Target
Page 2
SOE’s war on Mussolini’s Italy was a desperate business. Errors were made. The obstacles were immense. The difficulties included enemy intelligence officers skilled and experienced in counter-subversion, complemented by varying degrees of ignorance and naïveté on the part of the British, and reveal an important world of Italian accomplishment and British inferiority that a modern audience may find entirely unfamiliar. When significant success was had by SOE, it resulted more by accident and from clever quick-thinking than from any established anti-Fascist activity or carefully laid plan. The supreme instance of this – an episode that Barbara Salt would later highlight as further cause to record SOE’s contribution to the war against Italy – was the remarkable solo role that Dick Mallaby was destined to perform in the events that led to the Italian surrender in September 1943. Events, wrote Dwight Eisenhower in his memoirs, ‘that, if encountered in the fictional world, would have been scorned as incredible melodrama’.20
Notes
1 E. De Selincourt (Revised by C. L. Shaver), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805 (Oxford: OUP, 1967), pp. 34–5.
2 Sortie report: Operation ‘Neck’, TNA AIR 20/8350.
3 ‘Segnalazione – agenti nemici aviolanciate in abito civile’, report by Comando Difesa Territoriale Milano, 16 August 1943, TNA HS 6/872.
4 J. Gleeson and T. Waldon, Now It Can Be Told (London: Elek Books, 1954), pp. 125–6.
5 Author’s interview with Anna Maria Rusconi, Carate Urio, 17 December 2010.
6 ‘The Mallaby Case’, report by Captain P. Cooper, 1 August 1944, TNA HS 6/872.
7 ‘Cattura di un paracadutista nemico’, report by Ufficio Protezione Impianti e Difesa Anti-paracadutisti, 14 August 1944, TNA HS 6/872.
8 Squadron Leader H. G. Crawshaw to Captain J. Dobrski, 2 July 1943, TNA HS 6/870.
9 Captain E. de Haan to Major C. Roseberry, 15 August 1943, TNA HS 6/870.
10 M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944 (London: HMSO, 1966).
11 C. Cruickshank, SOE in the Far East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); C. Cruickshank, SOE in Scandinavia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
12 M. R. D. Foot, SOE in the Low Countries (London: St Ermin’s, 2001).
13 Report by Dame Barbara Salt, July 1969, TNA CAB 103/570. For more on the heritage and evolution of SOE official histories, see: R. Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence since 1945’, English Historical Review (2004), 119/483, pp. 922–53; Christopher J. Murphy, ‘The Origins of SOE in France’, Historical Journal (2003), 46/4, pp. 935–52; and M. Seaman, ‘A Glass Half Full: Some Thoughts on the Evolution of the Study of the Special Operations Executive’, Intelligence and National Security (2005), 20/1, pp. 27–43.
14 D. Stafford, Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy, 1943–45 (London: The Bodley Head, 2011).
15 C. M. Woods, CMG, MC. A personal memoir of Captain Woods’s work in German-occupied Italy is preserved in the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum.
16 These consist principally of a mass of SIM ‘controspionaggio’ files that fell into the hands of the American Office of Strategic Services at the end of the Second World War, copies of which survive today at the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The SIM archive in Italy, held in Rome in the Archivio dell’Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, was temporarily opened to research a few years ago; during work on this book, however, it was closed for reordering. Other Italian documents drawn upon here are the files in Rome of the Special Tribunal, which was responsible for trying captured Allied agents (among other opponents of the regime); those records are available to readers at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato.
17 Christopher Woods and the Italian historian Mireno Berrettini are the principal writers who have sought before to explore SOE’s overall record against Italy prior to September 1943. For Christopher Woods’s work, see his articles ‘SOE in Italy’, in M. Seaman (ed.), Special Operations Executive: A New Instrument of War (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 91–102, and ‘A Tale of Two Armistices’, in K. G. Robertson (ed.), War, Resistance & Intelligence: Essays in Honour of M. R. D. Foot (London: Leo Cooper, 1999), pp. 1–17. Full details of Mireno Berrettini’s publications can be found in the bibliography, but his main work is La Gran Bretagna e l’antifascismo italiano: diplomazia clandestina, intelligence, operazioni speciali, 1940–1943 (Florence: La Lettere, 2010). A brief chapter in Professor W. J. M. Mackenzie’s in-house history of SOE, completed for the Cabinet Office in the late 1940s and published over fifty years later as The Secret History of SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–1945 (London: St Ermin’s, 2000), remains one of the few other accounts in print to touch on the topic of SOE’s efforts against Fascist Italy. For accounts of SOE’s work in Italy’s overseas territories, W. E. D. Allen’s Guerrilla War in Abyssinia (London: Penguin, 1943) and D. McNab’s Mission 101 (Sydney: Macmillan, 2011) both describe SOE-backed operations in Italian-occupied Abyssinia (Ethiopia). For a thorough study of SOE activity in Axis-occupied Albania, see my own The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), which draws heavily on SOE records and the stories of survivors.
18 Brigadier C. Gubbins to Lord Selborne, 22 December 1942, TNA HS 6/901.
19 Narrative of the work of SOE’s Italian Section by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, July 1945, TNA HS 7/58.
20 D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (London: Heinemann, 1948), p. 202.
1
‘Useless wishful thinking’
July 1937. An MI6 officer calling himself Mr Constable is waiting by the ticket barrier at London’s Waterloo Station. A train draws in, and the final passenger to disembark is a tall, blond, blue-eyed man of twenty-nine years of age. From the barrier the pair leave the station and cross the Thames to the Strand Palace Hotel. They exchange pleasantries – they have not met before – and then talk of more serious matters. Speaking fluent English with a pronounced Italian accent, the young man explains that he holds a British passport, has an English wife, and is a prominent member of an underground organisation of Italian anti-Fascists. He tells Mr Constable that he wants money from the British to help spread anti-Fascist propaganda inside Italy.1
The young man’s name was Max Salvadori. Probably he was the most outstanding Italian asset within easy reach of British Intelligence in the years running up to Italy’s entry into the Second World War. Destined to leave an indelible mark on the history of Italian anti-Fascism, he was a toughened and dedicated activist whose hard-won knowledge and experience of underground work gave him rare insight into the ways, means and difficulties of opposing the Fascist regime from within. Later, while attached to SOE as a commissioned officer in the British Army, he would take part in the invasion of Sicily, land on the mainland at Salerno and Anzio, be wounded by a landmine on the banks of the Garigliano, parachute into the German-occupied north, work closely with some of the most senior members of the Italian resistance, rise to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and be decorated by the British with the Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross. ‘This officer was in constant danger of capture in civilian clothes,’ reads the recommendation for his DSO; ‘his courage and determination in these circumstances were of the highest order.’2
But in 1937 that military record lay far in the future. So, too, did an appetite among policy-makers in Britain for anything more than the most oblique approach to confronting Italian Fascism: a lack of appetite at that time that helps explain why British plans for taking clandestine action against Italy were virtually nonexistent when war with Mussolini eventually came. It was an approach perfectly illustrated by the course of British dealings with Salvadori up to June 1940.
Born Massimo Salvadori-Paleotti in London in June 1908, Max Salvadori was brought up in Florence in a freethinking and liberal home in which both parents found Fascism repellent. His father was Gu
glielmo dei Conti Salvadori-Paleotti, a philosophy professor descended from protestant landowners on Italy’s Adriatic coast. His mother was Giacinta Galletti di Cadilhac, whose English mother was the daughter of Sir Robert Collier, a lawyer and Liberal politician under Gladstone. It was by his father’s side on an autumn afternoon in 1922 that Salvadori first saw Mussolini in the flesh. A crowd had filled the piazza facing Florence’s railway station. Then, to cheers and flanked by black-shirted Fascists, an open-topped car drove slowly through the throng. Standing inside was Mussolini, the blacksmith’s son, ex-journalist, ex-socialist and ex-soldier who was destined to become, a few weeks later, Italy’s premier. ‘Looks like a gorilla,’ Salvadori heard his father say.3
Salvadori’s own loathing of Mussolini’s regime was forged, with blood, at an early age. In March 1924, an article by his father entitled ‘Fascismo and the Coming Elections’ appeared in Britain’s New Statesman, drawing attention to the Fascists’ use of violence in Italy’s electoral process. Publication was dangerous and Salvadori’s father knew it. ‘We were warned that if we put his name to his article he might be murdered by the agents of Mussolini,’ the New Statesman reported the following month; ‘but as a brave man, he wished his name to appear, and so we decided to print it.’
We now learn, not from the Professor himself but from some of his English relatives who can speak without fear of further reprisals, that he has been punished most brutally for the honest expression of his opinions. A band of armed Fascisti visited his house and demanded an explanation. This he offered to give at their headquarters. He went there and was received by a dozen or so Blackshirts, first with gross insults and menaces and then with blows. They hit him repeatedly in the face and head and turned him out bleeding, to be struck again – this time with leather-covered canes – by another band at the door. His young son, who was waiting outside, rushed to his father’s rescue, and he, too, was hit and thrown to the ground. The two got away, but were followed by their tormenters, who presently came up with them and once more beat them over the head with their sticks. Policemen looked on without interfering. They were only saved by a passing officer, who deputed two soldiers to escort them home.4
The Fascist headquarters in Florence sat in a piazza with a monument in its middle to the dead of the Risorgimento, the great nineteenth-century struggle for national unification that culminated in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and made famous the names of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Cavour. Salvadori would vividly recall the square’s evening stillness being ‘shattered by yells and curses’ as ‘black-shirted squadristi carrying clubs and daggers’ burst from the building’s doors. Seeing his father, ‘silent, his face covered in blood’, in their midst, Salvadori had hurled himself at the gang, striking one in the face as hard as he could. An ‘avalanche of blows’ descended. Semi-conscious, he felt someone lift him, then drop him, and heard a voice say, ‘He’s dead.’5 Soon afterwards, on foot and by sleigh, he followed his father into Switzerland and exile.
In Switzerland Salvadori finished his schooling and enrolled at the University of Geneva for a degree in economic sciences. It was also in exile that his anti-Fascism matured. In Paris in 1929 he joined Giustizia e Libertà, literally ‘Justice and Liberty’, a movement of Italian anti-Fascists, mostly socialists and liberals, whose members tried to oppose and undermine the new regime in Rome. Propaganda was their primary weapon. Few other means of action seemed remotely within their grasp: money was short; weapons were few; and no foreign states were interested in backing them. Those in charge in Paris included the charismatic scholar and thinker Carlo Rosselli. With Rosselli’s encouragement, Salvadori returned to Italy and began three years of underground activity. It was a period that saw him gain a sobering introduction to the challenges faced by anyone tempted to rebel in Mussolini’s Italy.
As with all groups that tried to oppose Italian Fascism, Giustizia e Libertà was a tiny band – a few thousand sympathisers at most – with a mountain to climb. Although helped by a strategic use of violence, typically in the form of rampaging Fascist thugs, Mussolini had not seized power: Italy had chosen to forgo democracy in favour of the authoritarianism and strident nationalism proffered openly by his new Fascist Party. Fuelled by domestic unrest, economic crisis and terror of the communist spectre that stalked most of Europe after the First World War, a popular fear of socialism had been key to Fascism’s success. So had the disunity, ineptitude and ineffectiveness of the Fascists’ rivals. Liberalism in Italy looked weak and incapable. Fascism offered action, discipline and direction, and promised to revive the fortunes of a war-worn country whose dead between 1915 and 1918 came to well in excess of half a million. Parliament, the police, the civil service and the courts all viewed the nascent Fascist Party with sympathy. Ultimately Italy’s governing elite decided that the only acceptable means of containing the party’s militant, street-fighting, strike-breaking edge was to invite Mussolini to form a government. The support of other parties then allowed him to form a coalition cabinet, secure the reforms needed to fill parliament with Fascists, and take long-term control.
The foundations of Fascist rule became more concrete as the regime worked hard to win more popular support. A great many Italians were more concerned with more pressing matters, like enduring the day-to-day grind of life in inter-war Italy, especially rural inter-war Italy, than with whatever political changes were occurring in Rome. Of those who were more interested, plenty accepted and tolerated Mussolini more than they supported or liked him. But a good number were won over by his charisma alone, while the Fascists’ promises of improved order and prosperity were certainly effective, accompanied as they were by a refreshing degree of political stability, an apparently revived economy and the fast-declining ability of Fascism’s opponents to seem an attractive alternative. Care was taken to keep big business, the Catholic Church, the monarchy and the courts onside. Posters, film and radio were mobilised to bolster the notion of a strong state, with Il Duce, ‘The Leader’, at its heart. Propaganda also began to bombard the public with Italy’s supposed claims to greater territory overseas, together with tales of the iniquitous imperial influence of rival nations, especially Britain, gained at Italians’ expense.
All of this also helped to ensure that domestic opposition to the regime was kept to a minimum. What also helped was the fact that there was precious little room for organised dissent. To tighten Fascism’s grip, a flurry of laws saw Italians deprived of their rights to free speech and free association: spontaneous meetings and demonstrations were banned; strikes were outlawed; Fascist editors were installed on all main newspapers; Fascist prefects took charge of local government; anti-Fascists living abroad were deprived of their citizenship; and so on. Meanwhile Fascist thugs pursued their dirty work of intimidation and worse. One infamous method – juvenile and designed to degrade – was to ambush their victims, force open their throats, and make them drink laxative castor oil. They could be much more brutal. The most prominent early target was Giacomo Matteotti, the leading Socialist deputy and a vocal critic of the regime. In June 1924, while walking in central Rome by the Tiber, he was bundled into a car by a Fascist gang, then beaten and stabbed to death with a carpenter’s file. His body turned up in a shallow grave two months later. A year later it was the turn of the liberal politician and journalist Giovanni Amendola, who, in 1924, had accused Mussolini publicly of responsibility for Matteotti’s death and, at the head of a liberal coalition, tried to stand against him in Italy’s general election. Brutally bludgeoned by a Fascist gang who stopped his car on a road in Tuscany, Amendola never recovered from his injuries: he died in gangrenous agony in a clinic in Cannes in 1926. Dozens of other opposition deputies were beaten up, arrested or otherwise maltreated. Many went into exile. Hundreds of their followers were murdered.
Also in place in Italy was a robust judicial and security system. One element was the Tribunale speciale per la sicurezza dello Stato, the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State. Set u
p in 1926 after a run of attempts on Mussolini’s life, it was presided over by military judges, applied military law, and could hand down the death penalty, which was reintroduced – having been abolished in 1889 – for crimes of espionage and armed rebellion. Much is made today of the fact that formal death sentences under the Fascists were comparatively rare, which was true. It is also the case that the Special Tribunal and smaller courts imposed prison sentences or confino – confinement to a penal island or some other form of forced isolation – with comparative abandon. Among the first to come before the Tribunal was the head of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. Arrested in 1926, he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. The cells took their toll and a decade later he was dead.
Another victim was Carlo Rosselli. Arrested in 1926 for underground activities and given ten months in prison, he completed his sentence but was promptly interned, for the same crime, on the penal island of Lipari, the largest of the volcanic Aeolian Islands off Sicily’s northeast coast. In 1929, in a dramatic and daring escape reported in newspapers worldwide, Rosselli and two friends swam out to a waiting motorboat under the noses of the guards and were whisked to the safety of North Africa. It was then that he went to Paris and co-founded Giustizia e Libertà. ‘Fascism has been in power for seven years,’ Rosselli told an audience at London’s Liberal Club later that year. ‘It has now all the prestige of success, duration, and strength. Its adversaries are beaten down, driven into exile, or constrained to silence in the prisons or on the islands of deportation. Nothing is left of the former democratic regime.’6