A Civil War (7 page)

The collapse following Badoglio's proclamation of the Armistice with the Anglo-Americans on the evening of 8 September has been described countless times, especially as regards the conduct of the political and military leaders. I do not intend here to retrace those events, correcting the odd point, adding the odd detail and increasing the plethora of literature about the ‘failure to defend Rome'. Two circumstances do, however, need recalling: on the one hand, the objective difficulties that even more competent and better-intentioned Commands would have come up against; on the other hand, the opportunities still available in the days immediately following the Salerno landing, which proved to be such hard-going for the Allies, for an initiative by Badoglio and the king.
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Churchill himself, ill-disposed towards Italy though he was, had written in a memorandum prepared for the meeting with Roosevelt at the White House on 9 September: ‘Should fighting break out between Italians and Germans, the public prejudices will very rapidly depart, and in a fortnight or so matters may be ripe, if we can so direct events, for an Italian declaration of war against Germany.'
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Again, the behaviour of the Italian Commands is comparable to that displayed in France in 1940, as described by Bloch: ‘Our Command … did not limit itself to undergoing the defeat: … they accepted it … Deep in their hearts [the chiefs] were inclined to despair of the very country they should have defended and of the common people from whose ranks the soldiers came.'
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As the editors of a collection of testimonies by surviving Nazi concentration camp deportees have pointed out, ‘8 September was the watershed to our memory of things'.
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There was nothing ‘splendid' about the disaster marked by that date:
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not, obviously, for the Fascists, but neither for the mass of the population, nor the anti-Fascists, who could appeal to it only by taking it as a grievous disaster. The 8 September collapse succeeded in combining the effects of an event that had been too long awaited and of an event that had come unexpectedly. An ancient testamentary formula ran: ‘Nihil morte certius et nihil incertus hora eius' (‘Nothing is as certain as death and nothing as uncertain as its hour'). For the Italians the hour came at a moment that set two contradictory certainties against each other: the omnipotence of the Allies and the invincibility of the Germans. The Allies – this was the widespread desire – should, by
their rapid and total deployment of troops, have prevented the Germans from exercising their uncheckable power, thereby sparing the Italians the agony suffered by so many other European peoples. The false news, at the moment of the Allied air and sea landings and immediately after, of German reactions against Italians still swifter and more fearsome than those actually occurring, was given credence, tallying almost to the letter with the path traced by Bloch in a famous essay, because ‘representations collectives qui préexistent' converged with chance misunderstandings: in the course of those few days the whole of Italy became one immense cauldron, which is generally the place where false news is concocted.
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Witness a top-level example. When, at Chieti late in the evening of 9 September, the king, Badoglio and the other fleeing generals received news that Trieste, Genoa and La Spezia had already been occupied, some of them still believed that the occupiers were the Allies.
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But during those days the hunger for news was such that ‘it was enough for a drunkard to raise his voice a bit and shout disconnected words, for people to come running from every direction to hear him'.
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The first major piece of ‘false news' that the Italians saw belied by events was that the Armistice meant peace. Far more swiftly than after 25 July, and with infinitely more radical consequences, the immediate reactions were overturned, running the rapid gamut, widely attested by the documents and memoirs, of incredulity–stupor–joy–worry–bewilderment.

‘Those who don't understand, those who half-understand. Soldiers embracing, caps flying. The soldiers are in high spirits as if the war really was over': these are the first reactions recorded, in Cuneo, by Nuto Revelli.
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In Venice, Franco Calamandrei described ‘exclamations of delight, joyful singing by children, smiling yelps from babies … The usual sudden, short-lived optimism [and then] annihilation, silence, confusion.'
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A corporal stationed at Udine recently recollected that ‘the people, out on the streets, were elated and the soldiers rejoiced, [after which] a scramble by the officers, ours included.'
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Other testimonies concur about there being ‘a mixed atmosphere of joy, incredulity and bewilderment', of ‘joy and sadness', of people ‘partly exulting and partly – above all the older ones – expressing concern about what was going to happen'.
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The future partisan leader Guido Quazza wrote in his diary of the passage from joy to uncertainty to anxiety, of the desire to flee, of physical exhaustion and moral sorrow suffered in those few days.
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And another partisan commander
in pectore
, Giovanni Battista Lazagna, recalled that ‘after the initial moments of euphoria the more open-eyed began to take stock of the situation'.
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And soon there was a widespread sense of having been abandoned – the soldiers by their officers, all Italians by every authority which ought in fact to have been protecting them.

‘They've betrayed us, the officers have run away, even the King has abandoned us!' cried the soldiers who, in Padua on 9 September, descended into Prato della Valle from a nearby barracks.
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‘They've all bolted' was the sentry's ‘brutal' reply to his interrogators outside the headquarters of the Rome Corps in Piazza della Pilotta.
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In Turin, ‘lying in the fields were bayonets, holster-belts that the soldiers were discarding, saying “make them into shoes”. The officers are the first to flee, then the troops, and of course this is useful to Communism, because the bourgeois classes have cut a dreadful figure'.
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Again in Turin, a sapper recalls, ‘after two days, seeing that we weren't receiving orders, we thought the best thing to do was cut and run, because in those conditions the only thing that could happen to us was to get caught in a trap like a lot of mice'.
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In the 4
^th
Army divisions that, ‘each man shifting for himself as best he could', made it to Cuneo from France, the soldiers stood there in amazement, looking at each other ‘wide-eyed', until eventually each decided to save himself as best he could.
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One soldier asked the question, which no one was able to answer: ‘But, in short, signor colonello, what, now, are we supposed to do?'
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The growing frustration during the aimless waiting into which the not yet disbanded division had plummeted in the first few hours is well described by a pilot, a lieutenant in the air force, who was shortly to take refuge in Switzerland. After recalling the growing ‘nervous tension' that had taken possession of the airmen, he wrote, ‘We began to distrust our superiors, whom' – he is quick to add – ‘we had always distrusted, all the way through the war': finally, ‘on the evening of the 11
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the troop staff, who in this delicate moment had maintained a marvellous control, always disciplined and respectful, lost their calm and started sacking the airport, as a reprisal against the lack of orders and initiatives on the part of the airport commander'.
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The passage from the general breakup to the material breaking-up of whatever objects were within arm's reach is also recorded, by a naval gunner stationed on an Istrian island: ‘Then we smashed up everything; the barracks completely destroyed, the cannon into the sea, everything; everything was smashed up.'
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The dissolution of the Royal Army had actually begun earlier, at least as far back as the Sicily landing. On 16 July 1943 the 16
^th
Corps Command found itself compelled to issue draconian orders against the disbanded soldiers who – by way of a general rehearsal, as it were, for what was to happen shortly afterwards – ‘especially those born on the island, have abandoned their uniforms, buying civilian clothes, and altered their uniforms in the attempt to make them look like civilian clothes by ripping off insignia, stars and badges denoting rank'. The Corps Command had branded as deserters the soldiers who behaved in that way, ordering that they be shot.
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What is remarkable about the 8 September catastrophe is that no one, be he officer or soldier, felt that by disguising himself as a civilian he was deserting;
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nor did it occur to anyone that that mass flight ought to be denounced as an act of desertion. The feelings aroused and the first judgments formulated were of an altogether different nature. Eraldo Gastone, the future Ciro commander of the Garibaldi Brigades in which
Cino Moscatelli was to be the commissar, spoke of an ‘indecorous, doleful strip-tease'.
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‘The soldiers went by like a defeated flock of sheep', Primo Levi recalled.
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Roberto Battaglia, still hot from the scene, spoke of a ‘humiliating spectacle'.
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In one of the finest diaries about partisan life, Pietro Chiodi records: ‘It breaks my heart to see groups of soldiers being herded about like animals by the SS'.
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And another witness writes: ‘Like so many sheep we formed up and, escorted by the SS, passed through the streets of Cuneo which were deserted'.
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To this day a woman dolefully recalls the long file of soldiers who, with just one German at their head and one at the rear, came out of a barracks ‘with their rifles lowered like thieves to surrender their weapons'.
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Dante Livio Bianco speaks of the decomposition of the 4
^th
Army as ‘one of the saddest and most humiliating' spectacles, and describes ‘the pain that wrung our hearts and the shame that burned us'.
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Eraldo Gastone commented on a similar episode in these terms: ‘That before such meagre forces an entire division should have surrendered with its general at the head seemed to me outrageous.'
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The passivity of the soldiers, the dulling in them of every instinct of personal defence, seems to have imprinted itself with particular intensity, and with persistent stupor, on the memories of the women: ‘Tempted yet uncertain': this was how the soldiers of the Valdocco di Torino stared back at the women who were urging them to escape.
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Those who had been interned in the provisional camp of Vitipeno are described by another woman in these words: ‘These men have left me dumbfounded: they didn't move, they wept, seemed half-witted, had no spirit left for anything' – though it was still easy to escape from that camp. Indeed, she herself escaped; and an Alpino asked her: ‘Ma anduva toi ve?' (‘Where do you think you're off to?').
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In Modena the women urged the soldiers to escape through the sewers of the barracks, but only four decided to make an attempt.
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Fits of anger and desperation seized those who witnessed scenes in which very small numbers of Germans overpowered hosts of bewildered, dazed Italians.
Ada Gobetti writes that she wept with ‘unbearable sorrow' at the sight of the Germans, few and undisturbed, taking possession of Turin; and, recording the desperation of her son Paolo, she notes: ‘It was his first disappointment in love.'
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The present author remembers being seized by the shoulders in Via di Roma by a weeping girl imploring him to do something to prevent a lone German, who was shaking his rifle about and yelling, from holding at bay a crowd of civilians and disbanded soldiers. To avoid this anguish, Second Lieutenant Giampiero Carocci placed himself at the head of what remained of his company and gave himself up to the Germans.
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The young men who had not ceased to believe in the Fascist war were engulfed by a bewilderment without hope, which was to characterise many of those who would opt for the Italian Social Republic: ‘Here they were, all had become small, vulnerable: a sense of misery, of being nothing any longer, at the mercy of what would befall, without so much as a gesture of opposition, a word, anything.'
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To complete the picture, there was often the sacking of civilian and above all military depots. The intention of depriving the Germans of those goods or the elementary need for survival were often invoked as a cover for acts that appeared to be ‘a blatant manifestation of the general anarchy and confusion'.
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At times the Germans threatened to have the pillagers shot,
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at others they themselves urged the pillaging of what they were unable to carry away.
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It was yet another way for them to get their own back on an ally who had abandoned them, and also a confirmation – which they perfidiously provoked and at times gleefully photographed – that they were dealing with what Dr Goebbels defined, in his diary entries for those very days, as ‘a nation of gypsies'.
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The truth of the matter
was that the anonymous crowd was giving itself the satisfaction of demonstrating that, while the population were suffering starvation, ‘la roba' (‘the stuff') was actually there in the public warehouses; above all it was a collective way of experiencing and endorsing the exceptional nature of events that sanctioned some of the most transgressive forms of conduct. Italo Calvino recounted how this exceptional opportunity to pillage had remained impressed even in the memories of the soldiers of the Social Republic, whose favourite topic of conversation, in the barracks he describes, ‘was about the stuff they had made off with on 8 September', and about what they might make off with ‘when the next 8 September comes'.
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