When Italy declared a 1943 WWII armistice some 2.5 million Italian soldiers had to decide: fight with the Germans, go to prison or escape. More than 100,000 joined Gothic Line Allied Forces Pt. 1

``The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history By Joe Kirwin It is known as the ``the choice'' in Italian military history annals. When Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini was arrested in July of 1943 and the country declared a WWII Armistice against Allied Forces two months later, the soldiers of the Italian Armed Forces faced an agonizing decision - stay loyal to the Germans and fight with them or be shipped to prisoner of war camps in Germany. Many went to prisoner of war camps. Many died in the camps; some decided to join the Mussolini puppet army and government known as the Italian Social Republic set up by Hitler after the Italian dictator was rescued from a prison in the mountains outside Rome. However many Italian soldiers escaped and joined the Italian resistance. The Allied Forces retrained more than 100,000 of those that escaped and they joined the British Eighth Army on the Gothic Line in the last months of WWII. The soldiers played a key role in the post-WWII reconstruction of Italy and its becoming a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union. The Italian military of today traces its roots back to the ``The Choice.''