Large numbers often participated in the demonstrations of anti-British hatred, inspired by that motto ‘Dio stramaledica gli inglesi’ (‘God curse the English’) which figured on a specially minted badge. The English were in fact seen as richer and more successful competitors in imperialism. This point of view had existed for some time in Italian nationalism; but to it the Fascists added a plebeian resentment and racist fear-cum-envy: ‘I’ve seen so many of these curs whom we’ve taken prisoner and have given them a solemn raspberry.’18 Writing to a comrade, a Blackshirt savours the prospect of the time when the English will have to ‘learn to eat two meals a day and have done with their five traditional ones’; conversely, ‘presently it will be our turn to have, for once at least, five meals a day, like the English, and a good pipe of Oriental tobacco’.19
Fascist stereotypes were upset by the recognition that a declared nation of shopkeepers should know how to make war.20 The accent then shifted to denouncing the fact that the English made their subject peoples – and what’s more, coloured ones – fight for their own profit. Sometimes sympathy is expressed for the latter: ‘It’s almost always coloured troops who are put there for the defence of their blond masters and skinny spinsters. Our tank-crews compel these poor Indians to put their hands up.’21 But more often there are manifestations of racist contempt and fear, which we shall encounter again in the Social Republic, both in the official propaganda22 and in the newest young recruits: ‘The dead must be avenged. Italy needs us young men to prevent the niggers, in the service of England, from contaminating her sacred soil!’23 In short, hatred of the British could become a ‘more than ever supernatural’ hate.24
Nor were manifestations of openly ideological aversion to the Russians lacking, as was evident when they were dubbed ‘reds’ or ‘Bolsheviks’, or when Catholic motivations became intertwined with Fascist ones. ‘The pride of those who want to destroy the Roman Catholic Church will certainly pass … Christ has always won’, is the prediction of a soldier who seems to have found in Russia, against the godless, that motivation he had been hard put to discern in Albania.25 In another letter the Russians are spoken of as ‘people without faith’.26 ‘Either Rome or Moscow’, the Fascist propaganda slogan, in any case seemed tailor-made to please Fascist and Catholic ears alike, given the centuries-old polysemy of the word ‘Rome’.
The Russian campaign, like the occupation of the Balkans, was to offer, by contrast, that contact with the invaded and exploited peoples that was lacking in the war waged in North Africa, and that would provide the first occasion for reflection for many combatants of the Fascist war.27
Meanwhile, besides political and ideological motivations, identifiable in the fighting men were attitudes and sympathetic support offered above all to themselves, which, as we have seen, were to be found, in another key, in some resistenti as well: the urge for adventure, supported ‘by hatred of the humdrum routine of life; the monotony of certain family habits; a certain senselessness of social life’.28 Some youths from Rutino (in the province of Salerno) asked to be drafted into the paratroop corps because ‘here life is no longer tolerable’.29 ‘We were very young; like all young men [we sought] adventure; for us, the war was an adventure, we were thoroughly irresponsible … And then the war was adventure, something new that might just break the dreary routine’.30
Proceeding in a way that was possibly an attempt to resemble Renato Serra’s famous Esame di coscienza, a Sardinian university student wrote:
I can’t make myself out. I only know this, that finally I’ve found the only thing that has been able to shake me and exalt me and pull me out of melancholy, by throwing me into a state of complete inebriation, this unquiet spirit of mine which in civilian life has only been able to feel disgust for everything that makes up our paltry everyday existence. And this thing is the war … This reconnaissance had a real tang of Salgarian adventure.31
In his diary Giaime Pintor wrote that ‘among sluggard men war seemed to be a way out’.32 Even a combatant who does not spare his words in describing the horrors of the war and who does the rare thing of calling ‘sticking bayonets into others’ bellies … murdering human beings’, goes on to say that he finds in ‘love of the unknown and of adventures’ the only motivation that sustains him – not, certainly, the ‘mania for greatness or empires’.33 Instead of adventure, which is after all always an individual and dynamic experience, a peasant, to reassure his family and himself – ‘we resign ourselves and realise that it is a great party for us youngsters’ – equates departure for the front with the traditional and cheerful demeanor of raw recruits.34
The spirit of adventure could, in true Fascist style, become expectation of an easy victory. ‘They’d like to stab, win, deck themselves with glory, come out of it in one piece and get back to Italy as soon as possible … greeted as conquerors’, a lieutenant colonel wrote from the Russian front.35 The superficiality denounced by this serious officer on the one hand clashed with the stereotypical idea of the war as a forger of character – ‘We need to be men, by God, and here we learn to become so, take my word for it’36 – and on the other hand with the harsh impact with reality. This was true whether one wished to see this, intellectually, as ‘a first step towards possessing something concrete’,37 or described it as ‘falling on your back into the mud and drowning your face in the mire’, which put paid to any myth of ‘dying with a bullet through your heart, kissed by the sun’.38 The impact with reality did in fact have contradictory results. In the keenest men, it might at first make them stubbornly deny that very reality – ‘We shall win because we must win, otherwise it would be too great a disaster’39 – after which it could induce them to feel betrayed, by men and/or fate – a reaction which can be called proto–Social Republic.40 In those who were not motivated, or only dimly so, the counterblow was the feeling that they were victims, with a further, successive doubling of results: to cease being so as soon as one could by heaving oneself out of those waters, or by finding in it a cause for reflection and a desire for a positive response. The latter reaction could be called proto-Resistance, while the former is proto-attesistico (proto-fence-sitting).41 Pity for the enemy, confused with pity for oneself, appears as a first and simple way of placing oneself again in a humanly tolerable position. ‘There, there’ll be Greeks, poor and decent mountain folk perhaps, who’ll put out the white flag’, wrote an Alpini second lieutenant;42 and this is how another describes a female literature professor whom he had met in Rostov: ‘An eye and a face that struck one for their patient resignation beneath the blows of misfortune’.43
There are by now numerous testimonies about the contradictory reactions kindled in the Italians by contact with Russia – its land, people, army and regime. Possibly the most widespread sentiment is that of stupor – both stupor that aroused fear, and stupor that generated admiration in various forms and degrees (for example, for the widespread education and great industrial complexes that prompted one officer to give an elaborate discourse on ‘modernisation’).44 One thing that aroused particular surprise was the coexistence in the Russian populations of the occupied territories of a determined Soviet patriotism and a civil and even kindly manner towards the Italians as individuals.45 There was here a sort of rediscovery of the possibility that human relations might survive the crushing blow that the Germans were ruthlessly dealing them for reasons of war. That this rediscovery was nourished by the Italian soldier’s tendency to make another family for himself46 wherever he might be only made it more persuasive.
However, the event that left the greatest mark on the Italian experience in Russia was the terrible retreat. This was not only ‘a major turning-point in the relations between the two countries [Italy and Germany], and indeed the decisive psychological failure in “Fascist” warfare’,47 but for many of those involved it marked the beginning of a radical reappraisal of their own position regarding Fascism and the war, a lesson certainly more incisive than the Soviet appeals to rebel against Mussolini who ‘i
s drinking your blood’.48 An emblematic figure of this new tendency is certainly Nuto Revelli.49
‘Che Dio maledica chi ci ha tradito/ Portandoci su Don e poi fuggito’ (‘God curse him who betrayed us/Taking us to the Don, then escaping’), are lines from ‘Pietà l’è morta’, the partisan song inspired by Revelli, who wrote in his diary: ‘We have christened our formation: la compagnia Rivendicazione caduti. We want to avenge those who fell in Russia. Our oath says: “For every Italian who died in Russia ten Fascists and ten Germans are to be done in”.’50 The memorial tablet in the main square in Boves is a document of this kind of continuity between the Russian retreat and the Resistance: ‘died in Russia 95’, ‘died in the Resistance 134’, plus 11 in the German camps (when the figure for each of the other fronts does not exceed thirteen). True, this was an Alpini recruitment zone (of about 20,500 men from the Cuneo division, no more than 3,000 made it home);51 while in the immediate post-war climate the fate of the prisoners in Russian hands was to unleash passions of an opposite kind to those witnessed by Revelli. But, even steering clear of hasty generalisations, the fact remains that the survivors were, at the very least, vehicles of mistrust and disheartenment – ‘horrible things heard, which I don’t intend to recount’52 – that is when they did not transmit acutely, as has been written of one of them, ‘a tormenting guilt complex and, together with this, an anxious desire for liberation, mixed with an almost religious sentiment of expiation’.53
Giorgio Rochat justly writes that the majority of the testimonies (which are by officers) register ‘the abandonment or, better to say, the shelving during the retreat of many of the traditional values of society and of the Italian army’, but that, ‘as soon as they were out of danger’, the officers ‘once again started demanding observation of that very code of values which they had by their own confession infringed’.54 But meanwhile the code had shown cracks and reversals that were premonitory of the 8 September collapse and the repudiation of the Royal Army.55
Two encounters left their mark, albeit to very different degrees, on the Italians dispatched to occupy the lands of Russia and the Balkans. As is well known, the scant knowledge of the extermination of the Jews that the Germans had begun is a phenomenon regarding not only the Italian soldiers. The failure to see even where things were all too visible and to recount the little, or much, one had seen makes testimonies on this score extremely scarce. The Jews working along the railway, one survivor from Russia and the German concentration camps has written, ‘looked thin, exhausted, continually threatened by the Germans. And that was when I began to understand what the Germans were like’ – not least because they explained to him that Jews themselves had been made to dig the ditches there alongside them for their own bodies.56 When he heard a German officer’s calm account of the massacre of the Kiev Jews, a chaplain who was a keen supporter of the anti-Bolshevik crusade said: ‘I too am beginning to believe that this war can’t be won.’57
The impact with the partisans, which one was to be on one’s guard against, was harder to avoid. In Vorošilovgrad, Revelli encountered some twenty of them, prisoners, in civilian dress, on their way to be shot with their heads held high: ‘We were mere wretches with gentlemen’s airs and pretensions. I watched those partisans with great admiration. I felt humiliated.’58 Another Italian, who called them ‘Russian partisan bandits’, was astonished by the presence of women among the combatants: ‘There, three young women driving the tank disarmed me.’59
The experience of coming suddenly face to face with the partisan war could give rise to troubled consciences, inurement to witnessing and passively practising violence, education in repressive ferocity. ‘Lieutenant, if you’d been a rebel you wouldn’t have reacted like this, yet a rebel is a man’, was how a soldier answered the officer who had reprimanded him for killing a deer. And yet this lieutenant, Falco Marin, who was killed in Slovenia in July 1943, was a sensitive and reflective man. He wrote in a letter:
I can’t make out these Slovenes, these Croats, these Serbs, who are fighting with such ardour for something that baffles me, but which will certainly lead to the death of all of them or else to their liberty … The game is mortal because we’re still strong enough to be able to kill them all; but their strength lies in a strange perplexity we feel … Off he goes into the wood alone with a rifle, lives heaven knows how, but safer than if he were at home. And we who go in the hundreds to catch him feel his fascination and get ourselves hit without ever managing to catch him.60
In the memoirs of the officers interned in Germany, the counter-guerrilla operations in the Balkans are mentioned more than any other wartime episode. Rochat, who has noted this fact, attributes this to the desire to ‘underline the change of sides and role brought about by the Armistice’:61 almost as if they were applying to themselves the law of retaliation …
The deep impression made by the Yugoslav partisans was to have a maturing effect on Aligi Barducci (‘Potente’) and others like him;62 and for other partisan chiefs the impression of the guerrilla activity they had been sent to repress acted as a veritable school of partisan warfare. This is what Giulio Nicoletta, commander of the autonomous De Vitis division, has recalled.63 Mario Gordini was spurred to form the Ravenna battalion in the Apennines around Faenza by a veteran from Yugoslavia.64 After the initial setbacks, several officers took to reorganising the bands in the light of their experience in the Balkans.65
The presence in Italy of Yugoslav partisans who, on 8 September, had escaped from the concentration camps would intersect with these personal experiences of Italians, which at times bore the label, taken precisely from the Slav example, of ‘extremism’.66 It was in paradoxical terms that the Garibaldi commander Primo (Giovanni Rocca), formerly a member of the PNF, who had fought in Croatia for three years, was presented: in the Langhe, Primo ‘waged a hard, ferocious war without quarter’, following in fact the Yugoslav example, but also because he was ‘self-taught, with no guide, under the influence of Fascist propaganda, convincing himself that he was a Communist partisan as the Fascist papers describe the Communist partisans (revolution, extremism, ferocity)’.67
As I have already suggested, anti-partisan repression, including the shooting of hostages, practised above all in the Balkans, but also in Venezia Giulia,68 was a sorry precedent for the Fascists of the Social Republic, more so certainly than a stimulus, for everyone critically to reappraise the myth of the ‘goodness of the Italians’. A soldier wrote from Yugoslavia: ‘We have orders to kill everyone and to set fire to everything we come across, so we reckon we’ll finish things off rapidly’; and another: ‘We’ve destroyed everything from top to bottom without sparing innocents … We’re killing entire families, every night, beating them to death or shooting them. If they try to make so much as a move we shoot without pity and whoever dies, dies.’69
We know that quotations of this kind can be counterbalanced by those telling a different story, testifying to acts of great humanity.70 Here, let me make just two points.
The first is that the Resistance press, for understandable enough reasons, was keen to emphasise the differences in the ways the Italians and the Germans behaved in the occupied territories. ‘The sons of the popolo in grey-green did not fight furiously on any front and did not commit those acts of ferocity against the helpless populations which have disgraced the Hitlerian hordes and the few M battalions’; and again: ‘Where they conquered they brought, in contrast with the Germans, kindness and mildness; and in Greece and Croatia they fed the starving, and saved the lives of Jews, and always defended the persecuted, whatever their race and religion.’71
It should also be borne in mind that the ‘goodness of the Italians’ is a largely pre-political fact. At that level, the Italian soldier might very well not have made that much distinction between his friend and his enemy (witness what was observed above in his relations with the Russian population). But this kind of ‘goodness’, which is extremely difficult to practise in wartime, where it fostered the stereo
type of the Italian as incapable of fighting, a songster and buffoon, made him defenceless before orders to commit, and before examples of, indescribable violence, whether those orders came from the Italian commands, the Germans or local collaborationists.72 The violence practised during the Resistance would, by contrast, be ‘political’, and its relations with ‘bontà’ (‘goodness’) were thus different.
In the collection of servicemen’s letters that I have drawn on widely, Bianca Ceva observes that one has the sensation of ‘finding oneself before human beings, not citizens’.73 This view is borne out by the subsequent publication of letters and memoirs, and more than any other sums up the failure of the Fascist war. Certainly, Ceva’s point of reference are the letters of the First World War combatants collected by Adolfo Omodeo in Momenti della vita di guerra – namely the letters of those officers, above all reserve officers, whose quality as ‘citizens’ heirs of the Risorgimento Omodeo had been especially intent on celebrating.74 But if one looks at the ‘umili’ (‘the humble’) – tucked away by Omodeo in a slim appendix to the second edition of his book, and retrieved for history first by Leo Spitzer75 and then by more recent studies by Forcella, Isnenghi, Monticone and Rochard (to name but the leaders) – one finds in the trenches of Carso also ‘human beings’, noble or fragile, more than ‘citizens’.76 In any case, these two qualities tend to converge a good deal more in a defensive war fought on one’s own soil – like the war after Caporetto – than in a war of aggression taken into distant and inhospitable lands. What Ceva highlights acquires greater significance in that it referred not only to the ‘umili’, but, as we have seen, involved the officer corps as well.
On 14 February 1941 a note of the chief of police’s secretariat registered the ‘lack of a genuine spiritual preparation for the war’; and the following 26 December, the questore of Venice touched on a sore point by observing that ‘one would have expected men’s spirits and resources to be better prepared after twenty years of totalitarian rule’.77
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