Italy declares war on Germany

On 13 October 1943 the Kingdom of Italy declared war on the Third Reich – its partner in the Pact of Steel and its comrade-in-arms through three years of fighting in Africa, the Balkans and Russia. The decision was taken, with the authority of King Victor Emmanuel III, by the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which for five weeks had been sitting in Brindisi, at the southern tip of Apulia. According to the Italian government’s communiqué, Italy considered itself at war with Germany from 3 p.m. that day (some sources give 4 p.m., probably because of differing time reckoning). The reason given was the “repeated and increasingly violent acts of hostility” committed by the German armed forces against Italians.

The same day the governments of the United States, Great Britain and the USSR issued a joint statement recognising Italy as a co-belligerent (Italian cobelligerante). This was not admission to the ranks of the Allies. Italy remained a defeated enemy, bound by the terms of its surrender, while gaining the right to fight alongside the Allies against Germany. That ambiguous position was to define its fate until the end of the war.

Five weeks after the surrender

The declaration of war crowned a process that had begun with the fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943. On 3 September, at Cassibile in Sicily, Brigadier General Giuseppe Castellano signed the secret “short armistice”, and on the evening of 8 September Eisenhower and Badoglio announced Italy’s surrender over the radio. The Germans were ready. Within days Operation Achse had disarmed the Italian army in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania and France, and German troops had occupied Rome. During the night of 8–9 September the King, the Crown Prince, Badoglio and part of the high command left the capital and, travelling by way of Pescara and Ortona, reached Brindisi on 10 September, by then beyond the Germans’ reach.

So was born the state that Italians later called the “Kingdom of the South” (Regno del Sud). In the autumn of 1943 Badoglio’s government exercised real authority over only a few provinces of Apulia and over Sardinia; the rest of the liberated territory, including Sicily, Calabria and, from 1 October, Naples, remained under Allied military government (AMGOT). The government had no money, no administration and no army worth the name. Its greatest assets were the fleet, which under the terms of the armistice had placed itself in Allied hands, and the legal continuity of the monarchy itself, which the Allies recognised as the only lawful authority in Italy.

Meanwhile a rival state was emerging in the German-occupied north. On 12 September German paratroopers freed Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, and on 23 September his government was formed, giving rise to the Italian Social Republic, known as the Salò Republic after the seat of some of its ministries. To the Fascists of Salò the King and Badoglio were traitors, and the declaration of war on Germany was further proof of their treachery.

The long armistice at Malta

The short armistice of Cassibile contained only military terms; the Allies had announced that political and economic conditions would follow. On 29 September 1943 Badoglio sailed to Malta and, aboard the British battleship HMS Nelson at anchor in Valletta harbour, signed with General Dwight Eisenhower the so-called long armistice: 44 articles of “additional conditions of armistice”, whose English version was bluntly entitled the “Instrument of Surrender of Italy”. Among other things, Italy undertook to hand over Mussolini and suspected war criminals, to dissolve Fascist organisations, to repeal the racial laws, to pay the costs of occupation and any reparations, and to submit to the supervision of an Allied control commission.

Badoglio accepted these terms with a heavy heart. The words “unconditional surrender” in the document’s title pained him most. Eisenhower, who considered some of the conditions needlessly humiliating, promised that the Allies would ease them in proportion to Italy’s contribution to the fight against Germany. A declaration of war was also discussed at Malta. The Allies, and especially Winston Churchill, pressed Italy to declare war as quickly as possible, since only a formal state of war would allow Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen to fight the Germans as a regular belligerent, under their own flag and with the rights of combatants. Badoglio and the King preferred to wait until they had returned to Rome, so that the decision could be taken by a government sitting in the capital and including anti-Fascist politicians. When it became clear in the first days of October that the Allies would not reach Rome quickly, that plan was abandoned.

The final shape of the decision was settled by agreement between Washington, London and Moscow. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Italy would become not an ally but a co-belligerent, and that the long armistice would remain in force. Joseph Stalin, who had demanded a say in decisions concerning Italy, accepted this formula. On 12 October Badoglio sent instructions to the embassy in Madrid, through which the declaration was to be delivered.

The declaration in Madrid

Italy and Germany no longer maintained diplomatic relations, and the German embassy in Rome now served Mussolini, so the declaration had to be delivered in a neutral country. Madrid was chosen, where the Kingdom of Italy’s ambassador was the Marquis Giacomo Paulucci di Calboli Barone and the Reich’s ambassador was Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff. According to the Italian diplomats’ account, Dieckhoff, guessing the purpose of the request for an urgent meeting, avoided seeing the Italian, since formal delivery of the declaration might make it easier for Italian soldiers to claim combatant rights. Paulucci therefore sent the counsellor Pierluigi La Terza to the embassy on the Paseo de la Castellana with orders to hand the document to the first official who appeared at the door. The text was brief: in view of the repeated and increasingly violent acts of hostility committed by the German armed forces against Italians, Italy considered itself at war with Germany from 3 p.m. on 13 October.

Badoglio informed Eisenhower of the decision, asking him to pass the news on to the United Nations, and broadcast a proclamation to the nation from Bari. In it he listed the crimes and plunder committed by the Germans since September – in Naples, where before withdrawing the occupiers had wrecked the city and shot its people, in Catania and in other towns – and declared: “There will be no peace in Italy as long as a single German remains on our soil.” He called on Italians to fight shoulder to shoulder with the “free peoples” and promised that once the country was liberated the government would be broadened to include representatives of the political parties, and that Italians themselves would decide their form of government.

On the same day a joint statement by the three powers was published in Washington, London and Moscow. The governments of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union took note of the royal government’s position as set out by Marshal Badoglio and accepted “the active co-operation of the Italian nation and armed forces as a co-belligerent in the war against Germany”. The course of events since 8 September and the Germans’ brutal treatment of the population, culminating in the declaration of war, had – the statement said – made Italy a co-belligerent in fact. At the same time it stipulated that the new status did not alter the armistice terms already signed, which could be modified only with the Allies’ consent and in the light of the assistance the Italians provided. The three powers also noted the Badoglio government’s pledge to submit to the will of the people once the Germans had been driven out, and stressed the Italian people’s untrammelled right to choose a democratic form of government.

The new term aroused mistrust in countries that had been fighting Italy for three years. The Conservative MP Archibald Southby asked in the House of Commons whether the word “co-belligerent” meant that Italy would be treated as an ally rather than a defeated enemy. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Richard Law, replied cautiously that “if and when” the Italian government declared war on Germany, the two countries would simply be fighting a common enemy, which was best expressed by the idea of co-belligerency, and that this in no way affected the validity of the armistice terms.

The army of the Kingdom of the South

The navy was the quickest to take its place on the Allied side. The ships that had reached Malta and the ports of southern Italy in September returned to service under the Italian flag after a brief internment: cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats escorted convoys and carried troops and supplies, while submarines and motor torpedo boats landed special forces on German-held coasts. The battleships, however, stayed at anchor – the Allies had no intention of trusting or using them. The aircraft that had managed to fly south were formed into a co-belligerent air force, which flew mainly over the Balkans, supplying the Yugoslav partisans and the Italian units that had joined the resistance after the surrender.

The army was a harder matter. Most of it had been disarmed by the Germans, and the units that survived in the south and in Sardinia were poorly equipped. Distrustful of their recent enemy and reluctant to take on additional supply problems, the Allies long agreed only to a token Italian part in the fighting. At the end of September the 1st Motorised Group (I Raggruppamento Motorizzato) began forming at San Pietro Vernotico near Brindisi under General Vincenzo Dapino – according to Italian figures, fewer than 300 officers and under 5,500 men, mostly from the Legnano Division. Not until December 1943 was it to go into its first, costly action, for the hill of Monte Lungo on the Bernhardt Line, alongside the US Fifth Army. From this nucleus grew the Italian Liberation Corps (PL) in 1944, and later the combat groups that fought in the final offensive in Italy in 1945. Italian auxiliary units were far more numerous – by various estimates as many as 150,000–200,000 men or more serving in rear services, transport and labour for the Allied armies.

Prisoners not called prisoners

The government in Brindisi hoped that a state of war would improve the lot of Italian soldiers in German hands. After Operation Achse, by various estimates, between about 600,000 and more than 700,000 of them had been deported to camps in the Reich and the occupied territories. On 20 September Hitler gave them the status of “Italian military internees” (Italienische Militärinternierte, IMI), which deprived them of the protection of the Geneva Convention and of the care of the International Red Cross. The declaration of war changed nothing here. The Germans did not recognise a declaration by a government that in their eyes was a runaway clique of traitors; they regarded Mussolini’s republic, their ally, as Italy’s lawful authority – and so, they argued, they could not be holding “prisoners of war” from an allied state. The internees could leave the camps by enlisting in the Salò army or volunteering to work for the Reich; a minority did so, but the overwhelming majority refused and stayed behind the wire, enduring hunger and forced labour. By Italian estimates, tens of thousands of them died in the camps and labour detachments.

Nor did the declaration of war protect the soldiers who had resisted at the moment of surrender. On Kefalonia, Corfu and Kos the Germans shot Italian officers as “mutineers” and “francs-tireurs” – on Kefalonia as early as September, and on Kos in the first days of October, after the capture of the island. Among their justifications the Germans argued that the Kingdom of Italy was not formally at war with the Reich, but even after 13 October German commands treated captured soldiers of Badoglio’s forces with similar ruthlessness.

The King, Badoglio and the anti-Fascists

For the Allies, Badoglio’s government was a convenient partner: it guaranteed the implementation of the armistice, had handed over the fleet and brought to the war the legitimacy of a state that in 1940 had itself declared war on France and Great Britain. For Italians, however, it symbolised continuity with two decades of Fascism. Victor Emmanuel III had worked with Mussolini for twenty years and had signed the racial laws and the decision to enter the war, while Badoglio had commanded the army in Ethiopia and had been Chief of the General Staff when Italy attacked Greece. In the autumn of 1943 the anti-Fascist parties, united in the Committee of National Liberation, demanded the King’s abdication and refused to join the government while he remained on the throne. This was the stance of, among others, the philosopher Benedetto Croce and Count Carlo Sforza, who was just returning from exile in the United States.

The declaration of war on Germany strengthened the monarchy’s position with the Allies, but did not settle the dispute with the anti-Fascists. The country was entering a period that the historian Claudio Pavone later described as an interweaving of three wars: a patriotic war against the German occupier, a civil war between Italians on either side of the front, and a class war over the future shape of society.

Place in the war

The declaration of war of 13 October 1943 formally ended the Italo-German alliance and closed the first stage of Italy’s exit from the war, which had begun in July. Militarily its significance was modest: the Kingdom of the South had no army capable of changing the situation at the front, and the burden of the fighting on the peninsula until 1945 was borne by the Allies. Politically, however, it mattered. From then on the Italian navy and air force fought as the forces of a state at war with the Reich, the monarchy gained an argument in the dispute over its right to rule, and the Allies gained a basis for gradually handing the administration of liberated provinces over to the Italian government.

A few weeks later, on 30 October, the foreign ministers of the three powers announced at the conference in Moscow a declaration on Italy that promised the complete eradication of Fascism and the democratisation of the government. The Allied Control Commission was set up in November, and in December 1943 Italian soldiers went into their first action at Monte Lungo. The dispute over the monarchy was resolved by compromise: in the spring of 1944, after the about-turn by Palmiro Togliatti’s Communists, the anti-Fascist parties joined Badoglio’s government, and after the liberation of Rome in June 1944 Victor Emmanuel III handed his powers to his son Umberto as Lieutenant General of the Realm, while Badoglio made way for Ivanoe Bonomi. In July 1945 Italy also declared war on Japan.

Co-belligerent status did not bring Italy what its leaders had hoped for. In the referendum of 2 June 1946 Italians chose a republic, and the peace treaty signed in Paris on 10 February 1947 treated their country as a defeated member of the Axis: Italy lost its colonies, Istria and the Dodecanese, and had to pay reparations and limit its armed forces. The part Italians played in the fight against Germany in 1943–1945, however – sailors, soldiers of the co-belligerent army, partisans and the hundreds of thousands of internees who refused to serve the Reich – became one of the foundations of the post-war republic’s identity.