Target

by Roderick Bailey

  Olivetti’s reply was enclosed in a white envelope without an address, bearing two wax seals of a golden hue with the initials “G.S.” …

  Internally, the missive was made up of a single page written on a machine and wrapped in light green tissue paper …

  One can learn from the letter’s content that … having [obtained] the Pope’s consent, Adriano Olivetti will be able to begin discussions in the Vatican City with an as yet undesignated representative of the American and British governments for an examination of the situation in Italy and of the talks that could be begun immediately in Rome for the simultaneous separation of Italy, Hungary, Romania and Finland from the Axis …

  The letter in question has been restored with great care to its original state [and] … I have successfully taken note of the stamp of the seals used by Olivetti so as to have an identical one produced immediately (as I did a long time ago in the case of the seals used by the English service) in order to be used were it necessary to check subsequent missives …61

  Italian documents may yet confirm that Olivetti had been arrested on SIM’s orders rather than those of the OVRA or the regular police. For what it is worth, SOE would be told after the Armistice that, upon discovering what Olivetti was up to and the identities of the very senior Italian personalities involved, SIM, with an eye on the future, had decided not to interfere.

  In July 1943, three days after Allied forces began landing in Sicily, Sir Charles Portal, Britain’s Chief of the Air Staff, proposed to the Prime Minister a plan to kill Mussolini in a lightning attack by RAF bombers on the Duce’s office and home. The idea had been suggested once before, a year earlier. At that time there had been a ban on dropping bombs on Rome and the proposal was quickly turned down. Now, in the light of the Allied landings on Italian soil, the head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, wanted fresh permission to have a go. Portal, agreeing with him, put the idea before Churchill. ‘I suggest that if Mussolini were killed or even badly shaken at the present time this might greatly increase the chance of our knocking Italy out at an early date … I therefore ask your permission to lay the operation on.’

  Two years earlier, Portal had expressed squeamishness at the ethics of an SOE plan to parachute into France a party of agents in civilian clothes with orders to ambush a busload of enemy aircrew.62 Now he was advocating a plan to pick off the head of an enemy state by using high explosive bombs dropped from heavy bombers roaring in low over its heavily populated capital city. ‘Harris would use the Squadron of Lancasters (No. 617) which made the attacks on the dams,’ Portal explained, outlining the plan for the Prime Minister; he was referring to Guy Gibson’s famous ‘Dambusters’ force of four-engined bombers that had attacked Germany’s Möhne and Eder dams a few weeks before. ‘The attack would be made just above the roof tops,’ he went on, ‘and would give the only chance of destroying the two buildings without much other damage.’ The buildings Portal meant were the Palazzo Venezia, the grand fifteenth-century palace just north of the Capitoline which housed Mussolini’s office, and the Villa Torlonia, a nineteenth-century villa in the outskirts which was home to his official residence. Both were ‘unmistakable’, Portal added, ‘and neither is within 1,500 yards of the Vatican City or the Vatican churches. Strict orders would be given against taking any action against anything in Rome except the two specified targets.’63

  Permission to bomb Mussolini was never granted. Possibly this was due to the calming voice of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. When the Harris/Portal plan was finally made public in Foreign Office documents released in 2010, British press coverage claimed incorrectly that Eden had proposed the project to Churchill.64 In fact an accurate reading of the declassified paperwork shows not only that Portal had authored the memo but also that Eden had argued against him. ‘I do not like this,’ Eden told the Prime Minister after reading Portal’s proposal. ‘The chances of killing Mussolini are surely very slight, and those of “shaking” him not much greater. If we fail to kill him, we shall certainly not do his reputation any harm, we may even raise his stock of waning popularity.’ Pointing to the ‘odium’ that would undoubtedly result from ‘knocking the older part of the City about and causing civilian casualties’, Eden concluded: ‘My advice is to lay off the present proposal because the target is a too difficult one to warrant the attempt on military grounds, and because on psychological grounds it would be exploited to our disadvantage unless 100 per cent successful.’65

  Eden’s observation about Mussolini’s ‘waning popularity’ was sound. Throughout Italy, tolerance of the Fascist regime had been in terminal decline for months. Old radicals were beginning to stir. New groups, like the Partito d’Azione, had started to organise. Clandestine leaflets and newspapers circulated in ever-growing numbers: L’Unità, the official communist journal, had reappeared; the Partito d’Azione began to publish Italia Libera. Even the Church was becoming active. This growing dissent did not represent an immediate threat to the regime. Nor, it should be noted, had SOE played any role in fomenting it, despite all the reports of successful underground work that were still being regularly sent to Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff and everyone still believed were genuine. (‘Urgent requests for large quantities of explosives and incendiaries have been received,’ SOE confidently told the Chiefs in May. ‘A group in Venice claim to have set fire to dock warehouses which destroyed timber, cotton and other raw materials …’)66 Yet the shifting mood in Italy was real enough. In the spring of 1943, heavy Allied bombing of northern Italy was the principal reason for a famous series of local strikes, the first serious labour trouble in eighteen years.

  For growing numbers of Italians, the war was increasingly real and brutal, defeat and invasion seemed likely, and Fascism was obviously responsible. ‘[E]vents in Russia, the occupation of Tunisia and the complete expulsion of Italy from Africa, [plus] the continuous air raids on the various districts and the consequent deadly and destructive effects, have further increased doubt as to the final success of the war,’ read an official Italian assessment of public opinion in Sicily’s capital, Palermo. ‘The population is terrorized by the results of the last air raids and by the certainty that nothing can be done to prevent them and much less neutralize them … [E]verybody asks on what facts the heads of the Axis powers base their certainty of victory.’67

  That assessment was among a stack of official memoranda from Italy’s principal regions, all dating from May 1943, all drawing similar conclusions, recovered later from Mussolini’s office in the Palazzo Venezia. ‘Public morale is very depressed,’ read a report received from Genoa:

  The population foresees other military defeats, and as the air and sea forces of the enemy are known to be formidable, the certainty that our armed forces will not be able to stop the expected enemy operations is spreading everywhere.

  The faith in victory, that for so many months has nourished such rosy hopes, has now changed into troubled pessimism, and no propaganda is capable of mitigating it because after so many delusions the public does not believe any longer either what the papers or the wireless say …

  [A]lso these other reasons help to keep people depressed:

  The increasing food difficulties …

  The more violent bombardments on the Italian cities that cause more and more material and moral damage …

  The fear that the Anglo-Saxons may land in Italy, and precisely in this part of it so as to be able to get to the heart of Germany more quickly …

  The more and more disquieting news that the soldiers returning from the various fronts in the Balkans bring back …

  The depressing efficacy of the propaganda of the enemy’s wireless broadcasts: because, despite the prohibitions, many people listen in to them and spread them as news heard in Italy.

  News from Naples was little different:

  On the whole, there is a deep desire [here] for peace, and the speech made by the Duce on the 5th of May did not succeed in reassuring the minds of the people. The
refore a kind of indifference is reported for everything that has to do with the manifestations and the propaganda of the Party, which more or less openly is considered responsible for having in the past under-valued the enemy and drawn the nation into war …

  The economic situation is precarious because of the always increasing costs of living. Everybody complains of the cost of living.

  ‘Public opinion is consistently growing worse,’ echoed a report from Rome. ‘Faith in victory seems to be almost totally lost.’68

  On Sunday, 25 July 1943, less than a fortnight after Eden had advised against trying to kill him, Mussolini’s twenty years in charge of Italy came to a more natural end. At two o’clock that morning, after a nine-hour session in Rome of the Fascist Grand Council, a majority of war-weary Fascists approved what was essentially a motion of no confidence. Mussolini, who was present, seemed not to take the outcome seriously. That afternoon he turned up for an audience with King Vittorio Emanuele III as if nothing had happened. It was then that both his premiership and Fascism really came to a close. Emboldened by the backing of senior military officers who had also had enough, the King told Mussolini that Fascism was finished and a new government would be formed with Badoglio at its head.

  Arrested before he left the palace grounds, Mussolini was whisked away in a windowless ambulance and locked up in Rome in a Carabinieri barracks. Later he was shifted to Ponza, the same penal island where Max Salvadori had spent six months’ confino. News of Mussolini’s fall reached the world the same evening. Salvadori himself heard it over a radio in Sicily hours after he had flown in to join Malcolm Munthe and ‘G Topo’. ‘So it is ended,’ Salvadori recorded. ‘I didn’t close my eyes all night except for a few minutes when I had nightmares, seeing flames everywhere … Those who said they had no use for liberty will see now whether dictatorship is so wonderful. Ruins and blood will end twenty years of drunken dreaming.’69

  News of Mussolini’s removal was followed immediately by public assurances from Badoglio that Italy would remain at Germany’s side. ‘La guerra continua,’ he famously declared: ‘The war continues.’ The Allies expected this, since the Italians were clearly cautious of German reaction; but they also expected attempts by the Italians to sue for peace. Badoglio, it was noted in an intelligence assessment put before the War Cabinet in London,

  has always been anti-Fascist and anti-German. He is therefore not the man who would be chosen to lead the last defence of Fascist Italy as an ally of Nazi Germany … The only reasonable conclusion [to draw] is that the change of government is intended as a first step towards Italy’s withdrawal from the war … We may, therefore, in the very near future, receive serious peace overtures from the Italian Government.70

  It is unlikely that the British had ever had in their hands a channel for knocking Italy out of the war earlier. The prevailing Allied demand for Italy’s unconditional surrender had reflected a realistic assumption of what was needed to bring its leaders to the negotiating table: a costly thrashing on conventional battlefields; plenty of morale-sapping high explosive dropped on Italy’s population from the air; and blasts of propaganda holding Mussolini responsible for all of Italy’s woes, while implying that fortunes would improve once he was gone. Even then, it still required the presence of powerful Allied forces poised to land on the Italian mainland, plus a palace coup backed by senior military men. Indeed, though Badoglio and the King had finally done away with Mussolini, a continuing fear of precipitating a German occupation and counter-coup would see them hesitate to go much further. ‘The Italians wanted frantically to surrender,’ as the Allied commander in the Mediterranean, Dwight Eisenhower, wrote later. ‘However, they wanted to do so only with the assurance that such a powerful Allied force would land on the mainland simultaneously with their surrender that the government itself and their cities would enjoy complete protection from the German forces.’71 In fact, the key surrender talks would only begin when a fresh Italian peace emissary went far further in his dealings with the Allies than his masters in Rome had authorised.

  Notes

  1 Cipher telegram, SOE Algiers to SOE London, 6 July 1943, TNA HS 6/800.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Interview with Commander Richard Gatehouse, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Ref. No. SA 12213.

  4 See, for example, M. Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939–45 (London: HarperPress, 2011), p. 365.

  5 Narrative of the work of SOE’s Italian Section by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, July 1945, TNA HS 7/58.

  6 Prime Minister to Lord Selborne, 1 May 1944, TNA HS 8/281.

  7 ‘Armistice and Post-War Committee’, Lord Selborne to Prime Minister, 27 April 1944, TNA HS 8/281.

  8 Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, p. 395.

  9 For SOE’s success at securing foreign currency, see: Christopher J. Murphy, ‘SOE’s Foreign Currency Transactions’, Intelligence and National Security, 20/1, March 2005.

  10 Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry to D/HIS.1, 25 July 1945, TNA HS 7/58.

  11 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 384.

  12 P. Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 85.

  13 Cipher telegram, J. McCaffery to SOE London, 2 September 1942, TNA HS 6/778.

  14 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

  15 ‘General Annibale Bergonzoli’, 13 September 1943, TNA HS 6/778.

  16 Cipher telegram, General Sir Archibald Wavell to War Office, 24 March 1941, TNA FO 371/29936.

  17 Minute by V. Cavendish-Bentinck, 11 April 1941, TNA FO 371/29936.

  18 Cipher telegram, General Sir Archibald Wavell to War Office, 9 April 1941, TNA FO 371/29936.

  19 Minute by P. Dixon, 13 May 1941, TNA FO 371/29936.

  20 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

  21 ‘Memo from SOE Berne dated 5th January 1943’, TNA HS 6/777.

  22 Cipher telegrams, SOE London to J. McCaffery, 13 January 1943, TNA HS 6/824.

  23 Sir Orme Sargent to Sir Charles Hambro, 21 January 1943, TNA HS 6/777.

  24 Roseberry added that ‘Badoglio, the son of a Piedmontese yeoman, would have been surprised at this description of himself.’ Narrative of the work of SOE’s Italian Section by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, July 1945, TNA HS 7/58.

  25 Foreign Office to the Prime Minister, 17 February 1943, TNA PREM 3/242/9.

  26 Prime Minister to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 13 February 1943, TNA PREM 3/242/9.

  27 Sir Orme Sargent to Sir Charles Hambro, 20 March 1943, TNA HS 6/901.

  28 According to Professor F. H. Hinsley, the War Cabinet’s continued insistence on the principle of no-undertakings-before-negotiations had ‘put an end’ to that Italian approach. This was either because ‘the Italian offer had not been genuine’ or because the British ‘stipulations’ ‘had proved unacceptable to the Italians’. F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations. Volume III, Part I [London: HMSO, 1984], p. 102n. Professor W. J. M. Mackenzie, in his long-classified Cabinet Office history of SOE, stated too that ‘this was sufficient to break off discussions’. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, p. 540. But in fact, from inspection of SOE records, it seems that Jock McCaffery did not have the opportunity to report the fresh position to Rusca before his line to him from Berne went down.

  29 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/262.

  30 J. McCaffery (‘M’) to L. Rusca (‘Vulp’), undated but December 1942, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 221, Folder 49 (A).

  31 SIM report No. 81372, 30 March 1943, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 221, Folder 49 (A).

  32 SIM report No. 7098, ‘Azione “E–G”’, 3 April 1943, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 221 Folder 49 (A).

  33 G. Bonsaver, Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 235.

  34 Major C. Roseberry to Captain J
. R. M. Senior, 24 September 1943, TNA HS 6/780.

  35 ‘SOE & Italy’, by Major C. Roseberry, 28 September 1943, TNA HS 6/901.

  36 Roseberry’s regret is echoed by Mackenzie’s Cabinet Office history of SOE: ‘a rising in Italy timed to follow swiftly on the fall of Tunis [in May 1943] would have made an immense difference to the whole aspect of the war … The balance of arguments lay very even, and the decision taken [to dismiss Badoglio’s approach] was certainly one of crucial importance.’ Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, pp. 540–1.

  37 Information provided by the SOE Adviser.

  38 Covering letter to ‘An Italian Policy’, Sir Charles Hambro to the Foreign Office, 9 December 1942, TNA HS 6/901.

  39 ‘An Italian Policy’, 9 December 1942, TNA HS 6/901.

  40 Later, Roseberry would claim to understand the grounds for that policy. As he put it, ‘It is difficult for us to think always along the same lines as the Foreign Office, seeing that whereas they are necessarily concerned with the situation after [Allied] occupation, we are only concerned with operations which will hasten the day and ease the operations leading to [Allied] occupation.’ C. Roseberry to Brigadier E. Mockler-Ferryman, 28 June 1943, TNA HS 9/1119/7. But there was more to it than that, as Mackenzie acknowledged in his history of SOE. For example, ‘the political risks of negotiation were obvious’: the Anglo-American commitment to the policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ was seen as crucial to convincing the Soviet Union that a coalition with the Western Allies was worth it. Mackenzie could have added that public opinion in both Britain and the United States demanded nothing less. Certainly he was right to mention that this policy ‘meant that no serious attempt could be made to corrupt or seduce any part of the governing oligarchy in Germany or Italy’. He was also right to acknowledge ‘the technical difficulties of mustering sufficient forces for a landing and providing them with air cover while Sicily was still in enemy hands,’ which made it impossible for the Allies to offer the Italians much military support or any hope of Allied landings until late August. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, pp. 538, 541. Mackenzie was on less solid ground when implying – as many have done – that an alternative policy would have made a difference. Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower’s official biographer, put that claim at perhaps its most extreme. In Ambrose’s opinion, ‘Because the Allies were unwilling to abandon Roosevelt’s unconditional-surrender formula, deal once again with a fascist like Darlan, or even move quickly, the Italian campaign was long, slow, bloody and sterile … The bill for the delay was paid at in blood at Salerno, Anzio and Cassino.’ S. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (New York, Doubleday, 1970), pp. 235, 253.