A Civil War (56 page)

Clearly the reactions towards the British and Americans, with whom not only the combatants but the great mass of the population were coming into contact, did not all stem from opinions and preferences regarding the great political issues. The impact between Italian society and the customs, behaviour, and culture of the British and, above all, American troops – a prologue to the process of Americanisation that developed in the post-war period – was particularly visible in Rome and the South, where the Allied occupation lasted longer and was largely conducted by an army that was still belligerent, and therefore a generator of particularly acute tensions.
⁵³

Here, the
resistenti
's experience of things was particular. The British and American prisoners who, having escaped from the concentration camps, joined the partisan bands, often constituted an original channel for re-establishing genuine ties with the ‘traditional allies'. Involved in this were the rural populations who, often risking their lives and possessions, gave the prisoners refuge and assistance. In fact, some of the former prisoners were thinking of seeking refuge in Switzerland.
⁵⁴
Others, though of working-class background, made no effort to disguise their suspicion of anything smacking of Communism.
⁵⁵
But there were also those – like Tony, a British regular officer who was one of the protagonists of the guerrilla war in Garfagnana and the Apuan Alps – who genuinely chose to fight in the Resistance.
⁵⁶
In some cases the parachuted missions too
were a vehicle of mutual esteem and understanding, all the stronger for the fact that both parties were risking their lives. Bernardo recalls the case of a British mission which ‘won the indisputable affection of the partisans by stating, unlike other missions, that they would remain on the spot as long as even one partisan was left alive there'. Of another mission, consisting of Americans, Bernardo writes that ‘confidentially … they let us know that the orders they had received, and agreed on with the Rome government, were not the most flattering and that difficult times lay ahead for the partisans'.
⁵⁷

Perhaps the most burning issue in relations with the Allies was the aerial bombings of the cities, which indiscriminately hit the entire population (even if it is excessive to suppose, with Alessandro Portelli, that they aimed at ‘wiping out civilian society').
⁵⁸
In some of the Resistance documents containing protests against the bombings, these are attributed unambiguously to the British, no mention being made of the Americans (in the memoirs, by contrast, the Americans actually have the edge on the British on this score).
⁵⁹

‘Today the masses see the aerial bombing as the cruellest thing that Britain can do against them. All are of the opinion that it is no longer necessary to bomb the factories, because in consequence they would be the predestined victims, and then, why destroy all that is the patrimony of labour?' This is how a Turin Communist document puts it.
⁶⁰
The British came to be deemed capable of deliberately bombing the partisans too, and not just the Garibaldini, but even the ‘azzuri' (the non-Communist Blues).
⁶¹

Whatever weight the massive and indiscriminate bombings of Turin, Milan, Naples, and finally Rome may be regarded as having had in the collapse of the Fascist regime and Italy's surrender, after 25 July, and above all after 8 September, the scenario and people's expectations had changed too greatly for the air-raids over the cities not to produce a new and disturbing reaction.
The above-mentioned Turin Communist document reads: ‘What was justified before the Armistice is today denounced by everyone and creates in their minds exasperation and hatred, a possible prey for Nazi propaganda.'
⁶²

And indeed, German and Fascist propaganda did not let the occasion slip, and it was necessary to set about finding a way of combating it.
⁶³
The tone is often one of defensiveness and retort. The Salò authorities are accused of giving the air alarms deliberately late, so as not to hamper war production and ‘so that the Germans don't lose time'.
⁶⁴
Even the destruction of Montecassino by the Allies was blamed on the Germans.
⁶⁵
Some drew attention to the launching of the V1 and V2 on London.
⁶⁶
Particularly bitter was the reaction to the occasional Fascist accusation that the bombings had been requested by the anti-Fascists, and particularly the Communists.
⁶⁷

The most widely accepted argument was that, in the final analysis, the Fascists were responsible for the bombings, that they had wanted the war and had ruthlessly waged it. A recent Turin document reads: ‘I knew the British because
they were dropping bombs on us, but I had realised that it had been Fascist Italy that had asked for these bombs'.
⁶⁸
Togliatti's argument was no different;
⁶⁹
and a Marche Communist paper explained: ‘The main culprits for so many monstrous crimes are always the Nazi beasts who bring and attract death and destruction wherever they pass.'
⁷⁰

The argument was extended, a fortiori, to the considerably more destructive bombings of the German cities, though little mention was made of them. On the one occasion that it does mention these bombings,
Il Popolo
justifies them on the principle that ‘Germany will fall victim to that weapon that it has so rashly used to attack defenceless peoples'.
⁷¹

Stances at various levels were, however, taken against the indiscriminate aerial warfare conducted by the Allies. ‘But why have these English come to vex
us
, when they could quite easily go and bomb the Duce at Gargnano?', demanded a woman in an air-raid shelter in Brescia.
⁷²
Vent is given to an elementary desire for reprisal in a censored letter: ‘I know this sounds malicious, but, I swear, I'd be cruelly gleeful to hear news of the destruction of some American cities and I'm only sorry it isn't possible.'
⁷³
A ‘wave of contempt' was reported in Bologna for the bombing that came shortly after 8 September, claiming 4,000 victims and ‘ably exploited by the Germans and Fascists'.
⁷⁴
‘Terrorist bombings' was the
bald definition given to those of the Terni steelworks.
⁷⁵
Fratelli d'Italia
, organ of the Veneto CLN, ruled out the idea that the Allied actions could be considered terrorist ‘in the strict sense of the word', but expressed concern that ‘raids like those on Treviso and Padua wreak immense damage on the Italians, very little on the Germans, and cost a considerable amount for the Anglo-Saxons', who are clearly motivated ‘by cynicism, or poor training or selfish prudence'. The main culprit, however, still remains Fascism.
⁷⁶
The CLNAI itself protested against the ‘morally and politically disastrous effect of the bombings carried out on urban centres of Italian cities, the military utility of which does not appear to be sufficiently well demonstrated'.
⁷⁷
La Democrazia del Lavoro
prudently remarked that some of the sufferings and destruction wrought by the Allies seemed to the Italian population ‘neither necessary nor just'.
⁷⁸
Since before 8 September,
L'Italia Libera
had written that it was ‘an extremely sad psychological error' to believe that Italy's recovery would be accelerated by the bombings: ‘A people fleeing amid the smoking ruins of a destroyed city is momentarily lost for the cause of the revolution.'
⁷⁹

By contrast,
Voce Operaia
, the newspaper of the Catholic Communists, took satisfaction in pointing out that, of all the belligerent nations, the USSR was the only one that had not bombed enemy cities.
⁸⁰
The censor's remark about several letters from Reggio Emilia seems to bear this out when it complains about Allied machine-gunning of cyclists and peasants: ‘All this has cooled the Anglophiles greatly. But there's little to hope for, because the upshot has been
that Russophilia has grown vertiginously. We've really come to a sorry pass.'
⁸¹

There is a clear distance between the attitudes towards the Allies examined so far, and the military, political and diplomatic relations between the states. Those who set store by the latter tended to confuse national dignity with the international position of the country, and ended up setting objectives for the Italy that had gone over to the victor's side that were excessive, to say the least. The Resistance was not always free from attitudes of this kind, which reveal considerable uncertainty as to what the post-war world order would be and the status that Italy would have in it.
⁸²
Positions appeared that were inspired by a tardy and faint-hearted nationalism, but which nonetheless found (and were later to find) confirmation among a fair proportion of average public opinion, with the emergence of issues relating to borders, particularly the eastern ones, and to the dismantling of the Italian armed forces, the colonies, and the terms of the Armistice (and later of the peace treaty). In these positions, what was a drama of the collective conscience became the request, oscillating between superficiality, effrontery and servility, to cash in the reward for changing sides, as if Italy were able to repeat the operation that had led Restoration France to sit at the Congress of Vienna alongside the victorious powers.
⁸³
Togliatti, a minister in the Salerno government, wrote a letter to the Premier Badoglio recommending realism and dignity, and urging him to establish relations with the Allies in the grand style, though without pursuing the myth of promotion to the status of allies, and avoiding ‘querulous complaints'.
⁸⁴
A more or less analogous note is
struck in
Avanti!
: ‘Let us not delude ourselves that we will win the hearts of the victors by obeying their every order, and that we will then save our country by wresting a few wretched concessions in the diplomatic discussions at the green tables of the conferences.'
⁸⁵

The
resistenti
could generously repeat that peoples are not responsible for the sins of their governments.
⁸⁶
But peoples and governments were one thing, and states another; and if the Italian state had signed an armistice inspired by the anti-Fascist principle of unconditional surrender, this was the point of departure that had to be free of any kind of reservation (like Foa and Diena's memorandum, quoted at the beginning of this chapter). Participation in the war of liberation therefore had to be utterly alien to the ‘shameful cynicism with which Mussolini demanded ten thousand dead' to wield at the peace table.
⁸⁷
By contrast, according to the Roman monarchic newspaper
Italia nuova
, co-belligerence ‘nullifies, by abrogating them de facto and by law, all the clauses of the armistice regarding any form of disarmament'.
⁸⁸

The first public declaration of foreign policy made by the government of national unity set up in Salerno condemned the ‘invasions [the word ‘aggressioni' was avoided] that had occurred in France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Russia and Albania – the last of which we wish to see independent as soon as possible'; and the wish was declared ‘to adopt a policy of friendly cooperation to repair the ravages of the war and to conduct careful and rigorous investigations to identify Fascist misdeeds and acts of violence and to adopt the most severe penalties for the culprits'.
⁸⁹
This is the least that could be asked in public declarations. But it is possible that the non-participation of France and Greece at the armistice negotiations with Italy fed some absurd hope in what remained of Italian diplomacy,
nostalgic for the old mythical card of the ‘determining weight' of Italy in the contest between the powers.
⁹⁰

The declaration just quoted made no mention of the borders and colonies. The government, represented by Carlo Sforza, made its first semi-official declaration about these on 20 August 1944: independence for Ethiopia and Albania, the Dodecanese islands to Greece, the old colonies (Eritrea, Libya, Somalia) to be entrusted to an international organisation or to be left in the possession of Italy.
⁹¹
Sforza was the minister without portfolio in the government presided over by Ivanoe Bonomi, a revenant who believed that the problem could be placed once again in the context of the debates at the beginning of the century. In fact, in Bonomi's preface to an old and well-known book of his, he underlined his claim that it might be in Socialism's interest to support colonial expansion.
⁹²

Behind this preoccupation with the organisation of the international scene lay different convictions and intentions. It might have been a mere tactical ploy and a message sent to the other colonial countries. The memory of the old League of Nations mandates might have had something to do with it.
⁹³
Finally, there might have been a genuine desire to give the problem of the colonial peoples an international breathing space. But this breathing space was choked in several Liberal, Christian Democrat and Action Party writings by appeals to prejudicial formulae such as ‘porta aperta' (‘open door'), free access to raw materials, and outlets for emigration.
⁹⁴

The long and the short of it was that no clear-cut anti-colonialist stance was taken that sought in unilateral renunciation the only argument that could give it credibility.
⁹⁵
This is probably one of the cases where the distance is greatest between the diplomatic preoccupations of the governments and, to at least some extent, the parties, cowed by the old Fascist accusations of ‘rinunciatari' (‘renouncers'), and the conscience of the
resistenti
. The latter, even when they did not openly proclaim anti-colonialist principles, certainly did not regard Italy's preservation of its colonies as one of the motivations for their choices. On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that most Italians, at heart, could not have cared less about the colonies, which represented, at the very most, as Parri put it, a ‘question of
amour propre
'.
⁹⁶