The internal rehabilitation described by Vanni and Carlino is altogether different from the sudden arrival of the officers, ‘relics of the militarist face of Fascism’ – as a GL document put it – with their ambition of taking command of formations that had come into being and developed autonomously.57
Significant differences have been noted here between the Action Party–GL formations and the Communist Party–Garibaldi formations (in both cases, it must always be remembered, the political and military organisms never fully coincide), independently of their different attitudes to the institutional problem and the Badoglio government. In the GL formations there was no preconceived social distrust of the officers, but often a high degree of moral distrust, albeit tempered by willingness to recognise a certain role, in the best cases, for the professionalism of their technical military know-how. Some GL documents, particularly high-level ones, display a tone of military aristocracy, coupled pedagogically with the democratic aims of the movement. A case in point is a Piedmont Command circular whose form is very much in the tradition of the army, while its content exhorts the men to break away from it. The purpose of the circular is formulated as follows: ‘Collaboration with the other divisions of partisan troops’. Reparti (divisions) and truppe (troops) are words utterly at odds with the plainer partisan language, as is soldati, which nevertheless recurs also in the diary of the GL intellectual Emanuele Artom. But the circular then expresses the concept that our struggle is ‘essentially political’, even if the GLs are not ‘the expression of a party’, and reminds its readers that ‘we do not want to recreate the essentially static, bureaucratic situations of the old army, in which the high Commands were the sole depositories of the Word’.58 Also valuable is Beppe Fenoglio’s description of a partisan who has ‘the face of a GL’: in an English uniform, ‘with the air half of an intellectual and half of a regular officer’.59
In the Garibaldi brigades, by contrast, superimposed on a high degree of social distrust – though often more for reasons of party discipline than out of deep conviction – there was the line that rallied anyone showing a genuine wish to fight, and therefore, indeed often with particular emphasis, the army officers as well. Initially the appeals, when they were not highly stereotyped repetitions of those preceding 8 September, are less confident; but they then draw strength from the very development achieved by the formations. In this case, too, we would do better to refer not to the general PCI directives, which are sufficiently well-known and where the appeal to a policy of unity after the Salerno ‘turning-point’ went so far as to attempt to attach the ‘military’ and ‘autonomous’ formations as well to the CLN,60 but to intermediate or low-level documents. ‘We have said’, reads a Turin Communist document of 10 October 1943, ‘that the partisan formations organised and controlled by us are formations of the National Guard emanating from the people and that they recognise no authority other than the CLN. This does not mean that we deny the officers faithful to the old army and the monarchy’ the right to keep their opinions and to fight, even in formations that ‘appeal to and regard themselves as units of the Royal Army and obey Badoglio’.61 Around about the same time, a violent attack against cowardly officers, but a hand held out to honest ones, appears in a Garibaldi General Command document.62 And if some formations balked at this, they were told the error of their ways. Thus the Casotti brigade, which had not wanted as commander a certain captain Bellinzona, alias Saetta, ‘with the excuse that he hasn’t served with partisans long enough or something of the kind’, was told in answer that he was an officer ‘of unquestionable merit because a captain at the age of twenty-six’, and that ‘his position as regular officer who since 8 September has not reported for service is to his credit’. Thus, the reprimand concluded, ‘this is an error, comrade, because we are after the necessary political creed, but we also want people keen to fight against the common enemy’; and besides, we must ‘give the Voghera lot some joy and not rub them up the wrong way’.63 The fear that, by means of the CLN (‘the Voghera lot’), the officers would make a bid for positions they didn’t deserve is expressed with great frankness in this other document:
If we get the CLN to intervene now, before having the Command under our belts, they might send along their usual majors (they always have them tucked away somewhere or other and you know very well what they’re worth and what orientation they have) and be ousted, and so let control slip away from us, after working so hard to keep those forces on their feet.64
Even in documents containing self-criticism for disrespectful behaviour towards the officers, it was said that the latter did not manage to get themselves taken too seriously, particularly when they flocked in during the euphoria of the summer of 1944. The SAP divisional Command of Turin writes (though it should be borne in mind that the SAPs were support formations for urban guerrilla warfare, certainly the type least suited to Royal Army officers):
Possibly we can criticise ourselves for not having known how to behave with the officers, expecting from youngsters, with a petit-bourgeois mentality, what one could expect from already well-proven comrades. Perhaps we are not diplomatic enough and incapable of that tact and delicacy needed when dealing with daddy’s boys, who are easily upset by rough proletarian forms … Our belief is that the officers, unless they are very intelligent elements or comrades of proven faith, can be used as technicians, without command functions.65
Greater faith, and also greater tact, was expressed, instead, by a ‘scheme for the organisation of a Garibaldi assault brigade Command’, issued a few months earlier by the general Command, which considered the possibility of giving positions of command to ‘the officers who maintain a proud and firm anti-German and anti-Fascist stance’.66
Still more brusquely, and almost upending the terms of the question – in order, possibly, to prevent the worst from occurring – on the eve of the Insurrection, the regional triumvirate for Emilia-Romagna would declare: ‘There is no doubt that the officers who take command are to be apolitical: they will be officers and no more. Even if the majority will probably belong to no party, supporters of parties cannot and must not be excluded – that would be the limit!’67
In the appeals made to the officers who had joined the Social Republic, or even those who merely lay low without committing themselves, their soldier’s status is stressed in a clearly instrumental way. Thus, shortly after the Salerno turning-point, the north Italian edition of L’Unità also invoked the duty to obey the orders of ‘superiors’;68 while, more emphatically, a poster of the 7th Garibaldi division (Valle d’Aosta), addressed to ‘officers, non-commissioned officers, Alpini, our Brothers!’, made a direct appeal to the wartime experience of 1940–43:
We are former officers, former soldiers of the old Royal Army, who have however done our duty on all the fronts and now want to redeem the honour of an Italy which is derided, humiliated because of a regime of swaggerers, of thieving fathers- and sons-in-law … so you can’t fire at your former colleagues and fellow-combatants of the old battles bitterly fought together and lost only because they were poorly armed and poorly led by incompetent Fascist officers.
It is no accident that a document of this tenor, which constitutes a sort of summa of ‘continuismo’ between the 1940–43 combatants and those of 1943– 45, contemptuously rejects the description of the partisans as ‘rebels’, ‘bandits’, ‘outlaws’, let alone, obviously, ‘cowards’.69 A fairly late document of the military Command of the Ossola area offers a clear summary of the main lines of the attitude that had been taking shape towards the officers, who, given the imminent end of the war, were flocking in in ever greater numbers. The spirit of the document is that one should not disappoint the officers, that one should give them a good welcome, but that it was necessary to take care not to create misunderstandings, and to bring it home to them how different the atmosphere of the partisan army was from that of the Royal Army – no naja (military service), a political but not a party mentality; no ranks save those recognise
d by the patriots; the use of the officers, mainly – even after the period of re-education provided for – only as military advisers.70
Just one corps, the Alpini, were well thought of in the Resistance. Nevertheless, even the Alpini myth was to be critically scrutinised, both to see how much personalities like Nuto Revelli retrospectively contributed to the creation of that myth (Revelli’s work, moreover, has become part of a literary tradition that no other Italian military corps can boast), and to identify the dissent or at least doubt that already existed at the time of the Resistance. Hitler himself could be called to testify in favour of the Alpini: at his Klessheim meeting with Mussolini on 23 April 1944, he classed them as being ‘among our worst enemies’.71 Certainly, if the spirit of the Bersaglieri – to name another of the traditional and, in their way, popular corps of the Italian army – is compared with that of the Alpini, it appears clear why the latter, and not the former, became assimilated into a sort of Resistance ethos, most widespread in the GL formations, many of which took the name ‘divisione alpina Giustizia e Libertà’. In his book on the Russian campaign, Giusto Tolloy says: ‘Bersaglierismo in fact had its beginnings in Garibaldinismo in a purely formal sense, and the red fez is still there to recall its origins’ – so it is hardly surprising that it is found alongside Fascist squadrismo, ‘which itself adopted its half-brother’s fez, dyed black’. Against this brusque verdict – which took no account of the date of birth of the Bersaglieri (1836), but distinguished affinities underlined by Fascism itself – Tolloy affirmed that ‘in no Italian corps was there a greater democratic spirit and convinced discipline’ than in the Alpini, even if that corps had in its turn been polluted by Fascism.72 This seems to be borne out by the Alpini of the Pusteria division, who carried out a scorched-earth policy in the Balkans.73 And an Alpino from the Greek front had spoken of ‘old scarponi [as the Alpini were nicknamed] moulded in a Mussolinian atmosphere, and we have no fear of death’.74 These words seem to bear the imprint of a spirit much akin to that of the bersagliere who wrote from Dalmatia to a fellow-soldier: ‘The bersaglieri are the true soldiers, they are the symbol of vitality, they perpetuate the race of those created [by God] to dare’.75 Against the bersagliere with his hundred feathers and the Alpino with just one, the partisan, in one of his songs, would affirm the value of those who were up in the mountains fighting without possessing a single feather.
The fact is that the Social Republic too managed to organise its own Alpine division, the Monterosa, which arrived in Italy in August 1944. As in the case of the other three divisions put together in Germany, for many enlisting was simply a means of getting back to Italy and then deserting.76 The keenest remained, giving sorry proof of themselves in the armed forces of Salò. Here is the testimony of a report by the Conegliano CLN: ‘We have managed to unmask the wicked activity of the Alpini in our area led by a well-known war criminal, Attilio Pillon.’77 The memory of the execution of three GL partisans at Casteldelfino provoked this comment from Mario Giovana: ‘In this way even our illusions about the Alpini were waning.’78 In his diary Pietro Chiodi records that a partisan who had been taken prisoner related how he had been ‘beaten and tortured by the SS and the Alpini … The latter amused themselves by sticking their plumes up his nostrils. An officer kept repeating amid the quips of his men: while you’re here, your wife is having fun with others.’79
Fascist sources tell the same story. Unpopular with and insulted by the population, who call them ‘traitors’, ‘men who’ve sold themselves’, ‘down-and-outs’, the Monterosa Alpini ‘are often compelled to use an iron hand’; they react to provocation ‘immediately and energetically … shooting numerous elements’, and intend that at the end of the war they’ll be the ones to sort out the Italians who ‘need to be purged’.80
Detached and slightly embarrassed, Dante Livio Bianco placed the word ‘Alpini’ in quotation marks when referring to those of the Monterosa left in the valley, even if ‘they don’t appear to be too numerous or bellicose’.81 But Revelli can’t hold back this cry of anguish: ‘It seemed impossible to me that my Russian Alpini were wearing German uniforms. I saw them come out huddled together like a flock of sheep. I tried to make out at least one of my comrades among them, but they were all alike’.82
The link, which was also its limit, between the Alpini of the ARMIR and the ‘alpino’ spirit of some of the Resistance, can be gleaned from what Giorgio Rochat says about the Russian campaign. The compact and united attitude of the Alpini, which he sees as a ‘furious hope to save themselves in the teeth of those who had driven them out there, the German master and the proud enemy’,83 Rochat considers ‘far more defensive than offensive, aimed at the group’s survival on the socio-cultural plane more than on the military one’. In other words, it was an instrument ‘to defend a collective identity’, where ‘the weakening of “national” values gave way to closer and more limited “municipalistic”, values, like, indeed, esprit de corps’.84
In connection with the problem of local partisan recruitment, Revelli observed: ‘It’s the nucleus of montanari, the Alpini partisans, that keeps the brigade in one piece’; and, comparing his memory of the Don line and the experience of the Alpine huts of Paralup, he pointed out: ‘The discipline, the hierarchy, at Belogore as at Paralup, was not a matter of form, but of substance. The Alpini respected the corporal, the NCO, the officer whom they esteemed. Ranks counted for nothing … Our soldiers were waging war in grey-green uniforms, but underneath, on their skin, they wore bourgeois stuff, from home, made of warm wool.’85
Here, we are among the GL units of the Cuneo area. But in other resistenti, for example among the Garibaldini of the Isontino, Alpine solidarity could appear, instead, in the guise of old-style paternalism. The commanders of the Osoppo formations – national Catholics, but with a vein of azionismo as well86 – struck the political commissar of the Natisone division as being ‘distant from their men and when they approached them they did so in the paternalistic spirit of the Alpini officers’.87 For that matter, still less politicised autonomous formations of the Osoppo brigade and plainly ‘military’ ones, like the divisions commanded by Major ‘Mauri’ (Enrico Martini), had also dubbed themselves alpine. In the first section of one of their ‘Regulations’, the Brescian Green Flames, disliked both by the Garibaldini and the GL, wrote, with gestures drawn from patriotic rhetoric: ‘The Green Flames are continuing the glorious tradition of the Italian Alpine battalions, which have never known defeat.’88
As already with the Arditi, the Alpini were compared with the paracadutisti (the paratroopers), the army’s latest speciality.89 We have already seen how, after 25 July, with the collapse of the National-Fascist motivations for fighting the war, a powerful esprit de corps had sought to take their place. After 8 September this identity – expressed in the formula, ‘We are above all paracadutisti’90 – found itself with a still heavier and more contradictory task. On the one hand, it meant that the paratroopers became one of the most solid divisions of the CIL (Italian Liberation Corps); on the other hand, by insisting on a high degree of continuity between the two wars (1940–43 and 1943–45), and consequently refusing to accept any serious criticism of the recent past, it rendered impossible any genuine moral participation in the new experience. The case of the paracadutisti thus lays bare how a merely combative ethic was incapable of carrying the weight of such profound historical upheavals. The Fascist-type conduct of the paracadutisti in the Kingdom of the South, which made them resemble their fellow-soldiers of the Social Republic, was rooted in the fact that the ‘wide horizon of myths, symbolic references and values which had found expression and exaltation in Fascism, precipitating into the world war even in the identity of the corps born from it, did not appear to be called into question’.91
It is easy, therefore, to understand not only the denunciations and protests from the democratic side,92 but also the distrust that made General Umberto Utili advise against dropping paracadutisti behind the lines,93 and finally the
fact that after the war the paracadutisti of the North and South cancelled the Gothic line, converging into a single association. Frustration and the incapacity to overcome it characterise these soldiers. Paradigmatic of this is the episode which sees the paracadutisti triumphantly entering a liberated village in the Marche: joy at this rediscovered unison with the spirit of the people is immediately wrecked by their seeing those applauding them with clenched fists.94 This gave birth to defeatist velleities which, excusatio non petita, induced someone to write in the corps newspaper: ‘There’s no getting rid of the so-called squadristic spirit’.95 On the opposite side, the army put together by the Social Republic in turn found itself in a tricky relationship with the tradition of the Italian army. If the armed forces of the Social Republic seemed to have broken drastically with those of the Royal Army, this formal fracture with the institutional authorities of the state was not matched by a corresponding fracture in the institution of the army as such. Moreover, continuity with the war alongside the German ally – indeed, continuity with ‘all the wars’, as the Fascists were forever fond of putting it – provided a legitimising framework for the army, and also to a great extent the RSI as such. It was inevitable that a high degree of continuity should derive from the two wars even in the armed forces which had fought them, and which had to continue fighting them. Badoglio might well be dubbed the ‘felon marshal’; but could all the marshals, all the generals, all the high-ranking officers of the army, be dubbed felons? Could the whole structure be considered irremediably corrupt?
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