ITALY: About Face

The place of Italy was settled for the duration. Pietro Badoglio completed a maneuver begun last July when Vittorio Emanuele had him seize Mussolini: Italy had been eased from the losing to the winning side without so much as the loss of a king.

Unwittingly, Badoglio had done the Allies a great but indirect service. His declaration of war against his former ally last week had the approval of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin; their joint acceptance of Italy as a cobelligerent was the first three-way declaration on the record. It meant more to the future of Allied military and political operations than any weight which cobelligerent Italy might some day bring to bear against the Nazi.*

Carefully Badoglio rehearsed his intention to respect the “untrammeled right of the people of Italy to choose their own form of democratic government when peace is restored.” Carefully the Big Three repeated after him their understanding that “nothing can detract from the absolute and untrammeled right of the people of Italy by constitutional means to decide on the democratic form of government they will eventually have.”

Inside Italy the news produced consternation. Where a month earlier the news of armistice and an end to fighting brought smiles, flowers, wet and fervent masculine kisses for embarrassed Allied soldiers, now there were stricken faces and listless shrugs. Around Allied camps, surging crowds begged for food and cigarets. Each morning ragged soldiers, shuffling aimlessly homeward, queued up wherever Allied operations might offer a day’s work and a square meal. Fighting was out of the question for most. In Sorrento and in other picture-book resorts tucked away around the Bay of Naples, wealthy, well-dressed Fascists ate and drank abundantly of black-market goodies, frowned at rambling U.S. and British officers seeking respite from battle.

Brother v. Brother. In the north, beyond the German lines, the premature anti-Fascist risings of the summer had a painful aftermath. In Milan the Archbishop, Alfredo Ildefonso Cardinal Shuster, found it necessary to threaten excommunication to those who denounced their anti-Fascist brothers to the Germans. Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Government, speaking from a still-undisclosed capital, bawled new threats of death and imprisonment to all who wavered in their love for the Duce.

German motorized troops dashed from point to point. Yet some saw that the occupying force was incredibly small, took courage at evidence that the few were being shuttled to look like many. Partisan bands began to take shape in the foothills of the Alps. Against them, the Germans offered 42 times the normal pay of an Italian soldier to those who would sign up under Hitler and the Duce. There were few takers.

Profit & Loss. Militarily, the apathetic but now secure south could be a plus for the Allies, the restless north a burr beneath the German saddle. But, economically, cobelligerent Italy looms as a headache.

Food and fuel must be provided for the winter—fruit and vegetables are plentiful now, tiding most districts over the fall. Coal must come from U.S. stocks. Germans would no longer have to use 300 locomotives and 15,000 coal cars to transport 12,000,000 tons of coal to Italy each year.

The one clear gain for the Allies is the speedy but largely untried Italian fleet. Some 100 interned war vessels will now be available for patrol duty, if fuel can be supplied. Reportedly royalist to the core, the Italian Navy would probably be kept in the Mediterranean. But at least the ships would release U.S. and British units for service elsewhere.

Trial Balance. If Badoglio’s cobelligerent Italy was a military plus and an economic minus, politically it was a plain enigma. In declaring war against Germany, Badoglio said that representatives of all political parties will be asked to participate in the Government. But liberal Count Carlo Sforza, on the eve of entering Italy, was still saying he could not enter a Cabinet headed by Badoglio.

Outside Italy there were increasing signs of disquiet among neighboring Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Greeks and Ethiopians. All were remembering earlier experiences with the Italians, wondering what the Big Allies would propose next.

* As a cobelligerent, Italy remains a defeated enemy nation, subject to control but fighting with the Allies, until a peace is signed.