Allied arms destroy Fascismo. They refused to fight for a corrupt regime, to love the German ally. Their revolt, at first passive, then open, sapped Benito Mussolini's edifice, forced Badoglio to surrender.

Now, as best they could in a confused and disorganized hour, the people of Italy declared war on the Germans. In Milan they mounted machine guns on rooftops, sniped from windows. In Turin they held out after the rest of northern Italy had fallen to the Germans. Up & down the peninsula they heeded the Allied calls to sabotage Nazi movements. Along the coast they turned on lights at night to beckon British and U.S. landing parties. But by week's end the occupying Germans seemed to hold a firm upper hand over wide areas. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel proclaimed himself master of all Italy above the Spezia-Rimini line, imposed a "state of war," decreed death for "giving aid or assistance" to the Allies.

The Palace's Voice. Marshal Badoglio defended himself and his regime against the German cry of "betrayal." To Hitler he sent a telegram of justification:

"The war . . . has cost Italy--apart from loss of her colonial empire--destruction of her towns, annihilation of her industries, of her merchant navy, of her railway network and, lastly, invasion of her own soil. One cannot ask the people to continue to fight when all legitimate hope--I do not say of victory, but even of resistance--has vanished."

The Fuehrer replied with verbal abuse and with the shelling and occupation of Rome. Italian troops fought back in the suburbs of the capital. But Nazi jackboots pounded into the eternal city, up to the gates of the Vatican. In Rome, the Germans held the traffic junction between north and south Italy. They had the best site to set up a puppet Fascist government and to promote civil war among Italians. But by putting the Vatican under their "protection"* they had now, more than ever, arrayed against them Catholicism's power.

Marshal Badoglio and his King escaped the Nazi net. At week's end, from refuge somewhere in the countryside, the Marshal and the King belatedly called upon their countrymen to resist the Germans.

The Allies' Hand. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill addressed a joint message to Premier Badoglio and the people of Italy:

"Now is the time for every Italian to strike his blow. The liberating armies of the Western World are coming to your rescue. . . . The German terror in Italy will not last long. . . . You, by helping in this great surge of liberation, will place yourselves once more among the true and long-proved friends of your country, from whom you have been so wrongfully estranged."

In the '20s, spokesmen of the democracies had lauded Fascismo and thereby helped to prop it up. Financier Otto Kahn had said: "Mussolini is far too wise and right-minded to lead his people into hazardous foreign adventures." Pedagogue Nicholas Murray Butler had noted "the stupendous improvement which Fascism has brought." Cardinal O'Connell had observed: "Mussolini is a genius." Former U.S. Ambassador to Rome Richard Washburn Child had edited the Duce's My Autobiography. Later, Industrialist My ron Taylor had admired "the successes of Premier Mussolini in disciplining the nation." In 1938 Winston Churchill observed: "Had there been no war, . . . Mussolini would still have been great."

That had been a great mistake, and the leaders of democracy had come to know it. Now Italy's liberals and democrats, dispersed and long underground, cried for encouragement. In time, they hoped, the Italian people would freely choose their own rulers, and Italy would have what Gaetano Salvemini called "the dawn of a second Risorgimento."

* In the turbulent Middle Ages many a Pope was imprisoned or murdered by temporal powers. In 1527 the army of Emperor Charles V jailed Pope Clement VII for seven months in the castle of St. Angelo. In 1809 Emperor Napoleon kidnapped Pius VII, brought him to Fontainebleau, held him in custody until the Empire's fall.

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