by Gay Talese
The king’s appointed replacement was Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a career officer with a reputation for reliability, if not battlefield panache. The Fascist Party was dissolved, and a constitutional monarchy was restored with the promise of a democratic parliament. But the war against the Allies would continue, according to an announcement by Badoglio, and Italy would maintain its alliance with Nazi Germany.
Benito Mussolini, stunned and indignant over the king’s decision to dismiss him, was escorted out of Rome by armed guards and transported to the isle of Ponza, off Naples to the north, and then shipped farther out to sea to the island of La Maddalena, near the northern tip of Sardinia—close to the private island retreat where Garibaldi had died a half-century before in a state of disillusionment equal to his fame. At La Maddalena on July 29, Mussolini would mark his sixtieth birthday, an occasion unattended by his wife, his children, or his mistress, Clara Petacci, a woman less than half his age, with whom he had been secretly cavorting for nearly a decade. Belatedly, Mussolini received a birthday gift from Hitler, with the Führer’s warm inscription: a special edition of Nietzsche’s works in twenty-four volumes. These would become part of Mussolini’s summer reading, along with a book on the life of Christ, which moved him very much. He let it be known that he could well identify with a savior surrounded by unworthy apostles.
There was remarkably little protest among the people of Italy over the ouster of the man who had led them majestically for almost twenty-one years, and who had received their thunderous applause whenever and wherever he had appeared before them. Even the four million Fascist Party members, and the countless leaders of youth groups who used to honor him with one-armed salutes, failed to express condolences over his political demise, nor would they identify with his downfall—nor refrain from burning their black shirts. Many of his erstwhile loyalists in fact hastened to congratulate his successor, Badoglio, and to pledge their services to the new prime minister. Badoglio, no stranger to Italian political history, was hardly surprised; and if there were ways he thought he could make use of them, he was not remiss in availing himself of their counsel and companionship. Mussolini’s newspaper in Milan, Il Popolo d’Italia, accepted the Duce’s exit without editorial regret. Mussolini’s name was removed from the masthead, and where the newspaper had formerly displayed a photograph of Benito Mussolini, it now displayed one of Marshal Pietro Badoglio.
In the United States, the overthrow of Mussolini in July 1943 received a standing ovation from baseball fans reacting to the announcement over the public-address system during a game at Yankee Stadium; and when the news was communicated to a musical audience at an NBC studio in Rockefeller Center in New York City, interrupting an all-Verdi concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the people also stood and applauded, and the maestro was described in the next day’s Times as having “clasped his hands to his head, and gazed heavenward, as if his prayers had been answered.” The city’s Mayor La Guardia used the occasion to denounce Mussolini as “the betrayer of Italy,” while the ex-dictator was depicted as a “Sawdust Caesar” in The Washington Post. The New York Herald Tribune lauded the deflation of Mussolini’s “Napoleonic egoism,” and The Christian Science Monitor welcomed the end of his “balcony braggadocio.”
But New York Post journalist Samuel Grafton, who also did radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information, reminded his listeners that there was little to cheer about; Italy was still in the war, and “the moronic little King, who has stood behind Mussolini’s shoulder for twenty-one years, has moved forward one pace. This is a political minuet, and not the revolution we have been waiting for. It changes nothing; for nothing can change in Italy until democracy is restored.”
In August 1943, Mussolini was moved from La Maddalena to a place Badoglio believed would better guarantee his isolation: a vacated hotel at a ski resort perched seven thousand feet up on the Gran Sasso d’Italia, a range of the Apennines northeast of Rome. Mussolini was permitted to keep up with battle reports on the radio and to read the newspapers that came with the supplies toted through the mist each day by cable car from the fogbound cliffs below. One day he heard that Milan had been bombed heavily, including the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and its refectory. Only one wall of the refectory had withstood air attacks. On this wall was painted Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Mussolini was demoralized, anxious, and in physical pain from liver ailments and stomach ulcers. He had recently lost much weight, and he lacked energy. Fearful of being poisoned, he had eaten little since his imprisonment.
At two p.m. on Sunday, September 12, 1943, Mussolini heard the heavy droning sounds of several planes flying over the hotel, and he was surprised to see gliders swooping toward the mountainside, and finally landing softly in a pasture about one hundred yards from where he stood. Suddenly a German colonel, a commando of Austrian birth named Otto Skorzeny, appeared before him, saluted, and explained that he had come on direct orders from Hitler to liberate the Duce. Mussolini shook hands and said pleasantly, “From the beginning I was always convinced that the Führer would give me proof of his friendship.”
Mussolini was flown to Rome, then in a larger plane to Vienna. On the following day, in Munich, he was met by his wife, Rachele, and the youngest two of their five children, the teenagers Romano and Anna Maria. “I did not think that I would see you again,” said Mussolini as he received his wife. Their thirty-three-year-old daughter, Edda, wife of Ciano—with whom she had been stopped by the Germans from escaping to South America—was not part of the Duce’s greeting party; nor was the oldest Mussolini son, Vittorio, a twenty-seven-year-old military pilot. (The couple’s other pilot son, Bruno, born two years after Vittorio, had died in an air accident in Italy in 1941.) But Vittorio Mussolini would show up to greet the Duce a day later at Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg, in eastern Prussia. Here the Duce would embrace not only Vittorio but Hitler as well, and with them he would pose for photographs, and make cordial comments to the Axis-controlled press. He would also spend private hours with Hitler in the latter’s underground shelter, exchanging views in German without the presence of interpreters or stenographers; Mussolini would emerge from the lengthy dialogue with a sullen expression on his face that was appropriate to the terms he would henceforth be obliged to live by. He would be reinstalled as the Fascist leader of his homeland—Hitler thought it would have a stabilizing effect on the Italian population—but in actual fact he would be serving as Hitler’s puppet in Italy.
What was left of the Fascist army, and the subsequent additions to it drawn from northern and central Italy, was subservient to German authority. Mussolini’s government center was shifted from Rome to the northern Italian town of Salò, along the shores of Lake Garda, in the vicinity of alpine peaks and ski slopes; and here, throughout the winter of 1943–1944, he would not make a move without German instruction or supervision.
He made very few speeches in public, and when he did, even his Italian supporters remarked that his voice lacked timbre. His qualities as an actor declined along with his vocal powers, and while his health improved under the German doctors Hitler specifically sent to him, his once robust jaw and chest had clearly shrunk in size, and all the medals dangling from his newly tailored uniforms failed to resurrect his former image as Duce. It was suggested by some Fascists in his circle that Mussolini, almost desperate to seem decisive, was now receptive to partaking in a level of cruelty that was not truly in his heart. Edda, always his favorite among his five children, appealed to him repeatedly during this time to forgive the father of her three children, Ciano, for his concurring with the Fascist Grand Council when it had moved during the previous summer, nineteen votes to seven, to restore to the king and parliament the power and prerogatives that had for so long been assumed by the Duce.
The Grand Council, which had not criticized the Duce by name and which was functioning within its legal rights to circulate motions and respond to them, had not committed an act of treason against Benito Mussolini, in his daugh
ter’s opinion, and she saw no reason why her husband should be detained by the new Fascist regime as a prisoner of Italy. Most of the other Grand Council members were now in hiding, or had fled the country; five were currently in jail in Verona awaiting trial, one of them Ciano. Because of his marriage into Mussolini’s family, most Italians believed he would ultimately be pardoned, even though Rachele Mussolini and her son Vittorio did not support Edda’s appeals; to them, Ciano was a traitor of the most ungrateful sort imaginable, to say nothing of his alleged accumulation of illicit wealth during his time in government. But Edda was indefatigable and threatening in her father’s presence; she warned that should harm come to her husband she would see to it that his diaries be made public, making it clear that they contained much that was politically embarrassing and harmful to Mussolini.
On January 10, 1944, the Duce received a similar threat from Edda in writing. The letter had come from Switzerland, where she had escaped with her children. Her husband had not been pardoned, nor had the four other imprisoned Grand Council members; all had been convicted of treason by a court in Verona. Mussolini was outraged by the letter, and to his secretary he conceded that publication of Ciano’s diary could have “irreparable consequences.” But the Duce did nothing more at this point than he had done in the past to liberate his son-in-law.
On the morning of January 11, Ciano and the four others were taken before a firing squad and shot. Mussolini sent his secretary to witness the execution.
The Germans tried to defend southern Italy, but the Allies gradually overpowered them on the ground, in the air, and from ships that hugged the shorelines and bombarded German-occupied seaports and villages that had known war for centuries. On the west coast, Allied dive-bombers attacked Panzer divisions as the latter crossed Roman viaducts or sought cover behind Norman walls and the thirteenth-century buttresses built by the last German ruler of Italy, King Frederick II. On the east coast, the Allies targeted the ancient and once fearsome city of Crotone, which in 510 B.C. had invaded, torched, and buried forever its neighboring town of Sybaris. Allied amphibious battalions drove back Nazi machine-gunners along the beachfront of Pizzo, where in 1815 Joachim Murat had tripped over a fisherman’s net and was hauled before a Bourbon firing squad; and countless Italian towns and villages that had been depopulated through emigration were now depopulated further by Allied weapons often fired by the emigrants’ children and grandchildren. Italo-Americans served with Allied units that conquered the ancestral hometowns of American families named Iacocca and Cuomo, Ferraro and D’Amato and Auletta, and of a future rock singer surnamed Ciccone who would become known as Madonna. The birthplace of Mayor La Guardia’s father was strafed and cannonaded—while the mayor’s sister, Gemma Gluck, who had been living in Budapest at the start of the war with her husband, a Jewish bank clerk, was now imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. She would survive the war; her husband would not.
Among the Allied bomber crews with orders to strike Maida, which was then surrounded by German tank units and infantrymen, was an Italo-American from Ambler, Pennsylvania, whose father was employed by Keasbey & Mattison but whose grandfather and other kinsmen still resided in Maida. In the interest of greater safety, the bombardier’s relatives in Maida had recently moved downhill to the open fields of the valley, and were now living in tents located as far as possible from the crossfire of the warring soldiers in the highlands. A vast tent city had already been formed along the plains of the valley—hundreds of Maida families, virtually the entire village, had relocated there, including Joseph’s mother and the rest of his family. His brother Sebastian had at first refused to leave the village. “I’m staying right where I am,” he had insisted, as two of his uncles and his brother Nicola had arrived with a stretcher in his ground-floor room that opened on the yard with the animals.
“Come on, Sebastian,” Nicola had pleaded, “the planes might come any minute.”
“I’m staying,” repeated the gray-haired veteran of Caporetto, who, after his losses in the first war, perhaps felt he had little to lose in the second.
But one of his Rocchino uncles grabbed hold of Sebastian’s thin arms and tried to pull him from the cot, provoking screams from Sebastian. His mother then rushed into the room, carrying his freshly laundered clothes and an overcoat Joseph had sent from America.
“Get away from Sebastian, and wait for me outside!” she demanded. As the three of them turned to leave, she added, “And take that stretcher with you.”
Ten minutes later, fully dressed and with his hair combed, Sebastian walked slowly out of the house toward the carriages, with an arm around his mother.
The family lived for more than a week in the outdoors, dwelling in such close proximity to their townsmen that they were always surrounded by recognizable voices, by the familiar smells of their neighbors’ cooking, and by the sounds of the passeggiata which went on throughout the day in pastures edged by wheat fields and olive groves. Throughout the night the valley softly resounded with the litanies led by priests kneeling in front of wagon-wheeled altars; and from the churches in the hills came the sounds of bells, uninterrupted by the distant droning of planes and the occasional thunder of artillery. Many brave parishioners had remained in the churches, where they took their turns in the towers, ringing the bells at the appointed hours, and carrying the statue of Saint Francis through the vacated streets, praying that he would save the town from destruction. Maida’s police chief and its baron, together with the mayor and his megaphone, also remained; and thrice daily after the Angelus, the mayor stood along the edge of the Norman wall bellowing messages of reassurance to his constituents in the valley. But the clouds hung low, and there was so much fog during these days that the mayor could not see much farther than his megaphone, and at no time was there sufficient sunlight for anyone in the valley to see the outline of the town. Nor could Maida be seen by the Allied bomber pilots above, who were so thwarted by the clouds that enshrouded the mountain peaks that they dared not dip their wings in descent, for fear of turning the rocky highlands into their gravestones.
For three days and nights, while the bells rang and the litanies continued, the clouds hung heavily over the town, and during this time the Germans moved their defenses farther north, shifting the focus of battle closer to Naples.
48.
Throughout the winter of 1944, Joseph prayed several times each day in the living room of his home, kneeling on the red velvet of the prie-dieu under the portrait of the saint, ignoring the store bell below and leaving the operation of his business largely to his wife. He did this at Catherine’s suggestion, for he had been hospitalized after the Christmas holidays with appendicitis, and after returning to work he had become so uncharacteristically curt with the customers that he realized the business would be better served by his absence. A high percentage of the clientele now were American servicemen on shore leave, young men demanding quick service, often insisting that their uniforms be pressed or their newly earned chevrons be sewn on while they waited; and among such customers, many of whom had returned from triumphant tours in Sicily and Italy, Joseph could not always conceal the humiliation and divided loyalty he felt as an emotional double agent.
He had dutifully attended the memorial service for the town’s first war victim—Lieutenant Edgar Ferguson, a customer’s son who had died in Italy (Joseph had hesitated only briefly before approaching the victim’s family to express his condolences)—and Joseph had punctually participated in his daily shore patrol assignments along the boardwalk, on the lookout for German submarines with his fellow Rotarians, until his hospitalization had interfered; but since his release from the hospital in early February 1944, he had tried to isolate himself from his friends and business associates on this island that had become increasingly jingoistic as the war’s end seemed to be nearing and victory for the Allies seemed inevitable. He had stopped having lunch as usual at the corner restaurant near his shop because he was weary of the war talk at the counter, and tired of h
earing such tunes on the jukebox as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” He ceased attending the ten-fifteen Mass on Sunday mornings and went instead to an earlier one, at seven, which was less crowded and fifteen minutes shorter; it came without the sermon, which tended to be patriotic, and without the priest’s public prayers that singled out for blessing only the servicemen of the Allies.
Joseph continued to keep up with the war news in the daily press, but now he bought the papers at a newsstand beyond the business district, a six-block trip instead of the short walk to the corner cigar store, because he wanted to avoid the neighborhood merchants and his other acquaintances who lingered there and might try to draw him into their discussions about the war in Italy. The last time he had gone there, during the summer before his illness, Mussolini had dominated the headlines (he had just been imprisoned by the Italian king) and as Joseph left with his papers underarm, he heard a familiar voice calling out from the rear of the store: “Hey, Joe, what’s gonna happen to your friend now?”
Joseph glared at the men gathered around the soft-drink stand, and spotted his questioner—a thin, elderly man named Pat Malloy, who wore a white shirt and black bow tie and had worked for years behind the counter of the corner restaurant.
“He’s no friend of mine!” Joseph shouted, feeling his anger rise as he stepped down to the sidewalk and went quickly up the avenue with his papers folded inward so that the headlines and the photographs of the jowly-faced interned dictator were covered. Joseph did not make eye contact with the soldiers and sailors he saw among the strollers, although he could hardly avoid the American flags that flapped across the sidewalk in front of every shop on Asbury Avenue, including his own; and it was never possible at night to forget the ongoing war: the town was completely blacked out—all the streetlamps were painted black; lowered shades and drawn curtains hid the lighted rooms within houses; and few people drove their automobiles after dark, not only because there was a gas shortage but also because the required black paint on their headlights induced automobile accidents and collisions with pedestrians and wandering dogs.