WWII "Mud and Misery" Overdose

Since it’s the middle of the week (okay, not now, but it was when I wrote this…our internet is still acting up), not much has been going on besides classes. We’ve been reading a rather hefty book, Italy’s Sorrow, which is about Italy between 1944-45, and the sheer volume of the suffering that it chronicles has begun to get to me.
I never read much about the German occupation and Allied invasion of Italy. Most books and history courses tend to focus on other places of conflict: London during the Blitz, Dresden, Midway, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, and Normandy, and perhaps a brief mention of Monte Cassino.
It’s unnerving to read that in spite of the horrific reprisals against civilians and the concentration camp roundups, the Germans were often more conscientious soldiers. Much of the rape and pillage was behind Allied lines. Is shooting a woman so much worse than committing an act that destroys her life? In Italy’s Sorrow, a British intelligence officer, Norman Lewis, witnesses the plight of a young girl who had been gang-raped and was unable to walk because of her injuries. Instead of being supported by her community, the girl was declared insane by local police, who tried to commit her to an asylum. Lewis calls it “a fate worse than death.” The irony that the “liberators” left so many ruined lives behind them is painful.
But when I sense the indignation that the Italian soldiers and politicians felt when they were brushed aside by both Allied and Axis forces, I become irritated. Really, now…they expected to just switch sides just like that and be treated as equal partners? To be able to run their country just as they liked when more than fifteen different nations were sacrificing lives and pouring resources into liberating them? What was left of their military was offended that they were not immediately placed on the front lines…is it not understandable that their former enemies would have some misgivings about fighting alongside them? An aggressor expecting to sue for peace and instantly be on an equal political and military footing in their alliance with their former enemies seems arrogant, to say the least. Had Italy ended up like Poland, I could understand the complaints…but Italy became an independent democratic republic fairly quickly after the war ended. While the suffering was intense enough during the simultaneous German occupation, Allied invasion, and Italian civil war, the country was not horribly crippled, oppressed, or humiliated after the war.
There seems to be a price to be paid when a country tolerates a dictator. Endurance can become tacit consent; what would have happened if the German people had resisted the “final solution” openly and vigorously? A country’s people are represented by their leader, whether they like it or not, and it is the people who are called to account for their government’s actions. I don’t think that it is right for the many to atone for the sins of the powerful few, but it seems to be a consistent reality.
All I can say is that I agree with Sherman: war is hell.