- Most importantly, the Italians themselves
had overthrown Mussolini when the Fascist
Grand Council and the king had dismissed him.
The Allies were prepared to deal with his succes-
sor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, even though he was
the brutal conqueror of Abyssinia; what mattered
most to them was that he was prepared to take
Italy out of the war. The Italians were thus
allowed by the Western Allies to change sides and
become ‘co-belligerents’ – not exactly allies, but
not enemies either.
Italy had achieved something remarkable.
Without a revolution the old fascist establishment
and the monarchy had transformed their fascist
rule to one acceptable to the Allies. To all intents
and purposes they had escaped the consequences
of the Allied demand for ‘unconditional surren-
der’. As far as Italy was concerned, the needs of
war overrode other considerations in Allied coun-
sels. For Churchill and the British, Badoglio and
the monarchy represented the best bulwark
against communism.
The southern half of Italy had always been pre-
dominantly conservative and royalist. With the
Allied armies in the south and the Germans in the
north, Italy was, in 1944, more physically split
than ever. In central and northern Italy a coalition
of anti-fascist parties was formed in September
1944 embracing all anti-fascists from the Liberals
to Catholic Christian Democrats and from the
socialists to the communists. Calling themselves
the Committee of National Liberation, they
demanded war against the German occupiers. By
contrast, the king and his government, who had
earned the contempt of many Italians by fleeing
south to safety behind the Allied lines, seemed
paralysed and hesitant. The Committee of
National Liberation filled the vacuum and acted
decisively, despite the German occupation of cen-
tral and northern Italy. For this reason it became
the effective political authority in Italy in 1945.
With 250,000 armed partisans, a fierce war was
fought in the north against the well-armed
German divisions. The partisans suffered heavy
casualties in 1944 and 1945 but succeeded in lib-
erating Milan and Italy’s other northern cities
even before Allied troops advancing from the
south could reach them. Mussolini’s puppet
regime in the north collapsed and he tried to flee.
He was captured by partisans and executed
together with his mistress. Their bodies were then
exposed to the savagery of public vengeance. The
newsreels that showed these horrible scenes,
though they shocked many in the West, provided
a glimpse of the passions the war had aroused.
Why then did the communists not seek to
exploit their organisational strength among the
partisans of the centre and north and their mili-
tary success in sweeping through the Po Valley
during the spring of 1945, ‘the wind from the
north’, to try to hold on to effective power?
Palmiro Togliatti, the communist leader, a cool
and calculating politician, had left Moscow and
reached southern Italy a year earlier, in March- He had immediately declared that the com-
munists would collaborate with the royal govern-
ment and anti-fascist parties and he did not waver
from this course. It is probable that the strategy
had been coordinated in Moscow. The similarity
with the attitude of the French communists is
striking. Stalin was anxious to maintain Allied
unity until the war was won, and indeed after; he
had pressed for spheres of influence in the Europe
overrun by the Allied armies and he now tried to
demonstrate to the Western Allies that the com-
munists in the sphere he accepted as Western
would not be allowed to cause any trouble.
Realism, so Stalin believed, dictated that the
Western Allies, whose armies would conquer the
whole of Italy, would also decide future politics
in Italy. The Soviet recognition of Badoglio’s
royal government in the south in March 1944
sent this signal clearly. Stalin, of course, was also
anxious, as an obvious quid pro quo, to have the
Western Allies accept Soviet dominance in
Eastern and central Europe. Moscow, therefore,
urged the communist parties of the West to
follow popular-front tactics, to bide their time
and to gain strength by working constitutionally
within the system.
Togliatti too was committed to a policy of
caution. An insurrection now would only have
been crushed by the Allies; the path of legality,
on the other hand, guaranteed the survival of the
Communist Party, particularly when it was com-