End of the Monarchy in Italy
The Night of the 24th
The precise progression of events on July 24th is still up for debate. While there are many surviving witnesses to the Grand Council of Fascism, there are few reliable testimonies. Unlike other meetings of the council, Mussolini’s bodyguards had been dismissed. There was no stenographer, and no notes have been found from the meeting, other than the final product. Thus, the the only witnesses were members of the council, who all had a strong incentive to inflate or distort their role in the abortive coup. Both Tullio Cianetti (Undersecretary of Corporations) and Giacomo Acerbo (Minister of Finance) have claimed to have revealed the alleged assassination [1], but for different reasons. In Cianetti’s testimony, the discovery was incidental. When being seated, he brushed up against Dino Grandi, and felt a bump.[A] It would take a few minutes for him to realize what the hard lump was, and turned to confront Grandi. In Acerbo’s testimony, he was vaguely aware of Grandi’s machinations. When Grandi did not attempt to interrupt the beginnings of Mussolini’s speech, he whispered his belief to Carlo Scorza, in the hopes that a disturbance would prod Grandi into going through with the attack. [2] In either case, both witnesses testified that Scorza rose from his seat to approach Grandi, who also rose, reaching into his coat. A Blackshirt leader prior to his rise to the council, Scorza was able to tackle the would-be assassin, while the rest of the council looked on in confusion. After this point we have a larger pool of witnesses, as at 17:14 Mussolini ordered the doors opened, allowing several waiting Blackshirts to enter and detain Grandi. Scorza presented what he had discovered, a pair of hand grenades.
With the arrest of Grandi, any anti-Mussolini sentiments were forced to demure. While Grandi had brought an order of the day (OdG) to be presented (which may have served as a vote of no confidence [3]), no other member of the council would rise to challenge the council. While Emilio De Bono proposed that the council be adjourned due to security risks, Scorza, the hero of the night, pushed back, asking Mussolini to allow him to present his own OdG. Scorza’s OdG asked for all power to be concentrated in the Fascist party, and to pursue a united war effort with Germany. While the party had been largely discredited by this time, opposition to the proposal was guarded, due to the presence of blackshirts now stationed in the council. Following Scorza’s presentation and the muted discussion, Roberto Farinacci asked to present his own OdG. While there are similarities between the Farinacci and Grandi proposals, Farinacci’s OdG ultimately concurred with Scorza’s on the direction of the war effort. [4] The Italian military must be brought under German control, and subversives in the state and military must be purged. The president of the Senate, Giacomo Suardo, requested that the two proposals be reconciled. Mussolini approved the motion, noting that “Our enemy has resolved our dilemma. We must make war for the survival of the nation.” Despite further requests to adjourn by De Bono and Giuseppe Bottai, the meeting was complete by midnight. The next steps were clear. To protect the safety of the government and the King, the government would immediately be moved to the north, and the German army would be asked to enter the country. In Rome, the plotters of the coup would need to purged, along with the majority of the military staff. All copies of Grandi’s traitorous OdG were to be destroyed, and anyone who had a copy of the document was suspect.
The purges began immediately in the first few hours of July 25th. From Grandi’s recovered correspondence (and likely torture) Marshal Badoligo, General Ambrosio, General Catellano, and General Carboni were subsequently arrested, as well as other putschist officers in Rome. [C] De Bono, Bottai and Galaezzo Ciano were also arrested later that morning, although Ciano would be released on Mussolini’s orders. While elements of the Italian gendarme (the Carabinieri) resisted the anti-coup actions, without clear orders the Blackshirts were able to isolate and overwhelm the rebel units. With the coup crushed, there was only one last issue that needed to be accounted for in order to evacuate the government.
The Death of the King
The question mark that haunts the legacy of Victor Emmanuel is whether or not he was an instigator of the failed coup. Did the King attempt to overthrow his government at the last minute, or did he stand firm with Mussolini, like he had since the March on Rome? Grandi had requested Mussolini’s removal on several occasions prior to the attempted assassination. Despite Italy’s deteriorating conditions, he had not granted any such requests. Correspondence found between Badoligo the King suggested that Victor Emmanuel was aware of the plot, but nothing suggests that the King’s approval had been final. In this context, Grandi’s attempted assassination, may have served as a catalyst. If he had been successful in killing Mussolini, then the King would have no reason to continue supporting the Fascist government. With Mussolini alive, and the plot foiled, the King did not attempt to resist when Mussolini, Scorza and their bodyguards arrived to escort the King to the new seat of government in Verona. Despite this and his effective house arrest in the Palazzo Villabruna in Feltre, Victor Emmanuel still attempted to correspond with the Allied leadership. This was made possible with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agents that had begun to infiltrate the town, preparing for Operation Igloo. Unfortunately for the historical record, the actual communiques between the King and Allied agents remains classified to this day, along with the rest of the OSS Italian archive. With those documents undisclosed, and the King being isolated from any other confidants by the German occupying force, it is unknown to what degree the King consented to the operation. We do not know if the King still preferred to remain with the Fascist government in Verona, in order to attempt to convince Mussolini to seek an armistice, or whether he was eager to join the Allied rescue plot. With Umberto serving as a commander performing anti-partisan operations in Milan, the rest of his family in captivity in Aosta Valley, the King may not have wanted to put their lives in danger. [D] In addition, defecting from the Italian Kingdom would surely mean the end of the Fascism, and there was no guarantee that his throne would be restored after the war. Despite any possible objections, Operation Igloo was initiated.
From the Sampson Report submitted to the U.S. State Department in February 1944 (which was finally declassified in 1983), we do know the broad outline of the plan. [5] The OSS would launch a commando operation, bringing in three gliders. With the help of agents that had already infiltrated the town, they would neutralize the S.S. guards and extract the King, bringing him to a boat in the Adriatic. The vessel would then rendezvous with a seaplane, finally bringing the King into Allied-occupied southern Italy. [E] Simultaneously, the other members of the royal family would be escorted into neutral Switzerland, from where they could then be flown out of danger. The operation was approved for January 5th, 1944.
While the Crown Prince Umberto was able to leave the country, the other two operations did not fare as well. In the Aosta Valley, the OSS agents were apprehended, and Jose Maria and her children remained in captivity. In Feltre, the operation began smoothly. The Palazzo Villabruna was not heavily guarded, and the team left Feltre without causing a commotion. However, the King’s disappearance was soon noticed, and a manhunt for the commandos and the King was mobilized. Due to the final section of the report being redacted, we know the conclusion of the mission through the report’s summary and several second-hand Italian witnesses. [6] The King and his escorts car was discovered, and a firefight ensued. During the exchange, the King was shot, and his body was recaptured by Axis forces. Several OSS agents were also killed during the gunfight, but the majority of the team was able to escape and disperse into the Veneto countryside. Not a single agent escaped by boat.
According to the Sampson Report, the OSS confirmed that the King had been killed by January 18th. This was contrary to Fascist propaganda, which had announced on the 6th that the King had been wounded by Allied assassins, but was in recovery. The Crown Prince, who had successfully escaped to Allied custody, refused to take any action while the state of the King was in question. After the death was confirmed, Umberto announced his accession to the throne and defection to the Allied cause, asking all Italians to oppose the Fascist regime that had executed his father. The Verona regime modified their story in response, stating that the King had died from his wounds, and denounced Umberto as a traitor to the kingdom. The regime would declare Umberto’s son Vittorio Emanuele King of Italy, crowning the seven-year old captive as Victor Emmanuel IV in February. Mussolini would take the title of regent. [7]
While the Allies had failed to rescue the King, Operation Igloo did achieve its objective of disrupting the Italian war effort. The soldiers of the Italian army had made their oaths to King of Italy, not Mussolini or the Fascist party. With the King dead, supposedly at the hands of the Fascists, the rate of defection and desertion in the Italian army skyrocketed. While the German army had been able to integrate Italian units into its command structure following the July purge and the hand-off of high command to Albert Kesselring, the regicide disrupted these efforts. Italian forces fighting on the front-line would defect
en masse to the Allies, and those stationed in the interior would desert. In the former case, the defectors were quickly recruited into the royalist Italian Co-Belligerent Army, and in the latter case, the deserters often joined the partisans loyal to the National Liberation Committee. While in the immediate term both movements served to undermine the Fascist regime, they also had the long-term effect of polarizing Italian society.
Martyr King or Traitor King?
Even after the end of the Kingdom of Italy, and the subsequent division of the Italian Republic, the cultural effects of Operation Igloo, or the Regicide, are felt today. Some continentalists [F], including anti-American Italian nationalists and some Italian socialists, still buy the Fascist conspiracy theory that the King was assassinated by the OSS. In this view, the King’s murder was a cheap political move by the American invaders, sacrificing the symbol of the Italian nation in order to smear the regime. Another variation is that while the OSS had attempted to extract the King, either they found him non-cooperative and decided to execute him instead, or executed the King when he was about to be recaptured. After the exhumation of King Victor Emmanuael’s body in 1946, this myth should have been put to rest. The autopsy report confirmed that the bullet that struck the King was a German round and that the King was shot at a distance, as opposed to point-blank. Of course, this evidence merely leads such theorists to claim that the OSS used a Germany weapon in order to frame the regime, and that the King was fleeing when the trigger was pulled. Unfortunately, due to the time between the King’s death in 1944 and the autopsy, it was impossible to gather the precise time and date of his death, but even that would be unlikely to satisfy these fringe elements.
The more mainstream narrative in the People’s Republic of Italy is the that King was apathetic to the operation. Victor Emmanuel would only support the Allies on the condition that his throne was to be preserved. His every action from the March on Rome to his last days was to prop up the House of Savoy and the Italian monarchy, regardless of the harm done to the Italian people. In this view, the Regicide was a fitting end, an undignified death for a monarch who permitted countless indignities to be inflicted upon the Italian citizenry. This cynical narrative can be contrasted with the romanticized stories told in Southern Italy and Sicily. In these narratives, the King had engineered the failed coup, and was working tirelessly to destroy the Fascist regime from the inside up until his death. Some dramatizations go so far as to painting the Regicide as an act of personal sacrifice, protecting either one of the Allied agents [8] or an Italian bystander [9]. While both of these narratives are more grounded than the original conspiracy theory, elements of myth have still crept in. For the northern narrative, there is the myth of the cowardly king, who attempted to betray his rescuers when accosted by regime soldiers, only to be misidentified and shot. For the southern story, there is the myth of the evil partisan, who hated the monarchy so much as to rat on the fleeing king, leading to the confrontation and regicide. [10] These stories hold little water, but they do serve to help illustrate the divisions in Italian society that ultimately led to the Italian Civil War. The regicide stories give us a set of caricatures at odds with each other. One side, we have crypto-fascist sniveling royalty, and on the other sadistic revolutionaries. These caricatures were the images that the Italian public went to vote on the fate of the monarchy in the July of 1946. The north, which had sustained brutal repression by the Fascist kingdom during the war, including by Umberto himself, voted overwhelmingly in favor of ending the institution. The south, which had been swiftly occupied by the Allies and who saw Umberto as a war hero, voted to retain the crown. Despite the polarization, the more populous north defeated the south in this contest. [11] This was just another episode in the struggle for the center of political gravity between the north and the south, a struggle that would only reach its conclusion with the end of a united Italy.
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In Context Footnotes
- Prior the July 24th Council, Dino Grandi had his will revised. This is commonly seen as evidence that Grandi did not expect to leave the Council alive.
- In the context of Giacomo Acerbo’s political career in Southern Italy following the Italian Civil War and his pardon, his testimony is highly suspect.
- Based on similarities between the finalized OdG and Grandi’s OdG, it is unclear what impact that the approval of the OdG would have had. For a speculative dramatization of this outcome, see A. Bolzoni’s In the Den of Vipers (1968).
- Roberto Farinacci would later sideline Mussolini and Scorza as de facto leader of the Fascist regime from late 1943 until the end of the war.
- While a summary of the mission was declassified in 1949, the complete report was not released until later. Other missions under McGregor project heading remain classified.
- While independent journalists and historians were not able to verify these testimonies, the report of the Regicide Commission of the People’s Republic of Italy does corroborate the Sampson Report.
- See note 4.
- See T. Craft’s By the Dead of Night (2006).
- See G. Petroni’s Father of the Nation (1981).
- The origin of this myth may be an excerpt of the Regicide Commission report (see note 6). The report does detail several (second-hand) testimonies, including a witness who reported the OSS team to the police. There is no evidence that this witness was affiliated with any partisan group.
- This is a simplification, as sizable minorities in both the north and south voted against the grain.
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Out of Context Footnotes
A.) I don’t have a floor plan of the Parrot Room of the Palazzo Venezia, so I don’t know how the attendees were arranged. See note B.
B.) Grandi did state he brought these weapons into the Grand Council. I wasn’t able to get a copy of the source, so I don’t know if this was merely in self-defense, or if an assassination was on the table if his OdG failed. However, without the testimony of Grandi and other anti-Mussolini gerachi, it's likely we would have a much fuzzier picture of what happened that night. (
Wikipedia)
C.) I am not sure if all 4 of the mentioned Generals were present in Rome at that time.
D.) Umberto was a commander in the Italian Army. While he was anti-Mussolini, he was also anti-Communist. In absence of an armistice or the King’s defection, I believe that he would continue to serve the state.
E.) This is based on Skorzeny’s famous Gran Sasso raid, as well as Project McGregor, an operation by the OSS to extracted other Italian VIPs.
F.) Continentalism is an international relations ideology/foreign policy opposed to Atlanticism. More details will come.
