Someday You Will Understand

by Nina Wolff Feld

  (That’s it for now; I see nothing but clouds.)

  Flying over an iceberg. A pal woke me up to show me. What a magnificent view! The blue sky is radiant. I would have liked to see the sun rise. It must have been a beautiful sight. I’m going back to sleep. 0800: We eat again. Sandwich, coffee, doughnut, pineapple juice etc. . . . We’re really hungry.

  We’re flying over the Atlantic at 7,000 feet, above the clouds. From time to time the wings cut through the clouds. They seem like a sea of bubble bath. It would be a good advertisement for Supersuds.

  The poor colonel is so bored. I lent him my Encore magazine. He’s really nice and quite young.

  The war correspondent/ex army officer is such a funny combination of Colonel Blimp and the little man with a red face and white mustache with a blonde on one knee and a cocktail on the other.

  There is some turbulence now, but it’s practically nothing. From my writing you can see, it practically nothing. God, would I like a cigarette! We aren’t allowed to smoke aboard, so everyone is chewing. It reminds me of the subway to Flatbush. They’re like cows chewing cud—cows that make Carnation Instant Milk. Before boarding the plane, speaking of dairy products, I gorged myself on ice cream.

  If I think back to the way I came to the United States—if I compare it with my deluxe plane—and the troop transport on which I escaped—I can only say that I must have had some nerve.

  We’re approaching the Azores. They’re not yet within view. Quite wonderful, though. Blue sky above, a few scattered white clouds below. Below the clouds—the sea is as blue as the sky. If the plane were upside down one would never know which end was up except for the sensation in the stomach. I’ll ask for permission to take photographs.

  Arrival in Terser. At 1315 EWT, we leave the island. . . . In Tercera it was already 1800. Picturesque island, beautiful view from above. Looks like a mosaic. Bought some Portuguese cigarettes with absolutely black tobacco, like cigars. I engaged the native “mess boys” in conversation and it went really well. I also became a member of the Short Snorters Club, made up of those of us crossing the Atlantic by plane. Important!

  When I left the plane, I also left my magazines. When I returned, they’d been stolen—the rest of my stuff wasn’t touched—minor tragedy.

  Approaching the African continent. We’ll be in Casablanca soon. I hope we stay for an hour or two. Qui vivra verra! You know, the plane is perfect for crossing the big pond. We’re crossing to the African side.

  30th of April—In Casablanca, it’s exactly 0040 now. . . . We left D.C. 24 hours ago. With the five-hour time difference, we’ve been on the road for 29 hours.

  That’s it for now.

  Until the next edition, good-bye

  Walter

  * * * *

  The last days of the war. Of all days to fly to Europe, he leaves on the 28th of April. On that day Mussolini along with his lover Clara Petacci was executed and hung from steel girders at a gas station in Piazzale Loreto in the center of Milan. On that day, Dachau was liberated. And finally, on that day the British news services reported that Himmler had sought negotiations with the Allies, offering to surrender the German armies to Eisenhower, which led the BBC to make an erroneous and premature announcement heard all over the world. Between what Hitler considered a supreme act of betrayal by his most trusted ally and the death of Mussolini, he drafted his final political testament before poisoning Eva Braun and taking his own life. He wrote: “I have decided . . . to remain in Berlin and there, of my own free will, to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Führer and chancellor itself can no longer be held. . . . I myself, as founder and creator of this movement, have preferred death to cowardly abdication or even capitulation.”

  During the five days that it took my father and his unit to reach southern Italy from Washington, DC, the war came to a final and definite conclusion. As they touched down successively in Newfoundland, the Azores, Casablanca, Oran, and finally Tunis, the Germans surrendered to General Mark W. Clark in Caserta, ending the spring offensive. Hitler and Eva Braun were dead, Mussolini’s battered body was buried, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his wife took the lives of their six young children by injecting them with morphine and then placing a cyanide tablet in each of their innocent mouths before taking their own lives in Hitler’s bunker. The children were found neatly prone in their nightclothes, with their hair combed just so.

  Night stole the remains of the African day, plunging the northern coast into darkness. The troop plane flew across the Tyrrhenian Sea toward the southern Italian coast. The only color in the velvety blackness was the flashing light at the tip of each wing. The sleepy lieutenant from Lorraine who had been chatting with my father was telling him how she had been promoted to lieutenant in the French army before she began to yawn and slowly leaned into his uniform, gently letting her head fall upon his shoulder, where it remained for the rest of the flight. He glanced over at his friend George, who was sitting behind an RAF lieutenant and an American sailor. Scarcely moving a muscle so as not to disturb the lieutenant from Lorraine, he mouthed with his chin protruded and his lips pursed toward the Red Cross volunteer: “Toi aussi?”

  “Eh oui,” whispered George. The Parisian held the girl in his arms until he too fell into a deep sleep. When the girl woke up, she unhinged herself and went off to play pinochle with the pilot.

  Opening his eyes a short while later, George said, “L’avion vole tout seul . . . autopilote!” (The plane is flying all by itself. Autopilot!) After he heard the door to the cockpit close, he glanced around, looking to fill his now-vacant arms.

  The early morning light highlighted the coastline as the plane flew over the Mars-like terrain of the volcanic Phlegraean Fields outside of Naples, still bubbling and steaming with seismic activity. Now and again my father could make out the Roman and Greek ruins, some of which were hidden beneath the crisp azure blue of the sea. Cloud cover masked the damage to the towns and villages below. Moments later, in what felt like an instant, the wheels skidded against the tarmac.

  * * * *

  I read the next letters a hundred times before I recognized his omissions. On the surface they are simple and wonderful, but they never tell the whole story. Now that I have a better foundation, I have more questions. The problem was phrasing the questions to provide for the correct answers. At first they came haltingly, and, since the questions were unclear, the answers were always wrong. But by studying the wrong answers, I found the vocabulary for the next question, and the next, until, as in a chase in a good book, I began sleuthing like an obsessed gumshoe.

  1550 May 3rd, 1945

  On an airplane above Southern Italy:

  I haven’t written you since Casablanca . . . on May 1st, also by air. It’s from there that I’m continuing my story, and I’ll write you about Casa and Africa later. . . .

  We arrived at our destination in Southern Italy without incident. There, apparently no one had heard of us. Finally, after three hours of going between the cafeteria and the PX, I succeeded in securing our transport with the baggage. Ah, the good old telephone! When we arrived at our HQ, our commander received us very cordially. It was in a very nice town. We had great quarters in an annex of an immense royal castle. The officer’s mess was located in the main area, and the cooks prepared the food in the basement . . . European cuisine. Upon arrival, the commander gave me my choice of jobs. I chose (and then you can tell everyone else because that will be my address). I chose Quartermaster of the 5th Army Regiments. I could have had a job as Quartermaster of the entire Army Regiments—of the Mediterranean, but I chose this for good reason. You see, there is so much damage in the South, to have a pleasant life I prefer the North. The war is over anyway, and my placement would be the same in both cases. Anyhow, I don’t like the climate there. Last night I went to Naples. They say one should see this city and then die. As far as I’m concerned, one should die first. It’s an ugly place, and so very Italian. I’ll discuss
it again at the end of this letter or in the next. Before the end of the day, I will have passed through Florence. Fast life I’m leading here!

  I hope you received my 20-page letter sent from Casablanca by airmail. That letter was written aboard an airplane and gave you all the details about our crossing that the censor would allow. . . .

  At the moment we’re circling the Italian coastline and approaching Rome. My buddy says we’ve already passed over it. No, it’s not Rome. From the other side we see the island of Elba. We have a group of USO entertainers with us on this flight, some of them famous, and the young women are extremely beautiful. . . . I would love to take pictures of every one of them. They’re all wearing uniforms. Now we’re passing through a small storm, and the girls have woken up and we’ve taken the opportunity to get their autographs.

  I’m here at my temporary destination. I also visited Florence, a beautiful city, slightly damaged. Tomorrow we push on. It’s better here in the North—everything is more civilized. And I understand their Italian perfectly, whereas in the south I had a hard time understanding. This evening when I arrived at airport Y, I couldn’t get transport—until I saw a poilu [French soldier] with a jeep who promptly took us where we needed to go. I’m so glad I brought my TSF. It’s a treasure, and it works everywhere. We were really welcomed here as well, by the GIs and the Tommys both.

  All of my letters are for everyone. I have no time to repeat myself . . . I’m doing the work of a correspondent—speaking to dozens of people. Please send your letters by AIRMAIL.

  Having read to this point, I had a general idea of where my father was but couldn’t figure out the details. If he was flying over Southern Italy, where exactly was this “immense royal castle” he wrote about? By digging, I found out that they were taken to Reggia Caserta, the seat of the Allied Command Headquarters of General Mark W. Clark, after landing at Marcianise Airfield north-northwest of Naples. Caserta is Italy’s version of Versailles. It is a twelve-hundred-room castle built in the 1700s for the Duke of Bourbon. When architect Luigi Vanvitelli designed Reggia Caserta, I doubt he had any idea that Allied soldiers would use it as their headquarters any more than he thought he should engineer the grand staircase to support the load from 5th Army Regiment’s jeeps as they drove up and down them, with the soldiers who were in too much of a hurry to walk.

  The letter, dated May 3rd, was still confusing, because he was flying north and arrived at a temporary destination. One morning, at my favorite Italian café in New York, I started a conversation with my friend Lorenzo, the maître d’. He was a history buff and a voracious reader, originally from Salò, on Lake Garda in Lombardy. He listened to my queries carefully, and within a minute my months of exasperation evaporated when he said that my father must have gone to Salò. Later that day, I called him after I’d had the chance to do some more research about the events that unfolded in the days and hours before and after Mussolini’s death. With my new understanding, the answer was obvious. Salò had been the seat of the former Fascist government, and that’s where my father must have flown. Before fleeing toward the Swiss border, Mussolini and his convoy had packed at least one truck with documents and another with boxes of files, which, if I’m not mistaken, remain at the bottom of Lake Como to this day. Over the course of the next two days my father made his way back to Southern Italy and the castle in Caserta, where he became one of the first postmortem translators of Mussolini’s documents.

  May 5th, 1945

  Evening

  My Dears,

  After having read and classified the documents of the ex-Duce B. Mussolini during the past two days, and after having translated one part of the orders of the Allied Forces to the Nazis in Northern Italy for unconditional surrender, I’m very happy to be writing in French. Ah, what a pleasure it is to take an active part in the humiliation of these arrogant murderers, what a pleasure to write their defeat and our victory.

  You have certainly read the history of the surrender of General Vietinghoff and the SS General Wolff (whom everyone teasingly calls “my cousin”). Well, that surrender occurred about 100 feet from the building where I work.

  Yes, I am, for the moment at least, in the headquarters of General Mark Clark as the address shows. I had so much to do with Benito’s paperwork that I had no time to see anything. It was so interesting to follow the minute details of the history of Fascism, of all the participants in this tragedy without a happy ending. The bastard KEPT everything, but everything. We had 42 postal bags in all—and that represents only a part of his personal documents. There is so much that I understand now. There were complete dossiers on his collaboration with Hitler, from 1931 on. Italy’s part in the Spanish Civil War, the defeat of the Macaronis at Guadalajara, dossiers on the scandal in which his sons were implicated, on his daughter, Edda Ciano, who wasn’t the most religious of people, etc. . . . etc. . . . He was as conniving as a Boche, the bastard.

  I visited Florence, a beautiful city with heavy damage in some parts, but in general everything is normal. The stores aren’t empty here, we find a little of everything, including some luxury items. The people are very friendly, not like in the South.

  The reason? Because the South was already poor before our attack and the German defense, which caused terrible damage, whereas here the Boches are responsible. The murderers mined entire neighborhoods, especially on the Arno, near the bridges they blew up before their departure. You should have seen the neighborhoods bordering the river: they looked like Abbeville.

  With all of this Italian paperwork I’ve been reading, my Italian is coming back very quickly; and so I can speak to people. In the main, I’ve noticed that the common people, those who are influenced by propaganda directed at the masses, admit that for them fascism represents order and education. They blame us for their misery, which admittedly is great; because in peacetime and before our arrival, they ate better. They forget that it is to Hitler and the idiocy of Muss. that they owe their misery. The North suffered a lot during the [German] occupation. Our arrival was their liberation.

  Still, here, as in the South, I see far too many people wearing one or the other of the Fascist uniforms with the symbols removed, sometimes replaced by the star of the partisans, or the insignia of the new police and army.

  The wine isn’t bad and as ever not very expensive, but I refuse to drink anything stronger, because the bastards put rubbing alcohol in the Cognac, vermouth, etc. That practice is forbidden with wine, though they sometimes cut it with water. That at least isn’t harmful and is easily noticed.

  Everyone is trying to buy my TSF because no one has one. There aren’t any cigarettes for the civilians. Our ration is the same as we had at Ritchie—and I have too many. If I sold them, I could make a fortune, but I’m not interested. 1 lire is equal to one penny—nothing. However, we can buy everything at the PX. What you can send me is my flashlight. And I don’t want that square thing you bought, Chère Mamo; I would really like the one with the long neck and the ring I attached. Also, in limited quantities I would accept chocolate, not the pralines or other sticky candy, but ordinary Hershey etc. . . . And nothing else for the moment. If I need anything else, I’ll write to you. I hope to find the time tomorrow to write again. Please note: my address is G2 sec. HQ 15th Army group A PO 777. Halt. Let me revise that. Instead, write me at 2680 HQ co M.I.S APO 512. You could reach me there even if I were transferred.

  Kisses,

  Walter

  Mt. Vesuvius loomed in the background as they headed north through the fertile plains of Campania. Sometimes, come nightfall, rising gases from the volcano would streak the night sky, creating an eerie incandescence. My father’s first few days in Italy were the beginning of what he would call his Cook’s tour of Europe, leading him north from the heel and south again to a room where the treasure trove of Mussolini’s vital documents waited for him to sift through. Despite the richness of what my father left me from his years in the army, there is one missing piece that has yet to turn up. From one
of those forty-two postal bags, my father, shall we say, purloined a letter that was part of a correspondence between Mussolini and his son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, which my father discusses in a letter dated June 26, 1945:

  As far as the Ciano affair is concerned, I’m in possession of a very interesting document. I’m sure, dear Ellen, your Italian is sufficient to understand the letter. I want you to make some cash with it. Go to the New York Times or the Post or PM—but not to the Fascist Hearst-McCormack press. DO NOT give them the letter, but have them make photocopies. I’m certain someone will find it of interest. The envelope is very important, because it authenticates the letter inside. If it is published, I’d like to see the article; after all, an international prostitute should have a little publicity. Do not give out your address or mine, nor my name or yours. Capice? If you’re asked where you got it, you can say someone sent it from Italy. It will make a good supplement to Ciano’s personal journal if it’s published in the Times! And get paid for this, it has value!!

  The whereabouts of the letter remain a mystery.

  * * * *

  Even with all the devastation, there was no question that my father was happy to be back in Europe after four years. The Continent was his life force and would lend him strength until blood stopped flowing to his heart and he took his last breath. I am sure that, from the moment he landed and caught sight of the bright Italian sun as it lit the marble walls of Italy’s Versailles, he decided he would never again countenance such a long absence. As he traveled, he observed the debris left in the wake of the tidal wave of war. He was consumed by what he saw and struggled to understand how this much devastation was possible. He wanted to reassure his readers of the will and hope of those who were not as lucky.