A Civil War (131 page)

This document immediately listed first those to whom one should not abandon ‘the tactic of the
foibe
':

A meticulous list like this distances itself from the merely symbolic violence that strikes a human being, depersonalising him, only insofar as it sees incarnated in him something that transcends him. It is inspired rather by a violence that wishes to set an example only insofar as it strikes individuals deserving punishment, however broad – ‘et cetera, et cetera' – the area of enemies punishable with this summary and radical procedure may be. The commander of the Cascione division is keen to offer this assurance: ‘Up to now although we have taken action against a fair number of adversaries, we do not appear to have executed innocent people, and I do not deny that, given the situation, this too might just, by way of exception, occur, however much we try to do what is possible to avoid errors of that kind.'
¹⁹

There appears to be not a shadow of doubt that ‘patriotic terror' had deleterious effects on enemy morale. When in February 1944 the Germans organised an auxiliary police force in Bologna, the GAPs were initially ordered not to disturb them, in view of the fact that ‘immature youngsters' had enrolled ‘for the sole purpose of dodging the compulsory draft and not fighting the German war'. But when those policemen began to take part in anti-partisan repression, in five days the GAPs executed seventeen policemen, the result being that, out of 500, 150 seem to have deserted, while others actually went up into the mountains to join the partisans.
²⁰
A great deal of fear was inspired, and at times it seemed that what was invoked by the Garibaldi brigade newspaper had come to pass: ‘The third front must create for the Nazi-Fascists an atmosphere of hatred and terror; these criminals must no longer feel safe and sound anywhere; wherever they are they must feel hated and despised, wherever they are they must see enemies, wherever they are an armed hand striking them.'
²¹

An RSI soldier about to go on leave to Milan received this letter from a relative: ‘I advise you to come in civilian dress because the partisans are stopping trains and taking
carabinieri
and soldiers away with them, and they're knocking the black shirts off on the trains themselves.'
²²

The dispatching of threatening letters
ad personam
to Fascist
gerarchi
and soldiers and to collaborationist bureaucrats was part of this policy aimed at terrorising the enemies. Threatening letters directed at Fascists by the Green Flames are reported by the censors – and one of them, from Bergamo, ends with these words: ‘However things turn out, you shall not escape the punishment you have merited.'
²³
The Florence CLN sent the
vice-podestà
Guido De Francisci, whom the Germans had enjoined to report vehicles and other material assigned for public services, the letter, mentioned earlier, that ended: ‘Should you decide to go against our wishes, you will be shot without further notice.'
²⁴

I have mentioned the peculiar character that the urban violence of the GAPs acquired and (see
Chapter 6
), the not always easy relationship between partisan warfare in the mountains and guerrilla warfare in the city. Let me add now that it was not just a strategic problem which, in the final phase, took the form of making sure that a descent into town was not too premature.
²⁵
And nor was this only an immediately political question. At the beginning of April 1945, for example, the Communists ordered the transfer into the mountains of about 1,500 Gappists and Sappists of the Carpi area, in order to regain control of the Modena division,
²⁶
while the descent into town was feared by Edgardo Sogno, head of the Franchi organisation, because he saw in it ‘baldly revolutionary intentions'.
²⁷
Again, in terms of a short-term political project, Leo Valiani attributed the summons, which he supported, of sending the best
quadri
(leaders) from the mountains down to the town with the intention of using them in the negotiations with the Allies, not to feelings of contempt harboured by town-dwellers for the mountain bands. This in fact had been the accusation levelled at him by Mario Giovana, who, in an impassioned defence of the ethos of the partisans of the upper Piedmont valleys, had taken things beyond the strictly political terms of the controversy.
²⁸
It was in fact precisely the overall figure of the mountain partisan that differentiated him not only from the
politico
who
remained in town, but also from the urban fighter. Thus the Resistance too saw the re-emergence of the conflict between the ethic of the
alpino
and the ethic of the
ardito
, allowing for all the differences arising from the novelty of the times and the situation, and the obvious divergence between town and mountain. In fact, it is hard not to see in the name given to the ‘brigate e distaccamenti d'assalto Garibaldi' (‘Garibaldi assault brigades and detachments') some echo of the ‘reparti d'assalto' (the
arditi
) of the First World War, filtered possibly by the albeit unorthodox memory of the ‘Arditi del popolo'. The same could be said about the use of the word
fiamma
(flame), which had particularly compromising associations (the Fiamme Nere, and so on), as the title adopted by some newspapers and the name chosen by the
autonomi
of the Green Flames.
²⁹

‘In order to act, dirty methods are necessary', wrote a SAP command. (The SAPs, seen in terms of a mass organisation, at times let themselves take their cue from Gappist practice.
³⁰
But far from making these ‘scoundrel's methods' a symbol or a myth, as the
arditi
had taken such pleasure in doing – and which were still best left to complete scoundrels – the Command added: ‘This is how superficial and dishonest individuals went about things, troublemakers of our own and of other parties', causing numerous arrests.
³¹
Lest we overdo the comparison, it should be added that the ‘golden slumber' of the
arditi
behind the lines, and the obsessively solitary and clandestine nature of the GAPs are two utterly contrasting situations.

At the suggestion of the Slovenians, the Natisone divisions decided to create units of
arditi
. But, as its commissar later wrote, ‘it was a mistake, from both the operational and the political point of view': the non-
arditi
felt relegated to second-class combatants, while the
arditi
took to performing too many reckless
acts. So those units were quickly dissolved.
³²
The Alpino Revelli speaks of
colpisti
(strikers) in the same spirit: ‘The most buccaneering
colpista
, if he is not sustained by conscientious courage, by a firm will, is worn down and collapses in combat. The “calm” courage of the
colpista
is not enough; what is needed is the courage that resists fatigue, exhaustion.'

Revelli draws a revealing comparison with an English paratrooper, Captain Flight, who, though finding himself with the opportunity to shoot at the Germans, did not do so: ‘Perhaps the courage of these people runs out in the mechanical act of jumping, it all finishes there: a very striking courage, which we shouldn't set great store by, because it's like that of our
colpisti
.'
³³
Dante Livio Bianco makes a clear-cut distinction between
soldati
and
colpisti
; he attributes greater ‘fundamental' moral qualities to the former, and adds that the mountain band of the Cuneo area ‘was, contrary to what many said, not at all a clandestine army'.
³⁴
In the zone of the Piave Garibaldi brigade, its commander later recounted that ‘the GAPs never showed any reason for existing and represented, if anything, a disturbance for the brigade, creating confusion and difficulties through their undisciplined and irresponsible actions'.
³⁵

These comments, and other similar ones that could be cited, call to mind a fine passage by Marc Bloch: ‘It is a popular fallacy among officers that the man of hot temper, the adventurer or the hooligan, makes the best soldier. That is far from being the truth. I have always noticed that the brutal temperament is apt to break under the strain of prolonged danger.'
³⁶

It would be wrong, however, to put the Gappist on a par with the
ardito
and the
colpista
. To survive, the Gappists had to rely on an extremely difficult combination of qualities, and indeed there were very few of them, and not all managed to combine these qualities in an ideal fashion: coldness and determination of character, courage and physical dexterity, the most rigorous clandestinity, and solidity of political conviction which, given the need to interpret the struggle in the most severe, ruthless and relentless terms, was the only thing that could safeguard them from deviations and backslidings.

The commissar of the GAPs, says an instruction document,

Another task that the commissar had, it was then recalled, was ‘to keep the combatants' morale high, making clear to them the political aims of and ideals behind the actions, and to keep a check on their private lives, in order to avoid any form of degeneration'.
³⁸
Absolute respect for the conspiratorial norms figures in another text, as both a physical and moral safeguard:

The author of this document firmly criticised those Gappists who had decided not to perform an action because a woman had shouted, ‘Don't do it because they'll shoot my husband':

Incitements to strike with absolute intransigence appear in ‘middle'- and ‘low'-level sources, as they do in ‘high'-level ones. An example of the former is the reprimand, made very early on, to a commissar because

These draconian commanders' orders on the field tend to disguise themselves not only as political appeals to fight relentlessly (as early as 10 September 1943 from Radio Milano Libertà, which is to say Radio Moscow, Togliatti had urged his listeners to ‘destroy without pity traitors who place themselves at the service of the foreigner'),
⁴¹
but also as the directives, real or presumed, of the government of the South. Witness a document of 7 August 1944: ‘Nicoletta must be made to see that both the Allies and our Rome government have given clear instructions in this regard, that is to kill as many of the enemy as possible, wherever and whenever they are found.'
⁴²

Another feature appears in the testimonies regarding the Gappists: the tense and obsessive sense of loneliness that hung over this combatant, who was generally compelled to live in absolute and often solitary clandestinity: ‘An existence in which the sensation of being a hunted animal found respite only when it was overcome by the spur of action.'
⁴³
A Torinese Gappist has written: ‘The hardest thing to take was the complete isolation in which we were acting, an almost unbearable and at times pitiless isolation'; it had to be numbered among the reasons why ‘even the best among the mountain partisans did not feel up to acting as Gappists in town'.
⁴⁴
There are pages in the memoirs of a Bologna Gappist which well convey the atmosphere that was born when one had to spend days on end shut up in a tiny apartment: ‘Another three days went by, three interminable days of solitude and hunger. We would spend them listless and inert, looking out of the windows, leafing through the few remaining books, hunting down lice and cursing fate'.
⁴⁵