My Italian Adventures Read online

  Cover image: Author’s collection.

  Contents

  Title

  The Monte San Martino Trust

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 Joining Up

  Chapter 2 My First Posting

  Chapter 3 Wheels within Wheels

  Chapter 4 To an Unknown Destination

  Chapter 5 Algerian Interlude

  Chapter 6 See Naples – and Live!

  Chapter 7 Just the Job

  Chapter 8 All Roads Lead to Rome

  Chapter 9 On the Fringe of the Eternal City

  Chapter 10 Mädchen in Uniform

  Chapter 11 Do in Rome as Rome Does

  Chapter 12 Excursions

  Chapter 13 Live and Learn

  Chapter 14 Roman Winter I

  Chapter 15 Roman Winter II

  Chapter 16 Posillipo

  Chapter 17 Bella Napoli

  Chapter 18 Torn’ a Sorrento

  Chapter 19 A Journey of Discovery

  Chapter 20 Back in Harness, But not for Long

  Chapter 21 Home, Sweet Home

  Chapter 22 Traveller’s Joy

  Chapter 23 Retrenchment

  Chapter 24 A New Job – and a Fresh Angle on Italy

  Chapter 25 Roman Carnival

  Chapter 26 Will Proceed to Milan

  Chapter 27 Milano!

  Chapter 28 Verona and other Peregrinations

  Chapter 29 Italian Summer

  Chapter 30 Investigations!

  Chapter 31 Cavalcade

  Chapter 32 Trieste

  Chapter 33 Sacred and Profane

  Chapter 34 North of the Border Once More

  Chapter 35 Last Roman Christmas

  Chapter 36 Onore al Merito

  Chapter 37 Winter Journey

  Chapter 38 Nearly a Bad End

  Chapter 39 A Rivederci!

  The Author

  Plates

  Copyright

  The Monte San

  Martino Trust

  In September 1943, after Italy signed an armistice, tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war sought to make good their opportunity to escape from captivity and recapture by the Germans.

  The author of this book, Lucy de Burgh (née Addey), has donated her royalties to the Monte San Martino Trust, a charity established to commemorate the bravery of those Italians who assisted the fugitives.

  Lucy Addey was the intelligence officer in the Allied Screening Commission, which investigated the fate of those fugitives after the Allied invasion of Italy. She later married its commanding officer, who had himself been helped following his own escape from Fontanellato Camp, near Parma. Their admiration for the Italians whom the Trust seeks to remember is recorded in this book.

  The Monte San Martino Trust is named after a small village in the Marche region of Italy, as a tribute to the villagers, who were amongst the first to help the founder of the organisation, Keith Killby, and many others.

  The Italians, many of them extremely poor farmers, shared what little food they had, provided clothing and shelter, and generally did what they could to help the escapers on their way. In doing so, they risked imprisonment and the loss of their property. Many even paid with their lives.

  Every summer, the Trust brings twenty young Italians to England for a month to learn English, in Oxford and London, and to experience the British way of life. The students come from the regions of Italy where escaping prisoners found refuge, and many of them come from families who themselves sheltered prisoners – and possess Alexander Certificates to prove it.

  The Trust links the escapers, and their descendants, with the Italian families by organising fundraising events and commemorative trails in Italy. The Trust also has an archive of 100 POW manuscript diaries and books, an important source for historians of the period, and a priceless memorial to some very brave Italians, and their kindness to strangers.

  My own father was also in Fontanellato Camp, and owed his own eventual safe return to the many families who sheltered him and, in particular, to two Italian partisans who died helping him cross the final mountain range.

  The Trust (registered charity No.1113897) relies entirely on donations to carry out its work. If you would like further information, or if you would like to make a donation, please visit our website www.msmtrust.org.uk

  Sir Nicholas Young

  Chairman, Monte San Martino Trust

  Chief Executive, The Red Cross

  London, August 2012

  Foreword

  M any twenty-first century people who are not Italian merely have a vague notion of Mussolini’s Italy during the war as a Fascist state that was a bungling accessory to Hitler’s tyranny. In truth, as historians know, the principal victims of Mussolini’s grotesque political and imperialistic pretensions were his own people. If he had preserved Italian neutrality in 1940, instead of plunging into the war in hopes of a share of Nazi booty, I believe that he might have sustained his dictatorship for many years in the same fashion as General Franco of Spain, who presided over more mass murders than the Duce, yet was eventually welcomed into membership of NATO. It is unlikely that Hitler would have invaded Italy merely because Mussolini clung to non-belligerent status; the country had nothing Nazi Germany valued. As it was, however, between 1940 and 1945 the catastrophic consequences of adherence to the Axis were visited upon Italy. What I mostly want to do here is to offer a brief narrative of what ordinary Italian people suffered in the war, especially in its last two years.

  Italy’s surrender in 1943 precipitated a mass migration of British POWs, set free from camps in the north to undertake treks down the Apennines towards the Allied lines. A defining characteristic of such odysseys, many of which lasted months, was the succour such men received. Peasant kindness was prompted by an instinctive human sympathy, rather than by any great ideological enthusiasm for the Allied cause, and it deeply moved its beneficiaries. The Germans punished civilians who assisted escapers by the destruction of their homes, and often by death. Yet sanctions proved ineffectual: thousands of British soldiers were sheltered by tens of thousands of Italian country folk whose courage and charity represented, I suggest, the noblest aspect of Italy’s unhappy role in the war. A young Canadian soldier, Farley Mowat, arrived in the country with a contempt for its people. But he changed his mind after living among them. Mowat wrote home from a foxhole below Monte Cassino:

  …it turns out they’re the ones who are really the salt of the earth. The ordinary folk, that is. They have to work so hard to stay alive it’s a wonder they aren’t as sour as green lemons, but instead they’re full of fun and laughter. They’re also tough as hell… They ought to hate our guts as much as Jerry’s but the only ones I wouldn’t trust are the priests and lawyers.

  For many months even before Marshal Badoglio’s government surrendered to the Allies, his fellow-countrymen saw themselves not as belligerents, but instead as helpless victims. The American-born writer Iris Origo, living in a castello in Tuscany with her Italian husband, wrote in her diary:

  It is... necessary to… realize how widespread is the conviction among Italians that the war was a calamity imposed upon them by German forces – in no sense the will of the Italian people, and therefore something for which they cannot be held responsible.

  The Italians’ overthrow of Mussolini and declaration of war on Germany in October 1943, far from bringing a cessation of bloodshed and freeing their country to embrace the Allies, exposed it to devastation at the hands of both warring armies. The view of many Italians about their nation’s change of allegiance, and about the Germans, was expressed in a letter one man wrote two days later: ‘I won’t fight on their side – nor against them, although I think t
hem disgusting.’ Iris Origo noted: ‘The great mass of Italians “tira a campare” – just rub along.’ Emanuele Artom, a member of a Torinese Jewish intellectual resistance group, wrote:

  Half Italy is German, half is English and there is no longer an Italian Italy. There are those who have taken off their uniforms to flee the Germans; there are those who are worried about how they will support themselves; and finally there are those who announce that now is the moment of choice, to go to war against a new enemy.

  Artom himself was captured, tortured and executed in the following year.

  Nazi repression and fear of being deported to Germany for forced labour provoked a dramatic growth of partisan activity, especially in the north of Italy. Young men took to the mountains and pursued lives of semi-banditry: by the war’s end, at least 150,000 Italians were under arms as guerrillas. Political divisions caused factional warfare in many areas, notably between Royalists and Communists. Some Fascists continued to fight alongside the Germans, while the Allies raised their own Italian units to reinforce the overstretched Anglo-American armies. Italians were united only in their desperate desire for all the belligerents to quit their shores.

  Instead, their agony persisted and deepened. In June 1944, amid the euphoria of the Allied armies’ advance on Rome, the commander-in-chief General Sir Harold Alexander made a gravely ill-judged radio broadcast appeal to Italy’s partisans, calling on them to rise in arms against the Germans. Many communities consequently suffered savage repression, when the Allied breakthrough proved inconclusive. After the war, Italians compared Anglo-American incitement to a partisan revolt, followed by the subsequent abandonment of the population to retribution, with the Russians’ failure to succour Warsaw during its equally disastrous Warsaw Rising in the autumn of 1944. The lesson was indeed the same: Allied commanders who promoted guerrilla warfare behind the Axis lines accepted a heavy moral responsibility for the horrors that followed.

  The Germans, having previously regarded the Italians merely as feeble allies, now viewed them as traitors. An Italian officer, Lieutenant Pedro Ferreira, wrote: ‘We are poor wretches, poor beings left to the mercy of events, without homeland, without law or sense of honour.’ He was serving in Yugoslavia, where many of his comrades were shot by the Germans after the armistice. The Nazi General Albert Kesselring ruled Italy with a ruthlessness vividly documented in his order of 17 June 1944:

  The fight against the partisans must be conducted with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice and severity of the methods he adopts against partisans. In this connection the principle holds good that a mistake in the choice of methods in executing one’s orders is better than failure or neglect to act.

  He added on 1 July: ‘Wherever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a proportion of the male population will be shot.’

  The most notorious massacre of innocents was carried out at Hitler’s behest, with Kesselring’s endorsement, under the direction of Rome’s Gestapo chief. On 23 March 1944, partisans attacked a marching column of German troops in the Via Rasella. Gunfire and explosives killed thirty-three Germans and ten civilians. In reprisal, Hitler demanded the deaths of ten Italians for each German. Next afternoon, 335 prisoners were taken from the Regina Coeli prison to the Ardeatine Caves. They were a random miscellany of actors, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, cabinet-makers, an opera singer and a priest. Some were communists, and seventy-five were Jews. Two hundred of them had been seized in the streets near the Via Rasella following the partisan attack, though none was involved in it. In batches of five, they were led into the caves, executed, the bodies left where they fell; the Germans used explosives to close a shaft in a half-hearted attempt to conceal the massacre. Still, the caves became a place of pilgrimage and tears.

  There were a handful of survivors of another massacre, in the churchyard at Marzabotto, a picturesque little town at the foot of the Apennines, where in September 1944 Waffen-SS troops exacted a terrible revenge on the civilian population for local partisan activity and assistance given to Allied prisoners: ‘All the children were killed in their mothers’ arms,’ wrote a woman who miraculously lived. Though herself badly hit, she lay motionless under the dead:

  Above and beside me were the bodies of my cousins and of my mother. I lay motionless all that night, through next day and the night following, in rain and a sea of blood. I almost stopped breathing.

  At dawn on the second day, she and four other wounded women crawled out from beneath the heaped corpses. Of her own family, five had been killed. In all, 147 people died at the church, including the priests who had been officiating when the SS arrived; twenty-eight families were wiped out. At nearby Casolari a further 282 victims perished, including thirty-eight children and two nuns. The final local civilian toll was 1,830, and moved Mussolini to make a vain protest to Hitler. This was the sort of price many Italian communities paid for resisting Nazism, and which contributed heavily to the country’s wartime civilian death toll of 153,000, three times that of Britain. Three-quarters of that number perished after the Italian armistice.

  If the Allied invaders never matched the sort of horrors the Nazis inflicted on Italians, they were parties to lesser crimes: French colonial troops, especially, committed large-scale atrocities. ‘Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place,’ wrote a British NCO, Norman Lewis:

  Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Supino and Morolo were violated. In Lenola… fifty women were raped, but – as these were not enough to go round – children and even old men were violated. Today I went to Santa Maria a Vico to see a girl said to have been driven insane as the result of an attack by a large party of Moors… She was unable to walk… At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages two centuries ago to throw themselves from the cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks.

  Such Allied excesses, matched by the effects of air and artillery bombardment through the long struggle up the peninsula, ensured that few Italians gained much joy from their ‘deliverance’. Two soldiers of 4th Indian Division were chasing a chicken around a farmyard when a window of the adjoining house was thrown open: ‘A woman’s head appeared, and a totally unexpected English voice called out “**** off, and leave my ****ing ’ens alone. We don’t need no liberation ’ere.”’

  The wild Italian countryside and hospitable customs of its inhabitants prompted desertions from the Allied armies on a scale greater than in any other theatre. The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men ‘on the trot’ – overwhelmingly infantry because they recognised their own poor prospects of survival at the Front. Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944–45 – the equivalent of two divisions – and around half that number of Americans.

  Both the Germans and Allies distributed broadsheets to the population, making competing demands for their aid. Iris Origo wrote:

  The peasants read these leaflets with bewildered anxiety as to their own fate, and complete indifference (in most cases) to the main issue: Che sara di noi? – What will become of us? All that they want is peace – to get back to their land – and to save their sons. They live in a state of chronic uncertainty about what to expect from the arrival of soldiers of any nationality. They might bring food or massacre, liberation or pillage.

  On the afternoon of 12 June 1944, Origo was in the garden of her castello rehearsing Sleeping Beauty with her resident complement of refugee children, when a party of heavily armed German troops descended from a truck.

  Full of terror, she asked what they wanted, to receive a wholly unexpected answer:

  ‘Please – wouldn’t the children sing for us?’ The children sang ‘O Tannenbaum’ and ‘Stille Nacht’ (which they learned last Christmas) – and tears come into
the men’s eyes. ‘Die heimat – it takes us back to die Heimat!’ So they climb into their lorry and drive away.

  Less than two weeks later, the area was occupied by French colonial troops. Here were the alleged liberators, yet Origo wrote bitterly:

  The Goums have completed what the Germans begun. They regard loot and rape as the just reward for battle, and have indulged freely in both. Not only girls and young women, but even an old woman of eighty has been raped. Such has been Val d’Orcia’s first introduction to Allied rule – so long and so eagerly awaited!

  Allied forces sustained a sluggish advance up the peninsula, but from the summer of 1944 onwards, it was a source of dismay to Alexander’s soldiers that Mediterranean operations and sacrifices commanded diminishing attention at home. ‘We are the D-Day dodgers in sunny Italee’, they sang, in irony, ‘always on the vino, always on the spree…’. So they were regarded by some foolish people, who knew nothing of the reality of the mud, blood and misery in which the rival armies, and the Italian people, existed for most of the war years, the condition of the civilians being rendered far worse in the last years of the war by desperate hunger, indeed in some cases starvation.

  For Italians, hunger was a persistent reality from the moment the country became a battlefield in 1943: ‘My father had no steady income,’ recalled the daughter of a rich Rome publisher:

  Our savings were spent, we were many in the house, including two brothers in hiding. I went with my father to the [public] soup kitchen because my mother was ashamed to do so. We made our own soup from broad bean skins. We had no olive oil… A flask of oil cost 2,000 lire when our entire house had cost only 70,000. We bought whatever was available on the black market, bartering with silver, sheets, embroidered linen. Silver was worth less than flour; even our daughters’ dowries were exchanged for meat or eggs. Then in November with the cold weather we had to exchange goods for coal: the longest queues formed at the coal merchants. We carried the sacks back on our own, because it was better that no man showed his face [lest he should be conscripted for forced labour].