Still more defiant were expressions such as ‘fuori legge’ (‘outlaw’)165 and ‘bandito’.166 The latter, while deriving literally from ‘bande’ (‘bands’) and/or ‘messo a bande’ (‘banned’), and while rebutting the ‘Achtung! Banditen!’ of the German road signs, contained the problem of the distinction between bandits and highwaymen, which I will come back to. ‘Guerriero’ (‘warrior’) is, by contrast, a word that was rarely adopted: destined in recent times to enjoy renewed fortune, the term must then have appeared a trifle recherché and archaic,167 even if the word ‘guerriglia’ enjoyed wider circulation.168 A similar discussion could be devoted not just to the names the partisans were called by, but to the way in which the units into which they formed were designated. ‘Banda’ is undoubtedly the original and most spontaneous name, used in the first few months even by the Military Command for Northern Italy. Giancarlo Pajetta has written: ‘The giellisti of Cuneo, fine and courageous … called their formations “bande”, to make it clear that platoons, companies, battalions, regiments and brigades would no longer exist. We, on the other hand, said “brigades”, and dreamed of soon being able to call them “divisions”.’169
Indeed, the GL formations too ended up organising themselves into divisions, even if their Command re-divided them only into squads, detachments and brigades.170 The autonomous formations certainly had no semantic taboos about adopting names of the organic units of the army. Thus, when the ‘technical consultant’ of the CMRP (Comando Militare Regionale Piemontese) advised against several Garibaldi brigades being grouped together into the 1st Piedmont division, which had for that matter already been created, it is hard to know how much of this was a ‘technical’ move and how much it may be put down to political caution.171 ‘Brigade’ too was successful, in the wake of the Spanish international brigades. Towards the end of 1943 the PCI leadership was speaking of detachments, battalions and brigades;172 and ‘Garibaldi assault detachments and brigades’ was to be the definitively adopted name (where that word ‘assault’ recalled, with questionable opportuneness, the ‘reparti d’assalto’ (‘assault units’) of the First World War – the arditi).
‘Platoon’ or ‘company’ do not appear for the smaller units, and still more understandably ‘regiment’ was avoided, since it smacked too much of barracks (the mythical ‘fifth regiment’ of the Spanish Civil War was not enough to rehabilitate it).
Recourse to traditional terminology was made necessary not only by the growth of the formations and the consequent need to group them into higher-level units, but also by the political wish to acquire, as far as possible, the physiognomy of an army – paying the price of an attenuation of the original egalitarianism. There were those who insisted on carrying things too far. From the Ossola-Valsesia came the proposal to create in that free zone and in Lombardy as many as four ‘corpi d’armata della liberazione’ (‘liberation corps’) and to transform the Lombard regional Command into a Command of the ‘assault army of Liberation’. The CVL General Command dryly expressed its dissent.173 A ‘corpo d’armata Centro Emilia’ appears in other documents; but when Pajetta had an ‘enormous headline’ printed in the Combattente – ‘Partisan corps gives chase to the Germans’ – Longo became irritated and explained that ‘the most important thing was to get oneself taken seriously’.174 For its part, the CVL General Command devoted considerable care to the subject and eventually, following unification, sanctioned the ascending scale of squad–detachment–battalion–brigade–division.175
One should not, however, assume that the construction of an increasingly complex hierarchical pyramid meant a corresponding effective and regular organisation. Neither the Garibaldi nor GL General Command were equipped with General Staffs or operational offices that drew up battle plans, issued the consequent orders, and so on. The unity ensured by these General Commands was above all politically orientated, and broadly speaking organisational. Likewise with the General Command of the CVL (Corpo Volontari della Libertà), and with more reason.176 Even when the final phase of unification was reached, the General Command and the single peripheral Commands responded essentially to political perspectives and equilibria. The more unadulterated current of the partisan formations, which were territorially and politically differentiated, was in reality to unite more into a sort of federal form than into the rigid framework of a hierarchical machinery. Even the partial fusions that occurred locally were often more fictitious than real. Such was the case, for example, with the amalgamation into the Piave division of the Battisti and Perotti formations. And, again in the Ossola zone, when it was decided to create a single Command for the free territory of the ‘republic’, and the commander of the Matteotti formations was put in charge of it, nobody objected, because ‘we were all convinced that anyway no one would obey a single command’.177
2. RELATIONS WITH THE PARTIES
Military-style organisation, which, as we have seen, in many respects remained more a programme than a reality, would not have been enough to keep so variegated a partisan army, and one so jealous of its autonomy, united. With a realism verging on excess one partisan chief has written: ‘The absolute lack of higher control would have allowed us with a certain ease to reign over the territories that were subsequently occupied with a despotism and an irresponsibility that might, besides, have justified the urgent military needs.’1
A partisan chief with a certain degree of charisma might, that is, have found himself tempted down the slope of some form of rassimo (petty despotism).2 The ties established with the parties acted as a counterweight to this tendency, as they did, for that matter, to local pressures. These ties made the individual formations more internally homogeneous, differentiating them from others of a different persuasion, but at the same time they were a unifying factor: they not only transmitted the CLN policy of unity to the rank-and-file, but fostered the conviction that it was political commitment as such that established the essential bond between the partisans. Undoubtedly one of the presuppositions of the way the parties took root in post-war Italian society was their having been present in the Resistance – a factor which to this day gives legitimacy to the ‘constitutional arc’ of the parties of the Italian Republic. Some clarification is necessary, however. Above all, we need to recognise that there was some degree of fortuitousness in the ‘politicisation’ of a certain number of formations. This was clearly seen by Anna Bravo, when, writing of the Alto Montferrato, she said that, since the partisans were, so to speak, a politically amorphous material, those who first managed to help them, stimulate them, and give them advice with a wider experience, were able to orientate them towards their own political positions. The need to organise set in motion political conquest.3 It was thus that the military organism itself became a ‘natural channel for the current of political ideas’.4 Financing, access to Allied airdrops, assistance of various kinds, CLN recognition, as well, naturally, as the prestige that they had succeeded in gaining, were the instruments of which the parties availed themselves to lead the bands into their respective orbits. Some GL formations, an Action Party document complained, had regressed into apoliticism because they were convinced that this was the way to obtain greater funding and airdropped supplies. For the same reasons, it added, these formations could end up gravitating towards the Garibaldi or Matteotti brigades.5 The diary of the Rosselli brigade tells us that, while freedom of individual political orientation held good, ‘given that the brigade must however rely on one of the parties at the CLNs, it is logical and right for the ‘Carlo Rosselli’ brigade to rely on the representative of the Action Party’.6 The ‘non-political nature’ of the autonomous bands came in for a severe upbraiding from the General Command of the CVL, which reminded Mauri that ‘the struggle being conducted against the Germans and Fascists is absolutely political and must be conducted raising the political conscience of the various formations to the highest degree’.7 Non-politicalness was generally denounced by the politicians as false non-politicalness.8 And indeed it did lend itself w
ell to use by the Christian Democrats and Liberals, who did not have many bands of their own, to exert their influence over the autonomous bands. A Garibaldi document gives a colourful and angry description of this process:
The Christian Democrats are hard at work on the ‘autonome’. They’re sending them military chaplains, bigwigs from the curia, trusted and pretty sharp elements. They’re well received and don’t miss the chance to ‘advise’ and perhaps pretend in God’s name to participate at the zone Command meetings. We are being as tactful as we can not to provoke them; but it’s clear that sooner or later we won’t be able to tolerate positions and insinuations against us.9
On the other hand, some formations became ‘of a political leaning only because of the political profession of one or two of the men in charge of them’.10 Other formations, or at least some of their members, may be said to have gone looking for ‘politics’, without ever fully encountering it.11
The Communist Party and Action Party, those most engaged in the armed struggle, inevitably dedicated particular attention to relations with ‘their’ formations. Some of the problems arising from this will be discussed in the chapter of this book dealing with the class war. Let me just recall here that, in the PCI documents, complaints about what was considered scant politicisation are accompanied by a commitment to politicisation–militarisation along the party line, as a means of reabsorbing the manifestations of spontaneous leftism or, as commissar Davide writes, of ‘a more or less anarchic tendency, however much they profess Communist sympathies’.12 ‘How far are the GL formations following today and how far will they follow tomorrow the line of the Action Party?’ was the question that Giorgio Agosti, political commissar of the GL Piedmontese Command, asked himself on 31 December 1944.13 He gave a very full answer; and what needs highlighting is the point where he observes that, while the first bands were well and truly azionisti, of their own free choice, by now the GLs, following, as it were, an inverse path to the one traced above, were a small army that was more military than political. It would be wrong to think that they were fast becoming like the autonomi, but ‘it would be a mistake to confound the GL esprit de corps with adhesion to the programme of the party and fidelity to its directives’.
Militarisation and politicisation did not, therefore, always keep in step with each other; on the contrary, again according to the author of this report, it was a harder business politicising the partisan today than it had been yesterday. Today the partisan, especially since the start of the ‘pianurizzazione’ (that is, descent into the plains) which had brought him out of the Alpine valleys,14 was acquiring too much of ‘a soldier of fortune’s mentality’, assuming an ‘ “ardito’s temperament” and beginning to nurture a “passion for the bel colpo [the coup]” … There is more of a squadrista’s spirit than one might think.’
The two main parties were, moreover, the first to be of one mind in repeating that politicisation under their aegis did not mean adhesion to the parties themselves. A document drawn up by Duccio Galimberti in April 1944 is quite explicit on this count, where it still claims continuity with the column commanded by Carlo Rosselli in Aragon; likewise a Piedmontese regional command document of the following July, in which the distinction between political awareness and party membership is said to be ‘not a dialectical game’, that is to say, not a game of side-taking.15 The recognition of freedom of opinion, even within the politically defined formations, is one of the ways in which this relationship with the parties was manifested. Giovana gives an account of the GL formations he studied that is in line with the documents just quoted.16 As for the Garibaldi brigades, it is enough to quote this declaration of principle: ‘In the political field the patriot can express and support any opinion and doctrine and must conversely respect those of others, even if they should conflict with his.’17 This full individualistic guaranteeism, the affirmation of whose principle is recurrent, did not always combine easily with another widespread directive: that the only political line that it was legitimate to practise was the CLN’s unitary one. There was the risk, on the one hand, that this programmatic humanism would lower the political tone of the formations, and on the other hand that it might encourage the branding as anti-unitary of those who did not share the interpretation given to the unit by the political tendency prevailing in one or other formation. Thus one might reach the paradox that one did indeed have the right to be non-political, but ‘on the understanding that this was meant in the sense of espousing the CLN line, and no other one’.18 Relations between the parties could be regulated with a formalism hardly in line with circumstances. This is what the Dronero CLN did when it decreed that, in the Maira valley occupied by the GL and Garibaldi brigades, party newspapers could be distributed only ‘subject to authorisation’ by the CLN itself, and that the parties had to abstain from public demonstrations where not all of them were represented, ‘except for the private meetings of each single party’.19 A vast range of situations lie between these more or less solemn declarations, and the reality of the collective climate, characterised by a greater or lesser degree of political intensity, that was being created in the bands. Here, a central figure was that of the political commissar. Invented by Trotsky to control the Tsarist officers whom the newborn Red Army could not do without, the political commissars had accompanied the fortunes of the Communist and democratic formations (one need only think of Spain). In the Italian Resistance the commissars, whom not all the parties accepted easily,20 were called upon to play a role that complicated and greatly altered their image and function. The basic justification for their existence was expressed in these words: ‘In the Garibaldi brigades there cannot be combatants who do not know what they are fighting for’;21 or, in these other words, written by way of a comment on the difficulties raised by the autonomous units in accepting the commissars: ‘This tendency for … the soldiers to fight and ask no questions, to fight and stay clear of politics, is a militaristic reactionary tendency that must be combated.’22 Major Mauri actually refused to have commissars in his units: in his view, all that was needed, not least to understand the meaning of liberty, democracy and social justice, were arms, body and soul (cuore e braccio), and the Italian flag, the tricolore.23
Albeit after uncertainties and equivocations (even among the Communist and Action Party leaders),24 the political commissar came to be recognised as being equal in rank to a commander: ‘solidly responsible’ and ‘equal in law’ is what they were called in a document of the Garibaldi leadership; ‘equal in rank, in all the orders’ is how a document of the Action Party leadership put it.25 Transformed, with their power reduced so as to make them acceptable to everyone, at the act of unification,26 the parity of rank of the ‘war commissars’ with commanders was reiterated by CVL headquarters.27 As channels of communication, the commissars obviously mirrored the points of view of the parties they came from; but they also came to figure as representatives of the CLN’s unitary policy. They are clearly defined as such by Roberto Battaglia.28 In the Di Dio formations, for example, this function was interpreted extensively almost as a prohibition to talk politics.29 The Communists in turn would increasingly insist on this CLN and unitary–patriotic nature of the commissar, though always pointing out that this was precisely the line of their own party.30 If we compare the ‘guide del commissario’ (‘commissar’s guides’) and the instructions for the ‘ora politica’ (‘political hour’) with some original texts drawn up at Communist headquarters, we can see how the primitive political and class emphasis was diluted into that of the CLN.31 Mario Bernardo ruefully recalls: ‘The content of the political hour which had constituted the critical and constructive force of the first formations had gradually been debased, being transformed itself into lectures by commanders and commissars.’32 Nevertheless, clear traces of party spirit remain, as in the report recommending that a good political commissar must ‘give a clear explanation of the social constitution of the Soviet regime, [and] should be capable of giving some lessons on Leninism and
if possible in political economics’.33 More soberly, but still stepping beyond CLN bounds, the instructions sent to the 188th Ferruccio Ghinaglia (Cremona) SAP brigade included a request to talk about progressive democracy;34 while ‘Andrea Lima’ (Mario Lizzero), commissar of the Friuli Garibaldi division, urged his colleagues to explain ‘the principles of progressive democracy that will guide Italy after the invader and the traitors have been driven out’.35 It should come as no surprise, then, if the Communists themselves reprimanded the commissars who ‘confuse the life of the party with the political line of the Fronte Nazionale’,36 and if in some cases the commisars were substituted for their blatant sectarianism.37 At the opposite extreme of sectarianism, or simply of faith in one’s deep convictions, the figure of the commissar was diluted to the point at which he faded into a sort of lay chaplain or ‘social assistant’, just as the chaplain could in his turn blur into a commissar. In the Osoppo brigades, Fogar writes, there were ‘lay commissars in the complete and official sense of the term, and priests’ – that is to say, chaplains who devoted themselves not only to religious but also to ideological–political assistance, above all in an anti-Communist and anti-Slav sense.38 In this case, given the nature of the Osoppo brigades, we have an example of the paradox by which the Italian partisan bands were perhaps the only military formations in which political commissars and chaplains lived side by side,39 where the stress falls on the side of the chaplain. Elsewhere it is the commissar who intrinsically recalls the chaplain. A Piedmontese partisan has written: ‘They called them chaplains; they were rather like an equivalent of Catholic chaplains. But they were marvellous figures, always!’ The adversative conjunction ‘but’ is in this context all the more significant insofar as the traditional opposition between culture and lack of culture characterising the relationship between the chaplains and the soldiers is turned on its head: ‘I knew how to use the subjunctive, they didn’t. I knew how to use it in Latin, they didn’t. Not only that, but they got accents on words wrong.’40 At other times the commissars’ resemblance to the chaplains is mentioned in a quite different sense. In Giorgio Agosti’s long report about the GL brigades, which I have already recalled, it is argued that often the commissar, rather than politicising the commander, militarised himself: ‘Thus at a certain point in his talk sten guns and explosive pencils recur more often than the ideals behind the partisan war.’ An anonymous hand scribbles in the margin: ‘This is what happened to many military chaplains in the army.’41 Moreover, this frustrated the ‘anti-Bonapartist’ function, which some wanted to attribute to the commissars in their relations with the commanders, ‘in the sense of guaranteeing themselves against the possibility of excessive autonomy and safeguarding themselves against presumed bids for independence … even if there’s no sign of there being any Napoleon capable of undermining the authority of the governing body’. The alarmed author of this is a general writing to another general: in fact he concludes by stating that the commissars are necessary in the party formations, but not in those autonomous ones commanded by military men – an opinion shared by General Cadorna, the addressee of this message, according to whom commissars, whom he likens to the officers responsible for propaganda and to the chaplains, are admissible only in the formations without officers.42 Less paradoxical, in its ingenuousness, is the fact that an officer who declared that he had been sent by CVL headquarters, ‘after having made comments about the weakness of the Bonomi government’, asked the members of the Veneto Regional Command how they would view the rise of General Cadorna to head of government after the Liberation. (The people consulted obviously said that they were against the idea.)43
A Civil War Page 31
