Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
The soldiers made primitive fireplaces with stacks of tiles found in the courtyard.… The FRs [Red Cross field representatives] got 5 G.I. cans and 7 pails from the Salvage Depot … to cook the food in. A can opener, spoon, and ax were borrowed from the portiere, and a soldier whittled out a wooden spoon with a handle 2 feet long for stirring the soup.… The FRs discovered about 300 china cups in one of the storerooms, and these were washed … by the soldiers and used with pieces of biscuit serving as spoons.
Soldiers dished out the soup to groups of twenty-five refugees at a time:
That first night was really a show—the dark courtyard lit only by the fires and the lights of our command car, the FRs handing out food, the patient dazed grateful peasants grasping food and babies in both hands, the soldiers catching the spirit and carrying cups of soup to the steps for overburdened mothers.
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This touching and rather theatrical scene was fine for the 225 refugees involved, but obviously would not do for the far greater masses certain to need help as the Allies began their major drive toward Rome. In early January 1944, the Army, estimating that it would have to deal with at least 50,000 people in January and February and 200,000 by “midsummer,” finally set up a special Refugee Branch to handle such matters. These estimates were considered low by one officer, who calculated that more than a million people, at least 30 percent of them under the age of fourteen, could be defined as refugees in the areas already liberated, where they were living nomadic existences in the country or crowding into the cities. Planning and the search for suitable sites for big camps went forward at a snail’s pace, despite reports of the ever-worsening conditions of the refugees. The little hostel in Naples, meanwhile, had doubled its population but not its equipment. Cooking continued to be done in the courtyard, there was no hot water, and sleeping facilities still consisted only of
straw and a few blankets. The overwhelmed “sanitary facilities” were now filthy beyond belief, as all the plumbing was stopped up and sewage was seeping into the food storage areas, a condition the sanitation officer inspecting the premises superciliously attributed not only to the massive overcrowding and lack of maintenance, but also to “the personal habits of the refugees—most of them
contadini …
accustomed to only the most primitive ways of living”; though he did have to admit that the “rooms where the refugees sleep are clean.”
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At the end of February, considerable space would be provided by the opening of a large staging camp at Aversa and of others at Vairano, Bari, Foggia, Capua, and Naples, plus a string of forward camps nearer the battle lines. From these the refugees were gradually sent farther south. It was none too soon. By this time Allied landing craft, instead of trucks, were evacuating 10,000 more civilians from the embattled Anzio beachhead back to Naples. Landing craft have few amenities, and the bad weather, which required some to stand off the port for hours, was not good for the stomach. Seasickness was just the beginning. On Easter Monday, Anthony Saverese, an eighteen-year-old pharmacist’s mate from Brooklyn, was called upon to deliver a baby at sea. Having little experience of obstetrics, he consulted the Navy medical manual, which, of course, was not helpful. But the young sailor, luckily fluent in Italian, “using common sense” and with the help of other Italian ladies on board, boiled water and delivered the baby with no problem. The grateful mother named it George Raymond in honor of the two crewmen who contributed the most to a collection taken up for the infant.
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This event turned out well, but lack of planning at the arrival end forced long delays in the unloading of the ships and hours without food and water. Some of the boat commanders simply dumped their miserable cargoes on the dock. As one outraged officer noted, with a certain amount of understatement, “elderly and infirm refugees and children simply cannot stand the buffeting of journeys involving perhaps 36 to 48 hours at sea and 24 hours in a railway box wagon,” adding that due to lack of foresight “many thousands of battle zone refugees have been handled under conditions little better than conditions under which cattle are handled in peace time in the United States and Britain.”
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But being handled like cattle was preferable to the fate of certain others. By the time the Allied armies were within reach of Rome, the officers dealing with refugees were beginning to find evidence of Nazi total war much like that in Greece and France. At a small field hospital in the transit camp at Campobasso, northeast of Naples, medical officers were called
upon to treat numerous “refugees … who escape through the enemy lines and were injured by the enemy deliberately, and not accidental battle casualties.” The stories, new to these officers, are all too familiar. Villages had been burned down; people had been shot indiscriminately. The victims were not just peasants this time, but included educated people and a great many children who had fled from larger towns and cities as far away as Venice. Their experiences were of unbelievable horror:
Case II. Was in labour with her fifth child when Germans arrived and told her husband to evacuate the house. Husband shot dead. She herself was thrown out of the house and the house burnt down with two children … the baby was eight days old when she arrived at the camp. Birth in woods beside the ruins of the house.
Case III.… awaiting birth of twins … house burnt down, and her husband killed. Babies five days old on arrival. Birth in a field.
Case VI. Five girls … crossing the Sangro River towards the British lines. Two … shot dead. Three wounded.…
Case X. Three children, all under the age of ten. Father and mother killed by German soldiers and their home destroyed. They were picked up by British soldiers, suffering from starvation and exposure.…
… only one person was treated by the German Medical Corps. None of the others had had treatment until they had passed through the British lines. The Germans appeared to have removed Italian medical stores from the shops and the hospitals.
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Not surprisingly, considering such incidents, the Allied armies were collecting more and more orphans. They did not feel that these should be sent along on the trains to the transit camps, but instead that they should be put into the many local children’s institutions that still managed to function. Help from such groups and any others who could get themselves together was vital: as the field officers had predicted, by the end of May 1944, with Rome and its millions of citizens just ahead of them, the American Fifth Army was feeding 200,000 people in its area, while the British Eighth Army reported that its main camps had already processed some 45,000 refugees.
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The Germans were not the only ones creating orphans and uprooting children. The Allies had been bombing the ports and industrial cities of northern Italy for months, and thousands of children had been sent south to rural areas for safety. British and American planes had also attacked smaller towns and villages along the way. In Grosseto, just in from the coast south of Livorno, bombers reportedly strafed holiday crowds celebrating
at a carnival, perhaps thinking that the tents containing a merry-go-round and other entertainments were an enemy encampment.
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After the surrender of the Italian government, partisan activity increased in the German-occupied part of the country, and the woods were full of Allied prisoners of war, released by the Italians but relentlessly hunted by the Germans, and young Italian boys trying to escape the German draft and forced labor roundups, all of them armed to the teeth. Such things made life in the countryside no less dangerous at times than it was in the bombed cities, though the food supplies were generally better.
Children were sheltered everywhere. Hospitals, convents, and palazzos were full of them. Iris Origo, an Anglo-American married to an Italian aristocrat, first took in twenty-three children in January 1943. They would stay on her farm at Val d’Orcia, in Tuscany, for nearly two years as the Allies approached, passed through, and only months later liberated their hometowns to the north. During that time a dizzying series of German units came and went; their men ranged from hard-bitten veterans, who looted with abandon, to convinced Nazis to kindly inductees. The Origos were lucky not to have to deal with any SS units. Most of the Germans they encountered were sympathetic to small children, their brutality in this region being directed more at young partisans and those trying to escape conscription. Along with the Germans, a constant stream of refugees passed through, all needing food and clothing. Everyone in the towns did what they could for these wanderers, making children’s clothes from curtains and diapers from sheets, but supplies were finite.
By mid-June 1944, Val d’Orcia was literally on the front lines. After sheltering for nearly a week in the cellars of their house with some sixty people, among them a number of infants, including one of their own, and all the refugee children, the Origos were told by a German officer that they must leave immediately:
The babies were howling, and with Donata in my arms, I couldn’t help … much, but we managed to pack a basket with the babies’ food, and the pram with some of their clothes.… Each of the children carried his own coat and jersey. The grown-ups each carried a baby, or a sack of bread. And so in a long straggling line … half walking, half running, we started off.… We had been warned to stick to the middle of the road, to avoid mines, and to keep spread out, so as not to attract the attention of Allied planes. German soldiers, working at mine-laying, looked up in astonishment as we passed.
“Du lieber Gott!
What are those children still doing here?” And all the time the shells were falling … and the planes flew overhead.… When we came out into
the open cornland … shells were bursting with a terrific din. The children were afraid to go on, but on we must. Some more planes came over, and we lay down for cover in … tall corn. I remember thinking at that moment, with [my daughter] lying beside me and two other children clutching at my skirts: “This can’t be real—this isn’t really happening.”
After four hours the exhausted group had to rest just short of their objective, the town of Montepulciano. They began to doubt if they would really be able to find shelter there, but townspeople who had seen the line of fleeing children from the ramparts came out to meet them: “Never was there a more touching welcome. Many of them were partisans; others were refugees themselves.… They shouldered the children … and in a triumphant procession … we climbed up the village street.”
Liberation would not come for another week, during which bombing and artillery fire continued and food ran low, but for this lucky group, only one of thousands caught up in the fighting, the worst was over.
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For millions of others in the rest of Italy and Europe the long process of liberation had just begun. The great invasion in Normandy was launched on D-Day, June 6, 1944 and a few weeks later Allied forces would land in the south of France. Planning for these events had gone on for more than a year in Washington and London, where many lessons had by now been learned about the handling of civilian populations and refugees. A uniform policy was developed for the countries of the European Theater that aimed at maximum use of the structures of the indigenous governments and their “loyal” bureaucrats. Cadres of liaison officers were prepared from the exiled governments of each country, and civil affairs agreements were made in advance. This was not achieved without considerable fussing, especially in the case of France, where it was not clear exactly who the recognized authority would be. The Civil Affairs Division for the European Theater was increased to 6,000 officers and men, who were divided into detachments of about forty each. These would be placed in towns as they were taken and would remain there as the various combat units moved on, thereby providing continuity. Huge stockpiles were built up of what were now known to be the most needed items—food, medical and sanitary supplies, soap, clothing, and shoes. Everyone was warned that the liberated must be informed right away that the fact of liberation did not mean an instant end to the hardships of
wartime life. The planners, undoubtedly thinking of Rome, where the Vatican had been feeding 400,000 people in soup kitchens by the time the city was liberated, were particularly worried about Paris, whose huge population they expected to find covered with lice and in a state of starvation. There were many unknowns, above all whether the brutal scorching by retreating Nazis, seen in the USSR and parts of Italy, would also be inflicted on the rest of Europe.
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The first three months after D-Day went quite smoothly for Civil Affairs officers, if not for the inhabitants of the battle zones, who would lose many relatives to the fighting and to the continuing sporadic atrocities of withdrawing SS troops. One Allied officer had
brought a 12-year-old girl to the hospital who with four women had been deliberately machine-gunned by the SS when in a slit trench. This officer said at one village he met a man, wounded in the hand … who told him [that] while [he was] burying his wife and daughter, killed during the fighting, German SS stood about laughing and making apparently ribald remarks and looting what remained of his possessions.
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But no significant scorching had taken place, and despite the total destruction of many towns, the battles had left large sectors of the French countryside untouched and some shelter and food supplies had been preserved. French welfare agencies, both public and private, having by now been through many a refugee crisis, functioned well where they could get access. It soon became clear that the greatest problem, once again, would be transportation and controlling the movements of populations who had been forced to evacuate by the Germans or had fled from the battle zones. No good way was found to stop the estimated 250,000 people who, by the end of July, were hitching rides in Army trucks and swarming along the main roads in their efforts to get home or find help of various kinds. To keep them from clogging roads needed for military operations, therefore, selected roads were designated
“Route Autorisée aux Civils”
and primitive feeding stations were set up along the way.