The Birth of the Italian Republic: The History and Legacy of the Allied Occupation of Italy after World War II

By Charles River Editors

Canadian troops in Sicily after the Allied invasion

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Introduction

A picture of Allied troops unloading supplies during the invasion of Sicily

On March 25, 1957, Italy signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC), a forerunner of the European Union (EU) that was promoted as a guarantor of future peace in Europe. For the soldiers on both sides of World War II fighting each other 13 years earlier in the mountains around Monte Cassino, south of Rome, this would have seemed a highly improbable outcome.

Despite British diplomatic efforts, Italy had joined the Axis in 1940 with the intention of expanding its African empire and reliving the glories of Ancient Rome. That proved to be a major mistake, and by the spring of 1943 Italy had lost all its African possessions. The Axis’ North African defeat opened up the possibility of taking the war in the west to the European continent for the first time since France's lightning conquest by the Wehrmacht in 1940. The British and Americans debated the merits of landing in France directly in 1943, but they ultimately opted against it. The Soviets railed at the Westerners as “bastards of allies” – conveniently forgetting that they aided and abetted Hitler's violent expansionism in eastern Europe for over a year, starting in 1939 – but a 1943 “D-Day” style landing in France might have proven a strategic and logistical impossibility.

Complex reasons lay behind England's successful insistence on the Mediterranean theater rather than the French theater as the scene of the next western Allied strike against Nazi Germany. Chief among these remained Britain's determination to keep a postwar empire, one that Churchill and his cabinet hoped would include Iraq and Iran, the source of oil needed to ensure that England continued to “rule the waves” with a powerful modern navy. This strategic imperative, indeed, formed the backbone of the British choice of Sicily as the target for military operations in the summer of 1943.

Another major factor lay in Britain's deep (and, in the event, justified) distrust of the Soviets, and the perspicacious English assumption that the USSR would attempt to build a totalitarian empire in Eastern Europe following the war. Churchill and his generals hoped to engage in “peripheral warfare” with the Third Reich, defeating Germany in outlying territories until the Germans ousted Hitler and came to terms. The English leadership envisioned forming a quasi-alliance with the resultant German state to push the Soviets out of Eastern Europe and prevent an “Iron Curtain” scenario.

The Americans, by contrast, still showed considerable naiveté concerning the Soviet Union and its intentions. General James H. Burns prepared a memorandum which simultaneously underestimated both the fundamental aggression and hostility of the USSR to the Free World, and the military power of the United States, which proved capable of utterly smashing the Empire of Japan without Russian aid: “We not only need Russia as a powerful fighting ally in order to defeat Germany but eventually we will also need her in a similar role to defeat Japan. And finally, we need her as a real friend and customer in the post-war world.” (Bennett, 1990, 63).

The British also possessed intelligence, gathered from their ULTRA penetration of German codes, which, as they believed, revealed Hitler's intention to abandon Italy and retreat to the northern Alps to form a defensive line should Sicily fall and Anglo-American forces reach the shores of the peninsula itself. While correct at the time, this analysis failed to consider that Hitler's strategy naturally changed as circumstances themselves shifted.

In fact, the lackluster Allied showing on Sicily and the escape of most of the island's garrison encouraged Hitler to alter his plans and defend Italy vigorously. With its rugged mountain ridges, deep valleys, and numerous rivers, Italy contained tens of thousands of natural defensive positions. The Wehrmacht exploited these to the full during the ensuing campaign, bogging down the Anglo-American armies in an endless series of costly, time-consuming engagements. Even the rank and file German soldiers showed a clear awareness of the Italy's strategic significance: “’The Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch,’ a German paratrooper wrote in an unfinished letter found on his corpse at Salerno, ‘and we will surely make hard chewing for them.’” (Hastings, 2011, 408).

Indeed, it was a tough slog, and few places were tougher on the Allies than Monte Cassino, which witnessed a series of Allied attacks along the German line that aimed to create a breakthrough to Rome. Ultimately, the attacks would force the Germans into retreat, but not before they had inflicted over 50,000 casualties at a cost of about 20,000 of their own. The battle is perhaps best remembered today for the destruction of a historic abbey that dated back to the 6th century, and the controversial decision to bomb it is still widely debated today, but regardless, Monte Cassino and other operations around Anzio made it possible for the Allies to take Rome on June 4, 1944. Two days later, the Allies would land at Normandy.

The Germans had been preparing for this eventuality and immediately occupied as much of the Italian mainland as they could, but evacuated Sardinia and Corsica. They also seized control of all of the territories previously occupied by Italy in the Balkans and the Aegean.[1]

These events effectively divided Italians into three groups, and the country into two rival political entities. In the absence of clear orders, the first group was the Italian troops who simply melted away, and the many civilians who just kept their heads down and tried to survive. Meanwhile, those still loyal to fascism established the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic, RSI) with a capital at Salo. Mussolini had been imprisoned after his deposition, but the Germans sprang for him in a daring special forces operation. He was reinstated as Duce in the RSI, but very much under German control. At the same time, the Allies set up Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio as leaders of the Regno del Sud (Kingdom of the South, RS) with the support of anti-fascist parties and armed resistance groups.

That boundary slowly but inexorably moved northward as the Allied armies advanced, but the four main players in the contest for the post-war destiny of Italy had already been established; all of them heavily influenced by international ideologies. The fascists were loyal not only to the RSI but to Nazi Germany and wider fascist ideology. They were opposed by numerous mainstream parties of whom the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats, DC) quickly became the most important. These parties were loyal to a mixture of the liberal values of pre-fascist Italy and the ideologies of the USA and Britain. The third major force was the Catholic Church, who did not stand for election directly but continually sought to influence the values and votes of post-war Italians. The fourth major factor was the Partito Comunista Italiano (Communist Party, PCI) loyal to the Soviet Union and their allies, the Partito Socialista Italiano (Socialist Party, PSI), and the Partito d’Azione (Action Party, PdA).

This contest of transnational ideologies took place amidst Italy’s own historical and geographical divisions and inequalities, amidst immense destruction, and all under the watchful eye of a multinational occupying army led by Great Britain.[2] The Birth of the Italian Republic: The History and Legacy of the Allied Occupation of Italy after World War II chronicles the turbulent events and conflicts that brought about the occupation, and the way Italy transitioned in the years immediately following the war. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the establishment of Republican Italy like never before.

The Birth of the Italian Republic: The History and Legacy of the Allied Occupation of Italy after World War II

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

The Fall of Fascism

Issues Facing the Allied Military Government

Economic Reconstruction

The General Election of 1948

Conclusions

Online Resources

Further Reading

Free Books by Charles River Editors

Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

The Fall of Fascism

The Anglo-American strategic conference held at Casablanca between January 14th and 24th, 1943, decided the course of the war during that year. The American negotiators at the Anfa Hotel proposed a modest landing in France to establish a beachhead for later operations. The British, by contrast, preferred Sicily, and rapidly prevailed in the debate: “’If I had written down before I came what I hoped the conclusions would be,’ one British planner noted, ‘I could never have written anything so sweeping, so comprehensive, and so favourable to our ideas.’ Wedemeyer, the chief [American] army planner at Casablanca, bluntly concluded ‘that we lost our shirts... One might say that we came, we listened, and we were conquered.’” (Stoler, 2000, 103).

The Americans' plan, developed by Dwight D. Eisenhower with notable skill and speed, bore the codename Operation Roundup. This scheme, eventually used as the basis for developing Operation Overlord (the D-Day landings), envisioned setting 48 divisions ashore in France during spring of 1943, supported by over 5,000 aircraft.

A picture of General Eisenhower in North Africa with (foreground, left to right): Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander, Admiral Sir Andrew B. Cunningham, and (top row): Mr. Harold Macmillan, Major General W. Bedell Smith, and unidentified British officers.

However, the material strength needed to carry out a plan of this scale did not exist at that stage of the war. The Anglo-Americans lacked sufficient ships in early 1943 to transport a force so large despite the United States' remarkable industrial output, while aircraft production also lagged behind the necessary totals. Supplying the force after landing would likely have proven a logistical impossibility. Furthermore, the Luftwaffe still controlled European skies, not yet decimated by America's lethal P-51 Mustangs and other high quality, well piloted, and numerous aircraft of the late war period.

The British, in exchange for an American agreement to land in Sicily rather than their preferred target of France, offered the concession of strengthening their military presence in Burma, leading to the eventual deployment of over a million soldiers against the southwestern frontier of the Empire of Japan. The English also noted the strategic advantages gained by opening the Mediterranean route to Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union, a forecast revealed as accurate by the result.

While even greater strategic gains would likely have accrued from seizure of Sardinia, placed opposite the central Italian coast and permitting an immediate strike at Rome, one major factor militated against this choice. Sardinia lay outside the range of Allied air bases on Malta. Anglo-American commanders and planners feared devastating Luftwaffe attacks against the transport ships with no air cover. Sicily, on the other hand, lay within range of the Maltese airfields – the decisive factor in choosing it as the target.

Meanwhile, the Third Reich's commander of the Mediterranean theater, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring – dubbed “Smiling Albert” by the Allies due to his frequent, toothy, self-confident smiles in many surviving photographs – deemed it probable the Anglo-American forces would attack Sicily. He based this belief on the fact that it represented the easiest “stepping stone” into southern Europe, that the Allies possessed the means to attempt such a landing, and that they would do so as quickly as possible in order not to lose the momentum gained by their victory in Tunisia.

Accordingly, Kesselring – a superb tactician – strengthened Axis forces on Sicily considerably, gave orders to improve its defensive works, and dispatched paratroop General Paul Conrath of the Hermann Goering Division to command German forces on the island. Kesselring recorded the conference leading up to the defense in his memoirs: “’It makes no difference,’ I told them, ‘whether or not you get orders from the Italian army at Enna. You must go into immediate action against the enemy the moment you ascertain the objective of the invasion fleet. I can still hear General Conrath of the ‘Hermann Goering’ Panzer Division growl in reply: ‘If you mean to go for them, Field-Marshal, then I'm your man.’ I returned home feeling pretty confident (Kesselring, 1954, 194).

Kesselring and Rommel

Conrath (left) and Goering

Tardiness in preparation cost the Allies an easy seizure of Sicily. Thanks to Hitler's stubborn, irrational insistence on holding the last scrap of African territory still in German hands – in Tunisia – to the last, and losing over 100,000 men in the process, Wehrmacht efforts remained focused in Africa for several months in the spring of 1943. 9 of the 10 divisions earmarked to spearhead the Operation Husky invasion stood idle during this period, while only a skeleton garrison held the island.

The German forces assembled to hold Sicily, or at least to delay the Allied advance there, consisted of various units sent by Hitler and the OKW to reinforce the doomed Afrika Korps remnant in Tunisia. Kesselring, clear-sighted enough to see deployment to North Africa, and who sentenced these forces to almost immediate surrender as the Allies crushed the remaining German foothold there in an iron grip, diverted them to Sicily instead.

Though neither man commanded large portions of the Sicilian defense force, Kesselring tasked two officers, Colonels Ernst-Gunther Baade and Bogislaw von Bonin (who worked as a journalist after the war), with organizing the disparate elements into working military units. Assisted by a small but able staff of experienced veteran officers, Baade and Bonin worked hard and rapidly, setting up chains of command and arranging for efficient delivery of supplies. Baade's abilities prompted his superiors to overlook his eccentricities: “In the field, he wore a black beret with a tartan plaid ribbon, with a huge claymore (a double-edged broadsword formerly used by Scottish Highlanders) at his side instead of the traditional Luger. [...] Baade was a gentleman who believed in chivalry. He was also personally brave and professionally competent; hence, he had no problems in the Afrika Korps, despite his peculiarities. […] he led patrols wearing a kilt.” (Mitcham, 2007, 32).

While the Germans sent men and materiel to aid in holding the island, the Allies, though allowing the invasion force to stand idle, undertook massive preparations of their own. The logistical corps of both the American and British armies worked around the clock, stockpiling huge amounts of food, medical supplies, ammunition, spare parts, and gasoline for their invading soldiers. Seeing to every detail, the assiduous quartermasters even accumulated a store of 144,000 condoms, a large stock of chewing gum, and a supply of rat traps to deal with vermin.

The supply corps earmarked another vast collection of supplies to assist the Sicilian population, while scrambling to arrange for the shipment of no less than 38,000 tons of food and 160,000 tons of coal to supply the 19 million people in Italy's south each month (Atkinson, 2007, 57). The Anglo-Americans also worked to obtain donkeys for transporting supplies through Sicily's hot, harsh, rugged landscape.

In the days leading up to Operation Husky, both Axis and Allies bombarded the Sicilian population with propaganda. The Germans persuaded the Sicilians that the American soldiers were rapists almost to a man, causing the local men to expend vast efforts hiding their female relatives. For their part, the Allies air-dropped millions of leaflets, some quite pithy: “One message warned, 'Germany will fight to the last Italian'” (Atkinson, 2007, 56).

The Americans and British each offered a unique contribution to the preparations for Operation Husky, the hugest seaborne landing then attempted in the history of warfare. Superior quality landing craft and pontoons proved the indispensable element provided by the United States. The backbone of the landings, without which moving nearly 200,000 men ashore rapidly would have proven impossible, consisted of the DUKW.

Predictably but aptly dubbed the “Duck,” the DUKW amphibious transport rolled off General Motors Corporation (GMC) assembly lines in thousands between 1942 and 1945, eventually totaling over 21,000 vehicles. DUKWs, based on a heavily modified 2.5-ton truck chassis, showed extraordinary seaworthiness, surviving 20-foot waves kicked up by 70 mph winds to deliver troops safely to the beach in some instances. Successful deployment of Allied forces through the violent surf present during the initial Husky landings would have been impracticable without the superb American landing craft.

The Duck

The day before the invasion fleet launched, July 8th, 1943, most of the men already waited aboard the ships. Ominously – though most of the men lacked the meteorological knowledge to spot the coming trouble – the sea lay smooth and motionless as a mirror under a blast furnace sun. Confined below decks in case Axis reconnaissance aircraft passed over, the men sweltered in stifling conditions, checking their gear or writing letters.

Early on the morning of the 9th, the huge armada set sail across the Mediterranean towards Sicily. Nearly 3,000 vessels, including flat-bottomed LSIs (Landing Ship Infantry) and LSTs (Landing Ship Tank) alongside escorting destroyers and numerous other craft, left their North African berths and set out across the darkened Mediterranean. Calm prevailed for a few hours, but then the windstorm Steere predicted swept in from the northwest. The sea turned an ominous green color and gathered itself into hurrying mountains of sliding, battering water topped with wild crests of foam. At around noon, when the armada drew parallel with Malta, the gale achieved extraordinary violence, with winds of 35 miles per hour (Beaufort scale 7) and 16 foot wave heights reported.

As the ships pitched and tossed alarmingly on the tumultuous sea, filled with frightened, vomiting soldiers, Patton called for Steere and asked him whether the invasion could go ahead. Steere boldly stuck to his prediction that the winds would cease before the next day. The only members of the expedition seemingly unperturbed by the “Mussolini wind,” as the soldiers colorfully dubbed their airy tormenter, were the pack donkeys: “’Ship rolled thirty degrees and pitched fifteen,’ a naval officer recorded. ‘Donkeys               were unconcerned, and seemed to enjoy their hay splashed with salt water.’” (Atkinson, 2007, 65).

At around the time Patton queried Steere about the weather forecast, the commander of the Canadian contingent received information that a highly placed spy in Mussolini's government claimed a remote-detonated minefield lay exactly in his assigned path. Unwilling to turn back but nervous, the commander asked Simonds his opinion of the matter. The cold, aloof Canadian officer considered it briefly before dismissing the report as false, as indeed it was. Even Simonds, however, appeared nervous in the face of the worsening gale, warily watching the huge waves crash against the ship.

The ships drew close to Sicily after nightfall on the 9th, with an early morning landing scheduled for Saturday, July 10th, 1943. At 9:00 p.m. that night, the winds dropped sharply, seemingly vindicating Steere's predictions, and the men prepared to go ashore in an almost cheerful mood. However, when the invasion armada approached within eight miles of the Sicilian coast, the “Mussolini wind” increased again suddenly, growing even more violent than during the day.

“Commander Houdini's” prediction had been incorrect this time, but the attack went ahead anyway. Bombers struck the shore defenses shortly before the ships came into range, lighting up the northern horizon with brilliant flashes of light, followed by a wavering glow from incinerated crop fields. Soon the defenders on the shore at the chosen points of attack heard, above the sound of the wind and ocean, a deep rolling, throbbing sound from thousands of ship engines straining against the gale-driven waters.

A visually spectacular, lethally violent pageant began at 2:45 a.m. on July 10th. Moving ahead of the troop ships, Royal Navy destroyers moved inshore, using gigantic spotlights to sweep the Sicilian coastline and pick out targets for their powerful guns. The Luftwaffe and Italian air forces sprang into action, dropping searingly bright magnesium flares on parachutes to illuminate the ocean for miles and braving a storm of flak to strafe, bomb, and dive-bomb the approaching vessels. An eccentric British anti-aircraft officer, Derrick Leverton, who also worked as an undertaker and commanded his battery wearing a helmet, blue swimming trunks, and sandals due to the heat, described the approach to Sicily's shore at H-Hour: “With flares, searchlights and blazing fires, plus the vivid chromatic effects of bomb bursts and shell explosions, all of Sicily so far as the eye could reach was like nothing in the world so much as a huge pyrotechnical show.” (Macintyre, 2010, 241). Leverton, an incorrigible optimist despite his profession and his disconcerting habit of referring to trenches and foxholes as “graves,” continued to enjoy the scenes immensely, even expressing gratitude for a splash of cool seawater thrown up refreshingly by a near miss from a Stuka dive-bomber.

Even as the Allied landing craft undertook the final push towards the Sicilian coast, other Anglo-American soldiers already occupied a few scraps of Sicily's territory. The participants in two airborne insertions named “Husky 1” and “Ladbroke” suffered disastrously from poor planning and execution of the plan, but nevertheless, they caused disproportionate confusion and demoralization in the Italian and even some of the German troops, who believed them far more numerous than they were.

3,405 paratroopers from the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, supplemented by the 3/504th, set out under the command of Colonel James Gavin in 226 C-47 transports. Separated and confused by the darkness and the high winds, the aircraft dropped the paratroopers in a haphazard manner, some landing in the British sector and the rest scattered in small groups across the countryside. A few units managed to take their objectives, mostly minor bridges and road junctions, but most ended up lost. These men attacked Italian targets of opportunity, and, ironically, these widely-scattered assaults on Italian patrols, ambushes of small units, and destruction of bunkers or flak emplacements convinced even the Germans that as many as 40,000 American paratroopers were running amok in Sicily's interior. In his book about the invasion, Samuel Mitcham explained, “Spontaneously, small raiding parties led by junior officers […] stalked through the dark countryside, creating fear and confusion among German and Italian soldiers […] In a manner reminiscent of Indian warfare tactics of America's Old West, these stealthy raiders, many wearing war paint and with their heads shaved, lay in wait in the darkness along roads.” (Mitcham, 2007, 73).

Gavin

Further to the west, the U.S. 7th Army came ashore at their own designated landings, Cent – near Scoglitti, about 15 miles west of the Canadian disembarkation points – Dime – near Geta – and Joss – on a 10 mile stretch of coast flanking the town of Licata, a picturesque bluffside town. American objectives included several small airstrips within a short distance of the coast.

The U.S. 45th Infantry Division landed along the coast in the “Cent” sector, around Scoglitti. The “Thunderbirds” met little resistance from human adversaries, but suffered considerable losses during their landing from natural forces. Coming ashore through a violent, chaotic nine-foot surf, landing craft collided or smashed to pieces on jagged, half-submerged rocks, drowning scores of men. The Americans pushed inland, taking ground rapidly as the Italians fled in wild disorder or surrendered, as at San Croce Camerina: “When [Lieutenant Colonel Felix L.] Sparks arrived in the village, he was greeted by dozens of white flags fluttering from windows. Five hundred Italian soldiers had given up without the loss of a single American life. ‘Those goddamn Italians came right out with their hands up,’ Sparks recalled, ‘with their bags packed, ready to go to the States.’” (Kershaw, 2012, 36).

The 3rd Infantry Division landed in the Joss sector, seizing Licata and pushing inland. The U.S. 1st Infantry Division – the famous and relatively experienced “Big Red One,” named for its unit insignia of a crimson number one on an olive green shield, came ashore in the center of the American landings near Gela. The battle of Gela on July 10th, continuing into the 11th as the Germans launched a counterattack against the beachhead, represented the only serious fighting during the initial invasion.

The 1st and 4th Ranger Battalions, among the first American soldiers ashore, encountered minefields in addition to machine gun fire from the Italian defenders and artillery fire from heights commanding the beach and town from a distance of several miles. One luckless Ranger officer, in the lead, stepped on a mine which blew his torso open. He turned to the men behind him, his beating heart exposed, and exclaimed, “I've had it.” Other Rangers suffered wounds from exploding mines, and the Italians successfully set off demolition charges that destroyed the Gela pier. After a surprisingly vigorous firefight, the Rangers ejected the Italians – men of the 18th Coastal Brigade under Major Rubellino – from Gela, taking 200 prisoners in the process. The 26th Infantry Regiment leapfrogged inland to take the tactically useful high ground near Ponte Olivo, while the 16th Infantry Regiment took another commanding position at Piano Lupo, though only after a fierce struggle against determined Italian soldiers in a string of machine-gun nests.

By mid-morning, the Italians launched a major three-pronged counterattack, including troops from the Livorno Division. Dozens of Renault R-35 and Fiat 3000 light tanks supported each of the infantry columns as they advanced courageously against the dug-in Americans. No U.S. tanks yet supported the infantry due to difficulties in clearing the minefields while under Italian artillery fire. Light scouting aircraft deployed from the ships offshore served as spotters, despite being hunted ruthlessly by prowling Messerschmitt Bf-109D fighters. With their aid, the USS Shubrick, USS Savannah, USS Boise, and HMS Abercrombie fired their guns at a range of ten miles and successfully destroyed a number of Italian tanks. The Rangers then worked their way forward aggressively with bazookas, using the broken ground to get close to the Italian tanks and destroy more of them. With their routes of advance clogged by shattered, burning hulks, and with fierce fire directed at them by the Americans, the Italian soldiers finally withdrew, though not before taking a handful of prisoners from the 26th Infantry Regiment.

Scarcely had the Italians retreated when the ominous, faceted shapes of Panzer IV tanks appeared amid clouds of dust, advancing from the north at about 1 PM. The Hermann Goering Division's panzers attacked the 16th Infantry Division at Piano Lupo and overran their positions, then continued down towards the beachhead itself. At this point, heavy fire from the warships offshore brought the German tanks to a temporary halt.

Truck-mounted infantry of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, supported by the full force of 17 Panzer VI Tiger tanks, also launched an attack, capturing the entire 1st Battalion of the U.S. 180th Infantry Regiment. They were finally halted when the Tigers entangled themselves in an olive grove. The day ended indecisively as the Germans pulled back slightly to regroup and Patton's 2nd Armored Division put their first M4 Shermans ashore despite moderately effective bombing attacks by the Luftwaffe.

A Sherman tank on Sicily after the landing

A picture of materials being towed ashore

The Battle of Gela continued on the next day, July 11th, 1943. A pleasantly mild morning soon turned into a scene of chaos and mayhem as over 30 Panzer IVs and 30 Panzer IIIs rolled forward against the 26th Infantry Regiment, smashing through it amid a storm of bullets and shells and rolling down towards the beach. Out of 60 M4 Shermans then ashore, only four remained serviceable, the remainder having thrown their tracks. Patton himself landed as the German tanks advanced closer and closer to Gela and the beachhead, swaggering about fearlessly and barking orders.

The tide turned gradually as Patton called for the ships offshore to shell the German tanks. Directed with deadly accuracy by spotters on the ground and in the air, the naval gunners destroyed tank after tank. Daring American soldiers, many of them Rangers, worked close to the steel giants to fire bazooka rounds into their underside or engine compartments. When the Germans finally began to withdraw at 2:00 p.m., they left 43 tanks behind, a figure that both U.S. Army and Wehrmacht records independently corroborate. Among these, 10 of the mighty Tigers had suffered destruction from naval shells. Bazooka teams accounted for six Panzer III and IV tanks out of the total. Patton described the failed attack as “the shortest Blitzkrieg in history” (Macintyre, 2010, 245), and German losses numbered 630 men killed or wounded while the Americans sustained 175 killed and 665 wounded.

The key road junction at Randazzo fell to a collaborative Anglo-American attack on August 13th. Participants included the British 78th Division and the U.S. 9th Division, and the loss of this position prompted the Hermann Goering Division to abandon Taormina and move north on Highway 114, leaving the roadway behind them defended by huge quantities of land mines and booby traps. These lethal devices slowed the British pursuit sufficiently to allow the Hermann Goering's soldiers to reach Messina largely unmolested and begin their own evacuation.

Hube, comparing the adroit German escape to the British evacuation at Dunkirk earlier in the war, correctly predicted that its success would greatly bolster German morale: “The end of the Sicilian campaign is actually a full success. After the initial fiasco, the fighting as well as the preparation and execution of the evacuation, with all serviceable material and men (including the wounded) went according to plan.” (Mitcham, 2007, 222).

The final race into Messina took place during August 15th to 17th, and the Americans “won” the race by a few hours, with several platoons from the 45th Infantry Division – the Thunderbirds – entering the city outskirts late on the 16th and moving deeper into the city on August 17th. Darby's Rangers and more Thunderbirds entered the city shortly after dawn, followed by British armor in the mid-morning. Patton arrived at 10:00 a.m. to receive the formal surrender of the city officials, shortly before a British officer arrived in an armored car to do the same, just slightly too late.

The meeting naturally provoked banter on both sides: “‘Where you tourists been?’ asked GIs when the British arrived just two hours later. ‘Hello, you bloody bastards!’ replied British tankers. […] Patton entered the shattered city later that day, a phalanx of press and photographers in his wake. A               senior British officer greeted him with a snappy salute. ‘It was a jolly good race,’ said the gracious limey. ‘I congratulate you.’” (Kershaw, 2012, 42).

A bombed-out wreck, Messina offered little to the conquerors, though the populace who had not fled showered them with flowers and grapes as they marched through the streets. Patton, however, appeared radiant, his place on newspaper front pages across the globe momentarily assured.

The Anglo-American air forces and naval groups, each under their own independent command and seeing little need to confer with Eisenhower, Alexander, Montgomery, or Patton, made almost no effort to stop the German evacuations from Sicily. The Germans themselves expressed astonishment that no major attacks came, and they even began evacuating by day as well as night.

The German units emerged battered but fairly intact, while the Italians suffered devastating casualties: “Total Italian losses were about 4,680 killed, 5,000 wounded, and about 152,000 missing or captured [...] German losses were 4,561 killed, 4,583 missing, and 5,523 captured for a total of 14,667; a further 13,532 were wounded and evacuated […] Allied losses were 2,237 killed and 5,946 wounded in the Seventh US Army, and 2,062 killed and 7,137 wounded in the British/Canadian 8th Army.” (Zaloga, 2013, 89).

Despite his brief brush with personal triumph, Patton found himself in the crosshairs of scandal and hatred following the seizure of Messina. Almost immediately, news of the slapping incidents broke, enraging almost the entire U.S. 7th Army against its commander. Patton apologized to both men involved publicly, but the damage was done. While some troops cheered him, the 1st Infantry Division – the “Big Red One” – gathered its entire 15,000 men to hear a victory speech from Patton. When the general finished, the men, still furious enough to “shoot” Patton due to the slapping incident and because they knew he had permitted Bradley to replace their heroes Roosevelt and Allen, sat in deep silence with expressionless faces rather than cheering. One man, with a nearly sublime sense of irony, remarked loudly, “That f****ing f***er of a general f***ing swears too much.” (Atkinson, 2007, 172).

Meanwhile, in the Allied high command, the matter of where to land in Italy became a matter of pressing importance. Churchill favored a northerly landing, memorably and colorfully remarking, “Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest-bug from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee … Tell the planners to throw their hat over the fence.” (Atkinson, 2007, 136).

Ultimately, many far-reaching consequences followed from Operation Husky. The Italians ousted Mussolini, leading to his imprisonment, rescue by the Nazis, and reestablishment of a rump Fascist state in northern Italy. For their part, the Germans used the time taken by the Allies in expelling them from Sicily to occupy much of Italy in detail, creating a new front.

Of course, the Allies also gained some advantages. They carried out the amphibious assault with superb professionalism, even if the accompanying airborne drops proved catastrophically bungled. Perhaps most importantly, the Allied forces gained invaluable experience in amphibious operations that would later be put to good use during the D-Day landings in Normandy a year later. The U.S. Army also gained the battle experience needed to quickly become one of the most formidable Allied armies during the war.

The Mediterranean route also opened for Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union, increasing the flood of materiel by 27% annually. On top of that, the USSR also benefited immensely by the removal of many German divisions earmarked for a fresh 1943 offensive – 17 redeployed to the Balkans and Greece alone – which also gutted Hitler's Kursk offensive. With so many men and vehicles stripped from the Eastern Front, the balance tipped from deep uncertainty to a steady (though brutally costly) Soviet advance.

In fact, Operation Husky interrupted Operation Citadel in southern Russia at its most crucial moment. The Germans had penetrated two of three Soviet defensive lines and were poised to encircle and capture another vast horde of Russians. Had Citadel carried forward, the Wehrmacht stood a good chance of regaining the initiative in the east, pushing the Soviets back in a series of fresh defeats. Instead, Hitler decided to defend Italy, allowing the Soviets to counterattack and gain the initiative for themselves, grabbing momentum that they never relinquished. Operation Husky decisively switched the Third Reich to a losing, defensive strategy, and it had succeeded largely due to the Nazi failure to reinforce Sicily.

Under Kesselring's expert leadership, the Germans fell back northward methodically, fighting a major delaying action at Volturno in mid-October. The Wehrmacht then established themselves on the Reinhard Line, a temporary defensive front meant to delay the Allies until the Germans finished preparing the stronger Gustav Line, stretching from Gaeta to Ortona and anchored on the formidable strongpoint near the early medieval monastery of Monte Cassino.

In broad outlines, the Allied strategy witnessed the British Eighth Army under the tenacious but extremely undiplomatic Bernard Montgomery advancing up the eastern, or Adriatic, side of the Italian peninsula. The United States Fifth Army, meanwhile, pushed up the western side of Italy flanked by the Tyrrhenian Sea, directly towards the key town of Cassino. General Mark Clark led the Americans; the general showed many traits of an ambitious, smooth, conceited publicity-seeker and drew censure both at the time and later. Nevertheless, he also displayed determination, grit, and hard-driving aggression.

Montgomery

Clark

Cassino dominated Route 6, also known as the Via Casilina, a main highway artery and the only western Italian road at the time capable of supporting an aggressive advance by a large, motorized army. The ancient Appian Way or Route 7, closer to the coast, ran through numerous marshes and crossed many canals, and therefore seemed much less attractive to the Americans with their large numbers of trucks, tanks, and other vehicles.

These maneuvers and positions set the stage for the one of the largest land battles in World War II. The battle would consist of four main encounters, beginning in the bitter, rainy, mud-drenched weather of January 1944 and continuing through sunny, warm days of May 1944.

The Battle of Monte Cassino itself ended on the morning of May 18th. Polish troops of the 3rd Carpathian Division climbed into the monastery, accepting the surrender of 17 Fallschirmjager troops still inside, and capturing three wounded paratroopers they found in a makeshift hospital in one of the monastery's crypts. A makeshift Polish flag soon waved over the ruins, while the tough, experienced Polish soldiers wept as they listened to the Krakow Hejnal, the medieval bugle signal of their conquered homeland.

A picture of German prisoners following the battle

Following the German retreat from Monte Cassino, the Wehrmacht formed a fresh defensive line at the Hitler Line, a few miles beyond the now broken Gustav Line. However, this improvised defense lacked the prepared strength of the Gustav Line. Most of Vietinghoff's and Senger's artillery pieces lay abandoned around Monte Cassino, either spiked by having explosive charges put in their barrels or captured by the Allies.

The Hitler line crumbled after just two days' fighting, leaving the road to Rome open. Sparking yet more controversy, General Mark Clark opted for the “photo op” operation of seizing Rome rather than attempting the encirclement of the retreating German forces. This gave the Allies some interesting souvenir photographs and a minor propaganda boost, but it enabled most of the Wehrmacht soldiers to escape and fight again another day, which they did with their usual determination and skill despite their seemingly inevitable defeat.

For his part, Kesselring believed the Allied commanders changed their strategy and tactics in response to German propaganda: “I believe this development was due to a cardinal error of our German propaganda, which could not do enough to taunt the enemy for their lack of initiative, thereby goading them into a gradual change of operational principles. The method of cautious and calculated advance according to plan with limited objectives gave place to an inspirational strategy which was perfected through the months remaining till the end of the war.” (Kesselring, 1954, 264).

While ill-advised taunts about the Allies' slow, lumbering command and maneuver style undoubtedly helped the transition he noted, the incredible bloodbath at Cassino likely contributed even more. Fighting in a slow, methodical fashion clearly did not save lives – over 60,000 men lay dead around Cassino following the 129 day brawl. Speed, daring, flexibility, and the capacity to quickly seize opportunities even if the methods or routes taken proved “unorthodox” clearly not only produced victories more quickly and surely, but also conserved the lives of Allied soldiers.

Monte Cassino showed the worthlessness of the “tried and true” military techniques on the modern battlefield. Eisenhower and the Allied high command in France may well have given Patton more leeway for his aggression and initiative with the grim lessons of the Battle of Monte Cassino in mind, leading to the rapid collapse of Wehrmacht defenses across France once the Allies achieved a breakout from Normandy after D-Day.

In his final months, Mussolini unleashed everything he could against those who had betrayed him, beginning a systematic campaign of repression and a literal manhunt against anyone remotely connected to those who had unseated him. All the while, as he was ordering the death of hundreds of “traitors,” Mussolini obsessively went over his mistakes, pointing at the racial laws as one of his significant errors. The Salò Fascist Army wasn’t capable of actual military operation and were, therefore, relegated to police duty by the Germans, securing the territory behind the front and hunting partisan forces down.[3] A large number of testimonies indicated that the Germans, caring only about freeing themselves from partisan actions, provided anti-fascists with information about Salò troops' positions, numbers, and families more than once, letting Italians fight each other and leaving them in peace.

The Duce slowly imploded, suffering from more and more psychosomatic illnesses and isolating himself from his friends and family. When the Allied forces began their final push on Northern Italy, cutting through defenses known as the Gothic Line, Mussolini repeated delusions of defending his new republic, inch by inch. He contemplated the possibility of escaping his fate, attested to by the fact that he started to sell what he owned to pay for his freedom. At this point, the Duce was, to the Germans, as much a prisoner as he was an ally.

A picture of Mussolini inspecting youth soldiers in 1944

Mussolini’s final act was an attempt to flee his fate. On April 25, 1945, he was able to move about without German interference as the Allies advanced. He wore a German uniform to hide his identity and tried to march north with retreating troops, thinking he would find a way to freedom from Germany, but an armed force of partisan troops stopped the column on April 27, 1945. Mussolini was immediately identified, captured, and briefly jailed along with his lover, Claretta Petacci.

There was no great trial waiting for Mussolini and no last moment under the spotlight. The partisan troops organized a show trial to give the proceedings some sense of legality, and on April 29, 1945, they took Mussolini and Claretta out of jail. The Italian dictator was shot, along with his lover, after which their corpses were brought back to Milan's Loreto square and hung by their feet. The very next day, Hitler would commit suicide in his bunker in Berlin, and the fighting in Europe would finally come to an end a little more than a week later.

A picture of Mussolini hanging (second from left)

British involvement in Italian affairs was not confined to the Italian peninsula. Throughout the occupation, Britain viewed Italy in the light of its desire to retain influence in the Mediterranean. Britain fought long and hard during World War II to retain possession of Gibraltar, Cyprus, and particularly Malta. Its military importance is shown by its role in the surrender of Italy in September of 1943. Eisenhower wanted this completed before the invasion of mainland Italy, scheduled for September 9th, 1943. To achieve this, a “short armistice” containing only the military terms was signed in Sicily, on September 3rd, 1943. However, the “long armistice” which added the terms for the post-war governance of Italy, was signed on the battleship HMS Nelson in Malta Harbor on September 29th, 1943.[4] This surely symbolized the intention of the wartime coalition government of Britain to remain a Mediterranean power.

After the 1945 General election, the Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, continued to regard Gibraltar, Cyprus, and Malta as essential bases from which to project British power in the Middle East, especially over lines of communication including the Suez Canal and maintaining Britain’s pretensions to a great power status.[5] Furthermore, Britain viewed the restoration of trading relations with Italy as part of a wider resumption of trade with all Mediterranean countries who were invited to a joint conference on the subject in February 1947.[6]

Britain was also obliged to deal with the legacy of Italian imperial ambition in the Mediterranean and in the Horn of Africa. This began with Italian attempts to take part in the “Scramble for Africa” in the late 19th century. These were terminated by the defeat of the Italian army by the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II at Adowa in 1896. Attempts to revenge this humiliation and return Italy to the glories of the Ancient Roman Empire were a central feature of Mussolini’s rhetoric and popular appeal.[7] In practice, this meant the concept of the “Italian Shores” of the Mediterranean and Aegean.

In the Mediterranean, the islands of Sicily and Sardinia had been, for centuries, under the rule of kingdoms incorporated into Italy by the Risorgimento in 1870, but there was no guarantee that they would stay that way. Sicily had an independence movement led by a local landowner, Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile, which sought to use the liberation from fascism and long-standing aversion to Italian centralism to achieve independence. It attracted significant local support from 1942 onwards, and the British had to take a decision on the geographical extent of post-war Italy. They chose not to support the separatists, and its leaders’ willingness to flirt with the communists alienated the local mafia. This drove its leaders to increasingly extreme methods and led to its ultimate downfall.[8]

In addition, Britain had to deal with Corsica, Savoy and Provence, which were acquired by Italy in November 1942 after the Axis occupation of Vichy France. The Germans abandoned Corsica in September 1943. The island and the logistical challenges of feeding its people became the responsibility of the Allied Military Government (AMG) in Italy, until being returned to France by the Paris Peace Treaty with Italy in February 1947.[9] Italian positions in Savoy and Provence were occupied by German troops in September 1943, and were dealt with as part of the management of post-war France, which made them the responsibility of de Gaulle and the Free French government, not the Allied authorities in Italy. Britain played a leading role in the diplomacy, which thus delineated the temporal boundaries of post-war Italy.[10]

In the Adriatic and the Balkans, at the beginning of 1943, Italian troops occupied parts of present-day Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, as well as holding a protectorate over Albania as part of an incredibly complex division of responsibilities between Germany and her allies in this region.

Immediately following the surrender of Italy, all the Italian territories in the Balkans were occupied by Germany, but the British still had to deal with many thousands of displaced persons (DPs) who crossed to the Italian mainland. The British also tried persistently to influence the post-war settlement of the region, including ongoing Italian claims to Trieste with the primary objective of preventing the area falling under communist control.[11]

In the Aegean, it was a similar story; Italian forces failed in their efforts to overrun Greece and Crete in 1941 but, after being saved from total disaster by their German allies, continued to occupy most of the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands, in a tripartite division of responsibilities with Germany and Bulgaria until the Italian surrender in September 1943. At that point, Germany immediately occupied the Italian territories themselves.

Nevertheless, Britain claimed the right to influence the post-war settlement of Greece to the point of intervening in the civil war which broke out in 1944 and supplying direct financial assistance in order to support the monarchists and resist the communists. The British regarded the struggle against communism as a struggle against one and the same enemy in Greece and Italy, and they feared a domino effect long before Robert McNamara coined the term.[12] As it turned out, British intervention in Greece and the inability to sustain it had very important consequences in Italy as well.

Unlike the Germans, the Italians had retained their colonies at Versailles in 1919 and had even extended their extended their holdings in North Africa under Mussolini. Italy had lost all its North African territories before the invasion of Sicily, and Libya had a separate British military government between 1943 and 1951.

A similar pattern can be observed in the Horn of Africa. Here Italy succeeded in extending its pre-WWI holdings in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland by conquering Abyssinia (Ethiopia) at the second attempt in 1936 and British Somaliland in 1941.

Mussolini’s grandiose visions of linking Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa with those in Libya through the conquest of Egypt were defeated by the British in 1941, and British Somaliland and Ethiopia were recaptured in 1942-1943. The Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, had taken refuge in the UK, and Britain felt a proprietorial interest in the post-war future of the Horn of Africa as well. [13]

This presented challenges to the AMG regarding justice for war crimes, the resettlement of DPs, and nationalist resentment within Italy about the loss of colonies.

From the beginning, the British also aimed to win the hearts and minds of the civilian population, convince them that Mussolini and the Germans were the enemy, and to prepare the ground for the restoration of democracy. As Churchill told the House of Commons when announcing victory in Sicily, “What is it that these masterful forces bring to Italy? They bring, if the Italian people so decide, relief from the war, freedom from servitude and, after an interval, a respectable place in the new and rescued Europe. When I learn of the scenes enacted in the streets of the fine City of Palermo on the entry of the United States Armies and review a mass of detailed information with which I have been furnished, I cannot doubt that the main wish of the Italian people is to be quit of their German taskmasters, to be spared a further and perfectly futile ordeal of destruction and to revive their former democratic and parliamentary institutions. These they can have.”[14]

Consequently, there was never a ban on troops fraternizing with the Italian population such as was imposed in Germany in 1945. In fact, cooperation was positively encouraged. Allied officials used ingenuity and a can-do spirit to achieve a great deal to restore services to the civilian population with limited resources in Sicily and Southern Italy as early as the summer and autumn of 1943.[15]

As British forces moved north and entered the industrial heartland of Italy in the spring of 1945, it gradually became apparent that feeding the population and rebuilding infrastructure would not be enough to win over hearts and minds for liberal democracy. Much of the organized working class and peasants demanded fundamental reforms in class relations and working practices under the influence of communist and socialist ideology. There was no single date or event which marked the shift in British priorities from defeating fascism to defeating communism, but Italy became the most extreme case of polarization of opinions for and against communism, and that bipolarity exerted a unique degree of influence on the post-war settlement.[16] Italy also became a test of the ability of Western powers, including Britain, to limit the advance of communism as the Cold War took hold and precedents from other countries in the Balkans, the Aegean and Eastern Europe exposed the insidious ways in which communist parties could gain power.[17] As a result of this emergent “domino theory”, ensuring that Italy became a Western nation and not a Soviet puppet became predominant in British thinking from late 1945 onwards.[18]

Issues Facing the Allied Military Government

Some pre-invasion planning for the management and governance of occupied Italy did take place. The unprecedented and multinational Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT/AMG) was established in January 1943 in advance of the invasion of Sicily in July.[19] The British team was headed by Lord Francis Rodd, 2nd Baron Rennell, who was in charge of a team of Civil Affairs Officers.

Rodd

The British military campaign was always short of resources and became embroiled in attritional infantry fighting akin to World War I around Monte Cassino throughout the winter of 1944-1945. Consequently, the aims of the AMG were to “relieve the fighting troops of the challenge of delivering humanitarian aid or dealing with a hostile population”.[20] The AMG had extensive powers in the legal, financial, civilian supply, public health, public safety, and enemy property fields to achieve these aims.[21] These powers included making law by proclamation, removing and appointing local officials such as mayors, rationing, requisitioning transport, restoring infrastructure such as electricity and water supplies, and issuing its own currency.[22]

The AMG also operated military courts as part of the ideological cleansing or Epurazione program. This was similar in concept to the better-known denazification program developed later in Germany, but it was practiced far less thoroughly in Italy because it was recognized that Britain would need the active cooperation of the existing Italian bureaucracy, police and judiciary in order to govern and the cooperation of Italian industrialists in order to revive the economy. The National Fascist Party (PNF) had been in power in Italy since 1922, much longer than in Germany, and the entire civil service as well as most of civil society had been required to be PNF members. Therefore, it was simply impractical to replace them with untainted people, and it was politic not to ask too many questions. Hence, the AMG was never an investigative or prosecutorial organization, but one designed, pragmatically, to get the job done with limited resources.[23]

In setting the agenda and modus operandi of the AMG, the background and ideas about governance of the head of the AMG, Lord Rennell, were crucial for the future management of Italy and its former African colonies, on which he had worked in 1942 in the Overseas Enemy Territory Administrations (OETA). His colonial experience in Africa of administering large areas with just a handful of British officers and officials led to the system of “indirect rule” used in Italy and later in Germany. For example, there were only 270 British personnel to administer the whole of former Italian East Africa. This made indirect rule inevitable, and the priority was to do it in a way that did not compromise British military interests and achieved social reforms where possible.[24]

On the positive side, indirect rule was based on respect for native culture which Rennell had developed whilst working among the Taureg, but which translated successfully to respect for the relics of ancient Roman culture. This formed one of the founts of European civilization and helped to protect priceless artifacts from destruction in 1944-1945.[25] Indirect rule also allowed space for Italians to give the orders ostensibly in their own name and in their own language, which Rennell believed was more likely to produce obedience and protect British forces from insurrection. In the longer term, indirect rule also allowed Italians to shape their own constitution and political destiny with the ultimate aim of achieving a negotiated end to military government.[26] Of course, there was always an unstated proviso that their choice had to be a democracy that aligned with the West.

On the other hand, indirect rule allowed space for the reappearance of the mafia, black marketeering, and corruption.[27] It also severely limited the extent of Epurazione and led to the retention of almost the entire fascist era central and local civil service, carabinieri (police) and local judiciary. Rennell took a much more gradualist view of this issue than either the Italian resistance or the Americans did, a pattern which was to be repeated in the German zones of occupation and which led to tensions.[28] Rennell also believed that military government should be an interim measure, and he was opposed in principle to its use to impose regime-change or drastic reform from outside.[29] This coalesced with the desire to keep the communists out of power in a way which promoted the conservatism of Alcide de Gasperi and the DC but arguably left intact fiscal, agrarian, and economic weaknesses which now threaten Italy’s sustainability in the Euro area and even the EU. Certainly, leftist Labour MPs in Britain believed that Rennell was too close to Italian capitalist leaders and landowners, and that he would thus fail to bring about necessary reforms.[30]

De Gasperi

Once the Allies advanced into southern Italy, the AMG was split into two sections: AMG Front and AMG Rear. Both were replaced with the Allied Control Commission (ACC) on November 11th, 1943, which had a much larger staff and where American-thinking in favor of direct rule had more influence. Rennell believed this would stifle the development of Italian self- government, and he left Italy in January 1944, but by then the die was cast for the British.[31]

The military occupation of Italy did not officially end until the Paris Peace Treaty was signed on February 10th, 1947, and a new constitution for post-war Italy did not take effect until January 1, 1948. However, Rennell and his colleagues had allowed the Italians a lot of latitude in which to run their own affairs and shape their future political direction, to the extent that an Italian “proto state” was a reality long before it was formalized in the new constitution. This was a conscious decision by the conservative democrat Ivanoe Bonomi, who replaced Marshal Badoglio as President of the Council of Ministers after the liberation of Rome.

Bonomi

Bonomi wanted the outline of the future Italian state agreed to before the communist-led northern resistance movement could make its weight felt. In this, he had the full support of the British government, still led at this point by the vehemently anti-Communist Churchill.[32] In this period the key decisions were:

1. The retention of a multi-party system

2. The abolition of the Italian monarchy in a referendum, June 2nd, 1946

3. The simultaneous creation of an elected Constituent Assembly to draft the new constitution.

4. The reaffirmation of the central role of the Catholic Church and Vatican independence

The establishment of a political system with all kinds of different parties is taken for granted today, but it was far from inevitable in the wake of World War II. Under Mussolini, only the National Fascist Party (PNF) was permitted to operate after 1925, and the PNF was banned by Mussolini’s successor, Marshal Badoglio, on July 27th, 1943. However, Italy had previously been a multi-party democracy, and numerous parties quickly remerged to fill the vacuum. On the conservative right, the DC, formed in 1942 and led by Alcide de Gasperi, quickly became the largest and most dynamic. More traditional monarchist and liberal parties continued and filled several important roles, not least the governorship of the Bank of Italy held by the liberal Mario Einaudi. However, they attracted limited popular support. In the center were the Social Democrats (PSDI), while on the left the PSI, led by Pietro Nenni, the PCI led by Palmiro Togliatti, and the short-lived PdA all vied for attention, along with some new parties arising out of post-war circumstances, such as the southern regional and right-wing Qualunquista.

The British chose not to interfere with the process of party formation and registration, despite the fact that the cacophony of voices quickly established the pattern of unstable multi-party coalition governments that has bedeviled Italian politics ever since.

The left-wing parties went along with the creation of a conservative led proto-state because they were obsessed with the question of the monarchy.[33] Italian King Victor Emmanuel III had supported Mussolini until early 1943, when defeat in North Africa convinced him that Mussolini was no longer competent, but the royal family remained closely associated with fascism in the eyes of the people. Pressure grew for a referendum on the future of the monarchy through the spring of 1946. Left-wing parties supported this as a step towards democratic reform, whereas the British, the Americans, the Catholic Church, and the conservative parties, particularly the DC, saw the referendum as a means to delay the drafting of a new constitution in the hope that, with more time, stability and the economy could be restored and a less radical Constituent Assembly would be elected. The British did not take an overt position on the actual question of monarchy or republic. In the event, even the last-minute abdication of Victor Emanuel in favor of his son, Umberto, failed to prevent a decisive victory for the Republican option.[34] The British accepted the result, even though they had been happy to use the monarchy when it suited their military purposes to knock Italy out of the war.

In time, the overall republican victory was disguised a regional split along similar lines to the boundary between the German occupied RSI and the RS. Historians agree that the reasons were residual loyalty to the monarchy, which had originated in the south before Risorgimento, and resentment in the north against the king for deserting his country and exposing the people of the north to the horrors of German occupation.[35] The effect was to deepen existing regional divisions, although it is not clear that the British could have done anything to prevent this other than to take sides, as they had done so disastrously in Greece.

On the same day the referendum abolished the monarchy, elections to the Constituent Assembly took place. The DC emerged with 37% of Assembly seats under the complex system of proportional representation used but 15 other national and regional parties recorded significant shares of the vote.[36] However, the British seem to have accepted the regional divisions and the fragmentation as fait accompli, and there is no evidence that they interfered in any aspect of the referendum showing, once more, their laissez faire attitude to the political future of Italy— at least as long as things were going in a direction broadly compatible with retaining influence in the Mediterranean and preventing a communist “domino effect”.

Although the decision of the left-wing parties to forego labor and agrarian reforms in order to secure the Republic and Constituent Assembly is often condemned as a lost opportunity,[37] it should also be remembered that the referendum was progressive in one important respect: women were allowed to vote for the first time in Italian history. This decision appears to have been a joint proposal by De Gasperi and Palmiro, and was signed off by the king’s son Umberto. The British appear, once again, to have been passive observers.

 The Proto-Italian State also had to decide the future role of the Catholic Church. Under the Lateran Accords agreed to with Mussolini in 1929, the Church was granted temporal authority over the Vatican City, and Catholicism was declared the sole religion of Italy in return for the Church renouncing claims to the former Papal States. This did not automatically continue after the fall of fascist Italy, and a central aim of Church policy was to perpetuate their privileges, which they did in the Lateran Treaty of March 1947. In so doing, they ensured the Catholic Church a pivotal role in the eventual political and social settlement.

The Church had two main aims. The first was to keep out atheist communism, which meant reversing the traditional teaching that had prevented any Catholic participation in Italian politics before 1918 and muted opposition to fascism. Once that decision had been taken, the Church became a vital ally of the British and the DC through the agency of Catholic Action, which was able, repeatedly, to mobilize its two million plus members behind the DC and against the PCI at critical moments.[38] The DC also established its own organizations, the Coldiretti, among peasant proprietors, and the Associazioni Cristiane dei Lavoratori Italiani (Association of Christian Italian Workers, ACLI) among factory workers, both aimed squarely at Catholic constituencies. The hierarchical nature of the Church also tended to favor representative models of democracy in line with British and American wishes rather than the more radical, participatory models favored by many partisans and resistance groups.[39]

The second main aim of the Catholic Church was to preserve the family according to Catholic teaching. Partly to achieve this, they reluctantly allied with the DC who often presented the PCI as a threat to the family.[40] Despite the granting of female suffrage in 1946, that alliance tended to slow or prevent social reform in the role of women whose role was seen to be idealized housewives.[41] The influence of the Catholic Church also delayed serious debate about divorce, contraception, or abortion in Italy until the 1970s and beyond. Although Britain was not a Catholic country and had a Socialist government after July 1945, the all-male AMG and ACC did not challenge this. The British also appear to have refrained from asking awkward questions about the Church’s response to the Nazis and the Holocaust. They had extensive inside information via their envoy D’Arcy Osbourne throughout the war and knew that the church as a whole had been less silent and less accommodating towards fascism than is commonly believed today, but that individuals with whom they had to work, such as Cardinal Schuster of Milan, were heavily compromised.[42] A cynical decision was made that the need to maintain Italy as a pro-western democracy and keep it out of the Soviet orbit was paramount, and the reckoning could wait.

Neither the AMG/ACC nor the Proto-Italian State could manage the challenges they faced alone. NGOs, particularly Catholic Action, and the Red Cross provided some help but mostly the British and Americans turned to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). In terms of its long-term impact, this was one of the most important decisions the British made in Italy.

In the view of historian Emily Riley, UNRRA played a vital role in the emerging concept of international development. During its short lifespan, it went through three phases of thought and action: relief, reconstruction and development. In doing so, it defined the landscape of international aid for decades to come. Coming as it did before the foundation of the Bretton Woods Organizations, or the United Nations, the foundation and success of the UNRRA also marked a vital step in the transition from the exclusively sovereign nation states of the early 20th century to the globalized world of today, in which multinational organizations are set up to tackle complex cross border problems.[43] This was fully understood by some at the time in Britain.[44]

The UNRRA was chartered following an international conference in Washington in November 1943. Its first Director General was Herbert H Lehman, an American who was succeeded by Fiorello H. LaGuardia also an American. Each of the 43 signatory countries had a representative, in Britain’s case this was Robert Law. The headquarters were in Washington with a European Office in London and mission offices around the world, including in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Trieste, which liaised regarding resettlement of DPs from the Balkans who ended up in Italian DPs camps.[45] Those of the 31 member states which had not been invaded were supposed to contribute 1% of GNP to fund relief operations. This has remained the basic principle on which the UK’s international aid budget is calculated. A total of $3.7 billion was raised of which Britain contributed £900 million or 17% of the total budget.[46] Italy was allocated $50 million for a partial program in 1943 and $100 million in 1944 to provide food, medicine, clothing, and industrial raw materials.[47] This was supplemented by charitable collections, such as a collection of clothing in the United States. It is not known whether similar support operations took place in the United Kingdom. The budget was distributed by a counterpart fund under the control of a joint committee chaired by Spurgeon Keeny (an American) and Ludovici Montini (an Italian with close ties to the Catholic Church).[48]

From the outset, the UNRRA underestimated the scale of the problem of DPs and the cost of relief. Additionally, the UNRRA did not have the full support of elements of the American administration who objected to the fact that much of its work was in countries behind the emerging Iron Curtain, and it was wound up in December 1946. The British representative supported this decision, although some back bench Labour MPs did not.[49] Thus, the UNRRA was replaced by the International Refuge Organization (IRO) in January 1947 against the wishes of the United States, who would have preferred to revert to purely national aid policies. But the mission on the ground in Italy did not change significantly; both UNRRA and the IRO in Italy operated as representatives of western-liberal “internationalism” which was opposed, or paralleled, by the rival internationalisms of the Cominform from September 1947, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish diaspora among others, and was therefore compatible with of the wider British mission of preserving Italy as a western-facing, liberal democracy.[50]

Much more is currently unknown about the activities of UNRRA in Germany, Eastern Europe and the Balkans than in Italy where it was first deployed, but it is known that it drew on the professionalization and internationalization of relief work practices which had taken place between the World Wars to run a network of at least 25 DPs Camps on behalf of the AMG. [51] This involved recruiting and training around 10,000 specialized staff; the British supplied the director of Training, Harry Saunders, and made a vital contribution in this area although it is not known precisely how many staff were allocated to Italy.

Conditions in the UNRRA-run DPs camps were far from perfect, but they improved over time despite severely limited resources. [52] As in Germany, the major contribution of the UNRRA/IRO may well have been in public health. There were no major epidemics despite widespread malnutrition and injuries caused by overwork and fighting.[53] Meanwhile, food aid, accommodation and the care of orphans gradually became more organized and effective. Some camps in Italy even provided opportunities for basic employment and staff assisted with paperwork to reunite and relocate families.

Unfortunately, very little detail is known about the British contribution. The UNRRA archives contain extensive documentation and photographic records, but these await systematic study.[54] There has also been no examination of British documents in the National Archives which might show how the UNRRA liaised with the British at government-level in Italy or with officials or troops on the ground, and there are no published personal memoirs concerning the British relief efforts in Italy between 1943 and 1948. But, as far as is known, the British cooperated fully with the UNRRA, played an essential role in distributing relief supplies within Italy and generally acted with humanity and resourcefulness in very difficult circumstances. Logically, this should have helped to win hearts and minds for western liberal democracy, but there is no quantitative or qualitative study of the perceptions of ordinary Italians towards the British in this period. However, by turning to transnational organizations in Italy the British set a crucial precedent for operations in Germany and for many years afterwards in other crisis zones.

There are no precisely agreed figures, but somewhere between 11 and 20 million people were displaced by World War II.[55] Equally, there are no precise figures for the extent of the problem in Italy, but the occupation of Italy was the British government’s first encounter with the resulting issues that would dominate Europe in the late 1940s. As such the British response to the DPs in Italy is important because it set precedents, both positive and negative, for the even larger problem encountered during the occupation of Germany.

The British had to respond to the needs of a multiplicity of groups of DPs. For a start, there was substantial displacement within the “Italian Shores”. The surrender of Badoglio in September 1943 forced Italians to choose sides. Substantial numbers crossed the fluid lines in the first few days after the surrender to join pro-allied partisan bands, or in the opposite direction, to join the pro German RSI. Many more left their homes in the RSI area and took to the hills to avoid conscription. Initially many were helped simply to escape the war by sympathetic individuals among the Italian population who also took in some of the numerous war orphans and bombed-out families from the cities.[56] But others quickly coalesced into armed resistance groups which fought the local landlords as well as the fascists. Numbers are debatable but 200,000 seems feasible, of whom around 70,000 died, leaving around 130,000 to be resettled, many of whom had been radicalized by the communists and posed a direct threat to the British aim of ensuring that Italy became a western facing, liberal democracy.[57] Resettling these people and reuniting families was an urgent task for the AMG and the Italian Proto-State, in which the Catholic Church and the UNRRA played a large part.

The loss of the Italian colonies in North and East Africa created some further displacement of Italian settlers. In Ethiopia, Haile Selassie granted an amnesty, and the majority of the 35,000 or so Italians present in 1941 stayed until the Marxist upheavals of the 1970s.[58] The Italian community in Libya numbered almost 108,000 in 1939, but only about 35,000 by 1962. The rest preferred to return to Italy rather than live under the British military administration which ruled Libya from 1943 until independence in 1951.[59] Expats who did return to Italy from both the Horn of Africa and Libya were often committed fascists, and reintegrating them into post-war democratic Italy proved troublesome. They persistently contrasted the uncertainties, chaos and corruption of democratic Italy with fascist certainties and achievements. [60] This, along with nostalgia for the Italian monarchy and the failures of ideological cleansing, began to strike a chord as disillusionment. The post-war settlement became widespread in the 1990s and is one of the underpinnings of the resurgence of right-wing Eurosceptic parties such as Liga Nord, and neo fascist movements such as Casa Pound, which threaten the position of modern Italy in the EU.[61]

Small numbers of former colonial subjects also migrated to Italy in the post-war period, where they found themselves faced with ingrained racism and caught in a no-man’s land, neither inside nor outside the nation.[62] That has been amplified many times in recent Italian responses to the recent, much larger, influx of migrants from former Italian colonies in Africa that has left Italians divided and unsure how to respond with consequences that are reverberating around the entire EU. Britain neither facilitated not obstructed ex-colonial migration in the 1940s, and left it to the Italians to deal with. Their laissez faire attitude meant that they learned little, which might have helped improve the integration of the “Windrush generation” of immigrants from the British Caribbean colonies after 1948.

Probably the largest group of cross border DPs were POWs who needed to be repatriated both to and from Italy. Around 30,000 British and other allied nationalities, POWs held by the Italians,,escaped after being abandoned by their guards as the Italian army disintegrated in the days following Badoglio’s surrender. Some tried to walk south to meet the advancing allies or over the mountains to Switzerland, but others joined partisan groups and fought the remaining fascists in the Italian countryside.[63] Eventually AMG gathered and repatriated them. However, an assumption typical of the naivety of much of the British pre- invasion planning was made by M19: namely that the Germans would not occupy Italy following the Italian surrender. This meant that around 50,000 British POWs were ordered to stay in their camps and await the arrival of the Allied armies. The Germans got there first, and they were moved to camps in Germany and Poland to face another 18 months incarceration.[64]

The story of POWs returned to Italy from Allied prison camps starts with the approximately 400,000 Italians captured by the British in North Africa and in the Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa.

Another 130,000 Italian troops were captured in Sicily.[65] Numbers like these had never been seen in previous wars. The British were unprepared and were forced to ship them to camps not only in the UK but in British dominions, especially India, South Africa and Australia. In fact, only 131,800 remained in the UK.[66] Most of the rest were housed in India, though Australia received around 18,000. Almost all of the Italians captured by the British were repatriated under the terms of the Geneva convention between 1945 and 1947. They were physically fit, generally grateful for their humane treatment, and well-disposed to the ideals of western liberal democracy.[67] But the AMG and the Proto Italian State had to find them jobs and homes which was no easy task given the level of destruction in post-war Italy. Around 750,000 homes had been destroyed or damaged during the fighting, and over 1 million POWs had to be rehoused. Unsurprisingly, repatriated POWS were prominent in the social and industrial unrest in Northern Italian cities in the spring and summer of 1946.[68]

In addition to those captured by the Western Allies, over 60,000 Italians had been captured by the Russians while fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front. Only 10,085 survived horrendous conditions in captivity, but their complex needs posed an additional welfare burden when they were repatriated to Italy between 1945 and 1954.[69]

Another huge group of Italians, around 710,000, were captured by the Germans when they occupied northern Italy and Italian territories in Vichy France— the Balkans and the Aegean in September 1943. The Germans disarmed Italian units who refused to fight for the Nazis and transported these men to camps in Germany where they were classified as “military internees”. This meant they were not covered by the Geneva convention and became forced laborers suffering many of the horrors more familiarly associated with prisoners from Russia and Eastern Europe. Approximately 300,000 died.[70] The remainder were added to the burden of repatriations facing the AMG and the Proto Italian State.

A different repatriation problem was posed by soldiers from Russia and Eastern Europe who had fought for the German occupying forces in Italy in the “Vlasov Army” and subsequently been captured by the British or Americans. Some were fascist volunteers; others had been forced to fight to escape the concentration camps. Most did not want to return to their home countries for fear of reprisals, something Britain was very slow to understand. The British consistently took the legalistic approach that they were committed by agreements at the Yalta Conference to return citizens to the USSR and the emerging communist state led by Tito in Yugoslavia. Britain was also anxious to obtain the repatriation of British POWs liberated from camps in the Russian Zone of Germany, and an exchange was arranged. However, this has aroused intense controversy since it was alleged in the 1980s that the British knew full well that returnees from Italy would be massacred whether or not they had volunteered to fight for Hitler. It was further alleged by Nikolai Tolstoy and others that the repatriations were nevertheless authorized clandestinely by Harold McMillan, who was then serving with the British occupying forces in Italy as an adviser to Field Marshal Alexander and later became Prime Minister. The repatriations went ahead, and around 1000 returnees were killed, but the claims of ministerial collusion and coverup were eventually shown, during a libel trial, to be largely unfounded.[71] The controversy has, nevertheless, served to obscure the fate of much larger numbers of DPs of other groups for whom the British also made lifechanging decisions.

POWs were not the only concern of the AMG, UNRRA and the Italian Proto-State. Mussolini’s Italy, the RSI and, particularly, the occupying Germans made extensive use of slave labor in Italy to build fortifications. There was a degree of chaos caused by competing civilian and military organizations and considerable resistance, including a major uprising in Naples, which forced the Germans to use institutions of the RSI to do the recruiting from late 1943 onwards.[72] Nevertheless, the Germans did succeed in pressganging many thousands of men. The survivors, both Italians and foreigners, also became the responsibility of AMG, UNRRA and the Italian Proto state.

Adding all these groups together, the AMG, UNRRA and the Proto Italian state were responsible for resettling well over a million returning POWs and expats back into Italian society. Remarkably little is known about how this was done and how it impacted unemployment, wages, food security, housing and other social problems the existence of which played into the hands of the communists and their allies, and undermined the credibility of liberal democracy. But the story of repatriations is part of the background to the crucial general election of 1948, and it goes a long way to explaining why Britain and America had to work so hard to secure the result they wanted.

The Jews formed a unique group of DPs seeking to leave Italy. Despite pressure from the Nazis, extensive racism, harassment, discrimination and atrocities in the Italian colony of Libya, Mussolini never mounted a “final solution” against Italian Jews.[73] This changed following the German occupation of northern and central Italy, when the Nazis attempted to round up and deport all of Italy’s Jews to concentration camps.[74] Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church intervened and sheltered several thousand.[75] These survivors are known in Jewish circles as “old refugees”. Occupied Italy also became a rallying and trans-shipment point for Holocaust survivors, especially from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, smuggled across the Austrian-Italian border and known as “new refugees”. They were attempting to reach Palestine by sea, usually from the port of La Spezia. They were supported by a network of Jewish NGOs and some individuals among the British occupying forces, in defiance of official British policy, which was, controversially, to impose quotas and bureaucratic delays in an attempt to placate Arab interests in the middle East on whom Britain relied for oil and access to the Suez Canal.[76] This sorry episode, immortalized in the movie “Exodus”, seems to have had little effect on British efforts to frustrate the communist take-over of Italy other than to be a distraction, but it surely did detract from Britain’s aim of retaining influence in the Mediterranean by offending both sides in Palestine and the wider Middle East.

Displaced persons were one post-war problem the Allies encountered for the first time in Italy; negotiating a post-war settlement with resistance groups was another. In this case, policy developed through interactions between simultaneously developing situations, not only in Italy, but in Greece and the Balkans as well. Everywhere in occupied-Europe, resistance groups developed with different political perspectives and ambitions regarding the post-war settlement. While fighting was in progress the British policy was to back whichever group was most militarily effective; hence the switch from Mihailovic’s Chetniks to Tito’s communist partisans in the Balkans. Similarly, the British were willing to work with the socialists and communists of ELAS in Greece.[77] In Italy, the dozens of partisan groups which emerged in the chaos of September 1943 to resist the German occupation gradually organized themselves into Comitati di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN). More than 50% of them were members of the PCI led Garibaldi Brigades but the PSI and PdA also agreed that they would not accept any post-war role for the king, Victor Emmanuel or Badoglio. This, straightaway, created a problem because, the British government initially intended to work with the King and Badoglio for four reasons. Firstly, Churchill was instinctively a monarchist as he also showed in Greece. The British government’s principal adviser in Italy, McMillan, also supported strengthening the king as a counterweight to the RSI in the South. Secondly, the British believed that because Italian troops had sworn loyalty to the king, not to Mussolini, only the king could ensure that they changed sides to support the allies. This turned out to be wishful thinking in many cases. Thirdly, Rennell had recognized from the outset that the British did not have sufficient resources to rule Italy directly and would have to co-opt the fascist elite to rule indirectly and they too were loyal to the King and Badoglio. Finally, the king and Badoglio were willing to recognize a continuing British role in the Mediterranean through retention of Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus.[78] The result was that the resistance groups were largely left to fend for themselves in the winter of 1943-1944, whilst the British government continued to support Badoglio despite opposition from Russia and some left-wing British politicians who found his role in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and the atrocities in Libya unpalatable. The problem was compounded by the fact that by the time the Allies liberated northern cities such as Florence, the left-wing resistance groups had already installed de facto governments which tried to carry out much more far-reaching social reforms than the Allies were comfortable with.[79] This helped strengthen communist influence over the resistance groups and cemented the political divisions between the north and south of Italy which emerged in the referendum of 1946 and have manifested themselves ever since.

In Greece, British forces overtly took sides with the monarchists in armed clashes with ELAS and other left-wing groups, particularly in Athens, on December 3rd, 1944. The civil war ultimately kept Greece out of communist hands, but at a long-term cost in bloodshed, bitterness, goodwill towards Britain and threats to liberal democracy in terms of military coups and support for neo-fascism which remain.[80] In Italy, some lessons appear to have been learned from the Greek experience on both sides. Resistance groups learned not to trust British intentions regarding Epurazione and frequently imposed summary justice, for example on the former police chief, Pietro Caruso who had organized the Ardeatine Cave’s massacre for Germany.

Like the Greeks and the Yugoslavs, the Italian resistance groups and fascist survivors fought each other on occasions over local issues, particularly agriculture, and to influence the future political direction of Italy. Around 15,000 people were killed between April 1945 and December 1946. The extensive Italian literature on post-war violence ignores the role of the Allied occupying forces entirely.[81] But in reality, the violence posed a dilemma for the British occupying forces. The modern concepts of “peacekeeping” and “rules of engagement” in counter-insurgency operations did not exist in the aftermath of World War II. There is no evidence of any written policy but, in practice, British troops never overtly took sides in Italian political violence. They left it to the Carabiniere and in particular to the Polizia Partigiana to keep order. The latter were armed resistance groups superficially integrated into the police but allowed by the AMG, including the British. to operate as assassination squads in certain parts of northern Italy.[82] Instead of intervening on the ground to prevent such extra judicial killings, British policy was to assert control through political deals and maneuvers behind the scenes. A good example is the way in which the Christian Democrat, Raffaele Cadorna Jnr, was parachuted into the theatre of operations by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to become commander of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (CLNAI) under the supervision of a British liaison officer in August 1944.[83]

After the liberation of Rome in June 1944 British policy turned, firstly, to keeping the communists out of the administration of Italy and secondly, disarming the resistance groups after liberation both to bring about social stability and to prevent their weapons being used in a communist revolution. The partisans were reluctant because they did not trust the British to provide relief supplies or punish the fascists in return. But, eventually, they agreed to the Rome Protocols in which the CLNAI recognized Allied authority until the liberation in return for cash aid, and promised to surrender their weapons after liberation and give up claims to be the government in the North. However, enforcing disarmament proved tricky, and the British tended to avoid confrontation, which meant that partisan groups retained their cohesion and were able to mount numerous civil disturbances and industrial actions exploiting the unsatisfied grievances about employment, housing and land. Stability came only slowly and, crucially, the threat of social unrest and communist revolution was still very much alive at the time of the 1948 general election.[84]

British reparations policy in Italy had several strands, some of which differed markedly from those applied in Germany. In both countries, the first concern was to seize technology which might be of use to the Allies and to prevent it reaching other Axis powers, in particular Japan. The main organization developed to do this was AU30, a secret commando type unit created by Commander Ian Fleming within the directorate of Naval Intelligence. They operated beside and ahead of front-line troops and scored some notable successes in Italy. In the fields of torpedo and mine research, much of it commissioned by Germany from Italian companies, they were able to send technical drawings and prototypes back to the UK. Submarine maps, enigma coding machines, and radar direction finding beacons AU30 captured all helped to shorten the war and save lives. In the process, lessons were learned about the composition of units, the equipment they required, and methods of preventing the destruction or looting of valuable technology by retreating German units, Allied troops or DPs. This knowledge was to prove invaluable in the far larger operations to seize technology and equipment in occupied Germany conducted by AU30 and its much bigger brother T-Force.[85]

However, the huge scale and relentless intensity of reparations operations in Germany was based on a deep-seeded belief at all levels of the British government and military in German technological superiority.[86] There was no such belief regarding Italian technology. In fact, Italian industry was regarded with some disdain, and Italy’s emergence as a G7 economy in the post-war period was not foreseen. Consequently, AU 30 operations in Italy were wound down after D Day, and T-Force never operated in Italy. Nor was there was ever any plan to deindustrialize Italy such as the Morgenthau Plan envisaged for Germany and Italian industry was not asset stripped by the British. On the other hand, the Germans repeatedly tried to obtain their own reparations by moving equipment into Germany ahead of the advancing Allied armies. For example, they completely dismantled the steel plant at Cornigliano, near Genoa, but were sometimes thwarted by organized working-class opposition[87] This strengthened the leadership of the communists in the industrial north of Italy, posing a threat to British aims, but preserved a basis for post-war reconstruction.[88]

Once the fighting stopped, British reparations policy focused on reconstruction in an attempt to win over hearts and minds for west-leaning, liberal democracy. To achieve that, it was essential to avoid the kind of financial collapse which Germany had experienced as a consequence of reparations in cash and raw materials demanded at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. John Maynard Keynes’ work on this had become orthodoxy in both London and Washington by 1943.[89] As a result, the British never made any attempt to extract cash or raw materials from post-war Italy, and limited the cash payments made in the Paris Peace Treaty, on February 10th, 1947 to a total of $360m split between six countries.[90]

To the very limited transfers of money and equipment from Italy must be added reparations in the form of POW labor. Although officially prohibited by the Geneva Convention, the British made extensive use of Italian POWs in UK agriculture.

They were officially classed as “co-operators”. The dominions, particularly Australia, also made extensive use of Italian POW labor in agriculture and construction.[91] These men were considered a low-security risk, often welcomed into the local communities where they worked and were even permitted to stay on and settle in Britain with their families after the war; around 1,100 did so.[92]

Reparations in terms of territory forfeited by Italy were much more onerous. Corsica was returned to France, and Italy lost all its colonies in Africa and the Balkans.[93] Libya was placed under British military government until 1951, when it was granted independence and exited the British sphere of influence. The British regained British Somaliland militarily in 1942 and also overran Ethiopia. They tried hard to maintain the latter as a British sphere of influence imposing onerous terms on the returning Haile Selassie by treaty in 1942, and less onerous terms, also by treaty, in 1944. They succeeded in retaining substantial influence over borders with Somalia and development policies well into the 1960s.[94] However, failure to retain influence in territory once occupied by Italy, such as Greece and Yugoslavia, has been widely seen as evidence of a wider decline of British influence in the Mediterranean as a whole, including Italy, especially after Britain was unable to continue financial assistance to Greece or Turkey after March 1947.[95] As discussed further below, this had important implications for the economic and political reconstruction of Italy.

The most contentious territorial reparations issue, and a focus of British policy for almost a decade, was Trieste. This important port on the Adriatic coast had been coveted by Italy since before World War 1 but was also sought by communist Yugoslavia. The British succeeded in having it placed under an international mandate in 1945, which divided the area into Zones A and B.

Zone B fell under the growing influence of Yugoslavia, and there were recurrent border clashes. British MPs repeatedly urged the British foreign office to stand up for human rights in Zone B to little avail, and the Italians persistently tried to reunite it with Zone A and return the whole of Trieste to Italy. The British and Americans publicly declared support for the Italian position in March 1948, in an attempt to influence the outcome of the Italian general election. In the end, both sides had to accept a compromise reached at the Memorandum of London in 1954 which returned the city and Zone A to Italy, but Zone B was incorporated into Yugoslavia. This did nothing to enhance British standing in the Mediterranean.[96]

The British people supported World War II as a just war. They demanded that the major Nazi war criminals be prosecuted, as they were at Nuremberg, and that a thorough denazification program rooted out Nazi personnel and ideology at lower levels. In Germany, public pressure forced action, despite reservations among some politicians and a generally lenient policy towards low level Nazis in the British zone of occupation.[97] In Italy, British AMG officers did remove and arrest some senior figures, but this was often merely tokenism. For example, in Sicily, the mayor a town would be removed by AMG, but they would then cooperate with his deputy who was just as much of a fascist.[98] There was nothing like the Nuremberg War Crimes trials even for major atrocities such as the use of poison gas in Ethiopia,[99] the massacres in Cyrenaica,[100] the Domenico Massacre— in which 194 people were killed when the Italians levelled a Greek village in retaliation for resistance attacks—[101] and the mass-deportations from Slovenia.[102] Furthermore, no compensation was paid to individual survivors.[103]

This policy of subverting Epurazione did meet with concerted opposition from the resistance groups, former colonies, and countries occupied by the Italians, as well as some in the UK. Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia all compiled lists of wanted suspects. However, the British took two key decisions. The first was indirect rule, one consequence of which was the retention of almost the entire fascist judiciary of Italy. In the judgement of Cairoli (2015) their role was “on many occasions …. An obvious attempt to grant impunity for the highest hierarchs of the former regime.”[104] The second decision was to tolerate deliberate obstruction of the process of extradition by the DC governments of De Gasperi.[105]

The attitude of the British can be viewed as either pragmatic necessity, or bare-faced hypocrisy, depending on one’s viewpoint. Supporters of the pragmatic view see it as a necessity to support a regime who had been declared “cobelligerents” rather than enemies by the armistices of September 1943. What cannot be disputed is that it was deliberate. The British found a compromised judiciary preferable to the lynch law of the resistance, and colluded in the deliberate creation by the Italian Constituent Assembly of divergent “double paths” in collective memory between evil Germans and Italians who were merely collaborators.[106] However, there have been long term consequences as the expurgation of these war crimes from Italian collective memory and the process of hiding them behind the better-known German crimes has prevented the Italians from coming to terms with the past, along with sanitizing the return of Italian nationalist and neo-fascist ideology and parties in popular culture, especially among football fans.[107]

The Paris Peace Treaty officially resolved almost all of the reparations issues and ended the jurisdiction of the AMG and ACC, as well as the British military occupation of Italy in February 1947. In practice, there had been little for many of the soldiers to do for some time. They were not deployed as peacekeepers; with Italian Carabiniere empowered to deal with the remaining civil unrest, the specialist civilian staff of the UNRRA were running the remaining DPs camps, and Britain did not have funds for soldiers to carry our infrastructure projects. Many of the British troops had become virtual tourists.

Ernest Bevin told the House of Commons, on February 25th, 1947, that as a consequence, 45,000 British soldiers could be demobilized and returned to peacetime production where they were sorely needed.[108] The next phase of the battle to maintain Britain’s position as a Mediterranean power and to halt the spread of communism would be fought with economic weapons and backroom political deals by diplomats, bankers and propagandists.

Economic Reconstruction

Mussolini’s fascist regime inherited a generally backward economy with severe problems arising from the First World War of debt, inflation, unemployment, and industrial unrest. But there were clusters of modern industries, especially cars, aircraft and electrical goods in the Northern triangle (Turin, Milan and Genoa). Mussolini tried to use these to accelerate economic growth by using a corporatist model and breaking the power of the trade unions. With typical fascist rhetoric, he talked of four battles. The “battle for births” was to increase the population by a third by providing welfare and fiscal incentives ran from 1927 to 1938, but ended up being a failure. That meant that post-war Italian governments did not enjoy a demographic dividend, but suffered from a sense of welfare entitlement among large sections of the population.[109]

The “battle for land” aimed to increase land available for agriculture production and to clear land underutilized land for new infrastructure. It succeeded in reclaiming the Pontine Marshes and did provide much needed employment, but it did very little to solve the archaic and inefficient pattern of landholdings in the South and never matched up to the propaganda. The complimentary “battle for grain” aimed to improve Italy’s food security and reduce the chronic balance of payments deficit. However, the import tariffs used were one factor which raised prices by 2300% between 1938 and 1945, and, coupled with suppression of trade unions, caused real wages to fall by around half.[110] Predictably, the legacy of these policies played into the hands of Communist agitators and forced the AMG to provide food aid in order to lower prices, but at the expense of compromising pure free-market capitalist principles.

The “battle for the Lira” did achieve a revaluation from around 140 to the Pound to “quota 90” in 1927, which led to cheaper raw materials for heavy industry and rearmament. But that level proved unsustainable as it required import tariffs on consumer goods which added to the fall in real wages The post-war AMG was faced with an urgent problem of determining the correct exchange rate and stabilizing the Lira, as well as making the most efficient use of severely limited foreign currency reserves.[111] Outwardly, the Bank of Italy, under Einaudi, determined policy. But Einaudi spent most of the fascist period in academia in the USA, and it is known that this both influenced Einaudi’s thinking and created a conduit for the Americans to act as backseat drivers in the formulation of post-war Italian economic policy.[112] It is unclear to what extent the British did the same from their Keynesian perspective. Treasury and Bank of England files which might shed light on this question have yet to be studied.

By the end of the fascist era, most of Mussolini’s policies had failed and the Italian economy had fundamental weaknesses. Firstly, a policy of disregarding international trade and trying to achieve self-sufficiency by import substitution had been an expensive failure, and the country faced serious food and raw material shortages exacerbated by failure to reform the archaic farming practices of the Mezzogiorno and the loss of Italy’s oil producing colonies in North Africa. Secondly, Mussolini’s corporatist approach, in which the state created barriers to entry, protected existing firms and created inefficient oligopolies and monopolies. [113] The British approached the problem with no comprehensive plan such as Morgenthau had drawn up for Germany, but with a desire to restore capitalism and the Italian economy rather than to dismantle it. However, the degree of purity of that capitalism was disputed between the British and Americans. The British had guidance in the form of Keynesian economic principles and supported a broadly social democratic model. The Americans, by contrast, preferred a much less diluted form of capitalism, as did some Italians, notably Epicarno Corbino, Minister of the Treasury, who opposed Keynesian pump priming through public expenditure.[114]

Nevertheless, for the period from July 1943 to February 1947, the initiative in the economic reconstruction of Italy lay with the British. American interest was sporadic, and in 1945-1946, they were unwilling to fund the scale of relief and reconstruction required.[115] However, the British adopted the same principle of indirect rule that they did in civil administration. This allowed the development of a black market and rampant inflation, to which the German occupying authorities also contributed.[116] The British relied on a consensus among Italian employers to abandon autarky and develop an economy based on free trade and capitalism.

The communists and socialists failed to provide a coherent alternative to the employers’ model and did not demand major nationalization. Surprisingly, given what was happening in Britain at the time, neither did the British. Nor did the left-wing parties succeed in introducing progressive taxation at the same time as the Lira was revalued in the spring of 1946, and they were unable to prevent the abolition of the fascist era ban on redundancies, which led to a 25% rise in unemployment. But in return, the left- wing parties did secure national wage bargaining which limited the differential between rates in the north and south of the country and the scala mobile, which inflation proofed most salaries and lasted until 1985.[117]

The British were happy to leave the key decisions to the Italians, because these measures contributed to the return of stability and the restarting and expansion of industries, such as steel, metalmeccanica, especially cars, and household electrical goods. That of course supported the principal British objective of preventing Italy becoming communist and did not threaten Britain’s position as a Mediterranean power. However, free trade policies did not lead to immediate economic recovery, partly because of continuing unrest and partly because of the scale of infrastructure destruction, which included about 80% of the Italian merchant navy and 40% of railway track.[118] The UNRRA archives make it clear that their personnel, including a contribution from Britain, did some reconstruction work, but it was a drop in the ocean.[119]

The British can claim very little direct responsibility for the emergence of the “third Italy”: the light manufacturing hubs in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany in the late 1940s and 1950s, or the distinctive identity of Italian industry which rejects American mass consumerism in favor of a model based on style and design. But it can be argued that none of these successes would have been possible and that the preconditions for the entry of Italy into the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the EEC in 1957 would not have been met if Britain had not helped to achieve the Allies primary objective in post-war Italy: to halt the spread of communism.

It can also be argued that the limitations of the reconstruction that the Italians created for themselves now threaten Italy’s viability in the modern EU. Land reform in the Mezzogiorno is one key example. The Proto Italian State ducked the issue, although on this issue Bevin certainly did apply pressure through the British ambassador, Sir Victor Mallet, amidst fears that it would play into the hands of the communists.[120] The DC took no notice, and no significant reform took place until 1950, and then only after large-scale, violent peasant uprisings. This was after British influence had effectively ended and exposed the limitations of their role in post-war Italy

Although Britain adopted a laissez faire policy towards Italian reconstruction, once the Americans lost faith in Britain’s ability to restrain communism in the Mediterranean, they began to steer Italian economic policy much more actively driven by mounting fears of a communist takeover.

The key event was the unilateral British decision in February 1947 to cease all direct aid to Greece and Turkey on financial grounds after March 31st, 1947. President Truman responded by enunciating the Truman Doctrine, on March 12th, 1947, which committed American economic and military aid to both Greece and Turkey in the interests of repelling communism. The House of Commons debate which followed on March 17th, 1947 focused on regrets that the Americans had chosen to act unilaterally, instead of through the UN. The speakers showed no sign that the British government appreciated, at the time, that ending aid to Greece and Turkey would effectively end their influence in Italy and, in the long term, undermine their aspirations as a Mediterranean power, but that is what happened.[121]

The Americans followed up by offering huge volumes of financial aid to Italy among other countries in the form of the European Recovery Program (ERP) a.k.a. the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1944. This did not come out of the blue. The Italians had realized that they needed cash aid for infrastructure reconstruction as early as February 1946. Initially they approached international organizations such as the Export-Import bank, and when that failed, attempted to open multilateral negotiations for “Interim Aid” jointly with France in the autumn of 1947.[122] It was only after this failed that they made a case for inclusion in the Marshall Plan. Their case was accepted and Italy received $1.5 billion throughout 1948-1952. As it was intended to do, this permanently changed the dynamic between Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States as future influencers of Italy.[123]

Once in the ascendency, the Americans exerted pressure on Einaudi to use more orthodox deflationary policies of reducing the money supply. These finally brought inflation under control, but at a heavy price in terms of unemployment which harmed the DC electorally, at least in the short term. But even the Americans were unable to prevent the creation of a mixed economy in Italy, as the Italian case they accepted for inclusion in the Marshall Plan included extensive use of Autonomous Public Boards which were quasi-nationalized industries, mostly in the rural south. These created long term clientelism which hamstrung the Italian state and economy well into the 1990s.[124] Britain, as a fellow beneficiary of Marshall plan largesse, was merely a spectator in these developments in Italy, which De Gasperi termed the “strategy of dependence (on the United States).”[125]

The General Election of 1948

Everyone likes democracy when they are winning; the litmus test comes when public opinion is not going the way certain groups want it. It has also become a basic principle of Western democracy that foreign powers do not interfere in the conduct of national elections. In this context, it is instructive to study the conduct of the 1948 Italian general election, particularly as this was the decisive moment when Italy joined the community of Western liberal democracies and capitalist economies. Both Britain and the United States interfered massively in this election, the Americans brazenly and the British more subtly.

The 1948 election was the first to be held under the new constitution of the Republic of Italy, approved by the Constituent assembly in December 1947 and implemented from 1 January 1948. It was intended to be a decisive break with the past.[126] The PNF and its successor fascist parties were banned. The constitution also contained numerous checks and balances in a bicameral system comprising a chamber of Deputies and a Senate, elected by complex and different forms of proportional representation.[127] It was further designed to be extremely difficult to amend in order to prevent the return of fascism through a future elective dictatorship.[128] The effect was that Italians voted in 1948 knowing that their options on the right had already been legally curtailed.

The interim governments of the Proto-Italian State included ministers from the PCI, PSI and PdA. Despite being very cautious in their use of these powers,[129] the PCI and PSI were excluded from government in May 1947, in a move coordinated with similar action by the government of Paul Ramadier in France and strongly supported by the Americans, the Pope and the British. In fact, the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, made it a precondition for aid, although De Gasperi prevaricated until after the Paris Peace Treaty was ratified by the Russians.[130] This decision was prompted by a potentially existential electoral crisis for the DC. Economic discontents had led to a dramatic fall in its vote in municipal elections in November 1946. That was accompanied by the rising popularity of the PCI especially in the rural south, where they took up the grievances of the peasant sharecroppers that the AMG and DC had shelved.

The exclusion of the main left-wing parties from government significantly altered the balanced of power in discussions over the draft constitution drawn up in 1946. The result was a constitution which sought to define the range of acceptable choices. It featured a preamble which specified that Italy is a democratic republic, and laid down certain basic principles of human rights such as equality before the law. The body of the text also enshrined many individual freedoms including rights to travel, freedom from censorship, and religious freedom subject to the special role of the Catholic Church defined by the Lateran treaty in 1947.[131] Extensive discussion of these principles took place and involved compromises between the Liberal Party, the DC, PCI and the PSI. The communists in particular lost several crucial arguments, particularly on the independence of the constitutional court, the equal powers of the two chambers designed to prevent domination by a dictator such as Stalin and unconditional workers’ rights to participation in management and to strike.[132] However, the DC also lost ground to the Liberals regarding corporatism and regionalism. A federal Italy was decisively rejected, which curtailed the DCs powers of patronage but left simmering regional discontents unsatisfied. The result of all these compromises was a uniquely Italian document which was not a copy of any other western constitution, but which placed Italy firmly in the liberal, democratic mainstream.

Importantly, Constituent Assembly debates were held in public session and extensively reported in the Italian media at the time which, presumably, ensured that voters in the 1948 election were well aware of the principles and safeguards enshrined in the constitution, and could form a judgement of the willingness, or otherwise, of various parties and their supporting international ideologies to uphold them based on their actions elsewhere.

Exclusion from government did not prevent the left-wing parties from standing for election, but it did force the PCI and PSI to form the Fronte Democratico Popolare (Popular Democratic Front, FDPs). This was not unanimous, and a social democratic faction seceded from the PSI led by Guiseppe Saragat and formed the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (IDSP). They attracted little popular support, and the 1948 election was effectively a binary choice between the FDPs and the DC. In a huge swing compared with the November 1946 local elections, the DC won by 48% to 31%; when the votes were counted from April 18-19, 1948, it presented a much more decisive margin than the British had forecast in the early months of 1945.[133]

The Americans used both overt and covert methods in a manner which was “breathtaking in its contempt for any principle of “non-intervention” in the internal affairs of an independent country.”[134] The British efforts were more subtle but also represented a serious abuse of that principle. This was done on the advice of the British ambassador, Sir Victor Mallet who advised the foreign office that the British government should do “everything in its power to help and encourage the Christian Democrats and their allies in the electoral battle.”[135] Bevin, tempered by his experiences in Greece, was concerned lest intervention backfire and embarrass the British government.[136]

Nevertheless, Bevin took several initiatives. His first move was to ease trade restrictions on Italian exports. Next, a visit by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowitt, succeeded in smoothing ruffled Italian feathers over events in the former Italian colony of Somaliland, and made clear that the British government supported the IDSP, not Nenni’s PSI which had joined the FDPs. This weakened the credibility of the FDPs among progressives who looked to the domestic reforms of the British Labour government for inspiration.[137] That was followed by attempts, supported by both Bevin and Mallet, but ultimately unsuccessful, to drive a wedge between the PSI and PCI and then to steer Saragat’s secessionist social democrats into the DC in the hope that they would make the latter more enthusiastic about social reform in Italy and more palatable to the rank and file of the British Labour Party. Other European social democratic parties and trade unions were also encouraged to disavow the FDPs.[138]

One of the major problems which concerned De Gasperi and the DPs was Italy’s surplus population. Mussolini had encouraged them to emigrate to Italian colonies in Africa but, as previously noted, that flow had reversed by 1947. Bevin tried to find ways to absorb surplus Italian manpower in the form of repatriated DPs into British colonies in Africa, but this was blocked by the Colonial Office.[139] But, at some point in 1948, the European Voluntary Workers Scheme (EVW) which recruited labor for British factories and mines from DPs camps in Germany, was extended to Italy. Around 2,000 female textile workers were recruited for the textile industry. The Italians hoped for many more, but schemes to recruit male workers for the coal mines were blocked by British trade unions. It is unclear from existing studies if opening up the EVW to Italy was intended as a gesture to help the DPs in the general election. The most complete account of the British role in the 1948 election by Pedaliu (2004) ignores the issue of emigration as an incentive entirely. However, Italy had previously used its surplus labor as a bargaining chip in 1946 negotiations with France over territorial reparations on its northern border, and De Gasperi believed that free movement of labor was positive for future European integration. Cause and effect in a further effort to bolster the DPs in the 1948 election seems probable, but no paper trail has yet emerged.[140]

Bevin had more success over Trieste. He first asked the Americans to accept the partition of Trieste and the return of the Port and Zone A to Italy, but the Americans trumped this and persuaded Britain and France to declare that the whole of Trieste, including the Yugoslav occupied Zone B, should be returned. Such an unequivocal declaration was made on March 20th, 1948, and probably did significantly bolster nationalist electoral support for the DC.[141] The same objective was served by a British decision, supported by the Americans, to waive the right to further international trials of Italian war criminals and to entrust the process to Italy alone.[142] Finally, Britain trialed its new propaganda department, the IRD in Italy, based in the Rome embassy, from where it had some effect in countering Soviet propaganda.[143]

The Americans wanted to go even further but the British resisted, for example, revisions to the military provisions of the Paris Peace Treaty which prevented Italy from rearming.[144] British support for that, and for Italy’s inclusion in NATO, would come only after the country’s political direction was settled.

There is no question that the 1948 election result was the decisive moment in shaping Italy’s destiny as a Western democracy, but responsibility for that outcome is less clear cut. Was it simply a case of successful election rigging by the Americans and the British, or something more nuanced?

The evidence supports the nuanced view. Admittedly, contemporary observers and modern historians have no doubt that British and American intervention, particularly the Marshall plan and concessions to Italian nationalist feelings, made a significant difference.[145] But the political skills of De Gasperi should not be underestimated in any analysis of the forces leading to the DC victory. The coalition of the DC, the United States, Britain and the Vatican was not easy to assemble or maintain due to American protestant opposition to the Catholic Church, differences of emphasis between the British and the Americans, and the aversion of De Gasperi to the apocalyptic tone of much of the Vatican propaganda.[146] The role of the Catholic Church, which produced extensive propaganda, encouraged parishioners to vote, and refused mass to communists should also not be underestimated.[147]

Conversely, it can be argued that the Communists defeated themselves. Togliatti, leader of the PCI, represented the moderate wing of his party and often acted as a break on the most radical street level actions, despite inflammatory rhetoric in a strategy known as doppiezza (duplicity) which merely confused and demoralized his political base without in any way appeasing or fooling De Gasperi or the Allies. In fact, the strikes that did occur, including a general strike in Milan, never seriously threatened the stability of the government. With hindsight, and in the view of Mallet at the time, they merely indicated that the PCI was not strong enough to seize power by force. But the Russia Committee in the British Foreign Office and the United States State Department viewed them as a much more serious threat and used them to justify more heavy-handed intervention in the 1948 election.[148] To that extent, therefore, communist strategy was counterproductive.

Not only was internal PCI and FDPs strategy confusing and counter-productive, but developments in Italy did not take place in isolation. The activities of communist parties elsewhere also served to undermine Togliatti’s credibility. The inclusion of the PCI in the Cominform in September 1947 followed by the coup in Czechoslovakia in March 1948 was arguably crucial as both cast doubt on the willingness of the FDPs to adhere to the new Italian constitution. Those doubts were deliberately reinforced by the British.[149] The Italian Foreign minister, Sforza, proved to be correct in his assessment that the coup in Czechoslovakia had weakened the FDPs in Italy.[150]

The outcome of the 1948 election paved the way for “peaceful coexistence in the long run” between the DC and the PCI, given that De Gasperi resisted American pressure to further delegitimize the communists.[151] The split in the PSI which began in 1946 deepened, and following the 1948 election, Nenni’s Marxist fellow traveler faction effectively collapsed. This left the PCI in undisputed control of the Italian left from then on. However, it remained excluded from government and was unable to prevent 4 decades of DC domination which led Italy into the EEC in 1957 and presided over the “economic miracle” of 1958-1963. However, as mentioned earlier, British failure to persuade the DC to tackle agrarian discontents in the South, as part of its election interference strategy in 1948, left legacy issues which may yet undermine that miracle and place Italy’s position in the Euro Area and even the EU itself in jeopardy.

Conclusions

Britain invaded Italy in 1943 in order to satisfy demands for a second front, knock Italy out of the war, divert German troops from Normandy, and ultimately attack Germany from the south. Military considerations predominated, but some advanced planning was done for the post-war management of Italy. Nevertheless, the scale of the problems that would be faced, especially meeting the needs of displaced persons from a multiplicity of groups, was grossly underestimated, and the Allies were under-resourced and ill-prepared throughout the Italian campaign. The decision by the Americans, and more enthusiastically, the British, to turn to the fledgling UNRRA for help was inspired and has had profound, mostly beneficial, consequences for the handling of global humanitarian crises ever since.

Slow military progress and tortuous negotiations for the surrender of Italy after the overthrow of Mussolini enabled the Germans to occupy the northern half of the country and set up a fascist puppet state whilst King Victor Emmanuel, Badoglio, and his supporters became “co-belligerents” of the British in the south. The effect was to deepen ancient regional divisions in Italy, and the second central conclusion of this study is that the British failed to reconcile those divisions themselves or to force the Proto-Italian State to do so. Any other outcome would have required a direct and intrusive approach to the governance of post-war Italy but, given their lack of resources, the British opted for a policy of indirect rule.

The overriding aim of British policy shifted during the course of 1945-1946 from defeating fascism to defeating communism. Both Britain and the United States made a pragmatic decision to ally with the newly formed Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church in order to defeat communism. That entailed both a severely compromised program of ideological cleansing and the restoration of capitalism. The Americans favored unrestrained capitalism, whereas the British preferred a social democratic version in line with the policies of the British Labour government. The central gap in research is the extent, if any, to which the British attempted to act as backseat drivers and steer Italian socio economic policies in their direction. Even if they tried, a turning point came when the British were unable to sustain their Mediterranean ambitions and cut off aid to Greece and Turkey in March 1947. The American response, in the form of the Marshall plan and the Truman Doctrine, ensured that from then onwards, the initiative in determining the post-war orientation of Italy crossed the Atlantic.

However, the final conclusion is that the British laissez faire approach to the post-war settlement in Italy always had limits. When it appeared in the winter of 1947-1948 that those boundaries would be crossed and communism could triumph both in Italy and in the wider Mediterranean, where Britain still aspired to power, then the British were prepared to intervene heavily by economic and diplomatic means to influence the 1948 election, even though the British army had been withdrawn and Italy was an independent country. The political acumen of De Gasperi, the role of the Vatican, the tactical mistakes of Togliatti, and the activities of communist parties elsewhere, especially in Czechoslovakia, combined with American and British interference to produce a decisive victory for the DC. This set Italy on course to become a west-leaning liberal democracy primed for an economic miracle and a founder member of NATO and the EEC. Consequently, Britain can be said to have achieved its principal aim in Italy. At the same time Britain did retain its garrisons in Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus, and with them a diminished, but still significant, influence in the Mediterranean. But these successes came at a price. By allying with the DC and the Vatican to exert indirect rule in Italy, the British passed up the opportunity to carry out social reforms and left a legacy of a sanitized fascist past, corporatism, clientelism, corruption and regional divisions that have come back to haunt Italy in recent years.

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Further Reading

Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi. 2016. "The Organisation of Forced Labour In Italy (1943-1945)". Lavoroforzato.Topografiaperlastoria.Org. http://lavoroforzato.topografiaperlastoria.org/temi.html?id=6&cap=20.

Andall, Jacqueline, and Derek Duncan (Eds). 2005. Italian Colonialism. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Bernhard, P. 2012. "Behind the Battle Lines: Italian Atrocities and The Persecution of Arabs, Berbers, and Jews In North Africa During World War II". Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26 (3): 425-446. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcs054.

Booker, Christopher (1997). A Looking-Glass Tragedy. The Controversy Over the Repatriations from Austria in 1945. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd.

Boobbyer, Philip. 2017. "Lord Rennell, Chief Of AMGOT: A Study of His Approach to Politics and Military Government (C.1940–43)". War in History 25 (3): 304-327. doi:10.1177/0968344516671737.

Brown, Cindy. 2015. ""To Bury the Dead and Feed the Living": Allied Military Government in Sicily 1943-44". Canadian Military History 22 (3): 35-48. http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1693&context=cmh.

Caruana, Joseph. 2014. "Secret Signing in Malta of Final Italian Armistice During World War II". Times of Malta. 2014. https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/Secret-signing-in-Malta-of-final-Italian-armistice-during-World-War-II.502485.

Carver, Tom. 2013. Where the Hell Have You Been? New York: Short Books.

Casali, Luciano. Mira, Roberto. 2012. "Referendum on Monarchy in Italy". Blog. Destino Republicano - Republican Fate. https://destinorepublicano.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/referendum-of-the-monarchy-in-italy-1946/.

Caroli, Paolo. 2015. "The Role of The Judiciary Within the Construction of Collective Memory. The Italian Transition". Wroclaw Review of Law, Administration & Economics 5 (1): 162-179. doi:10.1515/wrlae-2015-0030.

Chadwick, Owen. 2011. Britain And the Vatican During the Second World War. Cambridge, GBR: Cambridge University Press.

Cresciani, Gianfranco (2004) Clash of Civilisations, Italian Historical Society Journal, Vol.12, No.2, p.7

Delaporta, Elia. 2011. "The British Military Mission and Army in Greece 1942-52. The British Role in Greek COIN Operations". Blog. https://ellinikosemfilios.blogspot.com/2011/12/british-military-mission-and-army-in.html.

Deplano, Valeria. 2018. "Within and Outside the Nation: Former Colonial Subjects in Post-War Italy". Modern Italy 23 (4): 395-410. doi:10.1017/mit.2018.27.

Dondi, Mirco. 2007. "Division and Conflict in the Partisan Resistance". Modern Italy 12 (2): 225-236. doi:10.1080/13532940701362748.

DPs Camps in Europe. 2019. "Italy DPs Camps in Italy". Dpcamps.Org. http://www.dpcamps.org/italy.html.

Einaudi, Mario. 1944. "The Economic Reconstruction of Italy". Foreign Affairs, no. January 1944. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/italy/1944-01-01/economic-reconstruction-italy.

Einaudi, Mario. 1948. "The Constitution of The Italian Republic". American Political Science Review 42 (4): 661-676. doi:10.2307/1950923.

Finklestein, Monte S. 1998. Separatism, The Allies and The Mafia: The Struggle for Sicilian Independence, 1943-1948. LeHigh University Press.

Forcucci, Lauren E. 2010. "Battle for Births: The Fascist Pronatalist Campaign in Italy 1925 to 1938". Journal of The Society for The Anthropology of Europe 10 (1): 4-13. doi:10.1111/j.1556-5823.2010.00002.x.

Gasparetti, Flavia. 2012. "Italian Women Migrants in Post-war Britain". PhD, University of Birmingham.

Gat, Moshe. 1996. Britain And Italy, 1943-1949: The Decline of British Influence. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

The George C Marshall Foundation. 2019. "History of The Marshall Plan - George C. Marshall". Marshallfoundation.Org. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/the-marshall-plan/history-marshall-plan/.

Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988. 1st ed. London: Penguin Books.

Grandi, Francesca. 2013. "Why Do the Victors Kill the Vanquished? Explaining Political Violence in Post-World War II Italy". Journal of Peace Research 50 (5): 577-593. doi:10.1177/0022343313480202.

Harrod, Roy. 2003. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hennessy, Peter. 1992. Never Again. London: J. Cape.

Hibbert, Christopher. 2001. Rome. London: Penguin.

Hogan, Michael J. 1987. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. Cambridge University Press.

Holland, James. 2014. Italy's Sorrow. [London]: Harper Press.

Italy, Official Gazette. 1947. "The Constitution of the Italian Republic 1948". Rome. http://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/Italy.FDPs

Judt, Tony. 2010. Post-war: A History of Europe Since 1945. Vintage.

Kendall Moore, Jason. 2000. "Between Expediency and Principle: U.S. Repatriation Policy Toward Russian Nationals, 1944-1949". Diplomatic History 24 (3): 381-404. doi:10.1111/0145-2096.00224.

Kokonnen, Susanna. 2008. "Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Italy 1945-51". Jewish Political Studies Review, no. 25 April. http://jcpa.org/article/jewish-displaced-persons-in-postwar-italy-1945-1951/.

Longden, Sean. 2009. T-Force: The Race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945. Constable & Robinson.

MacGalloway, Niall. 2013. "All the King's Men? British Official Policy Towards the Italian Resistance". Retrospectives 2. http://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/...

Martin, Simon. 2018. "Football, Fascism and Fandom in Modern Italy". Blog. Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/football-fascism-fandom-modern-italy/.

Mariuzzo, Andrea. 2013. "Land Reform in the 1950s In Italy and the United States: The Thinking of Mario Einaudi". Modern Italy 18 (4): 355-371. doi:10.1080/13532944.2013.842801.

Mussolini, Benito, Child, R.W. Ed 2009. My Autobiography. Dover Publications Inc.

Origo, Iris. 1999. War in Val D'orcia, An Italian War Diary 1943-44. Allison & Busby.

Pankhurst, Richard. 2014. "Ethiopia's Post World War II Relations with The British". Blog. Ethiopian Argument. https://zethio.blogspot.com/2014/03/ethiopias-post-world-war-ii-relations.html.

Pedaliu. Efstathia Effie. 2004 Britain and the 'Hand-over' of Italian War Criminals to Yugoslavia, 1945–48. Journal of Contemporary History. Vol. 39, No. 4, Special Issue: Collective Memory, pp. 503–529 JSTOR 4141408

Pedaliu, Efstathia Effie. 2014. "Britain, Italy And the Early Cold War: Aspects of British Foreign Policy Towards Italy, 1946-49". PhD, London School of Economics.

Perugini, Nicholas. 2017. "The Forgotten Italian Military Internees of WWII". The Stillman Exchange. https://thestillmanexchange.com/2017/03/26/the-forgotten-italian-military-internees-of-wwii/.

Pons, Silvio. 2008. "Communism and Anti-Communism in Italy 1945-1989". Accessed July 30. http://italianacademy.columbia.edu.../papers.CommunismAnti.FDPs.

Raftopoulos, Rigas. 2009. "Italian Economic Reconstruction and the Marshall Plan. A Reassessment". Politische Italien-Forschung Occasional Papers No 3. https://www.academia.edu/1567268/Italian_Economic_Reconstruction_and_the_Marshall_Plan._A_Reassessment.

Reinisch, Jessica. 2016. “Introduction: Agents of Internationalism”. Contemporary European
History, 25, pp 195-205 doi:10.1017/S0960777316000035

Reinisch, Jessica. n.d. "The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Organisation (UNRRA) and the "World Task in Public Health" after the Second World War". Presentation, Birkbeck College, University of London. www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/..

Riley, Emily. 2017. "From Relief to Reconstruction to Development: Defining and Implementing Foreign Aid in Post-War Italy". PhD, Princeton.

Schnitker, Harry. 2011. "The Church in Italy Under Allied and Nazi Occupation, 1943-1945 - CNA Columns: Inside the Church During WWII". Catholic News Agency. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/the-church-in-italy-under-allied-and-nazi-occupation-1943-1945-1654.

Tasca, Luisa, and Stuart Hilwig. 2004. "The Average Housewife; In Post-World War II Italy". Journal of Women's History 16 (2): 92-115. doi:10.1353/jowh.2004.0055.

Tapiolas, Joanne. 2019. "Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia". Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia. https://italianprisonersofwar.com/.

Taylor, Frederick. 2011. Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany. Bloomsbury Publishing.

UNRRA. 1944. "UNRRA Program in Italy 1". New York: UNRRA. https://www.cvce.eu/en/collections/unit-content/-/unit/df06517b-babc-451d-baf6-a2d4b19c1c88/362ac450-9b04-4a89-892d-011d296d33e2/Resources.

Vulliamy, Ed, and Helena Smith. 2014. "Athens 1944: Britain's Dirty Secret". Guardian, 2014.

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[1] Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988. 1st ed. London: Penguin Books.; Holland, James. 2014. Italy's Sorrow. [London]: Harper Press.

[2] Ginsborg.

[3] Claudio Pavone, A Civil War, (Verso 2013).

[4] Caruana, Joseph. 2014. "Secret Signing in Malta of Final Italian Armistice During World War II". Times of Malta. 2014. https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/Secret-signing-in-Malta-of-final-Italian-armistice-during-World-War-II.502485.

[5] Pedaliu, Efstathia Effie. 2014. "Britain, Italy And the Early Cold War: Aspects of British Foreign Policy Towards Italy, 1946-49". PhD, London School of Economics; Hennessy, Peter. 1992. Never Again. London: J. Cape.

[6] HC Deb 27 February 1947 vol 433 cc2290-404

[7] Mussolini, Benito, Child, R.W. Ed 2009. My Autobiography. Dover Publications Inc.

[8] Finklestein, Mont S. 1998. Separatism, The Allies and the Mafia: The Struggle for Sicilian Independence, 1943-1948. LeHigh University Press.

[9] The complete text can be found in the library of congress accessible at www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust...

[10] Pedaliu.

[11] Pedaliu

[12] Pedaliu

[13] Pankhurst, Richard. 2014. "Ethiopia's Post World War II Relations with The British". Blog. Ethiopian Argument. https://zethio.blogspot.com/2014/03/ethiopias-post-world-war-ii-relations.html

[14] Hansard, HC Deb 27 July 1943 vol 391 cc1397-402

[15] Boobbyer, Philip. 2017. "Lord Rennell, Chief Of AMGOT: A Study of His Approach to Politics and Military Government (C.1940–43)". War in History 25 (3): 304-327. doi:10.1177/0968344516671737.

[16] Pons, Silvio. 2019. "Communism and Anti-Communism in Italy 1945-1989". Accessed July 30. http://italianacademy.columbia.edu.../papers.CommunismAnti.FDPs.

[17] The transcript of the debate in the House of Commons, 19 June 1947 is a good example of this process at work; HC Deb 19 June 1947 vol 438 cc2230-343

[18] Pedaliu

[19] The later abbreviation AMG is generally used and will be followed in this paper.

[20] Brown, Cindy. 2015. ""To Bury the Dead and Feed the Living": Allied Military Government in Sicily 1943-44". Canadian Military History 22 (3): 35-48. http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1693&context=cmh.

[21] Brown, p.37.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Boobbyer, Philip. 2017. "Lord Rennell, Chief Of AMGOT: A Study of His Approach to Politics and Military Government (C.1940–43)". War in History 25 (3): 304-327. doi:10.1177/0968344516671737

[25] Hibbert, Christopher. 2001. Rome. London: Penguin.

[26] Boobbyear

[27] Ibid, p320; Ginsborg, 62-3

[28] Taylor, Frederick. 2011. Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany. Bloomsbury Publishing.

[29] Boobbyer, 317

[30] Ibid, 323

[31] Ibid, 322

[32] Ginsborg, 53

[33] Ginsborg, 53

[34] Casali, Luciano. Mira, Roberto. 2012. "Referendum on Monarchy in Italy". Blog. Destino Republicano - Republican Fate. https://destinorepublicano.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/referendum-of-the-monarchy-in-italy-1946/.

[35] Ginsborg; Holland

[36] The full results for each of the 31 regions can be found at https://www.electoralgeography.com/new/en/countries/i/italy/italy-constituent-assembly-election-1946.html

[37] Ginsborg

[38] Schnitker

[39] Ibid. 50ff

[40] Chadwick, Owen. 2011. Britain And the Vatican During the Second World War. Cambridge, GBR: Cambridge University Press.

[41] Tasca, Luisa, and Stuart Hilwig. 2004. "The Average Housewife in Post-World War II Italy". Journal of Women's History 16 (2): 92-115. doi:10.1353/jowh.2004.0055.

[42] Chadwick; Schnitker

[43] Riley, Emily. 2017. "From Relief to Reconstruction to Development: Defining and Implementing Foreign Aid in Post-War Italy". PhD, Princeton.

[44] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1946-11-29/debates/c499083c-ac31-48d7-8c11-357d7c868193/Unrra(Winding-Up)

[45] https://search.archives.un.org/united-nations-relief-and-rehabilitation-administration-unrra-1943-1946, Box AGO18

[46] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1946-11-29/debates/c499083c-ac31-48d7-8c11-357d7c868193/Unrra(Winding-Up)

[47] UNRRA. 1944. "UNRRA Program in Italy 1". New York: UNRRA. https://www.cvce.eu/en/collections/unit-content/-/unit/df06517b-babc-451d-baf6-a2d4b19c1c88/362ac450-9b04-4a89-892d-011d296d33e2/Resources.

[48] Ginsborg, 79

[49] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1946-11-29/debates/c499083c-ac31-48d7-8c11-357d7c868193/Unrra(Winding-Up)

[50] Reinisch, Jessica. 2016. “Introduction: Agents of Internationalism”. Contemporary European
History, 25, pp 195-205 doi:10.1017/S0960777316000035

[51] Reinisch

[52] DPs Camps in Europe. 2019. "Italy DPs Camps in Italy". Dpcamps.Org. http://www.dpcamps.org/italy.html. Is an ongoing attempt to recover the oral history of survivors of these camps

[53] Reinisch, Jessica. n.d. "The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Organisation (UNRRA) and the "World Task in Public Health" after the Second World War". Presentation, Birkbeck College, University of London. www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/..

[54] https://search.archives.un.org/italy-mission-99

[55] Judt, Tony. 2010. Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945. Vintage.

[56] Origo, Iris. 1999. War in Val D'orcia, An Italian War Diary 1943-44. Allison & Busby is one example of many memoirs of internal displacement and the individuals who tried to help.

[57] Ginsborg; Holland

[58] Pankhurst

[59] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_settlers_in_Libya

[60] Andall, Jacqueline, and Derek Duncan (Eds). 2005. Italian Colonialism. Oxford: Peter Lang.

[61] Jones, Tobias. 2018. "The Fascist Movement That Has Brought Mussolini Back to the Mainstream". The Guardian, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/22/casapound-italy-mussolini-fascism-mainstream.

[62] Deplano, Valeria. 2018. "Within and Outside the Nation: Former Colonial Subjects in Post-War Italy". Modern Italy 23 (4): 395-410. doi:10.1017/mit.2018.27.

[63] Ginsborg, 9

[64] Carver, Tom. 2013. Where the Hell Have You Been? New York: Short Books.

[65] Holland

[66] Gasparetti, Flavia. 2012. "Italian Women Migrants in Post War Britain". PhD, University of Birmingham.

[67] Tapiolas, Joanne. 2019. "Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia". Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia. https://italianprisonersofwar.com/.

[68] Ginsborg, 105.

[69] Vadim Erlikman. Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke : spravochnik. Moscow 2004, p47.

[70] Perugini, Nicholas. 2017. "The Forgotten Italian Military Internees Of WWII". The Stillman Exchange. https://thestillmanexchange.com/2017/03/26/the-forgotten-italian-military-internees-of-wwii/.

[71] Booker, Christopher (1997). A Looking-Glass Tragedy. The Controversy Over the Repatriations from Austria in 1945. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd: Kendall Moore, Jason. 2000. "Between Expediency and Principle: U.S. Repatriation Policy Toward Russian Nationals, 1944-1949". Diplomatic History 24 (3): 381-404. doi:10.1111/0145-2096.00224 documents the diplomacy involved from an American perspective but the British position was similar.

[72] Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi. 2016. "The Organisation Of Forced Labour In Italy (1943-1945)". Lavoroforzato.Topografiaperlastoria.Org. http://lavoroforzato.topografiaperlastoria.org/temi.html?id=6&cap=20.

[73] Bernhard, P. 2012. "Behind the Battle Lines: Italian Atrocities and The Persecution of Arabs, Berbers, And Jews In North Africa During World War II". Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26 (3): 425-446. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcs054.

[74] Ginsborg

[75] Schnitker, Harry. 2011. "The Church in Italy Under Allied and Nazi Occupation, 1943-1945 - CNA Columns: Inside the Church During WWII". Catholic News Agency. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/the-church-in-italy-under-allied-and-nazi-occupation-1943-1945-1654.

[76] Kokonnen, Susanna. 2008. "Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Italy 1945-51". Jewish Political Studies Review, no. 25 April. http://jcpa.org/article/jewish-displaced-persons-in-postwar-italy-1945-1951/.

[77] Delaporta, Elia. 2011. "The British Military Mission and Army in Greece 1942-52. The British Role in Greek COIN Operations". Blog. https://ellinikosemfilios.blogspot.com/2011/12/british-military-mission-and-army-in.html;

[78] MacGalloway, Niall. 2013. "All the King's Men? British Official Policy Towards the Italian Resistance". Retrospectives 2. http://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/...

[79] Ibid.

[80] Dealaporta; Vulliamy, Ed, and Helena Smith. 2014. "Athens 1944: Britain's Dirty Secret". Guardian, 2014.

[81] Grandi, Francesca. 2013. "Why Do the Victors Kill the Vanquished? Explaining Political Violence in Post-World War II Italy". Journal of Peace Research 50 (5): 577-593. doi:10.1177/0022343313480202.

[82] Ibid

[83] Dondi, Mirco. 2007. "Division and Conflict in The Partisan Resistance". Modern Italy 12 (2): 225-236. doi:10.1080/13532940701362748.

[84] MacGalloway.

[85] Longden, Sean. 2009. T-Force: The Race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945. Constable & Robinson. Kindle Edition Locs 46-52

[86] Ibid.

[87] Raftopoulos, Rigas. 2009. "Italian Economic Reconstruction and The Marshall Plan. A Reassessment". Politische Italien-Forschung Occasional Papers No 3. https://www.academia.edu/1567268/Italian_Economic_Reconstruction_and_the_Marshall_Plan._A_Reassessment.

[88] Ginsborg, 25, 68

[89] Harrod, Roy. 2003. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

[90] Text at www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust...

[91] Tapiolas, Joanne. 2019. "Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia". Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War in Australia. https://italianprisonersofwar.com/.

[92] Gasparetti, 34

[93] Ibid

[94] Pankhurst

[95] Gat, Moshe. 1996. Britain And Italy, 1943-1949: The Decline of British Influence. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

[96] Pedaliu

[97] Taylor

[98] Ginsborg; Holland.

[99] Pankhurst

[100] Bernhard

[101] http://www.ww2wrecks.com/portfolio/italian-war-crimes-and-atrocities-in-greece-during-ww2/

[102] Pedaliu.

[103] Cresciani, Gianfranco (2004) Clash of Civilisations, Italian Historical Society Journal, Vol.12, No.2

[104] Caroli, Paolo. 2015. "The Role of The Judiciary Within the Construction of Collective Memory. The Italian Transition". Wroclaw Review of Law, Administration & Economics 5 (1): 162-179.

[105] Pedaliu, 2004

[106] Caroli

[107] Jones; Martin, Simon. 2018. "Football, Fascism and Fandom in Modern Italy". Blog. Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/football-fascism-fandom-modern-italy/.

[108] HC Deb 27 February 1947 vol 433 cc2290-404

[109] Forcucci, Lauren E. 2010. "Battle for Births: The Fascist Pronatalist Campaign in Italy 1925 To 1938". Journal of The Society for The Anthropology of Europe 10 (1): 4-13.

[110] Ginsborg. 80

[111] Ginsborg, 94-95

[112] Mariuzzo, Andrea. 2013. "Land Reform in the 1950s In Italy and the United States: The Thinking of Mario Einaudi". Modern Italy 18 (4): 355-371; Pedalieu

[113] Einaudi, Mario. 1944. "The Economic Reconstruction of Italy". Foreign Affairs, January 1944. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/italy/1944-01-01/economic-reconstruction-italy.

[114] Pedaliu; Ratopoulos. 10

[115] Raftopoulos,9

[116] Ibid

[117] Ginsborg, 96-97

[118] Raftopoulos. 9

[119] https://search.archives.un.org/united-nations-relief-and-rehabilitation-administration-unrra-1943-1946

[120] Pedaliu, 183

[121] HC Deb 17 March 1947 vol 435 cc15-20

[122] Raftopoulos,11

[123] Hogan, Michael J. 1987. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. Cambridge University Press.

[124] Raftopoulos, 12

[125] Ibid. 13

[126] For the full text in English translation see, Italy, Official Gazette. 1947. "The Constitution of The Italian Republic 1948". Rome.

[127] Ibid. Articles 56-57

[128] Ibid, Articles 138-139

[129] Ginsborg

[130] Ibid, 106-113

[131] Ibid. Article 7

[132] Einaudi, Mario. 1948. "The Constitution of The Italian Republic". American Political Science Review 42 (4): 661-676.

[133] Pedaliu, 157

[134] Ginsborg, 115

[135] Cited by Pedaliu, 147

[136] Pedaliu, 157

[137] Ibid

[138] Ibid, 163-5

[139] Ibid

[140] Gasparetti, Chapters 2 and 3

[141] Ibid, 172

[142] Ibid, 182-183

[143] Ibid, 185

[144] Ibid, 181

[145] Pedaliu; Ginsborg; Pons

[146] Pons. 3

[147] Pedaliu, 189

[148] Pedaliu, 151

[149] Pedaliu, 173-175

[150] Ibid, 176

[151] Pons. 4