Sicily '43. James Holland

in the United States and their connections back in Sicily. Corvo soon managed to gather around him and Brennan a team of men, ranging from eminent anti-Fascist exiles to young liberal firebrands, who, it was planned, would infiltrate into Sicily as soon as possible. Once Sicily itself became a target for the Allies, the intention was to send these agents in with the invasion troops so that they could rapidly begin the process of undermining Sicilian resistance to the Allies. However, Corvo and Brennan agreed at an early stage that no attempt should be made to establish contact with the Mafia or any other form of organized crime, even though several attempts were made by other OSS sources to arrange a meeting between Corvo and Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian gangster in prison in New York for running a prostitution racket. Despite being locked up, Luciano had continued running his businesses via another Italian-American, Vito Genovese, and had maintained links with associates not only in the States but also back in Italy – including Sicily. Corvo had resisted these approaches. ‘I explained to Brennan that we could gain nothing from such a tie,’ he noted, ‘and that the relationship might prove embarrassing in the future.’9 In any case, as far as he was concerned, the Mafia had been practically stamped out. They were nothing.

      Corvo had set off for Algiers on 20 May 1943, flying via Cuba, Guiana, Brazil and then across to West Africa. Even with a week’s delay en route while his plane was repaired, that gave him and the agents of the Italian Secret Intelligence section of the OSS around six weeks to finalize plans for their infiltration and to put the ‘Corvo Plan’ into action.

      Corvo had been right in his view that the majority of Sicilians had been instinctively against Fascism, although plenty had cheered Mussolini when he’d first declared war. Images of Mussolini were everywhere – black-painted stencils of his helmeted head and the Fascist slogan Credere, ubbedire, combattere – ‘believe, obey, fight’. Giacomo Garra remembered when Italy entered the war in 1940. At the time he was the youngest of six children in a large and comparatively well-to-do family in Caltagirone, towards the south-east of the island, and his older brothers were all in the army. His family had embraced Mussolini and so had he, albeit through the naïve prism of a young boy. They had all been utterly confident of victory. ‘How could we not win the war?’10 he’d thought. The British were viewed as utterly despicable and inept, even though they would repeatedly crush the Italians in the opening years of the conflict.

      Nearby in Gela, Mario Turco had been at the town club at the time war was declared, and Mussolini’s speech had been broadcast on state radio. ‘There was only one radio in Gela,’ he said, ‘and it was at the Nobles’ Club right in the centre of town.’11 He had been excited by the prospect of war. ‘We believed’, he added, ‘that we were the strongest nation in the world.’ It was hardly surprising; as a young boy in Fascist Italy he had joined the Fascist Youth, starting with the Figlio della Lupa – She-Wolf’s Child – at the age of just six, then at eight moving up to the next stage, the Balilla, and on to the Balilla Moschettieri at eleven. Like so many others, he had been indoctrinated. ‘I used to believe all the things they taught us.’ He enjoyed it well enough, because his mates also did it and there were lots of sports. One time, he missed a weekly Saturday muster and was threatened with having his junior membership taken from him. ‘And do you know what it meant not having the membership card any more?12 It was like the end of the world,’ he said. ‘At my age, it meant being isolated, no more friends, and not even being allowed to go to school.’

      Another who had cheered the declaration of war on 10 June 1940 was Livio Messina, who back then, aged eighteen, had applauded excitedly alongside crowds of others in the Piazza Plebiscito in Naples, where he’d been brought up, though born in Sicily. He’d then looked around him and had noticed an elderly lady beside him with tears running down her cheek. Catching his eye, she raised a hand and touched his face. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘you don’t realise what is going to become of us.’13

      At the time, Messina had thought little of it. He had wanted war because he was fiercely patriotic and wanted Italy to be a great nation; he believed it was only right that Italy should expand and create a new Roman Empire. Patriotism – nationalism – had been drummed into him in the Balilla and Fascist youth organizations. At university he’d then taken a course in Colonial Studies and had never had much cause to question what he’d been taught. Now, three years on, he was back on the island of his birth and a tenente – a lieutenant – in the signals platoon of the 4° Divisione ‘Livorno’, and still young enough and naïve enough to be taking in his stride everything that life threw at him. An uncle had been killed during the fighting in Albania, which had shaken him, and the reverses of fortune in the war had dented his confidence a little, but when he’d been called up at the age of nineteen he’d set off for officer training with no small amount of pride. His father had been to see him off at the station and had given him a razor, brush and soap as a parting gift – even though, fair-haired and baby-faced as he was, he’d barely needed them, which he’d felt as something of an affront to his manhood. So far, though, the war had treated Messina fairly well. He’d been passed from pillar to post but, now aged twenty-one, was yet to go into action. Even after arriving in Sicily with the division the previous November, that prospect still seemed to him a remote one.

      Not all were as naïve as Tenente Livio Messina, however. Tenente-Colonnello Dante Ugo Leonardi was commander of the III° Battaglione of 34° Reggimento in the same Divisione Livorno, and although he was doing his best to prepare his men for the invasion he felt certain was to come on Sicily, he was doing so with a heavy heart. Leonardi did not share either Messina’s more laissez-faire approach to soldiering or his youthful enthusiasm for war. Rather, he was convinced that most Italians had entered the war with little conviction and that, despite Fascism, as a nation they had simply never had the aggressive spirit or hatred of their enemies to justify taking the terrible step to armed conflict. In fact, he reckoned they had never really thought through the consequences of going to war at all.

      There was a lot in this view. It resonated with Graziani’s reluctance in invading Egypt in September 1940, when it had become clear Britain had no intention of giving up the fight. Suddenly, Italy had found itself woefully ill-prepared. The country had even fewer natural resources than Germany. Compared with the leading powers, it was backward, too. Italy’s military was not modern enough, not well equipped enough, not organized enough and – as Colonnello Leonardi knew – not committed enough to win the war. Now, in June 1943, Italy seemed finished – most certainly so if what he’d discovered on the island was anything to go by. ‘The conditions on Sicily,’ he noted, ‘were abject.’14

      When he had first arrived in November 1942, Leonardi had toured the entire island and had been horrified by the lack of any kind of centralized defensive organization. Rather, the various units had been left to pursue their different approaches and differing ideas of how best to organize themselves. Some coastal units were even speaking entirely different dialects, which, of course, was hardly ideal for any kind of coordinated defence. The coastal divisions were made up of poorly armed and poorly trained men, most of whom had been hurriedly conscripted and showed not the slightest interest in fighting. They were also horribly stretched in certain parts of the coastline, with battalions of some six hundred men each defending stretches of up to 30 miles. ‘For example,’ he noted, ‘the Battaglione 435 had thirteen men per kilometre.15 The best case scenario was the Battaglione 388 with sixty men per kilometre spread over ten kilometres.’ Nor was there any naval artillery outside the main ports. ‘None!!’

      Matters had improved significantly with the arrival in February 1943 of Generale Roatta to command Sixth Army on Sicily. Contrary to what Hitler and von Neurath believed, Roatta was not a spy, spineless or otherwise. Having made a name for himself in the Balkans as an utterly ruthless hard man, willing to wage war against Yugoslavian insurrectionists with the utmost brutality, he had come to Sicily determined that Italy should fight and do its very best to repel the invasion which, like Kesselring, Mussolini and others, he felt certain would be directed at the island. In expressing his views to von Neurath, whom he had known for some time, he had been merely speaking frankly; such, though, had been von Neurath’s – and Hitler’s – paranoia, they had not taken Roatta’s warning in the spirit in which it had been made.

      Roatta had been as appalled as Leonardi by what he had discovered on Sicily. At the time, Sixth Army had