Читать книгу Sicily '43 - James Holland - Страница 22

THE PRE-WAR BAEDEKER GUIDE to southern Italy and Sicily warned that under no circumstances should the traveller attempt to visit Sicily during the months of July and August because of the appalling heat and prevalence of disease. The Allied planners were not taking any heed of that, but they were preparing a booklet for the Allied soldiers about to take part in HUSKY, which was to be issued to every single serviceman and included a brief history of the island and an outline of what they might expect when they got there, from climate to the living conditions of ordinary Sicilians, along with a handful of useful words and phrases. ‘The Island,’ the Soldier’s Guide to Sicily stated matter-of-factly on page 1, ‘has a long and unhappy history that has left it primitive and undeveloped, with many relics and ruins of a highly civilized past.’1 Sicily in 1943 was an island that had been rather left behind; the Allies might have been about to re-enter Europe, but this wasn’t a Europe many of them would recognize: parts of Italy – Sicily in particular – were very different from the modern, industrialized and increasingly urban worlds of Britain, the United States and Canada.

Shaped not unlike a stone-age flint arrowhead, with the point facing west, Sicily was, in many ways, trapped in a world that had barely changed in a thousand years: it was a place where agriculture dominated the economy and class dominated society, and where the peasants, which meant most of the population, were as poor, downtrodden and oppressed as they had ever been. In winter there could be vicious soaking downpours, which often did more harm than good as there were no dams or reservoirs to make the most of the rainfall, causing mudslides that could block roads to and from the hilltop towns for weeks. In the spring and early summer, Sicily would be briefly bathed in soft green and a multitude of wild flowers; but then came the long, volcanically hot summer, baking the hilly and mountainous interior into a brutal, bleached landscape that became more desert than farmland. In high summer, the air would be as still as the inside of an oven one day but the next whipped by dust storms brought on the North African scirocco.

Nor was this tough landscape improved by the dominating presence of Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, looming high over the north-east corner of the island and on clear days visible from even distant parts. It was like an all-seeing god, standing sentinel, occasionally with volcanic steam hanging over the top like a white cap. Sometimes, of course, it would erupt. Back in 396 BC, an eruption had stopped the Carthaginians in their tracks; another in 122 BC had destroyed much of Catania, lying just to the south-east of the mountain. Catania was nearly overrun again in 1669, while almost all of the town of Mascali, lying on the coast to the east of Etna, was swamped by lava barely more than a decade before the war in 1928.

Volcanic eruptions were one threat to the livelihoods – and lives – of Sicilians; earthquakes were another. At 5.20 a.m. on 28 December 1908 a massive quake hit Messina, swiftly followed by a 40-foot-high tsunami along the coastline. More than 90 per cent of Messina was destroyed and tens of thousands killed – possibly as many as a hundred thousand.

Along with natural disasters and a savage climate, Sicilians over the centuries had also had to deal with marauders and invaders. It was an island with an astonishingly rich history. Those modern, twentieth-century troops who had been taught Latin and Greek during their schooldays would have remembered that Sicily was the place where Daedalus, the first aeronaut, landed – according to the myth – and where, in Homer’s tale, Odysseus tricked and blinded the Cyclops.

Sicily had always been a bridge, or stepping stone, from one world to another – first to the ancient Greeks, then to the Romans and Carthaginians. Over time it was occupied by Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, before becoming a vassal to the Bourbons of the Holy Roman Empire, then to Napoleon, then back to the Bourbons once more. Over and over, successive powers arrived in Sicily, imposed themselves and ruled with an iron rod until usurped by someone else. The one constant was the appalling treatment of the native Sicilians. At the same time, the island was subjected to regular raids by pirates from Arabia, from Africa – from all over. This turbulent history gave rise to one of Sicily’s characteristic features: the lack of villages or isolated settlements. It was never safe to live in small communities, and so most Sicilians lived in towns, more often than not perched high on a hill for safety. Daily, the menfolk would leave the town and head down into the fields to eke out a pitiful living, then, the backbreaking day done, trudge back up to their homes.

Even by 1943, Sicilians for the most part were still living lives of appalling poverty. There was an electricity grid, but by no means all homes were connected, certainly not in the more remote towns of the mountainous interior. Only around two-fifths of the population had access to running water and those were mostly in the cities – the majority of the island’s towns, perched atop hills and mountains, were dependent on wells and rooftop water tanks, just as they had always been. This also meant modern sanitation was the preserve of the elites only. Most people simply threw effluent into the street.

Mario Turco lived in the coastal town of Gela. Thirteen years old, he was from a working-class family but they were better off than many. His father and uncle ran a construction business – in fact, one of their jobs had been to put up some wooden buildings for the Regia Aeronautica at the nearby Ponte Olivo airfield. Mario was one of five children, which was not at all unusual. There was no luxury and very little spare cash; life was simple. Turco was happy enough, however. ‘I had a good childhood,’ he said.2 ‘My father made sure we had everything. We all went to school.’ Food was simple, too: milk for breakfast, pasta for lunch, vegetables and fish for supper, meat once a week. ‘During the war,’ he said, ‘meat was scarce and expensive or it wasn’t available at all.’3 Not only was there severe rationing in Italy, often it was impossible to get even what little was supposed to be available – increasingly so on Sicily as the war progressed, primarily because the transport system was on the point of collapse due to the loss of shipping and, more recently, Allied air attacks on the railways.

There were hardly any vehicles in Gela – just a few cars for the most senior town officials, but no trucks, although that had been the case before the war too. ‘People used to move on farm wagons,’ said Turco, ‘on donkey-drawn carts.’4 There was a cinema in town, and a public radio in the town club – a kind of community centre – where people could hear the news. Otherwise, contact with the outside world was minimal; for Mario Turco, Gela was his entire world.

In contrast, sixteen-year-old Vincenza La Bruna, who lived in the town of Regalbuto in the eastern centre of the island, not far from the foot of Etna, lived a life of grinding hardship. There were nine crammed into their family home – her parents, her grandmother and six children. Vincenza went to school for just three years, and much of the rest of her time was spent working. ‘At home,’ she said, ‘but there was also work to do in the fields.5 At home there was a donkey and mule to look after too, and some chickens and a pig to feed. There was no lack of work.’ The family even had to make their own shoes – simple wooden clogs – although much of the time they wore nothing. ‘We were barefoot,’ said Vincenza, ‘like slaves.’6 Despite the animals and chickens, food was short, increasingly so as the war progressed. Boiled wheat berries became the staple.

Mario Turco was healthy enough as a boy, helped no doubt by swimming almost daily in the sea, but disease was rife on Sicily. In the plains in the west near Trapani, on the southern coastal strip and in the larger, low-lying Catania plain, malaria was an ever-present threat – but it could be caught in the mountains too. Vincenza La Bruna had had it as a child, which interrupted her time at school; by the time she’d recovered, her mother insisted she stay at home and help look after her younger brothers. And malaria was only one threat to health. Throughout the island sandfly fever, dysentery, typhus and typhoid were all prevalent. ‘The insanitary condition of the island,’ noted the Soldier’s Guide dryly, ‘is one of its best defences against an invader.’7 While it was true that Sicilians had built up a level of immunity to many of these diseases, life expectancy was still way below the national norm.

Public services and facilities were rudimentary or absent. Some 40 per cent of the islanders remained illiterate, and what public education there was remained basic in the extreme. Although the state roads, the strade stato – the ones that crossed the island and ran along the northern and southern coasts – were asphalted, the vast majority of the island’s thoroughfares were strade bianche – made of dirt and stone. Outside the cities there were few vehicles; Sicilians depended on donkeys, mules and their own two feet to get around, much as they had always done.

More than half the adult male population was involved in agriculture. Cereals, vegetables, olives, citrus fruits and also almonds as well as wine were all produced on the island, although with tools that had barely changed over the centuries and with the majority wedded to a system that went back to medieval times and beyond. Millennia ago, in the time of the Phoenicians, the land had been divided up into latifundia – effectively, large estates – which were then leased to local notables, who in turn forced locals into slavery, or even brought in slaves from elsewhere, to work the land. It was a system that continued right through the period of Arab rule; then, when the Normans arrived and swept out the Arabs in the tenth century they brought with them their feudal system, which was not so very different from the system of latifundia, except that instead of explicitly being slaves, Sicilian peasants now worked like slaves but at least got to take home some of what they produced, while the barons kept the rest. This baronial class stayed in place even after the Bourbons arrived to rule Sicily. The old latifundia were now known as feudi – large tracts of land of at least 5,000 acres each, of which several might be owned by a single baron. Increasingly, though, the last thing any self-respecting baron wanted to do was spend his time in some godforsaken spot getting baked alive when he could live off the proceeds more comfortably in a large town house in Palermo or Naples – or even Rome or Florence. This meant overseers were needed to keep an eye on things and make sure the share-croppers tending the soil – the contadini – were keeping their side of the bargain. Violence and systematic exploitation were part and parcel of the system.

The feudal system officially ended in 1812, although, as with the switch from latifundia to feudalism, the actual differences were – for the hapless contadini at any rate – rather slight. Instead of answering to armed guards, share-croppers now had to deal with a gabellotto – a kind of steward, who rented the entire feudo and paid the absentee landlord a guaranteed income, while continuing with his henchmen to grind the peasant class into the dust, screwing them for everything they possibly could. Armed revolutions in Sicily in 1820 and in 1848 loosened the power of the old aristocratic baronial class yet further, as did the Risorgimento of 1860, in which the Bourbon dynasty was finally overthrown and Italy became an independent and – notionally, at least – unified state. Yet even though Sicily had been at the centre of Garibaldi’s battle for freedom, the Sicilians, typically, suffered badly from its success, because the island did not fit into a one-nation brand of political rule. Italy may have been the most Catholic country in Europe, but it had more regional dialects and patois than any other, and even after unification remained more of a geographical concept than a nation-state. Not that the central government in Rome accepted this. New taxation laws were introduced along with across-the-board conscription, which prompted outrage among the Sicilians. Theirs was both an agricultural and a highly patriarchal society; men worked on the land, women stayed indoors and tended the home. Conscription meant fields would not be tended and people would starve and die. To avoid it, young men fled to the hills, recruiting officers were lynched and rural Sicily – especially the western half – became ever more lawless as these outlaws evolved into bands of brigands roaming the countryside. Now, Sicilian peasants no longer feared pirates from across the sea, but they did fear being rustled or robbed. Within a couple of decades of the Risorgimento, the murder rate on the island was ten times higher than it was in northern Italy.

It was into this melting pot of poverty, misery and growing violence that the Onorata Società – the Honoured Society – began to emerge as a dominating factor in Sicilian life. At the most basic level, it was a protection racket; but it also had a complex set of codes that revolved around respect, outward devotion to family life and, above all, loyalty. These ‘men of honour’ were also known more simply as the Mafia.

It’s hard to pin down the origins of the word conclusively, although it may well have come from an Arabic word of similar sound that means ‘place of refuge’, as safety, or protection – of a kind – is what the Mafia were offering. On the other hand, in the Palermo patois, mafioso was another word for ‘beautiful’ and ‘self-confident’. So a person described as mafioso came to mean someone attractive and self-assured.

The men of honour were none other than the gabellotti, who, after a period of years looking after the feudi and making money, were starting to acquire enough wealth themselves to invest in land of their own, putting them in a position to turn against the absentee landlord by refusing to pay up, threatening him – or worse, if he did appear on the doorstep – and eventually coercing him into selling up. By this time, the gabellotto had developed into a man of immense local power. He now had land he needed to protect on his own account, and a workforce and subsidiary interests that also needed safeguarding. Protection of the workforce was offered with guarantees and at a price. Those who refused to pay up would be ‘warned’. They might find their olive grove felled or livestock rustled – this was what they could expect if they didn’t have protection. If they still didn’t play ball, then blood would be spilled, often fatally. Bandits would either be paid off or warned off. If a life had to be taken, so be it. The rule of central government counted for nothing in these backwaters of Sicily because everyone, from the police to the politicians to the local parish priest, was in the pocket of the local man of honour.

Gradually, these men of honour began to respect different fiefdoms – there was, after all, some safety in numbers – and so a code began to develop: a code of honour that transcended any normal human loyalties, including those of blood relationship. There were strict lines that no man could cross with impunity. The rules were understood and they were accepted; if they were broken, blood would be shed and dishonour brought down on the perpetrator and sometimes those around him too.

Between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War, in a great exodus fuelled by the Messina earthquake of 1908, some 1.1 million Sicilians – a huge number, amounting to roughly a quarter of the entire population – had emigrated in search of a way out of the grinding oppression and poverty of life on the island. Some went to Britain, France or even South America, but most – around 800,000 – headed to the United States. Yet more left in the 1920s, and among them were many mafiosi, fleeing Fascist clamp-downs. The very notion of having much of central and western Sicily run by a secret organization that was uncontrollable by central government was anathema to Mussolini. He was Il Duce, the dictator, and he was in charge, not some so-called ‘man of honour’.

Determined to stamp out the Mafia once and for all, Mussolini dispatched a hard man, Cesare Mori, to sort it out. Mori, a tough and uncompromising policeman from Pavia in northern Italy, had first been posted to Sicily before the First World War and had made a name for himself for catching the notorious bandit Paolo Grisalfi; he had also used strong-arm tactics against banditry again immediately after the war when still serving on the island. Although he had since retired to Florence, Mussolini now persuaded him to return to duty and posted him back to Sicily as the prefect of Trapani with the sole task of destroying the Sicilian Mafia. ‘Your Excellency has carte blanche,’ Mussolini told him; ‘the authority of the State must be absolutely, I repeat absolutely, re-established in Sicily.8 Should the laws currently in effect hinder you, that will be no problem. We shall make new laws.’ Mori set about his task with an iron fist, smashing bandit gangs, imprisoning mafiosi without trial, and humiliating men of honour publicly with parades and show trials to try to dispel their mystique. Not for nothing was he known as the ‘Iron Prefect’. By the time he was brought back to mainland Italy by Mussolini in June 1929, he had arrested more than 11,000 mafiosi, most of whom continued to languish in prison without having ever had a trial. Very publicly, it was announced the Mafia had been destroyed.

That had been something of an overstatement. Still, rampant banditry, cattle rustling and small-time mafiosi had definitely been crushed. Mori’s successors in the 1930s turned away from show trials, preferring to send many mafiosi into internal exile on Sicily with the threat of further strong-arm tactics if they erred. What remained were a handful of Mafia groups, now operating more quietly and subtly. Perhaps a better way of describing matters would be to say the Mafia were lying dormant in Sicily; but there was definitely a sense that by the outbreak of war in 1939, their era of dominance was over.

In fact, the Mafia had rebooted itself into the United States, profiteering first from dominating the lemon trade and then from prohibition and a host of other protection rackets, and while there were plenty of Italian-American gangsters who did not hail from Sicily – Al Capone and Vito Genovese, to name but two – a large number of Sicilian mafiosi not only moved to and began operating in the United States, they also maintained firm links with the old country. Mafiosi always thought of themselves as a breed apart, and as men of honour that meant living and operating outside the normal rule of law. And yet the normal rule of law did exist; and having a foot in two different countries could be extremely useful.

In the central west of Sicily, lying on the edge of the province of Caltanissetta between Palermo to the north and Agrigento to the south, stood the small town of Villalba, home to around three thousand people. This was particularly harsh countryside, surrounded by low mountains, connected to the outside world by remote winding tracks, its thin, stony soil baked the colour of sandstone in the long summer. The town itself was built on a slope, looking northwards towards the Madonie Mountains, and laid out on a grid of thirteen streets by six around a town square, the Piazza Madrice, dominated by the Chiesa Madre – the Mother Church. Away from the church, the handsome stone houses around the piazza and along the central streets very quickly gave way to hovels and squalid one-room dwellings, or bassi, with compacted mud floors, effluent in the gutters and no running water.

This small, unremarkable and impoverished town was home to Calogero Vizzini, a 65-year-old man whose only sign of wealth was his paunch, a conspicuously rare feature on an island where very few fat people existed. With his spectacles, moustache and greying, receding hair, he looked otherwise nondescript; there were certainly no bespoke clothes, his usual outfit being a short-sleeved shirt and trousers with braces.

Born in the town back in July 1877, Vizzini had been the first son of a labourer and contadino, although his mother was slightly higher in the social hierarchy with the additional prestige that came from having a member of her family in the priesthood. While Vizzini’s two younger brothers took to their studies and later went into the Church, he had remained illiterate, deciding instead to make his way in the world in a different manner by trading in the cancia, the barter of wheat for milling into flour, which enabled him to take a cut at both ends as well as demand a transport fee. The men in this trade effectively acted as intermediaries between the peasants who needed their wheat milled and the mills that produced the flour – and the mill, in the case of Villalba, was 50 miles away along tracks that were impossibly dangerous and controlled by bandits.

Vizzini got around the travel risk by coming to an arrangement with the biggest bandit in the region, Paolo Varsalona. Together they ran the cancia very much to their own profit. Along the way, Vizzini was accused of robbery and murder and twice arrested, but acquitted on both occasions for lack of evidence, protected by the barrier of omertà – the Mafia’s sacred code of silence. Through a combination of guile, intelligence, ruthlessness and daring, by the outbreak of the First World War Vizzini had won respect and authority and had become a gabellotto. Unsurprisingly, he managed to duck war service and instead made a packet through the black market, supplying horses and other animals for the army through a combination of theft, bribery and threats. When he was eventually investigated, all those who had originally testified against him suddenly retracted. Nine of them were then accused of perjury and imprisoned; all nine took their sentences without so much as a further squeak. The episode only served to enhance Vizzini’s prestige as a man of honour.

Vizzini had become a gabellotto more powerful than the landowner, and so was able to buy his own feudo at auction at a ludicrously low price because there were no other bidders. Such was his rising influence and power. On another occasion, a young mafioso from Villalba named Lottò committed a very badly planned murder, so blatantly that his arrest and conviction seemed to be foregone conclusions. Not so. Certainly, men of honour did not simply murder people – there was a process to be gone through, and authority had to be given; and Lottò had breached the rules. And yet, for men of honour it was unthinkable that punishment should be left to the state. To have allowed this to happen would have caused Vizzini a loss of respect, and so he took matters into his own hands. First, Lottò was transferred to an insane asylum where, soon after, he ‘died’. His ‘corpse’ was then removed in a specially ventilated coffin and ‘buried’. Meanwhile, the very much alive Lottò was given false documents and some money and smuggled to the United States. Arriving in New York, he was met by ‘friends’, and identified himself by producing a yellow silk handkerchief on which was embroidered a single ‘C’ – C for Calò.

Vizzini continued to accumulate wealth and expand his interests, entering into a partnership with some Fascists to develop sulphur mines in the Caltanissetta region. Although he was strongly anti-Fascist, it suited him to keep in with the Church and the Fascist Party, and he skilfully managed to do so without the slightest loss of prestige as a man of honour – which was one of the reasons he escaped the fate of many other mafiosi during the regime of Cesare Mori. This didn’t stop him from repeatedly being charged with criminal conspiracy, but every time, without fail, he was acquitted due to lack of evidence, either because key witnesses clammed up or because vital papers mysteriously disappeared. In 1935 he declared himself bankrupt and from then on the authorities left him in peace; but by June 1943 he was as rich, powerful and unscrupulous as he had ever been, and while the Mafia might have been lying low, Don Calò, as he had become, was the most senior mafioso in all of Sicily, with contacts not just across the island but in the United States as well.

Don Calò had every interest in making sure Mussolini and the Fascist regime came to an end, because the Fascists had waged war against the Honourable Society and that needed to be avenged. Moreover, whenever there was political chaos there was opportunity, and that needed to be exploited too. Another Sicilian who was every bit as eager to see the back of Mussolini and Fascism, but for somewhat different reasons, was Lieutenant Max Corvo, now a citizen of the United States of America, who until the age of nine had lived in Melilli, a town perched in the hills overlooking Augusta and Syracuse in the east of the island. His father, Cesare, an outspoken critic of Fascism, had been forced to emigrate to the States ahead of the rest of his family, a separation that affected Max deeply. A keenly intelligent and determined young man, Max Corvo grew up fired by the same strong liberal political views as his father and, with the onset of war, was determined to play his part both for his adopted country and for the island of his birth.

While still in training as a conscript, Corvo wrote a paper he called his ‘Plan to Overthrow the State in Sicily’, outlining the kind of work US intelligence might carry out to undermine the Fascist regime. Managing to get it into the hands of the right people, Corvo eventually caught the attention of Earl Brennan, then head of the Italian Section of Secret Intelligence, a department of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, which had been established in June 1942 to train and deploy secret agents to gather intelligence and operate behind enemy lines, and to work alongside army and navy intelligence as well as the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). Corvo’s theory was that the dissatisfaction many Sicilians felt with the war and with their lot in general could be exploited and that, as someone who could speak the local dialect and had an intimate knowledge of the island’s customs and cultural quirks, he was well placed to help with this.

Brennan was impressed, and employed him to draw up a detailed plan and to start recruiting agents and operatives among the large network of Sicilians now in the United States and their connections back in Sicily. Corvo soon managed to gather around him and Brennan a team of men, ranging from eminent anti-Fascist exiles to young liberal firebrands, who, it was planned, would infiltrate into Sicily as soon as possible. Once Sicily itself became a target for the Allies, the intention was to send these agents in with the invasion troops so that they could rapidly begin the process of undermining Sicilian resistance to the Allies. However, Corvo and Brennan agreed at an early stage that no attempt should be made to establish contact with the Mafia or any other form of organized crime, even though several attempts were made by other OSS sources to arrange a meeting between Corvo and Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian gangster in prison in New York for running a prostitution racket. Despite being locked up, Luciano had continued running his businesses via another Italian-American, Vito Genovese, and had maintained links with associates not only in the States but also back in Italy – including Sicily. Corvo had resisted these approaches. ‘I explained to Brennan that we could gain nothing from such a tie,’ he noted, ‘and that the relationship might prove embarrassing in the future.’9 In any case, as far as he was concerned, the Mafia had been practically stamped out. They were nothing.

Corvo had set off for Algiers on 20 May 1943, flying via Cuba, Guiana, Brazil and then across to West Africa. Even with a week’s delay en route while his plane was repaired, that gave him and the agents of the Italian Secret Intelligence section of the OSS around six weeks to finalize plans for their infiltration and to put the ‘Corvo Plan’ into action.

Corvo had been right in his view that the majority of Sicilians had been instinctively against Fascism, although plenty had cheered Mussolini when he’d first declared war. Images of Mussolini were everywhere – black-painted stencils of his helmeted head and the Fascist slogan Credere, ubbedire, combattere – ‘believe, obey, fight’. Giacomo Garra remembered when Italy entered the war in 1940. At the time he was the youngest of six children in a large and comparatively well-to-do family in Caltagirone, towards the south-east of the island, and his older brothers were all in the army. His family had embraced Mussolini and so had he, albeit through the naïve prism of a young boy. They had all been utterly confident of victory. ‘How could we not win the war?’10 he’d thought. The British were viewed as utterly despicable and inept, even though they would repeatedly crush the Italians in the opening years of the conflict.

Nearby in Gela, Mario Turco had been at the town club at the time war was declared, and Mussolini’s speech had been broadcast on state radio. ‘There was only one radio in Gela,’ he said, ‘and it was at the Nobles’ Club right in the centre of town.’11 He had been excited by the prospect of war. ‘We believed’, he added, ‘that we were the strongest nation in the world.’ It was hardly surprising; as a young boy in Fascist Italy he had joined the Fascist Youth, starting with the Figlio della Lupa – She-Wolf’s Child – at the age of just six, then at eight moving up to the next stage, the Balilla, and on to the Balilla Moschettieri at eleven. Like so many others, he had been indoctrinated. ‘I used to believe all the things they taught us.’ He enjoyed it well enough, because his mates also did it and there were lots of sports. One time, he missed a weekly Saturday muster and was threatened with having his junior membership taken from him. ‘And do you know what it meant not having the membership card any more?12 It was like the end of the world,’ he said. ‘At my age, it meant being isolated, no more friends, and not even being allowed to go to school.’

Another who had cheered the declaration of war on 10 June 1940 was Livio Messina, who back then, aged eighteen, had applauded excitedly alongside crowds of others in the Piazza Plebiscito in Naples, where he’d been brought up, though born in Sicily. He’d then looked around him and had noticed an elderly lady beside him with tears running down her cheek. Catching his eye, she raised a hand and touched his face. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘you don’t realise what is going to become of us.’13

At the time, Messina had thought little of it. He had wanted war because he was fiercely patriotic and wanted Italy to be a great nation; he believed it was only right that Italy should expand and create a new Roman Empire. Patriotism – nationalism – had been drummed into him in the Balilla and Fascist youth organizations. At university he’d then taken a course in Colonial Studies and had never had much cause to question what he’d been taught. Now, three years on, he was back on the island of his birth and a tenente – a lieutenant – in the signals platoon of the 4° Divisione ‘Livorno’, and still young enough and naïve enough to be taking in his stride everything that life threw at him. An uncle had been killed during the fighting in Albania, which had shaken him, and the reverses of fortune in the war had dented his confidence a little, but when he’d been called up at the age of nineteen he’d set off for officer training with no small amount of pride. His father had been to see him off at the station and had given him a razor, brush and soap as a parting gift – even though, fair-haired and baby-faced as he was, he’d barely needed them, which he’d felt as something of an affront to his manhood. So far, though, the war had treated Messina fairly well. He’d been passed from pillar to post but, now aged twenty-one, was yet to go into action. Even after arriving in Sicily with the division the previous November, that prospect still seemed to him a remote one.

Not all were as naïve as Tenente Livio Messina, however. Tenente-Colonnello Dante Ugo Leonardi was commander of the III° Battaglione of 34° Reggimento in the same Divisione Livorno, and although he was doing his best to prepare his men for the invasion he felt certain was to come on Sicily, he was doing so with a heavy heart. Leonardi did not share either Messina’s more laissez-faire approach to soldiering or his youthful enthusiasm for war. Rather, he was convinced that most Italians had entered the war with little conviction and that, despite Fascism, as a nation they had simply never had the aggressive spirit or hatred of their enemies to justify taking the terrible step to armed conflict. In fact, he reckoned they had never really thought through the consequences of going to war at all.

There was a lot in this view. It resonated with Graziani’s reluctance in invading Egypt in September 1940, when it had become clear Britain had no intention of giving up the fight. Suddenly, Italy had found itself woefully ill-prepared. The country had even fewer natural resources than Germany. Compared with the leading powers, it was backward, too. Italy’s military was not modern enough, not well equipped enough, not organized enough and – as Colonnello Leonardi knew – not committed enough to win the war. Now, in June 1943, Italy seemed finished – most certainly so if what he’d discovered on the island was anything to go by. ‘The conditions on Sicily,’ he noted, ‘were abject.’14

When he had first arrived in November 1942, Leonardi had toured the entire island and had been horrified by the lack of any kind of centralized defensive organization. Rather, the various units had been left to pursue their different approaches and differing ideas of how best to organize themselves. Some coastal units were even speaking entirely different dialects, which, of course, was hardly ideal for any kind of coordinated defence. The coastal divisions were made up of poorly armed and poorly trained men, most of whom had been hurriedly conscripted and showed not the slightest interest in fighting. They were also horribly stretched in certain parts of the coastline, with battalions of some six hundred men each defending stretches of up to 30 miles. ‘For example,’ he noted, ‘the Battaglione 435 had thirteen men per kilometre.15 The best case scenario was the Battaglione 388 with sixty men per kilometre spread over ten kilometres.’ Nor was there any naval artillery outside the main ports. ‘None!!’

Matters had improved significantly with the arrival in February 1943 of Generale Roatta to command Sixth Army on Sicily. Contrary to what Hitler and von Neurath believed, Roatta was not a spy, spineless or otherwise. Having made a name for himself in the Balkans as an utterly ruthless hard man, willing to wage war against Yugoslavian insurrectionists with the utmost brutality, he had come to Sicily determined that Italy should fight and do its very best to repel the invasion which, like Kesselring, Mussolini and others, he felt certain would be directed at the island. In expressing his views to von Neurath, whom he had known for some time, he had been merely speaking frankly; such, though, had been von Neurath’s – and Hitler’s – paranoia, they had not taken Roatta’s warning in the spirit in which it had been made.

Roatta had been as appalled as Leonardi by what he had discovered on Sicily. At the time, Sixth Army had only partial control over Italian anti-aircraft defences, and none at all over the militia units or navy or Regia Aeronautica. Leonardi was right – there was no joined-up approach to the defence of the island at all. Clearly, this could not be allowed to go on; and, since Roatta was a wily operator, he managed to secure a decree from the Italian general staff, the Comando Supremo, that made him overall Armed Forces Commander, Sicily, a post that gave him control of some seven military and nine civilian defence agencies on the island. The only parts of Sicily’s defence that eluded him were the three naval fortress areas of Messina–Reggio in the north-east, Trapani in the west and Augusta–Syracuse in the east.

With the vastly increased power and authority that came with his new title, Roatta had set about licking Sicily’s defences into shape. Both troops and locals were drafted in to build bunkers, lay mines and wire, and create anti-invasion obstacles along the island’s beaches. Frustratingly for Roatta, however, many of the resources earmarked for Sicily ended up being sent to Tunisia, where they were lost for ever, either sunk en route or taken by the Allies. The general had demanded and had been promised some 160,000 tons of cement a month. Only around 7,000 tons had ever reached him.

On 13 May, the very day North Africa was lost, Ammiraglio Arturo Riccardi, the head of the Regia Marina, the Italian navy, held a conference in Rome. The report on Sicily made for grim listening. Allied bombing was causing mayhem and had cut off almost all coastal traffic, which was principally how Sicily was supplied. By May 1943, almost all of Italy’s merchant fleet was at the bottom of the Mediterranean; in fact, between November and the middle of May, Allied aircraft had sunk over 170 Axis ships and damaged a further 120, while Allied naval forces had sunk several hundred thousand tons of shipping too. Unlike the Allies, whose shipyards in the United States and Britain were building new vessels at an unprecedented rate, neither the Italians nor the Germans had any means of either building or bringing into the Mediterranean any more freighters. They were simply running out of shipping, which was why there were just forty small vessels left for maritime supply of Sicily. This meant that the population, already underfed at the best of times, was suffering even more severely from food shortages – and this went for the military as well as the civilians. It also meant there was little chance of Roatta getting the cement he needed – or much else besides, including boots, the shortage of which had repeatedly and bizarrely plagued the Italian army ever since it had gone to war. Many of the men in the coastal divisions were now wearing sandals or going barefoot – and so disabled by this that training had been affected. As it happened, there were warehouses full of boots; but they were all far too big and so had remained where they were.

The failure of Roatta’s attempt to provide Sicily with adequate defences also explained why, at Gela, some bunkers were now being made of cardboard instead of concrete. Tenente Giuseppe Bruccoleri was an engineer whose particular task of setting up barrage balloons around Italy had exempted him from overseas service; then his mother, who had a connection to Mussolini, wrote to Il Duce explaining that she had already lost her husband to war in 1917, and needed her son back home in Gela. Incredibly, Mussolini personally agreed to post Bruccoleri to Sicily, where he was to oversee the elevation of barrage balloons at Augusta but then could return to Gela – although he was to take his balloon company with him and set up a telephone switchboard in his house, and help with the preparation of local defences. This he did; and, since there was not enough cement, he and his men made fake bunkers out of cardboard. The idea was to fool the Allies into thinking Gela had stronger defences than it did. Bruccoleri’s story reveals one of two things: either Mussolini really was going a little mad, or the Italian army had by now become so institutionally broken that an officer could be sent home because his mother had the influence to demand it and end up overseeing the construction of cardboard pillboxes. Whichever was the case, it was certainly no way to fight a war.

Generale Roatta did his best, but even for a mover and shaker like him, the current shortages and endless difficulties now facing the Italians were insurmountable. In the middle of May, he made a speech which was thought to be just a little bit too disparaging about the Sicilians and questioning their patriotism. The Comando Supremo, nervous that the gulf between Sicily and the rest of Italy was already dangerously wide, recalled him, appointing him to the top job in place of Ambrosio – which was why he was in Rome talking to von Neurath, reflecting on the invidious situation in which they now found themselves.

The decision to push Roatta upstairs also revealed the stark limits to Fascism’s power; no German general would have been removed for fear of worrying the locals, after all. In his place arrived Generale Alfredo Guzzoni, sixty-six years old and retired since May 1941 after a long career that had begun in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. Small, heavy-set and with little obvious enthusiasm for the posting, he had never once before set foot on Sicily. Nor had his new chief of staff, Colonnello Emilio Faldella, who was much younger and more obviously energetic. In fact, Faldella and Guzzoni had never met one another before either, so their appointments were curious ones. It was now June, and as the Axis were all very well aware, an Allied invasion, wherever it fell, could not be long in coming.

On 22 June, Generalleutnant Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin was summoned to see Hitler at the Berghof, the Führer’s home in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Recently returned from commanding 17. Panzer Division on the Eastern Front, von Senger had been enjoying a very rare stint of leave; now, on joining Hitler, Keitel and Warlimont at their daily situation conference, he was told he was being sent to Sicily as German liaison officer to the Italian Sixth Army. His brief was somewhat loose. Hitler talked at length about the possibilities of defending Sicily, should it come to that, but was still undecided about how many German units he should commit. Baade’s newly constituted Division Kommando Sizilien was already there and a second division, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, was also on its way. Others were potentially waiting in the wings. Generalleutnant Hans-Valentin Hube, one of Hitler’s favourites, was also now in southern Italy. Due to the machinations of the Italian royal court and general staff, he reported, it was likely the Italians would soon defect and be out of the war – although it was felt the Allies had already missed the boat by not invading Sicily immediately after their landings in north-west Africa.

Afterwards, von Senger lunched with Warlimont, who believed that in the event of a major Allied attack on Sicily, it would be best to transfer the mass of Axis troops to the mainland. ‘This appreciation and definition of my task,’ noted von Senger, ‘were not in line with those of Hitler.’16

Von Senger was precisely the kind of military aristocrat Hitler loathed. The feeling was mutual. ‘I detested him,’ wrote the general, ‘for all the misfortune he had brought upon my country.’17 Born near the Swiss border in 1891, Frido von Senger had been educated in part at Eton College in England and then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, which had helped give him a slightly broader world-view than many of his peers. A fine military career had followed, initially in the First World War, then between the wars and now in this current conflict, where he had proved outstanding, both a deep student of warfare and also a compassionate and highly regarded general. A fine, indeed world-class, equestrian like Baade, he was also a devout Catholic, a cultured intellectual and, along with Kesselring, less prone than many senior Germans to regarding all Italians as feckless Latin types deserving only of deep contempt. This made him an ideal choice to play the go-between with German and Italian forces, regardless of what Hitler thought of him personally.

Three days later, von Senger was in Rome meeting with Kesselring, who talked far more optimistically about the chances of preventing an invasion of Sicily. The Allied assault on Dieppe back in August 1942 had been easily repulsed, he pointed out. Von Senger was not so sure; he felt the Allied victory in North Africa marked an entirely new phase of the war that did not augur well. On the other hand, he agreed that German forces could not fight two opponents – both the Allies and the Italians, should they defect. Von Senger would need to tread sensitively and carefully, Kesselring warned him; Sicily was a tinderbox, and the Germans would disregard the primacy of Guzzoni on the island at their peril. While Kesselring and von Senger were singing from the same hymn sheet with regard to relations with their Italian comrades in arms, the same could not be said of General von Richthofen, who told von Senger, in no uncertain terms, that the Luftwaffe was going its own way. Unlike Kesselring, Guzzoni or Mussolini, he was convinced Sardinia was the most likely target for the Allies and so had already begun moving his air forces there. ‘All this revealed’, commented von Senger, ‘a regrettable divergence of views.’18 It also put Allied planning disagreements into perspective.

Once actually in Sicily, the first stop for von Senger was Enna, an ancient town perched on a flat mountaintop right in the geographical centre of the island. Viewed from the west, Enna was silhouetted against the sky like a fairytale medieval bastion, Etna looming beyond; it was here that Guzzoni had his headquarters. Accompanied at this first meeting by Kesselring, von Senger found Guzzoni realistic and candid. The coastal divisions were next to useless and could not be relied upon; the four regular divisions were better equipped but still not up to standard, although the Livorno was in the best shape with some motorization and half-decent officers and commanders. It became clear, however, that there was a divergence of views as to how best to repel the enemy if he did come. Guzzoni was for keeping the coastal batteries intact and out of range of large naval guns, but the German view was that it was far better to have as much fire-power forward as possible. The time to repel an invasion was right away, while the attackers were exposed, under strength and devoid of effective cover. Let the Allies secure a bridgehead and it would be all over. This difference of views was not resolved, while Kesselring’s continued optimism also contrasted markedly with Guzzoni’s more sceptical view. At least the meeting remained cordial. None the less, there was still much to iron out – not least exactly where the German divisions should be located.

Time, though, was running out. Unbeknown to the Axis officers as they sat in Guzzoni’s palazzo up in Enna that day in late June, the Allies would be assaulting the island in just two weeks’ time. The countdown was on.