All Hell Let Loose (75 page)

The overthrow of Mussolini, far from bringing a cessation of bloodshed and freeing Italy to embrace the Allies, exposed the land to devastation at the hands of both warring armies. On 13 October, the new government declared war on Germany. The view of many Italians about their nation’s change of allegiance, and about the Germans, was expressed in a letter one man wrote two days later: ‘I won’t fight on their side – nor, since we have been guilty of
betrayal
, against them, although I think them disgusting.’ Origo noted, ‘The great mass of Italians “
tira a campare
” – just rub along.’ Emanuele Artom, a member of a Torinese Jewish intellectual resistance group, wrote: ‘Half Italy is German, half is English and there is no longer an Italian Italy. There are those who have taken off their uniforms to flee the Germans; there are those who are worried about how they will support themselves; and finally there are those who announce that now is the moment of choice, to go to war against a new enemy.’ Artom himself was captured, tortured and executed in the following year.

Nazi repression and fear of being deported to Germany for forced labour provoked a dramatic growth of partisan activity, especially in the north of Italy. Young men took to the mountains and pursued lives of semi-banditry: by the war’s end, almost 150,000 Italians were under arms as guerrillas. Political divisions caused additional factional warfare in many areas, notably between royalists and communists. Some fascists continued to fight alongside the Germans, while the Allies raised their own Italian units to reinforce the overstretched Anglo-American armies. Few such recruits proved enthusiastic: when an Italian artillery battery fighting with the Allies was inspected by the king’s son, Crown Prince Umberto, gunner Eugenio Corti found himself pitying the royal visitor, ‘leader of a people skilled in discovering scapegoats for their own cowardice’, united only in a desperate desire for all the belligerents to quit their shores.

In June 1944, amid the euphoria of the advance on Rome, Alexander made a gravely ill-judged broadcast appeal to Italy’s partisans, calling on them to rise against the Germans. Many communities consequently suffered savage repression when the Allied breakthrough proved inconclusive. After the war, Italians compared Anglo-American incitement to a partisan revolt, followed by their subsequent abandonment of the population to retribution, with the Russians’ failure to succour Warsaw during its equally disastrous rising in the autumn of 1944. The lesson was indeed the same: Allied commanders who promoted guerrilla warfare behind the Axis lines bore a heavy moral responsibility for the horrors that followed, in exchange for marginal military advantage.

The Germans, having previously regarded their Italian allies as mere poltroons, now viewed them as traitors. ‘We are poor wretches, poor beings left to the mercy of events, without homeland, without law or sense of honour,’ wrote Lt. Pedro Ferreira among the Italian forces in Yugoslavia, where many of his comrades were shot by the Germans after the armistice. ‘Italians, after this shame, can never again lift up their heads and speak of honour. Are we betrayed or betrayers? What fate will be in store for us when we have changed our flag three times in two days?’ Kesselring ruled Italy with a ruthlessness vividly documented in his order of 17 June 1944: ‘
The fight against the partisans must be conducted with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity
. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice and severity of the methods he adopts against partisans. In this connection the principle holds good that a mistake in the choice of methods in executing one’s orders is better than failure or neglect to act.’ He added on 1 July: ‘Wherever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a proportion of the male population will be shot.’

The most notorious massacre of innocents was carried out at Hitler’s behest, with Kesselring’s endorsement, under the direction of Rome’s Gestapo chief, Lt. Col. Herbert Kappler. On 23 March 1944, partisans attacked a marching column of the Bozen Police Regiment in the Via Rasella. Gunfire and explosives killed thirty-three Germans and wounded sixty-eight, while ten civilians were also killed. In reprisal, Hitler demanded the deaths of ten Italians for each German. Next afternoon, 335 prisoners were taken from the Regina Coeli prison to the Ardeatine Caves. They were a random miscellany of actors, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, cabinet-makers, an opera singer and a priest. Some were communists, and seventy-five were Jews. Two hundred of them had been seized in the streets near the Via Rasella following the partisan attack, though none was involved in it. In batches of five they were led into the caves and executed, the bodies left where they fell. Though the Germans used explosives to close the shaft in a half-hearted attempt to conceal the massacre, this was rendered ineffectual by the stench that soon seeped forth. The caves became a place of pilgrimage and tears.

Elide Ruggeri was one of a handful of survivors of another massacre, in the churchyard at Marzabotto, a picturesque little town at the foot of the Apennines, where in September 1944 Waffen SS troops exacted a terrible revenge on the civilian population for local partisan activities. ‘All the children were killed in their mothers’ arms,’ she later recounted. Though herself badly hit, she lay motionless under the dead. ‘Above and beside me were the bodies of my cousins and of my mother, whose stomach had been ripped open. I lay motionless all that night, through the next day and the night following, in rain and a sea of blood. I almost stopped breathing.’ At dawn on the second day, Ruggeri and four other wounded women crawled out from beneath the heaped corpses. Of her own family, five had been killed. In all, 147 people died at the church, including the priests who had been officiating when the SS arrived; twenty-eight families were wiped out. At nearby Casolari a further 282 victims perished, including thirty-eight children and two nuns. The final local civilian toll was 1,830, and moved Mussolini to make a vain protest to Hitler. It is bizarre that Kesselring, under whose orders the SS acted, was reprieved from execution at Nuremberg.

If the Allied invaders never matched such horrors, they were parties to lesser crimes against humanity: French colonial troops, especially, committed large-scale atrocities. ‘Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place,’ wrote a British NCO, Norman Lewis:

Such Allied excesses, matched by the effects of air and artillery bombardment through the long struggle up the peninsula, ensured that few Italians gained much joy from their ‘deliverance’. Two soldiers of 4th Indian Division were chasing a chicken around a farmyard when a window of the adjoining house was thrown open: ‘A woman’s head appeared, and a totally unexpected English voice called out ‘— off, and leave my —ing ’ens alone. We don’t need no liberation ’ere.’

Italy’s surrender precipitated a mass migration of British prisoners of war, set free from camps in the north of the country to undertake treks through the Apennines towards the Allied lines. A defining characteristic of these odysseys, many of which lasted months, was the succour such men received from local people. Peasant kindness was prompted by an instinctive human sympathy, rather than enthusiasm for the Allied cause, which deeply moved its beneficiaries. The Germans punished civilians who assisted escapers by the destruction of their homes, and often by death, yet sanctions proved ineffectual: thousands of British soldiers were sheltered by tens of thousands of Italian country folk whose courage and charity represented one of the noblest aspects of Italy’s unhappy part in the war. Canadian Farley Mowat arrived in the country with a contempt for its people, but changed his mind after living among them. ‘Now it turns out they’re the ones who are really the salt of the earth. The ordinary folk, that is. They have to work so hard to stay alive it’s a wonder they aren’t as sour as green lemons, but instead they’re full of fun and laughter. They’re also tough as hell … They ought to hate our guts as much as Jerry’s but the only ones I wouldn’t trust are the priests, lawyers, and the big shopkeepers, landowners and such.’

The wild Italian countryside and the hospitable customs of its inhabitants prompted desertions from the Allied armies on a scale greater than in any other theatre. The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men ‘on the trot’ – overwhelmingly infantry, because they recognised their poor prospects of survival at the front. Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944–45 – the equivalent of two divisions – and around half that number of Americans. These are quite extraordinary figures, which deserve more notice in narratives of the campaign, though it should be noted that official histories set the desertion numbers much lower, partly because they omit those who, by a technically important distinction, were deemed merely to be ‘absent without leave’. In a rest area behind the front, Lt. Alex Bowlby chanced on a man who had quit his own platoon, dining with an Italian family. The errant soldier finished his meal, left the house and stole the bewildered young officer’s jeep before anyone thought to stop him. Amidst the chronic discomforts and terrors of the campaign, Bowlby noted that most of his men performed their duties at the edge of mutiny. One would-be deserter removed by the military police shouted back defiantly at his comrades, ‘I’ll be alive when you’re all fucking dead.’ Alexander itched to reintroduce the death penalty as a deterrent, and a British divisional commander, Bill Penney, agreed: ‘Shooting in the early days would probably have been an effective prophylactic.’ But capital punishment was deemed politically unacceptable.

Both the Germans and the Allies distributed broadsheets to the population, making competing demands for their aid. Iris Origo wrote: ‘The peasants read these leaflets with bewildered anxiety as to their own fate, and complete indifference (in most cases) to the main issue:
Che sara di noi?
– What will become of us? All that they want is peace – to get back to their land – and to save their sons. They live in a state of chronic uncertainty about what to expect from the arrival of soldiers of any nationality. They might bring food or massacre, liberation or pillage.’ On 12 June 1944, Origo was in the garden of her castello rehearsing
Sleeping Beauty
with her resident complement of refugee children, when a party of heavily armed German troops descended from a truck.

Full of fear, she asked what they wanted, to receive an unexpected answer: ‘“Please – wouldn’t the children sing for us?” The children sing
O Tannenbaum
and
Stille Nacht
(which they learned last Christmas) – and tears come into the men’s eyes. “
Die Heimat
– it takes us back to
die Heimat
!” So they climb into their lorry and drive away.’ Less than two weeks later, the area was occupied by French colonial troops. Origo wrote bitterly: ‘The Goums have completed what the Germans begun. They regard loot and rape as the just reward for battle, and have indulged freely in both. Not only girls and young women, but even an old woman of eighty has been raped. Such has been Val d’Orcia’s first introduction to Allied rule – so long and so eagerly awaited!’

Allied forces maintained a sluggish advance up the peninsula, but from the summer of 1944 onwards, it was a source of some dismay to Alexander’s soldiers that Mediterranean operations and sacrifices commanded diminishing attention at home. ‘We are the D-Day dodgers in sunny Italee,’ they sang, ‘always on the vino, always on the spree.’ The world saw that the outcome of the war hinged upon events much further north, in France and Germany. But the Italian front occupied the attention of one-tenth of Hitler’s ground forces, which would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern Front or in France. Allied air bases in Italy made possible a heavy and effective bomber assault on Germany’s Romanian oilfields. It is hard to imagine how the campaign might have been accelerated, avoided or broken off. But it yielded neither glory nor satisfaction to those who fought, or to the hapless inhabitants of the battlefield.

3
YUGOSLAVIA

The Italian campaign prompted a surge of British enthusiasm, with tepid American acquiescence, for raising the tempo of anti-Axis operations in neighbouring Yugoslavia. Throughout the war, Churchill embraced every nation which displayed a willingness to join the struggle against Hitler: this was a fundamental tenet of his foreign policy, lent urgency in 1940–41 by Britain’s desperate circumstances. The consequence was to make bedfellows of some societies with which the democracies had little or nothing in common, of which Yugoslavia was a striking example. From 1943 onwards, its accessibility from Italy, together with the wider strategic significance of the Balkans, made it the focus of many British hopes.

Granted statehood in 1918 amid the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, the country was an ill-assorted ragbag of mutually hostile ethnic groups and conflicting ideologies, ruled as a dictatorship until 1941 by Prince Paul on behalf of the teenage King Peter. Most of the country was extraordinarily primitive. A communist partisan described a typical peasant community: ‘Many had never been even in the nearby towns. [The women] wore hand-woven dresses open down to the navel, so that their breasts flopped out. They greased their hair with butterfat, parted it in the middle, then tucked it up over their foreheads. Their vocabulary was meagre, except concerning livestock and the like … The men were on a markedly higher level than the women, for they had seen something of the world in the army, on jobs and through trade.’