A Civil War (30 page)

In connection with the problem of local partisan recruitment, Revelli observed: ‘It's the nucleus of
montanari
, the Alpini partisans, that keeps the brigade in one piece'; and, comparing his memory of the Don line and the experience of the Alpine huts of Paralup, he pointed out: ‘The discipline, the hierarchy, at Belogore as at Paralup, was not a matter of form, but of substance. The Alpini respected the corporal, the NCO, the officer whom they esteemed. Ranks counted for nothing … Our soldiers were waging war in grey-green uniforms, but underneath, on their skin, they wore bourgeois stuff, from home, made of warm wool.'
⁸⁵

Here, we are among the GL units of the Cuneo area. But in other
resistenti
, for example among the Garibaldini of the Isontino, Alpine solidarity could appear, instead, in the guise of old-style paternalism. The commanders of the Osoppo formations – national Catholics, but with a vein of
azionismo
as well
⁸⁶
– struck the political commissar of the Natisone division as being ‘distant from their men and when they approached them they did so in the paternalistic spirit of the Alpini officers'.
⁸⁷
For that matter, still less politicised autonomous formations of the Osoppo brigade and plainly ‘military' ones, like the divisions commanded by Major ‘Mauri' (Enrico Martini), had also dubbed themselves
alpine
. In the first section of one of their ‘Regulations', the Brescian Green Flames, disliked both by
the Garibaldini and the GL, wrote, with gestures drawn from patriotic rhetoric: ‘The Green Flames are continuing the glorious tradition of the Italian Alpine battalions, which have never known defeat.'
⁸⁸

As already with the Arditi, the Alpini were compared with the
paracadutisti
(the paratroopers), the army's latest speciality.
⁸⁹
We have already seen how, after 25 July, with the collapse of the National-Fascist motivations for fighting the war, a powerful
esprit de corps
had sought to take their place. After 8 September this identity – expressed in the formula, ‘We are above all
paracadutisti
'
⁹⁰
– found itself with a still heavier and more contradictory task. On the one hand, it meant that the paratroopers became one of the most solid divisions of the CIL (Italian Liberation Corps); on the other hand, by insisting on a high degree of continuity between the two wars (1940–43 and 1943–45), and consequently refusing to accept any serious criticism of the recent past, it rendered impossible any genuine moral participation in the new experience. The case of the
paracadutisti
thus lays bare how a merely combative ethic was incapable of carrying the weight of such profound historical upheavals. The Fascist-type conduct of the
paracadutisti
in the Kingdom of the South, which made them resemble their fellow-soldiers of the Social Republic, was rooted in the fact that the ‘wide horizon of myths, symbolic references and values which had found expression and exaltation in Fascism, precipitating into the world war even in the identity of the corps born from it, did not appear to be called into question'.
⁹¹

It is easy, therefore, to understand not only the denunciations and protests from the democratic side,
⁹²
but also the distrust that made General Umberto Utili advise against dropping
paracadutisti
behind the lines,
⁹³
and finally the fact that after the war the
paracadutisti
of the North and South cancelled the Gothic line, converging into a single association. Frustration and the incapacity to overcome it characterise these soldiers. Paradigmatic of this is the episode which sees the
paracadutisti
triumphantly entering a liberated village in the Marche: joy at this rediscovered unison with the spirit of the people is immediately wrecked by their seeing those applauding them with clenched fists.
⁹⁴
This gave birth to
defeatist velleities which,
excusatio non petita
, induced someone to write in the corps newspaper: ‘There's no getting rid of the so-called squadristic spirit'.
⁹⁵
On the opposite side, the army put together by the Social Republic in turn found itself in a tricky relationship with the tradition of the Italian army. If the armed forces of the Social Republic seemed to have broken drastically with those of the Royal Army, this formal fracture with the institutional authorities of the state was not matched by a corresponding fracture in the institution of the army as such. Moreover, continuity with the war alongside the German ally – indeed, continuity with ‘all the wars', as the Fascists were forever fond of putting it – provided a legitimising framework for the army, and also to a great extent the RSI as such. It was inevitable that a high degree of continuity should derive from the two wars even in the armed forces which had fought them, and which had to continue fighting them. Badoglio might well be dubbed the ‘felon marshal'; but could all the marshals, all the generals, all the high-ranking officers of the army, be dubbed felons? Could the whole structure be considered irremediably corrupt?

The dilemma that the Social Republic encountered when it attempted to furnish itself with a military organism was, if truth be told, but one aspect of the more general contradiction with which the Social Republic and the republican Fascist Party had to grapple as regards the Kingdom of Italy and the Fascist National Party, i.e. the twenty-year-old Fascist–monarchic regime. It is well-known that, in the case of the armed forces, this contradiction was shown in the different ideas as to how they should be organised that were held, on the one hand, by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had become minister of defence, and on the other, by the old
squadrista
ringleader Renato Ricci, now chief of the militia, and Alessandro Pavolini, secretary of the Republican Fascist Party (PFR).
⁹⁶
The communiqué issued on 27 September 1943, after the first meeting of the renascent Fascist government, reads as follows: ‘The land, sea and air forces will be respectively incorporated into the militia, navy and air force of the republican Fascist state. Recruitment will be by conscription and by voluntary choice.'
⁹⁷

In line with their programme of creating a ‘new', political and Fascist army, Renato Ricci and Alessandro Pavolini were in favour of voluntary enlistment; whereas Rodolfo Graziani, an old regular officer, was for conscription and recruitment in the internment camps in Germany (the Germans wanted
conscription but, to be on the safe side, training in Germany). Deakin is right when he says that the result of the internecine struggle for control of the armed forces was that the RSI found itself again with ‘a series of private armies and police forces owing but tenuous allegiance to any central authority'.
⁹⁸
This state of affairs made it hardly likely that there would be the recovery, so frequently boasted of by the Fascists, from the collapse suffered by the armed forces on 8 September; but it opened up new possibilities for those who somehow or other managed to pick themselves up. On the one hand, there was a small minority of diehards, easily swallowed up by the more violent aspects of the Italian military tradition. On the other hand, there was a certain quantity of conscripts, again wearing grey-green uniforms, with the
gladius
rather than stars, who instead reproduced the most depressing features of the old army. The censors recorded disbandments, desertions, ‘oaths taken passively', ‘humanitarian- or religious-based defeatism', and above all impatience with, or even hatred of, barrack-room life and military service.
⁹⁹
Very probably, the choice of the title
Naja repubblichina
– a small newspaper published by the Cuneo GL, and addressed to the soldiers of the Monterosa and Littorio divisions
¹⁰⁰
– was prompted by an accurate intuition of this reality. ‘Getting their pay and fence-sitting' are the distinguishing features of the officers of the RSI army, according to a report by the Cremona Republican National Guard of 4 October 1944;
¹⁰¹
and many other Fascist sources do not skimp on unsparing descriptions of the low morale and scant or even nonexistent fighting spirit of the new Republican army. ‘We're sick of being soldiers', one soldier writes, in the hope that the censors of his letter will get a clear ‘concept of us'.
¹⁰²

Already, at the end of 1943, a report from the Modena area speaks of recruits born between 1923 and 1925 who had presented themselves ‘solely for fear of something worse befalling them', and who lacked ‘the spirit of sacrifice, love of their country, youthful enthusiasm for anything military; in short, they bore with them the whole wretched bourgeois mentality which lately has completely disoriented almost the entire Italian population'.
¹⁰³

On the threshold of summer 1944, a German document describes the
situation in the Biella area as follows: ‘The Italian commands of the different units place themselves behind the German commands and take no initiatives of their own … The Italian commands are not a hundred percent committed to the struggle, the troops are not committed at all. One can't rule out the possibility that many will go over to the enemy.'
¹⁰⁴

The German Colonel Jandl made this general observation: ‘The men who must form the new army, and particularly the higher-ranking officers, may be inferior in number; but otherwise they will always be the same. The September 8
^th
revolution has not brought about a spiritual change.'
¹⁰⁵
Similar views are found in the Anglo-American documents.
¹⁰⁶
Even an Italian SS division, ‘all southerners', who have donned that uniform ‘in order to get back from Germany', are mocked in a GL document for ‘not being employed except to look after the horses'.
¹⁰⁷
And, as had already happened in the Royal Army, the choral war-song, an ‘element of spiritual invigoration', was given the task of reviving the troops' spirits, forgetting once again the distance separating a spontaneous song (including the Fascist ones) and a song ordered from above, between ‘the manly youth who with Roman determination will fight' and ‘I'm a poor deserter', sung by the Alpini in Russia.
¹⁰⁸
Towards the Royal Army and their symbols, the volunteer Fascist soldiers, or at least the more highly motivated of them, showed a hostility and contempt that vied with those of the
resistenti –
proving again how similar reactions found different outlets. Witness the letter of a soldier who, in the Balkans, had gone over to serve directly under the Germans:

I've suffered a lot but have already forgotten. What I haven't forgotten, though, are those sons of bitches, the Italian officers who abandoned us in the mountains of the Balkans, naked, without a piece of bread, and I who went the rounds of the Muslims' houses asking for a piece of bread or
polenta
to appease my hunger, naked and unshod, without clothes in the depth of winter sleeping in the woods.
¹⁰⁹

In another letter, as was sometimes the case between 1940 and 1943 as well, when comparisons were made with the German army the latter came out best in every way, and not only in terms of military power. A soldier training in Germany writes:

The Fascists who made their choice in Italy express themselves no less radically: ‘Ranks no longer exist … The defeat has abolished them. We're all equal! Let them just try coming and busting our balls!'
¹¹¹
Stars of rank become an ‘abhorred symbol', which is torn off, but – remember the contradiction pointed out above – a lieutenant says: ‘I've nothing to be ashamed of for wearing my stars, if anyone so much as tries I'll kill him.'
¹¹²
‘But what are they doing here?' the volunteers would say of the re-draftees. And their faithful interpreter recalls: ‘There was a disconsolate atmosphere, of people doing things without conviction, reluctantly resigned to having to do them, and which the mess officer's clowning certainly did nothing to dissipate … We didn't mix with them.'
¹¹³
A Fascist newspaper of 29 February 1944 speaks of young men who signed up ‘with enthusiasm and faith and who now say that they are discouraged'. There was even a drop in the morale of the ‘volontari della morte' (‘volunteers of death'), contaminated by the many
badogliani
with whom they were incorporated.
¹¹⁴
‘They seem like the royal army', a partisan chief said of a group of deserters who went over to the ranks of the Resistance.
¹¹⁵
Yet this ‘seem like the royal army'
would also be the salvation of the RSI officers when the tribunals appointed to judge them after the Liberation felt, as has been written, a ‘sense of guilt' towards them.
¹¹⁶

This sort of low-level continuity – as we might call it – this sort of drawn-out, dragging 8 September, is found, too, in an opposite political and international context, in the army that the Kingdom of the South was endeavouring to put back on its feet. The inefficiency, the mediocre fighting spirit, the lack of motivation, the widespread draft-dodging (the ‘we're not going' sentiment), the desertions, the scant influx of volunteers, are well-known phenomena.
¹¹⁷
They need to be recalled here as confirmation of the fact that the moral disenchantment with the Royal Army was as widespread a phenomenon in the South as in the North, though obviously it manifested itself in very different forms. Nor, in the case of the South, can this phenomenon be said to have been reabsorbed by the process of bureaucratic reconstruction that the old military institutions somehow succeeded in setting in motion. On the contrary, this very restructuring, in the small part that was successful as in the large part in which it suffered setbacks, reveals (with due exceptions) how historically mistaken it is to speak of the moral unity that was created between the combatants – the partisans of the North and the regular soldiers of the South.