Italian Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian Civil War left even its own veterans unsure how they had ended up on the side they chose. Nuto Revelli, who became a partisan commander, wrote of the night of the 25th of July: "If on the night of the 25th of July I had been beaten, today perhaps I would be on the other side." He added that he feared anyone who claimed to have understood everything at the time.

  The war set Italian fascists against Italian partisans, while German troops occupied much of the country and the Allies fought their way up the peninsula in the Italian campaign. It lasted just under two years and ended in the spring of 1945. Behind the partisans stood a committee of anti-fascist parties. Behind the fascists stood a state built under German direction.

  How does a state collapse so completely that a soldier must choose his side alone? Who were the men and women who took up arms, and what did they do to one another and to the civilians around them? And why do historians still argue about what to call the conflict at all?

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• 2. Roots of Resistance

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  On the 3rd of August 1921, the Italian Socialist Party signed a pacification pact with Mussolini and his Fasces of Combat. Trade unions adopted a similarly peaceful, legalist strategy. Workers who disagreed formed a militia called the Arditi del Popolo. The Italian General Confederation of Labour and the Socialists refused to recognize it, and the Communist Party of Italy ordered its members to leave.

  Mussolini's secret police carried the official title Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism, and the regime itself used the word anti-fascist for its opponents. Palmiro Togliatti was among the left-wing figures who later described the street fights with fascist squads between 1919 and 1922 as a true civil war in defence of the popular classes. Partisans of communist and socialist inspiration kept that memory alive.

  In 1924 the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti was murdered, and Mussolini openly accepted responsibility. From that point the state moved toward total control, with imprisonment and confinement hanging over opponents. In 1925 the liberal anti-fascist Benedetto Croce published his Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli were other liberal voices of the period.

  Severino Di Giovanni, an Italian anarchist, left for Argentina after the 1922 March on Rome and organized several bombings against the Italian fascist community there. Inside Italy, clandestine networks stayed fragmented into small groups that could not threaten the regime. Their writings were copious, especially among exiles, but they did not reach the masses.

  From 1927 to 1934, the Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana joined non-communist exiles in Nérac, France, and published a paper called La Libertà. Giustizia e Libertà, active from 1929 to 1945, was cofounded by Carlo Rosselli. Ferruccio Parri, later Prime Minister, and Sandro Pertini, later President of Italy, were among its leaders. Historian Gaetano Salvemini carried its message abroad.

  Many Italian anti-fascists then went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They hoped to set an example of armed resistance, and they gave themselves a motto: "Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy."

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• 3. Forty-Five Days

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  Between the 11th and the 12th of June 1943, Lampedusa and Pantelleria became the first Italian territories taken by the Allies, in Operation Corkscrew. The landing in Sicily began on the 10th of July, and Rome was bombed for the first time on the 19th. Defeat looked certain, and Mussolini could not detach himself from Germany. His presence also blocked any negotiation with the Allies.

  On the night between the 24th and the 25th of July, the Grand Council of Fascism approved a motion of no confidence in its own prime minister. The motion was named the Grandi agenda, after its promoter Dino Grandi. The next day King Victor Emmanuel III had Mussolini arrested and put Marshal Pietro Badoglio in his place.

  The fascists did nothing. The army occupied the Wedekind and Braschi palaces, the headquarters of the party and of its Roman federation, without meeting resistance. General Enzo Galbiati gave the Blackshirts no orders, although the 1st Armored Division "M" stood loyal to the regime north of Lake Bracciano.

  Badoglio's proclamation after the arrest contained a blunt sentence: "The war continues." Many exhausted Italians had read Mussolini's fall as the end of the fighting. There were celebrations, but also attacks on the property of the National Fascist Party and the removal of fascist symbols and monuments. Secret talks toward a separate peace began, while public statements still promised loyalty to Germany. The Germans meanwhile planned Operation Achse to occupy Italy.

  Badoglio dissolved the National Fascist Party, kept political parties banned and imposed martial law. On the 28th of July, soldiers fired on anti-fascist demonstrators in Bari and in Reggio Emilia. General Mario Roatta's circular had ordered troops to face riots "in combat formation" and to open fire from a distance, even with mortars and artillery, without warning.

  Anti-fascists seized on the continuity. A satirical song, La Badoglieide, mocked a government where "the shirt was no longer black / but fascism remained the master." Badoglio absorbed the Blackshirt militia into the army and replaced its senior officers with men of sure monarchical faith.

  Leaders came home from prison, confinement and exile. Luigi Longo, Pietro Secchia and Mauro Scoccimarro returned for the communists, and Pietro Nenni, Sandro Pertini, Rodolfo Morandi and Giuseppe Saragat for the socialists. Riccardo Bauer, Ugo La Malfa and Emilio Lussu returned for the actionists. On the 3rd of August, a delegation led by Ivanoe Bonomi and Alcide De Gasperi demanded that Badoglio end a war contrary to popular sentiment.

  During the night between the 23rd and the 24th of August, carabinieri sent to arrest the fascist hierarch Ettore Muti killed him, officially during an escape attempt. After the Italian Social Republic was founded, fascists celebrated Muti as the first fallen of the civil war.

  Later, many anti-fascists decided they had been too gentle with the old regime. They said that "the fascists returned because fascist blood was not shed on the 25th of July." The fascists told the opposite story, dating their own martyrdom to that same day and vowing revenge.

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• 4. Armistice and Allegiance

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  Marshal Badoglio read a radio message on the evening of the 8th of September 1943, announcing an armistice that Italy had in fact signed at Cassibile on the 3rd. The king and Badoglio fled the capital for Apulia, together with most of the government. German forces, already prepared through Operation Achse, occupied a large part of the peninsula, including Rome.

  Hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers, in Italy and in occupied areas such as southern France, the Balkans and Greece, received no orders. Many surrendered without a fight and were deported to Germany as military internees. Others found civilian clothes and refuge, helped by ordinary civilians. In the cities, crowds watched disbanded Italian troops overwhelmed by a handful of Germans. Many felt the humiliation as a "new immense Caporetto."

  Italy split into several political and territorial entities. The government under the king held authority mainly over the provinces of Brindisi and Taranto and over Sardinia. Territory conquered by the Anglo-Americans and not yet handed back came under the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories. From divisions of the former Royal Army came the Italian Co-belligerent Army, which fought beside the Allies.

  The historian Santo Peli writes that the Germans captured more than 800,000 Italian soldiers after the armistice. About 186,000 agreed to collaborate in various capacities. In February 1944, 615,812 former soldiers who had refused any collaboration were still imprisoned in camps under the Wehrmacht. Some who did choose the Germans received an armband reading Dienst der Deutschen Wehrmacht, meaning "in the service of the German Wehrmacht."

  Sardinia offered an early test. The Italian contingent there, including the 184th Infantry Division "Nembo," was strong enough to force the Germans to withdraw from the island. When the armistice came, the XII battalion of the Nembo, under Major Mario Rizzatti, mutinied to follow the Germans of the 90th Light Infantry Division. Lieutenant Colonel Alberto Bechi Luserna was sent to quell the mutiny and was killed by the mutineers. Some call this one of the first episodes of civil war.

  With no authority left to consult, soldiers decided by their own values. Sometimes "a nothing, a false step, a soaring of the soul" was enough to land a man on the other side. Fascists and resisters agreed on one thing, which was condemnation of the king and Badoglio. Civilians sheltered hiding soldiers, and others chose "not to choose," forming the so-called "gray area" of the "waiters."

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• 5. The Partisan Army

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  Hours after the radio announcement, representatives of several anti-fascist organizations converged on Rome. Mauro Scoccimarro and Giorgio Amendola came for the Italian Communist Party, and Alcide De Gasperi for Christian Democracy. Ugo La Malfa and Sergio Fenoaltea represented the Action Party, and Pietro Nenni and Giuseppe Romita the Socialists. Ivanoe Bonomi and Meuccio Ruini spoke for the Labour Democratic Party, and Alessandro Casati for the Liberals. Together they formed the first Committee of National Liberation, with Bonomi as president.

  The Communists wanted to act without waiting for the Allies. Their statement said that "We can not and must not passively expect freedom from the British and the Americans." The Allies doubted that guerrillas could be effective, and General Alexander postponed their attacks. Even so, the Western Allies supplied small arms, ammunition and explosives. Personnel, often Italian-American members of the OSS, were parachuted or landed behind enemy lines.

  The first partisan groups formed in Boves, in Piedmont, and in Bosco Martese, in Abruzzo. Other groups, mainly of Slavs and communists, rose in the Julian March, and some grew around escaped Allied prisoners of war. The Germans reacted quickly and dissolved these early units. On the 19th of September 1943 in Boves, the Nazis committed their first massacre on Italian territory.

  On the 16th of October, the committee's first important press release rejected the reconciliation offered by republican leaders. The Milan committee called on the Italian people to fight the German invaders and their fascist lackeys. In late November the Communists created assault detachments named after Garibaldi, led by Luigi Longo. Their first operational order, dated the 25th of November, told partisans to attack German officers, soldiers and depots, as well as collaborators and war industries.

  The Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, called GAP, formed small cells with a single aim, which was urban terror through bombings of fascists, Germans and their supporters. Each cell worked independently, so that an arrest or betrayal could not unravel the network. The attacks succeeded so well that German and Italian police suspected foreign intelligence agents. A Communist announcement of September 1943 urged answering the tyranny of Nazism with "violence and terror."

  Women joined the resistance by procuring supplies, clothing and medicines, spreading propaganda, raising money and keeping communications open. They also organized rallies and joined strikes and demonstrations. Some fought as combatants. In mid-1944, the Garibaldi Brigade Eusebio Giambone became the first detachment of guerrilla fighters to rise in Piedmont.

  According to Ferruccio Parri, partisans numbered only about 9,000 until February 1944. The Graziani call-up, proclaimed on the 19th of February 1944, changed that. At least seventy thousand young men joined the partisans to avoid enlisting with the fascists. At peak activity, including supporters in plains and cities, the movement reached 200,000 men and women.

  In the spring and summer of 1944, partisan strength allowed short-lived partisan republics. They lasted until autumn and winter, when Italian-German counter-offensives destroyed them. Mussolini called the operations against the Piedmontese republics a march of the Social Republic against the Vendee. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring estimated that from June to August 1944 alone, partisans inflicted at least 20,000 casualties on the Germans, and his intelligence officer gave a higher figure.

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• 6. Salò's Armed Men

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  Mussolini returned to power only because German paratroopers rescued him in the Gran Sasso raid. Under German direction, northern and central Italy became the Italian Social Republic, known as the RSI, with Mussolini as leader. Its army began with four regular divisions: the 1st Bersaglieri Italia, the 2nd Granatieri Littorio, the 3rd San Marco marines and the 4th Alpina Monterosa. The Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana came under regular army control in 1944.

  The fascists claimed 780,000 men and women under arms, but sources indicate no more than 558,000. Partisans and their active supporters numbered 82,000 in June 1944. Recruitment was hard. Most of the old Italian army had been interned by the Germans, many Italians had been conscripted into forced labour in Germany, and few wanted to fight for Nazi Germany. Convicts won freedom by joining, and anyone who resisted conscription faced a death sentence.

  Prince Junio Valerio Borghese commanded the Decima Flottiglia MAS, which fought the Allies on its own terms. He owed no allegiance to Mussolini and even suggested he would take him prisoner if he could.

  On the 29th of October 1943, the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica killed Domenico Giardina, head of the Turin Militia, and attacks spread to Rome, Florence, Genoa and Ferrara. The Rome attack struck the Adriano Theater, where Marshal Graziani was speaking. On the 14th of November, the federal Igino Ghisellini was killed. At the Congress of Verona, the news triggered a mob reaction that killed eleven anti-fascists unrelated to the assassination. Mussolini himself called the reprisal "stupid and bestial."

  Claudio Pavone dismisses the search for the first shot as "not very productive." Giorgio Bocca had written that "It is obvious that the anti-fascists are the first to move and that the Communists move first." By the end of November, Minister Mezzasoma ordered newspapers to stop discussing any pacification. Allied propaganda radios, among them Radio Algeri, Radio Londra and Radio Bari, also openly urged the killing of republican fascists, broadcasting their homes and habits.

  Special units added their own brutality. In Rome, the gang of Guido Bardi and William Pollastrini used methods that shocked even the Germans. Pietro Koch's band, under the protection of General Kurt Mälzer, tortured partisans and helped dismantle the Action Party's clandestine structure, then moved to Milan after Rome fell. The Banda Carità worked in Tuscany and Veneto and became infamous for the 1944 Piazza Tasso massacre in Florence.

  In Milan, the Ettore Muti squad answered to former army corporal Francesco Colombo, who had been expelled from the party for embezzlement. The federal Aldo Resega wanted to remove him in November 1943, but a GAP attack killed Resega. On the 10th of August 1944, the squad and Republican Guard soldiers carried out the Piazzale Loreto massacre, killing fifteen anti-fascist prisoners in retaliation for an assault on a German truck. Milan's mayor and provincial chief, Piero Parini, resigned afterward.

  Alessandro Pavolini called the war a "war of religion" and pushed Mussolini to militarize the party through the Black Brigades. They fought partisans first and the Allies second, and they also took part in arrests aimed at capturing Jews. German commanders and Italian police chiefs protested their lack of discipline, summary executions and the display of corpses in the streets. At the end of 1944, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin contested the methods of Franz Pagliani's brigade in Bologna, and Pagliani was expelled from the city at the beginning of 1945.

  The Germans gladly let Italians handle the repression. Doing so delegated the "dirty work" and kept RSI units away from the front. The brigades' biggest operation was the reconquest of the Ossola Valley and the destruction of its partisan republic. Even so, the Germans steadily eroded the little power the RSI held.

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• 7. Lines That Blurred

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  Italian regular troops of the two states mostly avoided each other, yet not always. The Forlì Battalions Group of the RSI, attached to the German 278th Division, fought the marines of the Folgore Combat Group, with dead and wounded. In the Polesine, the Cremona Combat Group's first battalion collided with the remains of the retreating Decima MAS Barbarigo Battalion.

  The RSI press magnified a small fascist resistance in the south through the figure of O'Scugnizzo, a second lieutenant who appeared in a comic strip by Guido Zamperoni. Late in the conflict, emissaries of Borghese held secret contacts with the ship's captain Agostino Calosi, Ivanoe Bonomi and Admiral De Courten. They sought to plan a joint landing in Istria to avert a Yugoslav invasion. Germany and the United Kingdom opposed it, so nothing came of it.

  "The crime news has jumped from the fourth page of the newspapers to the first," one account of the period complained. With central authority gone, bandits and gangs filled the vacuum across the country. Many carabinieri had been interned for monarchical loyalty, and the Republican Guard replaced them badly. In some areas, villagers organized their own armed patrols to defend their property.

  Partisans faced a problem of reputation. Formations needed money, and robberies of banks and company coffers became almost a necessity for many, especially Garibaldi units. Men in fake uniforms also staged robberies to blame the enemy. Nuto Revelli wrote that disbanded soldiers and local criminals posing as partisans terrorized the population. A hat and a jacket were enough to confuse the picture, and he said such men would be shot.

  Partisan commands marginalized formations that did not recognize the National Liberation Committee. Anyone who used the committee's collection vouchers without authority faced a popular court, and anyone who did so without even using its name would be shot. Pavone explained the severity as a need for self-legitimation without shadows. Among the Germans, units of eastern recruits, including Tartars, White Russians and Cossacks, committed violence and rape.

  The case of the so-called Battalion Davide, led by Giovanni Ferrero near Canelli, shows how blurred the lines became. A partisan gang living by banditry, it offered itself to the authorities and called itself "anti-fascist" and "pro-German" at once. The Nazis eventually used such men in the SS and as guards at the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste. In Turin, the Republican Guard captured youths who robbed shops using "promissory notes" stamped with a false Garibaldi Brigade mark.

  In the south, the bandit Salvatore Giuliano first emerged in this period, and historians still debate his role. The Allied occupation and the harsh economy helped the Camorra revive in Naples and Bari, where Allied supply bases fed the black market.

  Among partisans, secret bargains with the enemy bred suspicion. In several cases the Germans offered partisan commands carte blanche against the fascists, provided German units were spared. Many commanders refused such deals, and communists feared that autonomous partisans might become Italian equivalents of the Chetniks, the monarchist Yugoslav partisans who opposed Tito.

  That fear ended in blood at Porzûs. Communist partisans of the Natisone division, attached to the Yugoslav IX Corps on orders from Palmiro Togliatti, killed 20 partisans and a woman at the headquarters of a Catholic Osoppo brigade, claiming they were German spies. Among the dead were the commander Francesco De Gregori, uncle of the singer of the same name, and the brigade commissioner Gastone Valente.

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• 8. Insurrection and Naming

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  In early 1945, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, commander of the SS and German police in Italy, realized the war was lost and contacted Allied secret agents in Switzerland. To win Allied sympathy, he ordered the release of captured partisans, Ferruccio Parri first among them. On the 12th of March he halted anti-partisan operations except for self-defence and the minimum needed to keep up appearances.

  The Allies launched their final offensive on the Gothic Line on the 9th of April. On the 10th, the Communist Party told its partisan commands to be ready for insurrection regardless. On the 19th, the whole National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy agreed. Mussolini left Gargnano for Milan and sought contact with the committee through the curia of Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster.

  About 5,000 black brigadists formed the core of the so-called Colonna Pavolini, which was meant to make a last stand in the Valtellina. In Turin, the snipers of the Ather Capelli Black Brigade fought the partisans until the end of April. In Romagna, some Black Brigades kept the Germans from destroying property during the retreat.

  At 8 PM on the 25th of April, after a failed attempt to negotiate through Cardinal Schuster, Mussolini left Milan toward Lake Como. The reasons remain unclear. That same day Sandro Pertini proclaimed a general insurrectionary strike on the radio, telling Milan that, as in Genoa and Turin, citizens would confront the Germans with the dilemma "to surrender or die." The northern committee, chaired by Alfredo Pizzoni, assumed power in the name of the Italian people and decreed death for fascist hierarchs, Mussolini included. He was shot three days later.

  The fighting ended with the Surrender at Caserta on the 2nd of May 1945. The Italian Republic was born under the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, which operated until the Treaty of Peace with Italy in 1947. Italy still marks the 25th of April as Liberation Day, a national day introduced on the 22nd of April 1946.

  The name of the conflict was settled much later. Norway, the Netherlands and France also had partisans and collaborationist governments, but armed confrontation between compatriots was among its most intense in Italy. In 1965, the fascist politician and historian Giorgio Pisanò first used the phrase civil war in his books. Claudio Pavone's 1991 book, Una guerra civile, brought the term into more frequent use among Italian and international historians.

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