Pietro Secchia 1973
Source: Cronistoria del 25 aprile 1945. Feltrinelli, Milan, 1973;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2019.
June 4, 1944 the Allies entered Rome, the first European capital liberated. June 6 they landed successfully in Normandy, the largest amphibious military action that had ever taken place.
“The history of war has never known its like in its proportions, the vastness of conception and its magisterial execution.” (Winston Churchill)
The Anglo-Americans had employed 11,000 fighter planes, 4,000 warships and thousands of smaller vessels, sent 20,000 parachutists behind enemy lines; during the 24 hours they landed 250,000 men and air-transported three divisions onto the French coast. The Second Front was finally a reality.
June 23, in accordance with the Teheran Agreements, the Red Army began its sweeping offensive, smashing the German front in Finland and breaking through the center at Vitebsk and Gomel. Thirty German divisions were cut off in the Baltic countries. In July the press of events became precipitous. While the Anglo-American armies cleaned out Cherbourg on June 26 and liberated Caen July 9 and headed rapidly towards Paris, the Soviet army shattered Von Model’s lines, liberated Minsk July 5, Vilna the 13th and Grodno the 17th, bursting through to the western the borders of East Prussia.
On July 20 the attempt on Hitler’s life laid bare to the world the end of another myth. The unity of the German leading groups and the tightness of the internal front were collapsing under the overwhelming weight of the defeat. A plot organized and led by a group of generals from headquarters, in attempting to physically liquidate the dictator, had sought to save what could still be saved. The hour so long awaited by the oppressed and martyred peoples of Europe, the hour of the concentric general offensive, from the east, the west, the north and the south, had arrived. A tremor of general revolt ran through the European resistance: the final battle had begun.
From the very beginning of the partisan war the objective of national insurrection was present in the thoughts and the actions of the Italian anti-Fascist parties; and in particular the insurrection was the object of serious and constant preparation on the part of the Communist Party, the Action Party, and the Socialist Party. But the development of events imposed the necessity to accelerate its organization.
All the anti-Fascist parties and movements were in agreement on the principle of the insurrection (this was the objective that the CLNAI as a whole put forth). But as the hour to set it in motion approached it was inevitable that the divergences among them would appear concerning what they considered indispensable to the success of the war of liberation but which that they nevertheless feared as a great danger; divergences that manifested themselves in the various commitments that the parties in the CLN made for preparing and organizing it.
The insurrection, though it had a largely national and patriotic character, was no longer a purely military operation, but was above all a powerful fight of the popular masses, and for this very reason was a revolutionary movement: the conservative classes could not but be frightened.
In the first months of the partisan struggle the Communists had already openly and clearly posed the problem of the national insurrection:
“The political strike, the national insurrection cannot simply be simple watchwords for purposes of agitation: they must already be concrete tasks of organization and preparation. We must continue, expand, and make general the armed struggle for national liberation that has already begun; the partisan struggle in the first place but also the mass resistance to Fascist and Nazi orders as well as the protest movement of the masses against their oppressors and exploiters. Through this struggle the framework and the organisms of the insurrection will be created, training the masses for the final attack and the victorious insurrection.” (L'Unità, Dec 24, 1943, Northern edition)
This would be matured through the development of multifaceted partisan actions, workers struggles in the factories, and peasant movements in the countryside. With these concepts as our starting point, from the very first months of the partisan war we had precise directions for the creation of Agitation Committees in the factories and the objectives that the general political strike could pose.
“In the insurrectional strike we must occupy the factories, not to barricade ourselves inside, but to make fortresses of them, points of support for armed insurrectional actions to be conducted outside against the enemy’s strongholds and his vital points.” (L'Unità, Dec 24, 1943, Northern edition)
Orders were given to the railway workers that on a given day it would be their duty to take over the most important railway centers by force; to stop enemy transport; and to put themselves at the disposition of the insurrectionary centers, in the same way that it would be the duty of the postal and telegraph workers to occupy the telegraph and telephone centers and the radio stations.
It was a question of tasks that were serious and indispensable for the preparation of a victorious national insurrection which could not be improvised at the last minute; it was necessary to make prior arrangements for their realization.
Insisting on these arguments from the first months of the partisan struggle was politically and militarily correct, but didn’t fail to also provoke some erroneous interpretations which had to be clarified in order to avoid grave consequences for the victorious development of the struggle.
Especially in the course of the general strike of March 1944 there came to light an opinion quite widespread among the working masses and the population of the industrial centers, that is, that the strike had an insurrectional character and that the moment had come to finish off the Germans and the Fascists. In the popular quarters in particular the rumors were rampant that thousands of partisans had come down from the mountains and had occupied the city.
The objective situation itself had created certain illusions and led to the circulating of the most sensational rumors (the workers understood full well that the essential problem wasn’t that of the improving of economic conditions, but rather that of driving out the Germans.. They understood that there could be no real solution to the problem of living conditions if we didn’t have done with the Nazi-Fascists), but in part there were also some defects in our press and the erroneous interpretation of some watchwords, for example the one that said , “Prepare for the national insurrection.”
Having insisted on this in articles and directives on this theme, while at the same time preparing the general protest and political strike of March 1944, contributed to creating a certain confusion. “Prepare for the national insurrection” was here and there interpreted as an immediate watchword.
After the March general strike they continued to hammer away at the need to “prepare the national insurrection in every detail” but at the same time stressed that they weren’t joking about insurrection (we wanted a victorious insurrection and not an adventure), that this could only be unleashed when the force of the Italian people would be ready to strike and bring down the enemy: “therefore the moment and the hour of the national insurrection will be chosen by the Italian people and not by the enemy.”
The beginning of the battle for Europe announced that it was time to prepare the insurrection, not only on the political but also on the military plane. June 28, 1944 the General Command of the Corpo Volontari della liberta sent directive no. 5 to all the regional commands, having as its objective “the examination of the objectives” of the insurrection in the cities, the situation of effectives, and the elaboration of plans for insurrection and the systematic acts of sabotage.
Such directives consisted in a series of instructions concerning the tasks that every partisan commando had the duty to propose in order to accurately know the topography of the city and the surrounding territory (factories, barracks, rail lines, seats of the enemy command, etc), the strength of the enemy and that of the patriots, their effective efficiency, and for the intensification of attacks and acts of sabotage against the enemy.
Every peripheral command was assigned the task of elaborating a concrete insurrectional plan within the scope of its area of competency, which was to reflect the immediate objectives and actions for the systematic development of military action, up to and including the driving out of the enemy and the occupation of the zone by the patriotic formations.
For their part the leaders of the Action Party insisted that; “It is very true, and will become ever more obvious, that our people, along with the other oppressed peoples, are leading an untiring insurrectionary struggle against those who have profited from this war, against those who enslaved them, against Nazism and Fascism. We are on the road to the anti-Hitlerite national insurrection of the European continent. And this is the problem: don’t allow the struggle to be derailed or falsified. Don’t allow the fruits of our victorious rescue to escape us.” (L'Italia Libera, no. 9,July 10, 1944)
Even after the liberation of Rome and the opening of the Second Front there were those who thought, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats among them, that there was nothing else to do but to carry on with our every day routine. Their representatives within the CVL approved the directives, but in the underground press of their parties “insurrection” was never spoken of; the word was strictly avoided, and this wasn’t accidental.
In issue no. 5 of Risorgimento Liberale of May 1944, on the eve of the liberation of Rome, while the partisan struggle raged in all the valleys, there was not one single word inciting to armed struggle, and in an article entitled “Look ahead” they limited themselves to saying, “ Today this alone must we urge our readers: Don’t be discouraged. Don’t believe the pessimists and the spreaders of doubt. Continue to put up with things and you will see that the future will be peaceful. We will again take up our trade.”
Democrazia Cristiana, in issue no 2 as well as in the following issues, published in bold letters an article with the title: “What should the Christian Democrats do? In this hour of waiting every good Christian Democrat, convinced of the rightness of the cause, should not remain inert, but should carry out with prudent courage an active propaganda for our ideas, should make known our program, should distribute our leaflets and Democrazia.”
Some called to continue to put up with things and to already look forward to the “taking up of trade,” others spoke of “this hour of waiting.” It was certainly not with the spirit of prudent courage that the insurrection could be prepared. The Communist party responded to all of them with open criticism, inviting them to greater combativeness and to put in practice the decisions that had been taken in common in the CLN.
“It isn’t enough to decide, to accept, to approve. It is necessary to execute; it is necessary to honor one’s own signature. It’s not enough to pronounce against a wait and see attitude and to allow the partisan formations that you say you direct and control to not show any sign of life through concrete actions against the German and the Fascists. We are above all speaking to our Liberal friends, our Christian Democratic friends. It’s not enough to say that one is against every form of pacification, of non-belligerency with the enemy and then allow that negotiations in this sense be begun with the Germans and the Fascists. It’s not enough to say that you are for the general strike, to sign to this effect – as the Socialist Party has done – a common appeal with our party and then allow organizations to refuse to march, as occurred in Florence and Padua. And it’s even worse to allow the Turin organization to issue during the strike, on its own initiative, a tract that ordered the return to work without party measures being taken” (La Nostra Lotta, March 5-6, 1944)
These parties, though, were very busy preparing names and lists of the men who, when the liberation occurred, would be appointed to head prefectures, communes, and public administration. Instead of working to prepare the insurrection, they were intent on preparing the plan for afterwards, having in view putting the old structures of the state back in place; not, to be sure, democratic, but pre-Fascist. It never occurred to the authors of these plans that the organized and triumphant national insurrection would create on its own its own organs of power and order, and that these organs had to be the Committees of National Liberation.
“The new order that will issue from the insurrection,” we wrote, “if it wants to be vital and not betray popular aspirations, can only be democratic in the widest meaning of the term, can only base itself on the same organs that have today already marshaled the national masses and lead them in the struggle, and which will tomorrow lead them to the insurrection and to victory. These organs are the Committees of National Liberation and the formations that belong to it; factory agitation committees, peasant committees, village committees, partisan formations. Preparing plans for after the insurrection, based on prefects, police supervisors, and mayors, along with carabinieri and policemen formed by twenty years of Fascism, means preparing the stifling of the insurrection itself in the more or less short term. Behind these plans are hiding the same anti-popular and reactionary forces who we have already found behind the attempts to stifle the partisan struggle and the protest struggles of the workers.” (La Nostra Lotta, March 5-6, 1944)
With this as the starting point, obviously the varying viewpoints of the forces united within the CLN against the common enemy were divided by class interests that led them to act in different ways.
Organizing the insurrection and the post-insurrectionary period by the truly democratic forces had the very precise meaning of reinforcing and strengthening all the organs that led the struggle against the Germans and the Fascists, transforming them into ever larger mass organisms, and converted the Committees of National Liberation the future organs of government.