A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  1 Giorgio Agosti and Dante Livio Bianco, Un’ amicizia partigiana, 1943–1945. Edited by Giovanni De Luna. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007, p. 17.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Choice

  1. THE COLLAPSE

  On 23 August 1943, as he left the prison of Castelfranco Emilia, Vittorio Foa gave Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova to his cellmate Bruno Corbi, inscribing these words from Vico’s text as a dedication: ‘by various and diverse ways, which seemed like hazards and were in fact opportunities’.1

  Foa was referring to ‘the last harrowing years of Fascism’, but the situation was such that those words were as apt an interpretation of the recent past as they were prophetic of the immediate future. They divine that ‘widening of the field of possibility’2 which, before long, the 8 September 1943 catastrophe and the Resistance were to offer the Italian people, and which Foa himself, elsewhere in his writings, was to reformulate as follows: ‘During the Resistance and, for a brief moment, at the Liberation, all had seemed possible to us’.3

  In a short article entitled ‘Omero antimilitarista’ (‘Homer the Antimilitarist’) in the Turin edition of L’Unità for 15 September 1946, Italo Calvino was to write:

  What in fact is The Odyssey? It is the myth of the return home, born during the long years of ‘naja’ [military service] of the soldiers who have gone off to fight in distant places, of their anxiety about how they will manage to get home, when the war is over, of the fear that assails them in their dreams of never managing to make it home, of the strange obstacles that appear on their journey. The Odyssey is the story of the eighth of September, of all the eighth of Septembers in History: the need to return home by hook or by crook, through lands fraught with enemies.

  Between these two poles – a readiness to consider new possibilities and a run for cover in what was familiar and secure – lies the wide range of reactions provoked in the Italians by the 8 September 1943 Armistice and the collapse of the country’s military and civil structures immediately following it. To turn our attention to the Resistance means to give pride of place to the first of these positions – which was the minority position; but the variety of attitudes adopted by the Italians and the common elements linking, often in the most tenuous way, otherwise conflicting positions, creates a complex web of blurred relations between the two types of experience. Thus, the disappointment caused by being denied the chance to return home impelled many to take stock of the other possibilities that the situation had to offer.

  As yet we know little about the Italians who fought in the Second World War between 1940 and 1943. The inglorious defeat, the change of sides, the Resistance regarded as the founding moment of the new Italian republic, the memory of the connection between the desire to return home and right-wing subversivism, stressed by Fascism and to all effects assimilated by post-Fascism, the tendency of the protagonists to forget a past charged with sufferings that could not easily be re-processed in memory – all help to account for this lack.4 What we can say with a fair degree of certainty, however, is that weariness with a long, hard and ill-motivated military life had led the vast majority of the soldiers to the conviction that armistice, the end of the war, and return home amounted to the same thing. It was in these three aspirations that the desire to fight dissipated, experienced as a necessity which would brook no delay.

  With emphases and approximations reflecting the character of the document, yet in a singularly prophetic way, a group of Italian and English anti-Fascists had declared in 1941:

  The Italian soldier will fight no more under the orders of Mussolini, either for Hitler or against Hitler, not even for Italy. The Italian soldier will fold his arms and let himself be killed by the enemy in front or by the rifles of the Blackshirts watching over him from behind.5

  This page concluded by saying that the Italians would take up arms again only if they had something real to hope for.

  On 25 July 1943, weariness with the war had found a sort of moral sanction in the all-but-heroic fall of its promoters, guarantors of its political and patriotic significance. As Second Lieutenant Giorgio Chiesura, on garrison duty in Sicily, noted in his diary:

  If they wanted an armistice, the change of government was all right. But it makes no sense if they want to go on with the war, as seems to be the case. We won’t pick up as we did after Caporetto. Miracles are no longer possible. The war seems to be completely unjustified after the fall of the government responsible for its beginnings and its presuppositions.6

  The impossibility of a recovery such as occurred after Caporetto had already been noted in February 1943 by an Italian informer of the Germans (possibly Guido Buffarini Guidi, dismissed from the under-secretaryship for the Ministry of the Interior on 6 February), who did not mince his words in his judgment of the Fascist power system: ‘Since Fascism is a totalitarian regime it leaves no room for spontaneous patriotic reactions as in 1917.’7

  It is historically debatable whether Caporetto had in fact constituted the ‘spur to a racehorse’;8 but what is important here is the illusory appeals made to the memory of that event in the aftermath of the Fascist war. Figures as diverse as the federal secretary of Cuneo9 and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile gave credence to the legitimacy of that appeal. The latter, in a speech to the Italians given at Campidoglio on 24 June 1943, had in fact referred to one of his writings dating from 1917.10 Paradoxically, greater realism was shown, in their way, by those Fascists, real incunabula of the Italian Social Republic, who, albeit in the deviant form of an obsessive denunciation of traitors whom they saw lurking everywhere, were more fully aware of the oncoming collapse. From Radio Londra, Umberto Calosso had clearly explained that Fascism could not hope to construct ‘a space of patriotic passion for defence as on the Piave’.11 A cavalry captain who, after Stalingrad, El Alamein and the North African landing was going around declaring that the Italian people ‘if given a whipping will react overwhelmingly and victoriously’, aroused mere pity and a sense of the ridiculous in another officer who had close dealings with the new anti-Fascist recruits, and all the more so since the captain himself had the look of ‘a whipped cur’.12 After 25 July the tangled thread of motivations – Italian war, Fascist war – that had run through all three years of a war conducted in an increasingly subordinate position to Nazi Germany was highlighted with all its contradictions: ‘On 25 July – recalls a survivor of deportation – suddenly we were all happy, like a liberation, because we took it to be the end of the war; and then when we realised that this wasn’t the case, anger took possession of us, a terrible anger.’13

  In Venice, a diary records how a sort of ‘banditore’, or town-crier, went through calli and campi shouting the announcement of Mussolini’s overthrow in a voice that bespoke ‘emotion, hilarity and at the same time uncertainty, like somebody experimenting with an unfamiliar language’; and one soldier had ‘such a radiant smile on his face that it seems to contain all the joy in his heart, all the words he would like to utter: he’s a recalled soldier, he’s old, his family’s far away, knows no one here, for sure, and hopes now to return home’.14

  The passage from joy to hope and from hope to disappointment is described in numerous memoirs and testimonies, together with the wish to believe that the words of Badoglio’s proclamation – ‘The war goes on. Italy … will keep its word’15 – were insincere and dictated by mere tactical prudence. Most Italians took those words ‘as being a simulation’ and ‘from that moment they began not just to dream of the Armistice but to behave as if it had already taken place’.16 In a climate such as this, attempts to re-dub as ‘national’ the war that had been wished on the Italians by the now demolished Fascism had not the slightest hope of receiving a hearing.17

  Much has been written both about the tortuous and clumsily devious route by which the Badoglio government arrived at the drafting and then announcement of the Armistice with the Anglo-Americans,18 and about the responsibility for the disastrous predicaments that ensued to be attributed to Kin
g Victor Emmanuel III, Marshal Pietro Badoglio and his government, and the High Commands. They did not pay serious enough heed to the patently obvious prediction, unambiguously stated by Baron von Mackensen, the German ambassador in Rome, as early as 4 December 1942, that ‘A separate peace aimed at keeping the war away from the Italian mainland would automatically make it a theater of war.’19 Immediately after Mussolini’s overthrow, President Roosevelt himself had also stated: ‘Fighting between the Germans and the Italian Army and population will probably be a result of the fate of the German troops in Italy and particularly of those south of Rome.’20

  What also needs emphasising is that the generals and colonels were not sufficiently aware of the state of mind of the men serving under them. The fact that they themselves, in their heart of hearts, shared this state of mind very probably induced them first of all to hide its truth and significance, and then, by their conduct, to set the avalanche on its disastrous descent. The well-known, ambiguous sentence with which Badoglio concluded his proclamation of the Armistice – the armed forces ‘will repel any possible attacks from any other quarter’ – expressed both the hope that Italy would get off lightly and a resigned belief that things should be allowed to run their course.21 Thus, in the absence of precise and unequivocal directives, morally still more than technically,22 Italy was heading towards a fate analogous to that vividly recalled in 1942 by Churchill with regard to Bulgaria in 1918:

  When a nation is thoroughly beaten in war it does all sorts of things which no one would imagine beforehand. The sudden, sullen, universal, simultaneous way in which Bulgaria – Government, Army, and people alike – cut out in 1918 remains in my memory. Without caring to make any arrangements for their future or for their safety, the troops simply marched out of the lines and dispersed to their homes, and King Ferdinand fled. A Government headed by a peasant leader remained to await the judgment of the victors.23

  Weariness with the war and a desire for peace were not phenomena limited to the men-at-arms. ‘We are waiting for peace and only peace’ – so ran a report on the ‘politico-economic situation of the Kingdom on 28 February 1943–XXI’.24 The violence suffered at first hand with the air-raids, solidarity with relatives of those who had been killed or gone missing, scattered among innumerable theatres of operations, hunger and other material privations, and awareness of the overwhelming superiority of the enemy, vied with each other in making it seem pointless to go on with a war that was irremediably lost.25 ‘We thought our sufferings were over’, a later testimony of 25 July recalls: ‘instead, 8 September came’.26

  The fact that Mussolini’s overthrow and the Armistice did not coincide created the feeling that, if the war was not over, Fascism was not well and truly over either.27 From Radio Milano Libertà (namely, Radio Moscow) Togliatti warned that ‘party hierarchs and followers … have in no way capitulated and are preparing to take their revenge in a more or less hidden manner’: the most dangerous were those who ‘have put a mask on’.28 The BBC Italian Service received instructions to highlight ‘the Badoglio Government failure’ in the work of de-Fascistisation, which was limited to ‘half-measures and palliatives’.29 This, no doubt, was a way of putting pressure on Badoglio.30 But the fact that Radio Londra often called the Marshal ‘Duke of Addis Ababa’ well expressed a grotesque fact that was plain to the Italians and, for that matter, to the Resistance movements of other countries, but not to Badoglio himself, who declared to ‘the officers in Agro di San Giorgio Ionico’: ‘I am still Marshall Badoglio, your general of the Sabotino, of Vittorio Veneto, of Addis Ababa.’31

  A soldier stationed in the Balkans, finding himself before an ‘immense, widespread, host of enemies’ (‘the Germans, the Bulgarians, the Ustashas, the Cetnics, the Muslims, etc.’) had the sensation that everything had come to a standstill in a ‘leaden, agonal’ climate.32 And a young man, protagonist of an autobiographical novel, who would subsequently opt to join the Social Republic, expressed himself thus: ‘That lot have lost no time! They’ve lost no time!… But what does that leave us with?’33

  The anti-Fascist parties, which were busy re-establishing themselves during Badoglio’s forty-five days of rule, pressed ahead, each with its own nuances, with the request that the war be brought to an end. As early as April, Riconstruzione: Organo del fronte unico della libertà, in its ‘Appello agli italiani’, had asked for ‘the passage from the state of war to the state of peace’, and the manifesto agreed in Milan on 26 July by the Gruppo di Riconstruzione Liberale, the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), the Partito d’Azione, the Partito Socialista, the Movimento d’Unità Proletaria, and the Partito Communista, numbered among its points ‘an armistice for the conclusion of an honourable peace’ (this formula, the fruit of mediation between the parties, was in fact confused compared with the victors’ clear desire to impose an unconditional surrender – a desire which, it should be repeated, despite historiographical polemics, was correct).34

  The 4 August 1943 Milan edition of L’Unità had this long headline: ‘The communists are fighting alongside Italians of all persuasions on the road to peace and freedom in order to save the patria from ruin.’ A year later, L’Unità would again speak of ‘the sloth and organic incapacity of a government in which the people did not participate, the betrayal undermining an army’.35 The paper of the Action Party denounced, ‘more than a month after 25 July’, the fact that the cardinal error of the coup d’état had been its failure to proclaim explicitly: ‘Fascism has fallen. The Fascist war is over.’36 These comments are quoted not so much because they testify to the different party lines (which were as yet little known to the Italians) and their capacity to exert a widespread and direct influence on the popular will, as to the existence of a state of mind that the parties would necessarily have to take as their point of departure.

  The common desire to have done with the war was not enough to create that correspondence of intention and action between the army and the population that was also part of official rhetoric during Badoglio’s forty-five days. This failure was due not only to the attitude of the High Commands, described above, but also to the fact that the use of the armed forces for public order immediately put paid to any form of fraternisation; even though, as has been noted, the troops and junior officers frequently showed themselves reluctant to carry out the more drastic orders.37

  The circular issued by Mario Roatta, chief of the Army General Staff, with orders to proceed against demonstrators ‘in combat formation, and to open fire at long range even with mortars and artillery without forewarning of any kind’, and the Bari and Reggio Emilia massacres, are among the most glaring cases in point. Another circular, by General Quirino Armellini, who had been appointed commander of the Fascist militia that Badoglio incorporated into the Royalist Army, provides the most complete – indeed, grotesque – measure of this. Armellini, whose words are worth quoting, recalled the ‘merits of which we are all aware’ of the MVSN (Milizia volontaria per la sicurezza nazionale), ‘born of the action squads’; deplored the reaction of the country, ‘hostile and often brutal towards the Milizia’, as well as ‘the ill-advised demonstrations and offences coming from the turbid rabble’, and concluded with an enjoinder to oppose the enemy, who were fired ‘by inhuman hate and the stern resolution to annihilate’ the patria, with ourselves, in the name of God, Christianity, Rome and the King and Emperor.38 Some of the themes that were to form part of the propaganda of the Social Republic are anticipated in this circular, mixed with others that were to be taken up and voiced by the monarchist and reactionary press in the South.

  Thus, in its relationship with the people, the army as an institution came to find itself in an ambiguous position, which was starkly evoked, years later, by a Torinese Communist militant: ‘Fascism had fallen but it had returned in Badoglio’s army; it had ended up inside the army.’39 It is striking how deeply this remained imprinted in people’s memory as a dominant fact, and how this memory coincides, for instance, with the amazement observed by Second L
ieutenant Giorgio Chiesura in the people of Fossano at the rigorous maintenance of law and order by the troops against a population who had so warmly approved the anti-Fascist coup performed by none other than the armed forces.40 Amazement becomes contempt in an appeal addressed, in August in Bologna, to the women of Emilia: ‘Twenty-three years of oppression and slavery and still we’re not satisfied! Still Badoglio, still the generals.’41

  This small manifesto was certainly Communist-inspired; the line that can be identified in the underground press of the same period, even that of the left, is far more variable, caught as it was between, on the one hand, the need to acknowledge popular weariness and suspicion and to use them as a weapon of pressure on the government, and, on the other, the not yet discarded hope that something positive might still be agreed on and projected with those armed forces. On 4 August the Milan edition of L’Unità considered it an ‘absurd crime’ to go on with the war now that Mussolini was no longer in power, and added: ‘The popular masses are beginning to ask themselves whether the liquidation of Fascism might not be a tragic swindle.’ On 12 August, L’Unità ran this headline on all its front pages: ‘Ma la musica è sempre la stessa’ (‘But the music is always the same’), and on the second page: ‘Soldiers! Don’t fire at the workers. They are fighting to enable your return home’, while a subtitle urged: ‘People and soldiers! Unite in demanding an immediate peace that will save the nation. Workers! Demand the end of Hitler’s war! Save your lives, your houses, your factories!’