Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

* (#ulink_cf6d857b-9bb1-5a3d-b35d-491dcb1b25ef) ‘Jabo’ was an abbreviation of Jagdbomber – literally, ‘fighter-bomber’.

ELEVEN (#ud2e39e9e-24c5-56d1-a9a2-3cd5a91f0e3f)

Achtung Banditen! (#ud2e39e9e-24c5-56d1-a9a2-3cd5a91f0e3f)

Despite the cool efficiency with which Germany had occupied much of Italy and the way it had disarmed the Italian armed forces, these actions had begun to cause something of an own goal. By May 1944, German forces in Italy were faced with a major partisan – or ‘bandit’ as they liked to call them – problem. Still comparatively few in number in the big scheme of things, these guerrillas were nonetheless already becoming a serious thorn in Kesselring’s side and greatly loathed by the German soldiers, who felt it was one thing to fight against a uniformed enemy at the front, but quite another to be shot at from behind by men and women who looked like civilians. Unsurprisingly, this threat did much to fuel the already prevailing attitude of most Germans towards Italians – which was one of contempt for their perceived collective cowardice, treachery, and poor fighting qualities. Italy had let them down and so deserved everything that came its way.

It was a vicious circle because it was largely due to severe German measures that a number of young Italians were now actively engaged in guerrilla warfare. ‘Everything in occupied Italy must be exploited by us for our war effort,’ wrote Ambassador Rahn – and that meant bleeding the country dry. Nearly all Italian gold reserves had been handed over. The Repubblica Sociale Italiana was denied the right to an economic and trade policy of its own. The north’s factories were turned over to Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister. As the Allies advanced, any industry at the front line was shut down, the equipment packed off to Germany and then the factory or plant blown to bits. Food was also siphoned off to Germany, even though there was not enough to go round in Italy. The Italians were also expected to pay for German war-related costs, an expense which proved impossible. Even so, by May 1944, the RSI was handing over a staggering 10 billion lire a month – roughly £2,500,000 in today’s money. ‘I am perfectly conscious of the sentiment of violent aversion nourished by the German soldiers against the Italians,’ Rahn continued, ‘including those Italians who for one reason or another continue to fight at our side.’ Yet, he warned officers of the German Propaganda Section, ‘This negative attitude damages our war effort. It is an emotional impulse which must be better hidden.’63 (#litres_trial_promo)

It was a bit late for that. Germany’s disdain for those countries it occupied was all too evident to their inhabitants. Of course, very few Italians knew the details of these measures, but their effects were keenly felt. Moreover, for a nation that had briefly thought the war was over the previous autumn, it did not help seeing German troops all over the place, their continuing presence preventing the peace that the majority so strived for; or reading repeated notices warning that infringement of the new laws was punishable by death.

Moreover, Germany was not only bleeding dry Italy’s wealth and resources, but also its manpower. The Third Reich had become expert at plundering occupied territories for labour, and no one was better at foreign labour recruitment than Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilisation. By May 1944, there were more than 7.5 million foreign workers in Germany. As soon as Italy surrendered, Sauckel packed off his subordinate, Hermann Kretzschmann, to organise labour recruitment, whether it be voluntary, coerced or compulsory. Most workers were sent to Germany, but a large number were also used by the Organisation Todt, founded by Albert Speer’s predecessor as Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, as a labour force that was used for the construction of military defences. It had been the Organisation Todt, full of forced Italian labourers, which had made most of the German defences around Cassino and which was now also reinforcing the next major line of defence north of Rome, the Pisa–Rimini Line.

A number of men were recruited by regular round-ups not dissimilar to the press gangs used by the British Royal Navy of old. Others were creamed off from Mussolini’s conscription drives, much to the Duce’s chagrin. Initial conscription had not been too bad: 50,000 men had responded to their call-up papers by the beginning of 1944. But thereafter numbers fell dramatically. Those who had not reported for duty were given several amnesties: a date in March was declared by which they had to report and then a further date in May. Those who still did not present themselves were threatened with execution and reprisals against their families. The only alternative for many was to go into hiding, within the city or in the mountains, where a large number joined the growing bands of partisans.

This was precisely what happened to Carlo Venturi, an eighteen-year-old from the tiny village of Fondazza, south-west of Bologna. By May 1944, as one of those born in 1925, Carlo had received his call-up papers. His family, contadini, had never had much interest in politics. ‘They were neither anti-nor pro-Fascist,’ says Carlo. ‘My father didn’t want to get involved.’ Since the armistice, however, Carlo had instinctively felt opposed to the German occupation and the new Fascist government. A factory worker in nearby Casalecchio di Reno, Carlo had, along with a number of other young men, raided a barracks immediately after the surrender and had stolen some arms. They viewed the Germans as the aggressors, and after the end of the Fascist regime the previous July, no longer wanted to live under the authority of a totalitarian state. ‘We loved our country,’ he says, ‘and we wanted to live in freedom.’ Not that they did anything much with the weapons except hide them; Carlo had a number of rifles stashed away in his attic.

But Carlo soon found himself on the wrong side of the Fascist militia, the GNR. One day he was on his way to Bologna when the tram he was on was stopped. A Fascist had been killed nearby and the GNR were carrying out a search. Carlo and two other men were immediately hauled off, and Carlo was accused of having a hand-grenade in his pocket – in fact, it was simply a bread roll. After being taken to prison, he was beaten up then released a few hours later. ‘From that time,’ says Carlo, ‘I told myself I had to make them pay.’

In early May, with the deadline for presenting himself for service drawing near, he was brought to the GNR barracks in Casalecchio, and accused of stealing and hoarding weapons. Among his questioners was a Fascist who lived on the same staircase as him. ‘He lived above me,’ says Carlo, ‘and the arms were right beneath his feet! They said, “If we find the weapons, we’ll send you to Poland”’. Somehow, Carlo managed to convince them he was innocent. But he was now beginning to feel seriously in danger, and so tried to join a nearby band of partisans. Unable to find them, however, he then went to look for another group of rebels in the mountains south of Bologna.

At five in the morning of 16 May, Carlo left his flat and headed first to Sasso Marconi at the confluence of two rivers, the Reno and the Setta, then headed south down the Setta valley to the small town of Vado, lying beneath the Monte Sole massif. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going, not even his parents. It was dark by the time he reached Vado, but he soon spotted four young men sitting outside a house by the side of the road. ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked.

‘I was looking for you,’ Carlo replied, tentatively.

‘And who are we?’

Carlo felt a wave of panic. What if they were Fascists out of uniform? But to his great relief the men then admitted to being ‘rebels’ and invited him into their house, a short way up the mountain above the eastern banks of the River Setta. There he spent the night, along with them and another man they had picked up that day. Early the next morning, at about half past four, he was woken and they headed out in the early morning gloom back across the river and up into the mountains to the band’s headquarters at a farmhouse called Ca’ Bregade.

As the sun rose, Carlo saw the ancient mountain landscape of the Monte Sole massif for the first time. Above him, standing sentinel, was the summit of Monte Sole itself. Either side were further peaks, wooded with small oaks and chestnuts, but with sheer escarpments too. There was also a high mountain plain, dotted with tiny farming communities, here a small village and church, elsewhere, as at Ca’ Bregade, just a few barns and buildings. And either side of the massif, the mountains fell away into the two river valleys of the Reno and Setta. Monte Sole was indeed an ideal place to hide a partisan band: plenty of woods and foliage, sandwiched by the two valleys, but with far-reaching views that would warn of any attack from below.

However, Carlo had not yet been welcomed with open arms. The partisans were deeply suspicious of anyone new: trust had to be proved and earned. No sooner had they arrived at Ca’ Bregade than the other new man was ordered to dig a pit, which Carlo assumed was to be a trench. A number of partisans, with Sten guns hung over their shoulder, gathered round to watch him. Suddenly Carlo understood what was about to happen. So too did the other man, who threw down his shovel and took off. He did not get far, as a volley of machine-gun fire cut him down. Carlo was horrified. A spy, they told him, sent to infiltrate them by the Fascists. They then turned to Carlo. His blood froze. In desperation, he told them to ask about him at Casalecchio. ‘I’ve stolen weapons,’ he told them, ‘and given them to the rebels. They’ll tell you about me.’

For the time being it did the trick. Carlo was locked in a cave, where he spent the next few days waiting for word from Casalecchio. It gave him time to think. He’d never seen a man cut down before, and the reality of the life he had entered upon began to sink in. ‘Something that up until then had been fundamentally a romantic and ingenuous ideal,’ he noted, ‘had run up for the first time – but not the last – against the harshness of the clandestine fight.’64 (#litres_trial_promo)

Guarding him were two Allied POW escapees, who repeatedly quizzed him about his life, his beliefs and the choice he had made. It soon became clear to Carlo that they believed his story. They also knew that their leader, Lupo, disliked killing, and would avoid taking lives whenever he could. ‘They told me to have faith,’ says Carlo, ‘and that once information had reached headquarters that my story was true, all would be well.’

Three days later, he was finally taken to see the commander, ‘the famous Lupo who provoked fear in Germans and Fascists alike’. Lupo shook his hand and told him the information they had sought was just as Carlo had said. Also there to welcome him was the vice-commander, Gianni Rossi. He was given a Sten gun, five magazines, and two hand grenades and assigned to the company led by a partisan called Golfieri. For better or worse, Carlo was now a member of the ‘Stella Rossa’ – the ‘Red Star’ brigade. There could be no turning back.

‘There were three crystal clear choices,’ says Carlo about his decision to become a partisan. ‘Either go with the Fascists, the Germans, or choose to fight with the partisans.’ In making his choice, however, he had to discard his former life. He was given a new nom de guerre, de rigueur for any partisan: ‘Ming’, the name of a villain in a comic strip called L’Avventuroso, destroyed any means of identification, and cut himself off entirely from his family, a harsh necessity for their safety and his own.

Failure to report for conscription was seen as desertion, and desertion was punishable by death. In reality, such action was comparatively rare – after all, an executed twenty-year old was no use to Kretzschmann’s labour effort. But there were executions. Only a few weeks before, for example, three young men, one of them a nineteen-year-old boy, were shot in Florence for failing to report for military service. Word of such executions spread rapidly, exactly as the Fascists and Germans hoped, and men like Carlo and many others were not prepared to put the threat of execution to the test. But this did not mean they flocked to report for duty. Rather, large numbers fled to the hills and became partisans instead.

* * *

While undoubtedly a large number of men became partisans because of the stark choice that seemed to face them, there were a number who did so from a more pronounced political conviction.

Some forty-five miles to the south-east of Monte Sole, in the mountains of Romagna, south of the city of Forlì, the 8th Garibaldi Brigade of partisans were recovering from a devastating battle against the Germans in which, over Easter, a combined force of more than 10,000 German and Fascist troops had swarmed into the area, trapped the one-thousand-strong 8th Garibaldi Brigade and all but destroyed them.

At the beginning of May, however, the 8th Brigade began reforming once more with around 600 men. The commander of the 2nd Battalion, in an operational area known as the First Zone around the small town of Sarsina, was twenty-year-old Iader Miserocchi, a passionate young man who had already repeatedly cheated death, both in prison and during the Easter battle.

It was often the case in Italy that sons – and daughters – followed the political convictions of their parents, and especially their fathers. This was certainly the case with Iader, whose father had always been vehemently anti-fascist. Iader, the second of four sons, followed his father’s example. As someone who was strongly against the war, he only very reluctantly joined the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, when he was called up in 1942, and then, when his squadron was posted to Libya, he refused to go, claiming illness. Promptly arrested, he was sent to a military hospital in Bologna, where, by good fortune, he met a doctor who had served with his father in the First World War. The doctor chastised him, but agreed to help, declaring Iader unfit for active service and citing a ‘varicose problem’.

With that, Iader returned home to the ancient city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast. So many men were away that he managed to get plenty of labouring work. It was during this time that he joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party – the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) – a deeply illegal organisation. It was with a sense of mounting despair that he had witnessed German troops flooding into Italy that summer, and following the armistice, he was denounced by a neighbour for being ‘a Red’. On 14 September, six days after the armistice, his house was searched by German soldiers, his papers confiscated and his books and belongings destroyed.

Armed resistance was an inevitable next step for him, although initially the rebels in Ravenna had been poorly organised and largely ineffective. On 12 November, Iader and some others had started lobbing grenades into an RSI officer training school. Caught in the floodlights, Iader found himself being arrested by one of his former classmates from school and was flung into prison. Held there for forty-five days, he suffered nine days of twenty-four-hour interrogations, eight days without food, and a beating every two hours. His cell was big but had no furniture at all. Next door, a tap was kept running continually so that the floor of Iader’s cell was permanently wet and he had no means of keeping dry. Eventually he took a shutter off one of the window hinges and lay on that. ‘I was beaten even more for doing that,’ he recalls.

Eventually, Iader could stand it no longer, and so wrote a declaration that he was a member of the Communist Party and that he would never, ever adhere to the RSI. In doing so, he knew he was signing his own death warrant. ‘There was no other way out for me,’ he explains. ‘I was too ill to carry on in there. I had a very high temperature and could no longer continue with the torture.’

His family were informed that the following day he would be shot and then hanged in the main square in Ravenna as an example to others. The man charged with his execution was called Zanelli, a senior Fascist from nearby Faenza with a reputation for ruthlessness and as a torturer. Iader was taken from the prison and driven towards the town square. However, he then shocked Zanelli by reeling off a list of names of anti-fascists and draft dodgers whom he knew the Fascist had had imprisoned, tortured and even executed. ‘What happens to me will happen to you,’ Iader had told him. ‘I have plenty of friends. We know your movements and you will be killed.’

Alarmed by these threats, Zanelli began to dither, driving Iader around Ravenna. Iader continued his defiance, demanding a trial and pointing out places where Zanelli and his henchmen had murdered civilians. Eventually, Zanelli ordered the driver to slow the car, clearly hoping Iader would try and make a run for it, so that they could then shoot him as he tried to escape. ‘Of course, I wasn’t going to fall for that,’ says Iader. Zanelli had taken fright, and sensing Iader was not making idle threats eventually took him back to Ravenna prison, rather than carry out the execution.

There Iader remained another month, jailed with a number of other, mostly older, political prisoners, who looked after him and helped him regain some of his strength. Eventually, at Zanelli’s bequest, he was taken to the police station and questioned by a Fascist official and a judge. No sooner had the grilling begun than the air-raid siren rang out and bombs began to fall on the city. In great haste, the judge pronounced that he was either to join up or join the Organisation Todt. Understandably keen to hurry for cover, the judge bailed him on the understanding he report the following day to the Questura. Iader did no such thing. Instead, through the help of local Communists, he headed to the mountains of Romagna, south of Mussolini’s birthplace, and joined the partisans.

The 8th ‘Romagna’ Garibaldi Brigade, as it had become by March 1944, was led by Communists, most of whom had fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but not all its members were Communist. Nor was Iader what he considered a ‘Soviet-style Communist’. Rather, he and his comrades dreamed of a more Utopian form of equality. ‘It was more like pure socialism, really,’ he says. ‘Also, communism was the antithesis of fascism.’

Like Iader, Gianni Rossi, the second-in-command of the Stella Rossa, also came from a background of anti-fascism. It is often forgotten that during the late 1920s and for much of the thirties both Mussolini and fascism were hugely popular in Italy. Even those who remained less convinced tended to sign up for their tessera, the Fascist Party membership card; it made life easier. Those who stuck their neck above the parapet and denounced the Fascists were comparatively few and far between. But Signor Rossi was one of the few, refusing the tessera and continually finding himself in trouble with the local Fascists. ‘If there was a Fascist dignitary due to be visiting the area,’ says Gianni, ‘my father would be picked up beforehand and put in jail for a few days.’ He had been put in prison and out of harm’s way before Hitler’s visit in 1937.

Despite this, the Rossi family lived in relative comfort in their family home in the village of Gardelletta, along the banks of the River Setta beneath the Monte Sole massif. Being self-employed was the only real option for those who refused to carry the tessera: when not in trouble with the Fascists, Gianni’s father, a decorated veteran of the First World War, managed to be a successful builder and property developer.

Gianni – or Giovanni as he had been christened – had been born in February 1923. At twelve, he had left school and had become an apprentice mechanic in Bologna. Soon after, he had moved there, living with an aunt until just before the war, when the whole family moved into a large apartment in the city. Although the family had kept the house in Gardelletta, Gianni’s father, Brazilian mother, and younger brother had continued living in Bologna throughout the war. In 1941, Gianni had been called up for military service and had joined the navy. Fortunately for him, he had been ill during the summer of 1943, and so at the time of the armistice had been at home in Bologna, convalescing. And it was during this time that he met up again with his old childhood friend, Mario Musolesi, always known to everyone as ‘Lupo’ – Wolf.

Like Gianni, Lupo came from a family that had always been firmly anti-Fascist. Several years older than Gianni, Lupo had also returned to Bologna, having successfully avoided capture following the armistice. It was during meetings with Gianni and a few others that the seeds of the Stella Rossa were sown. Lupo had in fact been approached by the local Fascist federale (party secretary) to become involved with the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. As a popular local figure who had served in North Africa, he was seen to be just the person they needed. But Lupo vehemently refused, believing that fascism was dead and that a German-controlled Italy had no future.

Two incidents, however, pushed him and Gianni towards active resistance. In October, anti-fascist posters had been put up around Vado, and Lupo was accused of being behind it. Finding out his denouncer, Lupo then beat him up and was promptly arrested. Although released soon after, he was seen as an anti-fascist agitator and was becoming a marked man.

The second incident occurred soon after while Lupo was at the Musolesi family home at Ca’ Veneziani. The house lay near a bend on the railway line that ran alongside the River Setta. Trains had to slow at the bend and Lupo and Gianni watched five POWs jump off in a bid for freedom. One was injured as he jumped; another was shot and killed, but three managed to get clear. Lupo ran to their aid and after taking them first to Ca’ Veneziani, hid them in the mountains as RSI and German patrols continued to hunt for the escaped men.

The die had effectively been cast. The POWs–aScotknown as Jock, and two South Africans, Steeve and Hermes – were kept hidden in the mountains, but along with his friend Gianni, and a few others, Lupo decided to go underground permanently. They began by raiding some of the army barracks that were still largely deserted. With arms, they could actively resist Germany and the new Fascist regime. ‘We didn’t have much of a plan,’ Gianni admits. ‘We borrowed a lorry, raided one of the barracks, and took a stash of rifles and ammunition.’ They then headed back to their homes in Gardelletta and Ca’ Veneziani and hid their cache.

The Stella Rossa was formally consecrated in the crypt of Vado’s church, overseen by the parish priest, Don Eolo Cattani, with Lupo elected as the band’s leader and Gianni as his second-in-command. Following this they recruited the three escaped POWs and put the word about to any draft-dodgers and to the mountain contadini. That first winter they did little, merely meeting up nightly, continuing to gather numbers and trying to carry on with their lives as best they could. The baptism of fire came at the end of November when they blew up a freight convoy that had halted on the railway. For Gianni, there had been no crisis of conscience. ‘I opened fire without emotion,’ he says. ‘It was just something I had to do.’ There were now about twenty of them in all. Each one had now crossed their own personal Rubicons, and with it came the usual hazards outlaws have faced throughout the ages: a price was on their heads; and they were forced to take to the mountains for good, living in the barns of sympathetic contadini, or in caves, never in one place for long. Following threats, even Gianni’s parents were forced to keep constantly on the move.

By the spring of 1944, their numbers had swelled to several hundred, as the first two deadlines for joining the New Republican Army passed and more and more young men avoiding the draft headed to the mountains instead. Most were frightened young men, but as the band grew so did the dangers – dangers that Lupo was initially slow to act upon.

At the end of the following January, Olindo Sammarchi – known as ‘Cagnone’ – one of the original members of the band, betrayed Lupo to the Fascists. On his information Amedeo Arcioni, a Republican spy, was sent to infiltrate the Stella Rossa. Although Arcioni’s real motives were soon discovered, Lupo dithered over what to do with him, refusing to accept his old friend Cagnone’s treachery. Instead, that night Arcioni was taken to a hide-out along with Gianni, Lupo and a third partisan called Fonso. Lupo was on watch while Gianni and Fonso slept. It was a cave they used regularly and to make it more habitable, they had lined it with wood. Lupo had stuck his dagger into the wood above them and was watching at the edge of the cave when Arcioni went out to relieve himself. On his return, he snatched the knife and lunged at Lupo, catching him in the arm. Lupo’s shouts for help woke Gianni instantly. Jumping up, he tried to pull off the traitor, but in the resulting tussle, Arcioni managed to get the better of him and was forcing the dagger ever closer to Gianni’s head until the point pierced the skin on his forehead. Just at the moment when Gianni thought his time had come, Lupo, together with Fonso, who had by now also woken, managed to come to his rescue and between them they were able to pin him down. After that there was no more hesitation. ‘We took him outside,’ says Gianni, ‘and we killed him.’

Another blow came on 6 May when Lupo’s brother, Guido Musolesi, was arrested. Since the previous autumn, he had been helping his brother’s fledgling band of partisans by working undercover with the local Fascist headquarters – the fascio – and feeding information back to the partisans. On the same day, a squad of GNR went to the Musolesi family home at Ca’ Veneziani, arrested Lupo’s parents and burnt the house to the ground. All were later sprung from jail, but these events had hardened the partisan leader. Unsurprisingly, he developed an often excessive distrust of others – one that on occasion led to a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ attitude, as Carlo Venturi discovered almost to his cost on his arrival on Monte Sole a fortnight later. The life of a partisan was brutal, and on Monte Sole there was now only one law and that was the say-so of the Stella Rossa and Lupo.

If the Stella Rossa gave the impression that they were making it up as they went along and somewhat preoccupied with fighting vendettas against local Fascists, then that was because that was precisely what was happening. Nor were they alone. Lots of groups of partisans had been emerging all over German-occupied Italy, learning as they went along and often paying for their mistakes with great casualties in the process – just as the 8th Garibaldi Brigade had done in April 1944. What was needed was guidance and a system of control and unified organisation. This was beginning to emerge, however, thanks in the first place to the undercover anti-fascist parties that had come to life once more.

Although political opposition had been banned during the Fascist era, underground parties had continued, albeit in extremely clandestine circumstances. The largest of these was the Italian Communist Party, and during the months before Mussolini’s fall the PCI and these other differing political groups had begun to organise themselves more actively in Rome and in other major cities. No sooner had Mussolini been deposed than six anti-fascist parties declared themselves. In addition to the Communists, there were the Socialists – once a major force in Italy before the Fascists took power; the Christian Democrats; the Liberals; the Labour Democrats; and the Action Party – a new organisation that took its name from Giuseppe Mazzini’s party during the age of Italian unification. None, not even the Communists, had any great strength and they held little sway during the days before the armistice. Furthermore, they all had quite different agendas. The Communists, Socialists and the Action Party, for example, were all vehemently anti-monarchist as well as anti-fascist, while the other three were far more divided on this issue. The Liberals were even positively right-wing. However, despite these differences, following the flight of Badoglio and King Vittorio Emanuele III on 9 September, delegates of these six parties came together in Rome to form the Committee of National Liberation – Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN – with the aim of leading the resistance against German occupation and the Neo-Fascists. The president of the CLN was the former Socialist prime minister and now leader of the Labour Democrats, Ivanoe Bonomi.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Throughout the autumn the CLN helped set up clandestine committees in northern Italy, and in January, the main Rome committee gave the Milan CLN the authority to become the ‘official’ clandestine government of the north and the supreme organ of the resistance movement. With this change, the Milan CLN became the National Committee for the Liberation of Upper Italy – Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale per l’Alta Italia – otherwise known as the CLNAI.