A Civil War (31 page)

Privileged testimonies are provided by the partisans fighting in the territories gradually liberated by the slow advance of the Allies or by those (the most notable being possibly that of the Modena Garibaldi division commanded by Armando),
¹¹⁸
who, for various reasons, crossed the lines and found themselves once more before a military machine by now utterly alien to their way of thinking. News circulating in the North about the ‘difficult encounter between partisans and liberation troops', and the whole state of affairs in the South, hardly boded well.
¹¹⁹
The real, new Italian army is the partisan one, wrote the
newspaper of the 1
^st
GL Alpine division, not the one formed from the relics of the ‘regular' army which ‘is on the other side of the front doing lord knows what'.
¹²⁰
‘Insurmountable distrust of an organism which is considered without a doubt an instrument of the monarchy' is attributed to ‘several partisan commanders' at a meeting of the Florentine executive committee of the Action Party;
¹²¹
while the black picture painted, in some ‘Appunti' (‘Notes') by the Presidency of the Council, of the situation at the Cesano training centre in Rome is completed by noting the tendency of the former partisans, along with other left-wingers, ‘not to recognise the authority of the officers of the army'.
¹²²

On 17 February 1945, speaking on Radio Roma, the Liberal Aldobrando Medici Tornaquinci, under-secretary for occupied Italy, might well hail the ‘day of the partisan and of the soldier' in the name of the ‘fusion between the regular and volunteer elements of the armed forces', blithely invoking precedents from the Risorgimento;
¹²³
but the denunciation that had been made on 27 July 1944 at a PCI leadership meeting comes closer to the truth.
¹²⁴

The former partisans were not alone in showing intolerance towards the officers. A Military Information Service report on the irregular divisions reads that ‘all in all resentment, hatred and contempt are often to be observed towards the officer category, who are regarded as responsible for the material ill-being of the troops'. The officers were accused of enjoying innumerable privileges even now that their ineptitude had brought about the collapse. Accordingly, morale was low in the officers and NCOs, ‘depressed' by the evident lack of esteem that they sensed in the lower ranks and among civilians, as well as by the difficulty of living conditions and the scant manifestation of patriotism.
¹²⁵

‘I curse all Italian officers, let's hope all these Italian officers spill blood, let's hope that things go badly for them too', says a soldier's letter. And in a carabiniere's letter:

Significant here is the overlapping of emotions and motivations, and the nagging memory of 8 September. In another letter, this generates derision for the generals who ‘have betrayed the country, handing it over to the Germans without fighting'. Or again: ‘Then someone will pay with his infamy to us, the world has changed, the time of Mussolini is over, those
signori
, the officers, will have to work and earn their bread with their own sweat.'
¹²⁶
In many of these letters, there is a telling comparison with the organisation and spirit of the Allied armies, also made by the partisans when the Anglo-American missions begin to arrive, and wholly favourable to the Allies. It is just the good-for-nothing officers who would prevent the Allies from doing all the good they might. This extract from a letter is typical: ‘Now we're more barefoot and naked, so we make a sorry sight walking through the street, but all this comes from the Italian commands who would like to send us all to a concentration camp because the Americans wanted to clothe us but they replied that they didn't need clothing, while we're the ones who have to suffer.'

Less rancorously, another letter speaks of the English as ‘human folk, very different from what they wanted us to believe in Mussolini's times'.
¹²⁷
A Military Censorship Office statistic, eloquent not least in its obvious approximation, gives the figure for those favourable towards the national government as 65.69 percent, while for those favourable towards the Allies the figure rises to 88.66, and patriotism must make do with 55.19.
¹²⁸
Mirroring such judgments are those given by authoritative Allied officers, which pitilessly reveal the contradictions of the Italian government's debating over the question of the war effort against Germany. A prime example is Major General Browning's severe sermon, addressed on 15 January 1945 to the war minister, the Liberal Alessandro Casati, because he had not yet cleared refugees out of the Cesano barracks allocated for training the Italian Liberation Corps combat groups: ‘Italy is expecting much of
her Combat Groups. You must give them the facilities to obtain the best possible reinforcements. Failure to do this is a definite hindrance to, even sabotage of, the war effort.'
¹²⁹

Certainly, the Allies themselves could be accused – at the centre as on the periphery
¹³⁰
– of sabotage, or at least of discouraging the Italian war effort; and the reasons for and contradictions of this attitude have been widely investigated.
¹³¹
But one act of sabotage does not exclude the other, while both contributed to throwing into disarray the improvised new Italian soldiers. Small wonder, then, that some of them came to see in the rigid correctness of the allied Commands the only point of less unstable reference. A couple of months earlier, General Browning, who supervised the training of the Combat Groups, had written: ‘The rank and file are of first-rate quality; give me two years with British officers and NCOs … and we'd have an army as good as any in Europe.'
¹³²
Almost in anticipated counterpoint with the British general, a clandestine paper of the North (commenting on an episode that had occurred in the South) had written, with a touch of white man's arrogance sustained by wounded national pride: ‘So the English have ended up incorporating our anti-Badoglian volunteers with their officers, as they do with the Indians and the natives of Kenya.'
¹³³
True, the testimonies of the grim legacies of the collapse refer above all to the divisions not deployed on the front (the majority), while generally, but not always,
¹³⁴
those on the fighting line are described as being more cohesive. But it is also true
that views like those expressed by General Browning refer to a more general picture including the entire armed forces of the South, which never managed to regain legitimacy in the eyes of the country. Their identity as an instrument against the anti-German war remained always uncertain even for the government itself. Apolitical patriotism, vaguely and rhetorically proclaimed, could provide no solid cement to so unliveable an endeavour as ‘traditional military enterprise'.
¹³⁵
An example of the rhetoric of the time is given by Under-Secretary Medici Tornaquinci's invectives against the ‘wretched sophistries' of those who want to know ‘whether the officer who will command them will be monarchic or republican'.
¹³⁶
An example of rhetoric shot through with diehard nostalgia can be found again in the position taken by the ‘Associazione nazionale combattenti della guerra di liberazione' deployed in the regular divisions of the armed forces: one of their representatives wanted retrospectively to sew military stars (
stellette
) on the shabby tunics of the partisans, who were in fact defined as ‘italiani con le stellette'.
¹³⁷
There is, however, some extenuation here in the fact that, at the PCI national council of 7 April 1945, Togliatti had deprecated ‘volunteers who do not want to wear stars'.
¹³⁸

The ‘staggering fact of the meagre number of those who have answered the call-up', as the CLN of Teramo put it,
¹³⁹
or the young men's repugnance ‘for a war whose cause they do not know' (according to the view of General Pietro Pinna, high commissioner for Sardinia),
¹⁴⁰
are borne out by General Utili's complaints about the silence over the Liberation Corps and the failure to support it.
¹⁴¹
General Angelo Cerica would declare to the Tuscan CLN: ‘This army, which feels itself to be held in contempt and forgotten by the country, can in no way accept the sacrifice, and will do all that it can to do as little as possible.'
¹⁴²
The failed influx of recruits, moreover, fanned the exhausted war veterans' feeling that it was ‘always the same ones who had to risk their lives'.
¹⁴³

South of the Garigliano, and then of the Gothic line, the Italians were in fact living in the profound conviction that, ‘for them, the war had really ended with the arrival of the Allies, and that what followed was a painful and mostly incomprehensible epilogue in which they felt they had no part'.
¹⁴⁴
Out of this grew an atmosphere of widespread depression and impatience with the authority of a state that had made itself so little trusted or believed. In those conditions it was ‘often dangerous – often loathsome'
¹⁴⁵
to perform the service of keeping the peace. But above all it was an atmosphere that helps us better understand, on the one hand, the Fascist traces whose presence is indicated by many documents among both the troops at the front and those in the supply lines, as well as the draft-dodgers, and on the other hand the explicit manifestations of left-wing tendencies revealed by the same documents relating to similar situations. Thus in Sassari, on 20 February 1945, several hundred re-draftees, hostile to the war, marched down Via Roma shouting ‘Duce! Duce!'; and on the very next day, another 200 abandoned the camps ‘with a red cloth around their heads'.
¹⁴⁶
The peacekeeping authorities were happy to bracket the Fascists and Reds together as ‘anti-monarchic'; but, quite apart from their slovenliness and archaic cunning, in the demonstrations against the calls to arms these opposite persuasions did at times overlap and become mixed, in a widely politically naive confusion. Well and truly Fascist, on the other hand, were those armed divisions who, like the Fiesole
paracadutisti
, went through the city singing Fascist battle songs or, like the Alpini in Fiesole, attacked the Communists.
¹⁴⁷

Such contrasts and confusions indicate the contradictory attitude of the parties of the left, and particularly the Communists, to the reconstruction of the armed forces in the South. On the one hand, the policy of national unity, which aimed at waging war against the Germans, required that every effort be concentrated on making the army efficient, and thereby overcoming the Allies' mistrust. On the other hand, an opposite kind of mistrust of the Italian military class and awareness of the mood of the population made it difficult to proceed coherently and efficiently towards that goal. The equation of partisans of the North and soldiers of the South was, moreover, often made by the northern
underground press, with different nuances – with more conviction by that of the right,
¹⁴⁸
but proposing the gradual diminution of ‘distinctions' by that of the left. As long as hope remained that volunteers' divisions might spring up in the South independent of the old army, this was the card that had been played, in the full knowledge of how that tallied with the mood rife among the
resistenti
. Thus
L'Italia Libera
hailed the ‘Gruppi combattenti Italia', on the very day that saw their definitive failure, as ‘the first nucleus of the Italian popular army … without any relationship with the royal authorities' – a position which did not, however, prevent them from associating the partisans with the soldiers who had fought at Monte Lungo from 8 to 16 December in the first, hapless, attempt to bring Italian regular troops back into the line.
¹⁴⁹

As early as 19 September,
L
'
Unità
had written: ‘And in the regions that have already been liberated we need to set up, we need to impose the setting up of Garibaldi volunteer formations to participate under the Italian flag in the anti-German war.'
¹⁵⁰
A couple of months later, a local Communist party petition, more or less deliberately forcing the facts, claimed that ‘The Guardia Nazionale and formations from the former army are already operating alongside the Anglo-Americans.'
¹⁵¹
L'Unità
saluted ‘with faith and enthusiasm'
the first Italian divisions fighting on the southern front
.
¹⁵²
A faith that scarcely tallied with the facts was placed in voluntary enrolment as a means of transforming the army from within, creating a more credible symbiosis with the partisans of the North. The orator who at the assembly of the ‘youth committee for the war of liberation', held at Rome in the Teatro Quirino, argued that the young were not joining up ‘because first they want a republican army',
¹⁵³
gave an explanation which was to some extent true in politicised city circles, but which over-simplified the infertile terrain on which calls to arms were falling. Here, too, a good example is a case from Rome where, in a demonstration at the university, weariness and
scepticism seek refuge in resentment of a nationalist feather. On the one hand, the young men contesting the parties' appeal claimed that they would not join up ‘because too long a period of suffering must give us the right to be left in peace'. On the other hand, they cited the persisting armistice regime, the imprisonment that so many Italian soldiers were still suffering in Allied hands, and lastly the memory of the ‘mutilated victory', the myth of which had been an intrinsic part of Fascist ideology. These young men argued that there was ‘no reason to fight for those who at the end of the last war, at whose side we fought, did not recognise our efforts to achieve victory'.
¹⁵⁴
Similarly inspired, a Liberal Reggio Calabria newspaper had published these reflections by a student: ‘The university students have been forced to take up arms for the defence of a cause they do not even know … The students ask today for many things to be set in order before they are made to fight.'
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