A Civil War (55 page)

The use of the Allies as an alibi for everything of democratic worth that one was failing to do in Italy – a tendency in which a considerable part of left-wing historiography was to indulge – is rejected outright in this other Action Party document: ‘It's we who are to blame, not the English or anyone else, if we haven't been capable of getting rid of the king and the reactionary forces.'
¹⁷

As the Resistance came to be recognised by the Allies – for whom, it should be noted, recognition was the best way of controlling it – there were increasing manifestations of intolerance of their presence and of the way they provided their help, which, nevertheless, the Allies knew they could not do without.

As Henri Michel has written, towards the Allies the entire European Resistance ‘manifests both gratitude and unease, a faith that weathers the worst trials and a desire for self-determination, that is to say for revolt'
¹⁸
– all the more so in the case of the Italian Resistance, which had to reckon with an ‘enemy ally'. The attitude circulating in many Garibaldi formations typifies this: they felt their being discriminated against in the air-drops as a lack of recognition and legitimisation, not least with respect to the formations that were their competitors. Regarding a request for heavy arms, a Garibaldi command wrote:

So one could not do without the Allies, but one needed to maintain autonomy and dignity in one's dealings with them, differentiating oneself, in this respect as well, from the way the Fascists were behaving towards the Germans. As early as October 1943,
La Riscossa italiana
, the Piedmonetese newspaper of the National Liberation Front wrote:

In May 1944, the Command of the GL formations ordered that the formations themselves were never to be placed under foreign officers nor (the juxtaposition is significant) under the command of ‘relics of the militaristic expression of Fascism': only ‘technical directives' could be accepted from foreigners.
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An ‘indomitable spirit of independence towards the foreigner, even if he is an ally' is insisted on by the commander of the 4
^th
zone (Piedmont),
²²
while a Garibaldi report from Reggio Emilia complains about the head of an American mission who was in the habit of throwing his weight about.
²³
The insurrectional Veneto (Communist) triumvirate stated plainly that the partisan formations depended ‘directly upon the CLNAI and the CVL Command, and
that from these organisms, with which the Allied Command and the Rome government are in contact, they receive orders, instructions, directives … We must defend our national dignity, so badly mistreated by certain Allied orders and certain Allied commanders. We must do this tactfully, but with dignity' – all the more so because all too often the Allied Commands seemed to do nothing other than re-propose Christian Democrat and Liberal positions already encountered elsewhere.
²⁴
Major Tucker, head of the British mission, mooted the idea of dropping British paratroopers in Friuli, but withdrew the proposal, which was supported by the Osoppo formations, when the Natisone Garibaldi division command asked the paratroopers to operate under them.
²⁵
The eastern border was an arduous test-case for the affirmation of a sense of national dignity which differed from the old and arrogant anti-Slav nationalism; this accounts for the different ways in which the Garibaldini and Osovani behaved towards the British proposal. But the commitment not to let oneself be deprived of authority by the Allied Commands, especially in the guise of the parachuted missions, is to be found in more or less all the partisan formations, whatever their political persuasion. It appears particularly acute, a veritable point of honour, when the Allied missions ‘rubbed into us the crimes weighing on our country'.
²⁶

Manifestations of disappointment and irony at the slowness of the Allied advance in Italy were fairly widespread. Among the Communists and Garibaldini, these sometimes took the form of denunciations of the bad faith of the Allies, which was generated by ‘clear political motives', as claimed in a meeting of Milanese Communist workers.
²⁷
The Allies' slow progress is made particularly clear by comparison with the overwhelming Soviet advances. Before the grandiose spectacle of the Allied armies north of Bologna, one GAP member was to remark: ‘At the sight of so much power, it was hard to understand why we had had to wait so long for that day!'
²⁸
Justifying his modifications to an article due to be published in
Stella Alpina
, Vincenzo Moscatelli wrote to the author: ‘It is neither my fault nor yours if the Russians are moving so quickly … I've put the Allies in as well, because, after all, even if they're not doing much we can't ignore
them, least of all in a patriots' paper … in short … have it out with Barbisun'
²⁹
– Barbisun being the nickname given to Stalin by northern Italians.

A Lazio Communist claimed that ‘the Anglo-Americans don't want to wage the war in Italy', and drew an apparently paradoxical conclusion from this: ‘We therefore have plenty of time and, if we work well without wasting it, we'll be able to develop our political movement and the partisans' war so that the liberation of Italy will be the work of the Italians themselves.'
³⁰
Other Garibaldi documents accused the Allied missions of counselling ‘attesismo', and reveal the difficulties encountered by the partisan chiefs in stilling the apprehensions aroused by the disarmament to which the partisans were subjected in the zones as the latter were liberated (‘they say … they'll never let themselves be disarmed even if this means opposing the English, and if the worst comes to the worst they will disarm themselves, bolting home and hiding their weapons').
³¹

This intolerance towards the Allies, which became more acute and widespread after events in Greece and British General Harold Alexander's proclamation,
³²
drove parties and commands alike to try and damp things down. The ‘same old expression – what are these Anglo-Americans doing?' was stigmatised by political commissar Michele as a mask for
attesismo
.
³³
Likewise, against ‘the word “betrayal” ', with reference to the Allies, which ‘recurs insistently, we have decided to react energetically'.
³⁴

If the events in Greece induced some partisans to say: ‘So that's how it is, now we're being shot at by the Nazi-Fascists and tomorrow we'll be on the
receiving end of the English cannon-blasts, machine-gun volleys and air-raids', it was explained to them that this kind of language ‘was not very different from that used by the Fascists'.
³⁵

A Garibaldi newsletter is criticised as follows: ‘We must never speak ironically in our newspapers about the efforts being made to defeat the Nazi-Fascists. If we wish to ridicule someone, it should always be our enemies and certainly not … General Eisenhower's hernia.'
³⁶

Some Modena partisans who had complained about the ‘customary respects paid to the representatives of the Allied armies' received a reprimand that recalls McCaffery's: ‘It is the Allied Command that is leading and directing the war in Italy against the Nazi-Fascists.'
³⁷

Likewise, there was the enjoinder always to give the Allied troops a friendly welcome. It is worth mentioning the motivation for this obvious directive that was given to persuade the Milanese militants who seemed to question it. The Allies, it is recalled

If these were the warnings coming from the Communists, committed as they were to keeping their members' class spirit in one piece, as well as the policy of unity firmly championed as an international prospect,
³⁹
more predictable still were those coming from elsewhere.
Il Risorgimento Liberale
cautioned against
inopportune criticisms of the slowness of the Allies: other peoples ‘more deserving than us' were destined to wait still longer.
⁴⁰

The Allied missions at times seemed to be held responsible for the bad news that they brought from liberated Italy. ‘Why are things not going well in liberated Italy?', the Liguria mission was asked. The answer, as typical as the question, was above all that it was often the Italian rulers who did not even reach the threshold of action conceded by the Allies. Then came the admission:

Quite apart from the difference between the respective political lines which were unknown or little known to them, the partisans grasped the differences between the British and the Americans with whom they were in direct contact, wholly to the advantage of the Americans, whose greater generosity was also attested by the news filtering through from liberated Italy.
⁴²
This preference for the Americans, identified
tout court
with the prospect of something new, provoked the astonished and slightly resentful remark of a Garibaldino: ‘Contrary to all expectations, a good number of the population of the valley were awaiting not so much the “liberation” as the Americans.'
⁴³

But others had no such perplexities: ‘The Americans are very democratic and have a different view of the way Italy should be sorted out from the British. Both today and tomorrow, we'll have to lean on the former greatly.'
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Or again: ‘They say the Americans intend to help us more than the British, and when they let their folks know what they've found here they'll send us all sorts of good things.'
⁴⁵
An American officer parachuted down to a Matteotti formation in the
province of Alessandria is said to have stated that ‘the American Command takes a hostile view of the agreements between the British Command and the Italian conservatives', and that ‘the Americans intend to create a banking trust and a commission that is to come to Italy to make loans at 0.50 percent interest'.
⁴⁶

Earlier, the Third International had already regarded the Americans more favourably than the British. A Communist veteran who had met Gramsci and Togliatti recounted: ‘I am present at the meeting between a major in the British army and the American airman I'm accompanying. A cold, stiff cordiality, consisting only of words: the cordiality of a conservative with a follower of the third estate.'
⁴⁷
Another old Communist militant stressed that ‘the English fought against the Nazi-Fascists only because this corresponded to their imperialistic interests and not because they were anti-Fascist like us'.
⁴⁸

Probably the younger and less politicised generations were influenced by the many forms in which the ‘American myth' had spread so widely, as well as the influences of Fascist propaganda that had furiously attacked ‘il popolo dei cinque pasti' (‘the five-meals-a-day people'). In any case, among the Communists attempts emerged to make political use of the differences encountered between the two Anglo-Saxon allies. The Modena Communist federation issued this directive:

In fact the Communist-inspired bands' attitudes to the British could range from prudent erasures of wall graffiti that were ‘blatantly pro-Soviet … exterior manifestations that could both be an impediment to normal relations and create difficulties in aid supplies',
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to sending, with typically excessive zeal, birthday greetings to King George VI.
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In the case of Britain and the United States, too, it had to be borne in mind that the people were not to be confused with the
governments, or rather, with the reactionaries who had sway over the governments: ‘We must always distinguish between the popular masses of the Allied countries and a certain inevitable resistance, which can and must be overcome, on the part of the reactionary cliques that try to exercise their sway over the governments and General Staffs.'
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