On May 18, 1944, Allied troops captured Monte Cassino in Italy, celebrated for its historic hilltop abbey, after four months of bitter fighting. The soldiers of the French Expeditionary Corps particularly distinguished themselves in the battle for this key point in the German defensive line. But their military honours are now marred by accusations of war crimes.
“Garigliano is a great victory ... France will know one day. She will understand.” On the evening of his departure from Italy in August 1944, French General Alphonse Juin spoke these words to his officers, underlining how decisive the crossing of the Garigliano River by his men had been for the Allies. Thanks to this breakthrough, the Germans finally abandoned Monte Cassino after four months of intense fighting. The road to Rome was finally open. But 80 years on, General Juin's heartfelt sentiments have not been fulfilled. The Italian campaign has gradually faded from the collective memory.
After the landings in Sicily and Calabria in September 1943, the Allied forces were bogged down in Italy. The Germans held firm, protected by the Gustav Line which stretched for 150km across the Italian Peninsula and barred the way to Rome.
“Monte Cassino was one of the bulwarks in the defensive system of the German armies. It was an important observation point, enabling them to keep Allied attacks at bay,” explains historian Julie Le Gac. “The Allies tried every possible way to break through this line, with waves of assaults that have been likened to trench warfare. It was referred to as the 'Verdun of the Second World War'."
'One of the most brilliant military feats of the war'
Between January and May 1944, Monte Cassino and the Gustav Line defences were attacked on four occasions by Allied forces. France contributed troops from the French Expeditionary Corps (CEF), comprising units of the African Army, colonial troops and Free French forces. “Sixty percent of this army was made up of colonial soldiers, mainly North Africans – Algerians and Moroccans, but also Tunisians,” explains Le Gac, author of "Vaincre sans gloire : le corps expéditionnaire français en Italie" ("Victory without glory: The French Expeditionary Corps in Italy").
These soldiers had already fought with distinction in early 1944. “The 4th Regiment of Tunisian Riflemen accomplished one of the most brilliant military actions of the war, at the cost of enormous losses,” General Charles de Gaulle wrote in his memoirs. The regiment captured the Belvedere plateau near Monte Cassino after fierce fighting between January 25 and February 1. Despite this victory, the Gustav Line remained intact. General Juin then devised a bold strategy, choosing to launch his attack through the Aurunci Mountains, considered by the Germans to be impassable.
His offensive manoeuvre relied on the mountain fighting skills of the soldiers from North Africa, particularly the Moroccan "Goumiers", as the soldiers were known, who were used to rough terrain. “These were really goat trails. They managed to get divisions carrying all their equipment and machine guns over these paths on mules. These men were mountain specialists. It was an extraordinary coup by General Juin, who I consider to be the greatest French military strategist of the war,” says historian Jean-Christophe Notin, whose books include La Campagne d'Italie 1943-1945 ("The Italy Campaign, 1943-1945").
Ten thousand Goumiers penetrated the Aurunci Mountains and in three weeks eliminated the entrenched German units, finally enabling an advance towards the Italian capital.
“The French, and above all the Moroccans, fought furiously and exploited every success by immediately concentrating all available forces on the most vulnerable points,” wrote German General Albert Kesselring in his notebooks at the time.
On June 4, 1944, the Allies finally entered Rome. But this victory was overshadowed by the Allied landings in Normandy, which took place two days later. “It marked the rebirth of the French armies, but it was completely overlooked. I'm not sure many people know what Garigliano means,” says Notin.
Mass rape
In Italy, on the other hand, the involvement of the French expeditionary corps is still vividly remembered, but for its criminal acts. A generic word even refers to them: “marocchinate”, or "Moroccans' deeds". It refers to the mass rapes committed by French army soldiers between April and June 1944 in the Ciociara region, southeast of Rome. These war crimes were attributed, as the term suggests, to the Moroccan goumiers of the CEF - although only one of these soldiers was subsequently convicted of such charges.
The British writer Norman Lewis, then an officer on the Monte Cassino front, described the violence in his 1978 book "Naples 44": “French colonial troops are on the rampage again. Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place." Vittorio De Sica's 1960 film “La Ciociara” was also inspired by these events. Adapted from Alberto Moravia's novel and starring Sophia Loren in the Oscar-winning title role, it recounts the tragedy of a mother and daughter raped by Moroccan Goumiers.
In her book, Le Gac examines this highly sensitive issue. “These crimes were of considerable magnitude,” she notes.
The historian estimates that between 3,000 and 5,000 rapes were committed by the CEF during the entire Italian campaign, although this number is the subject of debate among researchers. She points out that in the past, and even today, women have been perceived as “spoils of war”. According to Le Gac, these mass rapes can be explained by the “extreme violence of the fighting” leading to psychological trauma for combatants, but also by a flawed chain of command with “insufficient supervision”.
Among the Italian population, it was rumoured that General Juin had granted his soldiers 50 hours' leave after the battle, giving them a green light to prey upon the local population. But no record of such an order has ever been found, as Le Gac explains: “After the war victims' associations claimed to have found a written order, it was found to be a forgery. In any case, these are not orders that would be given in writing, and I don't really believe in them.”
For these acts of sexual violence, 207 CEF soldiers were brought before French military courts. In all, 156 soldiers were convicted (87 Moroccans, 51 Algerians, 12 French, three Tunisians, three from Madagascar), but only one of these was identified as being a Moroccan Goumier.
For Le Gac, this may mean that they were given summary justice. In addition to these convictions, 28 soldiers whose unit affiliation is unknown were executed.
Notin remembers discussing this subject with veterans of the Italian campaign: “Most of the time, the guilty parties were shot directly or more cruelly, they were told to leave the French lines, unarmed, and march toward the Germans. That's how they were killed.”
But Notin also believes that the Moroccan soldiers made convenient culprits. In his opinion, they were far from the only perpetrators of atrocities and were also subject to racism: “There was a lot of propaganda on the part of the Italians to denigrate the victors by making them out to be ignorant and uncouth men.” After the First World War, a propaganda campaign, known in the English-language press as the “Black Horror on the Rhine”, was also launched in Germany against the presence in the Rhineland of soldiers from the French colonies, Notin recalls.
However, Notin does not deny the reality of these mass rapes, which he estimates at between 300 and 1,000: “When I wrote my book, people asked me if I was sure I wanted to talk about it, but if you want to pay tribute to the combatants, you have to talk about all the facts. If you let them go unmentioned, it's as if you were complicit in them and approved of them.”
Exploitation by Italy's far right
Eighty years after the events, the subject is still controversial in Italy. In 2018, a stele paying tribute to 175 CEF soldiers killed in action was vandalised in the village of Pontecorvo, near Monte Cassino. Three years later, Pope Francis was criticised for visiting a French military cemetery in Rome where 1,200 soldiers who died during the Italian campaign, including Moroccan Goumiers, are buried.
France has compensated nearly 1,500 victims but has not issued an apology for the mass rapes. Italians are still demanding justice, including members of the Associazione Nazionale Vittime delle Marocchinate ("National Association of Victims of the Maroccochinate"). “Unfortunately, these initiatives are highly politicised,” says Camilla Giantomasso, a researcher at the University of Rome and author of a thesis on the memory of the Marocchinate. “They are ideological proposals that only find fertile ground in far-right parties that see African troops as scapegoats for what happened, whereas responsibility should in fact be extended to Franco-European troops and the Allies in general, and understood in the overall context of the war.”
In 2023, Senator Andrea De Priamo, a member of the Brothers of Italy party of far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, launched a bill to establish a national day of remembrance for victims of wartime rape. The law even puts forward the figure of 60,000 rape victims, which is disputed by historians.
“In the logic of far-right parties, this remembrance is particularly useful because, in the end, those responsible for what happened have always been identified as 'Moroccans' – in other words, non-Western people of colour”, Giantomasso says. “This is something that they don't hesitate to link to current African migrants who, in their eyes, seem extremely dangerous, precisely because of this past. Unfortunately, although this is an anachronistic view and lacks historical rigour, it resonates with many people who don't want to delve into what really happened and limit themselves to a superficial reading of the phenomenon.”
For Giantomasso, the events are still “a conflicted and difficult memory”. But as noted by Canadian historian Matthew Chippin, who wrote a dissertation entitled "The Moroccans in Italy: A study of sexual violence in history", these long-neglected war crimes are increasingly the subject of study.
It is a complex issue that deserves much greater investigation, according to Chippin, a researcher from the University of Leeds. The events that led to the origination of the term "Marocchinate", he says, “do not just concern victims and aggressors, but two marginalised peoples. On the one hand, there are the Italians, who suffered terribly during the war, and on the other, the Moroccans, who were treated like primitives and often looked down upon.”
This article has been translated from the original in French.
