Operation Achse
Operation Achse began at 19:50 on the 8th of September 1943, when an aide to General Jodl broadcast a single coded word to every German command across the Mediterranean theater: "Achse." That word was the signal for German forces to turn on their former ally and attack Italian troops wherever they stood. Within hours, paratroopers were fighting at the bridges of Rome, German armor was pressing through Alpine passes, and soldiers in the Balkans were being shot where they surrendered. The alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had existed for years. But the fall of Benito Mussolini in July 1943 and Italy’s secret armistice with the Allies had set in motion a plan the Germans had been preparing for months. How did Germany anticipate the Italian defection so precisely? How did a plan hatched in May 1943 translate into one of the largest forced disarmaments in the history of the war? And what happened to the hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers who found themselves abandoned by their commanders and surrounded by a former ally who now regarded them as enemies?
On the 20th of May 1943, Adolf Hitler sat at his headquarters and expressed his doubts about the Fascist government’s political stability. A report from German diplomat Konstantin von Neurath had already found declining morale among the Italian population and pro-British sentiment spreading through the professional classes and the military. These concerns were not abstract. German intelligence from Heinrich Himmler’s men in Italy, along with reports about the Italian diplomat Giuseppe Bastianini and suspicions about General Mario Roatta, had made Hitler believe that a collapse of Italy was a real possibility.
On the 21st of May, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel issued operational guidelines for just such a scenario. The plan was divided into several parallel operations: Operation Alarich covered the invasion of the Italian mainland; Operation Konstantin targeted Italian forces in the Balkans; Operation Siegfried addressed the Italian-occupied areas of southern France; and Operation Kopenhagen was designed to control the passes on the France-Italy border. The codename “Alaric” was later quietly renamed “Achse” because Alaric was the Visigothic king who sacked Rome in 410 AD, and the Germans did not want to offend the Italians while the alliance still formally held.
The fall of Mussolini on the 25th of July caught Hitler and his senior leadership genuinely off-guard. Wrong intelligence from ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen and military attache Enno von Rintelen, who had not foreseen that the Grand Council of Fascism meeting would threaten the regime, left Germany blindsided. Hitler immediately understood that the new military government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, despite its assurances, represented a prelude to an Italian exit from the war. On the 28th of July, the “Konstantin” and “Alarich” plans were combined into a single operation called “Achse,” now meaning not just a contingency but an imminent action. By the 14th of August, Rommel’s new Army Group B had moved to Bologna to direct operations in northern Italy.
Pietro Badoglio’s government played a dangerous hand after Mussolini’s arrest. Publicly, Badoglio proclaimed Italy’s commitment to continuing the war alongside Germany. On the 3rd of September, Badoglio himself personally confirmed to the German representative Rudolf Rahn his firm intention to remain at Germany’s side. Still on the 6th of September, General Toussaint, the new German military attache, believed that Italy had rejected Allied demands. Even on the morning of the 8th of September, Rahn met the king, and the latter reassured him that Italy would not surrender.
Privately, the Italian government had been making frantic, often disorganized attempts to contact the Allies since July. Early efforts involved personalities of minor importance: embassy official Blasco Lanza D’Ajeta, Foreign Ministry official Alberto Berio, and industrialist Alberto Pirelli. None succeeded in opening real negotiations. The breakthrough came on the 12th of August, when General Giuseppe Castellano, acting as Ambrosio’s representative, left Rome for Madrid, where he met British ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare. Hoare directed Castellano to Lisbon, where on the 17th of August the first substantive meeting with Allied representatives, including General Walter Bedell Smith, took place.
The Italians desperately wanted to bargain rather than surrender unconditionally. Badoglio had instructed Castellano to seek an arrangement that included the landing of fifteen Allied divisions north and south of Rome simultaneously with the armistice announcement, to shield the capital from German retaliation. The Allies rejected this condition. On the 3rd of September, Castellano and Bedell Smith signed the Armistice of Cassibile in the presence of Harold Macmillan and Robert Daniel Murphy. The Italian government hoped to delay the announcement until at least the 12th of September to prepare resistance. That hope evaporated on the night of the 8th of September, when General Maxwell Taylor, secretly sent to Rome, told Italian leaders that General Dwight Eisenhower would announce the armistice that same evening. The meeting in Rome so alarmed Taylor about Italian disorganization that he advised canceling Operation Giant 2, the planned American airborne intervention to protect the capital.
About 55,000 Italian soldiers and 200 armored fighting vehicles were concentrated around Rome to defend the capital against any German attack. General Giacomo Carboni commanded the main force, the Motorized-Armored Army Corps, which included the 10th Infantry Division “Piave,” the 21st Infantry Division “Granatieri di Sardegna,” the 135th Armored Cavalry Division “Ariete,” and the 136th Armored Legionary Division “Centauro.” On paper, these Italian forces outnumbered the German units nearby.
The German forces in the area consisted of General Kurt Student’s 11th Airborne Corps, totaling about 26,000 men, anchored by the 2nd Parachute Division under General Walter Barenthin and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division under General Fritz-Hubert Gräser. At 20:30 on the 8th of September, the Germans attacked the Mezzocammino fuel depot. By 21:30, the 2nd Parachute Division had pushed through units of the Piacenza and Granatieri di Sardegna divisions and reached the Magliana bridge, advancing along the Via Ostiensis. The 3rd Panzergrenadier Division came down from the north along the Via Aurelia, Via Cassia, and Via Flaminia, but was halted near Lake Bracciano by the Ariete II Division under General Raffaele Cadorna.
At 05:10 on the 9th of September, the king, Badoglio, and senior officials fled Rome in seven cars, passing through Tivoli and Avezzano before reaching Pescara and then Ortona. From Ortona, the king, his relatives, Badoglio, Ambrosio, and Roatta boarded the corvette Baionetta, which arrived in Brindisi at 14:30 on the 10th of September. General Carboni, left without orders, fled in civilian clothes. General Umberto Utili formally dissolved the General Staff on the morning of the 9th of September.
Paratroopers under Major Walter Gericke were dropped over Monterotondo to capture the Italian Army headquarters, but they found it already abandoned. The fighting at Porta San Paolo, two kilometers from Piazza Venezia, was among the fiercest of the battle, as German veterans overcame Granatieri units and civilian volunteers. Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, obtained Rome’s formal capitulation by the afternoon of the 10th of September. German casualties in capturing Rome were about one hundred dead and around 500 wounded; Italian losses were 984 killed, of whom 659 were soldiers, 121 were civilians, and 204 were unidentified. By the 15th of September, all Italian troops in Rome had been disarmed; on the 23rd of September, the provisional Italian commander, General Giorgio Calvi di Bergolo, was arrested.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Army Group B faced a strategically simpler task in central and northern Italy: there were no Allied forces nearby and the German units were numerous, well-positioned, and ready. The Italian units they faced were in many cases already depleted by earlier campaigns, with several divisions described as being “re-formed” after their destruction on the Eastern Front.
The response of many Italian commanders made the German task easier still. In Turin, General Rossi refused to arm civilians and immediately opened negotiations with the Germans; he surrendered as soon as German armored units entered the city and later joined the Italian Social Republic. In Novara, General Casentino surrendered his entire command without resistance. In Milan, General Vittorio Ruggero bought 48 hours before reaching an agreement with a German colonel of the 1st SS Panzer Division; German forces broke the agreement the following day, occupied the city, and deported Ruggero to prisoner-of-war camps in Germany.
In Trentino-South Tyrol, the two alpine divisions of XXV Army Corps, both being reconstituted after destruction in Russia, were attacked and disarmed almost immediately by the 44th German Infantry Division. Only in Rovereto did some units resist until the morning of the 10th of September before surrendering. In Gorizia, the 52nd Infantry Division “Torino” offered resistance, and local workers formed the first partisan groups, but the broader Friulian region was eventually secured by the 71st German Infantry Division with the assistance of soldiers of the Italian Social Republic. In Trieste, General Alberto Ferrero abandoned the city after fruitless negotiations, and 90,000 Italian soldiers in the area surrendered without a fight.
By the 19th of September, Army Group B had completed its task across central and northern Italy. The haul was enormous: 236 armored fighting vehicles, 1,138 field guns, 536 anti-tank guns, 797 anti-aircraft guns, 5,926 machine guns, and 386,000 rifles were captured. By the 20th of September, 183,300 of the officers and soldiers taken prisoner had already been transferred to Germany, transported through the Brenner Pass partly by train and partly on foot. Among the captured were also 43,000 Allied prisoners who had previously been held by the Italians.
The bloodiest episodes of Operation Achse unfolded not on the Italian mainland but on the islands of the Aegean and Ionian seas. On the Greek island of Cephalonia, 1,315 Italian soldiers were killed in action against German forces after units of the 33rd Infantry Division “Acqui” chose to fight rather than surrender. When they ran out of ammunition and gave up, the German Army summarily executed over 5,100 of them.
On Rhodes, Italian forces numbered around 34,000 men under Admiral Inigo Campioni, vastly outnumbering the approximately 7,000 men of the German “Rhodos” Division under General Kleeman. After an inconclusive battle, Campioni surrendered when the Germans threatened to bomb the town of Rhodes. More than 6,500 Italian soldiers from the Rhodes garrison died after the surrender, most of them when Allied aircraft and submarines sank the steamers Oria and Donizetti as they were being transported to mainland Greece. Campioni was later executed by Fascist authorities for having defended the island at all.
On Kos, which fell on the 4th of October, 2,500 Italian and 600 British soldiers were taken prisoner; 96 Italian officers, including the garrison commander Colonel Felice Leggio, were executed. Leros held out longer, with its 7,600-strong Italian garrison reinforced by 4,500 British soldiers. On the 12th of November, 2,700 German soldiers landed or were parachuted onto the island. Despite being outnumbered, the Germans prevailed by the 16th of November. In Crete, the sinking of two ships carrying Italian prisoners, the Sinfra and the Petrella, drowned at least 4,700 men. The Crete situation had one notable exception: General Angelico Carta, commanding the 51st Infantry Division “Siena” in eastern Crete, chose to contact the Special Operations Executive and was smuggled out by Motor Torpedo Boat, reaching Mersa Matruh on the 23rd of September 1943.
Over 30 divisions and 500,000 Italian soldiers were stationed across the Balkans in September 1943, deployed across Slovenia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece after years of counter-guerrilla operations. German forces were numerically inferior in this theater, but they were better led, more mobile, and supported by complete air supremacy. Croatian collaborationist units, on the 9th of September, immediately severed their ties with Italy and joined Germany against their former ally.
In Albania, the headquarters of Army Group East was surrounded on the morning of the 11th of September, and General Rosi was captured along with his officers. General Dalmazzo, commanding the 9th Army, issued no orders of resistance and began negotiations with the Germans, hastening the disintegration of his six divisions. The commander of the 151st Infantry Division “Perugia,” General Ernesto Chiminello, conducted a fighting retreat to Porto Edda but was surrounded and forced to surrender on the 22nd of September; Chiminello and 130 officers were executed. Some survivors formed the Antonio Gramsci Battalion. British documents estimated that mortality among Italian soldiers in Albania reached about one hundred deaths per day during the winter of 1943-1944.
In mainland Greece, General Carlo Vecchiarelli of the 11th Army ordered his troops to hand over their weapons to the Germans without fighting, believing German assurances of safe passage back to Italy. The result was the rapid dissolution of five divisions. The 24th Infantry Division “Pinerolo,” stationed in Thessaly, rejected this order; General Adolfo Infante fought at Larissa and retreated to the Pindus massif. His men were eventually dispersed among the local Greek population, many used as forced labor under harsh conditions for the rest of the war, with several thousand dying. In Split, the 15th Infantry Division “Bergamo” fought alongside Yugoslav partisans until the 27th of September against the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division; after its surrender, three Italian generals and 46 officers were executed. Across the Balkans overall, 393,000 Italian soldiers were captured and deported, roughly 29,000 joined the Germans, 20,000 joined partisan formations, and 57,000 dispersed or hid.
The Italian soldiers who joined Yugoslav and Greek partisan formations went on to fight through the rest of the war. The 19th Infantry Division “Venezia” and the 1st Alpine Division “Taurinense” became the partisan Garibaldi Division and kept fighting against the Germans until March 1945.
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Common questions
What was Operation Achse in World War II?
Operation Achse was the German military operation to forcibly disarm the Italian armed forces following Italy’s armistice with the Allies on the 3rd of September 1943. The coded signal “Achse” was broadcast at 19:50 on the 8th of September, triggering simultaneous attacks on Italian forces across Italy, the Balkans, and occupied territories in France and the Aegean.
Why was Operation Achse originally called Operation Alaric?
The operation was originally named Operation Alarich after Alaric, the Visigothic king who sacked Rome in 410 AD. The codename was later quietly changed to “Achse” to avoid offending the Italians while the Germany-Italy alliance was still formally in place.
What happened to Italian soldiers on Cephalonia during Operation Achse?
On the Greek island of Cephalonia, units of the 33rd Infantry Division “Acqui” chose to resist the Germans. After fighting that killed 1,315 Italian soldiers in action, the surviving soldiers ran out of ammunition and surrendered. More than 5,100 of those captured prisoners were summarily executed by the German Army.
How many Italian soldiers were captured during Operation Achse?
The total number of Italian soldiers captured was enormous across all theaters. Army Group B alone captured over 400,000 soldiers in northern and central Italy by the 19th of September 1943. In the Balkans, 393,000 soldiers were captured and deported to Germany. Army Group C in southern Italy captured 102,340 soldiers, though only 24,294 were held captive, with the rest released.
When was the Armistice of Cassibile signed and who signed it?
The Armistice of Cassibile was signed on the 3rd of September 1943. General Giuseppe Castellano signed for Italy and General Walter Bedell Smith signed for the Allies, in the presence of Harold Macmillan and Robert Daniel Murphy as representatives of the British and American governments.
What happened to Rome when the armistice was announced on 8 September 1943?
German forces launched attacks on Rome’s defenses at 20:30 on the 8th of September. By the early hours of the 9th of September, the king, Badoglio, and senior officials fled in seven cars, eventually boarding the corvette Baionetta at Ortona and reaching Brindisi on the 10th of September. German forces obtained Rome’s formal capitulation by the afternoon of the 10th of September, with all Italian troops disarmed by the 15th of September.
All sources
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- 1bookThird Axis, Fourth Ally: Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1941–1945Mark Axworthy — Arms and Armour — 1995
- 3bookThe Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the EagleRoderick Bailey — Random House — 2011
- 4bookLand of Eagles: Riding Through Europe's Forgotten CountryRobin Hanbury-Tenison — I.B. Tauris — 2014
- 5bookAlbania at War, 1939–1945Bernd Jürgen Fischer — Hurst — 1999
- 7webDocumenti
- 9journalE quei generali marciavano, marciavano e morivanoIlio Muraca