The Thing Itself (18 page)

He was a brave man but he was not a natural guerrilla fighter. Most of his men were local teenagers who had taken to the hills to avoid fascist call-up. If caught, they were likely to face the firing squad. I was with them about two months, trying to train them, going out on sorties, before disaster struck.

We had been using a barn as a refuge. One morning we were attacked there by a well-armed squad of fascist militia-men. The partisans had little in the way of up-to-date weapons. Their one machine gun, an updated World War One weapon, jammed. The barn became a death trap.

Behind the barn the ground sloped up some three hundred yards to the crest of a hill. I tried to persuade the others to take a chance but only one of them, an intense, bony young man called Fabbio Cortone, agreed to come with me. The two of us made a zigzag run for it up the hill and got away. The forty who stayed behind were all killed.

Killing had got no easier for me, but I got the job done. And under fire, as at the barn, I found I could think and act coolly. This was not because I felt myself in some way invulnerable, rather that I was able to disassociate myself from what was happening to me. As a survival mechanism, this took its toll. I forgot how to feel. Eventually, I even forgot about the young soldier quoting Rilke to the night sky.

Cortone, a former schoolteacher who had been in exile in the south, came from Chiusi. He told me it was the old Etruscan capital, built on a hill with a labyrinth of tunnels beneath it. He was heading that way. He guided me over the hills in that direction because it was en route to Rome. He was a communist and very cynical about Allied support for the partisans. I could say little in response because I knew from my own orders that what Cortone said was true.

I had been left in no doubt by London that the partisans were there to be exploited and ultimately sacrificed. Churchill, an admirer of Mussolini, had never forgiven him for choosing the wrong side in the war. When Italy wanted peace, Churchill wanted to make the country pay for its ‘disloyalty', to earn a ‘return ticket to the company of civilized nations'.

His hard line was supported by Eden at the Foreign Office. Eden loathed the Italians for their perfidy. Early on in the Allied occupation of southern Italy, the monetary exchange had been set at 400 lire to pound. This devastating devaluation ensured that the Italian economy would not recover. But then a revival would have threatened the British economy. Italian textiles would have competed with cotton from Lancashire. I felt that somehow even if Mosley hadn't triumphed his economic policies had.

The BUF had declared itself neutral during the war but many Blackshirts had chosen to fight. The first two RAF pilots to be killed in the war had been Blackshirts. The rest, including Mosley, had been interned. William Joyce, who had been kicked out of the BUF a couple of years before the war, had gone to Germany to broadcast sneering anti-British propaganda as Lord Haw-Haw.

Cortone left me to rejoin his original partisan group near Chiusi and I made my way to Rome. I stayed there doing what I could until the Allies liberated it in June. Reporting to Allied command, I was ordered to attach myself to the Sixth South African Armoured Division right bloody sharp for a special mission.

The Sixth was the most powerful individual formation in Italy because rolled into it were the Guards Brigade Group plus British, Indian, American, Polish and even Brazilian divisions.

I was briefed on my mission by a Major Rampling. Rampling was tough, gnarled. He sat bolt upright behind his makeshift desk although I doubted he'd been to sleep for twenty hours.

My destination was Chiusi. My mission was not assassination, as I had assumed, but protection.

‘Chiusi is currently in German hands but we are expecting a withdrawal any day,' Rampling said in his upper-class drawl. ‘Your job is to protect a fascist count – Alfonso di Bocci – and his family from partisan reprisals when the town is liberated. He's been the mayor of the town both before and during the German occupation. The partisans have him marked down as a fascist and a collaborator – both of which are undoubtedly true – but we're instructed that he is needed for the first Italian post-war government. Winnie, as you may know, doesn't care whether he is fascist, just so long as he isn't a Red.'

Two things occurred to me. The first, that once again Mosley's views were widely shared amongst Britain's governing elite. The second, that I was undoubtedly going to come into conflict with my travelling companion, Fabbio Cortone.

Three weeks later I was with the 12th Motorized heading for Chiusi. I'd joined the massive convoy a week earlier in Orvieto. The rest of Di Bocci's family lived there. In heavy rain the convoy headed north, winding its way across hills covered with thick forest. Along a road reduced to a muddy track we came upon the remote village of Allerona, high above the tree line.

It seemed impossible that war should have reached so high, yet the village was in ruins, its inhabitants already sorting rubble for good bricks and stones for rebuilding.

We occupied Chiusi railway station below the town and found about twenty civilians hiding in the cellars. Captain Miller from ‘A' Company went up the road past a large
albergo
to reconnoitre the town and returned with half a dozen prisoners.

I was sitting under an olive tree smoking a roll-up when Miller came over to me and squinted down. He was a chubby man with a handlebar moustache that suggested he had joined the wrong service by mistake.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but could you help us with some prisoners we've taken. We can't understand what they're saying.'

The other officers were wary of me but they knew what a useful linguist I'd turned out to be. I'd started the war proficient in German but by now I could get by in Russian, Polish and Czech. I towered over Miller when I put out the roll-up and got to my feet. I looked at him and he looked away. I knew why. He, like everyone else, thought I was an assassin.

The prisoners were cowed but well fed. Two, neither of them older than eighteen, were wearing snipers' camouflage jackets and the blue armbands of the Herman GÖring Division. The other four were Czech deserters from the 362 Infantry Division. I spoke with them quietly for ten minutes, then went with Miller to see the commander, Major Ian Moore.

‘Their officer deserted the snipers yesterday,' I reported. ‘They say there are two companies of the Hermann Göring Division in the area. The Czech deserters say they saw thirty Mark IV Panzer tanks north of the town yesterday. Looks like Chiusi is more strongly defended than HQ realizes.'

Chiusi was an irritation to Moore, who was eager to be in on the main push to dislodge the German army from central and northern Italy. He shook his head vigorously.

‘Tanks in such force? No, no. They aren't going to hang around to defend Chiusi. They'll be heading north to support Kesselring's Gothic Line. My intelligence has it there is only a parachute division in the town itself. I intend to have taken Chiusi and be advancing north within forty-eight hours.'

A
t five that evening ‘B' Company arrived to support our advance on Chiusi. Moore frowned and tutted when I repeated to its commanding officer, Major Arlington, what the deserters had told me about the strength of opposition in the town. Moore gave his own view. Forcefully.

Arlington frowned at me.

‘I tend to agree with Major Moore,' he said. ‘Chiusi has no strategic value. There is nothing there to warrant defence in depth. We will proceed as planned. I understand, Captain Tempest, that you are in something of a hurry to get there. Do you wish to join us this evening?'

It was a fresh night. As ‘B' Company moved cautiously up the road, I felt alert and vigorous. I could smell honeysuckle and wet earth, feel the cold wind on my face. I walked lightly, carrying a machine pistol I'd taken from one of the Czech prisoners.

When the Company was within five hundred metres of the town, Arlington sent three patrols ahead to reconnoitre. One got to within ten yards of an Etruscan arch at the entrance to the town before it was challenged by a sentry and quickly withdrew. The other two walked into German posts and came under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire. One man was killed, others wounded.

It was two in the morning. Arlington had the company dig in and rest for a couple of hours. Near dawn he invited me to lead a six-man patrol to observe enemy movements.

The mist lay heavy on the road. I sent two men ahead to act as a listening post. When the mist dissolved with the coming of the dawn, I saw the two men were completely overlooked from a church tower to the right and the tower of an old fort to the left. A couple of minutes later the Germans spotted the exposed soldiers and began rapidly firing down on them. The four of us laid down covering fire as the two men made a dash back down the slope, bullets slashing the air around them.

We withdrew. At six in the morning, I commandeered a bench in the station waiting room. I don't know how long I slept – possibly only minutes – before I was woken by the deafening roar of the Allied artillery opening up on the town. Ten minutes later there was an ear-splitting explosion and I was thrown off my rudimentary bed. The Germans were responding with concentrated Nebelwerfer and mortar fire on the station.

Nebelwerfers were always alarming. The name suggested they fired smoke mortars but the Germans often used them to fire chemical weapons. These seemed to be delivering smoke and low-grade explosives. For the moment.

I gave up any idea of sleep. I withdrew with other soldiers to the shore of Lake Chiusi and waited there, exhausted but awake, whilst the heavy brigade rolled up: the 11th South African Armoured. The tanks of the Natal Mounted Rifles clanked up the road, but within half an hour were bogged down. They were being pounded by heavy artillery, mortars and anti-tank fire – thickened by Nebelwerfers, of course. Individual tanks on reconnaissance stumbled on to well-protected anti-tank posts or were ambushed by heavily armed roving tank-hunting parties. By noon, with a hard rain falling, the South Africans had retreated.

Around eight in the evening, the Allies began pounding the town again. The heavy battery was softening it up for rifle companies from the Cape Town Highlanders. When they arrived, I was sheltering gloomily in the station waiting room. I watched through the open door as they struggled forward on foot over the soggy ground, their progress impeded by shellfire, ditches and canals.

As darkness fell, I saw them, silhouetted by the flash of shells and mortar bombs, scrambling towards the town up the steep slopes broken into terraces and dotted with twisted olive trees. My ears were ringing with the constant bombardment, my body shaking as each explosion set the earth juddering.

At one in the morning of 23rd June, so tired I was beyond tiredness, I set off once again with ‘A' company in loose formation up the winding road between the terraces. Moore had been mistaken, the deserters accurate. There were estimated to be 300 enemy infantry in town and a battalion of the Hermann Göring Division supported by artillery and tanks.

We reached the Etruscan arch without being challenged. Then the familiar pop of flares sounded and we were caught in their ghastly light. Grenades pattered in the mud. The instant the flares died, we broke for the terraces, scrambling, slipping and sliding into the rude cover of the olive trees.

For a further twenty minutes we were pinned down by the impatient stuttering of machine guns. Two soldiers coated in mud slid down in front of me and lay still. As another flare went off, they looked at me and I looked at them. The same thought occurred in the three of us. My heart leaped and I swung my machine pistol round just as the flare died away. When the next flare went off, the two Germans had gone.

As the firing eased, we lifted each other over on to the next terrace. Someone found a ladder and we swarmed up it on to the terrace above that. From here I could make out the town as a dark mass against the sky. The German fire was now going over our heads. Then it ceased.

We entered a well-tended garden. We crossed into another one, then another. Keeping low, we made our way along cobblestone paths until we were almost in the town. It was eerily quiet. There had been no flares or gunfire for fifteen minutes.

Five minutes later we reached a road that led into a small square. We gathered beside what a sign told us was a winery. Across the square was the Teatro Communale. In front of it I could make out a bulky shape, black in the blackness. Men crept to within fifteen yards of the massive machine and began to roll grenades underneath it.

They scurried back, identifying the tank as a Panzer. The grenades exploded with a dull rattle, doing no damage. Nevertheless, with a low roar, the Panzer's engine started up and it rumbled out of the square.

We took up positions around the theatre. The rest of ‘A' Company joined us. We put men into two adjoining houses and the winery. A platoon headed towards the
rocca
. A group of us went into the theatre via a staircase at the rear. It brought us directly into the dress circle.

It was a solidly built theatre, with little in the way of fenestration. We could only watch the square through a couple of windows in the corridor behind the dress circle and from the ground-floor offices and foyer. I positioned myself by an upstairs window. I had a lot of ammunition for my machine pistol and half a dozen grenades on my belt. It was three a.m.

At four a.m. I heard the heavy clang of gears and the screech of metal treads in the square. The Panzer was back, milling around in front of the theatre.

A cold, misty dawn broke thirty minutes later. If everything had gone to plan, ‘B' and ‘C' Companies would now be in position in town.

I could see ghostly German soldiers moving through the mist in the square around the tank. I was stiff, cold and tired to the bone. The soldiers on the ground floor of the theatre and in the buildings to either side opened fire. I saw a dozen or so Germans go down. The tank's motors ground, its turret cranked round and I was looking down the muzzle of its main gun. I thought blankly that I was about to die. I tensed, shut down my emotions, focused on the black maw.