Pietro Badoglio

Pietro Badoglio signed the armistice that took Italy out of the war and then left the army and the country without orders when the Germans arrived. He was a career officer blamed by some for the collapse at Caporetto in 1917 and promoted regardless, chief of the general staff for most of the fascist period, and the conqueror of Ethiopia in 1936, where Italian forces used mustard gas against troops and civilians on his authority and he was made Duke of Addis Ababa for it. He resigned after the disastrous invasion of Greece in 1940. When the Grand Council removed Mussolini in July 1943 the king made Badoglio prime minister; he announced that the war continued while secretly negotiating with the Allies, and the armistice was announced on 8 September. No plan had been given to the armed forces. The king, the court and Badoglio left Rome for Brindisi before dawn on 9 September, the Germans disarmed and deported some six hundred thousand Italian soldiers, and the massacre of the Acqui Division on Cephalonia followed. He led a southern government under Allied supervision until June 1944. He was never tried; Ethiopia's request for his extradition as a war criminal was not acted on, and he drew his pension until 1956. The failure to issue orders on 8 September is the reason Italian soldiers from Greece to Provence were captured, shot or deported in the following days, and it is the single most damaging fact about him. Cephalonia alone cost some five thousand men, most shot after surrendering. The postwar republic's decision not to prosecute its own war criminals, Ethiopia included, is generally traced to the Cold War and to the fact that the same officials were needed.

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