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The People's Role. In the agony of revolution, in the process of becoming a battlefield, a battered and buffeted nation might be finding its soul. It might be reaching back across the years to pick up again the democratic thread woven in a history of foreign oppression and domestic tyranny. Before Magna Charta and King John, Italy's northern cities had won self-rule from the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Florence and Venice had once borne the title of republic. But the trend had been beaten down through the centuries when the peninsula served as the cockpit of Guelph and Ghibelline, despot and noble, rival Spaniard, Frenchman and German. In Milan, in 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself with the iron crown of Lombardy. In Milan, in 1848, the Habsburg General Count Joseph Radetzky had smashed the people's barricades. But the day of Italy's Risorgimento (resurrection) came. In 1870 the poor, frugal, industrious country of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour ceased to be a geographical expression, attained nationhood under Vittorio Emanuele II, Rè Galantuomo (the Honest King). It was the shame of the Savoy dynasty that Vittorio Emanuele III helped Fascismo destroy the democratic constitution his grandfather had upheld.
When the test of World War II came, the little people of Italy helped Allied arms destroy Fascismo. They refused to fight for a corrupt regime, to love the German ally. Their revolt, at first passive, then open, sapped Benito Mussolini's edifice, forced Badoglio to surrender.
Now, as best they could in a confused and disorganized hour, the people of Italy declared war on the Germans. In Milan they mounted machine guns on rooftops, sniped from windows. In Turin they held out after the rest of northern Italy had fallen to the Germans. Up & down the peninsula they heeded the Allied calls to sabotage Nazi movements. Along the coast they turned on lights at night to beckon British and U.S. landing parties. But by week's end the occupying Germans seemed to hold a firm upper hand over wide areas. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel proclaimed himself master of all Italy above the Spezia-Rimini line, imposed a "state of war," decreed death for "giving aid or assistance" to the Allies.
The Palace's Voice. Marshal Badoglio defended himself and his regime against the German cry of "betrayal." To Hitler he sent a telegram of justification:
"The war . . . has cost Italy—apart from loss of her colonial empire—destruction of her towns, annihilation of her industries, of her merchant navy, of her railway network and, lastly, invasion of her own soil. One cannot ask the people to continue to fight when all legitimate hope—I do not say of victory, but even of resistance—has vanished."
The Führer replied with verbal abuse and with the shelling and occupation of Rome. Italian troops fought back in the suburbs of the capital. But Nazi jackboots pounded into the eternal city, up to the gates of the Vatican. In Rome, the Germans held the traffic junction between north and south Italy. They had the best site to set up a puppet Fascist government and to promote civil war among Italians. But by putting the Vatican under their "protection"* they had now, more than ever, arrayed against them Catholicism's power.