Without Orders, Without Protection: 8 September and the Beginning of the Resistenza
Author: Milan Spindler
On 8 September 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower announced the armistice with Italy on behalf of the Allies. Alongside 25 July, this marked a decisive moment in Italy’s history during the Second World War. Communication between the Italian government, the military, and the population was catastrophic both before and after the announcement. No clear orders or instructions were issued, and so this moment, the complete collapse of all familiar institutional structures, became a shared experience for many in Italy. For a large part of the Royal Army and the civilian population, the announcement of the armistice signified, if only briefly, the longed-for end of the war. Yet this expectation was quickly overtaken by reality, as the German Wehrmacht immediately began occupying northern and central Italy.
The government’s disorganised flight to southern Italy, along with the king, undermined the authority of both the monarchy and the state as a whole. In contrast stood the Wehrmacht, which acted according to its plan (known as Operation Axis). In the days following the armistice, the Wehrmacht captured hundreds of thousands of unprepared Italian soldiers who had received no orders. Italian officers, paralysed by fear of the supposedly invincible Wehrmacht and the absence of military leadership, were unable to take decisive action. At the same time, fear of revolutionary forces meant that no weapons were distributed from military depots to the civilian population. Many in the military still hoped for a swift Allied victory. Numerous soldiers were deported to Germany as Italian Military Internees (IMI), while others managed to escape, often with the help of Italian women, whose assistance in enabling them to go into hiding marked an early act of resistance.
Many women supported the fleeing soldiers by helping them exchange their military uniforms for civilian clothing. In the shortest time, they sewed new garments from blankets and old shirts and dyed the soldiers’ boots, allowing them to escape imminent capture by the Germans. At railway stations and in villages, soldiers were given addresses where they could discard their uniforms and bring themselves to safety. These actions helped many find refuge in the mountains and remote valleys, where they gathered in small groups, in some cases still armed with their military weapons.
As the occupation focused primarily on military control and the securing of cities and strategic junctions, many soldiers chose the inaccessible valleys and mountain regions of the Apennines or the Alps as places of retreat. Among them were men who had already fought on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. These veterans, many of them mountain troops (Alpini), harboured a deep resentment towards the Germans, feeling betrayed both by the fascist leadership and by their former allies during the campaign and retreat in the East. The devastating losses and their subordination to German interests had left them profoundly disillusioned with Fascism, their former allies, and the war itself.
Some of these former soldiers formed small armed groups in the mountains. Together with Allied prisoners of war who had escaped from the collapsing Italian POW camps, and with older anti-fascists, they formed the nucleus of the first organised resistance groups. They often still saw themselves as military units and initially sought to operate independently of the political parties.
The goal of these groups’ leaders was to organise a regular army to carry out the national liberation struggle on Italian soil. Leadership was frequently assumed by older officers from the former Royal Italian Army. These men had experience in conventional warfare, but little familiarity with partisan fighting. The demands of guerrilla warfare, from strict secrecy and operational flexibility to avoiding open battle with a superior enemy, were unfamiliar to many and posed significant organisational challenges.