The armistice was approved by both Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who was serving as Prime Minister of Italy at the time.

Nazi Germany responded by attacking Italian forces in Italy, southern France and the Balkans, and freeing Benito Mussolini on 12 September.

After the surrender of the Axis powers in North Africa on 13 May 1943, the Allies bombed Rome on 16 May, invaded Sicily on 10 July and prepared to land on the Italian mainland.

The conspirators devised an "Order of the Day" for the next meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism (Gran Consiglio del Fascismo), which contained a proposal to restore direct control of politics to the King.

After the Council, held on 25 July 1943, a majority vote adopted the "order of the day", and Mussolini was then summoned to meet the King and dismissed as prime minister.

On 27 August, General Castellano returned to Italy and, three days later, briefed Badoglio about the Allied request for a meeting to be held in Sicily, which had been suggested by the British Ambassador to the Vatican.

To ease communication between the Allies and the Italian government, a captured British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, Dick Mallaby, was released from Verona Prison and secretly moved to the Quirinale.

On 31 August, Brigade General Castellano reached Termini Imerese, in Sicily, by plane and was transferred to Cassibile, a town near Syracuse.

Other generals, such as Giacomo Carboni, maintained that the Army Corps deployed around Rome was insufficient to protect the city because of the lack of fuel and ammunition and that the armistice had to be postponed.

The message, however, was intercepted by the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, which had long since begun to suspect that Italy was seeking a separate armistice.

The Germans doubted his reassurances, and the Wehrmacht started to devise an effective plan, Operation Achse, to take control of Italy as soon as the Italian government had switched allegiance to the Allies.

Harold Macmillan, the British government's representative minister at the Allied Staff, informed Winston Churchill that the armistice had been signed "without amendments of any kind".

Nevertheless, Bedell Smith explained to Castellano that the other conditions would have taken effect only if Italy had not taken on a fighting role in the war alongside the Allies.

Most of the Regio Esercito (Italian Royal Army) had not been informed about the armistice, and no clear orders had been issued about the line of conduct to be taken in the face of the German armed forces.

Their initial intention was to move army headquarters out of Rome with the King and the Prime Minister, but few staff officers reached Brindisi.

From 8 to 12 September, the German forces occupied all of the Italian territory that was still not under Allied control, except Sardinia and part of Apulia, without meeting organized resistance.

On 3 September, British and Canadian troops crossed the Strait of Messina and began landing in the southernmost tip of Calabria during Operation Baytown.

The Allies coveted the Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy), with its 206 ships in total, including the battleships Roma, Vittorio Veneto, and Italia (known as Littorio until July 1943).

[3] At 02:30, on 9 September, the three battleships Roma, Vittorio Veneto, and Italia "shoved off from La Spezia escorted by three light cruisers and eight destroyers".

Most of the remaining ships made it safely to North Africa "while three destroyers and a cruiser which had stopped to rescue survivors, docked in Menorca".

[3] An agreement between the Allies and the Italians in late September provided for some of the Navy to be kept in commission; however, the battleships were to be reduced to care and maintenance and effectively disarmed.

The agreement included that Benito Mussolini and his Fascist officials must be handed over to the United Nations, and all Italian land, air, and naval forces must surrender unconditionally.