Operation Achse

On the evening of 8 September 1943, only a few minutes after Marshal Pietro Badoglio had read out the announcement of the armistice with the Allies on the radio, a single code word went out to German commands throughout the Mediterranean: “Achse” (“Axis”). It was the signal to carry out a plan that had been in preparation since the spring. The Wehrmacht was to disarm the army of its recent ally, seize its weapons, and occupy Italy, the Italian occupation zone in France and the Italian garrisons in the Balkans and on the Aegean islands. Within a few days the plan had largely succeeded. Some one million Italian soldiers laid down their arms, and more than half a million of them ended up in camps in the Reich and in occupied Poland.

A plan prepared in advance

The Germans had been reckoning with Italy’s exit from the war since the defeat in Tunisia. On 21 May 1943 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel approved the guidelines for several linked operations: “Alarich” concerned Italy itself, “Konstantin” the Italian occupation zones in the Balkans, “Siegfried” southern France and “Kopenhagen” the Alpine passes. After the overthrow of Benito Mussolini on 25 July, the plans were updated and combined under the common code name “Achse”.

From the end of July, under the pretext of allied assistance in defending the peninsula, several more divisions came into Italy over the Alps. In the north Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Army Group B was formed, with its headquarters on Lake Garda. In the south Field Marshal Albert Kesselring commanded the forces that had just withdrawn from Sicily and was forming the Tenth Army. Near Rome stood General Kurt Student’s XI Air Corps with the 2nd Parachute Division and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division. In the Balkans Italian divisions were intermingled with German units of Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs’s Army Group F and Colonel General Alexander Löhr’s Army Group E.

The German commands had detailed orders for the moment. They knew which barracks, airfields, ports and depots to seize first, and expected only weak resistance. Wehrmacht armaments representatives in Italy were already drawing up lists of factories to be removed or destroyed. Badoglio’s government assured Berlin of its loyalty to the last. As late as the morning of 8 September King Victor Emmanuel III was reassuring the Reich’s new plenipotentiary in Rome, Rudolf Rahn, and in the afternoon the Army Chief of Staff, General Mario Roatta, assured the Germans by telephone that foreign reports of a surrender were propaganda.

The evening of 8 September

The armistice signed at Cassibile on 3 September was to remain secret until the Allies’ main landing. The Italians had counted on the announcement coming no earlier than about 12 September, and had not had time to prepare the army. At 6.30 p.m. General Dwight Eisenhower announced the armistice on Radio Algiers, and at 7.42 p.m. Badoglio read his proclamation on the EIAR radio. It called on the troops to cease operations against the Allies but to “respond to any attacks from any other quarter”. The word “Germans” did not appear in it.

Adolf Hitler, who had returned that afternoon to the Wolf’s Lair from Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s headquarters in Ukraine, learned of the surrender from a BBC broadcast. At about 7.50 p.m. General Alfred Jodl’s staff at the OKW sent out the code word “Achse”. Kesselring had difficulty receiving it, because at noon American bombers had destroyed a large part of his headquarters at Frascati. German units near Rome were already on the move by 8.30 p.m., seizing the fuel depot at Mezzocammino.

On the Italian side chaos reigned. The instructions for the event of German aggression, especially Roatta’s memorandum “OP 44”, approved on the night of 1–2 September and sent out on 2 September in only twelve copies, were vague. The commanders who received them did not know when, or on what signal, they were to act on them. In the evening the Chief of the Supreme Command, General Vittorio Ambrosio, permitted only defence against attack, and during the night Roatta was urging above all that disorder in the units be avoided. Early on the morning of 9 September the king, Badoglio, Ambrosio and Roatta left Rome and, travelling via Pescara and Ortona, sailed to Brindisi. An army of some two million men was left without orders.

Disarmament in Italy

In the north of the peninsula Rommel’s troops had a relatively easy task. The garrisons in Milan, Turin, Genoa and Verona, surrounded by German columns and presented with ultimatums, mostly laid down their arms within a day or two. The Germans often promised that the disarmed soldiers would be sent home, and then loaded them onto trains heading north over the Brenner. Thousands of soldiers simply discarded their uniforms and made their way home, sheltered by the civilian population. Some of them, especially in Piedmont, escaped into the mountains with their weapons. From them grew the first units of the Italian resistance.

In the south Kesselring was in a more difficult position. On the morning of 9 September the Allies landed in the Gulf of Salerno, and he had to confront them and disarm the Italians at the same time. The OKW was reckoning with the loss of eight divisions in the south, and Rommel advised an immediate withdrawal to the La Spezia–Rimini line. Kesselring, however, staked everything on speed. Near Rome Student’s paratroopers and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division broke the disorganised resistance of several Italian divisions within two days, and the capital capitulated on 10 September. Only in Sardinia, Corsica, Calabria and southern Apulia did the Italians manage to hold out until the Allies arrived or force the Germans to leave.

The main body of the battle fleet sailed from La Spezia on the night of 8–9 September to surrender to the Allies under the terms of the armistice, and lost the battleship Roma on the way, sunk by German aircraft. Ships that had not managed to sail or were under repair were scuttled by their crews or seized by the Germans. The air force split in a similar way: some aircraft flew off to Allied airfields, while most were taken over by the Luftwaffe.

France and the Balkans

In France General Mario Vercellino’s Fourth Army was in the middle of moving from Provence to Italy. At the news of the armistice it began to disintegrate even before it was attacked by the Germans, advancing from France under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and from Piedmont with Rommel’s troops. German divisions entered Toulon, reached the Var river and entered Menton, taking over the whole Italian occupation zone. The Italian garrison on the Mont-Cenis pass held out for a time and, before surrendering, blew up part of the Fréjus rail tunnel. On 12 September Vercellino formally disbanded his army.

In the Balkans there were more than 30 Italian divisions, some half a million soldiers in all, who for two years had been fighting Yugoslav, Albanian and Greek partisans. They were exhausted, cut off from home and scattered among a hostile population, and alongside them stood German divisions, fewer in number but more mobile and in command of the air. The Croatian authorities under Ante Pavelić immediately broke with Italy and joined in disarming its garrisons.

The course of events depended largely on the commanders. In Greece General Carlo Vecchiarelli, commander of the Eleventh Army in Athens, believed German promises of a safe return home and on 9 September ordered his men to hand over their weapons without a fight. His divisions were disarmed and shipped to the Reich. In Albania the Germans surrounded and captured General Ezio Rosi’s Army Group East headquarters in Tirana as early as 11 September. The Perugia Division, which tried to break through to the sea, surrendered on 22 September, after which the Germans shot its commander, General Ernesto Chiminello, and more than a hundred officers. In Dalmatia the Bergamo Division, in agreement with Josip Broz Tito’s partisans, defended Split until 27 September. General Gastone Gambara, commander of XI Corps, by contrast, abandoned his soldiers at Rijeka (Fiume). In the Bay of Kotor the Emilia Division held out until 16 September. The soldiers of the Venezia and Taurinense Divisions in Montenegro went over to the partisans and, as the Garibaldi Division, fought alongside the Yugoslavs until 1945.

Resistance ended most tragically in the Ionian Islands. On Kefalonia the Acqui Division rejected the demand to hand over its weapons and fought, and after its surrender the Germans carried out mass executions of the prisoners. The Italian garrison on Corfu also resisted. In the Dodecanese the Italian garrison of Rhodes surrendered to the Germans after a few days, while the British arrived on Leros and Kos, opening the Aegean campaign that lasted until November.

The reckoning and the internees

As early as 10 September an OKW communiqué announced that the Italian armed forces had ceased to exist. According to German tallies a total of 1,006,370 Italian soldiers were disarmed, of whom some 415,000 were in northern Italy, 102,000 in the south of the peninsula, nearly 9,000 in France, some 165,000 in Yugoslavia and 265,000 in Greece and on the Aegean islands. More than 1.2 million rifles, nearly 40,000 machine guns, several thousand guns and over ten thousand vehicles were captured. According to estimates accepted in the literature, between 20,000 and 30,000 Italian soldiers were killed in the September fighting, and more than 13,000 later drowned aboard ships, sunk by the Allies or lost at sea, in which the Germans were carrying prisoners from the Aegean islands to the mainland.

Some 94,000 men, mainly from the Fascist militia, agreed at once to go on fighting alongside the Germans. Around 196,000 escaped from the transports. The rest were taken to camps in the Reich, the General Government and the Polish territories annexed to the Reich. On 20 September Hitler gave them the status of “Italian military internees” (German Italienische Militärinternierte, IMI). This deprived them of the protection of the Geneva Convention and the care of the Red Cross, and in place of the protection due to prisoners of war it meant forced labour in mines, the armaments industry and agriculture. Under the pressure of hunger, further internees later volunteered for service with the Germans or in Mussolini’s army. According to historians’ estimates, however, between 600,000 and 650,000 Italian soldiers refused to the end. By various calculations between 37,000 and 50,000 of them died in captivity.

Many of them ended up in Poland. At Schokken – Skoki in Greater Poland – the Germans set up Oflag 64/Z for captured Italian generals, and in November 1943 it held more than 160 generals and admirals. Among them were Italo Gariboldi, Ezio Rosi, Carlo Vecchiarelli and Sebastiano Visconti Prasca. In January 1945, during the evacuation of the camp, SS men shot six generals who could not keep up with the column, in what became known as the murder at Kuźnica Żelichowska (PL). Italian prisoners were also held in camps at Toruń, Częstochowa and many other places.

Significance

Operation Achse was a major success for the Germans. Within a few days the Wehrmacht had seized the key positions in the Mediterranean, captured huge quantities of weapons and equipment, gained hundreds of thousands of forced labourers and held the front far to the south of Rome. On 12 September German paratroopers freed Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, and on 23 September Mussolini announced the formation of a new government, from 1 December called the Italian Social Republic – formally an ally of the Reich, in practice a state under German occupation. Taking the place of the Italians in the Balkans and in Italy, however, required more than a dozen German divisions, which were henceforth lacking on the Eastern Front and later in France.

For the Italians 8 September became a date of national catastrophe: the state and its army fell apart within a few days, and the men who had led them into the war fled, leaving the soldiers to fend for themselves. Yet in those same days the Italian resistance was born. On 13 October Badoglio’s government in Brindisi declared war on Germany, and Italy became a “co-belligerent” state on the Allied side. The resistance of the soldiers on Kefalonia, in Rome and in Dalmatia, and the stance of the internees who refused to serve Hitler and Mussolini, have taken a lasting place in Italian memory of the war.