Gambit is the opening of a chess game when
one of the pawns or pieces is sacrificed.
In 1943, when the Red Army was breaking the back of the Nazi hordes with victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, the Allies preferred the opening of the Second Front to invade Sicily, and then the Apennine Peninsula. Roosevelt and Churchill, in their correspondence with Stalin, explained this by the desire to withdraw Italy, Hitler's main European ally, from the war as soon as possible. Formally, this is exactly what happened: Mussolini's regime fell surprisingly easily and quickly.
Duce, who had long been unpopular among the people, lost support even among his associates. Not the masses and not King Victor Emmanuel III, but the Grand Council of the fascist party, headed by Dino Grandi, by a majority of votes (12 to 7) demanded his resignation. After an audience with the king, the dictator was unexpectedly arrested, sent first to the island of Ponza, and then to the mountain hotel "Campo Emperor".
But at that time, the Anglo-American troops had not yet managed to clear Sicily of the enemy and could not even take Naples.
The real strategic gain for the coalition from the invasion turned out to be very doubtful, even taking into account the fact that official Italy eventually surrendered. There was no question of the Italians immediately taking the side of the Allies, especially after the cruel Anglo-American bombing of Rome and other cities of the country. With great difficulty and at the cost of the loss of a number of ships, including the ultra-modern battleship Roma, the allies only managed to get the main forces of the Italian fleet in their hands.
At the same time, most of the aircraft of the Italian Air Force continued to fight against the Anglo-American troops until the spring of 45.
In addition, soon the Germans, as a result of a special operation under the command of Otto Skorzeny, now promoted in films and books, found and fished Mussolini out of arrest. Announcing the restoration of legal power in Italy, they immediately promptly occupied the entire central and northern part of the country. With all its very solid industrial and raw material potential. Army Group South-West, consisting of first eight, and then sixteen and even twenty-six understaffed, but combat-ready divisions, was led by Air Field Marshal Kesselring.
After meeting with Hitler in Munich, Duce settled in the resort town of Salo on the shores of Lake Garda, making it the temporary capital of Italy. From there, he announced the overthrow of the Savoy dynasty and the convening of a neo-fascist party congress in Verona. He himself, frightened of the attempts, did not go to the congress, and confined himself to a greeting message.
King Victor Emmanuel III with his entire family managed to hide in Egypt.
And the government, which, after the resignation and arrest of Mussolini, was headed by 71-year-old disgraced Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who was once almost shot by the Nazis, was forced to flee south to the allies - in Brindisi, completely losing any influence on his own country. Nevertheless, England and the United States were not going to abandon the bet already made. In Italy, only they should dispose of everything, the government is nothing more than a decoration, and the gentlemen from the Savoy dynasty are quite satisfied with their "ceremonial prestige."
At the same time, Churchill, in his letters to Roosevelt, continued to insist that "it is very important to maintain the authority of the king and the authorities of Brindisi as a government and to achieve unity of command throughout Italy." Having agreed the terms of Italy's surrender not only with the United States, but for decency and with the Soviet Union, the British Prime Minister, given the fact that on October 13 the Badoglio government declared war on Germany, seriously hoped to grant him "the status of a jointly belligerent party." But at the same time, almost immediately and unexpectedly easily, he achieved the consent of Stalin and Roosevelt to the creation of a special commission of representatives of England, the USA and the USSR, which was supposed to really rule Italy.
The USSR in this Union Council was supposed to be represented by the notorious Andrei Vyshinsky, at that time the Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. However, upon his arrival in Italy, the Allies proposed not to introduce a Soviet representative to the commission at all, and to leave Vyshinsky's functions as a "liaison officer." Moscow clearly did not expect such impudence, and from there Vyshinsky was immediately given the go-ahead for direct contacts with representatives of the Badoglio cabinet, although under the terms of the armistice, any diplomatic initiative was forbidden to the Italians. Or, at the very least, it should have been controlled by the allies.
Vyshinsky met several times with the Secretary General of the Italian Foreign Ministry Renato Prunas, making it clear that the USSR was ready to accept direct recognition of the Badoglio government, which in the spring of 1944 moved from Brindisi to Salerno. But on one condition - the new Italian authorities will go to direct cooperation with the left forces, primarily with the communists, whose leader Palmiro Togliatti will not only return from emigration, but will also enter the government.
The Cabinet of Ministers, which for a month and a half not only dragged out the capitulation, but also continued behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Nazis, assuring the Fuehrer's comrades-in-arms of "loyalty to the ideas of the anti-Comintern pact," could not but accept such a gift. The "red" threat for Badoglio and his subordinates, as well as for the king, was almost a greater bogeyman than for the same Churchill.
Indeed, despite all the repressions of the Mussolini regime and mass emigration, long before the allies landed in Sicily, numerous partisan detachments were already operating in almost the entire territory of Italy, most of them, of course, "red". And let no one be misled by the fact that for the most part they were formed from fugitive prisoners, among whom there were several thousand Russians. The Italians themselves, for all their sentimentality and love of peace, hardly lost their revolutionary spirit, and could well have come out not only against the damned "Boches", but also against the government, because of which they invaded Italy.
However, P. Togliatti himself by no means overestimated the prospects for a left turn in Italy, insisting that the time had not yet come for its real “Bolshevization”. It was he who suggested to Stalin to limit himself for the time being to a simple entry of the communists into the government. Strange as it may seem, the Soviet leader was quite satisfied with this approach. Moreover, both from the point of view of not repeating the sad experience of the civil war in Spain, but also saving face in relations with the allies, firmly following the agreements reached with them earlier.
Moscow listened to the opinion of the Italian communists, realizing the fact that the Red Army is still very far from the Apennines, and even the idea of exporting a revolution to Italy from Yugoslavia is hardly realistic. And they preferred to first knock the Germans out of Soviet soil, and begin to deal with the post-war structure of Europe only later, and start, for example, with Romania and Bulgaria.
The recognition of the new, albeit in operation for seven months, Italian government by the Soviet Union took place on March 11. By that time, the Red Army was just completing the liberation of the Crimea, and the Anglo-American troops were firmly stuck in front of the German defensive "Gustav's line", unsuccessfully storming the Monte Cassino monastery, turned into an impregnable fortress.
Mussolini, inspired by the successes of Field Marshal Kesselring, who repelled the Allied offensive against Rome, staged a tough showdown in his party. He ordered the execution of five fascists from the 12 members of the Grand Council who voted against him last summer. Among those executed was even his son-in-law, the brilliant Count Galeazzo Ciano, who for many years held the post of Foreign Minister under the Duce. The dictator was not at all embarrassed by the fact that the Germans, who were already hated by everyone, were in charge in his native country, but that one of Hitler's military leaders actually ruled there.
For England and the United States, the establishment of diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and the new Italy came as a surprise, although it would seem that it gave them complete carte blanche in the Apennines. It was only after Churchill that Roosevelt realized what a mistake the Allies had made when they arranged something like a diplomatic embargo on Soviet-Italian contacts.
Having subjugated Italy, Britain and the United States created a precedent that the modern historian Jacques R. Powells, who was not noticed in particular sympathy for either London or Washington, called "fatal." It was from him that, in fact, the division of Europe into future zones of occupation began, when politics and economics are dictated by those who enter this or that country. It seems that those researchers are right who believe that it is with him, and not with Churchill's Fulton speech, that one can start the countdown in the calendar of the Cold War.
Churchill in his memoirs, apparently trying in vain to disguise one of his own mistakes, does not hide his irritation at the recognition of the Badoglio government by the Soviet Union. The leaders of the United States and Britain did not immediately realize that Italy could almost certainly turn red in the future so much that it would be very difficult to steer it as it does at the moment.
After the Allies, having promised the Italians democracy, replaced it with "decoration", the population's sympathy for the Russians, who promise nothing and do not impose anything on anyone, were ensured. Moreover, the USSR almost immediately took up solving the problems of tens of thousands of Italian prisoners remaining there. At the same time, the highest circles of Italy turned out to be grateful to Stalin not so much for the recognition as for the fact that he “made them happy” in fact with only one serious communist politician - the peace-loving Palmiro Togliatti. The Soviet leader thus confirmed that it was no coincidence that at one time he refused to support the Comintern, which continued to propagandize the ideas of a "world revolution."
Palmiro Togliatti returned to his homeland at the end of March 1944 - 18 years after he left it. And already on March 31 in Naples, under his chairmanship, the National Council of the Italian Communist Party met, which put forward a program to unite all democratic forces to end the struggle against fascism and German occupation. In response to the ICP resolution adopted at the suggestion of Togliatti on support of the Badoglio government, the cabinet obtained from the king the actual legalization of the Communist Party. But this in no way prevented the allied forces from engaging in the systematic disarmament of the Italian pro-communist partisan detachments.
Togliatti himself soon became part of the Italian government, and on that, by all indications, calmed down. Apparently, for the sake of this, the Italian communists did not even become overly indignant at the very fact of the recognition by the Russians of the Badoglio government, although in other conditions it could plunge them into horror. In addition, a whole series of measures followed to virtually eliminate any Soviet influence in Italy, right up to the replacement of the prime minister - instead of Marshal Badoglio, they "appointed" the moderate socialist Ivaneo Bonomi,who, under Mussolini, simply sat quietly in opposition.
However, the Soviet leadership in relation to Italy had other, much more pragmatic calculations, in addition to the desire to introduce "their own man" into the Italian government. The battles in Italy did not lead to the Germans seriously weakening their forces on the Eastern Front, where they had to reap the benefits of their powerful but unsuccessful offensive on the Kursk Bulge. However, the now becoming much more concrete prospect of an Allied invasion of France made the transfer of German divisions there inevitable, and the very fact of the impending threat tied the hands of the German command.
And most importantly, in the event of the rapid liberation of the Apennine Peninsula, the Allies were able to free up the landing craft that were so necessary for crossing the English Channel. Finally! In addition, despite the fact that Churchill once again remembered his "Balkan plans" and rushed about with the idea of landing from Italy on the Istrian peninsula, ostensibly to help Tito's Yugoslav partisans, it was clearly Soviet troops that now had to liberate southeastern Europe.
The provision of an airfield in Bari, Italy to the Russians (and not the Allies, but the Italians) turned out to be very handy, which made it possible to significantly improve the supply of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. In response to the excessive initiative of the allies, Moscow has competently played out a gambit, actually sacrificing its positions in Italy in order to later untie its hands in Eastern Europe.
