Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [155]
As the war receded into the distance, argument came to center less on the value of the bomber as a weapons system, and more on the morality of it. That particular question could be indulged only after the passions of the war had cooled. Total war followed a logical course from the killing of soldiers to the killing of those who provided weapons for the soldier, to the lessening of the efficiency of the enemy’s war machine—if necessary, by the incidental killing of his women and children. Many years ago Carl von Clausewitz had written, “War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit….” The first stumbling bombing of World War I led on to the more efficient bombing of World War II; Coventry and Rotterdam led inexorably to Hamburg and Dresden. From the point of view of the directing intelligence, morality did not apply.
PART IV: TOWARD THE ELUSIVE VICTORY
23. The Collapse and Invasion of Italy
IN THE SUMMER OF 1943 two muddied currents merged in the Mediterranean. The first was the Allied strategic problem of where to go and what to do now that the North African campaign was ending. The second was the Italian political problem of how to get out of an increasingly pointless war.
The Allies at Casablanca had decided on the taking of the island of Sicily, as a means of utilizing their strength in the theater, and of easing their shipping problems. In spite of the American desire for an invasion of the Continent, they accepted the British contention that Sicily was a valuable objective; they were also susceptible to the point that it was better to use troops in the Mediterranean to some advantage, than to withdraw them and have them cooling their heels in Britain through late 1943 and into 1944, waiting for the invasion. In this they were conscious of the immense battles being fought in Russia, and they believed rightly that the Russians would resent the downgrading of the one area where there actually was contact between Western Allied and Axis ground forces. For a variety of reasons then, most of which made good sense at the time, the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed on Sicily as the next campaign. They did not, as they began staff planning for the invasion, consider going on to invade the Italian mainland.
Yet Italy was ripe for invasion and for collapse, because the Italians and their Fascist regime were reeling on the ropes. The war had turned increasingly sour for them and they had long since lost any real interest in it. Mussolini was bankrupt politically, with little support among his own administration, and regarded everywhere as a mere puppet whose strings were pulled by Hitler. Mussolini himself recognized this, much as he hated it, and fought against it whenever he could, which was not often. More and more the Germans took over direction of the Italian war effort. Il Duce was bullied into sending Italian troops off to fight the Communist menace in Russia; Italians were used extensively on anti-guerrilla operations in the Balkans. Everywhere they were regarded and treated as second-class citizens of the Axis alliance, and they responded by being overtly unhappy and performing poorly. They were in exactly the situation of the troops of the Kingdom of Italy in the Napoleonic Empire, and though many units and individuals fought bravely, as a people their hearts were not in Hitler’s war—if they ever had been.
Hitler’s response to Italian dissatisfaction and grumbling was to send more German troops south. When Mussolini wrote of the threat of Allied invasion and asked for the return of his troops fighting in Russia, Hitler sent Germans instead. There were not too many of them, but they formed part of the mobile garrison of Sicily, and they were scattered