What's the Matter?

What's the Matter

Three of southern Italy's antiroyalist parties proposed to call a ten-minute strike in Naples last week. Object: to protest once more against the British-U.S. alliance with dilapidated little King Vittorio Emanuele III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Specifcally, Italian antiFascists felt that Winston Churchill had let them down again in his recent declaration of Allied policy. Said Count Carlo Sforza : "In London they seem so busy mistrusting antiFascism that they forget . . . thousands of Fascists . . . eager to stab Britain and the U.S.A. in the back."

There was no strike. Explained an anti-Fascist spokesman, the republican Action Party's Prince Caracciolo: "We had to give in to precise orders from General [Sir Henry Maitland] Wilson."

Nobody was happy. Allied control authorities felt that troublesome Italians had again put their internal politics ahead of a very troublesome war. Those Italians who cared at all felt that the Allies had once again demonstrated a complete contempt for everything the war was supposed to be about.

Amateurs at Work. Field Security officers in Italy move into newly occupied towns along with, or only a few steps behind, the front-line combat troops. The security men make a quick check on the townspeople, find out who were the Fascist leaders and send them back to the lines at the tail end of batches of German prisoners. It doesn't take much detective work to uncover the town scoundrels. No overpowering display of authority is needed to get rid of them.

Yet the U.S. and British Governments, acting in concert, have failed to do the same thing with Fascists of higher rank. One reason for this failure--and for most of the specific mistakes in Italy--is that amateurs at European problems are attempting to deal with chaotic and revolutionary situations. A more basic reason is that Allied officials in Italy have no firmly laid-down and well-understood policy to guide them.

The Italians have heard Allied political advisers and generals make speeches about liberation, promise food for the civilian population, but the Italians have a certain Latin practicality. They are aware of the lack of ships to bring promised food. They are aware that Allied troops are liberating Italy only from the Germans--and are not doing that very rapidly. The politically conscious, democratically minded minority in southern Italy is aware by now that "expediency" is as much an excuse as a policy.

Militarily, Italy is an available place in which to fight Germans. Politically. Italy is a place where Britain and the U.S. have lost a great opportunity to build up European good will, to prove that the Allies really do know what they want, and that they know how to get it.

The Weary Ones. Mussolini's abdication caught Allied political advisers with their brief cases down. There was no plan, either political or military, to turn such a development to account. Hasty conferences followed with some of the King's and the Marshal's emissaries. The armistice was signed, but its announcement was withheld to coincide with a proposed airborne invasion of Rome and the beachhead landing at Salerno. The Germans moved quickly. They prevented the airborne venture by disarming vastly superior numbers of Italians to whom the Allies had looked for help, then concentrated everything available at Salerno.

The Allies held Salerno, but they also had on their hands the King and Marshal Badoglio. The Italian fleet came over. Militarily the Allies gained some advantage by having Italian troops help out as dock workers, as railway and bridge guards. But the Allied command miscalculated when it expected the Italian armies --beaten, demoralized and wanting only to go home to their families--to be useful as combat troops. They, like the people of Italy, wanted only peace and food.

"The Small One." To Italian democrats, King Vittorio Emanuele is still a rankling symbol of the Mussolini regime. Once il piccolo (the small one) was a sentimental nickname for the king. Now it is a bitter epithet. His son, Umberto, has won the title lo stupido nazionale. Even such democratic political leaders as Benedetto Croce and Count Carlo Sforza were willing to join a new Government if the King were kicked out and a regency established for the "little prince." the seven-year-old Prince of Naples. But the King was kept on.

When Italian antiFascists assembled in Bari on Jan. 28 to demand his abdication, the left-over Fascists and opportunists still in office in Apulia tried to stop the meeting by decreeing that visitors to Bari must have special health permits to enter the city. The meeting, held nevertheless, received its answer a few days later; the Allies turned over new and additional parts of liberated Italy, including Sardinia and Sicily, to the control of the Emanuele-Badoglio Government.

Burden of the Past. In the final analysis, it is up to the Italians to put their house in order. That is a job which they may not be able to do alone. One of the great misfortunes of Italian antiFascists in the south is that they have been unable to bring help from German-occupied northern Italy, where political groups are stronger and the national fiber is tougher.

Behind the Italians are centuries of overbreeding, underfeeding, superstition, illiteracy and ignorance. More recently they have been cuckolded by 20 years of Fascism. Their food supplies are low. Typhus and a half-dozen other diseases follow in the wake of the Allied armies. And as the advance goes forward, more Italian cities are left in ruins, more civilians are killed, more are made homeless, more problems of rehabilitation pile up.

Many of the U.S. and British control officers are well-meaning; locally, some of them are good at their immediate jobs. But Italy needs more such officers who know and have a feeling for her people and her language. She needs, above all. a clearly stated Allied policy which will give the capable and articulate minority of Italians a real basis for faith in Britain, the U.S. and postwar Italy.

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