The historiography of the Allied occupation: five central themes

Approaching the Italian experience between 1943 and 1946 through the lens of military occupation has become less contentious today than it used to be during the second half of the twentieth century. For a long time, the confusion that existed around the extent to which Italy had been liberated or occupied (or both) reflected differences in regional and temporal experiences across the peninsula. Most notably, whereas in the spring of 1945 the Allies pushed through the North in a matter of weeks, the South was, in fact, occupied by Allied troops for over two years (Ellwood Reference Ellwood and Sambuco2018, 125). Five key insights have emerged from recent historical research that seeks to understand this unique Italian experience, and place it within the broader history of mid-twentieth-century Europe.

1. Time and place. In Italy, the fact that the Allied military campaign lasted far longer than originally planned brought to the surface all the ambiguities of Anglo-American policy. This included, first of all, the effects of the two armistices signed by the governments headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio after the fall of Fascism. The ‘short’, military version of 3 September 1943 put an end to all Italian military activity, gave the Supreme Allied Commander – General Dwight D. Eisenhower – total control of Italian space and its resources, provided for the installation of Allied Military Government in all liberated territory, and gave the Allies powers to ensure total disarmament, demobilisation and demilitarisation. Then there was the ‘long’, political and economic armistice, made up of 44 clauses and signed on 29 September 1943. This allowed the Allies to ‘exercise all the rights of an occupying power’, as Article 20 declared. Local law, government and finances would be at the Allies’ disposal, Fascism would be eliminated, and measures would be introduced to ensure that Italy paid the costs of its occupation. An Allied Control Commission would be installed to ensure respect for the provisions of the armistices, and supervise the work of future Italian governments (Ellwood Reference Ellwood1985, 39–40).

A rift soon opened up between the Allies. The Americans later stated that the two armistices ‘imposed the harshest kind of peace on Italy’, and that they had only signed after considerable British insistence. The British, they argued, thought of Italy ‘as a defeated nation which surrendered unconditionally’, whereas ‘[w]e … had taken Italy’s cobelligerency status seriously’, allowing the country ‘to regain her self-respect and … independence’ (Ellwood Reference Ellwood1985, 31, 40). Yet, it was the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who, within days of the military surrender, had started planning for ‘the conversion of Italy into an active agent against Germany’. With American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he encouraged Badoglio to step up Italy’s efforts, which culminated in the Italian declaration of war against Germany and the Allied declaration of Italian ‘co-belligerency’ on 13 October 1943 (Ellwood Reference Ellwood1985, 41).

Allied rule in Italy was strongly shaped by the consequences of the notion of ‘co-belligerency’, which was the key political-legal device used to balance the requirements of what was left of the Italian state with the military and political needs of the Allies. A product of the second armistice, the concept of ‘co-belligerency’ effectively abolished the distinction between enemy and ally, and between liberation and occupation, suspending Italian national sovereignty. It gave the Allies, in practice, a free hand to treat the Italians and their resources as they wished.

The official history by Charles Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 1943–1945, remains indispensable for its discussion of the impact of co-belligerency on occupation policy and for its recognition that ‘the exact significance of this word – parola bruttissima [sic] in Italian opinion – is not very clear. … Italy’s co-belligerency created a highly anomalous situation juridically, and one which to some extent defies legal analysis and classification’ (Harris Reference Harris1957, 130). The leading Allied authorities on the spot recognised that it was unsatisfactory, and tried to apply the concept as flexibly as possible (Macmillan Reference Macmillan1984, 253–254). While the Foreign Office argued that co-belligerency ‘means treating the Italians as friends and foes at the same time’, Harris wrote: ‘The implications of co-belligerency appear to have been most imperfectly realised, and detailed control of every branch of Italian administration was insisted on’ (Ellwood Reference Ellwood1985, 2, 53–55).

On the ground, some of the sentiments provoked by its paradoxes were memorably described in La Pelle (1949), the semi-fictional autobiographical novel set in Allied-occupied Naples by Curzio Malaparte, discussed here by Ruth Glynn. Malaparte argued that the Neapolitans, shaped by centuries of foreign invasions, were never likely to feel defeated simply because a new occupier had arrived. As for the Allied armies, they could not claim to be liberators while simultaneously seeking to impose a sense of defeat. Either Neapolitans were free or they were occupied. In truth, claimed Malaparte (Reference Malaparte1949, 4), they felt neither. Since then, and down to the present, Naples and the Neapolitans have acquired the distinction of being the place, the people, and the culture which have most vividly and convincingly represented all the costs and benefits, as well as all the contradictions, of what happened after the arrival of the Allies. This was the basic reality behind all the wartime and postwar novels, films and memoirs set in the occupied city.

It is therefore unsurprising that all the key historiographical contributions on the Allied liberation/occupation story have centered on Naples. They include Guerra totale (2005), the seminal work by Gabriella Gribaudi – the first to suggest that Allied bombs may have killed as many people as the Nazis – and, above all, Maria Porzio’s Arrivano gli Alleati! (Reference Porzio2011), based on an unprecedented use of local documentation. Fabio Simonetti’s Encounters in Wartime Italy (Reference Simonetti2025) also heavily focuses on Naples as a major site of multicultural encounters between Allied soldiers and Italian civilians during the invasion, liberation and occupation of the country.

2. The impact of total war. The Italian Campaign was long, bloody and destructive. Geography aided the Nazis and their defensive strategy from start to finish. What was supposed to be the Allies’ final push over the Apennines, in the late summer of 1944, was blocked by the Germans, the terrain, and the weather (Holland Reference Holland2008, 377–425). Meanwhile, Allied air forces bombed Italian cities throughout the peninsula from the beginning to the end of the war, armistices and co-belligerency notwithstanding. Matthew Evangelista has recently described this as ‘bombing among friends’ (Evangelista Reference Evangelista2023).

The Allied bombing campaign had significant social and political consequences and shaped the character of the Allied occupation. Soon after the end of the conflict, an American political scientist, William Reitzel (Reference Reitzel1948, 14, 17), described the consequences of the Allied way of war in a book which remains essential:

What, then, would be the role of the residual Italian government in all this? International law, as encapsulated in the Hague Regulations of 1899/1907, required occupying armies to respect and preserve existing laws and governmental institutions. This pre-condition obviously created tension with politics at all levels, with local administrations usually in total disarray after the fall of Fascism and the arrival of what Churchill called the ‘hot rake of war’. Owing to the specific nature of ‘total war’, the basics of law and order were upset in most places, as Isobel Williams has documented extensively in her study on the Allies in Southern Italy (Reference Williams2013, 33–35). The fighting also broke down every existing economic relationship on the ground, especially that between town and country. Throughout the war, starvation, unemployment and the emergence of black markets were the consequences, with the distribution of food occupying a central place in the relations between the Allies and the Italian population (Holland Reference Holland2008, 307).

The scale of the military confrontation deeply influenced interactions between Italians and Allied troops. For the first time, Fabio Simonetti’s work offers us the possibility to contrast the well-known American experience of the encounter with liberated peoples with the so-far marginalised perception of the British. A general impression seems to have spread through local societies that while the Americans could be welcomed as liberators, the British were often perceived as occupiers (Simonetti Reference Simonetti2025, 198). Roger Absalom’s research on Perugia liberata is also among the very few works to offer documentation on this topic. The book contains the transcript of a little-known November 1943 report in which British operators explain to newly arrived colleagues in the American intelligence services why the British seemed to show such unlimited contempt for the Italians. Their attitudes were determined by the Italian ‘change of sides’ of 1943, as well as by their experience of fighting Fascist armies in North Africa in 1941–1942, which the Americans had not shared (Absalom Reference Absalom2001, 251–258). In reality, the experience of ordinary British soldiers was highly varied, as Simonetti demonstrates, with a much greater degree of reciprocal openness than the stereotypes suggest.

3. Military-political leadership. The British were in charge in Italy, militarily and politically, from the time the American Supreme Commander Eisenhower left in December 1943 until the end. The Allied Control Commission, however, was run by ‘equal’ proportions of British and American officers. The key policy role was played by the very astute and authoritative figure of the Supreme Allied Commander’s political adviser Harold Macmillan, a future British Prime Minister. He was always very critical of the occupation regime – the lack of basic knowledge about Italy amongst Allied planners and troops, the generally poor preparation for the campaign and the practical tasks that it involved – but only succeeded in modifying it when the American government and press finally began to take a serious interest in Italy, from late 1944 onwards. The 26 September 1944 Hyde Park Declaration by Roosevelt and Churchill provided a large-scale programme of aid and relief, and lightened the controlling element of the Allied bureaucracy on Italian authorities. Macmillan ultimately took charge of the re-named ‘Allied Commission’ (Macmillan Reference Macmillan1984, 55, 367, 394–395; Ellwood Reference Ellwood1985, 66, 113–115).

Yet, the British authorities lacked the power to have a significant impact on the Italian scene, either militarily, politically or economically. This was so despite their leaders taking a serious interest in the Italian situation, with visits, among others, by the King, Churchill and the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee. In the end, they were left to hope that they could get the Americans ‘well embedded’ in the country so that they might take the lead in promoting Italy’s postwar reconstruction. These were the sentiments expressed by the new British Supreme Allied Commander, General Harold Alexander, upon his return to Italy from the Potsdam inter-Allied conference of July 1945. Alexander Kirk, a senior American diplomat in Italy, told Washington how Alexander explained to him that London

But Alexander’s appeal fell on deaf ears.

4. The role of the Americans. The Americans were only one out of 16 armies in Italy, and even their military included soldiers from Brazil, the Philippines and Hawaii. In addition, seven of their eleven divisions in Italy were removed to southern France in June 1944, to reinforce the impact of the Normandy invasion. Yet, they are the only ones to have left a lasting impact on the collective memory throughout Italy (Ellwood Reference Ellwood2012). As Guido Bonsaver has argued, the great reception given to US soldiers as they waded ashore in Sicily was, in many respects, due to the legacy of decades of exposure to Hollywood movies before Mussolini’s ban of 1938, but also to the long-standing connections that existed with the Italian American community (Bonsaver Reference Bonsaver2023).

In the end, it was not the Americans’ military exploits which left the most enduring impressions, or their half-hearted contribution to the Allied military government system (Ellwood Reference Ellwood1985, 128–129). Instead, what struck everyone was their style, their symbolism and what Patrizia Sambuco calls in her article their ‘comfort food’: coffee, doughnuts and chocolate, all of which had the effect of reinforcing soldierly pride and nostalgia for their country. But there was also music, dancing, hygiene, as well as the Americans’ extraordinary sense of optimism, and their purchasing power. Staying in Bologna only six weeks, the Allied army included Poles and Brits, but it was the Americans who had left the memories, as one may read in the testimony – gathered in a 50th anniversary supplement of the ex-Communist Party’s newspaper l’Unità (21 April 1995, Ponzani Reference Ponzani2021, 251–253) – from a young woman who had witnessed the city’s liberation:

In those joyous days one could be Communist, Catholic and pro-American, at least in Bologna.

In cinema, too, the Americans dominated the scene, though usually in ambivalent fashion, as in the Rome episode of Paisà (1946) all the way down to Paola Cortellesi’s C’è ancora domani (2023). Both films highlight the allegedly equivocal behaviour of the US military police. For the most part, the Americans we see in Italian film fiction are not only liberators from Nazi terror and occupation but, above all, folk in transit, barely aware of where they are, largely indifferent to local realities except when they engage with local young women. Luigi Zampa’s 1946 feature, Un americano in vacanza, made with the help of the US military authorities, conveys this idea from the title alone of the occupation being primarily an American experience of travelling and leisure (Ellwood Reference Ellwood and pupils2014).

5. The effect of war and occupation on women. The attention Gabriella Gribaudi (Reference Gribaudi2005, 635) has paid to the experience of women in wartime Naples has deeply influenced Italian historiographical approaches to the issue. As Gribaudi argues:

As in all the liberated territories of Europe, it was women who bore the brunt of the paradoxes and contradictions the Allies brought with them. From the very beginning, every kind of collaboration was on display between the newly-arrived soldiery and local women, as the Neapolitan historian Maria Porzio observes: ‘from the positive sort – dating, engagements, marriages – to the illegal kind, centred on the ever-swelling underground trade in Allied goods’ (Porzio Reference Porzio2011, 66).

The Americans’ opulence and generosity conquered many a heart and, in some way, made up for the recent bombardments and the plague of requisitioning. But within months of their appearance, it was these same Americans who unleashed unprecedented inflation, and came to dominate vast illicit markets in sex, war materials and crime more broadly. Issues triggered by the soldiers’ widespread encounter with women soon led many local men to think that ‘their’ women had been ‘requisitioned’. The armies sent by the US were supposed to be agents of the American version of modernity – as John Hersey suggested in A Bell for Adano (Reference Hersey1944) – but the profoundly ambiguous destiny of this message comes out unmistakably in works such as Porzio’s on wartime Naples. On the one hand, this vision of modernity was totally irrelevant and useless amidst the city’s chaos and misery; on the other, it provoked a desire amongst Italians to flee to America.

Against such a background, the question of sexual and other forms of violence takes on a particularly dramatic profile. A 1947 survey compiled by the Ministero della Difesa shows that of 1,159 reported rapes by Allied soldiers on Italian citizens, 1,035 were allegedly committed by some of the 15,000 North African troops attached to the French military contingent (Porzio Reference Porzio2011, 78). Localised figures are reported by Michela Ponzani: 818 cases in the Lazio region, 89 per cent of which were allegedly committed by North African soldiers (Ponzani Reference Ponzani2021, 265). Whilst there is a consensus that real figures concerning the most widespread instance of mass rape in wartime Italy must have been much higher than those officially recorded, it is important to note how easy it was to condemn non-white soldiers for such crimes by drawing on such statistics, while, at the same time, failing to report on more dispersed rape crimes committed by white Allied troops. Other expressions of violence and contempt perpetrated by Allied soldiers and recorded by local police contributed to ‘spread[ing] a feeling of unease among local people, who were forced suddenly and unexpectedly to acknowledge the sort of occupation they were subjected to’ (Porzio Reference Porzio2011, 92).

Yet the illusions the Americans brought persisted: these included, above all, notions of a standard of living far superior to anything Italy could ever provide. As Cassamagnaghi’s article in this collection demonstrates, that was a vision women sometimes hoped to grasp through marriage with the very men who were bringing so much chaos; men who, in spite of everything, also offered the opportunity of living a different kind of life.

Making sense of the Allied occupation

There seems little doubt that the encounter between war-scarred occupied populations on the one hand, and the multi-national occupying armies of the United Nations on the other offered the spectacle and the experience of a unique clash of cultures. Life in the ‘Italian contact zone of occupation’ was extremely intense, though how intense it was depended on the length and depth of the contact. The emphasis on the rigorously explored memory of individual participation in the liberation/occupation period is a relatively new addition to our understanding of what happened in occupied Italy and how.

Above all, such research demonstrates how profoundly harrowing and controversial the experience was – with devastating bombings and widespread hardships – for everyone except a minority at the very end. Today, it is perhaps worth asking whether the generic sentiment of pacifism, so widely diffused in Italy to this day, may be one of the most enduring legacies of the traumatic war and occupation experience. Film director Roberto Rossellini seemingly expressed a powerful strain of postwar feeling and memory when, in a 1960 radio interview on his Paisà, stated: ‘In the end, there were no victors and no defeated; all that remained was the daily heroism of people clinging on to life. And who survived, in spite of everything, whether on the winning side or that of the losers’ (Aprà Reference Aprà1995, 104).

In his book on the birth of the Italian postwar Constitution, Mark Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2024, 316–317) recalls the immense success of the Stockholm Appeal, an anti-war message produced in 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, with more than a third of the Italian population signing up. As Gilbert argues, ‘Italians had been thoroughly inoculated against war. For Italians, war meant national humiliation and destruction, not heroism, loyalty, patriotism … (and still does). Neutralism in the Cold War struggle … seemed like a better option for many.’

This can be compared with the results of a large-scale research project on today’s popular pacifism in Italy carried out by the social scientist Enzo Risso in 2024. Risso’s survey described at least ten varieties of the phenomenon, ranging from the more social and economic to the moral. But his conclusions appear to coincide with Rossellini’s perception: ‘the majority of Italians look forward in a variety of different ways to a future without arms, wars, winners or losers’ (Risso Reference Risso2024). This finding may be explained by Matthew Evangelista’s argument that ‘the legacy for Italy of the civilian losses and destroyed towns of World War II is persistent anti-war sentiment’ (Evangelista Reference Evangelista2023, 170).

Recent commentaries – including the ceremonials accompanying the 80th anniversary of the war’s end – do indeed make no mention of what might be called the enduring impact of the experience of liberation and occupation. But the repeated invocation in historical writing, fiction and cinema, down to the present, of what the Neapolitan population suffered in those months gives a clue as to how, and for what purposes, that lived experience can be evoked at any time. Metaphor, allegory, memory and historiography have made Naples the supreme, exceptional symbol of the Italian-Allied encounter during war and occupation.

The 80th anniversary of the end of the war was indeed a celebration, a festival dedicated to the reality and myth of Liberation, with a capital L. But even as a new, post-Fascist Italy was painfully constructed after April 1945, its citizens soon realised that they were not as free to reconstruct their society as they might have imagined. Two new superpowers, the USA and the USSR, had emerged that would immediately come to influence the years that followed. The former with indispensable economic aid, Hollywood’s return, and the attraction of the ‘American dream’; the latter with the vision of a comprehensive, anti-capitalist system that enjoyed its own appeal among large swathes of ordinary Italians. Democratic and republican Italy soon chose the pro-American camp, but large numbers were not convinced. One of the many uses of the postwar Liberation narrative was that it could ignore this division: during the ‘liberation’, so the story went, all had worked together for years (for a critical take, Ponzani Reference Ponzani2021, 263, 278).

The Liberation narrative also allowed most to forget the existence and experience of the clumsy, haphazard occupation regime that the Allies installed in Italy. In 1948, the already-cited key Allied personality in this encounter, Harold Macmillan, wrote: ‘We were very keen, we had lots of experts, we made a great quantity of plans, we imported a lot of food and materials; we set up all sorts of commissions and boards and committees. We started to govern (or try to govern) and regulate (or try to regulate) every aspect of Italian life’. The Italians, continued Macmillan, had listened and appeared grateful, ‘but they were waiting for us to leave’ (Sampson Reference Sampson1967, 70). Like co-belligerency, none of this ever gets a mention in the innumerable Liberation ceremonies taking place every year. And it barely appears in the continual flow of military histories dedicated to the war in Italy (e.g., Holland Reference Holland2008; Stafford Reference Stafford2011; an exception to this generalisation is Lowe Reference Lowe2024). But the military government of occupation, in all its forms, cannot be separated from the general Italian experience of violence during the mid-twentieth century, and the nation’s forced introduction to the harsh, contradictory world of the old and the new superpowers.