A Civil War (101 page)

A crucial point was armed support of strikes, requested for example by the Milanese Communist organisation in the light of their experience of the strike of mid-December 1943.
²²
Again in Milan, during the March 1944 strikes, the workers had high hopes of armed intervention but these hopes were dashed because of the number of Gappists who were arrested.
²³
In Turin as well the interventions were limited.
²⁴
This armed backing of the strikes, which failed to be forthcoming or was limited, were a sort of equivalent of the scant commitment of the city's organisms to the mountain war so often bemoaned by the partisans.

The March 1944 strikes, however, marked a turning-point in the relationship between struggle in the factory and armed struggle, in the sense that the Communists would set greater store by the latter.
²⁵
Essentially, it was a question of re-stipulating the 15 percent norm mentioned above. From Modena ‘in very few weeks dozens of comrades including a great many
quadri
and three members of the federal committee itself, were invited into the mountains'.
²⁶
The Ligurian CLN, anticipating inevitable dismissals, proposed that the industrialists pay several months' advance wages and that the dismissed workers join the partisans, a prospect made impracticable by the German deportation of 16 June 1944. On the other hand, the San Giorgio workers appeared to have little desire to abandon the factory.
²⁷

Many documents indicate the problematic nature of the triumphalist hendiadys ‘with strikes and guerrilla warfare towards the decisive battle'.
²⁸
At a meeting of the secretariat of the 2
^nd
Milan sector, held on 15 December 1944, voices opting for internal strikes in which ‘the worker doesn't abandon his machine' vie with voices demanding that ‘the mass be given in short the trust of the street'.
²⁹

Indeed, as the final showdown approached, military presence in the factories become more frequent, leading to stances that were reproved as being extremist. On 3 March 1945 at Borletti, Garibaldini of the 170
^th
brigade not only
held an assembly, not only made those present give one another the clenched fist salute but ‘one Garibaldino forced some hesitant individuals to do it at gunpoint. Finally, they sent a greeting to Stalin and the USSR, and not to the Allies'.
³⁰
In Legnano on 24 March the Garibaldini ‘to stir the
attesiste
[fence-sitting] masses' threw bombs in one plant.
³¹
On 9 April at the Pavan works, fear of a repetition of this action, which occurred in a Milan factory, prompted the Gruppi della Difesa della Donna (Groups for the Defence of Women) to organise a stoppage of a few hours, though it had no ‘male backing'.
³²
In Milan it was recorded with satisfaction that ‘the masses are electrified because [they feel] the presence of the Garibaldini'.
³³
In Turin the April 18
^th
strike, which had armed protection, would then be considered ‘pre-insurrectional' – and legitimately so.
³⁴

The GAPs (Gruppi d'azione patriottica) and the SAPs (Squadre d'azione patriottica) were assigned the specific task of conducting the armed struggle in the cities. The former were the more carefully picked,
³⁵
better trained and committed to isolated actions, though having also the ambitious task of ‘organising and directing the great masses of the workers of the plants towards insurrectional combat'.
³⁶
We shall return later to several particular features assumed by urban violence as practised by the GAPS, which never consisted of more than a few dozen people living in total clandestinity. This helps explain why in some cases a clear preference was manifested to take to the mountains rather than join the GAPs.
³⁷
The composition of the GAPS remained essentially Communist, even if intakes from other parties or of unaffiliated people were not excluded
³⁸
– (in Turin two alleged Liberal Gappists were shot).
³⁹

The SAPs were organisms recruited from a wider spectrum and for largely defensive purposes. Moreover, the different ways in which their nature and function were interpreted present some interesting features. Though less marked than with the GAPS, there was a Communist presence in the SAPs, at least as regards their intentions, even if it had to be solicited by the leaders: ‘Most of the elements belonging to the SAPs joined the squads out of party discipline and not out of a voluntary wish to fight'.
⁴⁰
Again in Turin, this definition which might be called canonical is given: ‘The SAPS are patriotic mass organisations organised by the PC; they are not PC organisations but supported and organised by it and they depend on the CLN, by whom they are recognised'.
⁴¹

But a ‘mobilisation order' issued by the federation of the Ravenna PCI in October 1944, when the Allies were at the gates, baldly stated that the SAPS were an ‘armed organisation of workers and peasants' and that it was necessary to ‘sapizzare' the whole party.
⁴²
The SAP as a vehicle of alliance between workers and peasants is also mentioned by a Piedmontese document,
⁴³
while, again in Turin, the fusion that had occurred between the Communist and Socialist SAPs was hailed as ‘the material and spiritual reinforcement of the proletarian united front'.
⁴⁴

Indeed, in the province of Ravenna, out of more than seven thousand (very poorly armed) members, the great majority were Communists; but there were also 138 Republicans (one of whom declined the post of commander), 19 Actionists and 15 Christian Socialists.
⁴⁵
And an Emilian document says: ‘There are no longer any SAPs organised from elements from other parties, except for a few in the
bassa
(lowland), in the same old places',
⁴⁶
which could include Ravenna itself. But rather than mentioning inevitably imprecise figures, it should be noted that in many areas the SAPs came to assume the reductive
role of organising, often only on paper,
⁴⁷
all those who intended in one way or another to be in on the scene, with a view to the epilogue. This accounts for the distinction between defence units mentioned in a Turin document, according to which the Communists in the SAPs were only a minority, ‘while the rest are either sympathisers or vague patriots', and the commander more often than not an ex-army officer. This document also testifies to the peculiar kind of relationship that the SAPs succeeded in establishing with the industrialists: not only to get money out of them, but also to get taken on as ‘surveillance staff, firefighters, guards'
⁴⁸
– a collaboration which was compromising for the SAPs and risky, initially, for the industrialists.

The interweaving between the various forms of
sinistrismo
and the generational differences, to which I have already drawn attention, produced widely divergent ways of viewing the armed struggle too. It is the older comrades who, throughout the twenty-month span of the struggle, and more or less in all the zones, were reported to be ‘for the most part faint-hearted', prey to a ‘mood of passive resistance and negative
attesisimo
'. These are ‘old comrades coming from the Livorno split' [January 1921 split of the PSI into the PCI], men ‘who refuse to join the bands, or who ‘are scared stiff of employing the young', who are ‘sectarian, fearful', and whose
attesismo
is ‘il punto nero' (‘the real blot').
⁴⁹
Speaking of an encounter with an old
bordighista
in Acqui, shortly after 8 September 1943, Giovanni Pesce recounted: ‘
I
want to act.
He
ladles out a fine lesson on the red army.'
⁵⁰

The older men also felt the tradition of the party of
quadri
, according to which it was indispensable ‘to form the organisation, to educate the
quadri
, then act'.
⁵¹
Instead,

An outraged Communist reports the presence in the CLN of Cremona, one of the most
attesista
of the provinces, together with Mantua, and both in the great tradition of the labourers' struggle,
⁵³
of ‘a phenomenon contrary to what usually occurs in these committees. The representative of
Italia Libera
is for action, while our representative is a fire-fighter, because he says we're not yet ready for the offensive.'
⁵⁴

A few months later another Cremonese Communist leader recounted that he had spurred his men to act ‘not only from the military point of view but also from the political point of view; in fact our party is revolutionary because it conceives action as being a means of winning and of keeping oneself healthy'.
⁵⁵
And this, furthermore, paved the way for combative activism, which, as we shall see, in its turn came in for criticism.

No particular reasons are given for the many instances of reluctance to engage fully in the armed struggle. Here and there one comes across attitudes resembling those of vague
attesismo –
‘things will run their course in any case without our participation'
⁵⁶
– or mirroring those of the
attesisti
of the right, who were awaiting the arrival of the Anglo-Americans; while those of the left put their trust in the victories of the Red Army.
⁵⁷
In the organisation of the
Milan party, ‘incomprehension' and ‘underestimation' of the job being done by the military were reported and some comrades even thought that ‘going into the mountains is something of a punishment'.
⁵⁸

The risk also appeared that relations with the partisan commanders were being compromised by ‘party comrades' behaving like ‘the most tenacious saboteurs of the actions of the Garibaldini', with the reverse effect that, ‘to the extent that military activity continues to be conducted independently of mass agitation, the factors expounded above will come to affect and diminish the fighting spirit of the Garibaldini'.
⁵⁹
Parallel with this, another document states that the military comrades ‘must support the demonstrations of the masses, and not impose them with methods that upset their feelings … and vice versa, naturally'.
⁶⁰

The important thing was to repeat that the reactionary classes ‘fear the armed populace more than the Germans and Fascists' – that is how
L'Unità
put it, and it seemed almost to be echoing the polemic against ‘better Hitler in Paris than the Popular Front in power'.
⁶¹
Vittorio Foa attributed to the
attesisti
conservatives the capacity to understand, in fact, that ‘a complete engagement of the masses, and one coming at the present time, even if it be for the purpose of the anti-German war … would liberate new energies, the developments of which would be hard to foresee, but without doubt contrary to the present interests of order and property'.
⁶²

Along similar lines,
Bandiera Rossa
, the newspaper of the ‘Movimento Comunista d'Italia' answered those who were saying our best comrades are dying and at our expense the bourgeoisie is giving itself an anti-Fascist facelift, that the calculation of the bourgeoisie ‘seems right but isn't!', because the bourgeoisie cannot halt our destiny and will pay dearly for every dead comrade.
⁶³
Some PCI documents express concern that the bleeding to death of the ‘healthy Communist forces' was viewed with approval in order to ‘reduce them and wear them out' and render them ‘innocuous' for the ‘opportune moment'.
⁶⁴

Traces of what was earlier called ‘red hyper-belligerence', with mixed shades
of satisfaction and concern, occur in many documents, revealing the discrepancy between scant political training and great military audacity.

A report relating to the province of Cuneo reads: ‘There is this characteristic often encountered in the formations: the difficulty of coupling the technical fighting capacity of the partisan war with the political quality of the Command.'
⁶⁵
And in one report about the Alto Monferrato: ‘Very active Garibaldi forces are continually performing marvellous actions, but leave much to be desired when it comes to their political organisation and orientation, their Anglophobia and their
sinistrismo
. We're hard at work getting them into step.'
⁶⁶
Often ‘lack of political know-how' meant no more than a vaguely classist radicalism out of tune with the party line, yet not meriting the precise political definition ‘sinistrismo'.

The Communist
quadri
often found themselves facing this dilemma: what was to be feared most? What today would be called grass-roots ingenuity or poor indoctrination? A May 1944 report reads: ‘Judging by divers elements who show off their doctrinaire knowledge in theory while being fence-sitters in practice we have to conclude that they are preferable to those comrades who don't know the principles of Marxism and who have never read Lenin, but who are active in practice.'
⁶⁷

In line with this, before the ‘low political level of the basic comrades and of some
quadri
too', one can only ‘hope that the military factor will influence the political one'.
⁶⁸
Or also, commenting on a renovation of political commissars that was conducted, drawing from the new recruits: ‘If the younger ones were untrained they were also free of sectarian and extremist tendencies encountered in the men with greater experience of partisan life.'
⁶⁹