Many considered humanity an impediment to survival. A survey of infantry divisions in the Mediterranean later found that 62 percent believed hatred for the enemy could help them through tough times. “The more you hate, the better soldier you become,” explained one command sergeant major. “Love is completely absent in the heart of a rifleman.” Like lightning seeking a ground, the high-voltage animus surging through Allied combat regiments discharged on one conducting rod: the German. “He has no right to do this to me,” the commander of the 132nd Field Artillery Battalion wrote his wife, “and I shall do something to him for it.” From Anzio, a 3rd Infantry Division officer wrote, “They sure cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. I wouldn’t mind participating in their complete elimination—like a rabid dog.” Rancor at the beachhead grew intense enough that wounded German prisoners were isolated in a separate hospital ward for their own protection. “Those Krauts,” a paratrooper in the 504th Parachute Infantry said, “I sure hate their guts.”
Many atrocity stories circulated, particularly of German white-flag ruses. Some were true, all were believed. “There’s no rules in this war,” a 45th Division soldier said. “If they want to fight like that, it’s okay with us.” Because of a supposed German tendency to shoot surrendering Yanks, one soldier reported, the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment’s unofficial slogan had become “Take No Prisoners.” He added, “We now do the same thing, and we have plenty of Germans to do it to.”
From the Tunisian campaign, four U.S. combat divisions had emerged full of killers. Italy created many more, American as well as British, Canadian, French, New Zealand, Indian, Polish, and others. Together they would form an avenging and victorious army, a terrible sword of righteousness. A VI Corps officer proposed that every soldier embody the “three R’s—ruthless, relentless, remorseless.” As the abbey and Cassino town had been pulverized, so would a thousand other strongholds. God could sift the guilty from the innocent. The war had come to that.
“This is a war for keeps,” an Air Force captain wrote his mother from Italy. “We will not rest satisfied until starvation and butchery have been visited upon German soil. There can be no parleying with the Devil.”
Eager boys no longer scaled Rome’s clock towers to watch for the Anglo-American legions pressing north from Anzio. For days after the SHINGLE landings in January, tens of thousands of Romans had kept vigil on their rooftops in the Eternal City. Allied flags flapped from balconies, and bookstores reported a run on English dictionaries. Jumpy German sentries one night fired on a sinister platoon of figures, which proved to be the stone saints lining the façade of the basilica of St. John Lateran.
Those heady hopes for imminent liberation had long faded. These days the nearest Allied troops flew four miles overhead in air armadas said to resemble “dragonflies in the sun.” Nervous Romans kept their weather eyes peeled for the clear skies of what came to be called una giornata da B-17, a B-17 day. The worst bombing of the capital since July occurred on March 14, when various rail yards were pummeled; civilian casualties proved particularly grim among those queued up for water at street fountains. Graffiti on city walls now chided the liberators for dawdling. One mordant gibe proclaimed: “Allies, don’t worry! We are coming to rescue you!”
Eight months of occupation had sharpened Roman cynicism. At first the German fist only lightly swiped the city. Wehrmacht looters plucked clean the palaces of the turncoat royal family, such as the Villa Savoia, where Mussolini had been arrested. “Everything went,” one witness reported, “including the nails in the walls.” But the cinemas soon reopened, and the royal opera house. Recruiting posters for German labor battalions showed a smiling Italian tradesman with a flower in his buttonhole, smoking a cigarette. “Do you want to work? Are you in need?” the caption asked. “Employment only within your country. You are assured good clothes, good food, good pay, and good fellowship.” Fifty thousand Italians, volunteers and otherwise, still toiled on fortifications along the country’s west coast.
The shadows soon deepened. Berlin had always considered Mussolini to be weak-kneed on the Jewish question, and on September 24, 1943, with the Duce reduced to a pathetic puppet, the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, secretly ordered the Gestapo chief in Rome, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, to arrest all Jews in the city. The thirty-five-year-old Kappler, gray-eyed son of a Stuttgart chauffeur, had lived in Rome since 1939. He was described as “intolerant, cold, vengeful, unhappily married and with interests in Etruscan vases, roses, and photography”; when he grew annoyed, the dueling scar on his cheek reddened. Two days later, Kappler gave Jewish community leaders thirty-six hours to deliver fifty kilograms of gold or face the deportation of two hundred men. On September 28, a convoy of taxis and private cars pulled up to the Gestapo headquarters at Via Tasso 155 number with the ransom, which was laid on a scale pan amid much haggling over the last gram. Three weeks later, at dawn on Saturday, October 16, storm troopers swept through the Roman ghetto anyway, seizing twelve hundred Jews; sixteen of them survived the war. Most were promptly shipped to Auschwitz and gassed, including an infant born after the roundup. Mussolini on December 1 ordered the arrest of “all Jews living on the national territory.” Italians showed admirable pluck in sheltering Jewish compatriots: nearly five thousand hid in Roman convents, monasteries, and the Vatican. More than forty thousand Jews in Italy would survive the war; nearly eight thousand perished.
Even for Romans not facing extermination, the occupation winter proved long and grim. Several hundred thousand refugees crowded the city, felling trees and chopping up park benches for firewood. Electricity supplies grew erratic: alternating neighborhoods went without power two nights each week. Tuberculosis and infant mortality spiked. Kesselring’s retreat to the Gustav Line hampered efforts to feed the city, for much of Rome’s granary lay in southern Italy; the destruction of supply trucks by Allied warplanes further complicated the task.
Prices doubled, and would redouble by early summer. Hungry livestock could graze on the new spring grass at the Villa Borghese, but the Romans had begun to starve. On downtown sidewalks women peddled their furs, scholars their books, children their shoes. The daily bread ration dwindled to the equivalent of two slices per person, from loaves made with ground chickpeas, maize flour, elm pith, and mulberry leaves. As spring arrived, so did bread riots; after one bakery was ransacked, SS troops dragged ten Italian women to a nearby bridge and shot them as they faced the Tiber.
Terror also doubled and redoubled. Blackshirts finding a film too tedious shot up the screen; another thug with a submachine gun leaped on stage at an opera and threatened to murder those who failed to stand for the Fascist anthem “Giovanezza.” In the central telephone exchange, five hundred eavedroppers reportedly listened in on local phone calls. Men were plucked from trams or rounded up in the Via Nazionale for labor battalions, with no mention made of good pay or good fellowship. A priest condemned for subversion blessed his firing squad as they shouldered their rifles.
Soon half of Rome was said to be hiding the other half. Interrogators in the Via Tasso extracted confessions by pushing pins through a suspect’s penis or by stuffing his ears with cotton and lighting it; others had their shoes removed and their toes inserted between the cylindrical drum and base plate of a mimeograph machine. “They pulled out the hairs of my mustache, and by means of screws and a steel bar, they compressed my temples until I thought my eyes were going to burst out,” a survivor said of his interrogation on the night of March 18. On the eve of his execution, one man scratched a message on his cell wall: “From my mother I ask forgiveness because in being faithful to myself I must be faithless to her love…. Long live Italy.”
Allied planes flying from Brindisi dropped tons of supplies and scores of agents behind the lines. Intended to inspirit Italian insurgents and dishearten German troops, OSS “morale operations” ranged from the clever to the puerile. Scattered pamphlets listed the bombed streets in every German city. Leaflets instructed Wehrmacht soldiers on
how to defect to Switzerland, and a “malingering booklet” prescribed methods to avoid combat by feigning various illnesses. Scheisse—shit—stickers mimicking the runic double “S” of the SS were designed to “be licked on the tongue and slapped on a wall in an instant.” Small stencils could leave a painted message in seven seconds, including one in Italian that read, GERMANS OUT. Tiny rubber stamps, equipped with tiny ink pads, depicted a skull and crossbones over the word “Nazi.” Project CORNFLAKES dropped 320 sacks of counterfeit mail along bombed Italian rail lines, as if the bags had been scattered from wrecked train cars; some envelopes—carefully franked with German postmarks—included forged subversive letters and copies of Das Neue Deutschland, the ostensible newspaper of an underground peace party. A “Father Schiller,” who wrote a column advocating German capitulation, was in fact a pair of U.S. Army sergeants.
In Rome, the OSS by March 1944 had established a dozen observation posts on the main roads leading from the capital, with coded information about traffic radioed to the Anzio beachhead several times a day; one clandestine shortwave station operated in a boathouse belonging to the Italian Finance Ministry. An Italian operative in Kesselring’s headquarters, an ardent royalist who served as a liaison with the Fascist command in Rome, also secretly provided the German order of battle and details about the FISCHFANG counterattack.
No OSS spy in Rome was more flamboyant than a twenty-four-year-old American named Peter Tompkins, who had lived in the city as a boy after his parents moved there to study art. Educated at English boarding schools—thanks in part to the patronage of his mother’s alleged lover, George Bernard Shaw—and then at Harvard, Tompkins had worked as a foreign correspondent before joining the OSS. In late January, a Royal Navy patrol boat put him ashore near Rome carrying a Beretta pistol and papers that identified him as a Roman prince. Tompkins had expected to greet Fifth Army liberators in a few days; instead he waited week after week, jumping from safe house to safe house: a dressmaker’s shop on the Via Condotti, a room in the Piazza Lovatelli.
Favoring a blue sharkskin suit with loose strands of Italian tobacco sprinkled in the pocket for verisimilitude, Tompkins collated the traffic reports, the order-of-battle lists, and other intelligence tidbits into daily radio bulletins to the beachhead. OSS operations in Rome, as in Italy at large, proved confused and often bootless, riven with rivalries and petty quarrels. Meaningful intelligence paled compared with that plucked from the airwaves by Ultra, of which Tompkins was ignorant.
Still, it was part of the good fight, requiring ingenuity, luck, and unspeakable courage. Tompkins kept moving, exchanging an identity card that identified him as Luigi Desideri, born in 1912, for one on which he was Roberto Berlingeri, born in 1914, or an employee in the War Ministry, or an archivist in the Corporations Ministry, or a corporal in the Italian African Police. Sprinkling bottled ammonia around his doorstep to discourage bloodhounds, he played cutthroat bridge, sipped brandy, and read Faulkner’s The Wild Palms while waiting to transmit the next coded dispatch. “In a way it’s a pleasant life,” he told his diary in mid-March, “if it weren’t for the nightmare of knowing that all the time you are hunted.”
Nearly twenty highway watchers, most of whom earned $1 a day, were captured and shot; shot, too, was the spy in Kesselring’s headquarters, after two months of torture that failed to break him. Yet German repression only steeled resistance. An estimated 25,000 Italian partisans were actively fighting in Italy in March 1944, and their number would triple in the next three months; later Alexander claimed they were “holding in check six German divisions.” Some attacked bridges or looted supply trains; others encouraged civil disobedience, such as the strike by 800,000 Italians in early March that almost paralyzed industrial Milan. And still others plotted how to answer terror with terror, vengeance with vengeance, blood with more blood.
The clap of several hundred boots on cobblestones carried up the narrow Via Rasella at 3:40 P.M. on Thursday, March 23, another lovely giornata da B-17. As the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion of the Bozen Police Regiment wheeled left into the street from the Via del Traforo, the men burst into song, an annoying martial ditty called “Hupf, Mein Mädel”—“Skip, My Lassie.” “Singing at the top of our lungs,” as one trooper later recalled, “chests pushed forward like a bunch of crowing roosters.”
From the Piazza del Popolo they had marched three abreast, as they marched each afternoon, through central Rome: past the Spanish Steps and the house where Shelley lived and Keats died, skirting the royal gardens of the Quirinal as they angled back to the Interior Ministry compound in the Viminale barracks. Their accents identified them as men of the South Tyrol; crow’s-feet and graying temples beneath their helmets suggested that most were too old for combat regiments. Today they had taken the precaution of loading their rifles, but the capital seemed placid and benign in the afternoon sunshine.
They huffed uphill, past the barber and the photo shop and the laundry that took in German uniforms. Geraniums spilled from the sill pots of the five-story buildings and palmettos peered over the gutter lines. No one heeded the moonfaced Italian street sweeper smoking a pipe and cleaning the gutter near the head of the street, fifty yards or so from the intersection with the Via delle Quattro Fontane.
He was in fact a medical student named Rosario Bentivegna, known to his fellow partisans as Paolo. Earlier that afternoon he had eaten lunch in a little trattoria before changing into a sanitation department uniform, lacing his battered shoes with red string for authenticity. Then Bentivegna had muscled his ash cart—stolen from a city depot behind the Colosseum—through the streets before parking it against the curb at Via Rasella 156, a dilapidated palazzo where, coincidentally, Mussolini had lived in the 1920s. In the cart, beneath a thin stratum of rubbish, lay a powerful bomb: twenty-six pounds of TNT in a steel case stolen from the gas company, plus another thirteen pounds in loose bags and several iron pipes packed with explosives.
As the singing troops approached, Bentivegna lifted the cart lid and touched his pipe to a twenty-five-second fuse, carefully timed to detonate in the middle of the column. “There was a lot of ash and it took a while to ignite,” he later reported. “Then I heard the sizzle.” Removing his black-visored blue cap, Bentivegna laid it atop the cart as a signal, then wheeled around and hurried up the street before vanishing down a Roman alley; after tossing the uniform into a dark corner near the Church of St. Peter in Chains, he would spend the evening playing chess to calm his nerves.
The blast struck the column as if it had been “blown down by a great wind.” Other partisans stepped from the shadows to lash the company with grenades and gunfire before melting away. Shards of broken window glass showered the street, along with smashed dishes, furniture, and dislodged stucco. Severed limbs and at least one head lay in the gutter; one victim was said to resemble “pulp with a coat over it.” A few survivors staggered to their feet, firing wildly at the building façades.
Lieutenant Colonel Kappler was enjoying a late lunch at the Hotel Excelsior with Lieutenant General Kurt Mälzer, military commandant of Rome, when word arrived of the carnage in Via Rasella. Arriving on the scene, they found thirty-two men dead and sixty-eight wounded; ten Italian civilians had also died in the explosion, among them six children. Fascist troops sent as reinforcements ransacked shops and houses, and the crackle of rifle fire carried to the Trevi Fountain and the Palazzo Barberini. Mälzer paced about bellowing, “Revenge! Revenge!” and calculating how best to raze the entire block. On his orders, two hundred Italians from the neighborhood were arrested and marched off with their hands raised to the Viminale barracks. A sanitation crew—genuine this time—arrived to scrub the bloody cobblestones with water and salt.
Late that afternoon the Berlin high command phoned Kesselring’s headquarters at Monte Soratte to report that Hitler, then brooding at his Wolfsschanze headquarters in the East Prussian woods, wanted “an entire quarter of Rome to be blown up, including any living soul dwelling therein.” If that
reprisal was not feasible, fifty Italians should be shot for each Bozen martyr. Kesselring, who found this crisis awaiting him upon returning to Monte Soratte from an inspection trip, wondered whether the Via Rasella ambush presaged the long-awaited Allied breakout from Anzio. After phoning Kappler for further details, Kesselring retired to bed at 8:30 P.M. and left the matter to his chief of staff, Siegfried Westphal.
Shortly after ten P.M., General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s military chief, phoned to denounce the Schweinerei—swinishness—in Rome. “I am giving you now a Führer order which is in front of me in this matter,” Jodl told Westphal. “This is the final version.” Westphal scribbled down the edict: “The Führer’s order is that for every German soldier killed in this treacherous attack in Rome, ten Italian hostages will be shot.” That ratio, previously announced as the appropriate riposte for “outrages,” was intended to “achieve a deterrent effect,” Jodl added. Westphal phoned Kesselring in his bedroom. “I agree,” Kesselring said. “Pass on the order.”
Kappler spent all night compiling the inevitable typed lists. By noon on March 24—another luminous spring day—the roster had grown to 320 names; when a wounded man succumbed to his injuries, Kappler added fifteen more on his own initiative. None of those listed had participated in the Via Rasella ambush. At two P.M. several canvas-covered trucks normally used to deliver meat arrived at Via Tasso 155; others pulled up at the Regina Coeli, a sprawling prison across the Tiber. Cries of “Murderers!” echoed through the cell blocks as prisoners were led away with their hands bound behind their backs, some hobbling because their toenails had been yanked out. The convoy from Via Tasso rolled past the sightless saints atop St. John Lateran and through the Aurelian wall at Porta San Sebastiano, where the Appian Way begins its journey south. Turning onto Via Ardeatina beyond the city, the trucks passed the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, then halted at a remote warren of tunnels left by miners quarrying volcanic tuff used to make concrete.
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