Decoded using the text of L’omnibus del corso, the first full messages, which were received in Algiers on the morning of 30 August, carried news that ‘Olaf’ was free.35 As SOE learned later, Mallaby, after being pulled from the lake, beaten up and quizzed, had been transferred from Como to Milan for further investigation by SIM, and then sent back to the cells in Como. But he had not remained in prison for long. On returning to Italy, Castellano had immediately instructed that Mallaby be sent to him.
Concerned that he might suspect an Italian trap if asked by his captors to work a wireless set on their behalf, Cecil Roseberry had primed Castellano with certain messages and facts that would, he hoped, convince the young man that SOE was genuinely involved. These included Mallaby’s real name and rank, plus ‘a covert hint to communicate with us in his own code to prove to us that he was working without restraint’.36 Castellano would remember that Mallaby, being ‘completely in the dark’, had still taken some convincing before agreeing to co-operate.37 When Mallaby finally said he would help, the Italians then installed him on the top floor of the Palazzo Vidoni, the Rome headquarters of the Comando Supremo. There, with the assistance of a senior Italian wireless operator by the name of Baldanza, he began coding and sending the outgoing Monkey messages and receiving and decoding the signals received.
Major Luigi Marchesi, an Italian officer into whose care he had been placed, would later recall that Mallaby had also been helped by a team of three young Italian sergeants: Otello Griffoni, Luciano Del Col and Mario Della Corte. One or two published accounts have made the romantic claim that Mallaby transmitted from the sixteenth-century Palazzo del Quirinale, the official residence of the Italian king, but there is no evidence to support this. In fact, Mallaby became so concerned that German direction-finding techniques might pick up his transmissions that at one point, together with his Italian team, he was moved to an apartment in the city’s outskirts. The apartment turned out to be in close proximity to a staff office of the German Red Cross.38
When Rome began sending, ‘Massingham’ spotted from the style of Morse-keying that at least two operators in Rome were taking turns to transmit. That one of these was Mallaby was confirmed when, in response to a reply from Algiers, he sent a message using the original code that SOE had given him prior to his parachute drop. As Algiers began to send more signals and a regular dialogue developed, Mallaby – realising that he, too, knew people at the opposite end – managed to add some personal messages to the outgoing traffic drafted by Badoglio’s staff. ‘Give my love to Mary Blondie and Miss Grinville [sic],’ reads one of them. ‘Wish I were with you.’39 ‘Mary Blondie’ was Mary McIntyre, Douglas Dodds-Parker’s blonde secretary at ‘Massingham’. ‘Miss Grinville’ was Christine Granville, a Polish SOE agent – her real name was Krystyna Skarbek – much written about since the war; Mallaby had been her wireless instructor, and the two had become friends.40
‘I recollect vividly my tremendous relief,’ wrote Kenneth Strong of hearing that signals had been received over the Monkey link. ‘The conversations in Lisbon had not failed. Our confidence in Castellano was justified.’41 Justified, too, had been the faith invested in SOE’s ability to provide a secure, rapid and regular way of keeping in contact with Rome. But Badoglio and Eisenhower’s only channel of communication would also prove vital, for the coming negotiations with Rome were to become very far from straightforward.
‘They do not want to humiliate us,’ Castellano had reported on returning to Rome, pointing out that ‘the formula of unconditional surrender’ had been changed to ‘Armistice Terms’ and that there was now ‘an entire change of attitude favourable to us which must be held in great consideration’. But it was ‘certain’, he had added, ‘that the diplomatic phase, that is, the one which intended to make known the conditions of the country and which asked for Anglo-American intervention before any action on our part, is now definitely over. General [Bedell] Smith’s decisive attitude was an indication of this trend since he permitted no further discussions.’ As Castellano also put it: ‘today it is only General Eisenhower who speaks’. Convinced that the Italians had little room to manoeuvre, he had therefore been stunned and disgusted to find few of his superiors in Rome ready to accept the Allies’ terms. These men included Badoglio, whom Castellano seems to have considered an indecisive old fool afflicted by ‘a softening of the brain aggravated by ill breeding’, and Raffaele Guariglia, Badoglio’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs.42
A good sense of the tension and dithering – and mudslinging – in senior Italian circles can be found in Castellano’s diary. In this, he gave his frustration full vent:
The 27th of August …
I briefly related the events of my trip and I read the armistice terms. The Marshal [Badoglio] behaved like an imbecile. Guariglia objects stating that we cannot ask for an armistice because if we did the Germans would butcher us. He would like to see the Anglo-Americans invade Italy without any assistance being offered on our part (thusly conducting ourselves as cowards) …
The 28th of August …
Guariglia criticizes my doings [in Madrid and Lisbon] and affirms that I should not have alluded to military co-operation. (Then what would have been my reason for having gone?) Ambrosio defends me. Guariglia does not want to accept [the Allied terms], saying that we cannot ask for an armistice at the moment of the landing but only after the landing had taken place and after the Anglo-Americans are entrenched in Italy. [To Ambrosio] I repeat that in this situation with an imbecile at the head of the government and with a coward as Foreign Minister, no headway can be made …
The 29th of August …
As soon as I arrive at the office I go to see Ambrosio to tell him that according to my way of thinking, it is necessary to go above Badoglio’s head …
At eleven, I accompanied Ambrosio to the Quirinale Palace. The King, through [the Minister of the Royal Household, Duke Pietro] Acquarone, states that the head of the government will decide first [on what action to take] and then he will give the last word.
Badoglio, Ambrosio and Guariglia hold a meeting in a private room. A few minutes later they go to see the King. Upon coming out, Ambrosio made a sign to the effect that the answer had been negative. He then beckoned me to join him and Badoglio. They asked me what procedure would have to be followed in order to give a reply [to the Allied demand for acceptance of the armistice terms] which would neither be yes or no. I answered that I had agreed with [Bedell] Smith only upon a definite yes or no.
Badoglio picks up his hat and kicks me out … stating that these are ‘questions of government’ and that I ‘Mister Castellano’ should depart. I am dumbfounded.43
On 31 August, and in line with a plan proposed in Lisbon and confirmed by messages over the Monkey link, Castellano, still acting as Rome’s delegate, flew from the Italian mainland to Sicily to resume discussions. His aircraft, a three-engined Savoia-Marchetti, was met by Allied fighters and escorted safely to the ground. Waiting for him among the olive trees at Cassibile – a little town near Siracusa where the commander of all Allied forces in Sicily, General Sir Harold Alexander, had his tented headquarters – were Bedell Smith and Strong. Both were now back in uniform. Neither was amused to find that Castellano had been authorised by Badoglio to sign an armistice only on the condition that the Italian Government should be informed where, and in what strength, the Allies would land in Italy.
That condition was immediately dismissed. ‘We had already decided that for security reasons we could not give the Italians precise information,’ Kenneth Strong recalled:
We could only keep impressing on Castellano that we intended to land in force; that whatever he said or did Italy was doomed to become a battlefield; [and] that we would declare an armistice before we landed but that we could not give any exact information of our intentions and plans until shortly before the landing took place.
Told to return immediately to Italy and secure a final decision, Castellano left that night. ‘All our nerves w
ere on edge,’ Strong wrote, ‘and we could do nothing but wait.’44
On the morning of 2 September, Castellano flew again to Sicily. Again he was found to lack the authority to sign the armistice terms. ‘The situation was becoming ridiculous,’ remembered Strong. ‘The invasion was due to take place in a few days’ time and many of our plans were based on reaching some kind of agreement.’ The highest-ranking officer in Sicily at the time, General Alexander, now entered the arena, ‘booted, spurred and bemedalled’ for the occasion. When the Italians told him that they were unable to sign the terms, Alexander ‘burst into a torrent of angry words’. He indicated, ‘in Hitlerian manner, that his sorely tried patience was at an end,’ and delivered ‘a sound lecture on the disgraceful manner in which they were endangering not only our own military operations but even the future of Italy’.45 Castellano, via Monkey, dispatched a chaser to Rome. ‘The Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, will not discuss any military matters whatever unless a document of acceptance of the armistice conditions is signed,’ his message began. ‘As operations against the Peninsula will begin very shortly with landings, this signature is extremely urgent …’46
Finally, over the Monkey link on the afternoon of 3 September, a message was heard from Badoglio authorising Castellano to sign. An hour later, seated at a wooden camp table in an army tent in an olive grove close to Cassibile, he and Bedell Smith duly signed the agreed armistice terms.
‘We picked branches from the trees to keep as mementos of the occasion,’ Strong recalled. ‘General Rooks produced a bottle of whisky; we drank out of rather dirty glasses and Bedell Smith, Castellano, Montanari and I had our photographs taken.’47 The most famous photograph of the events at Cassibile demonstrates how SOE had helped with the negotiations in another way. In the centre of the shot, between a seated and signing Bedell Smith and the short and sturdy frame of a black-suited Castellano, stands a young British officer in the uniform and forage cap of the Queen’s Royal Regiment. This is Captain Edward ‘Teddy’ de Haan. Twenty-three years old, he had lived in Milan for ten years as a boy, spoke Italian fluently, and, when war broke out, had been a hotel manager’s apprentice at the Savoy, Fortunato Picchi’s old employer. Joining the army, de Haan had transferred to SOE in 1942 and was manning the Italian desk at ‘Massingham’ when suddenly summoned to Sicily and given the job of Allied interpreter for the talks with Castellano.
With the ink barely dry on the documents signed at Cassibile, discussions continued, still in conditions of great secrecy, as Allied officers and Badoglio’s delegates sought to prepare for the main invasion of Italy and ensure that the Germans were not alerted too soon to what was coming. Although two British divisions landed on Italy’s toe on the night of 3 September, Rome had agreed that news of the armistice would stay secret until Eisenhower revealed it to the world in a radio broadcast on the eve of Operation Avalanche, the main Allied invasion of southern Italy, timed for 9 September: the moment when troops of the US Fifth Army would go ashore at Salerno. Talks were ‘very intricate’, Eisenhower recalled. ‘They involved the still strong Italian fleet, the remnants of the Italian air forces, and Italian ground forces throughout the peninsula and in the Balkans. Above all they involved the feasibility of a surrender while the Germans so closely dominated the entire country.’48 On 7 September, when General Maxwell Taylor was sent secretly to Rome to coordinate plans with senior Italian officers, he discovered such a state of fear, inaction and confusion among them that a planned parachute drop near the city by the US 82nd Airborne Division had to be scrapped.
Helping to speed this planning and problem solving, the Monkey channel continued to hum. In Rome, Dick Mallaby and his Italian assistants were still coding, decoding, sending and receiving. In Algiers, behind the locked doors of a suitably isolated washroom and ‘working 24 hours a day in [eight-hour] shifts – two girls on and two off,’ Paddy Sproule and her young FANY colleagues continued to code and decode.49 As SOE recorded later:
The ‘Monkey’ link was used to arrange the ex-filtration of technical experts, of members of the [Italian] Army, Navy and Air Force staffs to give details of defences; the infiltration of General Taylor to Rome to report on the possibilities of an airborne landing; the surrender of the [Italian] fleet, and in fact all the innumerable details which were necessary to ensure the implementation of the Armistice terms and the maximum degree of success in the contemplated landing at Salerno.50
On 8 September, Badoglio reported in another Monkey message that, given the growing presence of German forces around Rome, an immediate announcement of an armistice was impossible: ‘it would provoke occupation of the capital and violent assumption of government by the Germans’.51 A furious Eisenhower personally dictated an immediate reply. ‘I intend to broadcast the existence of the armistice at the hour originally planned,’ he said. ‘If you or any part of your armed forces fail to co-operate as previously agreed I will publish to the world [the] full record of this affair. Today is X-day and I expect you to do your part.’52 Transmitted over Monkey, that message reached Badoglio barely an hour before Eisenhower went on the air. ‘This is General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of the Allied forces,’ he began, on schedule, at six-thirty that evening. ‘The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally. As Allied Commander in Chief, I have granted a military armistice.’53 Badoglio duly followed it with his own broadcast an hour or so afterwards. The armistice took immediate effect.
When they heard Badoglio speak, very few Italian soldiers, of any rank, had known that an end to hostilities was being negotiated or had been told how to react if it came. Nor did Badoglio’s broadcast call on them to fight the Germans, even though Hitler’s forces were now present in Italy in rapidly increasing strength: King Vittorio Emanuele would formally declare war on Nazi Germany only on 13 September. Nevertheless, to all Italian troops manning garrisons across Italy, including those occupying foxholes and machinegun nests above beaches where the Allies might land, it was quite clear that Badoglio was telling them to stop fighting. On the morning of 9 September, when Allied forces began going ashore on the beaches at Salerno, they met solid German resistance, but Italian guns – save for those of a few diehard Fascists – were silent.
On the afternoon of 8 September 1943, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden addressed an assembly of representatives of Allied nations at the Foreign Office in London. Italy had surrendered, Eden told them. He read out Eisenhower’s announcement, which at that moment had still to be broadcast, and briefly explained that talks in Lisbon and Sicily had led to the signing of an armistice five days before. ‘He then asked the representatives whether they wished to ask any questions,’ the Iraqi Chargé d’Affaires told Baghdad afterwards. ‘One of them asked him whether the Germans were aware of what had happened. The Minister said that he thought they knew, and for that reason had concentrated part of their forces near Rome.’54
It is true that German forces across the Mediterranean had been preparing themselves for an Italian capitulation. It is true, too, that German officials in Italy had felt that such a collapse was imminent. By the end of August, Major Herbert Kappler, the chief SS liaison officer in Rome, was telling Berlin that he believed Badoglio would step aside or conclude a separate peace ‘in 10 days at the latest’.55 It is also the case that, when the announcement came, the German military command in Italy reacted rapidly. Rome was swiftly dominated. Italian units were disarmed. Strong German reinforcements were quickly rushed into place to meet the Allied soldiers landing at Salerno; they would prove formidable opposition. Indeed, the days that Badoglio spent dithering over the armistice conditions may well have lost the Allies a good many military advantages. Nevertheless, it is clear today from declassified British intercepts of enemy signals that the negotiations had been conducted so securely that, for both of Italy’s former allies, Germany and Japan, news of them still came as a shock.
‘Of late’, the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, Hiroshi Ōshima, told Tokyo aft
er Eisenhower and Badoglio had announced the armistice, the German Government had felt that ‘sooner or later such a thing would occur’, but ‘the skill with which this affair had been planned was amazing’. Even on 8 September, when the German Ambassador in Rome, Rudolf Rahn, had a private audience with the King, ‘the latter had said that since the downfall of Mussolini a feeling of confidence had been wanting between Germany and Italy but that this would gradually change for the better, and he would exert his efforts to this end … Rahn then saw Badoglio, and the latter spoke on the same lines.’ That evening the armistice was announced. When the German General Headquarters telephoned Rahn and told him,
Rahn went so far as to state positively that such a thing could not possibly be so. However, at 7 o’clock [the Italian] Foreign Minister [Raffaele] Guariglia notified Rahn that Italy had been compelled to sue for peace with the United States and Britain. Rahn said that this was nothing short of treachery, and violently reproached Guariglia, but nothing could be done.56
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