SEVENTEEN
‘Either the government will be given to us or we shall seize it by marching on Rome!’ The challenge was issued at a Fascist congress held in Naples towards the end of 1922, and was greeted by repeated cries of ‘Roma! Roma! Roma!’ from a crowd of delegates and supporters, 40,000 strong. The speaker was Benito Mussolini, a 29-year-old former socialist who, as an influential journalist, had been expelled from the party for strongly advocating Italy's intervention in the Great War. He had fought in the war with thebersaglieri; and, after being wounded, had returned to journalism. As early as February 1918 he had been pressing for the appointment of a dictator in Italy, ‘a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep’. Three months later, in a widely reported speech at Bologna, he hinted that he himself might prove such a man.
His supporters were a strange rag-bag of discontented socialists and syndicalists, republicans and anarchists, unclassifiable revolutionaries, conservative monarchists and restless soldiers many of whom had been arditi (the impetuous commandos of the Italian army) and some of whom were wanted by the police. They formed themselves into what were known as fascii di combattimenti, fighting groups, bound by ties as close as those that secured the fasces of the lictors, the symbols of Roman authority. The Fascists had not at first been successful at the polls: in 1919 as candidates for the Chamber of Deputies they received no more than 4,795 votes. But the failure of successive governments to deal with Italy's social unrest and manifold problems allowed the Fascists to put themselves forward as saviours of their country, the only force by which Bolshevism could be checked and strangled. Protesting that violence could be met only by greater violence, squads of armed Fascists, known as squadristi, attacked socialist workers' organizations, rival parties' and trade union headquarters, newspaper offices and all those whom they deemed Bolshevik sympathizers with a ferocity and regularity that led almost to civil war. Shouting patriotic slogans, singing nationalist songs and wearing the black shirts which the labourers of the Marche and Emilia had adopted as the uniform of the anarchists, the squadristi obtained the support of thousands who were prepared to condone their methods, their violence, their revolting practice of filling their opponents with castor oil, in the belief that only by such means could Bolshevism be wiped out and order restored. So, by the end of 1922, having taken over Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna, and encouraged by the occasional complicity of certain government officials, the frequent help of the police and the probable acquiescence of the House of Savoy which Mussolini had said could still play an important role in the nation's history, the Fascists were ready to seize Rome by force.
In four converging columns, 26,000 strong, they closed in upon the city on 28 October. The government proclaimed its intention of declaring martial law, but the King refused to sign the decree; and, once it was known that he was prepared to accept Mussolini, the army and the police stood aside and the blackshirts approached the capital, by train, by bus or on foot. Mussolini himself, a superb opportunist and flexible agitatore, for the moment remained in Milan. He had already been asked to form a government, so that the March on Rome was, in fact, unnecessary. But the March was required by the myth of Fascism, as were the fictitious 3,000 Fascist martyrs who were supposed to have died in the insurrection that brought Mussolini to power. He arrived in Rome by train at half-past ten on the morning of 30 October.
Once in power, as the youngest prime minister the Italians had ever had, Mussolini showed how shrewd a politician he was. Although from the beginning determined to become a dictator and, in personal control of the police, to have all his leading opponents arrested, he presented to the King a list of ministers calculated to demonstrate that he was a national rather than a party leader. And it was as a national leader that the Italians were prepared, indeed anxious, to welcome him. They were tired of strikes and riots, hungry for the flamboyant techniques, the medieval trappings of Fascism. Thus it was that there were spontaneous demonstrations of support for Fascism after the March on Rome, and thus it was that Mussolini's immense popularity survived the sporadic violence in Rome on the night of the Fascists’ triumphant entry, the undoubtedly fraudulent elections of 1924, and even the murder of the brave and gifted socialist leader, Giacomo Matteotti, in which Mussolini was widely believed to have been implicated.
He had set to work with the most enthusiastic determination, getting up early, performing a variety of violent exercises, then eating a breakfast which a stomach ulcer required should be as sparse as all his other meals, and reading with astonishing speed several Italian and foreign newspapers before arriving in his office at eight o'clock. He had no pleasures, he said, other than his work; and although there was to come a time when he scarcely worked at all, in these early years of power the claim was largely true. He fenced and boxed, he swam, played tennis and rode a horse; but his object was not so much pleasure or relaxation as the banishment of fat from his body and his massive but already slightly sagging jaw, the acquisition and maintenance of a hard strong physique, the proof that years of treatment for a persistent venereal disease had not taken toll of his constitution as his enemies maintained. He did take pleasure in sexual encounters, but these were hurried and impatient. Women who came to his office, or his hotel room, or to the flat he later took in the upper floor of a palazzo in Via Rasella, were ravished, usually on the floor, and then hastily dismissed while he, not having bothered to remove either his trousers or his shoes, returned to his desk. Generally ill dressed, he was frequently unshaved and often unwashed, being accustomed to splashing eau-de-Cologne over himself when he got up in preference to wasting
90. Mussolini, in October 1922, standing with a group of leading blackshirts who led the March on Rome.
time in a bath. He could not be bothered to tie up shoelaces, so he had elastic laces made with bows. He did not see why he should not wear spats with evening dress if they kept his feet warm, nor a black tie with tails if he could not find a white one, and he often did so, frequently also wearing yellow shoes. He appeared at his office in a morning suit, as the striped trousers and cut-away black coat appealed to him, but he was constantly wriggling his huge neck in the butterfly collar and shaking back the cuffs of his starched shirt.
At first Mussolini occupied offices both in the new Palazzo del Viminale, the Ministry of the Interior,1 and in the old Palazzo Chigi, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.2 But finding these inadequate, in 1929 he moved to Palazzo Venezia where he occupied the biggest of the spacious halls on the first floor. Almost seventy feet long and forty wide, it occupies two storeys of the original building and has two rows of windows, the upper row originally belonging to the floor above. The tall, wide centre window of the lower row opens on to a balcony and from here Mussolini made many of his celebrated speeches, hands on hips, legs splayed apart, jaw thrust out, falling into silence from time to time to gaze down at the crowds below him, to receive the benediction of their frenzied roar, ‘Duce! Duce! Duce!’, his expression as motionless as the symbol of his regime, the axe and the lictors' rods carved in stone on the wall beside him.
The room from which this commanding figure appeared was known as the Sala del Mappamondo from the old map of the world displayed there. It was unfurnished apart from a large desk placed sixty feet from the door, a lectern and three chairs arranged in front of a huge fireplace decorated, like the wall outside, with the emblem of Fascism. Some visitors whom the Duce wished to intimidate were required to walk across the bare floor towards the fireplace while no notice was taken of them, their feet ringing on the coldly echoing polished marble mosaics, the dark figure beneath the towering candlestick on the table still immersed in his papers. But others found him friendly and courteous, walking towards them quickly, holding out his hand. Even when he gave the impression, as he did to Lord Vansittart, of a man who ‘took such obvious pleasure in his own company’ that he was ‘reminiscent of a boxer in a flashy dressing-gown shaking hands with himself’, he managed to give pleasure to his visitors as well as to himself, although he was quite humourless and essentially misanthropic. He spoke fluently in a low voice, displaying a brilliant flair for unusual yet apt allusions and striking neologisms. ‘When the Duce starts to talk,’ his Foreign Secretary once said of him, ‘he is delightful. I know nobody who uses such rich and original metaphors.’ But he was not a good listener. He found it difficult to keep still in his chair, and would sometimes stand up abruptly to carry on the conversation, distractingly striding up and down the room. As the years passed, he grew increasingly restless during tiresome interviews and in the day-to-day conduct of government. He gave the impression of being always occupied with business, and at night left the light burning in the Sala del Mappamondo to bolster the illusion of ceaseless industry. In fact, he had no taste for organization, no patience with difficult work, such a horror of making decisions that he would write the word ‘approved’ on two conflicting memoranda emanating from two different ministries and then go through the door to his private apartment where his mistress lay waiting for him, or go home to his family in Villa Torlonia,3 the large graceful house in Via Nomentana which Prince Giovanni Torlonia had placed at his disposal for as long as he wanted it for one lira a year.
A skilful journalist and propagandist as well as artful politician, he was much happier when manipulating the masses by the written and the spoken word than when engaged in administration. He envisaged government as a series of dramatic headlines, ‘La Battaglia del Grano’, ‘The Battle to Reclaim the Marshes’, ‘The Demographic Campaign’. And he loved to be seen and photographed conducting these operations, reviewing troops and party members in the choreographic displays of Fascism, speaking to farm-workers at harvest time, his hairy, barrel-shaped chest bare to the sun, acting as host to those delegations which were regularly brought to Rome such as the ninety-three most prolific women in the country. These black-shawled progenitors of over thirteen hundred children were taken on a tour of the city on Christmas Eve 1933, visiting the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where, in the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs, they knelt to kiss the glass case containing the bloodstained handkerchief that the Duce had held to a bullet wound in his nose after an attempted assassination, placing a wreath by the altar in the Fascist Martyrs’ Chapel, receiving medals and scrolls in the offices of the National Organization for the Protection of Mothers and Children, and being presented to the Duce at Palazzo Venezia before attending the closing ceremony in the Augusteum.
The Rome they saw was gradually being transformed under the personal direction of the Duce who could be seen from time to time surveying the progress of the work from the balcony of the Sala del Mappamondo and who sent down occasional messages to encourage the workmen in their labours.
In five years [he told the City Council], Rome must appear wonderful to the whole world, immense, orderly and powerful as she was in the days of the first empire of Augustus. The approaches to the Theatre of Marcellus, the Campidoglio and the Pantheon must be cleared of everything that has grown up round them during the centuries of decadence. Within five years the hill of the Pantheon must be visible through an avenue leading from Piazza Colonna… The third Rome will extend over other hills, along the banks of the sacred river, as far as the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
He envisaged a city vastly increased in size and population, dominated by those huge buildings and skyscrapers which so much appealed to him. It would have, towering above the Forum, an immense Palace of Fascism which would be one of the largest and most impressive structures in the world. And to make way for this new Rome all that was ‘filthy and picturesque’, all that smelled of the Middle Ages would be destroyed.
The threatened wholesale destruction of medieval Rome was never carried into effect, but much of it did vanish, as did fifteen ancient churches, to be replaced by those monuments of Fascist architecture in many, though by no means all, of which the realization of sheer size and ostentation seems to have been the guiding principle of their design. A promised wide thoroughfare linking the Colosseum and the Piazza Venezia did appear as the Via dei Fori Imperiali;4 a wide avenue leading from the river to St Peter's Square, the Via della Conciliazone,5 was begun to commemorate that real achievement of the Fascist regime, the 1929 agreement with the Vatican known as the Lateran Pact which brought to an end the 80-year-old division between Church and State; and, on the southern outskirts of Rome, the huge complex, known as E.U.R. and built for a proposed Roman exhibition to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome, remains as an example of planning on the grand scale.6
But in Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, Fascist achievements never matched Fascist promises and boasts. The success of various land-reclamation schemes could not be denied, and the draining of the huge areas of the Pontine Marshes, the partial eradication of malaria there, the building of canals, new roads, towns and hydroelectric power stations, gave land, homes, work and opportunities to thousands of poor people from all over Italy, while a widespread improvement in working conditions was achieved. Yet despite the boasts of Fascist statisticians that never less than 100,000 labourers were engaged on public works and that between 1922 and 1942 the government spent no less than 33,634 million lire on such enterprises, performance fell far below both intention and claims. Archaeological work in Rome included excavations and reconstructions in Caesar's and Trajan's Forum, in the Piazza Venezia and on the Capitol, the rebuilding of the Curia and the uncovering of temples in the Largo di Torre Argentina dating back to the time of the Roman Republic, and the repair of both the Ara Pacis and the Augusteum which Mussolini intended, so rumour had it, for his own tomb. While much was undoubtedly accomplished, only a fraction of the work planned was actually undertaken. Work begun was often left unfinished, and immense sums of money disappeared on impossibly ambitious schemes or drifted into the pockets of corrupt officials and high-ranking Fascists anxious to make their fortune while they could. A huge Forum of Mussolini, for instance, was planned to cover an immense area between Monte Mario and the Tiber. It was, so the Duce ordered, to dwarf both St Peter's and the Colosseum and to have as its centrepiece a marble obelisk 118 feet high and weighing nearly 800 tons, ‘the largest monolith in the world’. But then it was decided that even this was not impressive enough. Instead, there must be a statue of Hercules 263 feet tall, its right hand raised in a Fascist salute, its features resembling those of Mussolini himself. After 100 tons of metal had been expended, part of a gigantic head and a foot as large as an elephant's had been cast, this project progressed no further.
The Duce himself was rarely blamed for Fascism's shortcomings. There were many anti-Fascists in Rome, but few anti-Mussolinians. He was not only a dictator, he was an idol. Photographs of him were stuck on the walls of countless homes, slogans in praise of him – Duce! Duce! Duce! Il Duce ha sempre ragione – were splashed in white paint everywhere; objects that he had touched were prized as sacred relics. Skilfully presented to the people as Italy's man of destiny, he was accepted as such; and millions fell under the sway of that proudly jutting jaw, those black, wide-open eyes, those wonderfully expressive gestures, that strangely emotive voice. When, on the night of 9 May 1936, he announced from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia that victory had been achieved in Abyssinia and Italy had ‘her empire’, the last words of his speech were lost in a wild torrent of cheers, in the screams of hysterical women, in shouts of adoration and protestations of loyalty until death.
Yet Mussolini was by then already on the road which was to lead to his downfall, set upon a course for a war for which his forces were utterly unprepared. The victim of his own propaganda, convinced of his infallibility, closing his mind to unwelcome evidence, he chose to believe that alliance with Hitler in the Rome-Berlin Axis would ‘bring Italy the true greatness of which Fascism had made her worthy’.
When Hitler came to Rome in May 1938, with the expressed intention, so a secretary at the Italian Embassy in Berlin reported, of flattering the Italians' pride and of demonstrating that the Axis was a living reality, Mussolini was determined that his visitor should be deeply impressed.
91. The hero of the March on Rome.
The planning had begun six months before; and all along the railway line to Rome houses had been repainted and stations redecorated. The streets of the city itself, through which the parades were to pass, were made splendidly welcoming; and although many shopkeepers refused to display portraits of the Führer, they allowed banners and flags to be flown from their windows. The Italian soldiers who were to take part in the parades and who had been chosen for their height and prepossessing appearance were drilled endlessly, issued with new uniforms and equipped with weapons which they had not yet been trained to use in war. The resultant military pageants were, indeed, magnificent, so Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, said. ‘The Germans, who may have been a little sceptical on this point, will leave with a very different impression.’
Hitler certainly seemed to be impressed. And he himself had a ‘great personal success’, Ciano thought. ‘He has succeeded in melting the ice around him… His personal contacts, too, have won sympathy, particularly among women.’ His reluctant host at the Quirinal, the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III, however, disliked him on sight. He told Mussolini that on his first night in the palace Hitler had asked for a woman. This request caused the utmost commotion in the Royal Household until it was explained that the Führer could not get to sleep until he had seen a woman remake his bed. Was the story really true? Ciano wondered. Or was it malice on the part of the King, who also insinuated that Hitler injected himself with stimulants and narcotics? The whole atmosphere of the palace, Ciano decided, was ‘moth-eaten’.
The antipathy between the King and Hitler was as marked as the cordiality which existed between the two dictators. On first meeting Hitler, Mussolini had decided that the ‘silly little clown’ was ‘quite mad’. But he had now changed his mind about him. At the station when they said good-bye, both of them were moved and Hitler was seen to stare at Mussolini with an almost dog-like devotion. ‘From now on,’ the Duce told him, ‘no force on earth will be able to separate us.’ The Führer's eyes filled with tears.
Neville Chamberlain's eyes also filled with tears when he left Rome the following year to the strains of ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow’, sung rather tunelessly by a group of English residents. Chamberlain's visit had not been a success, and Mussolini had not intended that it should be. ‘These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the British Empire,’ he decided after the Englishmen had gone. ‘They are the tired sons of a long line of rich forefathers.’ But then what could you expect of a people, he asked later in a speech in which his misconceptions of English life were so grotesque as to be appealing, who changed into dinner-jackets for their afternoon tea?
On 10 June 1940, after many hesitations and doubts, Mussolini declared war upon these degenerate people, persuaded by the surrender of the Belgian Army that he could wait no longer. That night in Rome an atmosphere of gloom hung over the dreadfully quiet city. Going home dejectedly to his flat to pack, the correspondent of The Times passed down Corso Umberto and across Piazza di
92. The Duce appeals for 90,000 more young Fascists to bring the Fascist Militia up to its required strength.
Spagna and saw not a single flag hung out. Italian friends came to wish him farewell, walking past the policeman on watch near his front door and the people muttering anxiously in the doorways, and they shook hands with him with a kind of sad apology. ‘I feel miserable,’ Count Ciano recorded in his diary. ‘The adventure begins. May God help Italy!’
Ciano's fears were well justified. The course of the war proved disastrous for Mussolini; and in Rome, by the summer of 1943, Fascists and non-Fascists alike constantly discussed ways and means of getting rid of him. The King, in almost daily contact with various dissident groups, had been deeply distressed and alarmed by an Allied air raid on Rome on 19 July in which hundreds of people had been killed and the basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura very badly damaged, and he had been persuaded after weeks of hesitation to order the arrest of Mussolini when he called for an audience either at the Quirinal or at the Villa Savoia.7 At the same time a group of prominent Fascists had themselves been plotting their leader's overthrow which, it was planned, should be arranged at a meeting at Palazzo Venezia of the Fascist Grand Council, the supreme authority of the state. Informed of this plot, the King was confirmed in his resolve to act, since a vote of no confidence in Mussolini by the Council would give him the constitutional authority he felt he needed to dismiss him. Although forewarned that Count Dino Grandi, a former ambassador in London and one of the most influential members of the Council, was to present a resolution calling for the Duce's resignation, Mussolini strode with his usual confidence into the Sala del Pappagallo where the meeting was to be held, not looking at any of them. He was wearing the greyish-green uniform of the Supreme Commander of the Fascist Militia as though to distinguish himself as a man apart from the others who were all, at his orders, clothed in the black bush-shirt known as the Sahariana. ‘Salute the Duce!’ the Secretary of the Party called out. They all obediently jumped to their feet and gave the traditional response, ‘We salute him!’ Glowering, Mussolini sat down at a table on a dais raised above the level of the table at which the others sat. On their way into the room they had noticed that the courtyard was filled with Fascist militiamen. Other militiamen were patrolling the corridors, stairs and apartments of the palazzo itself. One senior member of the Council had murmured apprehensively to Grandi, ‘This is the end for us.’
The Duce began to speak. He spoke for two hours, rambling on inconclusively, inconsequentially, disingenuously, blaming everyone other than himself for Italy's predicament, remarking in one aside, so outlandish and irrelevant that his listeners wondered if it were some obscure joke, that he had foreseen the English attack at El Alamein on 23 October 1942 because he knew they wanted to spoil the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome during the following week.
For a long time after these extraordinary pronouncements had been drawn to a close, no one spoke. In the uneasy silence they were all conscious of an appalled disillusionment, so the Italian ambassador to Berlin considered. They had never heard Mussolini speak to such ill effect. Twenty years of power were at an end. As
93. Mussolini standing beside his writing-table in the vast Sala del Mappamondo at Palazzo Venezia. Contrary to rumour, visitors were rarely required to walk across the sixty feet of mosaic from the door. ‘He met me at the door,’ wrote Duff-Cooper of an interview in 1934, ‘and accompanied me to it when I left… I was favourably impressed.’
other members began to speak, abusing each other, the Germans and the Allies in turn, and as Ciano rose to make an unprecedented attack upon the Duce, Mussolini leant in a cramped position over the table as though he were in pain, occasionally pressing his hands against his stomach or lifting them to shade his eyes from the glaring light of the chandeliers. His pale face was covered with sweat. After six and a half hours, Mussolini adjourned the meeting. When he came back and the debate resumed, he appeared to have recovered. He spoke with calm confidence and it seemed, so Grandi said later, that ‘he had regained at one stroke all that he had lost’. But it was too late. At a quarter-past two in the morning the resolution was put to the vote. Nineteen of the twenty-eight members of the Council voted in its favour. Mussolini gathered his papers together and stood up abruptly. ‘Salute the Duce!’ the Secretary called out once more. But Mussolini cut short the muffled response by snapping, ‘I excuse you from that.’ At the door he paused for a moment and announced accusingly, ‘You have provoked the crisis of the regime.’
94. Mussolini with his family at Villa Torlonia. From the left are his wife, Rachele, holding the baby, Anna Maria, the Duce with his younger son Romano, and in front of Edda, the two elder boys, Bruno and Vittorio.
The next morning, however, he went to his office as usual and carried on with his work as though nothing unusual had occurred. He brushed aside the advice of close colleagues and members of his family to have the members of the Council who had voted against him arrested. When the Secretary of the Party telephoned to say that some of the nineteen were now having second thoughts, he accepted the news as though he had expected it and had already decided how to deal with the traitors. ‘Too late,’ he answered with one of those enigmatic threats which had once been heard with alarm but had long since ceased to carry any weight.
It was arranged that he would go to see the King that afternoon. He went home to Villa Torlonia to change into the civilian suit which the royal staff had specified for the audience. This seemed ominous to his wife, since he had always worn a tailcoat for official audiences in the past, and she warned him, ‘Don't go. He's not to be trusted.’ But Mussolini had no sense of danger. He conceded to the Chief of Staff of the Fascist Militia that the King might want to take over from him as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces but there would be nothing more important than that. He had had a royal audience once or twice a week for over twenty years; the King had always been solidly with him.
Accompanied by his secretary, he stepped into his car which drove off towards the Via Salaria and the Villa Savoia. It was a quiet Sunday, suffocatingly hot; the streets were almost deserted. The papers that morning had announced the fall of Palermo.
The car stopped outside the portico and the driver was surprised to see the King standing at the entrance to the villa in the uniform of a Chief Marshal of the Empire. He had never seen the King greet the Duce in that way before; nor had he ever seen so manycarabinieri as there were in the grounds that day. But the Duce at first remained quite unperturbed, maintaining that the vote of the Grand Council was not legally binding. And even when informed by the nervous King of his dismissal he seemed unable at first to understand what was being said to him. Then he sat down suddenly and heavily and, so it seemed, feeling faint. The King went on talking, but Mussolini interrupted him to murmur, ‘Then it's all over.’
The interview had lasted for a mere twenty minutes. The Duce came out of the villa looking bemused as he walked down the steps to his car which had been moved across to the other side of the drive. As he approached it a captain in the carabinieri came up to him and said, ‘His Majesty has charged me with your protection.’ Mussolini objected, but the captain was insistent. ‘No, Excellency, you must come with me.’ He took him by the elbow and led him to an ambulance the back doors of which were open. Mussolini, followed by his secretary, stepped inside, pulling his rather rumpled brown felt hat over his eyes. The captain, another officer and three carabinieri climbed in after him, as well as three police officers in plain clothes carrying machine-pistols. The doors were loudly slammed shut. It never occurred to him even now that he had been arrested.
No one spoke as the ambulance sped away to the carabinieri's Podgora barracks in Via Quintino Sella, where Mussolini stepped down and stood scowling about him, his jaw thrust out, leaning forward slightly with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, as though he had come on a tour of inspection. He was shown to the officers' mess where he was left alone for about an hour before being taken on in the ambulance across the river to the barracks of the carabinieri cadets in Via Legnano. For the rest of that day and for the whole of the next he was kept here, for most of the time lying on a camp-bed in the commandant's office, looking through the window at the cars driving in and out and at the cadets marching in front of the wall on which, painted in huge white letters were the slogans of his régime: ‘Credere! Obbedire! Combattere!’ On the evening of 27 July he was driven out of the barracks and taken into exile on the island of Ponza.
In the streets of Rome on the night of his arrest, the people had gathered to ask each other what was happening. There were squads of soldiers armed with machine-guns in the squares, but what they had been called out for no one knew. There were rumours of an Allied parachute landing in the south; stories that the Duce had resigned and gone home to the Romagna, that he had flown to Germany, that he had been assassinated. It was known that the Grand Council had met and that the meeting had been prolonged; but its decisions had not been made public. When wireless sets were turned on there were no sounds but hum and crackle. Even the gramophone records which were usually brought into use when programmes did not run to time had not been played. And then at last the announcer had come on to the air with news of the resignation of Cavaliere Benito Mussolini and the nomination as Head of the Government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio.
The information was greeted with the wildest excitement which even the subsequent announcement that the war would continue failed to dampen. It was believed that this was merely a formula, a meaningless declaration made to give the new government time to negotiate a peace without interference from the Germans. Crowds rushed through the streets shouting that the war was over. They broke into the offices of the Fascist newspaper, Il Messaggero and threw furniture, files, telephones and enormous portraits of the fallen Duce out of the windows. They hurled a bronze bust out of an office into the Corso and dragged it by ropes through the streets. They hacked Fascist emblems off buildings and tore Fascist badges out of the lapels of anyone foolhardy enough to wear them. Few badges, however, were still worn. Almost everyone, it seemed, had suddenly become anti-Fascist. Hooligans looking for victims could find none. The houses of a few known Fascists were broken into, but their owners could not be found. A gang of demonstrators burst into Palazzo Venezia, shouting that they wanted the man who had oppressed them for so long, but they did not attempt to break down the locked door of the Sala del Mappamondo and they contented themselves by waving a red flag.
Elsewhere there was little violence. The mood in the city was one of gaiety rather than revenge. People ran to the Quirinal to cheer the King and to Via XX Settembre to cheer Badoglio. In Via del Tritone, Piazza Colonna, Via Nazionale and Piazza del Popolo they sang and danced as at a festa. ‘Fascism is dead,’ they called happily to one another. It was true. Not a single man died that night in an effort to defend it, though one, the head of the Stefani News Agency, committed suicide. Fascism had collapsed in Rome without a struggle. Even Mussolini's own newspaper, Popolo d' Italia, quietly recognized his dismissal and where his photograph had previously appeared inserted one of Badoglio instead.
Most Romans remained at home. They had heard the announcer on the wireless say, ‘The war goes on.’ And they rightly feared that it might continue for a long time yet. The British and Americans and their allies had overrun Sicily and were now ready to invade the mainland. But the Germans were far from being beaten; and they would surely take steps to protect themselves from the consequences of an armistice signed by the Italians without their knowledge.
After a month of furtive negotiations, on 3 September, in an army tent near Syracuse in Sicily the Italian surrender was signed. On the same day Badoglio assured the German ambassador in Rome that Italy would fight alongside ‘her ally Germany to the end’. On the evening of 5 September, the Allies having landed at Salerno, the armistice was revealed. Immediately the German High Command ordered its troops in the neighbourhood of Rome to close in upon the capital. After a brief, bravely conducted but badly commanded resistance, the Italian defences of Rome crumbled. The King and the General Staff of the Armed Services fled to southern Italy, and the Nazi occupation of Rome began.
Rome was declared an open city, not to be defended even if attacked, and was allowed to have an Italian commander, subordinate to Field Marshal Kesselring, the German commander-in-chief. The administration of Rome was, however, kept strictly under the control of the Germans who watched even more closely over the activities of the various government departments than they did over those of the new Fascist government in northern Italy which had been set up at Salò on Lake Garda under the presidency of Mussolini after his rescue by the Germans from his Italian captors. The activities of the Fascist Party, which had been allowed to reopen its General Headquarters in Palazzo Wedekind,8 were also carefully watched, as were those of the Roman branch of the Party, the Fascio Romano, in Palazzo Braschi. The German forces stationed in Rome were placed under the command of General Stahel, an officer whose tight lips and glinting spectacles lent him a far more intimidating aspect than General Kurt Maeltzer who was soon to succeed him. Yet Maeltzer's ready smile, his roistering habits and buffoonery belied a harsh and callous nature.
It was, indeed, immediately made clear to the Romans that the Germans intended to rule their city with a firm, relentless hand. A proclamation was issued by Rome radio, which had of course been taken over by the occupying forces, ordering all Italians to surrender their arms on pain of being executed. A curfew was established; and it was eventually decreed that anyone seen on the streets after five o'clock in the afternoon would be shot on sight. A series of man-hunts resulted in the arrest of numerous men whose presence in Rome was considered a threat to the new regime. And to the fears of house arrest were added those of being rounded up in a cordoned-off street and pushed into a lorry for shipment to a German factory, farm or mine, or to those defence lines which were to prove so formidable an obstacle to the Allied advance and which were already being constructed. At the same time men of military age were in danger of being called up by the Fascist authorities. Hundreds of young Romans consequently disappeared from their homes every day. It has been calculated that of a total wartime population of 1,500,000 in Rome, some 200,000 were being hidden by the rest, many of them in churches and religious houses, others in the Vatican, yet others in such warren-like structures as Palazzo Orsini where the partly English and outspokenly pro-Allied Duchess of Sermoneta managed to disappear when the Germans came to arrest her.
Jews were naturally at particular risk. Granted full rights as Roman citizens in 1870, they had not since been persecuted with anything like the cruelty practised in Nazi-occupied Europe. In speeches and conversation Mussolini had often ranted against them and under German influence had endorsed a programme of racial legislation which was, however, never very rigorously enforced. Several Jews had thought it as well to go abroad; others had been expelled. But most of their faith had continued until now to live contentedly in Rome without undue interference from the authorities. On 26 September, however, Colonel Kappler, the head of the Gestapo in Rome, suddenly demanded fifty kilos of gold from the Jewish community. This was followed by an attack on the synagogue by Gestapo agents and by threats of attacks on shops run by Jews and houses occupied by them. About 8,000 found refuge in Catholic convents and institutes which held extraterritorial status; but over 2,000 were arrested in raids and deported to Germany in conditions of terrible brutality. Many others, given due warning, were able to escape from Rome, like the half-Jewish writer, Alberto Moravia, who fled to a peasant's cottage at Fondi.
Escaped prisoners of war, many of whom had converged upon Rome hoping to find sanctuary in the neutral Vatican, were also hounded by the Gestapo and the Fascist police. Thousands of them managed to get back to their units, however, many of them through an organization and escape line formed by one of their number, Major S. I. Derry, who was assisted by a resourceful and intrepid Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Risking their lives, numerous Romans broke the curfew and evaded the nightly patrols to bring food and money, clothes and medical help to the large number of apartments all over the city where escapers were hidden while waiting to be moved on. Several Italian helpers in the escape line were caught and shot; but a fugitive was hardly ever refused assistance, even though helping him might well result in a visit to one of the Gestapo interrogation centres in Via Tasso or to the Pensione Jaccarino in Via Romagna where Pietro Koch, a former wine-merchant and officer in the Italian regiment of the Granatieri, was, with the assistance of his two Italian mistresses, employed as a freelance interrogator by Colonel Kappler. In these notorious places, captured Resistance fighters were forced to undergo such fearful tortures that some died, while others broke down and revealed what secrets they knew.
Clandestine resistance in Rome had begun a week after the announcement of Badoglio's surrender when, on 9 September, a group of politicians representing the Socialist, Christian Democrat, Communist and Action Parties had met under the chairmanship of the former Prime Minister, Ivanoe Bonomi, and had founded the first Committee of National Liberation in Italy. Subsequently, numerous other committees and groups were established to form an Italian Resistance movement which, by the end of the war, had endured losses greater than those suffered by the Allied Fifth Army during the entire Italian campaign. In Rome there were military groups, formed by Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo from members of the Italian armed services, which provided an excellent network of communications with army contacts all over Italy and which proved extremely useful to Allied Intelligence. And there were groups, formed out of adherents to one or other of the political parties, which also maintained intermittent communication with Allied Force Headquarters through secret wireless stations established by Allied agents in Rome and which, in the case of the Socialist and Communist groups, organized acts of sabotage, attacks on German troops and assassinations of SS and Fascist police.
The most celebrated of these exploits was the attack by a Communist group on a detachment of soldiers from a German police regiment on their way to mount guard at the Ministry of the Interior. As they marched up Via Rasella a large bomb concealed in a rubbish cart exploded, killing thirty-two Germans and wounding many more, as well as a child and several other civilians. All the partisans involved got away, but the Germans took terrible reprisals. When Hitler heard of the killings he demanded that thirty or even fifty Italians should be shot for each German killed. And after Field Marshal Kesselring had managed to have the ratio reduced to ten to one, the main prison of Regina Coeli9 and other detention centres for partisans were ransacked for victims, five more than were required being produced because of some miscalculation after a further ten had been added to the list by Kappler when another victim had died in hospital. Among them were anti-Fascist officers of the Italian army and the carabinieri, activists from the political parties, a few Allied prisoners of war, seventy-five Jews, a priest and a diplomat. They were all shot in the caves along the old Ardeatine Way.
A surge of hope had swept through the people of Rome when news had come through that the Allies had landed north of the city at Anzio on 20 January 1944. But this was followed by a mood of despair as it became clear that the invasion had not been a success and that, pinned down in their bridgehead, the Allies were in danger of being forced back. Conditions in Rome began to deteriorate fast. Water, like gas and electricity, was frequently cut off; water-sellers appeared in the streets, as in the days of the Middle Ages; and a bottle of clear water became a precious possession. Prices soared as food became scarce; the black market flourished; people offered their possessions in the streets – books, gramophone records, clothes – in order to get money for bits of beef or packets of salt or extra bread. The poor verged upon starvation, despite the charitable work of the Vatican which, according to Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the British Minister to the Holy See, was eventually supplying 100,000 meals a day at one lira a head. In the parks, trees were cut down and benches chopped up for firewood. Men walked about in constant apprehension of arrest or deportation; and one day a pregnant woman, the mother of five children, was shot in the face and killed as she ran screaming towards her husband who had been rounded up for forced labour. Thereafter women had their heads shaved for sleeping with Germans.
Yet the graffiti scrawled on the walls did not attack the Germans alone. The papacy, fearful of exacerbating the plight of the Romans in general and the Jews in particular, was blamed for its refusal to condemn outright the excesses of the occupying force. The Allies, as careless in observing Rome's status as an open city as were her enemies, were attacked for their negligent air raids on the city which, while directed at such targets as railway lines, frequently damaged buildings and killed people in the surrounding areas. One raid in the Testaccio district left many dead; another on the Castro Pretorio barracks cost nearly a hundred civilian lives as well as those of several patients in the nearby Policlinico hospital.
Then, at last, at the end of May, as the roar of heavy guns could be heard in the distance, reports that the Germans were preparing to withdraw from Rome spread throughout the city: the luggage of their officers was seen being carried into the street from the big hotels on the Via Veneto. Yet even now there were fears that the Germans would defend the city as Mussolini wanted them to do. Remembering only too well how the Romans had greeted his downfall the year before, he insisted that there must be a battle for Rome, that the city must be fought for, street by street. On 2 June, however, the Pope issued a warning: ‘Whoever raises a hand against Rome will be guilty of matricide to the whole civilized world, and in the eternal judgement of God.’ And, on that same day Kesselring sought permission from Hitler to evacuate the city. Hitler, describing Rome as ‘a place of culture’ which must ‘not be the scene of combat operations’, granted it, ignoring Mussolini's protests.
So the German evacuation began. For fear lest it might lead to a Roman uprising, it was set in motion as discreetly as possible. Kesselring told General Maeltzer to attend a performance the following evening, 3 June, by Gigli in Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera. Soon after the curtain fell, however, the general exodus started; and by dawn German troops could be seen streaming out of the city, on foot, in vehicles, on bicycles, their artillery drawn by horses, their baggage piled up on Rome's horse-drawn cabs which they had commandeered. The Romans watched them depart with relief but without rancour: some of the troops in the bedraggled, dejected columns were offered drinks and cigarettes. ‘Continuous files of German soldiers, tired, sweaty but armed to the teeth, passed along the Lungotevere, between people standing in rows, people in shirt-sleeves, dirty and silent,’ recorded Mario Praz. ‘They don't laugh, they don't jeer, they don't show pity. The ancient Roman crowd, among the ancient monuments, sees once more an army in retreat, understands and is silent.’
On the outskirts of the city, German rearguards, shelled and dive-bombed, fought to delay the enemy advance; but by the middle of the afternoon Allied troops had passed beneath the walls of S. Paolo fuori le Mura and were advancing towards Porta S. Paolo, while American tanks were soon grinding their way slowly through Porta S. Giovanni. Families came out on to balconies and into the streets, cheering and clapping their hands, holding up flowers and jugs of wine; and, as the tanks and trucks continued to rumble through the streets in the gathering darkness, they lit candles in their windows in celebration of the end of their long trial.
95. General Mark Clark, commander of the 5th Army, talking to a priest in St Peter's Square after his troops' liberation of Rome in June 1944.