Manifestations of disappointment and irony at the slowness of the Allied advance in Italy were fairly widespread. Among the Communists and Garibaldini, these sometimes took the form of denunciations of the bad faith of the Allies, which was generated by ‘clear political motives’, as claimed in a meeting of Milanese Communist workers.27 The Allies’ slow progress is made particularly clear by comparison with the overwhelming Soviet advances. Before the grandiose spectacle of the Allied armies north of Bologna, one GAP member was to remark: ‘At the sight of so much power, it was hard to understand why we had had to wait so long for that day!’28 Justifying his modifications to an article due to be published in Stella Alpina, Vincenzo Moscatelli wrote to the author: ‘It is neither my fault nor yours if the Russians are moving so quickly … I’ve put the Allies in as well, because, after all, even if they’re not doing much we can’t ignore them, least of all in a patriots’ paper … in short … have it out with Barbisun’29 – Barbisun being the nickname given to Stalin by northern Italians.
A Lazio Communist claimed that ‘the Anglo-Americans don’t want to wage the war in Italy’, and drew an apparently paradoxical conclusion from this: ‘We therefore have plenty of time and, if we work well without wasting it, we’ll be able to develop our political movement and the partisans’ war so that the liberation of Italy will be the work of the Italians themselves.’30 Other Garibaldi documents accused the Allied missions of counselling ‘attesismo’, and reveal the difficulties encountered by the partisan chiefs in stilling the apprehensions aroused by the disarmament to which the partisans were subjected in the zones as the latter were liberated (‘they say … they’ll never let themselves be disarmed even if this means opposing the English, and if the worst comes to the worst they will disarm themselves, bolting home and hiding their weapons’).31
This intolerance towards the Allies, which became more acute and widespread after events in Greece and British General Harold Alexander’s proclamation,32 drove parties and commands alike to try and damp things down. The ‘same old expression – what are these Anglo-Americans doing?’ was stigmatised by political commissar Michele as a mask for attesismo.33 Likewise, against ‘the word “betrayal” ’, with reference to the Allies, which ‘recurs insistently, we have decided to react energetically’.34
If the events in Greece induced some partisans to say: ‘So that’s how it is, now we’re being shot at by the Nazi-Fascists and tomorrow we’ll be on the receiving end of the English cannon-blasts, machine-gun volleys and air-raids’, it was explained to them that this kind of language ‘was not very different from that used by the Fascists’.35
A Garibaldi newsletter is criticised as follows: ‘We must never speak ironically in our newspapers about the efforts being made to defeat the Nazi-Fascists. If we wish to ridicule someone, it should always be our enemies and certainly not … General Eisenhower’s hernia.’36
Some Modena partisans who had complained about the ‘customary respects paid to the representatives of the Allied armies’ received a reprimand that recalls McCaffery’s: ‘It is the Allied Command that is leading and directing the war in Italy against the Nazi-Fascists.’37
Likewise, there was the enjoinder always to give the Allied troops a friendly welcome. It is worth mentioning the motivation for this obvious directive that was given to persuade the Milanese militants who seemed to question it. The Allies, it is recalled
have spilled their own blood and not just ours to liberate us from Fascism. The distrust that they may nourish for us is justified: we should not forget that guilt weighs on the Italian people too. It will be for us [note the different meaning that this second us (noi) acquires], the people’s vanguard, to show the Allies that we have made a clean break with Fascism and taken a new road.38
If these were the warnings coming from the Communists, committed as they were to keeping their members’ class spirit in one piece, as well as the policy of unity firmly championed as an international prospect,39 more predictable still were those coming from elsewhere. Il Risorgimento Liberale cautioned against inopportune criticisms of the slowness of the Allies: other peoples ‘more deserving than us’ were destined to wait still longer.40
The Allied missions at times seemed to be held responsible for the bad news that they brought from liberated Italy. ‘Why are things not going well in liberated Italy?’, the Liguria mission was asked. The answer, as typical as the question, was above all that it was often the Italian rulers who did not even reach the threshold of action conceded by the Allies. Then came the admission:
We’ve made mistakes, but down there the liberation movement was all but nonexistent, and if there were Fascists in the administrations and the industries we couldn’t substitute them because we had no one else. Here things are completely different. You can act, provided you avoid disorder in the administrations and the industries and in every branch of life and keep out of trouble.41
Quite apart from the difference between the respective political lines which were unknown or little known to them, the partisans grasped the differences between the British and the Americans with whom they were in direct contact, wholly to the advantage of the Americans, whose greater generosity was also attested by the news filtering through from liberated Italy.42 This preference for the Americans, identified tout court with the prospect of something new, provoked the astonished and slightly resentful remark of a Garibaldino: ‘Contrary to all expectations, a good number of the population of the valley were awaiting not so much the “liberation” as the Americans.’43
But others had no such perplexities: ‘The Americans are very democratic and have a different view of the way Italy should be sorted out from the British. Both today and tomorrow, we’ll have to lean on the former greatly.’44 Or again: ‘They say the Americans intend to help us more than the British, and when they let their folks know what they’ve found here they’ll send us all sorts of good things.’45 An American officer parachuted down to a Matteotti formation in the province of Alessandria is said to have stated that ‘the American Command takes a hostile view of the agreements between the British Command and the Italian conservatives’, and that ‘the Americans intend to create a banking trust and a commission that is to come to Italy to make loans at 0.50 percent interest’.46
Earlier, the Third International had already regarded the Americans more favourably than the British. A Communist veteran who had met Gramsci and Togliatti recounted: ‘I am present at the meeting between a major in the British army and the American airman I’m accompanying. A cold, stiff cordiality, consisting only of words: the cordiality of a conservative with a follower of the third estate.’47 Another old Communist militant stressed that ‘the English fought against the Nazi-Fascists only because this corresponded to their imperialistic interests and not because they were anti-Fascist like us’.48
Probably the younger and less politicised generations were influenced by the many forms in which the ‘American myth’ had spread so widely, as well as the influences of Fascist propaganda that had furiously attacked ‘il popolo dei cinque pasti’ (‘the five-meals-a-day people’). In any case, among the Communists attempts emerged to make political use of the differences encountered between the two Anglo-Saxon allies. The Modena Communist federation issued this directive:
We shall need to pay great attention to the disagreements between the Americans and the British, since we must avoid creating tension with the British. With the latter we must benefit from the better disposition of the Americans, in order to induce them to modify their attitude, while we must make it clear to the Americans that our behaviour towards the English has to be correct, because they are one of the allies.49
In fact the Communist-inspired bands’ attitudes to the British could range from prudent erasures of wall graffiti that were ‘blatantly pro-Soviet … exterior manifestations that could both be an impediment to normal relations and create difficulties in aid supplies’,50 to sending, with typically excessive zeal, birthday greetings t
o King George VI.51 In the case of Britain and the United States, too, it had to be borne in mind that the people were not to be confused with the governments, or rather, with the reactionaries who had sway over the governments: ‘We must always distinguish between the popular masses of the Allied countries and a certain inevitable resistance, which can and must be overcome, on the part of the reactionary cliques that try to exercise their sway over the governments and General Staffs.’52
Clearly the reactions towards the British and Americans, with whom not only the combatants but the great mass of the population were coming into contact, did not all stem from opinions and preferences regarding the great political issues. The impact between Italian society and the customs, behaviour, and culture of the British and, above all, American troops – a prologue to the process of Americanisation that developed in the post-war period – was particularly visible in Rome and the South, where the Allied occupation lasted longer and was largely conducted by an army that was still belligerent, and therefore a generator of particularly acute tensions.53
Here, the resistenti’s experience of things was particular. The British and American prisoners who, having escaped from the concentration camps, joined the partisan bands, often constituted an original channel for re-establishing genuine ties with the ‘traditional allies’. Involved in this were the rural populations who, often risking their lives and possessions, gave the prisoners refuge and assistance. In fact, some of the former prisoners were thinking of seeking refuge in Switzerland.54 Others, though of working-class background, made no effort to disguise their suspicion of anything smacking of Communism.55 But there were also those – like Tony, a British regular officer who was one of the protagonists of the guerrilla war in Garfagnana and the Apuan Alps – who genuinely chose to fight in the Resistance.56 In some cases the parachuted missions too were a vehicle of mutual esteem and understanding, all the stronger for the fact that both parties were risking their lives. Bernardo recalls the case of a British mission which ‘won the indisputable affection of the partisans by stating, unlike other missions, that they would remain on the spot as long as even one partisan was left alive there’. Of another mission, consisting of Americans, Bernardo writes that ‘confidentially … they let us know that the orders they had received, and agreed on with the Rome government, were not the most flattering and that difficult times lay ahead for the partisans’.57
Perhaps the most burning issue in relations with the Allies was the aerial bombings of the cities, which indiscriminately hit the entire population (even if it is excessive to suppose, with Alessandro Portelli, that they aimed at ‘wiping out civilian society’).58 In some of the Resistance documents containing protests against the bombings, these are attributed unambiguously to the British, no mention being made of the Americans (in the memoirs, by contrast, the Americans actually have the edge on the British on this score).59
‘Today the masses see the aerial bombing as the cruellest thing that Britain can do against them. All are of the opinion that it is no longer necessary to bomb the factories, because in consequence they would be the predestined victims, and then, why destroy all that is the patrimony of labour?’ This is how a Turin Communist document puts it.60 The British came to be deemed capable of deliberately bombing the partisans too, and not just the Garibaldini, but even the ‘azzuri’ (the non-Communist Blues).61
Whatever weight the massive and indiscriminate bombings of Turin, Milan, Naples, and finally Rome may be regarded as having had in the collapse of the Fascist regime and Italy’s surrender, after 25 July, and above all after 8 September, the scenario and people’s expectations had changed too greatly for the air-raids over the cities not to produce a new and disturbing reaction. The above-mentioned Turin Communist document reads: ‘What was justified before the Armistice is today denounced by everyone and creates in their minds exasperation and hatred, a possible prey for Nazi propaganda.’62
And indeed, German and Fascist propaganda did not let the occasion slip, and it was necessary to set about finding a way of combating it.63 The tone is often one of defensiveness and retort. The Salò authorities are accused of giving the air alarms deliberately late, so as not to hamper war production and ‘so that the Germans don’t lose time’.64 Even the destruction of Montecassino by the Allies was blamed on the Germans.65 Some drew attention to the launching of the V1 and V2 on London.66 Particularly bitter was the reaction to the occasional Fascist accusation that the bombings had been requested by the anti-Fascists, and particularly the Communists.67
The most widely accepted argument was that, in the final analysis, the Fascists were responsible for the bombings, that they had wanted the war and had ruthlessly waged it. A recent Turin document reads: ‘I knew the British because they were dropping bombs on us, but I had realised that it had been Fascist Italy that had asked for these bombs’.68 Togliatti’s argument was no different;69 and a Marche Communist paper explained: ‘The main culprits for so many monstrous crimes are always the Nazi beasts who bring and attract death and destruction wherever they pass.’70
The argument was extended, a fortiori, to the considerably more destructive bombings of the German cities, though little mention was made of them. On the one occasion that it does mention these bombings, Il Popolo justifies them on the principle that ‘Germany will fall victim to that weapon that it has so rashly used to attack defenceless peoples’.71
Stances at various levels were, however, taken against the indiscriminate aerial warfare conducted by the Allies. ‘But why have these English come to vex us, when they could quite easily go and bomb the Duce at Gargnano?’, demanded a woman in an air-raid shelter in Brescia.72 Vent is given to an elementary desire for reprisal in a censored letter: ‘I know this sounds malicious, but, I swear, I’d be cruelly gleeful to hear news of the destruction of some American cities and I’m only sorry it isn’t possible.’73 A ‘wave of contempt’ was reported in Bologna for the bombing that came shortly after 8 September, claiming 4,000 victims and ‘ably exploited by the Germans and Fascists’.74 ‘Terrorist bombings’ was the bald definition given to those of the Terni steelworks.75 Fratelli d’Italia, organ of the Veneto CLN, ruled out the idea that the Allied actions could be considered terrorist ‘in the strict sense of the word’, but expressed concern that ‘raids like those on Treviso and Padua wreak immense damage on the Italians, very little on the Germans, and cost a considerable amount for the Anglo-Saxons’, who are clearly motivated ‘by cynicism, or poor training or selfish prudence’. The main culprit, however, still remains Fascism.76 The CLNAI itself protested against the ‘morally and politically disastrous effect of the bombings carried out on urban centres of Italian cities, the military utility of which does not appear to be sufficiently well demonstrated’.77 La Democrazia del Lavoro prudently remarked that some of the sufferings and destruction wrought by the Allies seemed to the Italian population ‘neither necessary nor just’.78 Since before 8 September, L’Italia Libera had written that it was ‘an extremely sad psychological error’ to believe that Italy’s recovery would be accelerated by the bombings: ‘A people fleeing amid the smoking ruins of a destroyed city is momentarily lost for the cause of the revolution.’79
By contrast, Voce Operaia, the newspaper of the Catholic Communists, took satisfaction in pointing out that, of all the belligerent nations, the USSR was the only one that had not bombed enemy cities.80 The censor’s remark about several letters from Reggio Emilia seems to bear this out when it complains about Allied machine-gunning of cyclists and peasants: ‘All this has cooled the Anglophiles greatly. But there’s little to hope for, because the upshot has been that Russophilia has grown vertiginously. We’ve really come to a sorry pass.’81
There is a clear distance between the attitudes towards the Allies examined so far, and the military, political and diplomatic relations between the states. Those who set store by the latter tended to confuse national dignity with the international position of the country, and ended up setting objectives
for the Italy that had gone over to the victor’s side that were excessive, to say the least. The Resistance was not always free from attitudes of this kind, which reveal considerable uncertainty as to what the post-war world order would be and the status that Italy would have in it.82 Positions appeared that were inspired by a tardy and faint-hearted nationalism, but which nonetheless found (and were later to find) confirmation among a fair proportion of average public opinion, with the emergence of issues relating to borders, particularly the eastern ones, and to the dismantling of the Italian armed forces, the colonies, and the terms of the Armistice (and later of the peace treaty). In these positions, what was a drama of the collective conscience became the request, oscillating between superficiality, effrontery and servility, to cash in the reward for changing sides, as if Italy were able to repeat the operation that had led Restoration France to sit at the Congress of Vienna alongside the victorious powers.83 Togliatti, a minister in the Salerno government, wrote a letter to the Premier Badoglio recommending realism and dignity, and urging him to establish relations with the Allies in the grand style, though without pursuing the myth of promotion to the status of allies, and avoiding ‘querulous complaints’.84 A more or less analogous note is struck in Avanti!: ‘Let us not delude ourselves that we will win the hearts of the victors by obeying their every order, and that we will then save our country by wresting a few wretched concessions in the diplomatic discussions at the green tables of the conferences.’85
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