Garibaldi Division

Garibaldi Division, perhaps the most important Italian Army formation to fight with the Balkan partisan movements after the armistice of September 1943 brought the Italians over to the Allied side. At that time the Italians had 27 divisions, amounting to over 600,000 troops, in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, excluding those on the Aegean and Ionian islands. Only a part of these forces resisted the Germans. Those who did lost some 3,000 dead in a few days, many of whom, in cluding 5 generals and more than 200 officers, were shot im mediately after being captured. The bulk of the Italian troops were interned in Germany; a few thousand succeeded in crossing the Adriatic to southern Italy, while others joined up with Yugoslav, Albanian, and to a lesser extent Greek partisans and continued to fight.

Of the 14 divisions which had garrisoned Yugoslavia, the Taurinense Division (13,000 Alpine troops) and the Venezia Division (10,000 infantry) in particular fought as organized formations against the Germans while at the same time maintaining their cohesion in the face of pressure from Tito's partisans, who wanted to disarm them or break them up into small groups. The Italians were aided by the fact that the Venezia Division possessed powerful radio sets with which it was able to maintain permanent contact with the legal Italian government, from which it received aid. On 2 December 1943 these two divisions joined with a number of smaller units to form the Garibaldi Division under Italian command. Tito's lieutenants were initially able to restrict its combatants to 6,000; the remaining troops were organized into eleven battalions of ‘labourers’, who were then gradually called upon to replace the division's battle losses. The division, which was partially supplied by Italian aircraft of the Balkan Air Force, fought alongside Tito's forces in a number of battles including the liberation of Belgrade in October 1944. It was repatriated in March 1945, although other smaller Italian Partisan forces continued to fight in parts of Yugoslavia. These included five battalions operating in Slovenia, and the four battalions of the Italian brigade employed in Bosnia, then in the liberation of Belgrade, and finally that of Zagreb ( May 1945). Approximately 10,000 of the Italian troops operating in the partisan armies of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece were killed or went missing in action. Of these, more than 3,000 died and a comparable number went missing in Yugoslavia alone.

Lucio Ceva ( andTr. John Gooch)