"Nobody ever commended George Patton for his tact, but he was one of the best "motivational speakers" of his day. The hapless Axis soldiers who found themselves in Sicily in the hot Summer of 1943 had only a vague idea of what awaited them, and it was far worse than what anybody – even Patton – could put into words.
Ill-advised and disastrous it may have been, but Italy's entry into the Second World War was no accident, nor did it reflect exclusively Fascist policies, though these were certainly involved. It was prompted by an expansionist foreign policy rooted in earlier nationalist aspirations to establish an "Italian Empire" at the turn of the century, thus (it was hoped) aiding the economy and making Italy a "great power" on a par with Russia, Germany, France and Great Britain. Italy had seized some east African territories beginning in the 1880s only to be checked by Ethiopian forces at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 – a landmark defeat for a European colonial power. In 1911, the Italians occupied Libya, formerly part of the fading Ottoman Empire, following unexpectedly heavy fighting against a ferocious enemy. The Italian occupiers subsequently undertook a civilian massacre. This action shocked even powers such as Great Britain and France, whose own colonial exploits often led to high civilian casualties. There's no escaping the fact that as colonialists the Italians were inept, and no great power took the "new" nation (united only in the 1860s) seriously, either militarily or politically. The First World War and its immediate aftermath led to acquisition of new territories in what is now northeastern Italy, but to this day the Germanic Tiroleans of "Trentino-Alto Adige" and the Slovenians of Trieste hardly consider themselves "Italians."
The Sicilians were -and are- ethnically more Italic than these peoples, but in the 1860s Sicilian revolts against the new "unitary" regime of the House of Savoy were ruthlessly suppressed, with thousands of Piedmontese carabinieri troops stationed in Palermo, Catania and Messina for over a decade. Initially, the Sicilian secessionist movement sought restoration of the exiled House of Bourbon of Naples (ousted in 1860). Decades later, with the increasing poverty of a region which (until the 1870s) had been more prosperous than most northern regions (now industrialized), the more radical Sicilian separatists desired full independence. This may seem arcane, but it partly explains the reluctance of many Sicilians to defend their "Italian" island when war came to their shores in 1943, and does much to define the kind of "liberation" that took place in Sicily, from "Italian" forces, as opposed to the liberation of peninsular regions which (after September 1943) were controlled primarily by German forces, augmented by the die-hard Fascists of Mussolini's short-lived Nazi puppet state, the Italian Social Republic ("Salò"). In reality, Sicily was one of the least Fascist, and least nationalist, regions of the Kingdom of Italy…"
More here
bestofsicily.com/ww2.htm
Amicalement
Armand
reports from OrcCon 2008.
