When it comes to the Italian army in World War II, everyone often thinks of the comedic "duanzi" and "pig teammate" image. For example, when the 5,000-strong Italian army encountered a barricade set up by the British army, they immediately confessed to "instigation" and began to break up, because they were busy returning home for the autumn harvest; or surrendered just after the war, only because they found crowbars that did not open the ammunition box, etc.....
Similar spoof anecdotes that are difficult to distinguish between true and false make the Italian army a "funny bearer" in World War II. However, the "Aguyi Division" we are talking about today truly shows the "other side" of the indomitable and tragic Italian army.
Moreover, this heroic battle, which took place between the Italian Agoui Division and his German "allies", was a bloody and just resistance.
In 2005, Italy produced the film "The Tragic Aguyi Division"
Let's start with a brief historical background of the event.
As early as May 1941, with the assistance of the "ally" German army, the Italian Agui Division successfully ascended greek territory and became the Axis occupation force in southwest Greece. Kefalonia, on the other hand, was used as the division headquarters and command center of the Aguy Division.
For the next two years, the main activities of the Aguy Division were to resupply the Axis armies in North Africa, or to suppress the Greek resistance movements and guerrillas, as well as to the daily pampering of sisters. Although there were not many opportunities for actual combat, the strategic location here was very important, so the Agui Division had always been highly valued, with a large and well-equipped team, including shore guns, warships, torpedo boats and flying brigades.
German-Italian occupation of Greece, with the blue part being italian-controlled areas
By June 1943, Antonio Gandin was the new commander of the Aguy Division, where he had fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front, where he had distinguished himself and had been awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
To say that this Knight's Iron Cross is of a very high grade, only 43 expatriates in the entire Second World War have received such awards. It can be seen that General Gandin was still very hard at fighting for the Axis powers, and was highly recognized by the German side.
Antonio Gundin
However, shortly after General Gandin took over the Aguyi Division, a coup d'état took place in Italy, Mussolini was placed under house arrest, and the newly formed Italian government immediately announced its withdrawal from the "Axis Powers" and voluntarily surrendered to the Allies.
In the face of Italy's defection, the Germans reacted quite quickly, immediately sending a large number of reinforcements to the Balkan Peninsula and the Mediterranean coast. The regiments surrounded the area of southeastern Europe occupied by the Italian army, ready to strike.
In this situation, Italian overseas troops such as the Agui Division were momentarily caught in a dilemma - either surrendering to the Germans who had already moved and surrendering their weapons, or directly resisting the Germans on the spot.
General Gandin was instructed by his superiors to try to negotiate peace with the Germans and to find an opportunity to retreat. If the German army did not move, the Italian army must not open fire first.
To tell the truth, this is a simple statement, but the actual talks are very unsmooth, and the German negotiator, Colonel Johannes Barchi, is polite but tough. In order to stabilize the German army, the Italian army had to first transfer most of the warships, heavy weapons, merchant ships and aviation brigades to show their sincerity in peace talks.
This negotiation experience was also played in the movie "The Tragic Aguyi Division", and at the beginning, the atmosphere was not tense, and the relationship between Germany and Italy was quite harmonious
Obviously, these concessions and abandonments put them at a distinct disadvantage in the subsequent battles with the Germans.
A week later, Gundin and Barki received the latest instructions from their respective superiors almost simultaneously.
The instructions of the Italian top brass were: "The German army is about to be transformed into a hostile side of us, and it is necessary to use force against the German army that has come to disarm."
Barki also gave Gandin an ultimatum to the German side, giving his team a choice of three options:
1. Continue to stand on the side of the German army and fight in coordination with the German army;
2. Disarm and at the instigation of the Germans, who will try to repatriate them to Italy;
3. Enemies of the Germans.
Gandin immediately held a high-level meeting, at which the Italian officers were still very reluctant to fight in the face of the menacing German army, and most of them did not want to go to war, but the government's instructions made them ready to "break" with the German army and resist by force.
In this case, Gandin is also helpless, does not know how to be good, and can only continue to delay time under the guise of "negotiation".
However, unlike the higher-level officers, the officers and men of the Agui Division at the grass-roots level were more inclined to choose the third plan - to directly confront the Germans.
At the same time, some of the more reliable rumors also flowed into the Italian army - the Italian army, which had earlier chosen to surrender its weapons to the German army, was not properly resettled or sent back to their hometown in Italy as promised, regardless of their rank, immediately after disarming, they had no dignity to speak of, and they were directly put on the stuffy tank truck, all the way north, locked in concentration camps for forced labor.
In this way, the position of the high-ranking Agui Division, which had originally descended from the Lord, also began to waver.
Before Gandin could make a final decision, on 13 September, an Italian artillery officer in Corfu took matters into his own hands and opened fire directly at the approaching Germans, sinking 2 of the opposing landing craft, killing five Germans.
This small-scale exchange of fire gave the Germans a good reason to strike directly, and the beams of the two armies had been concluded.
The next day, Gandin urgently convened a high-level meeting. At this time, most of the officers who had previously expressed their intention to compromise turned to war resistance. According to the voting statistics, the Aguy Division chose the third option - to make enemies of the Germans.
Even if they knew in their hearts that in the absence of air support, heavy weapons and supplies, it was almost a death sentence.
On the same day, Gandin delivered an uplifting pre-war speech, in which he publicly took off the Knight's Iron Cross, which had once brought him great glory, to show a "break" with the Germans, to announce that the Aguyi Division would refuse to surrender, to go to war with the Germans, and to defend the dignity of Italy to the death.
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross
There, the Germans gave the Italians an ultimatum that if they did not surrender their weapons and surrender before 2 p.m. on September 15, the Germans would take decisive action to eliminate the Aguyi Division by force.
Finally, on September 15, 1943, the two armies officially broke out.
The German-Italian battle scene in the movie "The Tragic Aguyi Division"
At the beginning of the war, in the face of the bombardment of german fighter formations, almost completely lost the right to control the air, and the Agui Division, which was seriously short of heavy weapons, constantly sent reports to the Allied forces in Italy, asking for naval and air support.
Gandin was well aware that there were several air brigades stationed in southern Italy, not far from here, that could be used to support the Greek island of Kefalonia nearby.
However, it did not happen that the Allies who had just taken over Italy did not have much trust in the Italian pilots, fearing that they would take advantage of the opportunity to defect to the German camp, so it was strictly forbidden for fighters to take off. Two torpedo boats that had been sent to Kephalogna after receiving the news were recalled by the Allies for the same reason.
The Aguyi Division, which had never waited for Allied reinforcements, quickly sent emissaries from the Red Cross, under the cover of the Greek guerrillas, to personally run to the Italian high command in Brindisi and ask for support in person.
Unfortunately, this messenger walked for more than three days on the road of soldiers and horses, and when he reached his destination, he found the Italian high-ranking officer in charge of the matter, and after explaining his demands, the Aguyi division over there could hardly hold on.
Throughout the engagement, the only "foreign aid" of the Aguyi Division, which had no air power, turned out to be the target of its own suppression and strangulation earlier—members of the local resistance movement and Greek guerrillas.
After several days of hard fighting alongside the Greeks, on September 22, 1943, the Agui division on the island of Kefalonia was finally exhausted.
According to historical records, about 9,000 officers and men of the Agui Division in Greece, which had not been withdrawn before the war, directly killed 1,315 people in the fierce battle on the island of Kephalogonia. In addition, the casualties of the Greek partisans were also very tragic.
However, only more than 1,800 people returned safely to their hometowns in Italy after World War II.
So, how do the more than 5,000 people in the middle explain that they disappeared out of thin air?
According to later research, there are three whereabouts of them:
1. Being shot directly on the spot;
2. Death in a shipwreck on a German prisoner-of-prisoner ship;
3. Forced labor in concentration camps, tortured to death.
In addition to the headquarters of the Agui Division on the island of Kefalonia, the surrounding Aguy Division stations such as Corfu and Kos, even if there is no large-scale resistance activity, will inevitably be "wiped out" after disarming.
Most of those who were shot on the spot were senior officers of the Aguy Division and incapacitated wounded.
On 24 September, General Gandin and 147 of his officers were summarily charged with "treason" by the Germans and executed on the spot.
The reason is simple, they violated the agreement of the Mussolini government - "The German and Italian troops in Greece should be united under the command of the German army".
The order of executions was in order of rank, with General Gandin being the first Italian officer to be executed.
Before he died, he despised the Knight's Iron Cross, which he once regarded as a treasure, and still fell into the mud.
The massacre of the Italians lasted for a week, and the roar of machine guns, the sound of guns being mended with pistols, and the screams of despair intertwined, and there were Italians crying, praying, or chanting of sorrow.
A scene of slaughter restored in the Italian film "War Lover"
Other Italians would be dragged into the city, executed in front of the Greeks, and brutally killed in the streets. After the body began to decompose, it was loaded in rubber boats and dumped directly into the sea one by one.
In "War Lovers," the Greek masses, forced to watch the execution of the Italians, pray from the sidelines
However, some of the bodies thrown into the sea will be washed back and forth by strong waves, and some of them will hang on the rocks and surface, like a tragic image of the end of the world.
The remaining Italian troops were transported by the Germans to the concentration camps in batches. On the way, a prisoner-of-war ship was hit by the Allies, and nearly 3,000 people fell into the water and died.
In the end, about 2,000 people were escorted to concentration camps on German soil for forced labor. More than 100 of them did not survive the war.
Objectively speaking, in terms of scale and brutality, the massacre of the Aguy division can be said to be the most heinous massacre of prisoners in World War II, along with the Katyn Massacre.
However, due to the consideration of the post-war pattern and the general environment of European cooperation, coupled with the important role played by some German military personnel in post-war NATO, this massacre was deliberately forgotten by Europe and the whole world, and only occasionally appeared in Italian film and television works, which made people sigh.
Having said all this, we can all feel that in fact, for the Italians who can "put their lives and deaths outside" in the street smashing the field, the performance of the "pig teammates" in World War II is not that they "can't fight". To a large extent, it has to do with the fact that "fascism" and extreme racial ideas do not have a strong mass base among the Italian military and civilian population.
The Italian policy of fascist aggression and expansion, as well as the idea of "going all the way to black" with Nazi Germany, were only the ideas of a small group of people led by Mussolini. Therefore, ordinary Italians are not interested in practicing with their lives.
Just like the Aguyi Division, the Italian army will choose to fight a bloody battle when it is life and death. This has nothing to do with "isms", nor is it the kind of brainwashing "allegiance", they are simply defending the glory of their soldiers and the dignity of the country.