Navy, always professional, swiftly sailed away from Italy to escape the Germans, as agreed in the armistice terms. Four battleships and six cruisers surrendered in Malta and were greeted with full military honours by the Royal Navy. The Luftwaffe expressed its fury by bombing and sinking the Admiral’s flagship, the cruiser Roma, with the loss of 1400 men.
On July 19 the US Air Force had hit the Rome railway marshalling yards. The decision to drop 1,000 bombs on the outskirts of the Eternal City was taken by the combined Chiefs of Staff because the two vast yards were the hub of all rail movement between north and south Italy. This Allied attack spread considerable public panic. The USAAF bombed Rome again on August 13, and next day the Italian Government declared Rome an Open City. Three weeks later Italy surrendered, and two days after that the German Army occupied Rome – Open or Closed.
King Emmanuel’s Government was transferred to Salerno. In Feb ’44 the Allies returned authority for the whole of southern Italy to the Italian administration. There were then three Italys: Southern Italy, occupied by the Allies; Central Italy, which remained under German rule until the summer of ’44; and Northern Italy which until April ’45 was the theatre of the struggle by Allies and partisans against the Fascists of the Salò Republic, and the Germans.
The role of Italians in this confused struggle for liberation is usually dismissed. In fact from September 9 until the end of the war, 72,500 military and civilians were killed and 40,000 wounded. There were believed to be some 360,000 partisans and patriots fighting with little direction, but most of them on our side.
Definitely on our side, thank goodness, were the Goumiers – a little-known group with considerable impact. Our armies were well-equipped in almost every way, with one surprising omission: apart from the Gurkhas of the Indian divisions, we had no troops trained in mountain warfare – unlike the Germans, who had an LI Mountain Corps.
An odd exclusion this, as we were fighting our way up a chain of 800 miles of Apennines, from the Straits of Messina to the Alps, by way of everywhere. This great mass of mountains bisecting the centre of Italy always seemed to cut through the heart of our battle lines of fighting soldiers – some of whom had probably never seen a mountain until they faced a towering range soaring up to 9,000 feet. Putting townsfolk to fight through such majestic scenery must have slowed our advance – certainly it made supplying troops dug into the skyline a task sometimes even beyond mules.
General Alphonse Juin, commanding the Corps Expéditionnaire Français in the international Fifth Army, trumped everyone by introducing the Goumiers – 12,000 formidable fighters recruited from the Berber tribes of North Africa’s Atlas mountains, with French officers and NCOs. He launched them across the trackless peaks and savage hills west from Ausonia. Preferring mules to jeeps, knives to rifles, and used to far more serious mountains, they saw the Apennines as foothills through which they moved as to the manner born.
I remember standing in front of vast wall maps at VI Corps headquarters in the catacombs of Nettuno, checking to see if there was any movement on the Front around Cassino. On a long horizontal map of Italy’s boot, sideways, there was a vertical line across Italy showing exactly how far the Fifth and Eighth had got in their struggle to advance. The Intelligence officer briefing me then turned and walked a few paces to one lone dot on the map miles ahead of the static front line. ‘That’s the Goums’ he said.
They were fighting alone, having left every other unit standing. These skilled and fearless tribesmen had one considerable disadvantage to outsiders – sometimes even to their own officers: an instinctive and barely controlled savagery. Goums would descend upon a friendly or an enemy village and rape everyone in sight: women, men, children, animals … Often they formed queues.
All this was standard – but not as we knew it. Italian peasants in villages through which they fought said they suffered far more in 24 hours of Goumier occupation than during eight months under the Germans.
They were a military success – though not if you were living in their path. Neighbouring units much preferred the old-style steady plod through the mountains; they admired the Goums’ natural skills, but few were at ease with them. Even on our side, they were not easy to like.
Capri lies three miles from the Italian mainland with a magnificent view of the Bay of Salerno and so a ringside seat at the war’s toughest and most dramatic assault landing. This dominant position was pointless because the island was just not interested in conflict. Apart from a couple of dormant antiaircraft batteries and a German radio station, it ignored any fighting anywhere, following a tradition of escapism established at the time of the Roman Empire.
For a passing glance at paradise, we landed by ferry at the Marina. A scramble of tourist-touts descended offering the regulation peacetime excursions around their miniscule haven, two-miles-by-four. The Blue Grotto? Up to Anacapri? The villa where Emperor Tiberius enjoyed various antisocial vices? The more innocent home of Gracie Fields?
Inland, the tiny Piazzetta remained brilliant and ridiculously theatrical, its little tables filling at noon with the surviving international smart-set, wartime edition, lured by the seductions of the island. Among such elegance were far more gaily-dressed women than men – who were younger and even smoother, with smaller wristwatches. It was the Roman Emperor Augustus who had first noticed the ‘sweet idleness’ of Capri, and it would take more than a world war to affect that balmy attitude among this blend of races untroubled by national ties.
The café chatter was full of happy laughter, though one subject was never approached: the War. I sensed it would be bad form to bring it up. There was a mild preoccupation with the shortage of bread which had to be brought across from the mainland, but at least there was plenty of cake, beautifully presented. Marie Antoinette would have appreciated the situation perfectly.
With some Correspondent friends I dined at the lovely home of a French resident. We had heard that an announcement of vital importance was to be broadcast from Radio Rome that evening, and were concerned. We were playing truant for a couple of days in paradise when we should have been at war, so were displeased that our cover was about to be blown. The prospect of some big story breaking while our backs were turned made us feel even more guilty. We waited anxiously.
Finally after much martial music the radio announced: ‘The Government of Marshal Badoglio … has declared war on Germany!’
‘My God’ cried our hostess, exasperated, ‘Is that all?’ She switched back to dance music. That was Capri in October ’43.
Later that night we again passed through the Piazzetta on our way back to reality. It was crammed with socialising Caprese, still refusing to pay any attention to the war, however close. They had chosen not to notice that a few miles north even their sort of civilisation was being saved by men in landing craft fighting and dying across the muddy Volturno River under a chill grey October sky.
* * *
As we all know, the Italians are a delightful race: good company, extremely stylish and rightly proud of their ancestors and their gorgeous country; but not even their greatest admirers would say that they were successful soldiers, these days. Even Mussolini noticed. After their surrender in Libya his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, told him, ‘With an Army like ours we can only declare war on Peru.’ Unaccustomed to the truth, Mussolini stored that away.
In Rome, King Emmanuel had called a meeting of the Grand Council in July ’43 to remove Mussolini and replace him with Marshal Badoglio. Count Ciano was one of those who supported this dismissal. Six months later, after his rescue from hotel-arrest at Gran Sasso, a resurrected Mussolini did not choose to spare his favourite daughter’s husband when he was tried by a Tribunal in Verona and sentenced to death for ‘attempting to destroy the independence of the State … and giving aid and comfort … to the enemy.’ Ciano was executed by firing squad at Fort Procolo, outside Verona.