(This takes 6¾ minutes to read.)
Conscription of agriculturalists, Allied activity at sea, and prioritisation of the military’s needs lead to less food for the civilians under Fascism:
Fascist Italy entered the war in a general position of vulnerability regarding food supply and was forced over the course of the war to introduce increasingly stringent rationing. Starting in the late 1930s, a marked contraction in popular consumption — driven by autarkic policies and the growing prioritization of military preparations — began to undermine the régime’s ability to maintain consensus on the islands, particularly in large cities, where hardship and public discontent had been mounting throughout the second half of the decade. The blockade thus struck at what was already a vulnerable point in the foundations of fascist support.⁶⁷
The announcements of new rationing measures were themselves often accompanied by reports of increasing discontent, public protests and later rioting.⁶⁸ Within months of joining the war, there were indications of food shortages damaging popular support for the war throughout the country. Collected Carabinieri reports from December 1940 highlight the rising prices of fish, eggs, butter and pulses, along with scarcities of flour, pasta, oats, meat and other essentials in some provinces. This ‘economic malaise’ had ‘a significant impact on the public spirit’.⁶⁹
The islanders, however, with their additional vulnerability due to reliance on seaborne transport, found their suffering to be that much more acute, and their ‘consensus’ thus declined even faster. Just weeks after the Italian declaration of war, informers and secret police in Cagliari reported overhearing concerns voiced in public over food shortages. This was during the initial period when shipping to Sardinia was suspended, and the report noted patrons at one café stating impatience waiting for the arrival of ‘a few steamships’.⁷⁰
Similar concerns about the vulnerability of Sardinia’s sea communications were also reported in the northern city of Olbia in a report to the Chief of Police in late 1940.⁷¹ These concerns were accurate, given that, by November 1940, stockpiles of wheat in the Cagliari province had dropped to 75,000 quintals, ‘sufficient to cover [their] needs until 30 June 1941’. The consequent rationing of pasta impacted all but was deemed to ‘absolutely deficient’ for hard labouring miners.⁷²
Local Prefectures and their personnel often felt the brunt of rising public anger as the food situation on the islands continued to worsen into 1941. In March, for instance, there was ‘a certain turmoil’ in the Sardinian mining regions of Iglesias and Carbonia, as bread rations were tightened further, forcing some partial, temporary relaxations in these measures by the local authorities.⁷³
In April, multiple citizens in the municipality of Geraci Siculo near Palermo took the opportunity to complain to a visiting fascist Gerarch that they were being ‘left to starve’ and requested the removal of the local Prefectural Commissioner.⁷⁴ In the following months other protests exploded in Alimena and Mezzojuso, motivated by the reduction of rations assigned to the population.⁷⁵
By June, the Police Chief in Sardinia was reporting that students from the University of Sassari were organizing to ‘form a nucleus of opposition to the Régime’ known as the ‘Movimento universitario rivoluzionario antifascista’, and had recruited members in universities across the island. Both the public and secret police were forced to act to supress them, reporting the next month that public demonstrations of antifascism had been ‘attacked and crushed’.⁷⁶
As the war drew into the autumn of 1941, a period when the shipping losses and supply interruptions started to increase rapidly, stringent new rationing measures were brought into place, limiting most individuals to just 200 grams of bread per day.⁷⁷ A report for the Palermo prefecture noted that the ‘discomfort’ caused was not limited to ‘specific categories of consumers, but the whole population’.⁷⁸
The impact was not only a physical one for islanders, but also visual, as noted by the Prefect in Cagliari:
The greatest satisfaction of the citizens of Cagliari, in times of peace, was to pass by the market in the morning, where they always found it well supplied with meat, vegetables, fruit and abundant fish. Such a morning spectacle could no longer be given to the citizens of Cagliari in times of war.⁷⁹
It was easy enough for these citizens to link at least some of these shortages directly with the maritime war, given that the Italian Navy had requisitioned many of the fishing vessels operating from the island.⁸⁰ The island’s censorship office recorded that complaints about the scarcity of bread and the high prices caused by the difficulties in supply were dominating private correspondence in late 1941.⁸¹
In response to these shortages, public protests over food reached a new level of intensity on the islands. Reports soon surfaced of ‘communist propaganda’ being circulated among workers in the industrial and mining communities of Sardinia, accompanied by what was suspected to be deliberately slowed productivity.⁸²
Across Sicily, the Carabinieri reported multiple substantial protests in October, usually by women and young boys. In the Acireale comune of Catania province, around 300 women and 50 boys protested outside the town hall over bread shortages on 2 October, while in one neighbourhood of Catania city, about 1,000 women marched the same day, chanting ‘we want bread’.
This was followed by at least seven other substantial public protests over food across Acireale, Siracusa, and numerous areas of Catania and Messina in the space of one week. On at least one of these occasions, it took a (non-lethal) intervention from the Army to disperse the protest.⁸³
In November, the Palermo Police Chief (Questore) noted that coal shortages on the island were also causing severe dissatisfaction, and that there was an urgent need to increase availability.⁸⁴ By December, the ‘severe economic hardship’ showed ‘no signs of abating’ and plenty of public anger over the shortages of meat, milk and fats, as well as over coal deficiency.
Even supplies of beans and potatoes were limited, while the visible preferential treatment of the Armed Forces stationed in Sicily for the few meat stocks that were available was noted as stoking public resentment further.⁸⁵ It was a similar concurrent story in Sardinia, especially as the arrival of more military personnel on the island caused yet more strain to the supply situation.⁸⁶
[…]
Public anger increased over the course of 1942, even while much of that year represented Axis success in many aspects of the Mediterranean War. By March, security services warned that ‘Sicily is like a powder keg, and that the slightest shock will be enough for it to burst’.⁹²
Over June and July, even as the Axis powers successfully pushed the Allies back across North Africa and interdicted major convoys to Malta, the Sicilian population as a whole showed serious signs of ‘alarm and discontent’ over inadequate pasta availability. The malnutrition was found to be causing oedema (fluid retention and swelling) among the island’s working-class population.
By September, the Prefect for Palermo felt that while public opinion ‘remains favourably oriented towards the current war events’, the food situation had not notably improved. Public anger remained over the ‘almost total lack of pulses, eggs, sausages and cheese, the shortage of potatoes, and the insufficiency of meat and fresh fish’.⁹³
In the town of Ciminna, one local official was chased by residents who were angry over the lack of food and accused him of hoarding meat. The official, who was lucky to escape serious harm, noted that public anger over food was usually directed first at local authorities.⁹⁴ More broadly, it was feeding widespread disillusionment with the war and the fascist régime.
It was a similar story for Sardinia. One resident of the comune of Nuraminis, for instance, later recalled that the stringent rations of essentials such as bread, sugar and milk never provided anything close to enough for their needs. Despite efforts to supplement diets via black market purchasing, ‘Hunger became more and more intense, malaria broke out’.⁹⁵
Public signs of anger became more widespread in the face of such conditions, often taking the form of antifascist posters and graffiti. One report from March warned of graffiti in multiple public toilets with slogans such as ‘Mussolini [is] betraying us and starving us to death. Remember this people. Let the revolution break out, at least let us drive out that cuckold Mussolini’ and ‘To the ground, the Fascio! Mussolini down! Down with Mussolini!’⁹⁶
[…]
The fronte interno had been fundamentally undermined at an earlier stage than 1943, but in that year it effectively collapsed. Food shortages were a, perhaps the central reason and the transport issue was a key causal factor in these shortages for the islanders.
Beyond general disaffection and protest, anti-fascist activity and propaganda had begun to spread more widely on the islands. As one report from early July succinctly put it, there was abundant evidence that ‘in Sicily and Sardinia no one wears the fascist badge anymore and that the economic situation with regard to food and especially transport is disastrous. The Sicilian and Sardinian populations are said to be fed up and have all become anti-fascist’.¹⁰⁷
To conclude, food was undoubtedly a central issue in the deterioration of wartime public opinion and, for the islanders, this was intimately linked with the war at sea and the issue of maritime supply, on which they were heavily reliant for many key foodstuffs.
Overstretched shipping commitments, mismanagement, losses of ships and interruptions to the island routes all contributed to ensuring that food shortages were worse on the islands than the shortages on the mainland.
(Emphasis added.)
If you are aware that other populations have put up with food deficiencies, then Sardinia’s and Sicily’s impatience looks puzzling. My hypothesis is that since Sardinians and Sicilians did not choose Fascism, and the Fascists suppressed their languages, the food scarcities were simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was little trust and little love between these Italic minorities and their régime, so most of them did not care about a government that was largely alien to them anyway.