ABSTRACT
On 10 July 1943 Montgomery's 8th Army and Patton's 7th Army landed on the south coast of Sicily. The Allies caught the Germans by surprise. In an operation involving 'the man who never was', phoney plans for the invasion of Sardinia and Greece were planted on a corpse which was washed ashore and fell into German hands. Hitler was taken in by this deception, although Kesselring, who commanded the troops in Italy, felt that the plans were a hoax and believed that the Allies would land in Sicily. By 1942 native anti-fascism was experiencing a revival, the exiles being hopelessly out of touch with the situation in Italy. On 17 July Roosevelt and Churchill promised that Italy would have an honourable place in the European family of nations if the fascists were deposed. If not, Rome would be bombed. Two days later Rome was indeed bombed, resulting in 1500 deaths, among them General Hazon, the royalist head of the Carabinieri.
