Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

  But that was too long for the Allies. Allowing seventy-two hours for the news to reach all German units in the field, they wanted the agreement signed that same day to prevent any further loss of life. They calculated that Wenner and von Schweinitz would have to leave Caserta with the agreement by 3:00 p.m. at the latest, if they were to be safely back on their own side of the line by nightfall. There was no more time to lose.

  Bowing to the inevitable, the two Germans agreed to the surrender. It was signed at two that afternoon, in the ballroom of the royal palace. The room was crowded when they arrived for the ceremony: eleven British and American generals and admirals, a Russian general and his interpreter, several other officers, and a battery of newspapermen and radio journalists flown in from Rome for the day. The Germans were disconcerted to see film cameras as well and a row of klieg lights and microphones. They had been expecting to sign the surrender in private, not least because they were afraid of being murdered if their identities became known, killed as traitors by their own people when they got home.

  Yet there was nothing they could do about it. Schweinitz repeated his claim that he was exceeding his powers in agreeing to the internment of the Wehrmacht, but was told to sign anyway. Wenner signed, too, sitting in a sports jacket at the end of a long table. The ceremony was over by 2:17 p.m. The Germans were airborne by three o’clock, taking off in an Allied aircraft from Marcianise airfield, en route for Annecy in the Haute-Savoie. From there, they were due to travel in plain clothes to Switzerland, and thence through the night to Bolzano. The surrender was still a secret, not to be revealed until it came into effect at 2:00 p.m. on May 2. It remained to be seen what General von Vietinghoff would make of the agreement when he met the two envoys and learned the severity of the terms.

  * * *

  NAPLES HAD BEEN IN ALLIED HANDS since October 1943, but the city was still not back to normal. It had been heavily bombed before the Allies arrived, the docks and factories pounded repeatedly in the run-up to the invasion. Food remained scarce, and the black market was rife. Prostitution was still rampant, among not just local women, but others from all over southern Italy who had flocked to Naples to sell themselves to the Allied soldiers, particularly the black troops of the American army, who were the kindest to them and paid the most.

  In the port of Pozzuoli, a few miles around the bay from Naples, Romilda Villani had been struggling for years to bring up two illegitimate children without any help from their father. A good-looking woman, she had won a cinema competition at seventeen to discover “The Girl Who Is Garbo’s Double.” The prize had been a trip to Hollywood and a screen test with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her father had forbidden her from taking it up, so Romilda had gone to Rome instead, where a man claiming to be a film producer had swiftly seduced her, leaving her pregnant with her eldest daughter, Sofia, and later also Maria.

  Now they were back in Pozzuoli, living in squalor on the Via Solfatara, so named for the sulfur that steamed from the nearby volcano. Their house had been damaged in an air raid, the windows blown out, the walls cracked, and the roof sagging, but they had patched it up as best they could and were making do, struggling every day to find enough to eat. Romilda had opened their top floor apartment to American servicemen, giving them an Italian home to relax in for a few hours during the day, somewhere to sing around the piano and forget about the war for a while. The Americans brought food, fantasized about Romilda, and smiled at Sofia, so ugly and skinny at the age of ten that she looked as if she had never had a square meal in her life.

  Sofia had only been five when Italy entered the war. German soldiers had arrived in Pozzuoli soon afterward, as she later recalled:

  They were our allies then, and friendly, and my earliest memories are of delightedly watching the young, handsome soldiers in their beautiful uniforms, playing war games in the back yards of the houses on our street. I don’t think I had ever seen a blond, blue-eyed man before the German soldiers arrived. It was exciting to stand in front of our house and watch the troops march by, and it was especially exciting when long columns of tanks rumbled down the street.8

  But the honeymoon hadn’t lasted long. As the war came closer, the Germans had turned on their allies, taking out their frustrations on Jewish Italians first, then the rest of the population as well:

  Seeing it for myself, I really understood the appalling viciousness of war. Inanimate bombs dropping from the sky, wounded people lying in the streets, the lack of food and water, were awful, but not as bad as a human being, dressed in a soldier’s uniform, committing an atrocity against another, defenceless human being. Now that I actually observed these mounting atrocities from my balcony, I finally understood the full terribleness of war. I saw men grabbed on the streets below me, beaten, thrown into German army trucks and hauled away. People were shot in the streets without warning. My young eyes saw one appalling, gruesome spectacle after another.9

  Sofia herself had been a casualty, injured in the air raid that damaged her house. Her chin had been lacerated by shrapnel as she ran for cover. She still carried the scar, as GI Charles Dial had noticed. Sitting with Romilda one afternoon, neither of them able to speak a word of the other’s language, he had invited her to bring Sofia to his camp seven miles away, where he would scrounge some food for them and ask the medics to take a look at Sofia’s chin. Mother and daughter had duly presented themselves at the gate, only to be arrested as potential looters. Dial had been preparing for guard duty when he heard:

  A guy from C Company comes up to the tent and tells me they’ve got a blonde and her kid locked up. She told them she’d been asked out to visit me—and so she had. I went down and got them out of jail and brought them back to our area. Romilda had walked all the way from Pozzuoli with the little girl. She’s a cute little kid. Mom has her all dressed up in a navy blue coat and little brown kid gloves—a real effort these days. She’s about nine years old—very quiet and serious with very dark eyes. Unfortunately, she’ll never have her mother’s looks. She’s probably scared to death of all us dirty, smelly GIs. I took them over to the medics to see what they could do about the little girl’s chin.10

  The Americans had been good to Romilda and her daughters. So had the Scots, strange men in skirts fighting off attempts by the street urchins to discover what they wore underneath. The only Allied troops they didn’t trust were the Moroccans, who had been recruited to the war on the promise of all the women they wanted whenever there was no fighting. The Moroccans had an appetite for women of all kinds, and children, too, of both sexes. Some thought nothing of rape, or sex with child prostitutes, thousands of whom were willing to oblige them for nothing more than a blanket or a tin of Spam.

  A number of Moroccan soldiers had been billeted on the ground floor of Romilda’s house. They were commanded by a French officer who did little to control them, or stop them drinking. With rape a distinct possibility, and child prostitution never far from her thoughts, Sofia had regarded the troops with trepidation:

  To get to our flat on the top floor, we had to pass by the Moroccans, and it was always frightening. They would talk to us in a language we didn’t understand, and with their gestures tease us and pretend that they were going to go after us. Actually they never molested us. A couple of times in the dead of night, though, when they had had much too much to drink, they did come pounding on our door, to frighten us.11

  But the Moroccans would be gone soon, now that Mussolini was dead and the war all but over. The Americans would be gone, too, with their cheerful friendliness and their bars of chocolate. Whatever the future held for Sofia, later Sophia Loren, and her younger sister, later Mrs. Romano Mussolini, they knew that it could hardly be more traumatic for them than the immediate past.

  * * *

  HAROLD MACMILLAN was in Assisi when he learned of Mussolini’s death, making a quick visit to the monastery on Mount Subasio, where St. Francis had lived. As political adviser to Field Marshal Alexander, the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean t
heater, Macmillan had done much of the groundwork for the German surrender in Italy, but had decided to absent himself from the actual signing ceremony in Caserta in order to allay the suspicions of the Russians, who did not trust political advisers. Macmillan had spent the day in Assisi instead, visiting the monastery in the morning and going round Assisi’s great churches in the afternoon.

  It was a very busy time for him. He had been in Bologna on April 23, a few hours after the town’s liberation, inspecting the corpses of local dignitaries shot by the Fascists before they fled. The Fascists’ leader had been shot in turn, captured by the partisans before he could escape, and executed against the same wall. Macmillan had been shown the blood on the ground and the man’s brains spattered against the brickwork.

  From Bologna, he had driven by Jeep to Modena under desultory sniper fire. The town had been in the process of liberating itself when he arrived. German troops and Italian Fascists had been defending themselves from windows along the main street while partisans advanced from house to house. As the first of the Allies to appear in the town, Macmillan and his British and American companions had swiftly found themselves recruited to the cause:

  Our arrival at the Municipio [town hall] caused some excitement. There was a lot of shouting and embracing. The leader of the partisans kissed me on both cheeks on being told that I was the famous Haroldo Macmillano—said by the BBC to be the ruler and father of the Italian people. I was presented with an armlet and taken into the Town Hall to be formally enrolled.12

  As a civilian, albeit with a partisan armband, Macmillan had tried to do as little fighting as honor would allow:

  But naturally one had to pretend to do something. It was really quite an exciting little action while it lasted and quite spirited. Of course a lot of partisans fired off their pieces quite aimlessly and threw grenades just for fun. Indeed, these gentlemen and their curious assortment of rifles, grenades, tommy-guns etc caused me more alarm than our opponents.13

  Afterward, Macmillan’s Jeep had come under sniper fire again as he tried to return to Bologna. He and his companions had had to abandon their vehicles and run for cover while the partisans tackled the sniper from a neighboring house. They had reached Bologna eventually, where girls with Fascist sympathies were having their heads forcibly shaved, and from there had continued to Rome. After a few more days at his desk, Macmillan had slipped away to Assisi with Robert Cecil, a wounded British officer who had been seconded to him as an aide-de-camp.

  It was evening when they learned that Mussolini had been hanged, as the first broadcasts had it. As night fell, they also received a message from Field Marshal Alexander, saying that the Germans had signed the surrender on the terms agreed. Afterward, Macmillan and Cecil switched off the wireless and went out for a walk, still unable to believe that the war was actually coming to an end. The night was lovely. The whole valley of Assisi was bathed in moonlight as they strolled. In his mind, Macmillan compared Adolf Hitler unfavorably to St. Francis and was quietly thankful that he found himself in such a beautiful place as the carnage of the past few years drew to a close at last.

  * * *

  IN THE HILLTOP TOWN of Sant’Ambrogio, overlooking Rapallo and the Gulf of Genoa, American poet Ezra Pound was in a very different frame of mind as he contemplated Mussolini’s death and the advance of the Allied army. As a U.S. citizen and a longtime supporter of fascism, he was terrified of what the future held for him once the Allies were in control. Pound had made no secret of his opinions during the war, signing his name to Fascist manifestos and making pro-Mussolini, anti-Semitic broadcasts on Italian radio. The U.S. government had indicted him for treason in 1943. The penalty for treason was death.

  Pound had lived in Rapallo since 1925. He had spent most of the war in the flat on the Via Marsala that he shared with his English wife, Dorothy. But the flat was on the seafront, in the way of the German coastal defenses. Ordered out in 1943, Pound and his wife had moved in with his mistress, Olga Rudge, who lived in nearby Sant’Ambrogio. The two women knew each other well, although relations were never easy. Olga had a daughter by Pound, who had been fostered out to parents in the Italian Tyrol. Dorothy had a son by an unknown Egyptian, conceived when she traveled alone to Egypt before the war.

  Pound was undecided about what to do as the Fascists fled from Rapallo and the partisans moved in ahead of the Americans. Like many others, he did not regret his Fascist leanings and remained convinced that time would prove him right in the end. He was aware, though, that Fascists were being hunted down and shot all over Italy. He knew, too, that he was wanted by the Americans, who had circulated his photograph and description. The problem for him was whether to run and hide—and, if so, where?—or whether to stay put and bluff it out.

  Pound had already fled once, abandoning Rome hours before the city’s capitulation to the Allies in 1944. Heading north on foot, he had slept rough for several nights, traveling a total of 450 miles, some of it by train, to join his daughter’s foster family in the Tyrol. From there, he had made his way several weeks later to Sant’Ambrogio, where his wife and mistress were waiting for him.

  He had also tried to give himself up when the Americans reached Rapallo. Presenting himself at their headquarters in the town, he had offered his services “as having lots of information about Italy which could be of use.” But the Americans were far too busy when they first arrived to worry about Pound, whoever he might be. Failing to make any impression, he had been sent away again, left to his own devices to do as he pleased. Pound was pretty sure, though, that that would not be the end of the matter. Either the Americans or the partisans would come for him, sooner or later. They surely had his name on a list somewhere.

  Until they came, however, he could only sit and wait. He kept busy by translating Chinese philosophy from the Book of Mencius. He knew that he risked being shot for treason, but he was convinced that the American sense of justice would never allow that to happen. All he had ever done was exercise his right to free speech on the radio, ranting against the Jews on the day of Pearl Harbor, claiming that they had President Roosevelt in their pocket. The Americans surely wouldn’t execute him for anything as stupid as that.

  * * *

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF ITALY, the U.S. Air Force’s 488th Squadron had just arrived in Rimini, its new posting on the Adriatic. Until mid-April, the bombers had been at Alesan in Corsica, their base for repeated operations against German-occupied France and Italy. The squadron had spent most of 1944 in Corsica, taking heavy casualties as the war intensified on the mainland. So many aircrew had been lost that the number of missions they had to fly to qualify for rotation back to the United States had been raised again and again, from twenty-five initially to eighty by the end. No matter how many sorties they flew, it seemed to the airmen that the bar was always raised just before they reached it. There was invariably a catch of some kind to prevent them from going home.

  Lieutenant Joseph Heller had joined the squadron as a bombardier in May 1944. For the rest of that year he and his friend Francis Yohannon had flown repeated sorties against the enemy, risking their lives in broad daylight as the flak came up at them over the target. The Germans had long since run out of fighter aircraft, but they had a bad habit of sending up a single plane to fly alongside the Americans and radio their exact height and speed back to the antiaircraft batteries below. The flak that burst around the 488th’s B25 bombers was often far too close for comfort.

  Heller was inclined to take the antiaircraft fire personally. He knew the Germans weren’t aiming at him in particular, but that meant little when the end remained the same: “They were trying to kill me, and I wanted to go home. That they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation. They were trying to kill me.”14

  Heller’s worst moment had come on his thirty-seventh mission, a more than usually dangerous raid over Avignon, in the south of France. From his position in the bombardier’s compartment he had seen a plane in front hit by flak, bur
sting into flames and losing a wing as it fell out of the sky with no possibility of any parachutes. His own aircraft had then gone into a seemingly terminal dive of its own as the pilot panicked. After the aircraft leveled out, Heller had crawled back to help the top gunner, whose thigh had been shattered by flak. Swallowing his nausea, Heller had poured sulfanilamide into the gaping hole before covering it with a sterile compress. He had administered a shot of morphine in addition, after the gunner complained of the pain. The man had survived, but Heller had never forgotten the horror of that mission. He had remained terrified of flying ever since.

  Yet that was all in the past now. Magically, unbelievably, Heller had completed his tour of duty in December 1944. He had filled his quota of sixty combat missions just before it rose to seventy and had qualified for an immediate return to the United States. Heller had spent the days until his departure in a tent with a couple of newcomers, one of whom had brought a typewriter on which Heller had practiced his writing skills while he waited. He was thinking of becoming a writer after the war was over.

  Heller had been given the choice of returning to America by land or sea. He had plumped unequivocally for the sea, preferring to sail from Naples and risk being torpedoed, rather than take a flight he didn’t have to. Back in the States, he had immediately asked to be taken off flying status, even though it meant a considerable cut in pay. While the rest of the 488th remained in Corsica, Heller had seen out the war as an air force public relations officer in Texas. He was in San Angelo when the Italian campaign ended, promising himself that for as long as he lived he would never fly in an airplane again.