Unto the Sons (99 page)

Don Calò in the meantime was touring Sicily in an American tank, surveying the frontlines with a subdued confidence that was almost blasé. He said nothing to the tank crew as he squinted through the peephole; and if a shell exploded nearby, he registered little emotion and certainly no fear. Although some GIs called him “General Mafia,” his appearance was less commanding than comic: fat and ungainly, dressed in shirtsleeves and suspenders fully stretched to hold up his voluminous trousers, Don Calò had required the strong-armed assistance of many men to lift him into the tank that had come to fetch him near his home in Villalba on July 20—a tank that displayed a yellow L flag on its turret. After the tank and the rest of the American convoy rumbled out of Villalba, Don Calò’s townsmen would not see him again for an entire week. But it was during this week—from the twentieth to the twenty-seventh of July—that the Americans seemed to advance without deterrence through the towns and villages in central and western Sicily where Mafia influence had traditionally been strong (such places as Corleone, Castelvetrano,
Termini Imerese, and Cerda); and while Don Calò did not travel farther than Cerda—the land beyond presumably fell under the jurisdiction of a fellow
mafioso
—it was a fact that by July 27 the morale of the Axis command in Sicily was lower than it had been since the start of the invasion, and the prestige of the Mafia had probably never been higher.

Shortly after his return to Villalba, the Allies would install Don Calò as the town mayor. A ceremony marking his appointment was held in the barracks of the town’s Carabinieri; and later that night, the new mayor hosted a party honoring some of the Allied officers. Don Calò wore a jacket for the occasion and seemed mildly embarrassed on hearing the cries of the crowd: “Long live the Allies! Long live the Mafia!” Laconic as he was in manner and speech, Don Calò was highly sensitive and alert—his eyes, wrote Norman Lewis, “moved like lizards”—and he was sufficiently opportunistic at this time not only to grasp political power for himself, but to convince the Allies to install several of his
mafioso
friends as mayors and administrators of other Sicilian cities and towns. His friends were ardent anti-Fascists, he reasoned earnestly, adding that many had suffered for years in dark prisons and dungeons on orders from the Duce—neglecting to mention that many had previously been convicted on charges of mass murder.

Still, the American officers endorsed most of Don Calò’s appointments; and the Mafia that Mussolini had quelled for more than twenty years, suddenly, in a matter of days, gained revenge against the Fascist leader. Except by this time Mussolini was no longer the leader. Word had arrived in Sicily on July 26, 1943, that Mussolini had just been dismissed from his position as prime minister by the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III. On the previous day—and a few days after Rome had been bombed for the first time by Allied planes—the Fascist Grand Council had met and expressed limited confidence in Mussolini’s abilities to rule over the nation’s army and economy. Among those voting against him was his son-in-law the count, Galeazzo Ciano.

The king’s appointed replacement was Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a career officer with a reputation for reliability, if not battlefield panache. The Fascist Party was dissolved, and a constitutional monarchy was restored with the promise of a democratic parliament. But the war against the Allies would continue, according to an announcement by Badoglio, and Italy would maintain its alliance with Nazi Germany.

Benito Mussolini, stunned and indignant over the king’s decision to dismiss him, was escorted out of Rome by armed guards and transported to the isle of Ponza, off Naples to the north, and then shipped farther out
to sea to the island of La Maddalena, near the northern tip of Sardinia—close to the private island retreat where Garibaldi had died a half-century before in a state of disillusionment equal to his fame. At La Maddalena on July 29, Mussolini would mark his sixtieth birthday, an occasion unattended by his wife, his children, or his mistress, Clara Petacci, a woman less than half his age, with whom he had been secretly cavorting for nearly a decade. Belatedly, Mussolini received a birthday gift from Hitler, with the Führer’s warm inscription: a special edition of Nietzsche’s works in twenty-four volumes. These would become part of Mussolini’s summer reading, along with a book on the life of Christ, which moved him very much. He let it be known that he could well identify with a savior surrounded by unworthy apostles.

There was remarkably little protest among the people of Italy over the ouster of the man who had led them majestically for almost twenty-one years, and who had received their thunderous applause whenever and wherever he had appeared before them. Even the four million Fascist Party members, and the countless leaders of youth groups who used to honor him with one-armed salutes, failed to express condolences over his political demise, nor would they identify with his downfall—nor refrain from burning their black shirts. Many of his erstwhile loyalists in fact hastened to congratulate his successor, Badoglio, and to pledge their services to the new prime minister. Badoglio, no stranger to Italian political history, was hardly surprised; and if there were ways he thought he could make use of them, he was not remiss in availing himself of their counsel and companionship. Mussolini’s newspaper in Milan,
Il Popolo d’Italia
, accepted the Duce’s exit without editorial regret. Mussolini’s name was removed from the masthead, and where the newspaper had formerly displayed a photograph of Benito Mussolini, it now displayed one of Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

In the United States, the overthrow of Mussolini in July 1943 received a standing ovation from baseball fans reacting to the announcement over the public-address system during a game at Yankee Stadium; and when the news was communicated to a musical audience at an NBC studio in Rockefeller Center in New York City, interrupting an all-Verdi concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the people also stood and applauded, and the maestro was described in the next day’s
Times
as having “clasped his hands to his head, and gazed heavenward, as if his prayers had been answered.” The city’s Mayor La Guardia used the occasion to denounce
Mussolini as “the betrayer of Italy,” while the ex-dictator was depicted as a “Sawdust Caesar” in
The Washington Post
. The
New York Herald Tribune
lauded the deflation of Mussolini’s “Napoleonic egoism,” and
The Christian Science Monitor
welcomed the end of his “balcony braggadocio.”

But
New York Post
journalist Samuel Grafton, who also did radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information, reminded his listeners that there was little to cheer about; Italy was still in the war, and “the moronic little King, who has stood behind Mussolini’s shoulder for twenty-one years, has moved forward one pace. This is a political minuet, and not the revolution we have been waiting for. It changes nothing; for nothing can change in Italy until democracy is restored.”

In August 1943, Mussolini was moved from La Maddalena to a place Badoglio believed would better guarantee his isolation: a vacated hotel at a ski resort perched seven thousand feet up on the Gran Sasso d’Italia, a range of the Apennines northeast of Rome. Mussolini was permitted to keep up with battle reports on the radio and to read the newspapers that came with the supplies toted through the mist each day by cable car from the fogbound cliffs below. One day he heard that Milan had been bombed heavily, including the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and its refectory. Only one wall of the refectory had withstood air attacks. On this wall was painted Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. Mussolini was demoralized, anxious, and in physical pain from liver ailments and stomach ulcers. He had recently lost much weight, and he lacked energy. Fearful of being poisoned, he had eaten little since his imprisonment.

At two p.m. on Sunday, September 12, 1943, Mussolini heard the heavy droning sounds of several planes flying over the hotel, and he was surprised to see gliders swooping toward the mountainside, and finally landing softly in a pasture about one hundred yards from where he stood. Suddenly a German colonel, a commando of Austrian birth named Otto Skorzeny, appeared before him, saluted, and explained that he had come on direct orders from Hitler to liberate the Duce. Mussolini shook hands and said pleasantly, “From the beginning I was always convinced that the Führer would give me proof of his friendship.”

Mussolini was flown to Rome, then in a larger plane to Vienna. On the following day, in Munich, he was met by his wife, Rachele, and the youngest two of their five children, the teenagers Romano and Anna Maria. “I did not think that I would see you again,” said Mussolini as he received his wife. Their thirty-three-year-old daughter, Edda, wife of Ciano—with whom she had been stopped by the Germans from escaping
to South America—was not part of the Duce’s greeting party; nor was the oldest Mussolini son, Vittorio, a twenty-seven-year-old military pilot. (The couple’s other pilot son, Bruno, born two years after Vittorio, had died in an air accident in Italy in 1941.) But Vittorio Mussolini would show up to greet the Duce a day later at Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg, in eastern Prussia. Here the Duce would embrace not only Vittorio but Hitler as well, and with them he would pose for photographs, and make cordial comments to the Axis-controlled press. He would also spend private hours with Hitler in the latter’s underground shelter, exchanging views in German without the presence of interpreters or stenographers; Mussolini would emerge from the lengthy dialogue with a sullen expression on his face that was appropriate to the terms he would henceforth be obliged to live by. He would be reinstalled as the Fascist leader of his homeland—Hitler thought it would have a stabilizing effect on the Italian population—but in actual fact he would be serving as Hitler’s puppet in Italy.

What was left of the Fascist army, and the subsequent additions to it drawn from northern and central Italy, was subservient to German authority. Mussolini’s government center was shifted from Rome to the northern Italian town of Salò, along the shores of Lake Garda, in the vicinity of alpine peaks and ski slopes; and here, throughout the winter of 1943–1944, he would not make a move without German instruction or supervision.

He made very few speeches in public, and when he did, even his Italian supporters remarked that his voice lacked timbre. His qualities as an actor declined along with his vocal powers, and while his health improved under the German doctors Hitler specifically sent to him, his once robust jaw and chest had clearly shrunk in size, and all the medals dangling from his newly tailored uniforms failed to resurrect his former image as Duce. It was suggested by some Fascists in his circle that Mussolini, almost desperate to seem decisive, was now receptive to partaking in a level of cruelty that was not truly in his heart. Edda, always his favorite among his five children, appealed to him repeatedly during this time to forgive the father of her three children, Ciano, for his concurring with the Fascist Grand Council when it had moved during the previous summer, nineteen votes to seven, to restore to the king and parliament the power and prerogatives that had for so long been assumed by the Duce.

The Grand Council, which had not criticized the Duce by name and which was functioning within its legal rights to circulate motions and respond to them, had not committed an act of treason against Benito Mussolini,
in his daughter’s opinion, and she saw no reason why her husband should be detained by the new Fascist regime as a prisoner of Italy. Most of the other Grand Council members were now in hiding, or had fled the country; five were currently in jail in Verona awaiting trial, one of them Ciano. Because of his marriage into Mussolini’s family, most Italians believed he would ultimately be pardoned, even though Rachele Mussolini and her son Vittorio did not support Edda’s appeals; to them, Ciano
was
a traitor of the most ungrateful sort imaginable, to say nothing of his alleged accumulation of illicit wealth during his time in government. But Edda was indefatigable and threatening in her father’s presence; she warned that should harm come to her husband she would see to it that his diaries be made public, making it clear that they contained much that was politically embarrassing and harmful to Mussolini.

On January 10, 1944, the Duce received a similar threat from Edda in writing. The letter had come from Switzerland, where she had escaped with her children. Her husband had not been pardoned, nor had the four other imprisoned Grand Council members; all had been convicted of treason by a court in Verona. Mussolini was outraged by the letter, and to his secretary he conceded that publication of Ciano’s diary could have “irreparable consequences.” But the Duce did nothing more at this point than he had done in the past to liberate his son-in-law.

On the morning of January 11, Ciano and the four others were taken before a firing squad and shot. Mussolini sent his secretary to witness the execution.

The Germans tried to defend southern Italy, but the Allies gradually overpowered them on the ground, in the air, and from ships that hugged the shorelines and bombarded German-occupied seaports and villages that had known war for centuries. On the west coast, Allied dive-bombers attacked Panzer divisions as the latter crossed Roman viaducts or sought cover behind Norman walls and the thirteenth-century buttresses built by the last German ruler of Italy, King Frederick II. On the east coast, the Allies targeted the ancient and once fearsome city of Crotone, which in 510 B.C. had invaded, torched, and buried forever its neighboring town of Sybaris. Allied amphibious battalions drove back Nazi machine-gunners along the beachfront of Pizzo, where in 1815 Joachim Murat had tripped over a fisherman’s net and was hauled before a Bourbon firing squad; and countless Italian towns and villages that had been depopulated through emigration were now depopulated further by Allied weapons often fired by the emigrants’ children and grandchildren. Italo-Americans served with
Allied units that conquered the ancestral hometowns of American families named Iacocca and Cuomo, Ferraro and D’Amato and Auletta, and of a future rock singer surnamed Ciccone who would become known as Madonna. The birthplace of Mayor La Guardia’s father was strafed and cannonaded—while the mayor’s sister, Gemma Gluck, who had been living in Budapest at the start of the war with her husband, a Jewish bank clerk, was now imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. She would survive the war; her husband would not.