Cecil Roseberry’s assessment of SOE’s pre-Armistice Italian record was based purely on the information available to him when he sat down to write it. Had he known more, he might have included the contribution made by Gabor Adler’s wireless set to two major Allied deception schemes in the Mediterranean that summer. And if he had written the report a little later, Roseberry might even have included a discovery made in January 1944 after the Allied landings at Anzio that revealed another instance of SOE having inconvenienced the Italians, albeit inadvertently, while Mussolini had been in charge.
When Allied soldiers secured and searched Anzio’s neighbouring town of Nettuno, documents found in its police station included a months-old Italian report carrying the following urgent warning: ‘Informing all concerned of a projected attempt on the life of the Duce … alleged to be sponsored by the British.’16 The would-be assassin was reputed to be an Italian, Luigi Mazzotta, once of the 24th Artillery Regiment, who had left Lecce for Africa in 1935 and, after leaving the army, set himself up in Addis Ababa as a tailor. Hearing of this, SOE immediately recognised Mazzotta as one of its Italian volunteers from East Africa. Mazzotta, in fact, had come as close as any agent to being sent into enemy territory to be deliberately caught: it was he that Roseberry had proposed to drop into Sardinia as a way of implying that the British still believed that Gabor Adler and Salvatore Serra were free.
SOE was never quite sure how the assassination plan had reached the Italians. Clearly there had been a leak somewhere but it all seemed very garbled: Mazzotta had never been earmarked for the mission to kill Mussolini. ‘It was a companion of Mazzotta’s who was to make this attempt on the Duce’s life,’ one officer noted. ‘His name was Di Giunta. He was, however, indiscreet to such an extent that it was found necessary to dispose of him before he went into the field.’ Perhaps Mazzotta, ‘who is extremely boastful,’ had proved similarly indiscreet: ‘He must have known well what Di Giunta’s mission in the field was, owing to Di Giunta’s indiscretions.’ Perhaps, while training in Palestine, Mazzotta had bragged that he was going to have a crack at killing Mussolini, and his boast somehow found its way to Italy. There was also the possibility that Emilio Zappalà, the MI6 agent captured in Sicily with SOE’s Antonio Gallo, had said something to his interrogators. ‘Zappala knew very well that it was Di Giunta who was to make the attempt on the Duce’s life, but he may have made the confusion on purpose.’17 Ultimately it proved impossible to discover exactly what had happened.
The full worth of another aspect of SOE’s pre-Armistice work took time to emerge, too. This was the important post-Armistice pay-off of its efforts, before September 1943, at helping Italians who were hostile to Fascism. Once Italy was fighting for the Allies and half the country was German-occupied, Italian anti-Fascism lost its anti-national character, and several men with whom SOE had closely co-operated went on to make significant contributions both to the anti-German struggle and to Italy’s recovery. For example, ‘the elderlies’ – Alberto Tarchiani and Alberto Cianca – landed at Salerno with Malcolm Munthe and assisted with his search for new recruits; both men also joined the Giustizia e Libertà-backed Partito d’Azione. In 1944, Tarchiani, who went ashore with Munthe at Anzio, too, became Minister of Public Works in Badoglio’s short-lived government; and later that year, when Ivanoe Bonomi became Prime Minister, he went to the United States as Italy’s Ambassador, a post he would hold for ten years. Cianca, who also served as a minister under Bonomi, saw out the war as a minister in Alcide De Gasperi’s first government. Aldo Garosci and Leo Valiani, who had almost been dropped into Italian hands in the summer of 1943, both did good work behind the German lines: Garosci in Rome, after the British sent him in by parachute; Valiani across the north, after being put through the German lines at Salerno. Valiani ended up in Milan working with the most senior members of the partisan leadership, the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale. After the war, both Garosci and Valiani, who had also become members of the Partito d’Azione, mixed politics with successful careers as journalists and historians. Then, of course, there were the ex-POWs and recruits from East Africa and Canada who would go into German-occupied territory on dangerous SOE missions to work with partisan bands, or would assist at training schools and signals stations.
Another old friend who did important work with the Italian Resistance was Emilio Lussu, of whom the British had heard little – save for the occasional message – since putting him ashore in southern France in August 1942. When Fascism fell, Lussu made his way into Italy with his wife, Joyce, and proceeded to Rome. Shortly after the Allied landings at Salerno, Joyce set out to cross the front line in the hope of regaining contact. Intercepted by Allied soldiers, she was locked up close to the battlefield while inquiries were made into her story.
After three days she was told she had a visitor. ‘It will be one of those Intelligence Officers, I thought with irritation,’ she later wrote. ‘But when the captain entered in his dusty battledress, a khaki beret on his fair hair, I threw my arms around his neck and greeted him noisily in Italian so shrill that the footsteps of several sentries could be heard rushing up the stairs.’18 ‘I had not seen her since I was in France a few days before the fall of Paris,’ her brother, Max Salvadori, would recall. ‘The officer who took me to her room was visibly astonished … We have different names, I am in British uniform under an assumed name and she is an Italian who has crossed the lines … how the hell did we know each other so well?’19 Soon afterwards, Joyce returned to enemy territory and made it safely to Rome, where she and Lussu helped organise anti-German resistance until the city’s liberation. The Lussus, too, joined the Partito d’Azione and, after the war, remained active in politics: Emilio later joined the Socialist Party and became a senator; Joyce devoted herself especially to anti-colonial causes.
Max Salvadori – or Max Sylvester as he had been commissioned in the British Army – had landed with Malcolm Munthe’s party at Salerno. At the end of 1943, while engaged in the ever-hazardous task of running agents through the front lines, he escaped with light wounds while trying to recover one of their bodies from the middle of a minefield. The following January, again with Munthe, he landed at Anzio and took over the mission when Munthe was wounded. Later, Salvadori assisted for a while with covert naval operations along Italy’s Adriatic coast. In June 1944 he was a member of SOE’s little spearhead team that reached Rome on the day the city fell to American soldiers. Shortly afterwards, asked by Harold Macmillan to participate in the newly formed Italian Government, he refused, seeing his work with the Italian Resistance as unfinished. The recommendation for Salvadori’s Military Cross, awarded later that year, praised his ‘great daring and gallantry’ and his ‘calmness, cheerfulness, and contempt for danger’.20
Salvadori parachuted into the snow-bound hills of German-occupied northern Italy in February 1945. It was a dangerous time to be there. Within weeks, two British colleagues were dead – one killed by accident and the other in an ambush – and Salvadori was in Milan, pursuing an active clandestine life despite an ever-present risk of detection. He stayed there, playing a prominent liaison role with the partisan leadership, until the city’s liberation. ‘Major Salvadori was warned against entering Milan until the situation was quieter,’ read the recommendation for his DSO, which he received a few months later. ‘However he insisted on entering the city to investigate the situation and to assist the remaining members of the Resistance.’21 The Milanese later made him an honorary citizen.
Salvadori left SOE in August 1945. ‘A PROFESSOR TURNS COMMANDO’ declared a story in the New York Post when he visited to see his family that summer. ‘It is hard to imagine Lt. Col. Max Salvadori M.C. of the British Army in the role of a college professor, which is what he was before the war. But in a Commando uniform, as he was seen in New York the other day, with a paratrooper’s wings on his right sleeve, the tall, lanky, blond, blue-eyed Anglo-Italian was thoroughly in character …’22 During the same trip, he was also under FBI surveillance.
‘The subject and his wife boarded the 11:30 to Washington and seated themselves in a coach, which was the third car from the end of the train,’ reads one report. ‘The subject was wearing a British Lt. Colonel’s uniform, khaki shirt, overseas cap, wide canvas belt, and carrying two brown leather bags and a military canvas bag similar to a gas mask container. His wife was wearing a gray and white print dress, and black hat.’23 Finally satisfied that he was engaged in nothing subversive, the FBI soon stopped watching him and, in December, closed its investigation. Ten years later, two additions were made to his file. One was a New York Times report that President Eisenhower had praised a lecture by Salvadori on how the United States should be seen from abroad.24 The other was a subsequent Newsweek profile, explaining how Eisenhower’s endorsement had ‘catapulted into fame’ this ‘obscure college professor’.25
Demobilised from the British Army in 1945, Salvadori had worked briefly in Paris for UNESCO and NATO, but then returned permanently to the United States and a full-time career in academia, settling at Smith College, Massachusetts, where he became Professor of History and taught until his retirement. He also wrote, particularly about liberal democracy, and worked hard to maintain the memory of the anti-Fascist struggle and its relevance to the contemporary world. ‘Count Salvadori belonged to a privileged family but his sympathies were always for exploited peasants and workers,’ read a local newspaper editorial when, shortly before his death in 1992, a study-day was held in his honour in Porto San Giorgio in the Marche, where his family had had their home. ‘He himself put it slightly differently,’ says Salvadori’s Times obituary, ‘claiming to be just “an old-fashioned Radical – in the British sense”’.26
The memoirs of John Verney, a British officer of the Special Boat Squadron who parachuted into Sardinia in 1943 to raid enemy airfields, contain a criticism often levelled at units engaged in behind-the-lines work. Verney would recall a British general at the War Office grumbling that ‘irregular formations and private armies’ served only ‘to offer a too-easy, because romanticized, form of gallantry to a few anti-social irresponsible individualists, who sought a more personal satisfaction from the war than that of standing their chance, like proper soldiers, of being bayoneted in a slit-trench or burnt alive in a tank’. Verney agreed. If he and his colleagues had been keen to drop into Sardinia, ‘it was for the adventure itself rather than for its military significance’.27
There were certainly men and women employed by SOE whose motives matched Verney’s. As Max Salvadori had judged from reports coming out of German-occupied Yugoslavia in 1944, there were plenty of young British SOE officers ‘to whom the war is a big adventure and politics too puzzling to bother with’.28 But these characteristics were hardly those of a man like Salvadori. Nor, indeed, can they be applied to many of the men, often forgotten in books like this one, who sat quietly behind desks at headquarters in roles that were not adventurous at all. Cecil Roseberry, for example, whom senior officers would praise as ‘a shrewd political observer … hard-working and extremely conscientious’, dedicated himself passionately to Italian matters until the end of the war, yet barely left London.29 In Berne, recovered from his illness and the shock of SIM’s revelations, Jock McCaffery, too, stayed at his post until the end, doing well in complicated cross-border dealings with senior Italian partisans and being rewarded with an OBE.
It would also be hard to argue that the remarks made by Verney and his general can be applied to the motives of many of the recruits whom SOE selected to resist Mussolini. Only a few emerge from the files as adventurers, mercenaries or thrillseekers: Gabor Adler, perhaps; Giovanni Di Giunta, probably; two or three others, possibly. A man like Fortunato Picchi may have been naïve about the dangers, but his motivation for parachuting back into Italy appears to have been a selfless sense of duty to the British, coupled with genuine distaste for Fascism. And of those agents who volunteered to follow him, all, whether they were passionate anti-Fascists or drifting individualists, knew very well that they risked Picchi’s fate if caught. Whether the British took adequate care with the lives of these volunteers is another matter.
Indeed these Italians risked more than their lives. Among SOE’s papers survives a letter dated July 1947 from Signora Iacopina Pazzi of ‘Prato, La Briglia n/153’, addressed to the ‘War Office, Whitehall, London’. Signora Pazzi was the mother of Fortunato Picchi. Writing in Italian, she outlined in her letter what little she had learned of his return to Italy. She said that she had heard that he had come back ‘for the purpose of organizing Resistance nuclei’. She knew that he had been captured and shot. She had heard the BBC speak of him, ‘praising his heroic deed’, and was aware that an article published by Italians in London on the third anniversary of his death had proclaimed him to be ‘il primo martire del 2° Risorgimento Italiano’: the first martyr to Italy’s second Risorgimento. ‘I am a poor old woman who cannot hope to live much longer but before dying I would like to know something about my son,’ she wrote; ‘to know whether, before leaving on that mission which was to cost him his life, he had left some word or message (or souvenir) for his mother far away.’30 What she did not mention was how her family had suffered after her son’s capture. Persecution by the regime had seen three of her children denied work. One son had felt compelled to volunteer to serve with the unenvied Italian contingent sent to fight on the Eastern Front. Another was denounced as a traitor and deported to Mauthausen concentration camp.31
Replying to the letter, the War Office broke the news to Picchi’s mother that her son had left no message, while all his possessions had gone to Florence Lantieri, his landlady. But the War Office (more accurately, a department still dealing with outstanding SOE matters, SOE itself having been disbanded a year before) did seek to reassure her on one point. ‘Please accept our sympathy in the loss of your son, who was very much respected in this country,’ she was told; ‘Fortunato Picchi was the first Italian to volunteer to return to Italy in the cause of her liberation.’32
That meant liberation from Fascism. But whether men like Picchi had really been loyal to Italy is a question that would endure long after the war. Italy’s new authorities would refuse Picchi’s mother’s request for her son to be acknowledged as a patriot or partisan; their explanation was that he had been serving in the British Army when he parachuted into Italy and had not been fighting Nazis. In 1949, an Italian press article asked if Picchi was ‘a traitor or a hero’ and concluded that he was a bit of both.33 It was exactly the stigma that Emilio Lussu and others had predicted for those who committed themselves unconditionally to a foreigners’ war against their home.
Even Max Salvadori, after twenty years of spotless anti-Fascist work, experienced this sting in the tail. In June 1944, while Allied forces in Italy were battling their way north, Salvadori was at SOE’s headquarters in Allied-occupied Bari when he heard that Polish frontline soldiers had reached Fermo, a hill town in the Marche close to Porto San Giorgio and his family’s old home. Aware that his father had returned there from Switzerland in the mid-1930s, Salvadori, in his British officer’s battledress, clambered into an army truck and set off, hoping to find his parents.
After Pedaso I knew every inch of the road: Torre di Palma, l’Ete, Santa Maria, Porto San Giorgio … The Rio, Capodarco on top of the hill, the Vallato, the pine avenue … Eleven years away from it all.
The light was failing. I got down from the lorry and waited a few minutes before going into the house. Emotion? Why not? Memories and images rushed through my mind: the long years in Switzerland, England, Africa, America; all my experiences before and during the war; efforts both successful and unsuccessful; fallen friends …
Someone was walking along the verandah. I opened the door and went up the dark stairs. I heard muttered words – they did not seem to be directed particularly towards me, but they were – it was my father’s voice.
‘Agente straniero!’ – ‘Foreign agent.’
Wrapped in a familiar black cloak, he passed me on the st
airs and vanished into the gathering darkness. So that was my welcome home.
‘Others might not be so outspoken, but might well have the same thought on seeing me in foreign uniform,’ Salvadori reflected. ‘And to think that for all these years I had dreamed of that moment.’34
Notes
1 ‘SOE & Italy’, by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, 28 September 1943, TNA HS 6/901. Some of Roseberry’s claims to success were rather overdone. He was wrong, for example, to say in his report that the Partito d’Azione had caused the strikes in northern Italy in the spring of 1943.
2 Ibid.
3 ‘SOE & Italy’, Major-General Colin Gubbins to Lord Selborne,
4 October 1943, TNA HS 6/775. 4 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/263.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, p. 541.
8 Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry to Miss Close, 5 January 1948, TNA HS 8/430.
9 For more on Malavasi, see Paolo Trionfini, ‘L’antifascismo cattolico di Gioacchino Malavasi. Note per una biografia politica dell’ultimo guelfo’, Bollettino dell’Archivio per la storia del movimento sociale cattolico in Italia, 35/3, 2000, pp. 171–213; and Paolo Trionfini, L’antifascismo cattolico di Gioacchino Malavasi (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 2004).
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