A Civil War (6 page)

Weariness with the war and a desire for peace were not phenomena limited to the men-at-arms. ‘We are waiting for peace and only peace' – so ran a report on the ‘politico-economic situation of the Kingdom on 28 February 1943–XXI'.
²⁴
The violence suffered at first hand with the air-raids, solidarity with relatives of those who had been killed or gone missing, scattered among innumerable theatres of operations, hunger and other material privations, and awareness of the overwhelming superiority of the enemy, vied with each other in making it seem pointless to go on with a war that was irremediably lost.
²⁵
‘We thought our
sufferings were over', a later testimony of 25 July recalls: ‘instead, 8 September came'.
²⁶

The fact that Mussolini's overthrow and the Armistice did not coincide created the feeling that, if the war was not over, Fascism was not well and truly over either.
²⁷
From Radio Milano Libertà (namely, Radio Moscow) Togliatti warned that ‘party hierarchs and followers … have in no way capitulated and are preparing to take their revenge in a more or less hidden manner': the most dangerous were those who ‘have put a mask on'.
²⁸
The BBC Italian Service received instructions to highlight ‘the Badoglio Government failure' in the work of de-Fascistisation, which was limited to ‘half-measures and palliatives'.
²⁹
This, no doubt, was a way of putting pressure on Badoglio.
³⁰
But the fact that Radio Londra often called the Marshal ‘Duke of Addis Ababa' well expressed a grotesque fact that was plain to the Italians and, for that matter, to the Resistance movements of other countries, but not to Badoglio himself, who declared to ‘the officers in Agro di San Giorgio Ionico': ‘I am still Marshall Badoglio, your general of the Sabotino, of Vittorio Veneto, of Addis Ababa.'
³¹

A soldier stationed in the Balkans, finding himself before an ‘immense, widespread, host of enemies' (‘the Germans, the Bulgarians, the Ustashas, the Cetnics, the Muslims, etc.') had the sensation that everything had come to a standstill in a ‘leaden, agonal' climate.
³²
And a young man, protagonist of an
autobiographical novel, who would subsequently opt to join the Social Republic, expressed himself thus: ‘That lot have lost no time! They've lost no time!… But what does that leave us with?'
³³

The anti-Fascist parties, which were busy re-establishing themselves during Badoglio's forty-five days of rule, pressed ahead, each with its own nuances, with the request that the war be brought to an end. As early as April,
Riconstruzione: Organo del fronte unico della libertà
, in its ‘Appello agli italiani', had asked for ‘the passage from the state of war to the state of peace', and the manifesto agreed in Milan on 26 July by the Gruppo di Riconstruzione Liberale, the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), the Partito d'Azione, the Partito Socialista, the Movimento d'Unità Proletaria, and the Partito Communista, numbered among its points ‘an armistice for the conclusion of an honourable peace' (this formula, the fruit of mediation between the parties, was in fact confused compared with the victors' clear desire to impose an unconditional surrender – a desire which, it should be repeated, despite historiographical polemics, was correct).
³⁴

The 4 August 1943 Milan edition of
L'Unità
had this long headline: ‘The communists are fighting alongside Italians of all persuasions on the road to peace and freedom in order to save the
patria
from ruin.' A year later,
L'Unità
would again speak of ‘the sloth and organic incapacity of a government in which the people did not participate, the betrayal undermining an army'.
³⁵
The paper of the Action Party denounced, ‘more than a month after 25 July', the fact that the cardinal error of the coup d'état had been its failure to proclaim explicitly: ‘Fascism has fallen. The Fascist war is over.'
³⁶
These comments are quoted not so much because they testify to the different party lines (which were as yet little known to the Italians) and their capacity to exert a widespread and direct influence on the popular will, as to the existence of a state of mind that the parties would necessarily have to take as their point of departure.

The common desire to have done with the war was not enough to create that correspondence of intention and action between the army and the population that was also part of official rhetoric during Badoglio's forty-five days. This failure was due not only to the attitude of the High Commands, described above, but also to the fact that the use of the armed forces for public order immediately put paid to any form of fraternisation; even though, as has been noted, the troops and junior officers frequently showed themselves reluctant to carry out the more drastic orders.
³⁷

The circular issued by Mario Roatta, chief of the Army General Staff, with orders to proceed against demonstrators ‘in combat formation, and to open fire at long range even with mortars and artillery without forewarning of any kind', and the Bari and Reggio Emilia massacres, are among the most glaring cases in point. Another circular, by General Quirino Armellini, who had been appointed commander of the Fascist militia that Badoglio incorporated into the Royalist Army, provides the most complete – indeed, grotesque – measure of this. Armellini, whose words are worth quoting, recalled the ‘merits of which we are all aware' of the MVSN (
Milizia volontaria per la sicurezza nazionale
), ‘born of the action squads'; deplored the reaction of the country, ‘hostile and often brutal towards the Milizia', as well as ‘the ill-advised demonstrations and offences coming from the turbid rabble', and concluded with an enjoinder to oppose the enemy, who were fired ‘by inhuman hate and the stern resolution to annihilate' the
patria
, with ourselves, in the name of God, Christianity, Rome and the King and Emperor.
³⁸
Some of the themes that were to form part of the propaganda of the Social Republic are anticipated in this circular, mixed with others that were to be taken up and voiced by the monarchist and reactionary press in the South.

Thus, in its relationship with the people, the army as an institution came to find itself in an ambiguous position, which was starkly evoked, years later, by a Torinese Communist militant: ‘Fascism had fallen but it had returned in Badoglio's army; it had ended up inside the army.'
³⁹
It is striking how deeply this remained imprinted in people's memory as a dominant fact, and how this memory coincides, for instance, with the amazement observed by Second Lieutenant Giorgio Chiesura in the people of Fossano at the rigorous maintenance of law and order by the troops against a population who had so warmly approved the anti-Fascist coup performed by none other than the armed forces.
⁴⁰
Amazement becomes contempt in an appeal addressed, in August in Bologna, to the women of Emilia: ‘Twenty-three years of oppression and slavery and still we're not satisfied! Still Badoglio, still the generals.'
⁴¹

This small manifesto was certainly Communist-inspired; the line that can be identified in the underground press of the same period, even that of the left, is far more variable, caught as it was between, on the one hand, the need to
acknowledge popular weariness and suspicion and to use them as a weapon of pressure on the government, and, on the other, the not yet discarded hope that something positive might still be agreed on and projected with those armed forces. On 4 August the Milan edition of
L'Unità
considered it an ‘absurd crime' to go on with the war now that Mussolini was no longer in power, and added: ‘The popular masses are beginning to ask themselves whether the liquidation of Fascism might not be a tragic swindle.' On 12 August,
L'Unità
ran this headline on all its front pages: ‘Ma la musica è sempre la stessa' (‘But the music is always the same'), and on the second page: ‘Soldiers! Don't fire at the workers. They are fighting to enable your return home', while a subtitle urged: ‘People and soldiers! Unite in demanding an immediate peace that will save the nation. Workers! Demand the end of Hitler's war! Save your lives, your houses, your factories!'

Appeals for peace and fraternisation between the civilian population and the soldiers became more pressing after the massive strikes that shook the factories of the North from 17 to 20 August, and which acquired a distinctly political character by virtue of the request for the liberation of political prisoners and arrested workers, for the expulsion from the factories not only of the Fascists but of the troops as well, and for the creation of internal commissions. Dominating all was the manifestation of a clear opposition to the continuance of the war.
⁴²
On 22 August,
Avanti!
denounced the ‘absurdity' (a recurrent epithet in the anti-Fascist press that week) of the continuation of the war,
⁴³
and bore the subtitle: ‘Peace, peace immediately, peace at all costs.' On the same day
L'Unità
once again urged: ‘Soldiers and people unite in the struggle for peace!' As early as 26 July in Cuneo, and on the 27 July in Turin, Duccio Galimberti had launched an appeal to the crowd for war against the Germans. This position would appear explicitly in the article ‘Guerra e pace', in the August issue of
Italia Libera
.
⁴⁴
At the semi-clandestine congress of the Action Party, held in Florence between 2 and 7 September, above all Ferruccio Parri, who had been appointed the party official responsible for military affairs in northern Italy, argued for armed struggle – volunteers fighting alongside the army – against German domination, heralded by the massive influx of forces into Italy after 25 July.
⁴⁵

It is well known that the anti-Fascist left-wing parties did not confine
themselves to launching appeals of this kind, but that – winning over, whenever possible, the other parties from the fronts and committees that were being formed at the time – they also made overtures to the government, or directly to the military authorities,
⁴⁶
in order to prepare the ground for the joint actions they hoped for in anticipation of the day of reckoning with the Germans that was clearly imminent. The best known of these approaches was that attempted by Luigi Longo to Badoglio, which was duly formalised in the ‘pro memoria', presented on 30 August, in the name of the Communist Party, to the committee of opposition
⁴⁷
The demand for peace was combined, with increasing insistence, as an indispensable stage with the demand for war against the Germans. Peace and giving chase to the Germans are the objectives indicated by a Communist leaflet of 4 September, with its enjoinder to create ‘fighting formations'.
⁴⁸
The document presented to the Prefect of Turin, during the August strikes, by the representatives of the ‘fronte nazionale' states that the people ‘want peace even at the cost of war against Nazism'.
⁴⁹
At the eleventh hour by now, on 7 September,
L'Unità
, in a headline occupying the entire front page, wrote, with impatience verging on breathlessness: ‘The People and the Army want peace. Peace can be obtained by chasing the Germans off our territory.' The ensuing article, ‘To soldiers and officers for the conquest and defense of peace', enjoined the army to make ready for its new, imminent tasks by identifying and isolating the Fascist elements who were ready to capitulate. Another part of the paper read: ‘Driving out the Germans is possible. Italy must dare.'

The army was certainly not lacking in openly Fascist elements; and in denouncing them, the Communist Party was again attempting to salvage the others, the good elements, the majority. But the collapse that followed soon afterwards was too widespread to attribute simply to the deliberate will of a few diehard Fascists. The fact is that the ‘heroes' of 1918, who, as in Bloch's account of 1940 France, still largely occupied the top echelons of the military hierarchy,
had by now ‘gone soft after a lifetime of bureaucratic administration and deviousness', and were therefore incapable of coping with emergency situations and interpreting the state of mind of the great masses of armed citizens who had been entrusted to their care. And it was the entire army that, in the climate of tension and also of opaqueness weighing on the country, was about to collapse, corroded by a ‘crisis of morality' that was indeed comparable to the crisis that had demolished the French Army in June 1940.
⁵⁰
The failure of army and country to engage each other in the days of the Armistice was to be one of the first facts with which the resistance forces would have to reckon.

Badoglio's forty-five days had not, then, ‘saved what there was to save', to quote a formula in fashion at the time that was contemptuously contested by the youthful intransigence of the new belligerent anti-Fascism.
⁵¹
The ‘serious condition of the history of Italy' was in fact preventing Fascism from evading ‘its responsibilities by pretending to scuttle itself with a decree by the Grand Council'.
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In time of war, Freud had written in 1915, ‘the State demands the maximum obedience and the maximum sacrifice from its citizens, but then treats them like children, thereby giving birth to a state of mind defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events'.
⁵³
In Italy the Fascist war and the 8 September collapse generated this type of phenomenon on an immense scale; but those defenceless children displayed a vast range of reactions which, even in their contradictions, attested to their determination not to let themselves go under.