Sicily 1944

 I thought I had better double-check the assertion I made last Friday, that the resurgence of the Mafia in the second half of last century stemmed in large part from the Americans naive resettlement of American Cosa Nostra barons in Sicily after the Allies' successful invasion. My source was a memory of one of the late Alan Whicker's TV presentations of his career in the media. Whicker had been an army captain in charge of a film unit, present at the landings and later. He claimed that the British had managed to set up a civil administration free of fascists which was functioning well. One of the few things which Mussolini can be praised for is virtually killing off the Sicilian Mafia, but this is just what the US government would reverse. The wartime US administration had two problems as they saw it: at home, the power of organised crime dominated by Italian-Americans and abroad, the growth of international communism. This has been a perpetual (one might say, pathological) fear on the part of the United States which had led her to support and even install dictators abroad. There was even some toleration of Hitler because of the latter's anti-communist stance until his ally Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. As HL Mencken was wont to say in several formulations, to every complex problem there is a solution which is neat, clear, simple ... and wrong. The US adopted one such in Sicily by deporting the anti-fascist, anti-communist, Italo-American gangsters so that they could rebuild their empires on the island.

In my checking, I came across this pdf of a doctoral thesis which goes into the background of the invasion of Sicily as well as detail of the British contribution to the Allied governance* of the various communes. It reveals that Mafia activity was not altogether extinguished by the Fascists and that at least one local Mafioso gained a mayoralty even before the US deportations. On the other hand, there was widespread resentment of Fascism on the island at the time of the invasion, clearly more than was realised in Washington, and a great deal of cooperation with the military government imposed by the Allies on the part of local officials. Intelligence was able to produce a schedule of those Fascists who had not fled the island, distinguishing those who were Fascist by conviction from those who were compelled to join the party in order to keep public office.

So the deportations did not help, and were anyway irrelevant to the struggle against communism which had hardly any traction on the island. Sicilians were probably more motivated by resentment of rule from mainland Italy than by political dogma. However, there would still have been a need to 

*In the Hague Convention, articles 42-56 govern the establishment of an administration after military conquest. It seems that the articles were applied assiduously and successfully by the Allies in Germany and Japan at the end of the war, had mixed application in Italy but were neglected in Iraq after the two Gulf Wars. It is a matter for debate whether the anarchy in  Iraq was better or worse than the corrupted order of Sicily.