The attacks in Milan

By mid-November 1943 reports of resistance to the Germans in occupied northern Italy were reaching the Allies in growing numbers. War chronologies record explosions on 16 November in Milan, the country’s largest industrial centre. Italian historiography does not link any single, particularly notorious attack to that day – what is well documented are the operations carried out by the Milanese underground from October onwards, among them the blowing up of a fuel depot at Taliedo airfield on 2 October and the bombing of a German information office at the Central Station on 7 November. The date of 16 November nonetheless captures well what was happening at the time: urban guerrilla warfare, waged by small communist combat groups known as the GAP, was beginning in the cities of the north, while the first partisan bands were forming in the mountains.

After 8 September

The announcement of the armistice between Italy and the Allies on 8 September 1943 found most of the country unprotected. In Operation Achse the Wehrmacht disarmed the Italian army within a few days, occupied Rome and the whole of the north, and deported hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers to camps in the Reich. Shortly afterwards German paratroopers freed Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, and Benito Mussolini became head of a new Fascist state in the occupied part of Italy, named the Italian Social Republic on 1 December and commonly known as the Salò Republic. The government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which had taken refuge in the south, declared war on Germany on 13 October.

The Italians did not wait passively. At the end of September Naples drove out the Germans by itself, during the Four Days of Naples, before the Allies arrived. As early as 9 September the anti-Fascist parties in Rome – the Communists, Socialists, the Action Party, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the Labour Democrats – set up the National Liberation Committee (CLN). In Milan a similar committee had been active since the spring of 1943; after the armistice it became the Milan CLN and in February 1944, with the authority of the Rome committee, the National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy (CLNAI), which directed the resistance throughout the occupied north.

The Patriotic Action Groups

The Communists were the most determined to take up arms. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) set up in Milan the general command of the Garibaldi Brigades, its partisan formations, headed by Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia. At the end of October 1943 this command created the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP) – the Patriotic Action Groups. They were modelled on the groups of the French communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), with whom some Italian activists had come into contact in exile. Many of the GAP organisers were veterans of the International Brigades from the Spanish Civil War.

The GAP operated in the cities in small cells of a few people each, whose members lived under false names and often did not know one another. Their weapons were pistols and explosive charges, and their targets were German soldiers and officers, officials of the Fascist party and militia, policemen, informers and military installations: depots, railway and tram lines, garages and offices. In this way the Communists wanted to show that the occupier and its Italian allies were safe nowhere, and to force the population to take sides. In November the PCI leadership in Milan even urged on its comrades in Rome, reproaching them for too little armed activity.

Milan, Turin, Genoa, Rome

In Milan the first GAP unit was formed among workers of the big factories in Sesto San Giovanni, the city’s industrial suburb. Further groups were organised in working-class districts – Niguarda, Porta Romana, Porta Vittoria and Porta Ticinese. Together with the partisan units emerging in the mountains above Lake Como and around Lecco, they formed the 3rd Garibaldi Brigade “Lombardia”, led by a committee of Spanish Civil War veterans. According to Italian studies, the brigade carried out 56 armed actions between October 1943 and January 1944, 33 of them in the city itself. One of the most notorious was the attack of 18 December 1943 that killed Aldo Resega, federal secretary of the Fascist party in Milan.

In Turin the GAP were organised by Ilio Barontini and Giovanni Pesce, also veterans of Spain; their groups planted charges on railway and tram lines and killed Fascist officials. Similar cells sprang up in Genoa, Bologna, Florence and Rome, where the most famous GAP action was the attack on a German police column in Via Rasella in March 1944. The Socialists and the Action Party also formed urban combat groups, though fewer of them.

The GAP’s methods were controversial from the outset, within the resistance as well. Attacks in the cities brought reprisals that fell on hostages and random inhabitants. The Communists regarded this as an unavoidable price of the struggle; some Christian Democrats and Liberals in the CLN preferred to wait for the Allies and not put the population at risk.

The first units in the mountains, and reprisals

Alongside the urban underground, the first partisan units were forming in the Alps and the Apennines. They were made up of soldiers of the shattered army who did not want to be taken prisoner, escaped Allied prisoners of war, young men fleeing conscription into Mussolini’s army, and activists of the anti-Fascist parties. Besides the communist Garibaldi Brigades there were the “Giustizia e Libertà” units of the Action Party, in which Ferruccio Parri played an important role, and “autonomous” formations led by professional officers.

One of the first was a group of soldiers under Lieutenant Ignazio Vian in the mountains above Boves near Cuneo in Piedmont. On 19 September 1943 its members captured two soldiers of the SS Division “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler”. In the skirmish that followed, one German was killed. Although the prisoners were handed back through the mediation of the local parish priest, Father Giuseppe Bernardi, SS men under Joachim Peiper set fire to the town. According to official figures, around 350 houses were burned and – depending on the source – between 23 and 25 inhabitants were killed, among them Father Bernardi, who was burned alive. Boves was the first in a long series of German massacres of civilians in Italy.

The Salò Fascists were just as ruthless. On 14–16 November 1943 the first congress of the Republican Fascist Party met in Verona and adopted the programme of the new state. During the proceedings news arrived that on the evening of 13 November Igino Ghisellini, the party’s federal secretary in Ferrara, had been shot dead outside the city. The circumstances of the killing remain unclear to this day – besides anti-Fascists, a settling of scores among the Fascists themselves was suspected – but party secretary Alessandro Pavolini sent armed squads from Verona and Padua to Ferrara. They arrested dozens of people regarded as opponents of the regime and on the morning of 15 November shot eleven of them beneath the walls of the Este Castle. In Milan, Turin and other cities the police and militia of the Salò Republic carried out round-ups, while the German Security Police filled prisons such as San Vittore in Milan.

Strikes

Resistance was not limited to arms. Workers in the big factories of the north – worn down by starvation rations, inflation, air raids and German deportations for forced labour – increasingly resorted to strikes. As early as March 1943, while Mussolini was still in power, a wave of strikes in Turin and Milan had exposed the regime’s weakness. In the autumn the protests returned: in the second half of November 1943 the FIAT works and other Turin factories went on strike, and in December the wave spread to Milan and Genoa. The workers demanded higher pay and better supplies; the Germans and the Salò authorities responded by turns with concessions, threats and arrests.

The high point of this movement was the general strike of March 1944, organised by the Communists and the CLN across northern Italy. According to various estimates several hundred thousand workers took part – it is often regarded as the largest mass workers’ protest in occupied Europe. The Germans responded with arrests and deportations: hundreds of strikers were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp and other camps in the Reich.

Place in the war

The autumn of 1943 marked the beginning of the Italian resistance as an organised force. From a few thousand men in the mountains and a few hundred in the urban GAP groups there grew, within a year and a half, a movement numbering – according to various estimates – more than a hundred thousand partisans, directed by the CLNAI in Milan, which the Allies and the government in Rome recognised at the end of 1944 as their representative in the north. The Italian resistance tied down German forces, sabotaged production and transport, and in April 1945 launched an insurrection in the cities of the north. On 25 April 1945 the CLNAI proclaimed the uprising, and Milan was liberated by the insurgents themselves before the Allies arrived; the day is now Italy’s Liberation Day.

It was also a civil war, waged with great cruelty on both sides. The Germans and the Fascists made hostages pay for the GAP attacks: in March 1944, after the attack in Via Rasella, the Germans shot 335 people in the Ardeatine Caves, and in August 1944 in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto Italian Fascists, on German orders, shot fifteen partisans and left their bodies on public display. On 29 April 1945 the bodies of Mussolini and his companions were hung up in the same place. The communist pedigree of the GAP and the Garibaldi Brigades, meanwhile, meant that the PCI emerged from the war as the largest communist party in the West, with enormous prestige won in the struggle.