The planes took off on the afternoon of 21 March at 14:30 hours.8 The striking force consisted of forty-eight Mustangs and Kittyhawks, with a Spitfire squadron providing an escort. Once over the target, the bombers dived almost vertically from 10,000 feet, dropping their bombs at the last minute. The dramatic dive, followed by the low release, was the only way of ensuring that the bombs fell directly on the target. Four waves of planes flew over the city. So accurate were the pilots that crowds of Italians gathered on the roofs of the palaces along the Grand Canal to wave and cheer them on.9
In London and Washington, the operation was hailed as a spectacular success. None of the city’s historic buildings had been damaged, and the harbour had been completely destroyed, preventing the Germans from using it. A flood of telegrams had come in congratulating Foster. One was from the Air Chief Marshal, who had taken the unusual step of circulating a brochure of the ‘neat little operation’ to other military commanders in Whitehall.10
Up ahead, the outriders were flagging the convoy to slow down. With the precision of a salute, their arms moved in unison, signalling to the right. Further on, set back from the road, an imposing arch loomed.
Foster peered through the clouds of dust churned up by the motorcycles, keen to get a glimpse of the castle that a month before he had made a split-second decision not to bomb.11 He remembered its footprint from the aerial reconnaissance photographs; the ruins of what appeared to be an old fortress, and the substantial house to one side. The barns and cottages, standing a little way off, and the sequestered position of the place – set amidst acres of woods and arable land – indicated a large country estate. It was evidently a grand establishment; landscaped paths, radiating from a lake cut in the shape of a shamrock, ran through the extensive gardens. He had even spotted a swimming pool in the grounds.
For an instant, he was back in the Operations Room outside Bologna, a fuggy, windowless room, thick with tension and cigarette smoke. In the last days of the Italian campaign (which began on 9 April when the Allies had launched their final offensive), DAF had flown a record 21,215 sorties.12 It was on one of those days – now merged into a blur – that an adjutant had shown him the photographs of the castle. Its name was Brazzà and a spotter plane had identified it as the HQ of a battalion of German troops. Seeing the photographs, something about the castle had captured Foster’s imagination; if the German retreat continued, it was possible that DAF could take it over.13 On a whim, he told his adjutant to take it off the target list, earmarking it as a potential Advance HQ on the move north to Austria.
The road leading up to the castle was over a mile long. It was impossible to see where it was leading; the overhanging boughs of the trees bordering the track lent the sensation of travelling through a long tunnel. As they progressed along it, Foster found it incredible to think that the castle was about to become his headquarters. Back in April, if someone had told him that he would be occupying it within a month, he would not have believed them.14 The speed of the German collapse had taken everyone by surprise. Just 30 miles away, up on the mountain passes leading into Austria, tens of thousands of Wehrmacht troops were being held in pens by the Allies.
A set of gates, surmounted by a pair of stone ball finials, marked the entrance to the castle. On rounding a line of ilex trees, a substantial villa, built in the Palladian style, came into view. Along the balconies and terraces, classical urns stood out white against the pale flint grey of the house and the deep greens of the trees around it. The castle itself, which dated from the Middle Ages, rose behind the villa and was considerably more ruinous than it had looked in the reconnaissance photographs. There were breaches in the high walls of the keep, and most of the fortified tower had crumbled away. Trails of ivy and wild clematis hung from the broken stonework, and in the gardens around the castle a profusion of roses – pale yellow, apricot and crimson in colour – were in flower.
Seeing it all, Foster could not help but smile.15 It was the nicest place imaginable. Once again, the advantages of air reconnaissance meant they had trumped General Army HQ in finding the best headquarters in the neighbourhood.
An hour or two of light remained. Leaving the officer in charge of the move to supervise the unloading of the vehicles, he set off to explore the castle and its grounds.
Walking briskly, keen to stretch his legs after the long car journey, Foster headed in the direction of the Home Farm. There was not a soul about. The whole place, with its barns and outbuildings, taking up some 100 acres – the size of a small village – had an empty, dilapidated air about it. Approaching the buildings, he could see they were in a poor state of repair; there were tiles missing from the roofs and broken panes of glass in the windows. Here and there, discarded farm machinery lay rusting in a corner. The place seemed long abandoned.
Yet, as he walked on through the courtyards and narrow passageways that connected the buildings, he had the uncomfortable sensation that there were people around.16 The doors to a number of the barns were open; farm tools stood propped up against the walls – scythes and hoes with gleaming blades, as if someone had just cleaned them. A row of chairs, sometimes a single chair, had been placed outside, indicating that a group of people or a single person had recently been sitting there. Passing a row of farm-workers’ cottages, he noticed there were plants and kitchen utensils on the windowsills.
The ghostly presence of people he could not see unnerved him. Could they see him? Was he being watched? The situation was not one he had encountered before. He and his staff had occupied a number of large country houses as DAF had advanced through Italy. They had been made to feel welcome. Usually the owner of the property or a member of his family had shown them around. So where were the castle’s owners? The odd emptiness and the dilapidation of the estate hinted at dark events in the recent past.
Retracing his route, Foster returned to the main house. As he passed the crescent-shaped flower bed that stood in the centre of the courtyard, he noticed that someone had driven through it.17 The imprints of the tyres were fresh, and the flowers lay crushed in the tread marks. He presumed the Germans had reversed their trucks up to the entrance of the house to load them as they were leaving.
The front door was ajar. Pushing it open, he found himself in a great hall. Hand-drawn maps dating from the sixteenth century, silver plate and the stuffed heads of spiral-horned antelopes adorned the walls. In one corner, approached through an arch, a stone staircase led up to the piano nobile, the principal floor.
The steps – a single flight – were wide and shallow. On the narrow landing at the top was a thick panelled door, its surround decorated with filigree stencil work. Foster expected the door to be locked, but it opened into a series of interconnecting rooms stretching the length of the villa. The first, he noted, was a perfect square. Yet, while it was well appointed, commanding views over the garden on three sides, it was sparsely furnished. The one significant item was a fine glass-fronted cabinet, the sort used to display porcelain and silver. Crossing over to it, he could see from the rings in the dust that the shelves had been emptied recently. By the Germans, looting the owners’ possessions? he wondered. Or the owners themselves, anxious to remove their valuables? Pictures were also missing from the walls, the blank spaces suggesting where landscapes and family portraits had once hung.
The other rooms were all of large proportions, with polished wooden floors and magnificently carved chimneypieces. The walls were limewashed in bright colours – ochre, aquamarine and pistachio green. But there were no personal belongings of any kind; nothing to indicate who owned the house or what sort of life they lived. The silence of the place – almost reverential – and the perfunctory arrangement of the few items of furniture had the deadness of a museum.
Then, as Foster was passing along the gallery which connected the two wings of the house, a sudden noise startled him. A grating, scraping sound, it was coming from the floor above. A narrow staircase led off to the right and, as he climbed the stairs, the noise g
rew louder. He could not think what it was. The only time he had heard anything like it was in Africa; it reminded him of the sound of a carpet being brushed on the lawn after a sandstorm.18
The stairs opened directly into a vast room. It was 200 feet long, taking up the entire area of the second floor. Immediately, the origin of the sound was apparent. With upwards of twenty tables positioned across it, the room had been turned into a makeshift silk factory and thousands of silkworms were feeding on mulberry leaves. Some of the cocoons had hatched and on the tables by the windows the moths fluttered against the lower panes, drawn by the light. Evidently, someone was feeding them; but again, there was no sign of their presence.
Inching his way around the tables, Foster went over to a window. The mountains were now blue, shot with gold from the last rays of sun. To the south, on the horizon, was the sea – the lagoons east of Venice. Looking over towards Tarcento, the bell towers of numerous hilltop villages were visible. Closer – about a mile off – a line of poplar trees marked the main road from Udine. Between the gaps in the trees, he could see the traffic moving. All the traffic was going from east to west.
Earlier that afternoon, he had passed along the road. The progress of the convoy had been slowed by a line of carts, piled high with furniture and grain sacks stuffed to overflowing with the possessions of the families following behind. There had been mothers carrying babies in their arms, and groups of tired children and elderly relatives, some laid out on beds on the carts or propped up in chairs. The carts had been of all shapes and sizes; pony traps and shooting brakes – even old wooden-wheeled barouches and curricles.
Foster had seen the situation reports compiled by General Army HQ. The families were fleeing their homes in the east of the province. A no man’s land inhabited by both Italians and Slovenes, it was disputed territory granted to Italy by the Allies as a reward for switching sides during the First World War. Following years of persecution under Mussolini’s Fascists, the Slovenes were calling for all Italians living in the disputed area to be denounced as Fascists, and for the land to become part of Yugoslavia.19
Already, Yugoslav troops, commanded by Marshal Tito, had crossed the border and were terrorizing towns and villages.20 More than 1,000 Italians had disappeared without trace and hundreds had been arrested and deported to concentration camps that had been formerly run by the Fascists. In some towns, army patrols had rounded up almost the entire population. They were holding them in makeshift prisons where men between eighteen and fifty-six years of age were being systematically starved until they agreed to volunteer for Tito’s army.
From where he was standing, Foster had a view over the landscaped gardens stretching up to the road. The beauty and tranquillity of it all was a world away from the horrors faced by the people passing beyond the line of poplar trees, and the spate of murders sweeping the north of Italy.
4.
There had been no let-up in the volume of top-secret telegrams flooding into Desert Air Force headquarters in the ten days since the Germans had surrendered. The recriminations following the defeat of Fascism had brought Italy close to civil war. Liberation had brought widespread killings, leaving hundreds dead on the streets of cities and towns throughout the north. ‘Total of unidentified bodies at the mortuary since the liberation of Milan now amounts to over 400,’ reported the British Ambassador in a telegram to the Foreign Office.1 ‘The sinister feature of these killings is that all identification marks have been carefully removed before shooting. It is therefore difficult to say whether the victims are Fascists executed by Partisans, or Partisans executed by Fascists, or just victims of personal vendetta.’
In the province of Friuli, the situation was particularly acute. In the space of ten days, hundreds of Italians had been killed by other Italians, adding to the tally of atrocities committed by Tito’s forces. At Ziracco, a small town on the plain 12 miles east of the castle, there had been a dozen murders.2 Further south, in the Manzano area, one partisan commander was reported to have killed forty-three people.
On the way through Udine that afternoon, Foster had attended an intelligence briefing at the regional headquarters of AMG, the interim organization set up by the Allies to govern Italy.fn1 The Coolant Mission – the SOE unit operating in the area – was reporting the discovery of another mass grave in Drenchia, close to Italy’s border with Yugoslavia.fn2 The bodies were found in ‘a ditch containing 30 corpses alleged to be Italians shot by the Slovenes’.3 Coolant’s intelligence indicated that the Communist Garibaldi partisans, of which there were 4,000 in the Udine area, were about to join forces with the Yugoslavs to launch a Communist coup. The unit had learned that Mario Lizzero, ‘perhaps the most dangerous of the Garibaldi leaders’, was directing the operation: ‘He is intelligent and unscrupulous and has complete control of the Communist Party.4 His present activity is to manoeuvre the penetration of all Municipal and Provincial offices, in and outside Udine, by Communist elements.’ Coolant was also warning that a ‘big net of Communist agents, lavishly supplied with funds’ was active throughout the province. Their orders were to ‘penetrate to Treviso and Venice to build up Communist centres’. While the Allies could count on the loyalty of the anti-Slav partisans, a force of some 8,000 men, their hatred of Communism had further escalated tension in the region.
In Udine itself, which was just 5 miles from the castle, the situation was becoming ugly. Garibaldi commanders, operating from secret hideouts around the city, were compiling lists of individuals whom they regarded as weak and fearful, and whom they believed could be bribed to join their units with gifts of money and food.5 Local girls were being told not to associate with Allied troops. Many had received anonymous letters warning that those caught doing so would have their heads shaved. In some districts, the Communists had daubed graffiti on the walls of the houses: ‘Zivio [Long live] Tito’, ‘Zivio Stalin’, ‘Tukay je Jugoslavia’ (This is Yugoslavia).6
During the briefing, a leaflet had been circulated. It was one of hundreds that had dropped from the skies over Udine on 2 May, the day peace was declared. With the ceasefire in operation, the Yugoslavs, who had fought on the side of the Allies, had stopped bombing the city; but their planes had returned to deliver a chilling message:
Citizens of Udine, Today you receive our visiting card: Terror accompanies our victorious march.7 Weep over the ruins of your homes and meditate upon your sins, you who in the secrecy of your hearts await the ENGLISH, the protectors of the Bourgeois and the well-to-do. Be it said once and for all, so that afterwards it may not seem strange to you: FRIULI BELONGS TO THE BOLSHEVIK ZONE OF INFLUENCE and consequently the patriots whom you must support are the communist patriots of the Garibaldi. IF YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO DO IT FOR LOVE, YOU WILL DO IT BY COMPULSION.
Over the previous twenty-four hours, 200 Yugoslav troops had marched into the city. Simultaneously, 500 men from Gorizia, fleeing to avoid Slovene conscription, had arrived and were clamouring to be enrolled in the anti-Slav partisan brigades. Peace in Europe had lasted eleven days. The intensity with which the crisis had blown up, fanned by Tito’s threat to seize the strategic port of Trieste, meant that the talk at the briefing was of one last battle or – if the Communists pressed their plans to seize the region – the first of a Third World War.
In this ‘witches’ cauldron of conflicting politics and nationalities’ – as one army officer described the situation – Foster’s Desert Air Force had a significant role.8 Besides flying sorties over the Alps to monitor the tens of thousands of Wehrmacht troops corralled on the main passes, the squadrons were to hunt down the SS stay-behind units that were hiding out in the mountains; further, they were to determine the strength and disposition of Yugoslav forces to the east of Udine, and pinpoint the positions of the Garibaldi partisan units that had retreated to the mountains with their weapons to prepare for a Communist coup.9
A soft evening light flooded the house. Foster stood on the gravel drive outside the west wing, looking up. There were still a numb
er of rooms that he had not seen, but he could not work out how to get to them.
He could see the windows. But inside, when he had tried the door leading into the wing, it had been locked. With operations resuming early the next morning, he wanted to see the rooms while he had time.
5.
The entrance to the wing was reached from the garden along a white stone path, bordered by low, tightly clipped hedges.
Stepping through the door, Foster entered a small hallway. Immediately, he was struck by the contrast to the empty rooms in the rest of the house. Along one side of it, outdoor garments were crammed on a coat rack and on the floor below was a row of riding boots. Beside them, sun hats of various shapes and sizes had been piled on the head of a marble bust. On the hall table, strewn around a pair of Chinese vases, were all sorts of items, among them bunches of keys, a dog lead, packets of seeds and rolls of gardening twine.
Despite the clutter, the room had a sense of order. The riding boots stood in a neat line, arranged according to size. The effect was curiously poignant. At the far end of the row, there were two tiny pairs of jodhpur boots. One looked as if it belonged to a child of four or five; the other was even smaller.1
The passage beyond the hall was in semi-darkness. Stopping at the entrance to it, he switched on a light. Straight away, his attention was drawn to a small card pinned to the door on his right.2 A gold crown was embossed on the thick white paper; below it, written in black ink in a curlicued script, were the words: ‘Camera del Victor Emmanuel III, S.M Il Re d’Italia’.
The bedroom of Victor Emmanuel III, His Majesty the King of Italy.
It was a startling discovery. For an instant, all Foster could think was that the king owned the castle. But then if it belonged to him, why had it been necessary to pin a note to the door to signal that this was his bedroom? Rather, the presence of the card suggested that the king’s stay at the castle had been a sudden, temporary arrangement. So what had brought him to this remote part of his country? Had he used the castle as a hideout earlier in the war? An unpopular figure, tainted by his support for Mussolini’s regime, the king had been Italy’s commander-in-chief until the autumn of 1943 when he had negotiated an armistice with the Allies. Nicknamed Il Re Soldato (the Soldier King) by the Italians or, more unfavourably, Sciaboletta (Little Sabre) – due to the fact he was only 5 feet tall – he had spent the remainder of the war under armed guard in a castle on the Amalfi Coast.3
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