INTRODUCTION

Three basic facts shaped the events from 1943 to 1945. First, the invasion of Italy was a joint Anglo-American affair. Second, the expectation that the battle would be brief proved a serious miscalculation. Third, the campaign that followed brought economic dislocation and misery with which the Allied military authorities were totally unprepared to deal. The U.S. military had opposed the Italian campaign as an unnecessary diversion of resources, and the decision to invade represented, in part, a compromise to win British agreement to the cross-channel invasion of 1944. Hopes that Rome could be captured quickly vanished almost immediately, and the Allies found themselves bogged down in a long and costly operation.

The progress of the war determined the phases of the occupation. The Allies occupied Sicily in July 1943 and attacked the mainland at Salerno in September. By October, the front had stabilized along the so-called Gustav line, running across the peninsula 200 kilometers south of Rome. This line defined the area under Allied control until the breakthrough at Cassino in May 1944 and the capture of Rome in June. The isolation of the southern third of the country had important long-term consequences. Because of its rapid liberation, the South remained outside the resistance experience, and the Gustav line established a separate economic unit in the poorest area of the country.

Allied political and economic policy was governed by the principle of military necessity. The Allied command thus imposed the Armistice of September 1943.