Advisory Council for Italy
이탈리아 자문위원회
The Allied consultative body set up by the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in October 1943 for matters relating to Italy. It began with representatives of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and the French Committee of National Liberation, with provision for adding Greece and Yugoslavia. It dealt with day-to-day questions other than military operations and made recommendations to coordinate Allied policy towards Italy. It is distinct from the Allied Control Commission that enforced the armistice terms.
In depth
The communiqué of the Moscow Conference announced that the three governments had agreed "to establish an Advisory Council for matters relating to Italy, to be composed in the first instance of representatives of their three governments and of the French Committee of National Liberation", with provision for adding representatives of Greece and Yugoslavia "in view of their special interests arising out of the aggressions of Fascist Italy upon their territory during the present war". The council would "deal with day-to-day questions, other than military operations, and will make recommendations designed to coordinate Allied policy with regard to Italy".
The council sat at Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers. The Soviet representative, Andrei Vyshinsky, arrived there from Moscow on 24 November 1943 with a party of some thirty-one people. After an informal preliminary meeting at the home of the American representative Robert Murphy on 29 November, the first formal meeting on 30 November chose the French representative René Massigli to preside, with the chair rotating thereafter. The British representative was Harold Macmillan.
At the fourth meeting on 24 December Macmillan proposed that the moment had come to invite Greece and Yugoslavia to send representatives, and Massigli and Vyshinsky agreed. When Macmillan argued that the council could extend the invitation without the specific authorisation of the member governments, however, Vyshinsky objected that such had not been the intention of the Moscow Conference.
The sixth meeting, on 24 January 1944, recommended that the Allied Commander-in-Chief accept the participation of the Soviet representative on the Allied Control Commission, and that he press the Combined Chiefs of Staff for an early solution of the question of French participation. The Advisory Council was not the Control Commission itself, but it gave the Soviet Union and France a voice in the Allied administration of Italy that the Western Allies ran.