The Fortress group which took me over Bologna was the same which saved Kasserine Pass by destroying Rommel's armor. It was among those responsible for the similar bombing at Anzio and the less successful attempt at Monte Cassino to break the mountain deadlock. For this reason, the briefing of crews—several of which have returned no more—in which I took part, before dawn in the barn of an old Adriatic farmhouse, was particularly moving. When the men shuffled in from the cold starlight, the briefing officer, Major George Sander, greeted them with the words: “Of all targets, this time we have the most ticklish one. If we hit our own troops we can cause disaster. Those kids down there are kids we went to school with, and kids we will have to live with after the war. Be careful.”
Sander added candidly: “The area will be heavily defended. There are always plenty of flak-guns right behind the German front line. You will be getting the full share of their guns at this low altitude.”
Sander was right.
NO HEAT, NO WATER, NO LIFT IN GRAND HOTEL DE LUXE
Tourist in Italy Would Find Courtyard a Wastebasket and Servants Mostly Boys Who Beg Guests for Cigarettes
Somewhere in Italy—October 18, 1944
Those “inveterate European travelers,” as society columns used to call them, who are restless to see Italy in the second year of its liberation, would forgo that pleasure without regret if they could see the Grand Hotel, 1944-style. In the gilded corridors things are not what they used to be. The one-time tourist slogan—WINTER IN ITALY—is no longer persuasive propaganda. It is more like a challenge.
Without mentioning the smashed villages and towns where people are still combing rubble from past bombings and where running water in the town fountain is virtually the only public service restored, take a look at the Grand Hotel as it is today. Sometimes it is closed and you have to part wooden shutters in order to see the bombed interior. In some cases you can enter.
Such a hotel is usually six to eight stories high. New arrivals are placed on top floors. Social values are thus reversed, for you work your way up by working your way down.
The reason for this is twofold. Elevators, when such still are existent, are usually broken; running water exists in some rooms, but power is insufficient to lift it to the upper stories. Transients, therefore, are placed among the gilt Cupids on the top floor. After six months of hiking staircases they have worked their way down as far as the sixth floor. After a year they may be as low as the third, which ranks high.
Allied officers, temporarily the aristocrats in Italy, live three, five, sometimes eight to a room. A single naked bulb illuminates the center of the room at night. It is possible to find things (except in corners), but reading, or writing dispatches, is excluded. For drinking water a field bag has been hung in the corridor, above the absorbent sawdust scattered across the marble parquet.
At an open window this Grand Hotel de luxe offers evidence that some Italian construction has begun, for intermittent hammering is heard. More constant is the beating sound of an accordion, played by one of Italy's young men who are living from no evident means.
Most door locks are smashed and the keys lost. Thievery, however, is less in the hotels than on the streets, so belongings are slightly safer indoors than out.
Gone are the uniformed porters and crisped chambermaids. Instead, a pack of uncombed boys in school pants run the elevator when it works and wrestle, fight and cadge cigarettes in the corridors. They are kept in order only by cuffs from long-coated porters, who alone preserve the traditional uniform.
The hotel where your correspondent is now living has the largest waste-basket known: the courtyard window. Approximately weekly, this gigantic wastebasket is emptied by being swept out. Altogether, the Grand Hotel is not what it used to be. Anyone who misses wintering in free Italy this year will not be missing much.
NORTHERN ITALY A LAND OF POLITICAL CANNIBALS
Somewhere in Italy—October 27, 1944 (Delayed)
Political cannibalism, raw and terrible, is the order of the day in northern Italy as the US 5th Army presses toward Bologna, hub of the crisscrossing trunk highways of the Po and Piave Valleys.
The enormous flatland, spreading from Genoa to Trieste, is like a pond teeming with vicious life and shrinking in size every day. As the pond's edges draw in, the fish turn cannibalistic, each aiming only to be the last to die. Political creeds are fiercely devouring each other amid the ruins of Italy's lost industrial power.
Fascism was born in Turin, and northern Italy possesses, with Milan and other cities, the extremist Mediterranean worshipers of the all-powerful state. Able to find only occasional authentic members of the underground, the Fascist Republicans are turning their revolvers on passive civilian sympathizers. For a civilian to be “doubtful” is enough for him to be doomed.
Partisans claim 200,000 members in northern Italy—an estimate probably exaggerated for purposes of peace-table bargaining, but notable as an offset to the S.S. (Elite Guard) and Gestapo, which undoubtedly have the upper hand.
These underground struggles belonging to history probably will go unrecorded. It is nothing new to southern Italy to have poverty, but northern Italy has both poverty and terror.
What is going on in northern Italy today may be judged by what has occurred in southern Italy in the year since the armistice, as revealed by a diary kept by an Italian lieutenant, now in the writer's hands. The lieutenant, ill, had holed up in a village. He kept a journal of what occurred from which the following are excerpts:
October 2, 1943—In Amandola, near the Church of St. Anthony of Caldarola, the S.S. shot an Italian soldier from Bari for having a revolver (broken and empty). Before shooting him they held him more than an hour in the basin of the town fountain, forcing him to paddle his feet and pushing him down with his head underwater.
February 23, 1944—As I have requested, an Austrian deserter was brought to me, a sergeant of aviation condemned to death by the German military authority for having shown favor to 150 Italians in a concentration camp. We procured him a place to sleep. For eating he will have to make out like others, one meal daily with friendly families.
March 1, 1944—The authorities today opened the grain silos at Comunanza. Four persons were killed in the rush.
March 18, 1944—A company of Schutzstaffel men, accompanied by Fascists, arrived at Monte Fortino and searched several houses. A column of 39 vehicles, some armored, began attacking Montemonaco on our right. On the left, also on the road to Gerosa, armed parties have reached St. George Island and burned several homes. At the rock of Montemonaco they surrounded some young patriots, who fought them off with their unfit and inadequate weapons. So they called out the parents of patriots from a neighboring village and shot twelve of them.
March 21, 1944—Yesterday evening German armored cars moved into Lacentrale. Several kids trying to run away were injured. It is snowing again.
March 25, 1944—They are burning houses around Sarnano.
March 26, 1944—At four o'clock this afternoon a stranger appeared who made himself out a German Jew. Everybody caught on that he was a spy. He insisted on talking to me. Then he went around to the bar and started gambling, possibly in the hope of pulling some information out of the customers. But the alarm against him had already gone out.
This same character pretended he sympathized with the patriots of Monte Fortino. When the Germans reached our town he was taken prisoner. But he did not appear worried. He kept on smoking tranquilly and then was suddenly released.
April 9, 1944—Fascisti led by spies searched the forest where two British prisoners had been kept all winter by a family. They smashed beds and crockery in a cabin and took them all to Monte Fortino.
April 13, 1944—A group of armed Fascists arrived. They were looking for Dr. Luogo Severino as well as myself. Warned in time, I hid out in a thicket.
April 17, 1944—Fascists led by spies during the night found the cave where our friends were concealed and took three, all Englishmen.
Thus ends the Italian lieutenant's diary. An American graves registration squad dug up the American and British bodies, but found no identifying marks.
WAR BLOWS INTO CAPRI—CLOSE CALL FOR G.I.
Somewhere in Italy—October 28, 1944 (Delayed)
The shock of war has tardily hit Capri, the high-cliffed, enchanted island of sirens, in the third week of October, a year after Italy's surrender. Nevertheless, the delayed concussion was still sufficient to blow—temporarily—Sergeant Sam Divich out of the softest job possessed by any G.I. in the Mediterranean theater.
Sam slaughtered pigs for a living back home in Steubenville, Ohio. The rugged-looking sergeant, with a boxer's profile, has been sitting on lovely Piccola Marina (Little Beach), on the seaward side of Capri, looking after the bathhouses and small gymnasium frequented by American air force officers. As was recently revealed, Capri has been a rest camp for weary fliers of the US 12th and 15th Air Forces since Naples fell a year ago.
With a dark-eyed fisher girl of Piccola Marina, Sam was thinking about what he would ask her to make him for breakfast the other morning when suddenly it seemed as though the end of the world had come.
The blast of a terrible explosion knocked Sam out.
When he recovered he found himself on the glass-littered floor. It took him a quarter of an hour to bring the Italian girl back to consciousness.
Sam's residence, which is a beach villa belonging to the English music-hall star Gracie Fields, was a mess. Its windows had been blown in, its lintels smashed. The concussion was so great that even the stone fireplace was riven in two.
Rocks on the beach, supporting Gracie's villa, were pushed apart, as though by an enormous hand. The strong smell of high explosives still came from them. When Sam got up courage he found fragments of the shell of a mine near the rocks. Capri's first taste of war had been a mine washed in from the sea by a heavy rainstorm, a year after the armistice.
GERMAN CORRESPONDENT TELLS REASONS WHY
NAZIS CAN'T QUIT
Somewhere in Italy—October 28, 1944
How Germany, while acknowledging itself defeated, is being held together by a fantastic cat's cradle of disorganized forces and emotions, is revealed by the following conversation between a German war correspondent captured in the Mediterranean theater, and an American newspaperman. The German, who denied that he was a Nazi party member, asked that his name not be revealed because “the arrest of my entire family would follow immediately.”
German: Every man in my outfit admits that Germany has lost the war. They have been convinced for more than a year now.
American: Then why keep fighting?
German: Because the Germans are told that if they yield they will be sent by the Russians to Siberia. They may not believe other Nazi propaganda, but knowing Russian tenacity, they believe this. And because most of our army has served some time in Russian winters, they would literally rather die than be sent to Siberia.
American: But why the same stubborn resistance on the Anglo-American Western Front?
German: Because the army believes that yielding there will only make it simpler for the Russians to crush in the Eastern Front.
American: Why not surrender to both simultaneously?
German: Because every Anglo-American advance is always linked by Nazi spokesmen with the danger of a “Bolshevist” victory. This is the only thing that both the army and German people fear equally. It is the only thing they fear more than Himmler's police.
American: Are the Germans aware of the Lublin* massacres?
German: Few have heard of them. All the ordinary German knows is that the secret police come and get the Jews. Where they go they do not know, and nobody dares ask. I consider the Lublin atrocities authentic, but if I had not served in Russia, I would not have known. And very few Germans know.
American: Do you think the Germans dread the Russians because they have a feeling of guilt for invading the Soviet Union and fear revenge?
German: The German people have no guilt toward Russia. They do not consider themselves responsible for the invasion. Like the army, they did what they were ordered. They feel their leaders are responsible. But they think Russia will hold the German people responsible. Also, some anti-Nazis fear surrender will mean a communist Germany, which they believe would be about the same as Hitlerism.
American: What is the attitude of the officers?
German: They have the same fear that I have described, plus another. They are afraid to surrender because whenever an important officer surrenders, his family is arrested by the secret police. In such circumstances, all the alternatives are so terrible that it is easier to keep fighting than to do anything else. So every officer hopes that when the crackup comes, it will occur elsewhere than where he is, and be total. Because every incomplete defeat means worse police reprisals at home.
American: What was the effect of the attempt by the generals on Hitler's life (July 20)? Was the morale greatly shaken? German: No, rather the reverse. From the failure of the attempt, everybody in the army perceived that even this way out was hopeless. Seeing that assassinating Der Fuehrer was impossible, the soldiers came to feel, more than ever, that nothing was left but to fight until death. And since the three Allies offer only unconditional surrender—which to the Germans means also Siberia—the Reichswehr is hearing a similar point of view from both sides.
American: Do you agree that the Junkers officers' clique is planning for an easy peace in order to make a third attempt to conquer the world?
German: I know there has been much Allied discussion along those lines. I know thousands of officers, and I consider such talk rubbish. They admit they are beaten. Their plans go no further than the predicament of the moment. Nobody is thinking about the next war. They are just wondering how to end this one. But as long as Himmler controls the situation within Germany, the Reichswehr feels it must go on fighting. If they surrender piecemeal, the officers' families will fall to the secret police. If they surrender totally—Siberia. That is the way the German army is thinking today. Whether they can fight all winter in such a frame of mind, with all confidence in Hitler as commander-in-chief evaporated, I simply can't say. When the end comes it will be suddenly.
*Polish region where many thousands of Jews died, in many different massacres.
XVII
The Liberation of Greece
Weller had witnessed the April 1941 invasion of Greece by the Nazis, and they did not retreat from the mainland until October 1944. (The Germans held Crete and other islands until May and even June 1945.) After the deaths of over three hundred thousand civilians from starvation and reprisals, liberation turned into a civil war that would continue until 1949. With the British deeply involved, Weller and other reporters were hard-pressed to make sense for readers back home of a situation of numbing complexity. I have chosen several tragic dispatches of Occupied Greece under the Nazis and those pieces that succinctly explain the civil war that followed, to which he later returned for the CDN and portrayed in his 1949 novel The Crack in the Column.
In praising it, Weller's colleague Homer Bigart (the New York Herald Tribune) called him “probably the best informed United States correspondent on Greece” and the civil war the “first real skirmish between Communism and the West.” In the novel, Weller could be more critical of American non-policy in Greece than he could in his reporting—the “passive, critical, open-handed, complacent Americans” who could not make up their minds about who was right or wrong, and hoped they would not be forced to decide. “The great disorderly thud of the American heart could be heard, eager to be tapped for everybody and everything, everywhere, more like an udder than a heart,
indiscriminate and cowlike, asking only to be asked, hinting only that it would like to be loved.”
From a correspondent's perspective, there was blame laying back home—when attention was paid at all—as to what America's responsibility was and who was doing the least dishonorable job of covering the fate of Greece and hence of postwar Europe. In mid-1945, Time magazine's Walter Graebner published an article criticizing the reporters in Greece months earlier, when liberation had slid into civil war. Weller, in Chungking by now, rose to their (and his own) defense, although Time ran little of his letter:
To support his tardy but valid point that the United States is blundering politically by withdrawing its forces from Mediterranean Europe, your skipping correspondent Graebner (Time, July 16) need not have paused to slur as “a pretty bad job of reporting” the work of correspondents who covered the civil war in Greece.
We American and British writers were no more “cooped up in the Grande Bretagne Hotel” than were General Scobie and his staff, who lived there and worked next door. We went everywhere unguarded, even under fire, and crossed the lines until forbidden to do so by the British military. We were never “pressed for immediate copy.” We struggled rather to cut down our teeming material to the limited wordage of the military radio facilities.
Please be reminded that every line we wrote passed through censorship. No “solid bloc of pro-EAM and anti-British” ever developed among correspondents. Both American and British reporters were subdivided into many degrees of experience, observation, and understanding.
I suggest that Time resurrect the unpublished dispatches from its own able eyewitness correspondent, Reg Ingraham, and notes by Life photographer Dmitri Kessel, who photographed the Greek police opening the civil war by killing unarmed EAM marchers. In-graham's straightforward reporting went largely unpublished or mutilated, apparently to conform to Manhattan policy. Possibly Graebner's Mediterranean account has also been editorially gleich-geschaltet [forced into line], in which case he deserves sympathy rather than criticism.
Weller's War Page 59