The Italian surrender announced

At 6.30 p.m. on 8 September 1943 General Dwight Eisenhower announced over Radio Algiers: “The Italian Government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally.” The armistice, signed in secret five days earlier at Cassibile, was taking effect “at once”. An hour and a quarter later, at 7.42 p.m., Marshal Pietro Badoglio stepped up to the microphone of the Rome radio station EIAR and read out a short statement confirming the surrender. He did not do so of his own free will: that very morning his government had asked the Allies to postpone the announcement, and a quarter of an hour or so before Eisenhower’s broadcast the Quirinal was still considering disowning the signature of its own envoy.

At noon the same day American bombers bombed Frascati near Rome, home to the headquarters of the German Commander-in-Chief South, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. The Italians thus lived through their last Allied raid as an enemy and their first hours as a country that had laid down its arms at one and the same time – and after dark they learned that their army had received no orders for the event of a German reaction.

The raid on Frascati

Frascati, a small town in the Alban Hills about 20 km south-east of Rome, had since 1941 been the seat of Kesselring’s staff (Oberbefehlshaber Süd), spread across villas and buildings around the town. The operational order of 7 September from General James Doolittle, who commanded the heavy bombers in the Mediterranean, stated briefly that the town was to be destroyed because it was an important target. Rome had already been bombed in July, but this time the target was a command centre. On the eve of the landing at Salerno, the Allies wanted to paralyse the German command at the moment the armistice was announced.

At about 12.10 p.m. some 130 B-17 Flying Fortresses from four bomb groups arrived over Frascati and, according to Italian studies, dropped some 1,300 bombs. Paradoxically, Italian fighters also tried to intercept them – it was one of the last combat sorties flown by the Royal Italian Air Force on the Axis side. About half the town’s buildings were destroyed, including the cathedral, Piazza San Pietro and some of the historic villas. The number of victims is given variously: local studies and the town itself speak of about 485–500 civilians killed, some publications of about 200 Germans killed; higher estimates, of up to a thousand Italians dead, usually include later raids as well, especially that of 22 January 1944. Kesselring came through the raid unharmed, and his staff remained able to exercise command. A few days later he moved his headquarters to bunkers under Monte Soratte, north of Rome.

Two Americans in Rome

The Allied plan assumed that the announcement of the armistice on the evening of 8 September would coincide with two operations: the landing of the US Fifth Army at Salerno on the night of 8–9 September, and the drop of the 82nd Airborne Division on the airfields near Rome (Operation Giant II), where Italian divisions were to secure its landing. Eisenhower was not sure that the Italians were really ready for this. He decided to send to Rome the 82nd Division’s artillery commander, Brigadier General Maxwell Taylor, and Colonel William Gardiner of Troop Carrier Command.

The two men left Palermo at 2 a.m. on 7 September in a British motor torpedo boat, transferred off Ustica to an Italian corvette and landed near Gaeta. From there, their uniforms soaked so that they would look like downed airmen fished out of the sea, they were driven to Rome in a Red Cross ambulance, passing German patrols on the Via Appia. By nightfall they were in the capital. At dinner in the Palazzo Caprara none of the Italians was in a hurry to talk business. Only late in the evening were they received by General Giacomo Carboni, commander of the Motorised Army Corps defending Rome, who announced that the situation had changed: the Germans had strengthened their forces around the city, the Italian troops had neither fuel nor ammunition and could not hold the airfields, and announcing the armistice before a major landing near Rome would mean a massacre.

The landing near Rome called off

Taylor demanded a meeting with Badoglio. Around midnight they drove to his villa; the marshal, roused from his sleep, confirmed what Carboni had said, protested his good faith and asked for the announcement of the armistice to be postponed. At about 2 a.m. on 8 September the Americans handed over two telegrams for encryption: a letter from Badoglio to Eisenhower, in which the marshal wrote that in view of the German forces near Rome immediate acceptance of the armistice was impossible, and Taylor’s own report recommending that Giant II be called off. Because encrypting long telegrams could take as much as three hours, at 11.35 a.m. Taylor also sent the agreed code phrase “situation innocuous”, which meant that the drop was cancelled.

The message arrived in time, but only just. The deputy chief of staff of the 15th Army Group, General Lyman Lemnitzer, flew from Bizerte to Sicily with the cancellation order, and his pilot got lost over the island. In the afternoon General Matthew Ridgway’s paratroopers were already boarding some 150 aircraft on Sicilian airfields, and some aircraft had taken off and had to turn back. Many historians believe that an operation in which a single division was to land among German panzer and parachute divisions near Rome would have ended in disaster; others argue that with a determined Italian stance it might have saved the capital. Taylor and Gardiner flew out to Africa from Centocelle airfield in the afternoon.

“I will publish to the world the full record of this affair”

Badoglio’s letter outraged Eisenhower. The convoys carrying the troops for the Salerno landing were already at sea, and postponing the armistice would have meant landing straight into Italian and German troops. Eisenhower replied with a telegram that left no room for doubt: he intended to announce the armistice at the agreed hour, he did not accept the request for a postponement, and if the Italians failed to fulfil their obligations he would “publish to the world the full record of this affair”. He added that backing out of the signed agreement would have “the most serious consequences” for Italy and would lead to “the dissolution of your government and nation”.

At 6.15 p.m. a council met at the Quirinal under King Victor Emmanuel III: Badoglio, the Minister of the Royal Household Pietro d’Acquarone, the foreign minister Raffaele Guariglia, the chiefs of staff and General Carboni. Some of those present proposed disowning Castellano and declaring that he had acted without the government’s consent. Badoglio set out both options to the king and offered his resignation, but took no position himself. In the course of the meeting word arrived that Eisenhower had already spoken and that Reuters had carried the text of his statement. The king decided: there could be no going back; Italy would honour the armistice.

Badoglio’s proclamation

At 6.30 p.m. Eisenhower read his statement on Radio Algiers. He announced that he had granted Italy a military armistice, the terms of which had been approved by the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States and the USSR, and that all Italians who helped to drive the German aggressor from Italian soil would have the support of the United Nations. When there was no response from Rome, Radio Algiers broadcast in English the previously agreed text of Badoglio’s proclamation.

Badoglio reached the EIAR studio and read the proclamation at 7.42 p.m. (the American official history gives 7.45). It ran:

The Italian government, recognising the impossibility of continuing the unequal struggle against the overwhelming power of the enemy, and in order to spare the nation further and graver misfortunes, has asked General Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Anglo-American Allied forces, for an armistice. The request has been granted. Consequently, all acts of hostility against the Anglo-American forces by Italian forces must cease everywhere. These forces will, however, respond to any attacks from any other quarter.

The recording was repeated throughout the night. In the cities people poured into the streets, convinced that the war was over. Soldiers threw down their weapons and set off for home.

An army without orders

The worst part of the proclamation was its last sentence. “Attacks from any other quarter” meant the Germans, but the proclamation did not name them and did not say what to do. The Italian commands did have certain instructions. On 1–2 September General Mario Roatta’s Army General Staff had prepared the so-called Memoria OP 44, which ordered army commanders in Italy and Sardinia to prepare strikes against German communications hubs and units – but only on receipt of a special code word or in the event of a German attack. The document was passed on orally or in a few copies, with instructions to destroy them after reading. On 6 September General Vittorio Ambrosio’s Supreme Command issued a similar Promemoria 1 for the naval and air staffs, and a Promemoria 2 was prepared for the troops in the Balkans. All these documents, however, assumed that the armistice would be announced around 12 September – as Castellano had understood the talks at Cassibile – and that there would still be time to complete them.

On the evening of 8 September no one issued the code word. Carboni and the officers of the Army General Staff pressed Roatta to activate Memoria OP 44; Roatta referred the matter to Ambrosio, and Ambrosio decided that so grave a decision required Badoglio’s consent. Badoglio could not be found. Memoria OP 44 never came into effect. Meanwhile the Germans, who had had a plan ready since August, issued the code word “Achse” that same evening and began disarming Italian units in Italy, in southern France, in the Balkans and on the islands of the Aegean.

Flight from Rome

During the night, as German units began attacking Italian posts around Rome, the king and Badoglio decided to leave the capital. Before 5 a.m. on 9 September a column of cars left the city by the Via Tiburtina: the king, the queen, the heir to the throne, Umberto, and Badoglio, followed by Ambrosio, Roatta and the other chiefs of staff. That same day they reached the Adriatic coast at Pescara and Ortona, from where the corvette Baionetta took them south during the night. On 10 September they landed at Brindisi, in territory that neither the Germans nor the Allies had yet reached. In Rome they left behind neither orders for the defenders of the capital nor a government capable of acting. The flight, presented by those who took part in it as preserving the continuity of the state, became in Italian memory a symbol of the abandonment of the army and the nation.

Significance

The announcement of Italy’s surrender was the first exit from the war by one of the main Axis powers and a great political success for the Allies, three years after Mussolini had taken Italy into the war. Yet the way it came about brought disaster. Deprived of orders, the army fell apart within a few days. The Germans shipped hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the Reich as military internees, and wherever the Italians resisted – on Kefalonia, on Corfu or in Rome – there was heavy fighting and mass executions. Most of the Royal Italian Navy (Regia Marina) managed to reach Allied ports.

For the Allies the armistice did not open the road to Rome. The Salerno landing, launched a few hours after Eisenhower’s broadcast, ran into Germans who were not in the least surprised. The Germans occupied Rome, and the Allies entered it only in June 1944. In the north Mussolini’s puppet Italian Social Republic soon emerged, and partisan war and civil war began in the country. In Italian history 8 September became a watershed: the end of the Fascist war state and the beginning of twenty months of occupation, resistance and fighting on the peninsula.