Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 118–119, 121–122:
Mussolini’s brutal and corrupt fascist régime was thoroughly despised by the majority of Italians, and they welcomed his fall in the summer of 1943 with relief and enthusiasm. Their liberators, the Americans and the British, now had an opportunity to help the Italians replace Il Duce’s fascist régime with a[nother] system of government. (Incidentally, Canadian troops also played an important rôle in the Italian campaign, but Washington and London did not involve Ottawa in the least in the political decision-making process.)
A significant anti-fascist resistance movement had been politically and militarily active in Italy. This movement enjoyed wide support among the population and it claimed a leading rôle in the reconstruction of the country. However, the [Western] Allies refused to cooperate with this anti-fascist front: it was too left-wing for their taste, and not only because the Communists played an important rôle in it. It was obvious that the overwhelming majority of Italian antifascists favoured radical social, political, and economic reforms, including the abolition of the monarchy.
Churchill, in particular, was allegedly obsessed by the spectre of such radical reforms on the other side of the Alps, reforms that in the eyes of this conservative statesman amounted to the “Bolshevization” of Italy. And so neither the plans and wishes of the Italians themselves nor the merits and aspirations of their anti-fascist resistance movement carried any weight.
Instead, a deal was made with officers and politicians who represented the traditional Italian power élite, such as the monarchy, the army, the great landowners, bankers and industrialists, and the Vatican. It did not seem to bother the Allies that it was precisely this élite that had made it possible for Mussolini to come to power in 1922 and that had profited enormously from his régime, for which it was despised by the majority of Italians.
The Italian partisans were disarmed militarily and neutralized politically, except of course behind [Axis] lines in northern Italy, where they were and remained a force to be reckoned with. Marshal Badoglio, a former collaborator of Mussolini’s, who had been responsible for terrible war crimes in Ethiopia,² was allowed to become the first head of government of postfascist Italy. In the liberated part of Italy the new system looked suspiciously like the old one and was therefore dismissed by many as fascismo senza Mussolini, or “fascism minus Mussolini.”³
[…]
The military situation of the Western Allies in Italy in early 1944 was hardly wonderful. The [Axis] put up a very effective resistance, and the long and murderous fighting around Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, could be compared to the terrible battles of the First World War. As it was now obvious that by way of the Italian boot Berlin could never be reached before the Red Army, preparations were accelerated for Operation Overlord, the landings on the French Atlantic coast.
The urgency of this task increased rapidly as the Red Army advanced systematically along the entire length of the Eastern Front and was poised in the spring of 1944 to invade [the Kingdoms of] Hungary and Romania. “When Russian troops began to push the Germans back,” write two American historians, Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble, “it became imperative for American and English [sic] strategy to land troops in France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of Communist hands.”⁸
The Americans and the British also worried about the possibility that [the Third Reich] might suddenly collapse before they could have opened a second front in France. In this case, the Soviets would occupy all of Germany, liberate even Western Europe, and would be able to do there as they pleased, exactly as the British-Americans had done in Italy. “The possibility of a complete Russian victory over Germany before American forces landed on the Continent,” writes the American historian Mark A. Stoler, was “nightmarish” for Washington, and of course also for London, but this scenario had to be envisaged.⁹
Contingency plans were therefore prepared for an emergency landing on the coast of France and the subsequent use of airborne troops combined with a rapid overland push by armoured units in order to occupy as much territory as possible in Western Europe and Germany before the arrival of the Soviets. This operation was code-named Rankin, and troops were kept in a state of preparedness for Rankin until three months after the landings in Normandy.¹⁰
(Emphasis added.)
This explains why the Western Allies bailed out Axis capitalists, failed to prosecute most of the Axis’s war criminals, hesitated to release concentration camp prisoners, did nothing to prosecute the Fascists for their crimes in Africa, reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution, and reused surviving Axis employés for anticommunism, to name only a few disappointments.
It would have been one thing if the Western Allies acted solely for defensive purposes, as the United Kingdom did in 1940, and Imperial America did in December 1941. Nevertheless, because communism was resisting the Axis already, there was a danger that the lower-classes could overthrow their masters and seize the means of production, along with other resources, for theirselves. Thus, the Western Allies invaded Axis territories with the long-term goal of reinforcing the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie; they could not trust the Axis to control the lower classes forever.
[Click here if you have time to read more.]
You have seen already that the Italian communist movement was actively resisting Fascism, but communism was also actively resisting Fascism in e.g. France. Page 130:
The authoritarian de Gaulle — a “general who had never conducted a battle and a politician who had never presented himself at an election,” as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor has cynically noted¹³ — was thus foisted upon the French people by their American and British liberators.
De Gaulle would have to allow the communists and other left-wing groups of the Resistance a measure of political input, and would have to introduce certain political reforms, but without him a much more radical government would have certainly come to power in France and the reforms envisaged in the Charter of the Resistance might perhaps have become reality.
Japanese communism was gaining a foothold as well. Quoting ‘What’s Left of the Right: Nabeyama Sadachika and Anti-communism in Transwar Japan, 1930–1960’:
In characterizing postwar Japan as chaotic, Nabeyama was not just lamenting the generalized “exhaustion and despair” caused by the war (see Dower 1999, chap. 3). He was tapping into the Right’s fear, dating back to the 1920s, that a moment of acute change was releasing the Left’s energy.⁹ The bombed-out streets of Tōkyō were a landscape of wayward veterans, orphaned children, and maimed civilians; of black markets, prostitutes, and drunk intellectuals.
But they were also the stage of what Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru lamented as a “sea of Red Flags”—an outburst of strikes and demonstrations that went along with the growth of radical unions and the Communist Party. It was an expression of protest and popular power that the [Imperial] ruling classes had not witnessed since the days when Nabeyama had militated as a communist youth.
Read Steve Cushion’s On Strike Against the Nazis for more examples.
Most of the soldiers who fought for the Western Allies were not antifascists in any serious way. Returning to The Myth of the Great War, page 22:
The generation of Americans that was predestined to fight a second “Great War” was no longer susceptible to the idealistic Wilsonian phrases that now gushed forth from the mouths of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. This generation had really no idea why they were fighting; on an ideological level its representatives fought, as the American historian (and war veteran) Paul Fussell writes, “in a vacuum.” “The troops in the field,” writes the same author, “were neither high- nor particularly low-minded. They were not -minded at all.”
The American soldiers had not wanted this war, and they did not fight for the beautiful ideals of freedom, justice, and democracy; they fought to survive, to win the war in order to end it, in order to be able to leave the army, in order to be able to go home. When they heard an idealistic rationalization for the war, they usually responded with a pithy “Bullshit!”
The GIs were driven by an absurd but compelling logic, as Fussell writes, “To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.”⁷ The same motif pervades the movie Saving Private Ryan, in which one of the American soldiers makes a remark to the effect that they were fighting “for the right to go home.”⁸
Some Jews fought for the Western Allies out of love for their own folk, but this was not always the case. Quoting Yorai Linenberg’s Jewish Soldiers in Nazi Captivity, page 103:
As Norman Rubenstein, a British Jewish soldier, described it: ‘When I signed up […] it was more out of a desire to defend the British way of life than my hatred for […] the anti-Semitic Nazis’.⁶
As always, excellent post.
