Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [158]
Instead, everything went as planned. The king demanded Mussolini’s resignation and told him he had already replaced him with Badoglio. They parted amicably, and the ex-dictator walked out of the palace and into the arms of the carabinieri, who put him in a police van. They took him through the streets of Rome, past squares where bands were playing their customary Sunday afternoon concerts, and by suppertime the bloodless coup was over.
The first of the Italians’ two problems was now resolved. The other one, negotiating the change of sides, was trickier. Mussolini’s successor Badoglio, on assuming office, immediately announced that Italy would remain in the war and would continue faithful to her alliances. He then equally immediately opened negotiations with the Allies, working through neutral territory in Portugal. The problems were immense; not only were there Italian troops over in the Balkans and out in Russia, hostages to good behavior, there were also German troops in Italy. The contacts with the Allied representatives had to be made in great secrecy, for the new Italian government was profoundly and rightly afraid of the German reaction should they discover what was happening.
Actually, in July and August, according with Hitler’s earlier decision, the Germans did not plan to fight in Italy. If the country tried to defect they would garrison it and take it over. If it were invaded by the Allies, they planned to fall back northward. They were conscious of Allied air superiority and even more of Allied amphibious capability, and they believed Italy could not be held. The German contingency plan for an invasion of Italy was therefore that Kesselring should withdraw his forces from southern Italy, carrying out demolition work as they went, and that the Germans would hang on in the north, around Florence.
Meanwhile, the Allies, who originally never intended to invade Italy at all, had changed their minds. As far back as May, at the Trident Conference in Washington that was their next meeting after Casablanca, Churchill had pressed for an invasion of southern Italy as a follow-up to the Sicilian operations. He thought possession of the southern part of the peninsula would allow the Allies to threaten a landing in the Balkans; further, there were large airfields in the plain around Foggia, and Allied bombers based there could reach the Rumanian oil fields. Churchill thought the still-forthcoming invasion of Sicily would bring Mussolini down, that the Italian war effort would collapse, and that the Germans would probably not fight in southern Italy; the Allies might even get Rome for nothing, and that would be a major victory, the first Axis capital to fall.
The Americans were thoroughly upset at this. Every time they thought they had Churchill and the British pinned down to a hard date for the invasion of France, he seemed to run off in pursuit of some new will-o’-the-wisp. Yet once again they gave in; in return for an absolute promise that France would be invaded no later than May 1, 1944, they agreed that the Sicilian operation ought to be exploited, and that the Allies would go on to invade and occupy southern Italy. They planned a cautious assault across the Straits of Messina and a march up the Italian toe of Calabria. Later on, in July, when the Sicilian defense was collapsing, they became a bit bolder and planned a second landing farther up the peninsula.
Neither the German nor the Allied intentions were known to the Italians. Their efforts were concentrated on getting the Allies to protect them from the Germans as much as possible. The Italians wanted the British and Americans to land fifteen divisions in the north of Italy, around Leghorn or