So, if, after more than 70 years, the reader wishes to find out what really happened in the summer of 1943, in the ambiguous and controversial matter of the Kingdom of Italy’s unconditional surrender to the Allies, and how, in 1945, a cessation of hostilities in Italy was agreed between the German and Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) forces and the Allies, my advice is to continue reading.
The original subject matter for my second book was supposed to be a controversial World War II Italian general; but at the conclusion of many years’ work on this topic, despite having uncovered some startling results, a certain spark was missing. As a result, this biography of Dick Mallaby happily got the upper hand, like a wild plant triumphing over what has been sown (and eradicated) by the gardener.
My work here is based on in-depth research to the extent of appealing for help on local radio stations around Lake Como; has taken 20 years of, at times, quite maddening study and analysis; is not based on inference; features a self-imposed limit on the use of personal evaluations; and has been written in a style to render it as readable as possible.
The reader must now judge if the process has been successful, considering that what follows was mainly written in the small hours, and at very low temperatures.
Do not ask me why and how I managed to do it.
I currently find myself living through a phase succinctly described by my favourite musician, the West Londoner Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend of The Who, in which I am ‘too old to give up, but too young to rest’.
And so I am trying to make the best of my increasing experience and of my as yet unwaning strength.
It is enough to force oneself to do, and remember, everything, all of the time.
Even if this is ever more tiring, often frustrating and ever less appreciated.
G. B.
From La Castolina, Laviano, Perugia Province
25 October 2018
list of acronyms
ACC
Allied Control Commission
ACS
Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Central State Archive, Rome)
AFHQ
Allied Force Headquarters
AMGOT
Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories
AUSSME
Archivio dell’Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito (The Italian General Staff Archives)
CLNAI
Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy)
CVL
Corpo Volontari della Libertà (Volunteer Freedom Corps)
EIAR
Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche (the public service broadcaster in Fascist Italy)
FANY
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
GS(R)
General Staff (Research)
MI(R)
Military Intelligence (Research)
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration
ONB
Opera Nazionale Balilla (a Fascist youth organization, 1926–37)
OSCAR
Organizzazione Scout Collocamento Assistenza Ricercati (an organization dedicated to the expatriation from Italy to Switzerland of former prisoners, dissidents and Jews after 8 September 1943)
OSS
Office of Strategic Services
OVRA
Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism)
RSI
Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic – also known as the Republic of Salò)
SD
Sicherheitsdienst (the SS intelligence agency)
SID
Servizio Informazioni della Difesa (Defence Information Service)
SIM
Servizio Informazioni Militare (Military Information Service – Italian military espionage and counterespionage)
SIS
(British) Secret Intelligence Service
SOE
Special Operations Executive
TNA
The National Archives, London
UPIDA
Ufficio Protezione Impianti e Difesa Antiparacadutisti (Office for the Protection of Infrastucture and Anti-Parachute Defence)
1
Mallaby’s Early Years, 1919–39
There are people who express contemptuous amazement at the time sacrificed by some scholars in composing such works and by all the rest in familiarizing themselves with their existence and use.
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft
Cecil Richard Dallimore-Mallaby – known as Dicky, Dick, or in the Tuscan dialect as Gnicche, Dicche, or Signorino Dìcche – was born in Nuwara Eliya, a city known for the growing of tea and known by many as ‘Little England’ for its cool, humid climate, in modern Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) on 26 April 1919 to Mary Beatrice Schofield and Cecil-Dallimore Mallaby, who had married on 24 December 1918. Cecil, who had been born in Hyderabad on 21 February 1886, was the son of Florence Maud Dallimore and Cecil Ridley Mallaby, a British Army captain and subsequent member of the colonial police in West Africa.
At the time of Dick’s birth, the Mallaby family lived in fairly comfortable conditions in the town of Naseby, Ceylon, where his father was employed by the Anglo-American Direct Tea Trading Company and was responsible for the extensive tea cultivation in the area.
According to the Mallaby family diary, which Dick’s parents began to keep with the arrival of their firstborn, in the phase following the happy event, his mother began a long convalescence from childbirth; it also records the regular, pleasing growth of the newborn.
His father’s comments on the first moments of Dick’s life were both somewhat peculiar and typical of the ‘new father’:
26th Saturday. At about 2 AM the child is born a son, as I hear the nurse tell Mary – then, to my horror I am called in to assist. I do not see very much as I keep my eyes fixed on my baby lying on the bed looking rather like a skinned rabbit but still quite sufficiently unpleasant for a young husband to experience.1
However, almost immediately Cecil Mallaby was obliged to show how affectionate and attentive a father he could be.
In the days that followed, the couple’s affectionate writings demonstrate a rediscovered serenity, after the worries and sufferings of pregnancy and the immediate period following the birth. What also comes through is the joy (sprinkled with the typical anxiety and concern) that every worthy parent feels following the birth of their first child – for a number of years, Mallaby senior even noted down the age of his son in days.
But fate began almost immediately to turn the development of Dick Mallaby’s existence away from the norm. On 2 June 1920 his mother died in hospital, aged 38, from complications relating to her second pregnancy.
Cecil Mallaby, who had himself lost his father aged nine, was left alone to write the family diary. In the midst of his immense suffering, he wrote his first entry only on 16 June, following on from the last lines composed by his wife on 15 April, before the onset of her illness. His first thought was for his son Dick: ‘This poor little boy will never know the loss he has suffered of his sweet mother’s love and wisdom. Only with the aid of infinite divine mercy will I be able to make up for this in some small way.’
Across six pages, Mallaby senior recorded the events for future memory, describing to his son the details of the last days of his mother’s life, reminding him who took care of them in those terrible moments and revealing that, on his wife’s death bed, he promised her to always do his best to help their only child.
The last moments of his wife’s life were described as follows: ‘Her breathing became more and more difficult, and at the end, around 5.30 in the afternoon of Wednesday 2 June 1920, she drew her last delicate breath and her spirit passed. Also towards you, my son.’
Cecil Mallaby would commemorate the anniversary of this tragedy every year, and, for a long time after, every Wednesday would note the
weeks passed since his wife’s death.
The upheavals of that period brought Cecil Mallaby to religion: he was baptized on 28 August 1920, St Augustine’s day, at the Church of San Filippo Neri in Petiah district, Colombo. The curious thing is that the family documents reveal that Cecil Mallaby had married according to the Catholic rite two years before. Evidently, the Mallaby family already had some kind of karma for peculiar and extreme exploits.
But, in light of subsequent events, the above appears to be a fateful step towards both Cecil Mallaby’s arrival and settlement in the capital nation of world Catholicism, and his second marriage to a committed Catholic.
Indeed, shortly after, fate offered some slight compensation for the devastating loss suffered by Cecil and Richard Mallaby.
On 28 February 1921, a telegram arrived in Ceylon, sent three days earlier by the notary Guglielmo Rossi in Asciano, a district located some 30km south-east of Siena, Italy. It read: ‘This morning Marquise Elisabeth Mallaby died leaving you heir.’
Many would have rubbed their hands with glee at this point, given the material benefits of this inheritance, but Cecil Mallaby’s comment reveals the nobility of his soul: ‘Another who loved us has left us, as all those who love Dicky and I seem to abandon life, leaving only the indifferent, or our enemies! Poor little Dick, it seems likely he will grow up a lonely boy. I hope I’m not an old boring dog for him, but his best companion.’ Mallaby senior’s mood failed to improve when, a few hours later, a final, affectionate letter arrived from his now deceased Aunt Elisabeth.
Italy, and Tuscany in particular, was about to play a key role in the lives of this British family, which for several generations had lived beyond the borders of their mother country. On 13 May, Mallaby senior left Colombo aboard the Orvieto and arrived in Asciano on 8 June.
There, almost at once, he met Countess Maria Luisa Bargagli-Stoffi. The countess, born in Asciano in August 1888, was of English origin on her mother’s side, and was involved in managing Elisabeth Mallaby’s estate.
Having settled matters relating to the estate and appointed Countess Bargagli-Stoffi as his attorney, Cecil Mallaby departed from Naples on 29 August aboard the Ormonde. On 14 September, he was reunited with a slightly thinner-looking Dicky, who, in his absence, had been cared for at a monastery.
The following May, Mallaby senior set off for London once again, this time accompanied by the infant Dick, for whose safety during the sea voyage he had purchased a pair of reins. After spending a few months in England, the pair reached Asciano on 20 December 1922.
Having returned to Sri Lanka once more, their next journey was to be a permanent one. The Mallaby family changed not only their place of residence, but also the continent, returning to Europe – but not England.
The tea plantations were swapped for fields of wheat, surrounded by the olive trees, cypresses and evergreen oaks of the beautiful Crete Senesi region in Tuscany.
On 1 June 1925, the older and younger Mallaby arrived in Venice; two days later, they were in Asciano, residing at the villa Il Campo.
On 27 November of the same year, his father Cecil and Maria Luisa Bargagli-Stoffi were married, and all of them lived at Poggio Pinci, another of the family’s dwellings. Cecil Mallaby’s second marriage led to the arrival of Carlo Alberto in 1926 and, in 1928, Pia Teresa.
According to those who knew him, Dick Mallaby was a handsome boy with striking blue eyes, light hair and fair skin, who spoke with a strong Tuscan accent and spent his days furiously pedalling along the roads that connected Poggio Pinci and Il Campo.
The young Mallaby already had a reputation for daring enterprises: the most common was cycling along the parapets of bridges. Fearful local mothers would warn their children not to hang around with, or at the very least not to copy, this dangerous stranger, whom not even his father’s punitive lashes could completely tame.
As the years went by, Dick also developed a precocious interest in the opposite sex, which led him on one occasion to steal a precious family object which he then gifted to one of his girlfriends. His reputation in Asciano was such that he was, albeit affectionately, nicknamed ‘Gnicche’ after a famous 19th-century brigand from Arezzo.
Fascism was in full flow in Italy during this period, and even the Mallabys conformed to the customs of the time despite their British citizenship; the black fez of the ONB (Opera Nazionale Balilla – a Fascist youth organization), which Dick was given, is one of the family’s heirlooms, although now deprived of its fascio littorio badge – a symbol of Italian Fascism.
From 1925 to 1928, Dick Mallaby attended the Asciano elementary schools, reluctantly but with average results; then, from 1928 to 1931, he was a pupil at Panton College in Lincolnshire, UK, which was run by Franciscan friars.
Back in Italy, from 1931 to 1935, he boarded at the Nobile Collegio Convitto Nazionale Celso Tolomei in Siena. Between 1935 and 1939, he was a student at the scientific high school at the Collegio San Carlo in Modena. Mallaby intended to study engineering, and was awarded a place at university, which he was unable to take up due to the outbreak of war.
The subjects Mallaby studied undoubtedly served him well during his wartime activities, for on leaving school, in addition to English and Italian, he could speak and understand German and French.
In Europe, meanwhile, as Mallaby passed through childhood and adolescence, the first signs of the new world war were beginning to show. In the portentous summer of 1939, on the outbreak of hostilities, young Dick, despite having spent most of his life in Italy and being an Italophile, without the slightest delay decided to enlist in the British Army.
After an emotional conversation with his father, Dick Mallaby decided to head to Britain as soon as possible. Having said goodbye to his best friend Bernardo and the family cook Adele, without further disclosing the news of his imminent departure he went to Florence, accompanied by his father, where they met with the British consul with unsatisfactory results.
In his private memoirs, Mallaby confided that en route to Florence he had even felt ‘a little excited’ about what lay ahead, in contrast to his father. Evidently, adventure and risk were part of his makeup.
The two Mallabys continued on to Milan, in time to allow Dick to reach Britain by train across Switzerland before any restrictive measures could impede him. The date was 1 September 1939, the day World War II broke out. Dick Mallaby had avoided getting stuck in Italy, which was not yet at war.
In Milan, the long journey and the wait before departure allowed tiredness to prevail over the excitement, and Dick Mallaby began to reflect on what he was leaving behind.
Cecil Mallaby said goodbye to his young son with understandable emotion, hoping to see him again, with these words: ‘Dick, I know you’ll think me an old bore, but don’t forget what I told you, it always pays to be honest and straight, though other ways may seem easier, and keep your chin up.’
On the train bound for Britain, Mallaby found himself travelling with many British and Americans fleeing Italy. In his compartment was an elderly man with his family who had evidently been plucked from hospital, as he was still wearing his pyjamas under his coat.
Dick Mallaby’s movements did not escape the efficient Italian information-gathering network, which immediately knew about them. Thereafter, there would be plenty of reports by the Italian information services on Mallaby, his family and his activities.2
Within a few days, the situation in Europe had deteriorated. When Dick left Italy, Germany had just invaded Poland, but when he arrived in Britain, war had been declared. News of the latter, which came through during a stop at a small French station, helped bind together Mallaby and his travelling companions on this long journey.
On 3 September 1939 – the day the United Kingdom, together with Australia, New Zealand, India and France, declared war on Germany – Mallaby arrived in Britain, having managed to board one of the last available ferries.
At the Dover border check, he was asked the reason for his journey to Britain. The 2
0-year-old Dick Mallaby replied: ‘I have come to join up.’ The clerk looked at his colleague and said: ‘This man has come to join up.’
‘Man!’
With a mixture of excitement and emotion, Dick realized that his adolescence was officially over. He was 20 years old, he had been officially declared a grown man, and his duty was to defend his homeland.
During his first night in Britain, Mallaby experienced an air raid alert and a blackout. The next morning he formally submitted his request to join the armed forces, but bureaucracy immediately intervened to frustrate his attempt: his age group had not yet been called up, and no voluntary recruitment was planned.
Dick Mallaby decided to join his aunt in Sidmouth and find a temporary job, but five weeks later he managed to succeed in his original intent.
On 18 October 1939, Private Cecil Richard Dallimore-Mallaby was enlisted in the 8th Battalion, The Devonshire Regiment, in Exmouth. Three months of basic training on Dartmoor were followed by several weeks in the Signals Section.
In March 1940 Mallaby was still in Britain, engaged in coastal defence duties in Sussex, which he found less than satisfying. In an attempt to get nearer to the action, he volunteered for a parachute course, which led him to join the elite No. 2 Commando and undergo gruelling training at Largs and on Arran, in Scotland.
By chance, or by choice, Mallaby had taken the first steps that would give him the skills to perform his breathtaking missions. In January 1941, he was assigned to the training centre for No. 8 (Guards) Commando in Scotland, under Robert Laycock’s command.
An Englishman Abroad Page 2