Christopher Seton-Watson, the Second World War and Italian liberalism

Abstract

Dunkirk–Alamein–Bologna: Letters and diaries of an artilleryman 1939–1945 (1994) is based on the letters written by Christopher Seton Watson while on active duty as an officer in the Royal Horse Artillery in the Second World War. In this essay, the correspondence provides a platform for exploring first how CSW's wartime experiences coloured his views on Italy and Italian politics, and then the ways in which those views had developed and changed by the time he published his major study of the crisis of Italian liberalism (Italy from liberalism to fascism 1870–1925 (1967).

Keywords:

• Christopher Seton-Watson
• Second World War
• liberalism
• Fascism
• historiography

Notes

1. On Burns see Vidal (1972) and Gatt Rutter (1997).

2. See also Day and Day (1997).

3. Kogan (1956, 1966); Delzell (1961).

4. Deakin (1962, 1971); MacLean (1949).

5. Another example would be Richard Lamb who served in the Eighth Army in Italy in 1944–1945 and was a liaison officer attached to the Italian royalist regiments that fought against the Germans. See Lamb (1994).

6. Hanak, Harry. R.H. Seton-Watson. In Dictionary of National Biography.

7. Hanak, Harry. R.H. Seton-Watson. In Dictionary of National Biography.

8. CSW (1994, 193). For other contemporary accounts see Lewis (1978), Burns (1947) and Gatt Rutter (1997).

9. Although civilian casualties had nonetheless been high. See Gentiloni Silveri (2007).

10. Lewis (1978, 143–44). Outside Italy the incident is best known through Alberto Moravia's novel La Ciociara, which was subsequently the basis for Vittorio de Sica's 1960 film Two Women starring Sofia Loren. There is no agreement over the figures but it is claimed that between 12,000 and 60,000 women (the Marrochinate) were raped in the period immediately after the battle of Cassino. In response, the French authorities made some small financial compensation to the victims whose desperate plight – many of the survivors were suffering from crippling venereal diseases – was taken up in the Constituent Assembly in 1946 and then twice raised in the Italian Parliament (April 7–8, 1952). Despite repeated demands there was no public inquiry. See also Blimberg (1999).

11. The Friuli Group was formed from units of the Italian Army that volunteered to fight for the king after the armistice of September 8, 1943: the group was in action against the Germans in the assault on the Gothic Line. See Lamb (1994, 176–201).

12. CSW 1994, 276. Curiously CSW does not mention the Poles’ reactions to the division of Poland agreed shortly before by the Allied leaders at Yalta.

13. See Seton-Watson and Seton-Watson (1981).

14. See DNB entry on R.H. Seton-Watson (notes 7 and 8).

15. See Delzell (1968); Grindrod (1968); Roberts (1969); Bosworth (1969); Coppa (1971).