Fascism’s supreme ambition had indeed been to fuse politics with war – that is, the citizen with the soldier, or better still the warrior. In 1937 Giuseppe Bottai had, incautiously, taken it for granted that this fusion had already come about, on the model of the Fascist assault troops’ fighting spirit. The Blackshirts were ‘the first champion of the “political” army as we intend and practise it (bearer and defender of one idea, and therefore not party biased)’.78 Today we know that, in the internal equilibrium of the Fascist power system, the full unfolding of this drive to politicise the armed forces was checked by the logic of compromise between the party and the military hierarchies, leaving the traditional military with a fairly wide leeway for self-management as both a corps and a career.79
But the war obeyed a yet more stringent logic, which put paid to any compromise between velleity and opportunism, and showed how vain it was to attempt to ‘mobilise’ the masses after having gone to such pains to ‘demobilise’ them.80 In his speech to the party directorate on 17 April 1943, Mussolini himself had to acknowledge that the ideal of the political army – for which he held up the SS as a model – was still a long way from being achieved.81 In an earlier speech to the same audience, on 3 January of the same year, Mussolini had declared that ‘the Armed Forces can never be political enough, never Fascist enough … Because this is a war of religion, of ideas.’ The question as to ‘whether twenty years of Fascist rule have changed things only on the surface, leaving them much the same below’, was for Mussolini purely rhetorical. The answer was ‘that the Italian people will hold firm and astound the world’.82 But it was precisely the Fascist ‘new man’ who did not appear on the battlefields, however much the trial of war had been taken as the elective testing-ground for him to manifest himself.83 An RSI soldier was to number this very ‘absence of the homus novus’ among the ‘three squalors, one greater than the others’, that he saw as weighing on his death.84 As early as the beginning of the war, a major in the Royal Army had written to his son that Fascism ‘had failed to create a new youth, and with this terrible crime Fascism has foreclosed its outlet towards the future’.85
These different attitudes to being at war, briefly outlined above, fostered germs of reducismo (diehard veteran’s spirit) partly akin to the experience of the First World War,86 as it has been studied, and indeed partly peculiar to the Italians of the Second World War. In general, it has been rightly observed that trench warfare ‘seems to have left a more salient psychological mark than earlier or more recent experiences of combat’, and that consequently ‘the Second World War generated less sense of political mission in its former soldiers than the First’.87
The Italian war had this peculiarity: in the Resistance (and, in its way, in the RSI as well) vent was given to some of the tensions we might call protoreducistiche that had built up during the conflict. They were condensed in formulae like, ‘When we return, we’ll put things in order’, generated by the illusion of being able to transfer into civilian and normal life the exceptional and totalising character of the wartime experience, whose traumatic aspects one believed one had the right to redress.88 Obviously, the shirkers (imboscati) were the first and immediate targets of this resentment. They were despised as those who ‘complain about the radiator, about the inconvenient timetables of the theatres’; they were hated as ‘scum’ who deserved to be sent ‘into the desert and then see what they have to say’, as ‘armchair heroes who make high-sounding utterances in the cafés and write vincere to you on every scrap of paper they can find’; like those who ‘are here in town laughing and living it up … while the women forget their most sacred duties in the arms of profiteers’.89
The desire to take revenge on all such people is equally apparent: ‘but let’s hope to find these malingerers one day and settle accounts with them!’; ‘but the day will also come when I’ll be able to get my own back’; ‘but God will keep our memory in shape’; ‘sooner or later you’ll be found out’; ‘we’ll make a clean sweep of the defeatists (mormoratori – ‘murmurers’); and that whole rabble of individuals who are now looking contemptuously at the army will have to pay or think differently after the Victory’.90 These utterances already reveal the variety of possible directions the combatants’ reactions might take.
Certainly the most absurd anger was that of the staunch Fascists, for it was an anger against themselves and their own myths. If a woman could write to her husband in Russia, ‘It’s nonsense for them to write that this was a war for all – for all the poor yes, but not for the rich who are the ones making millions out of the war’,91 the only way a Fascist could vent his feelings against ‘i signori della doppia camicia’ (‘the double-shirted signori’), against the ‘ “let’s-arm-ourselves-and-off-you-go” gang’, was by swathing himself again in his language: ‘It is better to die in war than live uselessly … We are Italians and Fascists only when we have smelled the scent of the trench, the whistle of the machine-gun.’92
Paradoxically, the Fascists at the front had to take issue with other Fascists, the ones who had stayed at home – thus anticipating one of the themes of the contradictory polemic of the Republican Fascist Party against the Fascist National Party. Carlo Scorza himself, soon to become the last secretary of the PNF, was to say to Fidia Gambetti, who was departing for Russia in the summer of 1942: ‘Make sure you come back; then we’ll settle up with everyone, even the Duce, if necessary.’93 At a certain point Edgardo Preti, lieutenant-general of the militia in the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR) Command, began to speak of ‘counter-revolution when the war’s over’ and pronounced grim threats against ‘those signori in Rome’.94 Berto Ricci, an intellectual of the so-called Fascist left, expressed a similar point of view: ‘For the time being let’s get on with winning the war … We’ll sort out the English in our ranks later.’95
It is not surprising that the officer who, from the end of 1942, edited the paratroopers’ newspaper Folgore, where many diehard positions appear, later found himself in the Social Republic.96 We should add, however, that even in the Social Republic the diehard component had, as such, limited room for political action, as witness the failed ‘conspiracy’ promoted by the ‘party of the “medaglie d’oro” ’.97
Many other former combatants wanted to ‘sort things out’, in a deeper and more global sense – that is, by participating in the Resistance. When the hardship of wartime experience fused with repudiation of the military hierarchies and the values they embodied (or should have embodied), the way was paved for this, whatever paths individuals might have taken.98 To this day, a survivor of deportation still writes resentfully: ‘I’ve read a lot about the events of those few days on the western front, but I’ve never read anything about the shitty idiocies the officers committed and which I witnessed.’99 A soldier’s letter says: ‘I never expected to be treated so badly or that the officers would be such a crew.’100 With candid malice, another soldier recounts from the Marmarica desert: ‘Here I can see officers who were so cocky in Italy, and yet in only a few, in only a very few days they’ve bowed their heads and their morale and no longer seem to be even privates.’101
In the next section we shall see how the repudiation of the Royal Army accounts for much about the attitudes and behaviour of the partisans. Here I only wish to recall the lieutenant described by Primo Levi, where this rejection was kept problematically bottled up, finding, as yet, no outward expression:
One could see that he wore the uniform with revulsion … He talked about Fascism and the war with reticence and a sinister gaiety that I had no trouble interpreting. It was the ironic gaiety of a whole generation of Italians, intelligent and honest enough to reject Fascism, too sceptical to oppose it actively, too young to passively accept the tragedy that was taking shape and to despair of the future; a generation to which I myself would have belonged if the providential Racial Laws had not intervened to bring me to a precocious maturity and guide me in my choice.102
On 2 April a ‘captain of the Alpini’ re
vealed the existence of reducismo ‘andato a bene’ (‘for a good cause’); or, if one prefers, of ‘reducista anti-Fascism’,103 sending this letter to a clandestine paper:
The survivors bear with them a legacy and mission received on the field from their comrades: to ensure that justice is done and to strike at those responsible for the disaster that is pounding our country. We shall be up in the front line for the vindication of liberty and for a better social order … I am with the Italy of Vittorio Veneto which goes back to the traditions of our Risorgimento.104
Hard on the heels of this, and aggressively, came a young man’s broadsheet:
Above all we respect those who are fighting, both in the ranks of the revolutionary forces and in the ranks of the armed forces. Fighting, mind you, not hiding themselves away in headquarters or the censor’s office or else sporting coffee-room anti-Fascism and meanwhile enjoying the many girls available, going off to the pictures or the races.105
As if in distant countermelody to this, in the same period Giaime Pintor was reflecting on his own ‘anti-militarism … which took shape in a privileged military atmosphere.’106
To discredit the heir to the throne, Prince Umberto, who ‘is staying afloat … in that distant Italy’, Nuto Revelli called him an ‘imboscato’, or draft-dodger (‘we’ll have to shoot him’); and in another page of his diary Revelli gave an exemplary outline of the itinerarium mentis militaris in Resistentiam (itinerary of the Resistance military mind) – an itinerary following which a regular officer like himself, who had believed in the military virtues, had come to reconvert, integrate and sublimate them into partisan life.107 The ‘poetry of military life’, which in August 1942 an officer of the occupying troops in Greece had recognised as something that could not possibly be felt by ‘thirty or thirty-one-year-old men, veterans of two wars, some of whom had been away from their homes, some for two years, some for three’, was, we can infer, found again among the partisans in command of whom that officer was to die.108 We can see proto-reducismo taking an anti-Fascist turn in many other testimonies. Witness this passage: ‘Once again the war has surprised our good faith, playing upon young men’s instinctive patriotism – this war! the culmination of the twenty-year-old crime … each one of us has a friend who has died far off, in the ranks of a prostitute army.’109
A few months earlier, a university students’ underground paper had spoken about young men ‘exploited until only yesterday on the battlefields in a senseless war’.110 This link between proto-reducismo and anti-Fascism is endorsed by many biographies, and emerges too from other passages in this book.111 In a vain attempt to save himself, a youth who failed to report for service in the Social Republic, about to be shot in Florence in March 1944, invokes his past as an honest combatant: they shouldn’t do it because I’ve always done my duty, I’ve always fought, ‘and I’ve never been punished’.112
To those who had fought in the 1940–43 war, the old-guard anti-Fascists generally showed an attitude in which obvious pragmatism prevailed (the important thing is that they join us); it also included respect for the sufferings they had endured; recognition (at times with a fair share of opportunistic rhetoric),113 however it had been deployed; satisfaction at noting so great a capacity to set things right, so much ‘profound moral rebellion which had matured particularly in the course of the war’.114 There was less of an urge to get to the heart of the complexity and contradictions in the itineraries of so many individual lives. Some expressed the fear that scepticism would take hold of the ex-combatants, ‘save the minority who had chosen the Resistance and the (slimmer) one that had chosen the Social Republic’.115
As if to reassure the mass of ex-servicemen who began to flock down into the South, Adolfo Omodeo, trying to make good use of what he had written about the 1915–18 combatants, said: ‘The rejection that has accompanied the military venture from the beginning does not mean failure to recognise the positive value of the rich human experience gained on the battlefields … Thus the energies lavished by the combatants do not seem vain to the men who are now setting about restoring Italian society.’116
The anti-Fascist leaders were, in fact, mainly concerned with the problems of the imminent post-war period, when the great mass of survivors who had not been filtered through the Resistance, nor foundered into the Social Republic, might represent a huge political problem that would have to be handled differently from the way it had been handled after 1918. The line taken towards the soldiers enrolled in the Royal Army, which during the war had been chiefly a matter of principle, an invitation, with little hope of immediate success, not to leave the bodies and souls of soldiers to the Fascist generals,117 became, at the end of the war, a thorny question that had to be solved if the reconstruction of democracy was well and truly to get under way.
3. THE REPUDIATION OF THE ROYAL ARMY
The corollary of the resistenti’s ethico–political condemnation of the Fascist war was their bitter and contemptuous dissociation from what had been its instrument, the Royal Army, both as a military institution and ruling class, and as a style of life. Testimonies of this repudiation, which seemed obvious to many resistenti, abound. The most drastic and unequivocal are those that speak baldly of the Royal Army as of a ‘dissolved’ army. This, literally, is how it is put by a document – which is nevertheless very ‘military’ in form, insofar as it forbids political activity in the nascent partisan formations – written at the end of December 1943 for the Committee of National Liberation of Northern Italy.1 And it was likewise to be expressed again by the ‘internal regulation of the Corpo volontari della libertà’ of 18 April 1945.2 Ugo La Malfa trenchantly wrote: ‘Badoglio’s great army succumbed and died in Italy on 8 September 1943.’3 At the end of March 1944 a circular of the Justice and Liberty political commissar for the 2nd sector asked that ‘it be made quite clear to the partisans that they are soldiers of a new and revolutionary army, the National Liberation Army, which does not identify with, nor even succeed, as heir and continuer of the old Royal Army, which has failed so miserably’.4
In November 1944, and then towards the end of the war, two authoritative Communist leaders, careful as ever, though at times with evident effort, to toe the political line that their party had indicated for relations with the institutions, also spoke of the ‘dissolved royal army’.5 If the epithet disciolto (dissolved) registers a reality that can by now, one hopes, be taken for granted, fallito (failed), or similar epithets, which were also recurrent, express a political and moral verdict that was taken to be equally incontestable. A Verona CLN leaflet reads: ‘Our army has come to a tragic end, but an array of Patriots still holds high Italian valour.’6
A few fundamental points account for the condemnation of the Royal Army. To this day, in a survivor’s memory, these can be said to come under the heading of betrayal: ‘There was no longer any doubt. We had been ignobly betrayed [by the High Commands] and handed over to the Germans.’7
The attitudes towards the high-ranking officers had been severe and unsparing, and not just in the days immediately following the collapse. Dante Livio Bianco tells of an Alpini lieutenant turned partisan leader who, in Cuneo, ‘proposed to kill without hesitation the colonel commanding the regiment, and possibly those superior officers who had wanted to throw in their lot with him’, and remarked: ‘Events would then show that what might at the time have appeared brusque ruthlessness was actually proof of wise foresight.’8
In a bitter attack on the regular officers, Il Segno, a Roman young people’s Catholic paper, already noted for a certain freedom of spirit, spoke of a ‘caste’ which ‘was the direct parallel of the party hierarchs’.9 Even the 1 October edition of Risorgimento Liberale, though crediting the army, ‘badly armed and badly run’, with the wish to ‘fight against its real enemy, against the Nazi oppressor’, recognised that it had been ‘deceived, disoriented, made to disarm, dispersed’. As we shall presently see, a smaller clandestine group like the Italian Labour Party (present almost exclusively i
n Romagna and Milan) was induced to reject the war against the Germans for fear that it might once again fall under the hegemony of the Royal Army. Its paper, La Voce del Popolo, reads: ‘We don’t want our young men to be enrolled in the monarchic army, which they joyously abandoned on 9 September, and to be compelled to fight under incompetent – as well as dishonest – generals and by mainly cowardly and spineless officers.’10
The book published clandestinely by this movement is shot through with a withering indictment of the high-ranking officers of the ARMIR.11 The ‘military’ and ‘autonomous’ formations, who appeared to the Justice and Liberty and Garibaldi ones as a more or less direct continuation of the Royal Army, often paid dearly for this hostility, whatever the line pursued by the political parties that the giellisti (members of GL) and Garibaldini followed. ‘May all our comrades rest assured that there are no Badogliani in our midst’, the joint Osoppo-Garibaldi Command reassured its men in the brief period of its existence.12 The ‘committee for the Faenza zone’ was enjoined to overcome the repugnance that the partisans felt at fighting alongside Badoglio’s officers.13 But another Communist document lets slips the word purtroppo (unfortunately) when having to explain the reasons inducing one to avail oneself also of high-ranking officers from the army.14 A symptomatic episode is recounted by Vittorio Cerri, second lieutenant of the Green Flames (Fiamme Verdi), who, on 1 May 1945, immediately after the Liberation, was surrounded by a group of Garibaldini from the Pavese Oltrepò bent on tearing off his stripes, plumes, Alpine cap and eagles, who partly succeeded in doing so; as they moved off, the Garibaldini ‘made jeering remarks about the army’.15
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