The Thing Itself

THIRTY-EIGHT

Victor Tempest exercise book four cont.

I went into Tuscany by parachute in November 1943 to help wreak havoc behind Kesselring’s wavering line. I first made contact with a small band of partisans near Perugia. They were led by a middle-aged man called Franco. He had worked in the wool mills until the dust and fibre from the machines had ruined his lungs and forced him back to the hill village of his birth. He was a communist whose hatred for fascism stemmed from the time the local squads had brutally destroyed the workers’ organization at his mill.

He was a brave man but he was not a natural guerrilla fighter. Most of his men were local teenagers who had taken to the hills to avoid fascist call-up. If caught, they were likely to face the firing squad. I was with them about two months, trying to train them, going out on sorties, before disaster struck.

We had been using a barn as a refuge. One morning we were attacked there by a well-armed squad of fascist militia-men. The partisans had little in the way of up-to-date weapons. Their one machine gun, an updated World War One weapon, jammed. The barn became a death trap.

Behind the barn the ground sloped up some three hundred yards to the crest of a hill. I tried to persuade the others to take a chance but only one of them, an intense, bony young man called Fabbio Cortone, agreed to come with me. The two of us made a zigzag run for it up the hill and got away. The forty who stayed behind were all killed.

Killing had got no easier for me, but I got the job done. And under fire, as at the barn, I found I could think and act coolly. This was not because I felt myself in some way invulnerable, rather that I was able to disassociate myself from what was happening to me. As a survival mechanism, this took its toll. I forgot how to feel. Eventually, I even forgot about the young soldier quoting Rilke to the night sky.

Cortone, a former schoolteacher who had been in exile in the south, came from Chiusi. He told me it was the old Etruscan capital, built on a hill with a labyrinth of tunnels beneath it. He was heading that way. He guided me over the hills in that direction because it was en route to Rome. He was a communist and very cynical about Allied support for the partisans. I could say little in response because I knew from my own orders that what Cortone said was true.

I had been left in no doubt by London that the partisans were there to be exploited and ultimately sacrificed. Churchill, an admirer of Mussolini, had never forgiven him for choosing the wrong side in the war. When Italy wanted peace, Churchill wanted to make the country pay for its ‘disloyalty’, to earn a ‘return ticket to the company of civilized nations’.

His hard line was supported by Eden at the Foreign Office. Eden loathed the Italians for their perfidy. Early on in the Allied occupation of southern Italy, the monetary exchange had been set at 400 lire to pound. This devastating devaluation ensured that the Italian economy would not recover. But then a revival would have threatened the British economy. Italian textiles would have competed with cotton from Lancashire. I felt that somehow even if Mosley hadn’t triumphed his economic policies had.

The BUF had declared itself neutral during the war but many Blackshirts had chosen to fight. The first two RAF pilots to be killed in the war had been Blackshirts. The rest, including Mosley, had been interned. William Joyce, who had been kicked out of the BUF a couple of years before the war, had gone to Germany to broadcast sneering anti-British propaganda as Lord Haw-Haw.

Cortone left me to rejoin his original partisan group near Chiusi and I made my way to Rome. I stayed there doing what I could until the Allies liberated it in June. Reporting to Allied command, I was ordered to attach myself to the Sixth South African Armoured Division right bloody sharp for a special mission.

The Sixth was the most powerful individual formation in Italy because rolled into it were the Guards Brigade Group plus British, Indian, American, Polish and even Brazilian divisions.

I was briefed on my mission by a Major Rampling. Rampling was tough, gnarled. He sat bolt upright behind his makeshift desk although I doubted he’d been to sleep for twenty hours.

My destination was Chiusi. My mission was not assassination, as I had assumed, but protection.

‘Chiusi is currently in German hands but we are expecting a withdrawal any day,’ Rampling said in his upper-class drawl. ‘Your job is to protect a fascist count — Alfonso di Bocci — and his family from partisan reprisals when the town is liberated. He’s been the mayor of the town both before and during the German occupation. The partisans have him marked down as a fascist and a collaborator — both of which are undoubtedly true — but we’re instructed that he is needed for the first Italian post-war government. Winnie, as you may know, doesn’t care whether he is fascist, just so long as he isn’t a Red.’

Two things occurred to me. The first, that once again Mosley’s views were widely shared amongst Britain’s governing elite. The second, that I was undoubtedly going to come into conflict with my travelling companion, Fabbio Cortone.

Three weeks later I was with the 12th Motorized heading for Chiusi. I’d joined the massive convoy a week earlier in Orvieto. The rest of Di Bocci’s family lived there. In heavy rain the convoy headed north, winding its way across hills covered with thick forest. Along a road reduced to a muddy track we came upon the remote village of Allerona, high above the tree line.

It seemed impossible that war should have reached so high, yet the village was in ruins, its inhabitants already sorting rubble for good bricks and stones for rebuilding.

We occupied Chiusi railway station below the town and found about twenty civilians hiding in the cellars. Captain Miller from ‘A’ Company went up the road past a large albergo to reconnoitre the town and returned with half a dozen prisoners.

I was sitting under an olive tree smoking a roll-up when Miller came over to me and squinted down. He was a chubby man with a handlebar moustache that suggested he had joined the wrong service by mistake.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but could you help us with some prisoners we’ve taken. We can’t understand what they’re saying.’

The other officers were wary of me but they knew what a useful linguist I’d turned out to be. I’d started the war proficient in German but by now I could get by in Russian, Polish and Czech. I towered over Miller when I put out the roll-up and got to my feet. I looked at him and he looked away. I knew why. He, like everyone else, thought I was an assassin.

The prisoners were cowed but well fed. Two, neither of them older than eighteen, were wearing snipers’ camouflage jackets and the blue armbands of the Herman GOring Division. The other four were Czech deserters from the 362 Infantry Division. I spoke with them quietly for ten minutes, then went with Miller to see the commander, Major Ian Moore.

‘Their officer deserted the snipers yesterday,’ I reported. ‘They say there are two companies of the Hermann Goring Division in the area. The Czech deserters say they saw thirty Mark IV Panzer tanks north of the town yesterday. Looks like Chiusi is more strongly defended than HQ realizes.’

Chiusi was an irritation to Moore, who was eager to be in on the main push to dislodge the German army from central and northern Italy. He shook his head vigorously.

‘Tanks in such force? No, no. They aren’t going to hang around to defend Chiusi. They’ll be heading north to support Kesselring’s Gothic Line. My intelligence has it there is only a parachute division in the town itself. I intend to have taken Chiusi and be advancing north within forty-eight hours.’