The Italian Campaign and the Fall of Mussolini

Before Tunis fell, the war was already coming apart

When Axis forces surrendered at Tunis and Bizerte on 13 May 1943, Italy's crisis was not merely a military crisis awaiting the next invasion. Since 1922, Benito Mussolini's Fascist state had suppressed opposition and independent trade unions, making military prestige and imperial expansion pillars of its legitimacy. Yet the wars of that empire exceeded Italy's productive and transport capacity. After entering the war in 1940, Italy suffered repeated defeats in Greece, North Africa, East Africa, and the Soviet front, and increasingly depended on German support to sustain operations. The capture of about 250,000 Axis troops in North Africa in May 1943 showed more than a loss of manpower. It exposed that Italy could no longer decide or end the war on its own terms.

The costs of war also eroded the regime away from the front. Allied bombing struck ports and industrial cities, while shortages of fuel and food produced rationing, black markets, and falling real wages. The strike that began at the Fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin in March 1943 signaled that organized collective action was still possible under Fascist rule. The strikers did not all begin with a single revolutionary plan. Demands to stop the war and improve living conditions joined with anti-Fascism, turning working-class discontent into a political expression of national crisis. At the same time, socialists, communists, and liberals who had been exiled, imprisoned, or driven abroad in the 1920s remained divided, but began discussing the order that might follow the regime.

Three forces imagined different exits from the crisis. Mussolini and his loyalists believed that preserving the alliance with Germany was necessary if Italy was to remain a great power and prevent social revolution. King Victor Emmanuel III, military leaders, and conservative elites concluded that they had to distance themselves from Mussolini in order to preserve the monarchy and the state apparatus. Anti-Fascists connected ending the war with ending dictatorship, but liberals, socialists, and communists had not agreed on who would lead the new state. The Allies, too, were not simply planning immediate liberation. American and British leaders intended pressure through Sicily and the mainland to remove Italy from the Axis, tie German forces down in the south, and secure Mediterranean routes and bases. The surrender in May was therefore not the moment Italian society ended the war. It was the point at which forces with different aims began using the same collapse in their own ways.