Rome

by Matthew Kneale

  The Italians did poorly in the Second World War for two reasons: because it was a war they did not believe in and because they were disastrously let down by their rulers. Though Fascism had poured money into the military it got very little for its lira. Poorly supervised industry produced submarines that were dangerous to their crews, bombers whose engines regularly failed (and whose test data was falsified), a fighter plane that was considered the worst in Europe and tanks that were so tiny and thinly armoured that Italians called them sardine cans. Italy’s military was bloated with too many officers and too many empty boasts. In 1939 the air force claimed it had 8,500 aircraft ready for war when it actually had a tenth as many. Mussolini was no better. As war approached he claimed that Italy had twelve million bayonets in 150 well-equipped divisions when in fact the country had ten divisions, all of them below strength and none properly equipped. Some had guns that had been captured from the Austrians in 1918. Once again Fascism compared poorly with the elected, Liberal governments Mussolini so despised. Italy had been far better prepared when it went to war in 1915.

  Finally there was the problem of Mussolini himself. Hitler has been accused of disastrously overruling his generals. Mussolini, who was minister of war, of the air force and the navy, would not even allow them to attend his strategic meetings. As a war leader he was both too aggressive and too timid, he vastly overestimated his country’s capabilities and, most of all, he kept changing his mind. In the autumn of 1940 when Britain was beaten and vulnerable, he sent his bombers to Belgium to raid London (which it emerged they did not have the range to reach) and dispatched his trucks to Trieste in readiness for an invasion of Croatia, only to decide that he would attack British Egypt instead. Lacking trucks, proper air cover, and protected by their feeble sardine can tanks, Italian soldiers had to walk across the desert, to be overwhelmed by a British force a tenth their size.

  Defeat followed defeat yet Fascism staggered on, zombie-like. By the spring of 1943 it had lost the power even to frighten its own citizens. Government spies wrote despairingly that in theatres and cinemas, on trams, trains and in air raid shelters people denounced the regime quite openly, blaming Mussolini as readily as the rest. As they turned their backs on their government, Italians looked to their pope. The population of Rome, which, unlike other Italian cities had not yet been bombed, grew to two million as people fled there, hoping Pius XII’s presence would keep them safe. The number of people who applied to join the priesthood, and so could avoid being called up, likewise swelled.

  Even now Rome hardly felt like a city at war. Unlike in Britain or Russia there was no mass mobilization of the nation. When M. de Wyss visited the beach at Ostia she found Rome’s coastline was guarded by two soldiers who had to share a pair of boots. Mussolini’s great construction projects had all ground to a halt, and the opening of the vast E-42 exhibition of Fascism was indefinitely postponed, but the regime did its best to keep up its propaganda war, celebrating its 20th anniversary with a third (and last) Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in the Museum of Modern Art. Its main purpose was to promote the war effort and the racial campaign. A Sala del Cinema displayed carefully selected film stills of well-known actors in military roles: Americans and British looking scared or foolish and Italians looking tough. Other exhibits and caricatures warned of the danger to the nation posed by Africans and Jews, and photographs of classical statues and lookalike modern Italians were placed side by side to show the enduring purity of the race. On 10 May 1943, as in previous years, Empire Day was celebrated, and posters appeared depicting Italians in colonial helmets, despite the fact that every inch of Italy’s African Empire had now been lost. Optimistically the posters declared, ‘Torneremo!’ (We will return!) though some were rewritten by Romans as ‘Perderemo!’ (We will lose!)

  III

  Romans’ prediction came good on the evening of 8 September 1943, when Marshal Badoglio announced the country’s surrender to the Allies. Romans celebrated in the streets, if more warily than they had when Mussolini had been deposed six weeks earlier. They hoped that the Allies would appear quickly and that their war would be over.

  When she woke the next morning M. de Wyss was cautiously optimistic. Everything seemed much as usual. Walking through the city centre she saw a young Roman striding off to a tennis party with his racquet. True, from the early hours of the morning she had heard the faint sound of guns, which seemed to be growing gradually louder, but there was no knowing whose guns they were. The newspapers were no help. They had announced the armistice but regretfully, like a spouse who is leaving a marriage but hopes that the separation will be amicable. To add to the confusion some papers also offered stirring – and quite untrue – reports from the Calabrian front, describing how German and Italian units had pushed the Allies back. Romans were told to remain calm as the Italian authorities negotiated the transfer of German forces to the north. As the well-informed de Wyss knew, Rome was ringed by large numbers of Italian troops, including a well-equipped motorized division, who should have been able to keep the Germans at bay till the Allies appeared.

  Leading figures on the German side fully agreed. The Allies were landing forces at Salerno and Hitler worried that his troops in the south of Italy would be cut off unless they retreated without delay. His commander in southern Italy, Albert Kesselring, who had his headquarters just south of Rome at Frascati – in chaos after a devastating American bombing raid – concurred. He expected the Allies to drop parachutists in Rome and perhaps make a further sea landing near the city. The Italian forces around Rome far outnumbered his own and Badoglio, Kesselring assumed, would already be moving them against him. Kesselring ordered his troops near Rome to advance on the city and test the water. In the city centre German diplomats burned documents and sent their families away. Neither de Wyss not Kesselring knew the shameful truth. In all the previous attacks on Rome examined in this book, its defenders were sometimes incompetent or ineffective, yet the city was never so badly served as it was by the former Fascists, and those who had risen high under Fascism, who governed in early September 1943.

  Italy’s armistice with the Allies had been secretly signed on 3 September at Cassabile in Sicily and was to be announced five days later. The Allied commander in the Mediterranean, Eisenhower, sought to make good use of the time left to him before the news broke. As Kesselring had guessed, Eisenhower had arranged that 2,000 parachutists would descend on Rome on the evening of 8 September to secure the city’s airfields and help Italian forces defend the city from German attack, and the next day his troops would land at Salerno. To prepare for the parachute drop two US generals, Taylor and Gardiner, were smuggled into Rome the evening before. Arriving in the city late they soon became concerned by what they found. They were taken to the Palazzo Caprara beside the Ministry of War where, instead of being introduced to key figures engaged in Rome’s defence as they had expected, they were brought a splendid meal from the nearby Grand Hotel, which included consommé, veal with vegetables, crêpe suzette and vintage wine. Losing patience, they demanded to see Badoglio and were driven to his grandiose home. It was a discouraging meeting. Badoglio, who the Americans had supposed would be frantically preparing for the next day’s events, was fast asleep and had to be woken. While they waited his nephew explained that the announcement of the armistice would have to be delayed by a few days as nothing was ready, and the parachute drop should be cancelled as the Germans had taken all the available fuel. Badoglio, when he eventually appeared, looked scared. ‘I’m an old general who has won two wars,’ he told the Americans. ‘Don’t leave me to the Germans. If they catch me …’12 He made a sign of his throat being cut.

  He and Vittorio Emmanuele had had five days to prepare for Italy’s surrender yet all they had done was look after themselves. Vittorio Emanuele sent his daughter-in-law to Switzerland and Badoglio sent relatives both there and to Tangiers. It was only in the afternoon of 8 September, when the announcement of Italy’s armistice was imminent, that the king final
ly held a meeting with his ministers and military chiefs at the Quirinal Palace to consider what to do. The Minister of War, Antonio Sorice, and General Carboni, both of whom were nervous of the German response to Italy’s unilateral surrender, proposed that the Italians should pretend that they had not surrendered after all. Major Marchesi, the assistant to the king’s chief minister, Ambrosiano, who had been present at the surrender in Sicily, scotched the idea, pointing out that the Americans had filmed the whole ceremony. Then discussion became irrelevant, as news arrived that Eisenhower was speaking on the radio and announcing the armistice. The king declared, ‘Now there’s no doubt,’13 and Badoglio hurried to Rome’s broadcasting centre on Via Asiago, to announce it, too.

  From that moment Italy’s rulers behaved less like a government and more like a theatre audience wondering what would happen next. Badoglio, the king and a number of high ministers assembled at the Ministry of War on Via XX Settembre. At this stage reports suggested that the Germans were retreating north. After a modest dinner, Badoglio and the royal family, who were all early sleepers, went to bed. The king and queen took the precaution of sleeping in their clothes. When everyone woke shortly before dawn they were told that the Germans had cut off all routes out of Rome except one, which led east to the Apennines and the Adriatic.

  There was little or no discussion as to what should be done. Then again, this was a moment that Vittorio Emanuele had been anticipating for some time. Ever since he had deposed Mussolini he had kept a naval vessel at Civitavecchia ready to whisk him away. Just after five in the morning he, his family, Badoglio and their helpers assembled with their luggage in a courtyard of the Ministry of War and a convoy of seven cars took them on to Via Napoli, made its way up the Via Nazionale, past Termini station, San Lorenzo and out of the city. So fled Italy’s royal family and head of state. The only one who was troubled was the heir to the throne, Prince Umberto, whom everyone called Beppo, and who said, ‘Dio Mio! Che figura!’ (‘My God, how bad we’ll look’.) His mother, Queen Elena, told him sharply in French, ‘You’re not going back, Beppo. They’ll kill you.’ Badoglio, pale and nervous, kept murmuring to himself, ‘If they get us they’ll cut all our throats.’14

  Some seventy more cars followed soon afterwards and that afternoon the small port of Ortona on the Adriatic was crammed with royals, government ministers and generals, anxiously waiting for a boat to take them away. Though not everyone of high rank was there. In Rome a group of anti-Fascist partisans paid a visit to the Ministry of Trade and Industry. The main door was wide open and there were signs of a chaotic departure. In the main meeting room they found the minister, Leopoldo Piccardi, with his head in his hands. ‘I’m all alone,’ he told them despairingly. ‘They left me. They ran.’15

  Yet fleeing Rome and abandoning their people was not the worst thing that the king and his government did that day. Worse were the instructions they left. Two clear orders were issued. First, the navy was told to send the cruiser Scipione and two corvettes to collect a group of ‘high personages’ (the king and his government) and take them south to Allied territory. Second, the army commander Roatta ordered the armoured division outside Rome – the most effective Italian unit – to proceed to Tivoli, east of the city, to establish an eastern front. As there was no enemy to establish a front against (the Germans were behind them, advancing on Rome) Roatta’s purpose was obvious. The division was to cover the country’s rulers’ flight. Rome was denuded of its most capable defenders to help its leaders escape.

  Changing sides in the middle of a war was never going to be easy but it was not even attempted. A few of the more fanatical Fascists favoured the Germans but most Italian troops felt little liking for them and would, if clearly instructed, have fought to defend their country. Their orders, though, were anything but clear. Even Badoglio’s announcement of the surrender had been murkily ambiguous. He told Italian forces to ‘Cease all hostile acts against the Anglo-Americans,’ and to ‘Oppose attacks by all hostile forces.’16 During the night of 8 September, as the king slept in his clothes in the Ministry of War, his chief minister Ambrosiano sent out an order forbidding Italian forces from taking hostile action against the Germans, and instructing them that if Germans advanced without aggression they were to let them pass through their positions. Ambrosiano evidently hoped that if the Italians did not aggravate the Germans they would go away. By contrast there was nothing ambiguous about the orders of Field Marshal Kesselring, who, as the Allies’ Salerno landing became bogged down, began to change his mind about abandoning Rome. He told his troops that the Italians were to be disarmed and if necessary attacked, adding that, ‘There is no need to show any pity towards these traitors. Heil Hitler!’17

  Some Italians fought bravely. South of Rome at the Magliana Bridge, beneath the half-constructed buildings of Mussolini’s E-42 exhibition area, Germans holding a white flag advanced on a position held by the First Regiment of Sardinian Grenadiers. The Italian commander went to meet them, only to be cut down by machine-gun fire. His soldiers reacted furiously and a battle began that lasted through the night, with the Italians several times losing and retaking their position. The Germans also struggled north of Rome near Monterotondo, where a force of their paratroopers became pinned down by Italian soldiers and local hunters, so badly that by the evening of 9 September, having lost 300 men killed or wounded, the Germans were forced to seek a truce.

  Elsewhere, though, the Germans met little resistance. They soon grasped the orders that Italians had been given and advanced on their positions with white flags, then trained their guns on the Italians, disarming them and killing any who resisted. Many Italians, having long ago lost all belief in their government and the war, threw away their weapons, changed their uniforms for civilian clothes and made themselves scarce. The entire La Piacenza division dissolved without trace. Soldiers were also let down by their commanders. Some abandoned their troops. One officer left to make sure his prize racehorses were safe and when he returned to his battalion, three hours later, found it had vanished. A very few units, which included two battalions of Blackshirts, joined the Germans.

  By the morning of 10 September the Germans were advancing towards the centre of Rome. Confusion reigned. Streets were deserted, doors and shutters were closed, and buses and trams stood abandoned in mid-journey. Civilians seized weapons, some of which they found in the streets left by deserting soldiers. Carabinieri, concerned to keep order, tried to stop them. A second diarist of these days, who published an account under the name of Jane Scrivener but was later revealed to have been an American nun in Rome, Mother Mary St Luke, saw a column of German prisoners being marched down a street by their Italian guards and assumed the Italians were winning. At eleven she heard that a deal had been struck and that the Germans had agreed not to enter Rome. By noon shells were landing on the city and Italian guns were firing back. In front of Termini railway station German soldiers fired from the window of the Continentale Hotel and were attacked by grenadiers in armoured cars and tram workers throwing bombs.

  By the late morning the Germans were close to Porta San Paolo and Ostiense railway station: the same spot where, five years earlier, Hitler had been welcomed by the cheering crowds. A mixed bag of volunteers hurried to meet them, including Catholic Communists, Bersaglieri soldiers from their barracks in nearby Trastevere and a crowd led by an actor, Carlo Nichi; many of them were unarmed. By one in the afternoon fighting was intense around the Piazza Adolf Hitler in front of the San Paolo Gate but it was a hopelessly unequal struggle. For all their numbers and passion the defenders had no organization, many soldiers had only a few rounds left and their tanks stood no chance against German Panzers. To make matters worse, news was spreading that the king and his government had fled the city. By the afternoon the Germans had broken through Porta San Paolo and were advancing along the same route Hitler had taken in his motorcade: along the Viale Africa to the Colosseum and then down the Via dell’Impero to the Piazza Venezia.

  A final bat
tle took place at Termini. A hundred officers and soldiers from Monterotondo arrived on a sequestered train, a small artillery piece on the engine, to help the Romans. They set up machine guns on the platforms, railwaymen fought at their side and it took five hours for the Germans to overwhelm them. The railwaymen they executed. By six in the evening Mother Mary found all was quiet. On the street below her convent she saw German cars speeding by while little knots of Romans talked anxiously together. When she turned on her radio, the Rome station, which before had played only music, she found now broadcast in German or in Italian spoken with a strong German accent.

  Rome was occupied.

  • • •

  In the first few days Rome experienced the twentieth-century equivalent of a sacking, which was fairly mild compared to what the city had endured in the past. As businesses reopened and hungry Romans emerged on the streets seeking food, German soldiers looted shops, mugged people of their valuables, took cars and bicycles at gunpoint, and a few Roman women suffered the horror of rape. Romans comforted themselves with the thought that the Allies would arrive soon. Even the gloomiest expected them within two weeks. It would prove to be a very optimistic prediction.