In Europe (74 page)

Close to Ithaca, about 300 kilometres from the Italian coast, lies the island of Kefallonia. When we land at the little airfield, a violent summer storm is underway. The sea is covered in white horses, the olive trees bend beneath each gust, the water bursts across the breakwater dividing the bay at the capital of Argostoli. The island was hit by a major earthquake in 1953, most of the streets and villages were rebuilt, and now the razing and hammering is once again going on everywhere. My hotel, the Mirabella, looks out over a market square crowded with cafés. Yet it is not the British and Italian tourists causing this huge upturn in the local construction trade. It is the homecomers.

Like large parts of the Mediterranean, this island was for decades a baby factory for Western Europe and the rest of the world. All the young people moved away, because they had no future here. I remember my first trip through Greece, in summer 1965: everywhere you came across villages inhabited only by old women. I recall a boarding house where I once ended up after a village feast: the woman of the house sadly showed me an enormous pile of beautifully embroidered blankets, made for her husband and her children. They had not been used for years.

Having made their fortunes in Western Europe, Australia and America, these prodigal sons have reached retirement age and are coming back by the hundreds. And they are all living out exactly the same dream: a two-storey house in the old village, a big balcony, a rooftop terrace, a garage with an automatic door, electric shutters and marble steps before the door. You see the men sitting in front of Hotel Mirabella, talking to their old schoolmates, toying with their worn strings of beads, gossiping about dead acquaintances. But their island has been consumed by time, there is little left of the old place, and so they stick together, the homecomers, fallen forever between two stools.

Upon arrival I announce my presence to the Grande Dame of the island, and am immediately summoned. Helena Cosmetatos (b.1910) resides in one of the few old houses that survived the 1953 earthquake and the ensuing demolition by the Greek Army. ‘Only the top floor is gone.’ The dark rooms are full of old paintings and antique woodwork. Her elderly husband potters about the house, occasionally singing a naughty French song from the 1930s.

During our talk in the garden, a lady friend, a grandchild and a British couple all come to pay their respects, and we move back and forth through a gamut of languages. Helena was born in Rhodesia, grew up in Athens, and now lives comfortably from her family's colonial fortune. ‘I met my Waterloo in 1936,’ she said. ‘That's when I married a Greek. What a peaceful life I should have had if I had only gone for a British office clerk who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five!’

She talks about her parents, who lived next door to the former dictator Metaxas, and about the parties that were held at their house all the time. ‘Ioannis Metaxas was a stern little man, he also came from these islands. But I had no idea what was going on behind all those closed doors. Back then all those men wanted to marry me, you know how it is. Metaxas was a great admirer of Mussolini, so when Italy declared war on us he felt utterly betrayed. He died not long afterwards. It was a catastrophe.’

Her husband fought against the Italians, in the Albanian mountains. ‘One day he suddenly showed up at the door. At first he didn't speak a word, until finally he said: “A bath.” He had come back all the way from northern Greece, on foot.’

Old Mr Cosmetatos shows me the big book of icons he has made, and whispers a racy joke in French. His wife shuts him up and starts talking about the war again.

‘The Italian years were good ones. When I arrived here on the boat in 1941 – you had to come ashore in a little dinghy then – my son lost one of his sandals in the water as he was climbing out. Two Italian soldiers ran into the water right away to fish it up. That was my first encounter with our occupiers.’

She tells me how to get to the local museum, saying I should go take a look for myself. In the heat of the afternoon I flip through files containing letters and instructions written by the Italian occupiers in 1942, pictures
of happy, marching soldiers, laughing men with a girl on a motorbike, and then a few clandestine photographs of the same boys sprawling on the ground, having been shot against a wall.

The garrison on Kefallonia was manned by officers and soldiers of the Acqui Division, friendly Italians who were perfectly content to have the gods of war pass them by. Occupiers and islanders lived together in remarkable harmony, they had drinks together, lay on the beach together and played football against each other. The troops attached to the little German occupational force on the island shared in that same peaceful atmosphere, they lazed in the sun, and at parties and meals let themselves be carried along by the contagious good cheer of their Italian comrades.

On 8 September, 1943, all that changed at a blow. A newly appointed Italian cabinet decided to end the fighting and sign a truce with the Allies. The Germans swiftly sent reinforcements to replace the Italians on the island. The commander of the Italian garrison, General Gandin, did not know what to do: should he lay down his weapons and surrender to the Germans, or take up arms and fight, this time on the Allied side?

Astonishingly enough, it was his soldiers who finally broke the deadlock: they held a vote, and decided to fight with the Allies against the Germans. So when two German landing craft with reinforcements approached the harbour, Captain Renzo Apollonio ordered the artillery to open fire. One of the ships sank.

More than enough opportunities presented themselves to come to the assistance of the troops on Kefallonia. The Allied navy was active everywhere in the region, and at least 300 Italian planes were standing ready at Brindisi. But nothing happened. One of the pilots later told the military historian Richard Lamb how they had urgently requested fuel and munitions, to go into action over Greece. ‘Instead we were told to fly our aircraft to Tunis, out of range of the hard-pressed troops on Kefallonia.’

The Acqui Division fought till their ammunition was exhausted. On 22 September, at 11 a.m., they raised the white flag.

Then the
Wehrmacht
's 22nd Mountain Corps, led by General Lanz, began slaughtering the Italians. Hundreds of soldiers were machine-gunned immediately upon surrender. Those who were not were locked up in Cassetta Rosa, the little town hall at San Teodoro. The first of them to be
executed was General Gandin. Then it was his officers’ turn; in the end almost 5,000 Italian soldiers were killed.

In Cassetta Rosa they were administered last rites before being led outside in little groups. ‘They knelt, wept, prayed, sang,’ wrote chaplain Romualdo Formato, one of the few survivors. ‘Many of the men called out the names of their mothers, wives, children.'Three officers embraced: ‘In life we were comrades, and that is how we shall enter paradise.’ Some of them clawed at the grass, as though trying to dig their way out. Meanwhile, the shooting continued.

Cassetta Rosa is still there. The house was abandoned years ago, and nature is busy devouring what is left. There are trees and bushes growing through the windows and the roof, the walls have sunken halfway into the ground; in another twenty or thirty years it will all be gone. Amid the tall grass is a plain little altar, put there only last year, bearing a statue of the Holy Virgin and a handful of artificial flowers. You can still see the bullet holes in the walls.

The bodies of the soldiers who were executed were burned, or loaded onto barges and sunk far out to sea; the
Wehrmacht
knew all too well that they had something to hide. The surviving soldiers of the Acqui Division – some 4,000 in all – were put aboard three ships bound for Piraeus, as prisoners of war. Just outside the harbour the ships ran into a minefield and exploded. The holds were padlocked and most of the prisoners were unable to escape, those who swam around were machine-gunned by the soldiers of the
Kriegsmarine
.

Any elderly person on this island can tell you about the stench and the sea full of corpses, but officially none of it ever happened. General Lanz of the
Wehrmacht
was sentenced to only twelve years at Nuremberg in 1948, because he insisted that he disobeyed Hitler's orders to kill all the Italians. His report to Army Group E, in which he confirmed that 5,000 Italians had been executed, had been meant only to mislead his superiors. According to Lanz, fewer than a dozen officers were shot, and then only because they had put up resistance. Other German officers verified his story: most of the Acqui Division had simply been shipped out to Piraeus. The American judges believed them. According to the Nuremberg tribunal, therefore, Lanz had actually
prevented
a mass murder.
At least half of the Acqui Division had apparently disappeared into thin air.

In fact, only a few dozen Italians escaped, including the legendary Captain Renzo Apollonio. ‘I don't really remember how we felt in those days,’ Helena Cosmetatos says. ‘It was horrible, perhaps it didn't impact on us directly, but those Italians had lived with us for two years. And they were always very helpful.’ While the killings were still going on, a taxi driver brought a wounded Italian soldier to her door. ‘What am I supposed to do with him?’ she had shouted. The driver shouted back: ‘Think of something, he has a mother too!’

She nursed him back to health; today he has a restaurant on Lake Como, with fifty tables. It all worked out in the end, for him.

WHEN THE AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT MARTHA GELLHORN FIRST
set foot in Italy in February 1944, she could hardly believe her eyes: no hurricane could have done more damage than the German-American front lines as they slowly rolled back. ‘It is not possible that once these places stood up foursquare and people lived in them,’ she noted.

She caught a lift in a French jeep, heading north from Naples, ‘in a steady stream of khaki-colored traffic’: trucks, jeeps, ambulances, salvage trucks, tank destroyers and munitions carriers. The windshield was folded down and the roof folded back, the icy cold hail struck her in the face. She saw endless tent encampments along both sides of the road. There was always a soldier standing alone somewhere on the flats, shaving ‘with care and comic solemnity’.

When the road began to climb she saw Italian women washing clothes in an old water tank. A little further along, six-wheeled army trucks were pushing each other up a hill. Her French driver asked: ‘Have you ever had an Alexander cocktail, Mademoiselle?’ He himself was having a hard time of it, he was skinny and dirty, and he seemed ill. They drove past a burned-out American tank. An Alexander is a very sweet cocktail made with crème de cacao. A little further along, two army trucks had crashed into a ravine. They passed some marshes ‘where nothing grows except guns’. Finally they arrived in a mountainous wilderness, with the loveliest views one could imagine, ‘though everyone dislikes it, for the Germans are there’. ‘I do not mean to brag,’ Gellhorn's driver said, ‘but I made the best Alexanders in Casablanca.’

A few kilometres further lay the monastery at Monte Cassino.

I had sailed from Greece to Italy aboard ships from the Strintzi and Minoan lines, a peaceful crossing that lasted a day and a night. At Patras I had spent a warm, sleepy afternoon waiting amid dozens of complaining Hungarian truckers who had been forced into this detour by the war in Yugoslavia. Then came a restless night in a shuddering hut, and then, on the sunny quay at Brindisi, my own green van. Thoughtful friends had driven the thing south, so I could head back north, along with the Allied troops.

The long, grim Italian war from July 1943 to April 1945, the five great landing operations at Sicily, Messina, Taranto, Salerno and Anzio, the enormous destruction of the country from south to north: this whole, bitter history has always remained in the shadow of the gigantic heroism of the landings at Normandy and what came afterwards. Still, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers died here, and more than 400,000 Germans. It was a slow, tough and nasty war that all parties wanted to forget as quickly as possible. It was not until April 1945 that the guns were silenced in Italy, but not because the Allies had won the fight; it was because all the other German fronts had collapsed.

The war in Italy began on 10 July, 1943 with a landing on Sicily. It was the first time – with the exception of an ill-fated ‘trial invasion’ at Dieppe on 19 August, 1942 – that Allied troops returned to the European continent. In early September new landings followed, at the Strait of Messina, at Taranto in the south-east and at Salerno, not far from Naples. To speed up the sluggish advance a fifth landing took place in late January 1944, at Anzio, just south of Rome. That was not a success: the Allied troops captured a bridgehead of a few square kilometres in size, but could go no further. ‘You feel,’ the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from Anzio, ‘pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.’

Opening this Southern European front had pretty much been Winston Churchill's idea. The Americans were in favour of a much shorter route to Berlin, by way of the Channel, Paris and Cologne, but in 1943 their armies were not yet ready for an operation of that magnitude. At first glance, moving from North Africa through Italy to Trieste, Vienna, Prague and then Berlin did indeed seem like a vast detour. But in any case, the Italian Front was needed to keep as many German troops as possible occupied in Southern Europe and provide relief for the embattled Soviets.
The British and Americans wanted at all costs to prevent a situation like that of spring 1918, when exhausted Russia had suddenly declared a cease-fire and German troops were able to swing back and reinforce the Western Front. That would have been a disaster.

Churchill also had reasons of his own for this remarkable detour. As early as 1942 he was one of the very few to take into account the shape of post-war Europe. In his view, the Soviet Union absolutely had to be kept out of Europe. Therefore, the war was ultimately to be fought in Eastern Europe, not in the West. By taking the Italian-Austrian route, the Allied armies would not only defeat the Germans but also cut off the advancing Soviet troops. Furthermore, he expected no major problems in taking Italy. He viewed it as the soft underbelly of the Third Reich, a country with an unstable regime, easily waltzed through by the Allies. As far as the regime went, Churchill was right. But the waltzing was an altogether different story.