51 ‘Report on XX’s Trip’, Salvadori papers.
52 Ibid.
53 Handwritten note by M. Salvadori, 14 August 1980, Salvadori papers.
54 ‘Report on XX’s Trip’, Salvadori papers.
55 Report (‘Max Salvadori alias Paleotti’), 21 July 1941, attached to letter from P. E. Foxworth (FBI office, New York) to the Director (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC), 8 October 1941, Bureau file 100-12404, FBI Archives.
56 Letter (‘Re: Max William Salvadori. Internal Security – I’), J. Edgar Hoover (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC) to Special Agent in Charge (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC), 3 June 1941, Bureau file 100‑23064‑1, FBI Archives.
57 Letter (‘Re: Max William Salvadori. Internal Security – I’), S. K. McKee (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC) to the Director (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC), 4 April 1942, Bureau file 100-2769, FBI Archives.
58 Report (‘Max William Salvadori, with aliases Dr Massimo Salvadori-Palleotti, Dr Massimo Salvadori, Dr M. Salvadori-Pallotti’ by P. P. Schneider (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC), 4 April 1942, Bureau file 100-2769, FBI Archives.
59 Report by Corporal E. Beaumont, 9 July 1943, TNA HS 6/882.
60 Report by Corporal E. Beaumont, 16 July 1943, TNA HS 6/882.
61 Vetere was from Montreal and had worked before the war as a clerk. Peter Lizza was a shoemaker from Toronto and the only one of the six to speak fluent Italian, his parents having taken him, when he was two, to live in Italy for a few years. Frank Fusco was a pre-war welder from Niagara Falls. The remaining three of that six-strong Canadian party went on to work at SOE headquarters and training schools. Another Italian-Canadian, a labourer and hotel worker called Frank Misericordia, was trained as a wireless operator and would have gone into action but for illness. Recruited in Ottawa in 1941 at the older-than-average age of thirty-five, Misericordia was a married father of four who had been in Canada for twenty years but remembered southern Italy well. Training reports glowed with praise: ‘one of the best shots that has ever been trained at this school … intelligent and conscientious … has shown aptitude, concentration and great keenness … happy, likeable and helpful … extremely keen to go to Italy and to do any work … has a deep hatred of the regime’. Quoted in report entitled ‘Frank’, 17 April 1943, TNS HS 9/1042/1. Passed fit for work as an agent, Misericordia refrained from disclosing to SOE that he suffered from a bad heart until, in 1944, he became so ill that he was incapable of concealing it. By then, SOE had already made a series of attempts to land him behind the enemy lines by boat. ‘On no less than five occasions he was taken within reach of land,’ SOE recorded, ‘but each time something outside his control went wrong; engine failed, oars broke, patrols observed on the beach, etc … It is not difficult to conceive that being keyed up on five occasions for a hazardous enterprise accentuated his heart trouble.’ Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry to Flight Lieutenant J. L. Day, 18 May 1944, TNA HS 9/1042/1.
62 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
63 R. Maclaren, Canadians Behind Enemy Lines 1939–1945 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1981), p. 174.
64 ‘Italy’, Sir Frank Nelson to G. Jebb, 15 October 1941, TNA HS 6/885.
5
‘A mass of difficulties’
Among the finest Italian memoirs of the First World War is Un anno sull’Altipiano. An English edition, Sardinian Brigade, remains in print. The author, who had been an infantry officer and company commander in the Italian Army’s distinguished Brigata Sassari, recalls in its pages his searing experiences on the Austro-Italian front. One noted passage is his powerful account of terror-stricken soldiers poised to go over the top on the Asiago plateau in July 1916:
Captain Bravini had his watch in his hand and was following the inexorable passing of the minutes …
‘Ready for the assault! Officers, to your places!’
Wide and staring, the men’s eyes seemed to seek ours. They met only mine, for Captain Bravini was still gazing fixedly at his watch …
‘Ready!’ shouted Bravini again.
To attack! Where was one going? Out into the open, away from the cover afforded by the trenches. Machine-guns, stuffed with ammunition, were lying in wait. Those who have not been through such moments do not know what war is …
The 10th was directly in front of me and I could distinguish every man. Two of them moved, and I saw them, one beside the other, place the barrels of their rifles under their chins. One leaned forward, pressed the trigger, and slipped to the ground. The other did the same.1
The book’s author was Emilio Lussu. Born on the Italian island of Sardinia in 1890, in a village called Armungia in hills northeast of the capital, Cagliari, he had been a popular officer known for showing concern for the plight of his men. While still at the front, and in spite of his youth, he had been made president of a federation of ex-servicemen. By the end of the war he had been wounded twice and decorated four times for valour. After it he devoted his life to law, politics, writing and revolution.
In 1921, still only thirty, Lussu had been elected to Italy’s parliament. He represented the Partito Sardo d’Azione, the Sardinian Action Party, which he had co-founded the previous year with a platform of social democracy and Sardinian autonomy. In 1924 he returned to Sardinia after resigning in protest at the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist deputy kidnapped and killed by Fascist thugs. Then he became a target himself. The island was not at all a Fascist stronghold and, to pacify its politicians, Rome began to sponsor quasi-military gangs in an attempt to assert its authority. In 1926, when a baying crowd of Fascists surrounded Lussu’s home in Cagliari, one tried to get in through the window and Lussu shot him. It was a killing committed in self-defence but Lussu was sentenced by the Fascists to five years’ confino and dispatched in chains to Lipari.
In 1929, Lussu was one of the two political prisoners who joined Carlo Rosselli in the daring escape from the island that made headlines worldwide. Settling in exile in Paris, he started working for Giustizia e Libertà and married Max Salvadori’s redoubtable sister, Joyce, who became a professor of philology at the Sorbonne. They had first met in Geneva when Joyce delivered a secret message from anti-Fascists imprisoned with her brother on Ponza. ‘Lussu had no intention of settling down with a wife and family,’ she later wrote. ‘To his way of thinking such things were incompatible with the life that he led as a militant rebel. I, on the other hand, was convinced that I was just the ideal companion for an active revolutionary and I missed no opportunity of telling him so.’2 The couple lived together in borderline poverty in Paris’ Latin Quarter, moving whenever OVRA agents found out their address. In exile, Lussu also wrote. Marcia su Roma e dintorni (1933), published in English in 1936 as Enter Mussolini: Observations and Adventures of an Anti-Fascist, recounted his political experiences up to his flight from Lipari. Un anno sull’Altipiano appeared in 1938. In May 1940 he was among the Italian anti-Fascists in Paris whom his brother-in-law introduced to Section D. When the city fell a few days later, Lussu and his wife, on foot, carrying little suitcases, joined the columns of refugees fleeing south.
In May 1941 a story reached London that Lussu was in Marseilles. It seems to have come courtesy of Umberto Calosso, an anti-Fascist of Italian roots who was assisting with Allied propaganda in the Middle East, and it was the first the British had heard of Lussu since the Germans marched into Paris eleven months before. ‘We would naturally like him here,’ George Martelli put in. ‘Lussu is one of the best known and most able of the Italian anti-Fascists.’3 Martelli also urged speed, since the Gestapo was reportedly on Lussu’s tail. Facilitating an escape from southern France, which was Vichy-controlled and not yet under German occupation, was not an impossible proposition, but plans for a rescue were still being laid when, in June, Lussu appeared in Lisbon and made contact with the British Embassy. Wielding a home-made Polish passport and accompanied by Joyce, he had managed to flee France through the Pyrenees
.
Soon Lussu was talking to one of SOE’s representatives in Lisbon, a businessman by the name of Laurent Mortimore. Lussu told him that Italy would soon be ripe for revolution. With that in mind, he wished to return to France and make his way to Corsica from where he would establish himself on Sardinia and organise ‘total action … including sabotage and revolt’. If successful, he would extend that activity to the rest of Italy. He also said that, while he wanted this action to be ‘100% Italian and not dependent on British money’, he was keen for British involvement. Lussu struck Mortimore as ‘a first-rate man and undoubtedly a daring organiser’, who wanted to ‘prepare a revolution in Italy and also start immediately on subversive work, sabotage, etc.’ He was ‘full of energy and dynamic’ and ‘full of ideas: some of them may be good’. Jack Beevor, another of SOE’s Lisbon men with whom began to deal, took a similarly positive view. Lussu, he reported, was ‘a proud and independent creature’ and ‘an enthusiast and an idealist of an extremely active type, and although he throws his arms about and spreads out vistas of extensive schemes, he is a fair critic of himself’.4
As officers in London began to learn more about Lussu, hopes for anti-Italian action grew. Here was an energetic exile with prestige, contacts, experience and ideas. Soon one of those ideas was at the centre of SOE’s plans for Italy: Lussu’s grand project for a Sardinian-based rebellion that would inspire revolt across the Italian mainland.
Within days of Lussu appearing on the scene, SOE went into action on his behalf. It started by helping a dozen or so of his anti-Fascist Italian friends to escape from Vichy-controlled Morocco. After the French defeat in June 1940 they had all fled to Casablanca, another hub for refugees fleeing Europe, and Lussu wanted them out so they could assist him with his plans. Getting refugees out of Casablanca was a notoriously ticklish business. (Humphrey Bogart’s fictional Rick was supposedly attempting at about this time to get Victor Laszlo out of the city.) Eventually, at a cost of nearly £1,000 and with the help of a friendly Greek colonel in Rabat, SOE secured visas to let Lussu’s friends leave for the United States and Mexico. Among them were Alberto Cianca and Aldo Garosci, two more Giustizia e Libertà members whom Max Salvadori had introduced to Section D in 1940, and Leo Valiani, a political journalist and ex-communist friend of the author Arthur Koestler. Valiani had recently been imprisoned with Koestler in Spain (and is ‘Mario’ in Koestler’s 1941 memoir, Scum of the Earth).
When that was done, and to demonstrate the sort of support that the British might be able to offer, Lussu was flown by flying boat to Malta and briefed by SOE officers there about aircraft drops, submarine landings, coded communications and wireless links. With the Axis now dominant across Continental Europe, this tiny territory had become a crucial jumping-off point for British special operations in the Mediterranean: it was from Malta that the Colossus party had dropped into Italy in February; it was a Royal Navy submarine sailing from the island that put SOE’s first team into German-occupied Yugoslavia in September. Lussu returned to Lisbon a few weeks later, apparently ‘in splendid form’ and ‘delighted’ with his discoveries on the island.5
Through its office in New York, SOE also acted as a channel through which Lussu exchanged news and views with Italian anti-Fascists living in exile in the United States. While this mechanism proved useful to Lussu, it also allowed SOE to open and read his correspondence. Lussu knew this and drafted his letters carefully, but they still provided an authentic sense of his passion for the cause as he saw it. ‘I am striving to bring about a plan which pre-supposes co-operation with the English,’ he wrote to Alberto Cianca in October after his friend had reached New York. ‘In spite of so many difficulties of every sort it is clear that we must return to the struggle with all our energies.’ To Aldo Garosci, who was evidently having doubts about the effectiveness of Giustizia e Libertà, Lussu wrote:
[N]ations have been trampled underfoot, states have been wiped out, military, political and secular powers have crumbled away. And it surprises you that ‘G. and L.’ should have failed to achieve anything of value? Who has?
… ‘G. and L.’ lives on and will continue … It will live and, moreover, it will fight. Europe has entered the decisive phase of the political struggle; we must not be content with hoping for victory on the Anti-Fascist front: it is our duty to collaborate in causing it and to take an active part …
I must speak very strongly to you … You are making a big mistake in dissociating yourself from ‘G. and L.’ You owe a great deal to our movement; without it you would be a political castaway. ‘G. and L.’ has orientated you. You need ‘G. and L.’ more than ‘G. and L.’ needs you …
The tone is typical of Lussu’s directness and self-belief. ‘I know you well,’ he went on at Garosci, ‘you will get nowhere alone. You might perhaps write a book or found a review, and if so, you may count me amongst your readers, but, politically, you will be at a standstill.’6
Also obvious from Lussu’s letters is his steady belief that anti-Fascists and Italians in general had to reject and overthrow Mussolini’s regime in an autonomous and independent way. ‘The formation [abroad] of a Provisional Government would mean that we should only be able to re-enter Italy backed by British bayonets,’ he wrote to another of his old friends now in America, Alberto Tarchiani, in another letter read by SOE. ‘Even Anti-Fascists in Italy would lay in a stock of tomatoes and rotten eggs to bombard us with on our triumphal entry into Rome … Fascism would be overthrown, at the end of the war, by the British and not by us.’ For Lussu, action was everything. ‘Only the prestige of action, of success, can cause the rapid development in Italy of a political movement of revolt,’ he told Cianca; ‘we must work like slaves to make action possible … we must have the guts to involve ourselves inextricably … If one considers what may happen in Italy if anti-Fascism remains unexpressed before the end of the war in some decisive action, one’s brain reels.’7
To SOE, everything seemed to be progressing rather well. Then, in November 1941, a few days after his return to Lisbon from Malta, Lussu tabled his detailed plan. At once it was realised that dealing with him was not going to be hurdle-free. Much of what he proposed was already known: his intention to travel, with his wife, to France and then to Corsica from where they would begin working into Sardinia; his wish for a free force of Sardinian volunteers to be raised, trained and armed and landed on the island when the time was right; and his desire to coordinate everything with British military aims and capabilities. What caused alarm was his new request for a formal British declaration ‘that Italy will be guaranteed the metropolitan and colonial boundaries possessed by her previous to the advent of Fascism’.8 That statement was vital, Lussu stressed. It would reassure anti-Fascist Italians ready to rise up in Sardinia or rebel elsewhere in Italy that they would not be fighting to destroy their own country. ‘An Italian revolt against Fascism could only be popular if the Italians felt they had gained a constitution and regime freely chosen by themselves. Sardinians should be regarded by Italians as helping to liberate Italy and not as being “sold to England”.’9
Gladwyn Jebb, right-hand man to Hugh Dalton, SOE’s minister, spotted the implications as soon as Lussu’s plan arrived on his desk, and spelt them out for his superiors:
Lussu suggests that H.M.G. should declare that Italy, if she revolted against the Germans, should be allowed to retain her metropolitan and colonial frontiers as they existed in 1922. This would, of course, mean reinstating the Italian administration in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, which would have an unpleasant reaction in Africa generally, [and result] in debarring us from making any appeal to the Arabs in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica … and in infuriating the Yugoslavs in denying them the possibility of liberating the 600,000 Slovenes in Venezia Giulia. Nor could we even, I think, go so far as to promise a ‘liberated’ Italy any ‘compensations’ elsewhere, in accordance with the technique adopted during the last war. To offer them Tunis, for instance, would finally discredit us with all Fren
chmen, from Marshal Pétain to de Gaulle.
Jebb felt ‘pretty sure’ that this would be the Foreign Office’s opinion:
I therefore think it is hardly necessary to ask them for their views … What I should hope, therefore, would be that Lussu may be persuaded to go to Corsica and make his preparations without any political guarantee of any kind … It is our function in SOE to promote revolution by any means and in any place that we can, thus preparing the ground for any action by the armed forces, and if Lussu can get an organisation going in Sardinia (which I must say I rather doubt) all we can say is ‘Good Luck’ to him.10
Dalton was more impressed by the plan’s potential. ‘This is the most hopeful Italian idea I have had put up to me yet,’ he wrote when he read it. ‘Let us push it hard … Sardinians are good fighters, much above the Italian average.’ But he agreed that Lussu could not possibly be given the political assurances he wanted. ‘Let Lussu be discouraged from asking for precise and awkward undertakings, and be offered harmless generalities instead,’ Dalton instructed imperiously, failing completely, as events would prove, to gauge the strength of Lussu’s conviction. ‘Pick out suitable bits of the Atlantic Charter, including free for all to decide their own form of Government; freedom from fear and want; social security and improved labour standards, access to war materials, etc. This could be made to sound quite attractive.’11
Target Page 14
