A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  ‘Because of the prejudice against the officers in [Effective Permanent Service] I found myself, as everyone knows, in a moral condition of dire humiliation’ – this was how, on 27 August 1944, Colonel Roncioni, who had become commander of the patria battalion of the 4th Osoppo Friuli brigade, complained about a formation in which, it should be recalled, Catholic influence and anti-Communist (and anti-Slav) polemic were rife even at those moments when formal agreements were reached with the Garibaldi brigades. Speaking of the armed forces being put together again in the South, the colonel added polemically: ‘An army which is said to be destroyed and no longer existent, despite the fact that it is continuing to fight with the allies, as we are repeatedly informed by the radio.’16

  It was in its behaviour that the Royal Army appeared to the resistenti as something remote, squalid and immoral. In his diary Guido Quazza wrote: ‘one is cleansed from the detritus of the army’.17 The profound difference of the partisan bands was declared with pride. This too is a fact that became imprinted on people’s memories, according to formulae like ‘there was draft as in the Italian army’, ‘the commander was always the first into action’, ‘before an action, we all discussed it together’; ‘there were neither those who commanded nor those who simply obeyed’.18

  Distrust was mutual. When the Gappist Giovanni Pesce reported to an HQ that was to supply him with arms, he was asked: ‘Are you an officer? What rank are you?’ Furious, Pesce managed to restrain himself from voicing this reflection: ‘So, everything that’s happened in Italy and the world, the 8 September breakup, the partisan recovery, had not the slightest effect on that man’s way of conceiving existence in terms of fixed and immutable hierarchies.’19

  Ferdinando Mautino speaks of officers who conserved ‘a gangrened putrified mentality of supremacy and privilege’, regarding a group of them who were ‘far more intent on finding a bolt-hole than a place of combat’, and who would soon move off ‘in search of a less uncomfortable patriotic job’.20 In a Garabaldi brigade document of autumn 1944, the ‘social disparity and consequently the disparity of treatment between officers and troops’ was stoutly denounced as ‘one of the reasons that have caused the collapse of the Royal Army’. In contrast with this, ‘in our formations we have got off on a footing of absolute democracy, and it is on that basis that we intend to remain’; and therefore ‘the establishment of an officers’ mess’ is incomprehensible. ‘The Garibaldino officer shares his bread, pallet and fire with the private.’21

  When, in homage to unification, the political commissars became war commissars, Francesco Moranino stressed that they had to share mess-tins, pallets, scabs and lice with their men.22 In a party document, Vincenzo Moscatelli candidly reiterated the verdict on the Royal Army, describing it as a ‘bourgeois army’.23 Giovanni Battista Lazagna was convinced that the only useful job that could be found for the officers after the war was to send them for ten years to clear up the rubble.24

  Even at their stormiest, relations between comrades were very different from the tantrums that occurred in the naja (regular army), warned Moscatelli;25 and, again in the Ossola zone, fear was expressed that the return home of many officers interned in Switzerland, with a view to the final dissolution of the army, was accompanied by a style which was by now intolerable.26 In one of the first Giustizia e Libertà (GL) bands in the village of Paralup in the Cuneo area, rejection of everything that smacked of the Royal Army was such that a partisan refused to don a grey-green greatcoat in the rain. On this score Dante Livio Bianco, who recounts the episode, recalls what Carlo Rosselli had written in his Giornale di un miliziano: that, as they trooped through the streets of Barcelona, they did their level best not to march in step.27

  ‘I made a rather demagogic little speech,’ Emanuele Artom, political commissar of a GL division, wrote in his diary: ‘The soldiers of Badoglio’s bands would do well to come here and see how you are living: those who are on their best behaviour with the officers and live as they used to in the old army, where a soldier worked and got a lira a day and the officer commanded and got fifty.’28

  The trust placed in some cases, immediately after the Armistice, in military formations that were, or were supposed to be, to a greater or lesser extent organic, and which had repaired to the mountains – traces of which can be found even in the wary L’Italia libera29 – and the shortly ensuing disillusion contributed to increasing contempt for the army and its leaders and the distrust of the ‘military’ bands on the part of the ‘political’ ones. In a ‘Report on the military situation in the Biella area’ (November 1943), the condition of the ‘soldiers who had taken refuge in the mountains’ (about 700 men at the end of October) is described as disastrous because of the inertia, the political and organisational incapacity, the lack of surveillance, the nonexistent or contradictory commands. Thus, when the final, total breakup occurred at the beginning of November, only on new Garibaldini bases was it possible to start the work of reconstruction. And, as the Communist author of the report was keen to point out, this was done in the teeth of the sabotage work of the ‘Military Committee’, which, in cahoots with the industrialists, ‘spread the rumour that the Communists wanted to use the soldiers for their own ends’.30 Another report, on the Belluno area, speaks of the disbanded soldiers of the Royal Army, passive and fence-sitting, organising themselves into squads, leaving one no option but to organise other, Garibaldi ones;31 while a former combatant in Spain, who became the commander of the 8th Garibaldi brigade in Romagna, spoke ironically of the generals’ and colonels’ pretentious claim to create a regular army in the Apennines immediately after 8 September.32 Such episodes are but a few of the many that Resistance historiography has generally placed in its ‘first phase’, the one called in very approximate terms ‘military’, and soon to be superseded by the more mature phase that saw the birth and flowering of the bands connected in various ways with the political parties.

  I shall be dealing with the process of politicisation and its links with militarisation in the next chapter. What needs be stressed here is that the 8 September collapse marked a fracture that could not easily be made good in the history of the Italian military institutions and, still less so, in the country’s perception of them. The radical stances taken by the resistenti are simply the clearest manifestations of this fracture. Those stances even upset the role of father figure that had been entrusted above all to the reserve officers and had constituted the most human face of the Italian military hierarchy. That role had proved capable of tempering the bureaucratic dimension that makes the modern mass army officer ‘a special category of official in contrast to the knight, condottiere, tribal chief or Homeric hero’.33 (Traces of such figures – apart from the Homeric hero – were, for that matter, to be found in the partisan leaders themselves.)

  By its very nature, the presence in the partisan formations of Royal Army officers who had enrolled in them contributed to this process. In the first few weeks the political forces had mainly sought superior officers, to whom command duties could be entrusted. Behind this search lay the complex political question of the relationship with Badoglio’s government; and, insofar as it directly bore on the problems of the nascent partisan organisation, it was based on a residual overrating of the technical abilities of the military men, regarded as ‘experts’ whom one could under no circumstances do without. Even in intensely antimilitarist circles, like those of the first Cuneo GL bands, some such prospect had been fostered.34 As Bianco recalls, the failure of these searches consolidated the anti-militarist spirit.35 Drawing no general conclusions, but unequivocally, Ermanno Gorrieri (the Christian Democrat commander) was later to write in his book about the Resistance in the Apennines that ‘the regular officers, with a few laudable exceptions, stayed at the margins of or even outside the Resistance.’36

  A case in point is the affair of General Raffaello Operti, who was nominated to be military commander of Piedmont. Already in October an authoritative Communist leader, in dubbing (with a
reservation in favour of the Action Party representative) the members of the military Command of the Piedmontese CLN as fence-sitters, gas-bags and vainglorious stuffed shirts, had summed up his view of things by describing those gentlemen as capable only of thinking of the Royal Army.37 Before Operti’s candidacy, the PCI member responsible for military work in Piedmont levelled extremely harsh criticisms at the general;38 and the PCI delegation in the committee recalled that Operti had ‘been part of the corps commands in the occupied countries, whose actions can only be judged by organisms appointed or to be appointed by the victim peoples of occupation’.39

  The Communist representatives had evidently wanted to bring up a question that put the committee in a spot; but they had touched on the sore point of war criminals, which was one of those questions on which the ruling class was soon to close ranks. Not only was there to be no handing over of Italian war criminals to the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, the Albanians, the Russians, the Ethiopians, but no extradition of war criminals would be included in the programmes declared by the Resistance. The exchange of obedience for impunity between the generals who signed the surrender and the Allies, institutional continuity, the wish to safeguard the all-absolving myth of the ‘goodness of the Italians’, Italy’s new international position in the incipient Cold War – all of these factors would be opposed to it; nor would contempt at the incriminated General Mario Roatta’s flight from a Roman hospital on 7 March 1945 be enough to reverse this trend.40 Not even in the climate of November 1943 was the preliminary objection by the Turin Communists, interpreters of a sentiment that went beyond their party interests and contained some of the deepest reasons for rejecting the Royal Army and the war, successful. The directive declared so often by the PCI even then – that everything was to be subordinated to the war of liberation – rebounded against the PCI itself, not least because of the stance taken by the Action Party, which took Operti’s part, pleading greater military as well as financial needs (Operti was the depository of the 4th Army ‘treasury’).41

  But pride in being even technically more competent than the regular officers was to become a strong point of many partisan commanders. We find it proudly expressed by the Command of the Tollot (Veneto) Garibaldi brigade, which urges its men to give the Fascist enemy ‘the certainty that he is up against forces organised possibly with greater know-how and technical skill than their own, which number in their ranks wiseacres of their so-called General Staffs of the notorious former Fascist war schools’.42 The moral superiority that could offset even technical deficiencies was the main point stressed by the GL formations’ Lombardy commands, who rejected the commander of the Oroboca division’s request to be replaced by a person of greater military competence: ‘Twenty years of bad government and Fascist corruption have taught us that only when disinterest, abnegation and self-sacrifice govern one’s decision to serve one’s country, is the nation served as it should be, by people who also know how to make up for their lack of specific technical specialist skills.’43

  The downright inefficiency of the Royal Army came under fire, too. Care should be taken, wrote the Garibaldi command of Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio and Verbano, on 24 November 1944, to ensure that ‘circulars do not remain dead letters in HQ files as happened in the disbanded Royal Army’.44 Snide quips were made about the arrival of a general sent to ‘take command of our boat, which is not, when all is said, to be sniffed at … and which, if this happens, will certainly become something very chic’.45

  The fact is that relations with the regular officers, but also with those reserve officers who sought their identity in that rank, always remained somewhat tense (Barbato-Pompeo Colajanni – the most popular Garibaldi commander in the Cuneo area, had been a permanent regular officer, but did not act in this guise in the Resistance). Those relations are a particularly fitting terrain for identifying how the broad political lines of the parties and the average conscience of the resistenti intertwined. For the parties, the problem had to be seen in terms of what attitude should be taken towards the old institutions being reconstructed in the South, as well as the general view of the war of liberation in Italy, or indeed the world war as a whole. For the resistenti, the officers, their uniforms, their language, their behaviour took on a symbolic significance that went beyond the merits or demerits of individuals. Some of the officers who came into contact with the bands seemed, indeed, to be going out of their way to make themselves disliked, or at least ridiculous. On 21 April 1944, Colonel Silvio Marenco, head of SIMAR, an organisation operating in the Siena territory, which took its name from the first letters of his first and surname, declared: ‘We are making the recruits born in 1924–25 who are reporting to us take the oath of allegiance to King and Country as before; in other words, we are recreating our army here.’46 Likewise, Rita, the regular officer who had become commander of the Pasubio division, a formation of uncertain identity, created by the singular figure of Giuseppe Marozin, awarded decorations for military valour (among others, to Marozin himself), ‘availing myself of the faculty granted in Russia to the commander of the regiment, for exceptional cases, by His Excellency Marshal Messe’.47 In the report on the activity of another small Tuscan formation, where after sundry adversities a number of officers were dispatched to take command, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Malinotti, in an engagement, ‘gave orders with a pistol in his hand standing behind a big tree together with his son. The colonel’s orders were completely wrong (as the entire formation can testify)’; then, finding himself before a German action, ‘the colonel, almost with tears in his eyes, insisted on abandoning arms and commending his soul to God since all of them would die’; finally, another three officers arrived: ‘giving military orders, filing us up in squads; reluctantly we obeyed. The officers immediately understood that the partisans weren’t soldiers, a captain spoke up saying he and his companions demanded the formal “Lei” address, that he would brook no argument, that the affairs of superiors were no concern of ours.’48

  Certainly, in the reactions towards the army and the officers, different timeframes must again be distinguished. In the first weeks and months, what was involved was an immediate consequence of the moral crisis of the army and of disillusion in the residual hopes reposed in it. In a central phase, individual officers would be received into the more or less politicised formations, while the autonomous ones, generally led by military men, would provide structures which, despite a sometimes flaunted continuity with the Royal Army, would actually acquire a high degree of self-legitimisation. Lastly, in the final phase, when ‘militarisation’ sought institutionally guaranteed expression, the officers, as such, were once more to play at least a formal role, above all in the unified commands. For example, the zone Command for the province of Modena would consist of General Marco Guidelli – Max – and nine other members, eight of whom were officers, whose style would impress itself upon, if not the men’s conduct, at least the documents they drafted.49

  Typical of the first phase is the order sent on 9 November 1943 by a regular officer, who described himself as ‘military commander of the Biella CLN’, ‘a tutte le baite’ (‘to all the huts’), ordering the consignment of all weapons, which he would redistribute according to new criteria, and declaring anyone who failed to obey a ‘dissident’ and ‘rebel’, to be prosecuted as such: ‘It has finally been made unequivocally clear’, the order explained, ‘that there is no such figure as a political commander or a political officer or a civil commander. There is just the one commander and he is to be obeyed.’50

  Positions of this kind could only rekindle convictions like that expressed in a document kept in the archives of the Garibaldi brigade general headquarters: ‘It will be a long time before the Italian officers are able to redeem their reputation for incompetence and indifference to the patria, or even treason, which they earned for themselves in the most critical days of the Badoglio period’.51 More brusquely, a partisan said to Pietro Chiodi, ‘The regular officers who aren’t partisans are traitors and one day we�
��ll shoot them.’52

  On the other hand, still in the early days, the officers who joined the Garibaldi formations, particularly in the areas under strong pressure from the Slavs, received requests that the Communist directives would duly not only exclude but partly overturn into prohibitions. Thus, on 27 September Mario Lizzeri, a leader who was later to perform highly responsible functions in Friuli, reported, with a mixture of indignation and resentment, that the officers, windbags and pedants, wanted to be called patriots, refused to make the closed-fist salute, and wished to do away with the name ‘political commissar’.53 Witness, by contrast, the firm tone with which a similar problem was dealt with in a Piedmontese Garibaldini document of 10 October 1944, which tells the story of a captain who ‘has done his level best to persuade us to give up our positions and become exclusively soldiers [militari]. How can we get him to understand that we are soldiers in the true sense of the word and not as he would have it, for interests decidedly against the Italian people?’

  The document goes on to say that the captain ‘will help us the day after the war is over … we are very sorry if we do not receive help, [but] like the inhabitants of Warsaw we know where our duty lies and shall do it whatever the cost, since we are sure of being able to give [sic] alongside the entire people’.54

  In fact, the largest formations – the Garibaldi and GL – came to develop remarkably flexible attitudes to the officers, out of both political expediency and faith in the new solidarity that the partisan struggle was capable of fathering and developing, recreating within its own ranks plainer hierarchies of value. Witness what Vanni [Giovanni Padoan], political commissar of the Natisone Garibaldi division, wrote on this score in his memoirs. The ranks held in the Royal Army, he explains, ‘did not count; on the contrary, at times they could be a hindrance. There were cases of former officers who rose again from the ranks to became fine partisan commanders loved and respected by their men.’ Not so, Vanni polemically goes on to say, in the Osoppo formations (which were prevalently national–Catholic).55 It is interesting to read this testimony by Vanni, who was an experienced Communist leader, parallel with that of Carlino, the chief of the General Staff of the same division, who was in fact one of those officers, mentioned by Vanni, who had re-qualified themselves (Carlino – the Ferdinando Mautino whom we have already encountered several times – had been an officer with the occupying troops in Croatia, and had ended up with the Natisone division in January 1944, after fighting with the Croat and Slovene partisans). Carlino thus writes that every officer, ‘royal or republican’, ‘was asked to abandon positions acquired in very different settings and for a very different combination of reasons; each was obliged to assume the maximum responsibility that his intellectual, moral and military capacities, and the requirements of the struggle, demanded of him’.56