Italian Co-belligerent Army
Pro-allied Italian armed forces
The Italian Co-belligerent Army (Italian: Esercito Cobelligerante Italiano), or Army of the South (Esercito del Sud), were names applied to various units of the now former Royal Italian Army during the period when they fought alongside the Allies during the Italian Campaign and civil war of World War II from October 1943 onwards. During the same period, the pro-allied Italian Royal Navy and Italian Royal Air Force were known as the Italian Co-belligerent Navy and Italian Co-belligerent Air Force respectively. From September 1943, pro-Axis Italian forces became the National Republican Army of the newly formed Italian Social Republic.
The Italian Co-belligerent Army was the result of the Allied armistice with Italy on 8 September 1943; King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister in July 1943 following the Allied invasion of Southern Italy, and nominated Marshal of Italy (Maresciallo d'Italia) Pietro Badoglio instead, who later aligned Italy with the Allies to fight the Social Republic's forces and its German allies in Northern Italy.
The Italian Co-belligerent Army fielded between 266,000 and 326,000 troops in the Italian Campaign, of whom 20,000 (later augmented to 50,000, though some sources place this number as high as 99,000) were combat troops and between 150,000 and 190,000 were auxiliary and support troops, along with 66,000 personnel involved with traffic control and infrastructure defence. On the whole, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army made up 1/8 of the fighting force and 1/4 of the entire force of 15th Army Group of the Allied Forces.
I Motorized Grouping
The first formation of the Co-belligerent Army was the I Motorized Grouping (Italian: I Raggruppamento Motorizzato) created on 27 November 1943 in San Pietro Vernotico near Brindisi. The units for the I Motorized Grouping were drawn from the 58th Infantry Division "Legnano" and 18th Infantry Division "Messina". Some of the soldiers who joined the unit had managed to evade capture and internment by German forces. The unit was composed of 295 officers and 5,387 men and was created to participate alongside the Allies against Germany and the Italian Social Republic in the Italian campaign.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3732906. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Italian Co-belligerent Army” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.