Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (8 page)

In some instances, the ways of life in Italy undermined their own defense. The Italian inclination to ignore rules proved self-destructive when blackouts for air raids went unobserved. “RAF planes crossing the Alps were welcomed by the sight of Milan and Genoa fully illuminated. . . . Bologna houses were brightly lit and cars and bicycles drove with full lights.” The inability—and, at times, unwillingness—of some Italians to defend themselves was evident even to a Royal Air Force navigator looking down on the very city his crew was bombing. Don Charlwood, an Australian with the mixed crew of the 103rd Squadron, based out of Elsham Wolds, England, described the macabre scene:

Under the light of the moon the city [Turin] was mercilessly exposed—houses, churches, gardens, even statuary along the streets. The crews wheeled and dived, exulting as the Germans exulted over lightly-defended Britain in 1940. And yet, perhaps the minds of the attackers would have been easier if the Italians had attempted to defend their city. As it was, we blew women and children to pieces, unopposed by their men.

But the ghastly sight Charlwood described provided just one perspective. Many of the crews of these bombing missions had endured their own hell:

Smaller [British RAF] forces attacked Turin and Genoa. During the second of these attacks, Flight Sergeant Aaron of No. 218 Squadron, flying a Stirling, was severely wounded in an encounter with a night fighter whose fire hit three out of the four engines, shattered the windscreen, put both turrets out of action and damaged the elevator cables. With his jaw smashed, part of his face torn away, a lung perforated and his right arm broken, the flight sergeant sat beside the bomb-aimer, who had taken over the controls and showed him by means of directions written with the left hand how to keep the crippled aircraft in the air. By so doing he brought it safely to Bone in North Africa, where, dying of his wounds, he was awarded the Victoria Cross for “an example of devotion to duty which has seldom been equaled and never surpassed.”

The newspaper
Corriere della Sera
criticized these raids: “The frequent and intense bombing by the Anglo-American aviation on the Italian territory, with the subsequent destruction of the cities and the massacre of helpless population, goes way beyond the normal practice of war. For our enemies, it is no longer about the pursuing of military targets and to hit military objects. What do they want then? . . .Their purpose is obviously a terrorist one.” Therein lay a question for another time, a question involving the efficacy—and morality—of “morale bombing” and the messy nature of war. For now, the only way for Italy to escape the horror of further bombing, moral or not, was to negotiate for peace.

ON AUGUST 21,
1943,
The New York Times
headlined the major war stories: from the Eastern Front:
RED ARMY SLASHES DEEPER IN UKRAINE
; from the Pacific:
JAPANESE ABANDON RIDGES AT SALAMAUA
; from the Mediterranean:
AMERICAN FLEET TAKES ISLES OFF SICILY
; and from Italy:
FOGGIA BLASTED IN ITALY’S HEAVIEST RAID.
The front page carried an article about a new “gasoline famine” in New York City; another reported the end of the blackout in Cairo, where, for the first time since the early part of the war, the city was “again brilliantly lighted.” There was also a prescient report from a Western Union Telegraph Company vice president who stated that, “after the war, a method of beaming telegrams by light waves might make present-day wire transmission look as obsolete as the horse and buggy.”

Buried on page nine was a small item about a press release issued by the U.S. State Department:
U.S. GROUP IS NAMED TO SAVE EUROPE’S ART
. The commission’s official title comprised almost fifteen percent of the article’s word count: American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe.
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Named for its chairman, Justice of the Supreme Court Owen J. Roberts, the Roberts Commission included some of the nation’s foremost cultural and political leaders: Francis Henry Taylor, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Paul Sachs, Associate Director of the Fogg Museum of Harvard; Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress; Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Harlan F. Stone. The press release itself—State Department Release no. 348—proclaimed: “The Commission may be called upon to furnish museum officials and art historians to the General Staff of the Army, so that, so far as is consistent with military necessity, works of cultural value may be protected in countries occupied by the armies of the United Nations.”

By the time the article was published, Allied forces had already bombed Rome twice and Milan six times. While American bombers had demonstrated their ability to avoid hitting Vatican property and the most recognizable monuments during both bombings of Rome, they had accidentally damaged an important church and killed thousands of innocent civilians. Herbert Matthews, veteran correspondent for
The New York Times
and no stranger to the destruction of war, attended the briefing before the July 19 mission. “No one there could point out anything for anyone,” he later commented. “There was no mention whatsoever of San Lorenzo.” Matthews believed that “San Lorenzo could have been saved along with the other buildings indicated had anyone on the staff been aware of its importance.” His observation would prove prophetic.

The Allies were just weeks away from landing an invasion force of 189,000 troops on the Italian peninsula. Even with formal protection procedures, damage would be inevitable. Once troops arrived, who would be responsible for the protection of the richest concentration of cultural treasures in the world? The Roberts Commission seemed an unlikely savior. At that moment, it had yet to place even a single “specialist in planning for [the] protection of historic monuments” among the invasion force.

*
Mussolini was a pilot; both his sons, also pilots, served in the Regia Aeronautica.

*
The word
Europe
in the commission’s name later was changed to
War Area
s.

4

THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS

JULY–SEPTEMBER 1943

A
lthough the announcement of the Roberts Commission took place just days after the near-destruction of
The Last Supper
, President Roosevelt had, in fact, signed the order establishing the group two months earlier, in June 1943. Aware that the commission would not be operational before the invasion of Sicily, Roosevelt suggested that the army assign an “Adviser on Fine Arts and Monuments” as a stopgap measure. The first candidate, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Francis Henry Taylor, failed the physical for being overweight. John Walker, Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Art and former Professor of Fine Arts at the American Academy in Rome, suggested a friend and colleague already in the military: Captain Mason Hammond.

A Bostonian by birth, Mason Hammond had a youthful appearance and preppy face that belied his forty years. He had had a brilliant academic career, studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before joining the faculty of his alma mater, Harvard, in 1928. He taught Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome from 1937 to 1939, during the height of Mussolini’s dictatorship. After his stint in Rome, he returned to Harvard and resumed his position as Professor of Classics. In 1942, Hammond joined the Army Air Force, working in the Intelligence Branch at the Pentagon before becoming Adviser on Fine Arts and Monuments. “My qualifications were not in art or art history, but at least I knew some Italian and was somewhat familiar with ancient art and architecture.” But this assignment came at a considerable sacrifice; he had to leave behind his wife and two daughters to serve overseas.

Hammond knew some of the men who had developed the idea of creating cultural-preservation officers during war, including George Stout, a colleague at Harvard who had become a pioneer in the conservation of works of art. Stout spent World War I as an army private stationed at a hospital unit in Europe, then returned home to attend the University of Iowa, where he studied drawing. After saving his earnings for five years, Stout returned to Europe and toured the great cultural centers of civilization. By then, he was hooked. His calm, methodical, and studious personality equipped him perfectly for the science of art conservation.

Stout possessed a rare combination of visionary and patient thinking merged with the know-how and discipline to get things done. During the Spanish Civil War, Stout studied and recorded the impact of new innovations in bombing on the preservation of art—none with more far-reaching implications than the development of incendiary bombs and their consequent fires. He also maintained contact with friends in the German museum community, who wrote him about the Nazis’ removal of some museum directors and curators—and art they judged “degenerate”—from German institutions during the late 1930s.

After Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Stout took the initiative to write a field manual on the protection of works of art during armed conflict. This pamphlet incorporated his many insights from years of analysis. Stout believed it was only a matter of time before the course of the war turned and American boys would again be back in Europe fighting their way to Berlin. This time, however, the stakes would be much higher than in World War I; developments in the technology of warfare threatened to destroy much of the heritage of Western civilization. To prepare America’s soldiers, Stout worked closely with Paul Sachs, founder of Harvard’s Museum Studies course, to pitch his idea for what would become known as “Monuments officers” to the War Department. By the summer of 1943, Stout’s efforts had led to the creation of the Roberts Commission—and, indirectly, the transfer of Mason Hammond, Professor of Classics, to the war zone.
*
After the call went out, more than two hundred men volunteered, most with exactly the expertise needed, hoping to be transferred to the new “program” being endorsed by the War Department.

The urgency of getting Hammond in theater required the army to fly him to his first destination, Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers, rather than send him by ship. Although initially called an “adviser,” Mason Hammond was, in fact, the first Monuments Man. He reported for duty on June 7, only to discover that “the assignment for which I was destined was not concerned with the Monuments of North Africa. It has, therefore, proved impossible as yet to make any inspection of these, chiefly because of the difficulty of securing transport.” That single issue—transport, as in “lack thereof”—proved the most consistently vexing challenge the Monuments Men would confront.

In one of his first letters from North Africa to Samuel Reber, a friend working in the army’s Civil Affairs Section in Washington, DC, Hammond went as far as he ever would in expressing his frustration: “It is unfortunate that they did not give me more explicit information as to the job [while] in Washington, as they sent me out in a great hurry. . . . I doubt if there is need for any large specialist staff for this work, since it is at best a luxury and the military will not look kindly on a lot of art experts running round trying to tell them what not to hit.”

Hammond’s letter didn’t mention how frustrating it was to work within an organization as slow moving and at times inflexible as the United States Army. While he knew quite a lot about Italian art, Hammond wasn’t an expert on the monuments of Sicily. Knowing that the army expected him to be fully prepared, on just a few weeks’ notice, he tried to learn what he could. But the army had placed the public library in Algiers off-limits, fearing that his appearance there would somehow reveal their invasion plans for Sicily. Even after Sicily was in Allied hands, Hammond could only find one volume of the three-volume set,
Italian Touring Club Guide for Italy
, which had been captured in Libya.

The lists of important monuments and churches in Sicily and maps showing their locations weren’t available because Paul Sachs and the team working at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York City had yet to finish them. Hammond departed with the hope that the needed reference materials would be provided after he arrived in Sicily. Only then did the true picture begin to emerge: he would be expected to do his job, still largely undefined, without transportation or staff support. For the foreseeable future, Captain Mason Hammond, the first Monuments officer in the United States Army, was on his own.

PERHAPS THE ONLY
experience more frustrating than not being
prepared
for his assignment in Sicily was not
being
in Sicily. Not until July 28, almost three weeks after the Allied invasion began, did Hammond finally reach Italy’s largest region and island. When he landed in the ancient town of Syracuse, the professor of classics and student of the humanities felt he had, in a sense, returned home. He spent the first few months working with municipal officials in each town he could reach. In some settlements he discovered that local museum employees had walked off the job for lack of income. Hammond worked through the problem with the Civil Affairs Finance Section of Allied Military Government to get funds flowing to municipal officials. Only then would the knowledgeable workers be able to feed their families and return to work to help with temporary repairs and protective efforts.

Hammond had pathetically few tools to do his job: a desk, a chair, and the use—as he put it—of the “ancient” portable typewriter he’d brought with him from the States. His job, assessing damage to churches and other monuments in the island’s smaller towns, depended on transportation, which he had no hope of getting from the army. Thus began a series of independent efforts by Hammond to secure a vehicle, a pattern that would be repeated by virtually all Monuments officers who came after him. His British counterpart, Monuments officer Captain Frederick H. J. Maxse, who arrived in early September, nearly six weeks late, described one of Hammond’s early field demonstrations on the art of improvisation. Using “methods too devious to bear the cold light of print,” Hammond found a car that would assume legendary status in his reports, a “small and decrepit” Balilla. Not without a sense of humor, they named it “Hammond’s Peril.”

An amusing story accompanied each subsequent addition to their expanding motor pool. A Lancia, “model about 1927, of stately elegance and abundant room, was requisitioned for Advisers. However, the owner showed such an attachment to this Ancient Monument, and the question of maintenance was so problematical, that the Advisers felt that their official position required its return for conservation before it suffered ‘war damage.’
 
” As Hammond and Maxse wryly observed about their fleet of vehicles, “None of these has endured and the Advisers ended their career as they began, on their feet.”

Despite these and other frustrating experiences—Hammond had only learned about the creation of the Roberts Commission by reading a clipping from
The New York Times
—his odyssey in Sicily as the first official Adviser on Fine Arts and Monuments affirmed the concept envisioned by George Stout, embraced by Paul Sachs, and endorsed by President Roosevelt. Hammond assessed damage to monuments, effected temporary repairs where possible, got superintendents and other local museum and church officials back to work, and cut down on billeting problems by well-intended troops seeking shelter. His work in the field proved the job could be done.

Serving as the guinea pig for the Monuments officers became Hammond’s enduring legacy. Each miscue provided invaluable information about what to do differently once Allied forces reached the Italian mainland and began the push northward. Hammond’s acute skills as an observer not just of the process but of people—the local population and Italian officials, his fellow officers, and the average GI—and his ability to articulate the improvements that would be required in the months ahead, would ease the burdens of each Monuments officer who followed.

The most significant monuments of Sicily largely survived the Allied invasion and subsequent battles. Considerable bombing and occupational damage occurred in Palermo, but the raids claimed a far greater toll on the Baroque (and, by consequence, more delicate) churches of Palermo than those built hundreds of years earlier. The Cathedral of Messina lost its roof, but at least it wasn’t the original, which had already been rebuilt in 1908 after a devastating earthquake. Sicilians naturally lamented damage to even a single church, but Hammond and the other Monuments officers knew it could have been so much worse.

The battle for Sicily paled in comparison to the potential carnage that would accompany an Allied invasion of Western Europe, as Hammond explained in a September letter to his wife:

One has the ever present spectacle of a ruined city and one multiplies it by so many cities in Europe and it seems as though the task of reconstruction would never be done. And the loss of works of art is irreplaceable—beautiful churches gutted, archives buried under rubble, libraries exposed to weather and theft. . . . this work seems so much more important and so hopelessly immense. And singlehandedly I feel like the seven maids with seven brooms even in my little corner. . . . it would certainly help us if the rest of the country would give in without a battle.

BY AUGUST 17,
after thirty-eight days of continuous fighting, the Allies claimed victory in Sicily, bringing the war to the Reich’s back door. Most of the German forces had by then evaded capture, having crossed the Strait of Messina onto the Italian mainland. Even while Marshal Badoglio reiterated Italy’s ongoing commitment to Nazi Germany, his emissaries secretly engaged the Allies in surrender discussions being held in Portugal. But Hitler, following his earliest instincts that it was only a matter of time before Italy double-crossed its ally, ignored Badoglio’s reassurances and began increasing the German military presence in Italy.

Allied forces commenced Operation Baytown on September 3 and started landing troops in Calabria, their first foothold on the European continent. That same day, while Badoglio’s representatives were signing an armistice agreement with General Eisenhower’s commanders in Sicily, Hitler’s envoy, Rudolf Rahn, was meeting with Badoglio in Rome, listening to the Italian leader’s words of assurance. The Allies embargoed news of the surrender for five days to coincide with Operation Avalanche—the landing of the main invasion force at Salerno.

On September 8, Rahn, still in Rome, attended a brief late-morning audience with the king, who promised that Italy would “continue the struggle, to the end, at the side of Germany, with whom Italy is bound in life and death.” The pretense ended abruptly at 6:30 p.m. Mindful of the fifty-five thousand Allied troops just hours away from hitting the Salerno beaches, and still fuming over the message he had received from Badoglio earlier in the day attempting to
renounce
the surrender agreement, General Eisenhower made an announcement over Radio Algiers: “The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally.” Left with no alternative, Badoglio confirmed the news by making his own radio announcement shortly afterward. Many Italian soldiers “threw their weapons away,” one German officer wrote in his diary, “and showed their joy that the war was now over for them.” In the dark early morning hours, fearing for their lives, the king, Badoglio, and others fled Rome for the remote Adriatic town of Brindisi, leaving Italian troops leaderless and, worse, without orders.

German forces seized control of Rome on September 10, meeting only token Italian resistance. Within twenty-four hours, Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring placed all Italian territory under German military control. The pope had instructed the commander of his Swiss Guard that under no circumstances were they to resist should German troops violate the neutrality of Vatican City. But would German forces really usurp the pope’s authority in the capital of the Catholic world?

The feared moment soon arrived—first the sound of boots marching in unison across the cobblestone streets, growing louder and louder, followed by the appearance of heavily armed Wehrmacht troops. As they approached St. Peter’s Square and Bernini’s imposing colonnades, however, the marching came to a halt. The Germans posted guards but proceeded no farther.
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