Nicola CACCIATORE, Italian Partisans and British Forces in the Second World: Working with the Enemy

This book proposes a new interpretation of the relations between Italian partisans and British forces during the Italian campaign of 1943-1945.

The relationship between Italian partisans (or antifascism) and British forces had been examined by scholars for decades since the end of the war, sometimes even while the war was still going on. Early historiography has stressed the hostility of the British political class towards Italy, its unwillingness to consider Italian Resistance as a positive phenomenon and its fear of a possible Communist insurrection in the country. The widespread interpretation was that the British tried to hinder the Resistance and were a force generally opposed to its growth. On the contrary, since the 1980s, a new interpretation has emerged, which stressed the contingent factors in the British decision-making process and emphasised the fragmentation of the British organisation in Italy. However, this new interpretation seems to have failed to overtake the previous one, and the two now coexist in an uneasy balance. As new documents continuously emerge from Italian and British archives, it is worth revisiting the events, widening the timeframe beyond the 1943–1945 biennium, to possibly give a new interpretation considering the merits of both the current ones.

Nicola Cacciatore. Italian Partisans and British Forces in the Second World War: Working with the Enemy Italian and Italian American Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. 248. $129.99 (cloth).

It is clear that the interpretation of the Italo-British relationship (and, to an extent, the Italo-Allied relationship in its entirety) during the Second World War requires some further finessing. The idea that the Allies, and especially the British, were generally hostile to the Italian Resistance and that they tried to hinder and control it appears to be no longer tenable. Indeed, some sectors of the British administration and military adopted a rigid stance towards Italy’s future. However, it does not seem that these sectors had a particular influence over the decisions taken during the Italian campaign of 1943–1945, at least until the very last months. Even if we think that there was indeed a plot against the Italian Resistance, experiences like those of the British liaison missions listed in Chap. 3 should bring us to the conclusion that such a plot was developed without the knowledge of part of the British forces and conducted with a ruthless disregard towards partisans’ and British lives. The British military personnel and the SOE, in particular, supported the Resistance to a great extent. They allowed for requisitions to be carried out against former fascists and understood the desire for justice of the partisans to the point of allowing them a ‘period of grace’ before the arrival of the Allied Armies during which the dismissal of officers, beatings and even executions were allowed without repercussions. The killing of fascists would have been the perfect occasion to crack down on the more left-wing elements of the Resistance if that was the plan. However, those were considered only details in the overall framework of the operations in Italy, and the military personnel were open to concessions on these matters. They even noted how the imposition of orders in a manner that was too direct could have dampened the morale of the partisans. They often tried to protect the partisans from abuses, as their protests against the French habit of putting Italian partisans in concentration camps clearly show. They also monitored the groundless French attempts to annex the Italian north-western region of Valle d’Aosta. If indeed one of the Allies can be considered hostile tout court to Italy, it should be the often forgotten France, rather than the UK.