A Civil War (54 page)

In Venezia Giulia the Action Party also appealed to Oberdan,
¹⁰⁵
which was,
furthermore, the name given to a Garibaldi battalion and chosen also as a
nom de guerre
; while in Verona it was the CLN that began one of its leaflets as follows: ‘On 24 May 1915 Italy sided with the United Nations to defeat the Prussian idea of world supremacy, which means bullying. 24 May 1944 finds Italy again at the side of the United Nations, engaged, for the second time in thirty years, in a terrible war to disinfect German skulls of a still more oppressive conception.'
¹⁰⁶

Among the accusations that it levelled at the king,
La Voce Repubblicana
, organ of a party that was not part of the CLN, included that of having shilly-shallied in 1914–15, out of love for the reactionary sovereigns of the Triple Alliance.
¹⁰⁷
Numerous testimonies of this kind can be found in the names of some formations (Battisti, Piave), or also in explicit appeals by well-qualified people like Luigi (Gigino) Battisti, son of Cesare, who on 19 February 1945, in a letter from Lugano to the minister of war, the Liberal Casati, asked to be enrolled in the Combat Groups, ‘recalling the motives of the Risorgimento and of the democratic interventionism of 1915'.
¹⁰⁸
Here too one could overdo things. The ‘Partito della Democrazia del lavoro' invoked the Italy of the Risorgimento and of Vittorio Veneto and, in the same breath, also included that of the ‘Libyan enterprise'.
¹⁰⁹

The Socialist and Communist parties, though not dissociating themselves from these appeals to the First World War, indeed contributing importantly to them, displayed some uncertainty and wavering on this score. On the one hand, the two parties were keen to shake off the reputation of being anti-patriots who had spat on the officers' medals; but on the other hand they were not prepared to publicly disclaim their consolidated verdicts on the great imperialistic world war. A southern edition of
Avanti!
emphatically recalled ‘the victory of democratic Italy over Prussian militarism', and for the entire world expressed the wish for ‘the second inevitable victory for the definitive elimination of every kind of militarism'.
¹¹⁰
It is an article in which the renewed theme of the anti-militarist, and therefore final, war coexists with the re-proposal of one of Fascism's most pitifully ridiculous propagandist formulae: ‘inevitable victory'. The Milan edition of the same paper published, again on the anniversary of the 4 November 1918 armistice, this half-title:

Still in the Socialist sphere, in Rome the official party organ attempted a fuller and at once more traditional argument: ‘The spiritual confusion of today's Italy stems essentially from the drama of two generations: that of the world war of 1914, and that of the present war.' The paper then goes on to define as ‘subsidiary and secondary' the motives espoused in 1915 for entering the war, such as ‘hatred of Germans, Latin solidarity, Bissoloti's democratic war or Corrdoni's revolutionary one, or else Trento and Trieste'.
¹¹²

The Communists had attempted to mediate between patriotic war and revolutionary war by adopting the name Garibaldi, but they generally remained reserved and prudent about the 1915–18 war, even if there were cases of patriotic ingenuity such as that found in a Garibaldi poster in the province of Bergamo: ‘Hitler today wants to follow the same fate as the Hapsburgs. Whoever lays a hand on Italy dies.'
¹¹³

Particularly revealing is the Communist Party's criticism of an article about the 4 November 1918 armistice that appeared in
Liberazione
, the Perugia CLN newspaper – though edited, to all effects, by the Communists. What was wrong in that article was the statement that ‘the '14–18 war was a war of national liberation. We cannot accept this point of view. Certain references may be made to the '14–18 war but must avoid that way of thinking.'
¹¹⁴

The fact that the writer of this letter replaced ‘'15–18' with ‘'14–18' is itself indicative of his non-patriotically Italo-centric viewpoint. Moreover – and this is worth noting in order to highlight the contradictions of censor and censored alike – he also criticised another article in the same newspaper, of 7 November, that had seemed to him to smack a good deal more of a Communist organ than of any kind of national front.

Appeals to the 1915–18 war certainly offered an alibi to the ‘anti-Fascism of the Fascists'.
¹¹⁵
At times languages become almost grotesquely mixed up in them, as in the case of an Alpino who had fought in the 1915–18 war. That First World War veteran told the Social Republic general who shook his hand before the coffin of his son killed by Slav partisans that he was proud that his son had given his life ‘ “for the
patria
and for the king”. No one dared contradict him.'
¹¹⁶

But, besides their ideological content, the appeals to 1915–18 presumably found an echo because they referred to an event that was close in time but not so close as to prevent memory from having the chance to transfigure
it, parenthesising its horrors. The First World War was an event that had been recounted to the younger men by their fathers as a fundamental, formative experience, punctuated by exceptional gestures, which struck their imaginations. ‘The action which has the flavour of the hoax played on the Bulgarians [
sic
]', runs a report about an attack on a Fascist barracks.
¹¹⁷

The memory of the First World War, like that of the Risorgimento, in any case led to the rediscovery both of one's traditional allies and of one's traditional enemy.

One of the instructions which, after Italy's entry into the war, the British issued as propaganda for our country was to avoid all ‘sentimental references to Anglo-Italian “traditional friendship” '.
¹
From June 1940 to September 1943, many things had certainly changed, and in fact after 8 September the Italian rulers let no chance slip to appeal to the ‘traditional allies'.
²
But British distrust of pro-Italian sentiment had not weakened much, even though declarations by Labour MPs in favour of the Italian people were forthcoming. These openings were greeted with satisfaction by the Resistance press, which nevertheless did not fail to recall, albeit discreetly, Churchill's pro-Mussolinian lapses.
³

British hostility to and lack of esteem for the Italians had been fuelled by
three years of war. Scepticism ran high about the capacity of such a devastated people to recover.

The impression that Churchill had drawn from the first armistice approaches made in Lisbon by the diplomat D'Ayeta had been that, fundamentally, it was a ‘plea that we should save Italy from the Germans as well as from herself, and do it as quickly as possible'.
⁴
At the beginning of the war, Churchill had also said to his private secretary, Sir John Colville, that the Italians ‘know how to excel in countless fields … And yet they have insisted on doing the only thing that they have never managed to do very well, fight.'
⁵
More unsparingly, the British foreign minister, Eden, in a note sent on 14 January 1943 to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, had declared that, rather than the prospect of Italy as an ally, he preferred that of a collapsed Italy, which the Germans would be compelled to occupy, thereby diverting immense forces from other fronts.
⁶
A leaflet air-dropped in the North by Allied, presumably British, aircraft in November 1943, crudely warned: ‘You cannot expect only us to fight for you and for your liberty, while Italian men stand to one side, or even fight against us alongside the Germans … Those who stay inactive at home do not deserve a place alongside the victor.'
⁷

In a broadcast of 8 October 1943, which seemed to prefigure the directive to consider the Italians a ‘logical but volatile people', Candidus, the most caustic of the commentators in Radio London's Italian broadcasts, and the one who seemed to have been assigned the task of telling the Italians the bitter truth, stated things yet more baldly:

Certainly, in the twenty months of German occupation the Allies were not unforthcoming in their appeals and tributes to the fighting spirit and valour of the Italians, even if in anti-Fascist and Resistance circles they often appeared to be too parsimonious.
⁹
At some moments these appeals were clearly instrumental in character; at others they expressed genuine wonder at the unsuspected gifts demonstrated by the Italians. But it was the very manifestation of this wonder that confirmed the widespread presence of the limited view of their combative virtues that the Italians sensed in the Allies, as they had already sensed it in the Germans (and in any case, in their heart of hearts many Italians considered that judgment to be not altogether unfounded). In a broadcast about the March 1944 strikes, Candidus said: ‘Admiration is all the greater for the fact that – let's face it – opinion was widespread abroad that the Italians would never have done such a thing … The idea that they lack not so much physical courage as military virtue and even the will to fight, is an old story.'

But, shifting emphasis, Candidus went on to say that by refusing ‘to fight for what is not felt as being essential and inalienable to the national community', the Italians had shown that they ‘had outgrown the vanity of militaristic glory' and demonstrated that they were ‘perhaps the most civil and wise people on the earth'; so much so that now, when ‘their very historical personality is in jeopardy', the Italians have demonstrated, once again, that they possess ‘courage' and ‘virility'.
¹⁰

Words like those, in the 25 May 1944 issue of
L'Unità
, should not therefore sound rhetorical: ‘A profound sense of emulation is stirring our national pride'
¹¹
– emulation regarding both the Allied armies and the Resistance movements of the other European countries. The Resistance leaders made a tenacious effort to shake off the narrow role of ‘obscure fifth column auxiliaries', in which, as Parri put it on one occasion, the Allies wanted, at least initially, to confine
the unexpected capacity for fighting back demonstrated by the Italians.
¹²
One of the most well-known and significant documents attesting to this attitude of the Allies is the letter that John McCaffery, the British representative in Switzerland, sent to Parri on 16 August 1944. The letter began by recalling that 25 July had been made possible only by the Allied victories, and then went on to say:

Shortly before this, the Englishman had come out with this scoffing exclamation: ‘But, for heaven's sake, you don't mean now to direct military operations instead of Eisenhower or Alexander!' The letter concludes with a warning: ‘One last word of advice. You have friends. Don't actually try to lose them.'
¹³

The Allied point of view, expressed by McCaffery with realistic baldness, generated a mixture of sentiments and resentments among the
resistenti
that combined in varying ways with the image, often vague and filtered in any case through their respective political sympathies, that they had of the British and Americans. The most deeply felt positions were held by those who could not forget that they belonged to a defeated and guilty country (their most burning sense of guilt was towards the French and Yugoslavians);
¹⁴
the most distrustful were those who could not get it out of their heads that the British and American armies were still always the instruments of two capitalist and imperialist powers. The Milanese Communist leaders were taken to task
by their Roman colleagues for having expressed this concept all too clearly in
L'Unità
.
¹⁵

A Tuscan Action Party newspaper summed up well the difficulties distinguishing relations with the Allies: ‘For some time now we have been saying that what has happened in Italy in the last few years has happened against the will of the people. Now, we can be totally convinced of this, without however succeeding in convincing others, if at the present moment we fail to play our part in the victory of the Allies.'
¹⁶