Fosse Ardeatine
September 28, 2009
March 23, 1944
Italian partisans operating in Rome threw a bomb at an SS unit,
killing 33 soldiers. The very next day, the Germans rounded up 335
Italian civilians and took them to the Adeatine caves. They were all
shot dead as revenge for the SS soldiers. Of the civilian victims, 253
were Catholic, 70 were Jewish and the remaining 12 were unidentified.
Since the Italian surrender in the summer of 1943, German troops had
occupied wider swaths of the peninsula to prevent the Allies from using
Italy as a base of operations against German strongholds elsewhere,
such as the Balkans.
An Allied occupation of Italy would also put into their hands
Italian airbases, further threatening German air power. Italian
partisans (antifascist guerrilla fighters) aided the Allied battle
against the Germans. The Italian Resistance had been fighting
underground against the fascist government of Mussolini long before its
surrender, and now it fought against German fascism.
The main weapon of a guerrilla, defined roughly as a member of a
small-scale "irregular" fighting force that relies on limited and quick
engagements of a conventional fighting force, is sabotage. Aside from
killing enemy soldiers, the destruction of communication lines,
transportation centers, and supply lines are essential guerrilla
tactics.
The partisans proved extremely effective in aiding the Allies; by
the summer of 1944, resistance fighters had immobilized eight of the 26
German divisions in northern Italy. By war's end, Italian guerrillas
controlled Venice, Milan, and Genoa, but at considerable cost.
All told, the Resistance lost some 50,000 fighters — but won its republic.
