Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45. James Holland

shouted ‘Hurry! The sentries have gone! Quick! The Germans are coming!’ His heart racing, Cosimo had hurriedly dressed, cursing as the laces on his shoes snapped in his haste. Grabbing his wooden suitcase he had run to the barracks gate, peered outside, and seeing no Germans, had sped off towards a friend’s house in town.

      By the middle of the following morning, there were still no Germans in sight, but there had been plenty of notices from the barracks commander ordering his men back without fear of recrimination, and warning that they would be shot as deserters if they did not. Reluctantly, Cosimo had done as ordered and was shocked to discover that Pellizzari barracks had been looted. Officers were standing around gloomily amidst the pervading air of apathy and sudden listlessness. No further orders had been given. Moreover, as Cosimo realised, he was among only around 40 per cent who had returned – the others being still at large.

      His return had been short-lived, however. In the early afternoon, reports had arrived that the Germans really were on the edge of town. Once again, mayhem had followed, but this time most of those still at the barracks had left for good, and Cosimo was one of them.

      The Pellizzari barracks were in Bra, a small town south of Turin, and although his friend in the town had agreed to hide him for a short while, Cosimo had been unsure what he should do next. His father and two of his brothers were in Java, in Indonesia, where they had moved before the war in an effort to find much-needed work, but though he had desperately wanted to get back to his mother and remaining brothers and sisters – there had been eleven in all – he had felt it was simply too risky to travel all the way from Bra, in the north-west of Italy, back home to Naples.

      A few days later, he had thanked his friend and left, heading for the village of Bardo in the hills some miles away, where he knew his former captain’s batman lived and whose family had a farm. No German had spotted him leaving Bra and no one had bothered him as he walked through the seemingly peaceful countryside. ‘There was so much freedom around me in that world of nature,’ he noted; ‘yet deep in my heart I knew that I wasn’t quite free.’ Far from it: Cosimo was now on the run, an outlaw in his own country, and like many hundreds of thousands being rounded up all over the country, he faced, at worst, execution for desertion and, at best, servitude as manual labour for the Germans deep within the Third Reich itself – a role for which Germany considered the average Italian male was far better suited.

In fact, in under a week from the moment the armistice was signed the Italian Army had ceased to exist – all fifty-six divisions dissolved – and while there had still been a number of troops at large, Cosimo included, more than half a million had become POWs. By February 1944, there were some 617,000 former Italian troops interned in Germany and working in armaments factories. A large part of the navy had sailed to Malta and given itself over to the Allies, but the air force had also been disbanded and vast amounts of equipment requisitioned by the Germans. This booty included 9,986 guns, 15,500 vehicles, 970 tanks and self-propelled guns* and no less than 4,553 aircraft. Not a bad haul, all things considered.

      Even so, there had been some resistance. The Italian Motorised Corps had fought with conviction outside Rome, and the Ariete Division had also moved to help a mass of some 10,000 civilians who had spontaneously taken up arms throughout 9 September.

      One of those had been twenty-four-year-old Carla Capponi. From her mother’s flat near the Forum, she had seen flashes of artillery fire from the south-west throughout the night of the 8th/9th. Early on the morning of the 9th, she had heard excited voices in the streets below, and looking out had seen a group of men, armed with rifles. They beckoned her to join them – the Germans were coming and they needed everyone to help defend the city. Without much hesitation, Carla told her mother she was going to join them.

      At the Pyramid of Cestius by the Porta San Paolo, Carla had joined the growing resistance. Unarmed, she had spent the day tending the wounded and carrying food and provisions to the Italian troops and armed civilians. The fighting around the Pyramid had gone on throughout most of the 9th and on into the 10th, with high casualties on both sides. Realising he was the highest-ranking officer left in Rome, the ageing Marshal Enrico Caviglia had taken charge of the resistance, only to receive a severe ultimatum from Kesselring: surrender, or Rome would be carpet-bombed into dust. Unwilling to test the threat, Caviglia had ordered his ad hoc force to lay down their arms. They had done so, but for many – Carla Capponi included – the two-day battle had given them a taste for resistance. The seeds of Rome’s partisan war had been sown at the Porta San Paolo.

There had also been smatterings of resistance outside Italy – on Corfu, for example, and on Cephalonia. Of nearly 12,000 Italian troops on this latter island, more than a thousand had been killed in ten days’ fighting against the Germans, while nearly 5,000 had then been subsequently executed in one of the worst crimes of the entire war. Cephalonia had become a ‘carpet of corpses’.* 39 The 4,000 who had laid down their arms and survived the massacre had then been given starvation rations before being shipped to Germany. Cruelly, all three vessels had hit mines and sunk. Those who had jumped to safety had been machine-gunned in the water. In all, 9,406 soldiers out of 11,700 were killed. Almost the entire garrison had been wiped out.

      Not all Italians wanted to see the back of the Germans, however. Far from it: the bulk of the Nembo Division in Sardinia, and units of the Folgore Division, veterans of Alamein, had sworn their allegiance to Hitler and had continued to fight on the side of the Germans and under German command; so too had the Decima MAS, a semi-autonomous group of elite naval commandos led by the charismatic Prince Valerio Borghese. And not by any stretch of the imagination had there been universal cheering on the signing of the armistice. Twenty-one-year-old William Cremonini, for example, had been appalled on hearing the news. ‘I was disgusted,’ he admits. ‘It was a shameful thing.’

      He was an only child, and his father had died when he was five, so William had been brought up solely by his mother. Both she and most of their neighbours had been supporters of Mussolini, and as a boy William had joined the Balilla, the Fascist youth organisation that had been established in 1926. Like the Hitler Youth that followed, it served as a means of fascistizzazione, of reinforcing Fascist doctrine amongst the younger generation. Boys joined the Balilla between the ages of eight and fourteen and the Avanguardisti from fourteen to eighteen. William had enjoyed it – the sports, the discipline, and the sense of camaraderie that developed amongst them, so that by the time war broke out in June 1940, he and his friends had been excited by the prospect of winning glory for their country, and eager to do their bit.

      Although still not quite eighteen, William, with his mother’s assent, and a number of his friends had joined the Giovani Fascisti – Young Fascists – Bologna Battalion that was being formed at that time. Soon after, they had taken part in the ‘March of Youth’ across Italy, a grand military parade in which the Young Fascists marched sixteen miles a day for three weeks. In Padova, they had even been greeted by Mussolini himself.

      In the summer of 1941, the Young Fascists had been sent to North Africa, and there they had remained until the very end of the campaign, having been one of the few Italian divisions to have repeatedly distinguished themselves on the battlefield. William had somehow survived until two weeks before the Axis surrender, when on 29 April, as they attacked a British position at Enfidaville, he had been shot in the chest. By good fortune, he had been evacuated on the last hospital ship back to Italy before the campaign’s end, and so had avoided the fate of so many of his colleagues who were to spend the rest of the war as POWs.

      William had lost a lot of friends in North Africa. So many lives had been given for Italy, nearly his own too. Having been shot, he had recovered consciousness only to find himself in the middle of a minefield. Whilst trying to cross it back to his own lines, he had been tended to by some Germans. ‘They took my jacket off,’ he recalls, ‘and then the blood started glugging out.’ He was taken to a field hospital where a priest arrived to hear his confession: ‘It gave me the feeling that I was dying.’

      Somehow, however, he survived. His feelings