Two Wars

For Italy, as the Allied radio had warned, the breathing spell was over (TIME, Aug. 16). Now the big planes, winging through the night from England, crested the Alps, dropped their explosive and incendiary reminders on Milan and Turin. By day, up from Mediterranean shores came precision bombers to give Rome its second, searing assault.

Political objectives were meshed with the military. The bombardiers' sights aimed at railroad yards, aircraft plants, armament works"and the will of the Italian people. The Allied High Command had had enough of temporizing by Premier Pietro Badoglio. With the bombs on Italy's cities fell leaflets goading the people: "The Mussolini Government is gone, but the Nazi war continues."

For Peace. The people responded with anger and dismay. In Milan, despite Premier Badoglio's ban against public assemblies, they gathered in shattered streets and cried: "We got rid of one tyranny; now we must remove another." In Rome crowds shouted "Peace!" and knelt to pray with Pope Pius XII who came from the Vatican to see the raid damage.

What Winston Churchill had called the Italian "stew" was bubbling fiercely. But the Badoglio military dictatorship still summoned the people to carry on the war to "an honorable peace. . . . Under no circumstances must our soldiers be betrayed by those behind the lines." A portentous answer came from the people.

Said Rome's Lavoro Italiano, in an issue printed and distributed before censor and police could intervene: "We want peace and liberty! And both are indivisible. . . . To continue the war signifies the suicide of non-Fascist Italy in a catastrophe to which Fascism would have led us. ... To continue the war means to encourage and prepare an armed rebellion of the people."

Against Communism. The Government applied more terror, more arrest and executions, to hold the lid down. Premier Badoglio sought to split the five popular-front parties by weaning the liberal Actionists from the Socialists and Communists. The underground countered with mass "solidarity" demonstrations at the funerals of air-raid victims.

To frighten the Allies the Badoglio Government dressed up an old bogey. Said the Rome radio: "Every bomb razing a house to the ground opens the road to subversive ideas and creates a hotbed of revolution. . . . What victory . . . what security can the Anglo-Americans draw from a Europe in the throes of revolution, permeated through and through by the Communist virus?"

But Allied planes still came over: Then the Badoglio Government declared "formally and publicly . . . that Rome is an open city" (see p. 26). The Vatican radio gave glad approval, did not deny that the Church was serving as intermediary to obtain Allied recognition of Rome's demilitarization. In rebellious Milan the crowds shouted: "Rome does not want any more raids! Neither do we!"

In Confusion. The Wehrmacht had used the interim since Benito Mussolini's passing to entrench itself in strategic Northern Italy. If the Allies had been ready to invade at that time, Italy might well have fallen like a ripe plum. Now they would face at least organized German resistance. Now Italy may not only be fought over by the Allies and Germans, but perhaps be torn first by civil war.

London's Daily Herald reported that Dr. Gaetano Salvemini and Count Carlo Sforza, exiled Italian liberals, had arrived in England from the U.S., perhaps to help form a new Italian regime. The report was promptly denied, but it showed one trend of Allied thought. Last week the pen of scholarly Gaetano Salvemini who is disappointed that the U.S. did not drop 10,000 parachutists on Rome the day thai Mussolini fell, scourged Allied policy:

"Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt are waging, in Italy, two simultaneous wars. One is aimed at achieving 'unconditional surrender'; the other is aimed at preventing revolution. If unconditional surrender had been their only aim in invading Italy, they would have made a real revolution inevitable when moral collapse brought about the downfall of Mussolini. In their minds and in their actions, war against revolution interferes with the war for unconditional surrender and paralyzes it."

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