In Europe

provide relief for the embattled Soviets.The British and Americans wanted at all costs to prevent a situation like that of spring 1918, when exhausted Russia had suddenly declared a cease-fire and German troops were able to swing back and reinforce the Western Front. That would have been a disaster.
    Churchill also had reasons of his own for this remarkable detour. As early as 1942 he was one of the very few to take into account the shape of post-war Europe. In his view, the Soviet Union absolutely had to be kept out of Europe. Therefore, the war was ultimately to be fought in Eastern Europe, not in the West. By taking the Italian-Austrian route, the Allied armies would not only defeat the Germans but also cut off the advancing Soviet troops. Furthermore, he expected no major problems in taking Italy. He viewed it as the soft underbelly of the Third Reich, a country with an unstable regime, easily waltzed through by the Allies. As far as the regime went, Churchill was right. But the waltzing was an altogether different story.
    By spring 1943, Mussolini's political movement had lost its sparkle. Committed Fascists were to be found only among young people and the middle class. The party was severely divided and sorely compromised, the country was suffering from a famine, Mussolini himself was distracted by illnesses and love affairs. The entire Italian elite – the monarchists, the clerics, the entrepreneurs, the army, the police – was sick and tired of the war. In March 1943 massive strikes had already been held in Turin, Milan and elsewhere in northern Italy; after the February Strike in Amsterdam, these were the first major workers’ shutdowns in Nazi-Fascist Europe.
    The success of the Allied landing on Sicily – on the ‘impregnable’ island of Lampedusa where, the story has it, only one Allied soldier was injured: bitten by a donkey – was the last straw. In the early hours of 25 July, 1943, in the claustrophobic Sala del Pappagallo (Hall of the Parrot) in Rome's Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini was dethroned by the Great Fascist Council. The next day King Victor Emanuel III had him arrested and replaced as prime minister by the old field marshal, Pietro Badoglio. Mussolini was sent into exile at a ski resort near Gran Sasso in Abruzzo, close to L'Aquila, to what he called ‘the highest prison in the world’.
    Suddenly Italy had a new, anti-Fascist government, and it all happenedmore quickly than even the most fervent optimists had dared to hope. The news was almost too good to believe, and the Allies were taken by surprise. They had never paid much attention to indications of a possible coup; as a result, valuable weeks were lost negotiating a ceasefire. The Italians hoped to remain neutral, the Allies insisted on Italian support as the price for the ‘passage back’, as Churchill put it. There are even photographs of the American general, Maxwell Taylor, during a personal visit to Rome on 7 September, 1943, where he had gone to prepare for an airborne landing. (A scene as preposterous, for example, as a photograph would be of Montgomery walking calmly through Amsterdam in 1944.) The operation was called off when the paratroopers were already in the planes. The Allies were afraid to run the risk. They considered the Italian government too divided and too hesitant. The only ones who reacted decisively were the Germans: their troops came rushing over the Brenner Pass into Italy by the tens of thousands.
    On 8 September the Italian capitulation was officially announced at last, but by then the
Wehrmacht
had northern and central Italy firmly in its grasp. The next day, the king, the army chiefs of staff and the government fled in panic to Brindisi, leaving behind no instructions for their troops. They abandoned Rome, the army and the rest of the country to the enemy. The drama on Kefallonia can also be traced in part to this irresponsible flight: it took almost a month for the Italian government to officially declare war on Germany. Meanwhile the Germans treated all armed Italians as fifth columnists. The Italians never forgave their king: in 1946 they voted overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy.
    In the chaotic days of September 1943, an airborne SS commando unit performed a unique stunt: using a few small planes, they freed Mussolini from his mountain prison. The soldiers guarding Il Duce did nothing to stop them: they had not heard from Rome for days. A week later, in Munich, Mussolini had recovered