But his enthusiasm for continuing the war did not spread to his new Chief-of-Staff. After leaning of Mussolini’s new resolve to fight to the bitter end, General Ambrosio initiated his own plan for removing him from power. Meanwhile, the war went from bad to worse. On 10 April, the Italian cruiser, Trento, was sunk by American heavy bombers near La Maddalena. From 20 to 21 April, the Folgore Parachute Division fought to the last man defending the Takrouna stronghold. But Tunisia finally fell to the Allies on 8 May, followed on the 13th by the surrender of 275,000 German and Italian troops at the Cape Bon peninsula. Italians regarded Pantelleria as the rock on which any Anglo-American invasion of Italy would shatter.

But with the surrender of the fortress-island on 12 June, the country was faced with the gravest crisis in its history. Four days later, Mussolini met in council with fifteen cabinet members, who suggested that he relinquish at least some of his responsibilities, although his continued position as the nation’s supreme authority was really at issue. To their surprise, he readily agreed to bring the matter to the attention of the next Grand Council meeting scheduled for the following week, and promised to abide by its majority decision, whatever the outcome.

The next several days were filled with momentous incident. On 17 July, after months of virtually unrelieved defeat at sea, the Italian cruiser, Scipione Africano, won a stunning naval action against a squad of British motor torpedo-boats off Messina, as described earlier. The success was important to Mussolini, because it gave him some measure of confidence when he met just two days later with Hitler in the northern Italian town of Feltre. The Duce’s entourage urged him to ask the Führer for assistance in extracting Italy from the war before the Anglo-Americans invaded the peninsula. But Mussolini knew such a request would fall on deaf ears, and instead arranged for direct military assistance.

The arrival of German troops and arms on Italian soil would be a joint effort with the Esercito to defend Italy, but under direct Wehrmacht control. Although critics portrayed the stationing of Hitler’s forces in Italy as his most recent conquest, it was, in fact, fulfillment of the Axis Pact, drawn up four years earlier, when first Germany and Italy, then Japan, Rumania, Bulgaria and several other mostly Eastern European nations pledged to aid one another in the event of attack or invasion.

While the two men were conferring, American B-24 Liberators were carrying out the first heavy bombing of Rome. The attack came as a terrible shock to both the Italian people and their leaders. Rome was regarded as a citta sacra, a ‘sacred city’, undefended for lack of any strategic targets. USAAF commanders had nevertheless deemed the Eternal City’s government offices worthy of annihilation, and hoped the raid might help bring the Italians to their senses. Pope Pius XII rushed into the streets, administering last rites to the dead and the dying, his robes soaked with their blood. 1,400 mostly non-combatant men, women and children–including numbers of priests and nuns attending the wounded at Rome’s General Hospital–perished in the attack. Another 6,000 were injured.

“One more illusion had vanished in smoke,” Mussolini sadly declared, “namely, that Rome, the Holy City, would never be raided; that the best anti-aircraft artillery was the Vatican itself; that Myron Taylor (a U.S. businessman and Freemason, he was Franklin Roosevelt’s personal emissary to the Holy See) had brought the Pope a guarantee to that effect from the American President, and other things of that nature–hopes, desires–all of that had been wiped out by a brutal bombardment which had lasted nearly three hours, had caused thousands of victims, and destroyed whole quarters of the city.”⁷

In their efforts to break Italian morale, Allied air ministers ordered the additional ‘carpet bombing’ of Genoa, La Spezia, Milan, Naples, and Turin. Until now, RAF and USAAF air raids killed 64,000 civilians, injuring tens of thousands more. In a spirited response, Regia Aeronautica interceptors were credited with shooting down 275 U.S. and British bombers over Italy from spring until 8 September 1943, although the actual tally was substantially higher. It was during this desperate period that some of Italy’s best fighter pilots became aces by destroying five or more enemy aircraft. On 27 August, for example, the 3rd Stormo C.T.’s Luigi Gorrini, flying a Macchi Veltro, shot down two Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and a Lockheed P-38 Lightning over Latium in central Italy during a single engagement. At the time of the armistice a few days later, his score would rise to twenty-one ‘kills’.

But on 24 July, the shadow of Rome’s first air raid hung over the Grand Council when its members convened to consider the fate of their Duce. Leader of the opposition was Dino Grandi, President of the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations, who despised Germans and Italy’s alliance with them. According to Romano Mussolini, “my father still allowed Grandi to present his order of the day, knowing full well that it would mean his ruin. Despite the fact that Il Duce had the militia on his side, as Galbati and other loyal Fascist leaders had repeatedly assured him, he didn’t try to react. It would have been very easy for him to block Grandi’s initiative on the no-confidence vote. He could have done so right up to the last moment of that interminable meeting, by having the militia enter the room after deactivating the door-blocking device. The door control was in front of him–a small push-button apparatus attached to the underside of the long U-shaped table around which the voters seated. All Il Duce had to do was press a button to put an end to the conspirators, and many others in the room would have certainly denounced them as well.”⁸

As promised, Mussolini subjected his personal future to a roll-call of cabinet members. The vote went against him, nineteen to seven, with two abstentions. The next day, again according to protocol, he personally reported the Grand Council’s confirmation to King Victor Emmanuelle. The monarch despised such political popularity contests, and contemptuously brushed aside its majority vote as vulgar, whichever way it had gone. All that mattered, he insisted, was that Italy get out of the war which had made the Duce the most hated person in his own country.

“At this moment,” Mussolini replied, “I am certainly the most intensely disliked, or, rather, loathed man in Italy, which is only natural on the part of the ignorant, suffering, victimized, under-nourished masses subjected to the terrible physical and moral burden of the ‘Liberator’ raids, and to the suggestions of enemy propaganda. Political and military circles aim their sharpest criticisms at those who bear the responsibility for the military conduct of the war.”⁹

With that, he tendered his resignation. Victor Emmanuelle seemed compassionate, offering an armed escort of his own palace guards to convey Mussolini home. In fact, the disingenuous monarch had been conspiring for weeks with Duke Pietro Acquarone, Minister of the Royal Household, who, as Klibansky noted, “played a leading part in the coup d’état of July 1943, acting as the King’s chief advisor and go-between, and coordinating the actions of the generals with those of the Court.”¹⁰ The palace guards Victor Emmanuelle assured Mussolini were for his protection instead placed him under arrest. Sixty years later, his son, Romano, asked rhetorically, “Is it true that Hitler, whom my father met at Feltre on 19 July 1943, six days prior to the king arresting my father and subsequently confining him at Gran Sasso, wanted to have a detachment of the SS protect him---a development that would have changed the course of events?”¹¹

The day of Mussolini’s arrest, Pietro Badoglio, dismissed and disgraced for his failed campaigns in Libya and Greece, proclaimed himself as new prime minister in such evasive language Italians everywhere were unsure the Duce had voluntarily retired or been overthrown, especially after the Marshal told them that the war would continue at Germany’s side. According to historians Greene and Massignani, “Most of the officers and men of the Italian armed forces were caught completely by surprise.”¹²

The King’s own nephew, the Duke of Aosta, was no less astounded, and dismissed the radio announcement as ‘enemy propaganda’. Confusion combined with domestic wartime conditions to facilitate Mussolini’s effortless overthrow. “Over a million Fascists were under arms,” he explained, “from the Var to Rhodes, from Ajaccio to Athens. Only a few members of the Party remained in Italy, and they had dedicated themselves almost exclusively to social service.”¹³

Having publicly pledged his loyalty to Germany, Badoglio at the same moment undertook secret surrender negotiations with the Allies through the Vatican. They specified that Italy should be allowed the protection of a formal armistice in exchange for declaring war on the Third Reich. The Allied Supreme Commander hesitated to accept, because Anglo-American policy called for Italy’s unconditional surrender. Amid general uncertainty and growing confusion, chaos began to spread outward from Rome like shock waves from a seismic epicenter.

In an effort to win over General Eisenhower, Badoglio indiscriminately rounded up several hundred loyal Fascists and had them shot to death on the spot without trial, then disclosed the positions, strengths and weaknesses of all German troop placements throughout the peninsula. It was not enough. Eisenhower responded that the Marshal had just forty-eight hours to have the Italian military stand down, free all captured prisoners, turn over the country’s arsenals, and accept the establishment of an Allied military government. Badoglio balked. He had offered friendship to the Allies, but they were treating him like the powerless spokesman of an already vanquished nation.

On 17 August, Sicily fell, followed a fortnight later by two British divisions landing at Reggio di Calabria. Unsure Italian resistance continued, because Badoglio had been in the grip of indecision for more than a month before he finally repudiated the Allies’ draconian terms. His procrastination continued to cost the lives of soldiers on both sides. Ignoring the turncoat Marshal, Eisenhower broadcast Italy’s surrender on 8 September. Badoglio was compelled to either accept it, or run the risk of being caught simultaneously between the Anglo-Americans and the Germans. That same day, he informed his fellow countrymen that the cost of peace with the Allies was war with Hitler. The announcement plunged Italy into civil war, as pro-Fascists sought protection with the Wehrmacht invading from the north, and anti-Fascists embraced the Allied invasion from the south.

While the two camps began to define their territories and square off, the fate of the Italian Fleet was in serious doubt. Part of Eisenhower’s surrender terms included “the immediate transfer of the Italian Fleet and its aircraft to those places that will be designated by the Allied Command with the details of their disarmament.”¹⁴ In other words, they were to be spoils of war, contrary to earlier assurances that the Fleet would be merely deactivated. As Admiral (ret.) Bragadine observed, “It is true that later the Italian Navy was treated quite differently from what it was led to expect by the promises and pledges of the Allies.”¹⁵

Several battleships, a number of cruisers and auxiliary vessels were still serviceable, and the Anglo-Americans wanted them for their proposed invasion of southern France. The Supermarina’s plan to either scuttle its remaining ships or suicide them against the enemy in the event of a national surrender had been set aside by Eisenhower’s terms, which called for the mobilization of all Italian resources against Germany.

Shame ran deep and widespread throughout all ranks of the Regia Marina, as the same warships that had only a year before virtually scoured the British from the Central Mediterranean were now led in pitiful procession by Admiral Cunningham aboard his Royal Navy flagship into the service of their enemies. His prize catch was the Roma, a new, state-of-the-art battleship, which set out independently under orders to intern herself in Malta. From her bridge, Admiral Carlo Bergamini, as the Naval High Commander, led the line of other Italian vessels into captivity. Details of the humiliating surrender terms had been deliberately withheld from him by Badoglio to avoid losing the Fleet in its proposed last sortie against the enemy.

Bergamini had fired up the Roma’s boilers after learning of the Allied landings at Salerno, which he anticipated opposing in coordination with the Luftwaffe. Only after he was safely out at sea was he notified of Italy’s altered position on 9 September, a day following the armistice. His battleship joined up with two others, the Vittorio Veneto and Littorio (renamed the more politically correct Italia after Mussolini’s arrest), together with the cruisers Eugenio di Savoia, Montecuccoli and Regolo, and eight destroyers.

As this remnant of the Italian Fleet steamed through the Gulf of Asinara into the Straits of Bonifacio, morale plummeted, and a rash of suicides broke out on all the ships. Some officers urged Admiral Bergamini to make for neutral, Axis-friendly Spain, which he appeared to do when he led the ships through the Bocche di Bonifacto, a strait between Corsica and Sardinia, turning away from the course to Malta laid out for him by Admiral Cunningham.

Luftwaffe reconnaissance located the Roma, but the Germans drew the wrong conclusion. Admiral M. Bohlken, the Wehrmacht commander at La Spezia, was by then aware of Badoglio’s agreement with the Allies, and notified Berlin at once: “The Italian Fleet has departed during the night to surrender itself to the enemy.”¹⁶ Orders arrived at the Luftwaffe’s 3rd Squadron in Marseilles, and fifteen Dornier-217 medium-bombers took off to intercept the apparently turncoat ships. As they steamed twenty-three kilometers southwest of Sardinia’s Cape Testa, one of the German planes released a weapon making its debut in the Mediterranean Theater. The one-meter-long FX-1400 was remotely controlled and featured a small assist rocket motor. Also known as the ‘Fritz X’, it was specifically designed to carry an anti-shipping warhead.

The first guided bomb fell on the Roma’s stern, where its lengthy control wires got caught in the rudder but failed to detonate the missile’s warhead. Another Fritz struck the bow, piercing it clear through before exploding in the sea on the opposite side. Five minutes later, however, the magazines took a direct hit, causing a serious fire. For the next twenty minutes, the crew fought desperately to contain it, until a terrific explosion erupted in a column of flame and smoke, as the 1,500-ton number-two turret was blown overboard. The battleship listed heavily to starboard before breaking in half and disappearing into the sea.

Lost with her were two admirals, including Bergamini, eighty-six officers, and 1,264 sailors. Allied strategists were shocked by the Roma’s sudden end, as some indication of the price they would have to pay for invading southern France. Abandoning all immediate plans for such an invasion was important collateral the Germans collected from their destruction of the Italian flagship.

Mussolini was kept ignorant of these tragic events. Badoglio wanted him alive as part of the booty he intended paying the Allies for their willingness to put aside the harsh terms of unconditional surrender. The Duce’s royal captors had moved him from one secret location to another, as much to save him from falling into Allied clutches, as to foil any attempt by his followers to free him. He passed his 60th birthday alone on Ponza, a tiny island where Roman Caesars two millennia before him exiled troublesome relatives.

When throughout the 1920s and ’30s, congratulations had showered him from around the globe, now “nobody gave me a thought on July 29th, with one exception.” He was handed a telegram that read in part, “The feelings I express to you today of complete solidarity and brotherly friendship are all the more cordial. Your work as a statesman will live in the history of our two nations, destined as they are to march towards a common fate. I should like to tell you that our thoughts are constantly with you … I once more sign myself with invincible faith. Yours, Goering.”¹⁷

The Reichsmarshal was not the only German leader closely following events in Italy. Since the Duce’s arrest on 25 July, Adolf Hitler ordered his intelligence agents in Italy to determine Mussolini’s precise whereabouts, and entrusted the commando expert, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, with abducting him, no matter how extreme the circumstances of his confinement. They were difficult, indeed. In early September, the Duce was transferred to the Albert Rifugio hotel on Gran Sasso, high in the remote Abruzzi Mountains. The steep, lofty terrain prevented any kind of frontal assault, and rendered a parachute drop impractical. The base of the mountain was guarded by stationed troops who could be quickly reinforced if necessary by a direct rail line.

Intercepted radio messages alerted the Germans to the probability of Mussolini’s location atop the Gran Sasso, a suspicion confirmed by aerial reconnaissance, and photographs clearly revealed the unique challenges of the operation. Skorzeny’s solution was to use the world’s first mass-produced heliocopter. With its twin, twelve-meter-wide rotors, the 12.25-meter-long Focke Achgelis Fa 223 could carry eight soldiers over 700 kilometers up to 2,400 meters, landing vertically directly in front of Mussolini’s hotel door if necessary. A single Drache, or ‘Dragon’, was all the Wehrmacht could spare from the Eastern Front, where the innovative aircraft were busily engaged in med-evac operations. Even so, Skorzeny was willing to attempt his assignment with just seven other commandos. Fortunately for him, perhaps, the helicopter broke down en route, and he was forced to consider an alternate strategy.

Luftwaffe General Kurt Student believed a glider assault could carry it off. A similar operation he engineered on 10 May 1940 had overpowered Holland’s Eben-Emael, a great fortress deemed ‘impregnable’ by military experts. Now, he designed an equally daring mission that would likewise depend upon the element of surprise to succeed. Hitler gave the order, and a squad of DFS 230 assault gliders towed by Junkers-52 transport planes in the company of several Fieseler Storch, or ‘Storks’, rose from the Practica di Mare airfield shortly after noon on 12 September. The Fieseler Fi.156 was a remarkable STOL (‘short take-off and landing’) aircraft, able to get airborne after only sixty meters or less, and land in a third of that distance. Otto Skorzeny and ninety paratroopers huddled aboard the little armada of soldiers and Storks headed toward the Abruzzi Mountains.

They flew at a collective airspeed of just 180 km/hr, as set by the gliders. But as the planes swooped down toward the summit of Gran Sasso, their pilots were horrified to see that what they had been led to believe was a meadow by reconnaissance photographs was actually a short piece of very steep ground terminating suddenly in a sheer drop hundreds of metres to the valley floor. A Stork piloted by Walter Gerlach touched down within twenty metres of the precipice. With great skill, every glider landed atop the Gran Sasso, although one crashed, injuring every man on board. Skorzeny’s glider came to rest only a few meters from the main entrance of the hotel Albert Rifugio. He kicked down its front door, then machine-gunned a radio transmitter and its operator, the operation’s lone fatality. Having observed the landing from his second story room, Mussolini ran downstairs into the lobby, where he was confronted by the tall SS-Sturmbannführer:“Duce, I have come to rescue you!”¹⁸

As they ran outside to a waiting Fieseler Storch, the same men who had until just minutes earlier been his captors stood to bid him farewell with the Fascist salute. Personally entrusted by Hitler with Mussolini’s safety, Skorzeny insisted on joining him, even though his extra presence aboard the ordinarily three-seat Fi.156 made it dangerously overloaded. In addition to the Duce, it was already crowded with a pilot and navigator. Gerlach pushed the 240-hp, 8-cylinder engine to maximum rpms, as paratroopers shoved the light airplane forward to assist its lift. There was a long, breathless moment, as the Storch literally fell over the drop-off and plummeted in a steep dive, until Gerlach finally regained control. He flew it back to the Practica di Mare airdrome, where the Duce was bundled into a waiting Junkers trimotor. A few hours later, Mussolini landed at the Führer’s headquarters in Rastenburg. Hitler was on hand to greet him personally, as the older man stepped from the plane–unshaven, haggard from his ordeal, but smiling wearily.

Word of his dramatic escape dominated war news around the world, and even enemy commentators could scarcely conceal their admiration for the daring German commandos who successfully executed it. The rescue amounted to a propaganda coup that got Mussolini’s new political life off to a strong start, and his reputation as one of the grand, extraordinary characters of history in the Italian style of Benvenuto Cellini gained renewed popularity.

After a few days rest in Germany, the Duce flew back to his resort at La Rocca delle Caminate, in northern Italy, near Salo, a small village on the shores of Lake Garda, soon to become the headquarters of his new national capital. Six days later, a powerful transmission from Radio Munich was broadcast across Italy and around the world. Of the innumerable public speeches Mussolini delivered during the previous twenty-five years, none was so widely heard, nor elicited such strong, contrary emotions. “Blackshirts, men and women of Italy,” he began. “After a long silence, my voice calls out to you, and I am sure you recognize it. It is the voice that has been with you in difficult times, and in the triumphant days of our patriotism.”¹⁹

Following a description of his underhanded arrest by the King, peripatetic detention, and liberating abduction, Mussolini spoke knowingly of harsh conditions imposed by the Allies, thanks to German intelligence reports. He was therefore able to knowingly contrast events between 1940 and 1943 in words closely paralleling his memoirs the following year: “When one compares the Italy of 1940 with what it is today, now that it has been reduced to an unconditional surrender such as no nation worthy of the name would have ever greeted with outbursts of rejoicing like those after September 8th, it must be admitted that the comparison is heart-rending. Then, Italy was an empire. Today, she is not even a state. Her flag flew from Tripoli to Mogadishu, from Bastia to Rhodes and Tirana. Today, it has been hauled down everywhere. Enemy flags are flying over our home territory. Italians used to be in Addis Ababa. Today, Africans bivouac in Rome.”

“The unconditional surrender of September 1943 was the greatest material and moral catastrophe in the 3,000 years of our history. From that fatal month onwards, the sufferings of the Italian people have been indescribable and surpass anything human to enter the realms of imagination. Never did nation climb a more dolorous Mount Calvary! Many millions of Italians today and tomorrow will have to experience in their own bodies and souls what defeat and dishonor mean, what it means to be completely disarmed. The bitter cup will have to be drained to the dregs. Only by reaching the depths can one rise once more to the stars. Only the fury at suffering too great humiliation will give Italians strength for victory.”

He added somewhat cryptically, “There is a Mussolini who embodies the Mussolini of yesterday, even as the one of yesterday embodied the one of today, and this Mussolini, though no longer living at the Palazzo Venezia, but at the Villa delle Orsoline, has put his shoulder to the wheel with his usual determination.”²⁰