The dilemma that the Social Republic encountered when it attempted to furnish itself with a military organism was, if truth be told, but one aspect of the more general contradiction with which the Social Republic and the republican Fascist Party had to grapple as regards the Kingdom of Italy and the Fascist National Party, i.e. the twenty-year-old Fascist–monarchic regime. It is well-known that, in the case of the armed forces, this contradiction was shown in the different ideas as to how they should be organised that were held, on the one hand, by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had become minister of defence, and on the other, by the old squadrista ringleader Renato Ricci, now chief of the militia, and Alessandro Pavolini, secretary of the Republican Fascist Party (PFR).96 The communiqué issued on 27 September 1943, after the first meeting of the renascent Fascist government, reads as follows: ‘The land, sea and air forces will be respectively incorporated into the militia, navy and air force of the republican Fascist state. Recruitment will be by conscription and by voluntary choice.’97
In line with their programme of creating a ‘new’, political and Fascist army, Renato Ricci and Alessandro Pavolini were in favour of voluntary enlistment; whereas Rodolfo Graziani, an old regular officer, was for conscription and recruitment in the internment camps in Germany (the Germans wanted conscription but, to be on the safe side, training in Germany). Deakin is right when he says that the result of the internecine struggle for control of the armed forces was that the RSI found itself again with ‘a series of private armies and police forces owing but tenuous allegiance to any central authority’.98 This state of affairs made it hardly likely that there would be the recovery, so frequently boasted of by the Fascists, from the collapse suffered by the armed forces on 8 September; but it opened up new possibilities for those who somehow or other managed to pick themselves up. On the one hand, there was a small minority of diehards, easily swallowed up by the more violent aspects of the Italian military tradition. On the other hand, there was a certain quantity of conscripts, again wearing grey-green uniforms, with the gladius rather than stars, who instead reproduced the most depressing features of the old army. The censors recorded disbandments, desertions, ‘oaths taken passively’, ‘humanitarian- or religious-based defeatism’, and above all impatience with, or even hatred of, barrack-room life and military service.99 Very probably, the choice of the title Naja repubblichina – a small newspaper published by the Cuneo GL, and addressed to the soldiers of the Monterosa and Littorio divisions100 – was prompted by an accurate intuition of this reality. ‘Getting their pay and fence-sitting’ are the distinguishing features of the officers of the RSI army, according to a report by the Cremona Republican National Guard of 4 October 1944;101 and many other Fascist sources do not skimp on unsparing descriptions of the low morale and scant or even nonexistent fighting spirit of the new Republican army. ‘We’re sick of being soldiers’, one soldier writes, in the hope that the censors of his letter will get a clear ‘concept of us’.102
Already, at the end of 1943, a report from the Modena area speaks of recruits born between 1923 and 1925 who had presented themselves ‘solely for fear of something worse befalling them’, and who lacked ‘the spirit of sacrifice, love of their country, youthful enthusiasm for anything military; in short, they bore with them the whole wretched bourgeois mentality which lately has completely disoriented almost the entire Italian population’.103
On the threshold of summer 1944, a German document describes the situation in the Biella area as follows: ‘The Italian commands of the different units place themselves behind the German commands and take no initiatives of their own … The Italian commands are not a hundred percent committed to the struggle, the troops are not committed at all. One can’t rule out the possibility that many will go over to the enemy.’104
The German Colonel Jandl made this general observation: ‘The men who must form the new army, and particularly the higher-ranking officers, may be inferior in number; but otherwise they will always be the same. The September 8th revolution has not brought about a spiritual change.’105 Similar views are found in the Anglo-American documents.106 Even an Italian SS division, ‘all southerners’, who have donned that uniform ‘in order to get back from Germany’, are mocked in a GL document for ‘not being employed except to look after the horses’.107 And, as had already happened in the Royal Army, the choral war-song, an ‘element of spiritual invigoration’, was given the task of reviving the troops’ spirits, forgetting once again the distance separating a spontaneous song (including the Fascist ones) and a song ordered from above, between ‘the manly youth who with Roman determination will fight’ and ‘I’m a poor deserter’, sung by the Alpini in Russia.108 Towards the Royal Army and their symbols, the volunteer Fascist soldiers, or at least the more highly motivated of them, showed a hostility and contempt that vied with those of the resistenti – proving again how similar reactions found different outlets. Witness the letter of a soldier who, in the Balkans, had gone over to serve directly under the Germans:
I’ve suffered a lot but have already forgotten. What I haven’t forgotten, though, are those sons of bitches, the Italian officers who abandoned us in the mountains of the Balkans, naked, without a piece of bread, and I who went the rounds of the Muslims’ houses asking for a piece of bread or polenta to appease my hunger, naked and unshod, without clothes in the depth of winter sleeping in the woods.109
In another letter, as was sometimes the case between 1940 and 1943 as well, when comparisons were made with the German army the latter came out best in every way, and not only in terms of military power. A soldier training in Germany writes:
And then in the German army the officers have rights and duties like all the soldiers, they wear the clothes that the soldiers wear … When, seeing this, I think back, as I say, to our officers, it makes me want to laugh, they really seem like so many shopwindow mannequins. They’re capable of elegance, robbery and abuses of power of every kind. No distinction is made even for meals, even the generals eat the meals prepared for the troops in equal doses. The only difference is that these command and the others obey. With this system, what would seem very rigid discipline automatically becomes the most natural thing in the world; when a soldier is treated as a soldier in the true sense of the word, and not as a slave and wretch as we were treated, everything becomes pleasant and bearable.110
The Fascists who made their choice in Italy express themselves no less radically: ‘Ranks no longer exist … The defeat has abolished them. We’re all equal! Let them just try coming and busting our balls!’111 Stars of rank become an ‘abhorred symbol’, which is torn off, but – remember the contradiction pointed out above – a lieutenant says: ‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of for wearing my stars, if anyone so much as tries I’ll kill him.’112 ‘But what are they doing here?’ the volunteers would say of the re-draftees. And their faithful interpreter recalls: ‘There was a disconsolate atmosphere, of people doing things without conviction, reluctantly resigned to having to do them, and which the mess officer’s clowning certainly did nothing to dissipate … We didn’t mix with them.’113 A Fascist newspaper of 29 February 1944 speaks of young men who signed up ‘with enthusiasm and faith and who now say that they are discouraged’. There was even a drop in the morale of the ‘volontari della morte’ (‘volunteers of death’), contaminated by the many badogliani with whom they were incorporated.114 ‘They seem like the royal army’, a partisan chief said of a group of deserters who went over to the ranks of the Resistance.115 Yet this ‘seem like the royal army’ would also be the salvation of the RSI officers when the tribunals appointed to judge them after the Liberation felt, as has been written, a ‘sense of guilt’ towards them.116
This sort of low-level continuity – as we might call it – this sort of drawn-out, dragging 8 September, is found, too, in an opposite political and international context, in the army that the Kingdom of the South was endeavouring to put back on its feet. The inefficiency, the mediocre fighting spirit, the la
ck of motivation, the widespread draft-dodging (the ‘we’re not going’ sentiment), the desertions, the scant influx of volunteers, are well-known phenomena.117 They need to be recalled here as confirmation of the fact that the moral disenchantment with the Royal Army was as widespread a phenomenon in the South as in the North, though obviously it manifested itself in very different forms. Nor, in the case of the South, can this phenomenon be said to have been reabsorbed by the process of bureaucratic reconstruction that the old military institutions somehow succeeded in setting in motion. On the contrary, this very restructuring, in the small part that was successful as in the large part in which it suffered setbacks, reveals (with due exceptions) how historically mistaken it is to speak of the moral unity that was created between the combatants – the partisans of the North and the regular soldiers of the South.
Privileged testimonies are provided by the partisans fighting in the territories gradually liberated by the slow advance of the Allies or by those (the most notable being possibly that of the Modena Garibaldi division commanded by Armando),118 who, for various reasons, crossed the lines and found themselves once more before a military machine by now utterly alien to their way of thinking. News circulating in the North about the ‘difficult encounter between partisans and liberation troops’, and the whole state of affairs in the South, hardly boded well.119 The real, new Italian army is the partisan one, wrote the newspaper of the 1st GL Alpine division, not the one formed from the relics of the ‘regular’ army which ‘is on the other side of the front doing lord knows what’.120 ‘Insurmountable distrust of an organism which is considered without a doubt an instrument of the monarchy’ is attributed to ‘several partisan commanders’ at a meeting of the Florentine executive committee of the Action Party;121 while the black picture painted, in some ‘Appunti’ (‘Notes’) by the Presidency of the Council, of the situation at the Cesano training centre in Rome is completed by noting the tendency of the former partisans, along with other left-wingers, ‘not to recognise the authority of the officers of the army’.122
On 17 February 1945, speaking on Radio Roma, the Liberal Aldobrando Medici Tornaquinci, under-secretary for occupied Italy, might well hail the ‘day of the partisan and of the soldier’ in the name of the ‘fusion between the regular and volunteer elements of the armed forces’, blithely invoking precedents from the Risorgimento;123 but the denunciation that had been made on 27 July 1944 at a PCI leadership meeting comes closer to the truth.124
The former partisans were not alone in showing intolerance towards the officers. A Military Information Service report on the irregular divisions reads that ‘all in all resentment, hatred and contempt are often to be observed towards the officer category, who are regarded as responsible for the material ill-being of the troops’. The officers were accused of enjoying innumerable privileges even now that their ineptitude had brought about the collapse. Accordingly, morale was low in the officers and NCOs, ‘depressed’ by the evident lack of esteem that they sensed in the lower ranks and among civilians, as well as by the difficulty of living conditions and the scant manifestation of patriotism.125
‘I curse all Italian officers, let’s hope all these Italian officers spill blood, let’s hope that things go badly for them too’, says a soldier’s letter. And in a carabiniere’s letter:
I loathe myself for wearing this kind of dress … Again I remember how I was abandoned on 8 September 1943 by a coward of a captain and by a lurid carabiniere marshal who let me fall into the clutches of the Germans. Now they expect to be respected by us; seeing officers makes me want to spit in their faces. Among us here in Florence are carabinieri and foul NCOs who’ve sworn the oath to the republic, and are now treated almost better than us.
Significant here is the overlapping of emotions and motivations, and the nagging memory of 8 September. In another letter, this generates derision for the generals who ‘have betrayed the country, handing it over to the Germans without fighting’. Or again: ‘Then someone will pay with his infamy to us, the world has changed, the time of Mussolini is over, those signori, the officers, will have to work and earn their bread with their own sweat.’126 In many of these letters, there is a telling comparison with the organisation and spirit of the Allied armies, also made by the partisans when the Anglo-American missions begin to arrive, and wholly favourable to the Allies. It is just the good-for-nothing officers who would prevent the Allies from doing all the good they might. This extract from a letter is typical: ‘Now we’re more barefoot and naked, so we make a sorry sight walking through the street, but all this comes from the Italian commands who would like to send us all to a concentration camp because the Americans wanted to clothe us but they replied that they didn’t need clothing, while we’re the ones who have to suffer.’
Less rancorously, another letter speaks of the English as ‘human folk, very different from what they wanted us to believe in Mussolini’s times’.127 A Military Censorship Office statistic, eloquent not least in its obvious approximation, gives the figure for those favourable towards the national government as 65.69 percent, while for those favourable towards the Allies the figure rises to 88.66, and patriotism must make do with 55.19.128 Mirroring such judgments are those given by authoritative Allied officers, which pitilessly reveal the contradictions of the Italian government’s debating over the question of the war effort against Germany. A prime example is Major General Browning’s severe sermon, addressed on 15 January 1945 to the war minister, the Liberal Alessandro Casati, because he had not yet cleared refugees out of the Cesano barracks allocated for training the Italian Liberation Corps combat groups: ‘Italy is expecting much of her Combat Groups. You must give them the facilities to obtain the best possible reinforcements. Failure to do this is a definite hindrance to, even sabotage of, the war effort.’129
Certainly, the Allies themselves could be accused – at the centre as on the periphery130 – of sabotage, or at least of discouraging the Italian war effort; and the reasons for and contradictions of this attitude have been widely investigated.131 But one act of sabotage does not exclude the other, while both contributed to throwing into disarray the improvised new Italian soldiers. Small wonder, then, that some of them came to see in the rigid correctness of the allied Commands the only point of less unstable reference. A couple of months earlier, General Browning, who supervised the training of the Combat Groups, had written: ‘The rank and file are of first-rate quality; give me two years with British officers and NCOs … and we’d have an army as good as any in Europe.’132 Almost in anticipated counterpoint with the British general, a clandestine paper of the North (commenting on an episode that had occurred in the South) had written, with a touch of white man’s arrogance sustained by wounded national pride: ‘So the English have ended up incorporating our anti-Badoglian volunteers with their officers, as they do with the Indians and the natives of Kenya.’133 True, the testimonies of the grim legacies of the collapse refer above all to the divisions not deployed on the front (the majority), while generally, but not always,134 those on the fighting line are described as being more cohesive. But it is also true that views like those expressed by General Browning refer to a more general picture including the entire armed forces of the South, which never managed to regain legitimacy in the eyes of the country. Their identity as an instrument against the anti-German war remained always uncertain even for the government itself. Apolitical patriotism, vaguely and rhetorically proclaimed, could provide no solid cement to so unliveable an endeavour as ‘traditional military enterprise’.135 An example of the rhetoric of the time is given by Under-Secretary Medici Tornaquinci’s invectives against the ‘wretched sophistries’ of those who want to know ‘whether the officer who will command them will be monarchic or republican’.136 An example of rhetoric shot through with diehard nostalgia can be found again in the position taken by the ‘Associazione nazionale combattenti della guerra di liberazione’ deployed in the regular divisions of the armed forces: one of their representative
s wanted retrospectively to sew military stars (stellette) on the shabby tunics of the partisans, who were in fact defined as ‘italiani con le stellette’.137 There is, however, some extenuation here in the fact that, at the PCI national council of 7 April 1945, Togliatti had deprecated ‘volunteers who do not want to wear stars’.138
The ‘staggering fact of the meagre number of those who have answered the call-up’, as the CLN of Teramo put it,139 or the young men’s repugnance ‘for a war whose cause they do not know’ (according to the view of General Pietro Pinna, high commissioner for Sardinia),140 are borne out by General Utili’s complaints about the silence over the Liberation Corps and the failure to support it.141 General Angelo Cerica would declare to the Tuscan CLN: ‘This army, which feels itself to be held in contempt and forgotten by the country, can in no way accept the sacrifice, and will do all that it can to do as little as possible.’142 The failed influx of recruits, moreover, fanned the exhausted war veterans’ feeling that it was ‘always the same ones who had to risk their lives’.143
South of the Garigliano, and then of the Gothic line, the Italians were in fact living in the profound conviction that, ‘for them, the war had really ended with the arrival of the Allies, and that what followed was a painful and mostly incomprehensible epilogue in which they felt they had no part’.144 Out of this grew an atmosphere of widespread depression and impatience with the authority of a state that had made itself so little trusted or believed. In those conditions it was ‘often dangerous – often loathsome’145 to perform the service of keeping the peace. But above all it was an atmosphere that helps us better understand, on the one hand, the Fascist traces whose presence is indicated by many documents among both the troops at the front and those in the supply lines, as well as the draft-dodgers, and on the other hand the explicit manifestations of left-wing tendencies revealed by the same documents relating to similar situations. Thus in Sassari, on 20 February 1945, several hundred re-draftees, hostile to the war, marched down Via Roma shouting ‘Duce! Duce!’; and on the very next day, another 200 abandoned the camps ‘with a red cloth around their heads’.146 The peacekeeping authorities were happy to bracket the Fascists and Reds together as ‘anti-monarchic’; but, quite apart from their slovenliness and archaic cunning, in the demonstrations against the calls to arms these opposite persuasions did at times overlap and become mixed, in a widely politically naive confusion. Well and truly Fascist, on the other hand, were those armed divisions who, like the Fiesole paracadutisti, went through the city singing Fascist battle songs or, like the Alpini in Fiesole, attacked the Communists.147
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