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5 | Spoils of War

1944–1947

Iwent through the same army experience as thousands of others – base camp, training in the desert outside Cairo and on to a regiment on the Italian front. There were good moments and bad, none of them memorable or relevant enough to be recounted here.

A few years on: Spring 1945. The 6th South African Armoured Division ground to a halt for the winter south of Bologna, at the foot of the Appenines in what Churchill had once described as ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’. Our 25-pounder guns stood in deep snow, black as sentinels in a leafless apple orchard. On the farm where we spent the whole winter we lived together like troglodytes, hibernating in dugouts under a deep cover of earth and snow. Each morning one of my gun crew would crawl out to collect breakfast for the rest of us, who clung to our sleeping bags until it was time for lunch. Then we would emerge into the weak sun and eat an alfresco meal on a bank overlooking a deep valley below.

We were like the front-row audience to a war. A German 88mm gun was tucked away in the mouth of a disused railway tunnel on the mountainside high above. As regular as the lunch bell, its black muzzle would poke out from its lair like an animal nosing the air and wait for a vehicle to appear on the valley road below, where there was a low-level bridge across a frozen stream. For fifty yards it would have to run the gauntlet in sight of the German gunners before it disappeared from our sight and from theirs.

We knew, as did our divisional drivers, that at midday every day that stretch of road would be under fire. It had become a ritual. German ammunition must have been as strictly rationed as ours because of supply difficulties across snow-bound mountain roads. We were limited to irregular firing of eight to ten rounds per day. The orderly Germans used theirs only at midday.

We would watch the trucks emerge on to that stretch of road and make a dash for safety across the bridge. From where we sat we could see the muzzle flash from the 88 and hear a shell tearing by above our heads. The Germans had been there long enough to have the bridge precisely zeroed in; there was nothing problematic about where the shot would land, only about its timing. It would hit the bridge, but would it hit precisely when the truck was on it? Afterwards the drivers who played this perilous game of Russian roulette would shrug the whole thing off. For them and us the familiarity of it all made it feel more like theatre than war – lots of suspense but little blood. When the day’s ammunition had been expended the gun would pull back into the tunnel and the performance was over. We were left with the only other thing there was to do – play poker. If war is ever totally pointless and pursued purely out of habit, this must have been it. The German gun was a nuisance with little strategic purpose. It was invulnerable to attack from ground or air and was there presumably only to remind us it was there. In the mindless nature of the game we were obliged to show that we were there too. We would fire off our own ration of shells at odd hours of the day or night at targets we could not see, working only from map references. We never knew what we were aiming at and were scarcely ever told whether we hit or missed.

Between these random bursts of activity it was back to the poker table to kill time. There was little alternative. Reading matter was scarce, radio reception abysmal and alcohol almost unobtainable. Some men tried skiing the hillside on improvised planks until the incidence of broken bones prompted a divisional order banning recreational skiing at the front.

In the poker games Allied Military Government banknotes with the ‘Four Freedoms’ printed on the back changed hands in thousands and hundreds of thousands of lire, but with nothing to spend them on. Poker was our opiate against war. I had never been a keen card player and have not been able to face a game since that overdose.

Spring came. The icy roads turned into glutinous churned-up skid pads. Munition trucks bogged down in deep mud and had to be extricated by hand, but stockpiling went steadily ahead. Orders came through for an almighty barrage. For three days and nights every gun in the division blasted away at the German positions. Massed flights of bomber planes passed over us without any German challenge. We could see great bombs slowly turning over in the air as they dropped, and feel the percussion as they hit the ground. Great sheets of flame flashed across the mountain side. We decided they were petrol bombs, but they were probably napalm, which we had not yet heard about.

After all that sound and fury the front moved forward. We seemed to meet little resistance, as if the German army and its feared ‘Gothic Line’ had melted with the winter snow. We rolled on across the Appenines, past Bologna, into the plains of Lombardy. The Germans pulled back before us, across the Po into North Italy and then across the borders and into Germany. By mid-summer the war in Italy was virtually over.

We were camped near Venice when Army Intelligence reported German divisions preparing to counter-attack from the north. The entire division set off in a convoy of nose-to-tail guns, tanks and trucks across Lombardy to confront it. Our motorised force rolled through newly liberated territory like a triumphal procession. In every town and village, in the choking dust churned up by tyres and caterpillar tracks, cheering crowds threw flowers and passed up flasks of homemade wine. Word passed back along the convoy that the commander in chief and prime minister, Field Marshal Smuts, would take the salute as we passed through the next town – Mantua? Padua? Verona? I no longer recall.

In accordance with army codes of seniority, the artillery headed the convoy. My battery was almost at the head, with a truck carrying our field kitchen and regimental cooks close behind us. The cooks belonged to the unarmed Cape Coloured Corps. They were a raucous and bawdy crew with the rich vernacular wit of Cape Town’s District Six. On the back of their truck they carried our battery’s pride and joy, a three-hole wooden toilet seat which had been lovingly carved by one of our craftsmen and had travelled with us through the Italian campaign.

We drove through the main street of Padua – or was it Verona – sitting rigidly to attention, eyes right, as we rolled through a vast cheering crowd outside a magnificent Renaissance pile, perhaps the town hall. Smuts stood at the top of the steps taking the salute, goatee-bearded and stiff as a ramrod, in full uniform. As our kitchen truck passed in front of him our three-hole toilet seat slid slowly off the back, bounced on the road and came to rest. As far as we could see, no one in his entourage had the wit or courage to move. The entire 6th Division swept past in full military style in apparent salute to a toilet seat. The cooks swore it had been an accident, but it was wonderfully in tune with their zany anti-establishment sense of humour.

They were not alone in their irreverence. In the liberating atmosphere of an imminent end to the war a wave of anti-establishment feeling was sweeping through the ranks. The division, as the soldiers put it, was ‘going Bolshie’. It was an atmosphere in which the Springbok Legion could start to articulate their inchoate desire for social change.

The ‘intelligence’ that had started the convoy on the road towards Milan turned out to be false. There were no diehard German divisions about to strike out. We had become an army without a war and with nothing to occupy our time. We were outside Turin in what felt like holiday time. The sun shone and it was a good time for unauthorised walkabouts or sightseeing expeditions, which the army tolerated but did not encourage.

A few of us hitched a ride to the shores of Lake Como, which was also in holiday mood at the prospect of peace. Crowds eating waterices were strolling in the sun, mingling with servicemen from all the Allied armies who were, like us, holidaying unarmed. In the crowd a scattering of partisans with red neck scarves – some genuine partisans and some just pretending – all demonstratively armed and showing off their Sten guns, Tommy guns and revolvers.

We hired a rowing boat and pottered out on to the lake – the war might still be going on somewhere beyond the Alps, but not at Como. We were well away from the shore when a rifle shot rang out across the water and echoed back from the surrounding hills. Then another and another, followed by a regular crackle of small-arm fire from the shore. A grenade exploded near the water’s edge and spent bullets fell like hail in the water around us. We thought the rumoured German counter-attack must have begun, with us in a rowing boat in the centre of it, unarmed. We were panicking and uncertain what to do.

Then the church bells started ringing, first in Como and then from a dozen little churches in the hills. The firing tapered off as we rowed back towards the shore. The crowds had grown thicker – the whole town must have been there, cheering, shouting and singing. The end of the war in Europe had been announced by radio and Como was in the full madness of an Italian-style celebration. Partisans were still firing celebratory shots in the air as we made our way through the crowds, being bear-hugged and kissed by strangers as though we had won the war from our little rowing boat.

Back at our camp they were celebrating. Alcohol was flowing freely and drunken soldiers were reeling and falling about. Everyone sober enough to walk seemed to be making for somewhere else, like Milan or a pub, or just away from there and the army.

I wanted to make a record of the day and my feelings about it before they were lost. I sat writing late into the night. By morning it was done and posted off to Hilda. It appeared later in pamphlet form, published by the party in Johannesburg without my knowledge, titled ‘Letter from Italy’. It sank without trace.

The Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, the broad alliance of all Italy’s anti-fascist groups, was organising a fiesta in Milan in celebration of Italy’s liberation. In the morning I called in at the office of the communist daily paper, L’Unita, for a chat. I had become friendly with one of the editorial team which had restarted the paper illegally some time before the fall of Mussolini. He insisted I accompany him and his friends to the evening’s celebrations.

I do not like crowds. But that night in Milan there was a vast one in a mood of companionship and joy such as I had never experienced before. It seemed that the great city’s entire population had crammed into the cathedral area, which had been closed to traffic. The Piazza del Duomo and all the galleries leading off it were crammed.

People were threading their way through the crush with difficulty, for no other purpose than to be there and join the rejoicing at that moment. They were singing, laughing, joining hands and shouting greetings in sheer pleasure at the sense of liberation and togetherness. Wherever they could find a space there were brass bands and string orchestras, pop groups and singers with guitars, just making music which no one except themselves could possibly hear above the noise.

At the intersection of the great Galleria there was music of some sort, and heaving crowds of dancers. Wine was everywhere. Bottles passed from hand to hand, from friends or strangers, but with no drunkenness and none of the rowdyness I would have expected in a South African crowd. It was a wonderful night of warmth and joy, a triumphal celebration in gentleness and togetherness, as though an entire people was telling itself: Liberation is just marvellous! The sun was coming up before I could tear myself away. It was an unforgettable experience to have been part of. I have never felt that way again, except, perhaps, on a memorable day fifty years later when the people of South Africa came out into the sun together to vote in the country’s first free and non-racial election.

The army had nothing more to do in Italy but wait to be repatriated and demobilised. Armies are no good at idling, they feel compelled to keep the ‘other ranks’ busy in useless, time-consuming routine. Almost the only escape from boredom was offered by educational courses at the Army Education College in Florence. For a few weeks I went on an organised study tour of Northern Italy’s architecture, while other men from my unit went off to the college for residential courses. Naval Lieutenant Cecil Williams was the college principal. We had been friends since I had been a pupil at King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and Cecil a trainee teacher there for practical experience towards his teaching certificate.

I did not see much of him in the following years, during which he became a professional actor in Johannesburg and a well-known theatre producer. When we did meet our status had been turned around. I was the party district secretary vetting new applicants for membership; he was there for the test, which he passed. Thereafter we worked together in a variety of political activities and developed a close friendship. When he joined the navy early in the war we lost contact … until we met up again through the Springbok Legion in Italy.

While the war had been going on there had been little scope for doing anything more than talking about the legion. Now that the army was both stationary and idle we could hold meetings and start recruiting and building. Cecil fired enthusiasm for the legion among the men on short courses at the Florence college. They returned to our unit raring to go. We started holding regular open discussions in the regimental canteen and produced a wall newspaper which was open to anyone with anything to say.

The same thing was happening elsewhere in the army. The official army newspaper started carrying news about legion doings, suggesting we were becoming recognised and accepted.

Acceptability was a new experience. We were wary that it might lead to assimilation by the army establishment and before long came the troubling news from South Africa that talks about the amalgamation of the legion and the British Empire Service League (BESL) were under way. The BESL, a carry over from the First World War, was supposedly non-political and provided useful charitable services for ex-servicemen and their families. It had a decidedly Blimpish and blinkered British Empire patriot image. To us in Italy talks about amalgamation with the legion seemed absurdly ill conceived.

Out of the blue a telegraphed order arrived at my unit instructing me to report to Army Command in Rome immediately. It gave no hint whether for transfer, court martial or promotion. My regiment provided a jeep and driver and we travelled through the night to Rome. I discovered that I had been summoned to attend a legion consultation on the BESL merger, which only strengthened the feeling that we were already being assimilated into the establishment.

There were about twenty legion activists at the consultation. Some I was meeting for the first time, others were old comrades like Cecil Williams, Brian Bunting and Fred Carneson. Almost all of us had grave reservations about any merger with the BESL, although our opinions were not likely to influence the negotiations in South Africa, which seemed to be far advanced already. We recorded our opposition and returned to our separate units only to hear that the merger talks had been broken off for undisclosed reasons. There were no regrets among my legion colleagues in Italy.

Regiments in Italy were beginning to unravel. Men with the longest overseas service were being peeled off and transferred to Egypt for flights home and demobilisation. Everyone assumed that the rest of us would soon follow. We were wrong. Several planes carrying men home from Egypt crashed at Entebbe and further flights were suspended. A new period of waiting began and went on with no end in sight. South Africa had no shipping of its own and was a long way down on the Allied priority allocations. Many of the men who had left Italty on the ‘first in, first out’ principle had managed to get no further than the transit camp at Helwan outside Cairo.

Among them were men who had previously staffed my unit’s orderly room. I assume someone went through our records of pre-war employment to find replacements for them. Orderly room duty calls for nothing much more than simple office work. My army record gave my pre-war occupation as ‘secretary’. The search apparently failed to note that it had been in the Communist Party. I was ordered to take on orderly room duty, where all communications, secret or open, operational or political, would pass through my hands.

Having some regular occupation was welcome, but petty, mindless and irritating bureaucratic army procedures were not. I spent the days strained and impatient in an office, operating a primitive telephone exchange and reading and passing messages. It was deadly boring.

A message arrived one day from headquarters: ‘Gunner Bernstein to report on OC’s Orders, 10 a.m. tomorrow.’ Ominous. OC’s Orders generally involved breaches of discipline or offences too trivial for a full court martial. I could not recall doing anything more criminal than falling asleep on duty, but duly polished my boots and buttons better than usual and reported as ordered.

The Regimental Sergeant Major marched me in in proper style: ‘Quick march! Left turn! Right turn! Halt! Salute!’ I stood at attention while the OC stared through me as if I wasn’t there, until he grew tired. Then he picked up a paper from his desk and read from it without looking up and without any expression. There were to be no further Springbok Legion meetings whatsoever anywhere on or around army premises. Understood? I understood.

But what about prior permission? He repeated, as if talking to a retarded child: ‘No meetings whatsoever. With or without permission.’

‘May I ask the reason?’

‘No reason. Orders from Army Command in Rome. Dismissed!’

The RSM barked another ‘Salute! About turn! Quick march!’ And that was it.

I had no idea what it was all about. Later I learnt that there had been a riot in the South African army camp at Helwan and the army had reacted in typical South African fashion by banning all meetings. If there had been a riot agitators must have been responsible; and if there were agitators, who other than the legion?

Months later I learnt from my close friend and next-door neighbour, Ivan Schermbrucker, what had really happened. He had been one of those waiting at Helwan for the transport home, which never came. They were given no information. Anger boiled up over endless waiting in the heat, the wind-blown sand and the flies. In the evening several hundred men were sitting on the sand in the camp’s open-air cinema. The film broke mid-reel – as usual. The men reacted with whistles, jeers and lewd insults about the Arab operator’s ancestry. This was the moment chosen by an officer to take the stage and announce that a ship was available at last. Many of them would be leaving in the next few days.

Pandemonium. Ivan, who was young and very volatile, made the first public performance of his life. He jumped on to the stage in his excitement, flung his arms in the air, and shouted, ‘We’re going home!’ It was, he said, like magic, as if he had conjured fire from the air. Flames leapt up everywhere; in minutes the whole place was alight, with the flames leaping to the tinder-dry tents, huts and offices. The breeze took charge and the camp burned to the ground. For an instant, he said, he felt what it was like to have the power to change the world.

Without even legion meetings army life was more boring than ever. We were billeted in a small fishing village on the Ligurian coast, where the only amenity was a pub and the only entertainment watching the fishermen haul their nets across a wintry beach. The regiment had changed since men with long service had left for home. New recruits fresh from school had arrived to replace them. They were too young to have learnt to fend for themselves or to make their own lives. They were simply dumped among us, without any experience of work or work disciplines, and left to their own devices. After morning roll call they would spend the day on their beds, bored out of their minds, gossiping, while their morale collapsed.

Out of inertia and boredom they were turning their faces to the wall rather than face another day. One of my duties was to circulate notices of any entertainments, outings or sports in the neighbourhood, all free and with transport laid on. There was not much on offer – a few cinema shows and concert parties – but there was little response. The indolence of post-war army life was defeating them. A generation was wasting away without any noticeable concern from the army, perhaps because of disruption created by piecemeal repatriation, but mainly, it seemed to me, because of a military culture which places little value on individuals other than their utility in war. I was lucky. My strict hours on duty protected me from soul-destroying idleness. I was also making contact with the civilian world outside the army enclave.

Everything about Italian civil society was in a fascinating ferment of change. Partisans and freedom fighters all around us were unmaking fascism and struggling to create a new democracy. In their centre were the communists and left radicals with whom I shared an ideology. I was striking up friendships with some of them outside the army, while inside such relationships were withering away. The army was no longer united in war. Bonds of solidarity were dissolving as men left separately for home and their units were rolled together into ad hoc formations.

In these new and temporary formations men scarcely knew one another or their officers, and the officers did not stay long enough to get to know the men. Esprit de corps and all sense of unity was going. In its place came black marketing. What had once been a united and disciplined force was gradually turning into a body of free-booting traders. The locusts were taking over. Anything the army had which wasn’t actually bolted down was carried off and sold.

Years before, when I was a new recruit, the whole Potchefstroom camp had been paraded to hear court martial sentence passed on a sorry-looking private for selling army-issue cigarettes on the black market. His regimental badges had been struck from his shoulders with full military pomp and he had been marched off for a term of solitary imprisonment to be followed by a ‘dishonourable discharge’.

That was then. Now the black-market infection was spreading like a disease, though it could have been nipped out if anyone in authority had cared enough.¹⁸ Official indifference made black marketing appear acceptable. What had started with cigarettes spread to food, soap, petrol, boots, clothing and medical supplies. In the end the epidemic extended to army vehicles, and to weapons, which were seized on by the new Italian mafia. The army was becoming a pipeline which siphoned anything in short supply on to the black market for the highest price that could be obtained. It was helping to fuel Italy’s runaway inflation and to further impoverish the already starving civilian poor. And it was giving petty gangsters the economic leverage with which they would inherit the power of the fallen fascist bosses.

Indifference in the army hierarchy fostered corruption lower down. What appeared to be accepted at the top quickly became acceptable everywhere. Selling off army goods – public property – ceased to be a crime or even a misdemeanour; it was no longer theft or looting but a joke, ‘nicking’ or, more cynically, ‘liberating’.

The epidemic was at its height when the orders came to pack up everything the division had and deliver it to base. Regiments started to collect all stores and equipment and to transfer their heavy-duty equipment and vehicles to a vehicle park in Genoa in preparation for trans-shipment to South Africa. The store adjoining my orderly room slowly filled up with miscellaneous bits and pieces – coils of electrical wire, field telephones, first-aid kits, medicines, drugs, radios, uniforms, tools.

I kept them under lock and key. No procedures had been laid down for recording what came in or from where. Soon everyone realized that items could ‘fall off the back of a truck’, as they said, without any check.

A dispatch rider I had not seen before arrived at the office. He claimed to be under orders from a major I had never heard of to collect all our field telephones. I was feeling bloody-minded and made up my own regulations. Nothing could go out without a signed requisition. He left in a rage.

Later the major arrived and made an ‘official’ request for the telephones. I repeated my own regulations. He could have used his rank – there is nothing in the artillery more lowly than a gunner – but he wrote out a requisition and a receipt, signed them both with his name, rank and unit, and went off with his loot. I doubted that the details were genuine. I had no quick way to check, and we both knew that he would be back in civilian life and untraceable long before a check could be made through the army’s bureaucracy.

Stores continued to come in. Some went out and my file of on-the-spot requisitions and receipts filled up. No one ever came to check, or to find out what remained in the store. What I was doing made no sense. It was just a private protest. If field telephones were going to the black market, their copper and magnetic innards might be recycled into something useful. But what useful purpose would be served returning them to moulder in a South African army warehouse instead?

The dilemma was still unresolved when an alleged captain phoned to ask what medical supplies were in store – especially penicillin and sulpha. I stalled, and offered to call him back. He wouldn’t have that. He would come by the following day to collect what we had. All around us Italians were dying painfully for lack of such vital medicines. On the black market scarce supplies were being adulterated and diluted until they were useless.

I checked what we had and went off to the local hospital on the hill behind the village which was run by an order of nuns. The medical director was a man. I offered him the drugs, no questions asked. He nodded sagely and waited for me to name the price. I had difficulty persuading him that the price was that he keep his mouth tightly shut about the source – no word to nuns, medics or anyone else.

That night I delivered the whole stock to him. He embraced me and seemed close to tears. I felt smugly righteous. The doubts came later. What would he actually do? Pass the drugs to the hospital for nothing or to the black market for his own benefit? And then, why was I any more entitled to dispose of the army’s penicillin as I chose than the claimant captain? There were no satisfactory answers, but I repeated the transaction several times with anything I felt should be kept from the black market. Soap, foodstuffs, chemicals and tools I handed on to the local Communist Party secretary for distribution to the civilian population. He was the most concerned and apparently honest citizen I had found in the area, and I took him on trust.

Meanwhile, all the division’s guns, tanks, armoured cars and trucks were being collected at a vehicle park at the Genoa docks. It was a great empty tract of land enclosed by a high brick wall to keep out thieves and the sea. The vehicles were neatly parked, row on row, more closely than in the meanest car park. There was a constant armed guard at the gates day and night, but thieving went on inexorably. Anything which could be removed – batteries, lamps, mirrors, tyres and wheels – vanished.

There is an old story about a soldier who arrives at a guarded gate each evening pushing a barrowload of waste. Each evening the guard searches the barrow and finds no contraband. Long afterwards the soldier and the guard meet again. ‘I knew you were pinching something,’ said the guard, ‘but I could never discover what.’ ‘Wheelbarrows,’ said the soldier. The origin of the story is said to have been the Genoa vehicle park.

The spring tides came and waves crashed over the wall of the vehicle park. Through indifference or incompetence the drainage outlets had been blocked. The water rose to the top of the wall. The neat rows of guns, tanks and trucks were submerged in seawater. Only the muzzles of the anti-aircraft guns projected above the water to mark where they had drowned. Corrosion and slime seemed like an epitaph for the army’s last rites in Italy.

My army service was turning sour. I had joined with the belief that military service would be a continuation of the struggle for democratic change which had been the purpose of my life. Perhaps it had been, but only while the war lasted. Now, in the post-war, I could no longer believe that it did, or could be. Italy did not need even my do-gooding, which would change nothing. Italy needed profound political and social changes which the war had made possible. But the peacetime army had lost its way and was no longer assisting that process. It had ceased to be a crusade and had become a vehicle of tragedy … or farce.

Black market money sloshed around everywhere. Some of it ended in our unit canteen, whose profits belonged to the men, not to the army. The final winding up in Italy was underway; the accumulated canteen profits had to be disposed of along with everything else. We convened the only ‘authorised’ meeting we had held since the ban on the Springbok Legion and voted almost unanimously to divide the money fifty-fifty between the Red Cross and the legion. My last orderly room duty was to make sure that the cash was dispatched to the proper places and not simply recycled to the black market.

Christmas 1945. My number had come up for repatriation. I spent a miserable Christmas in a miserable transit camp in Foggia, drinking bad wine with Monty Berman, who had turned up there from places unknown. We bought the wine from a local peasant, across the fence. It dyed our enamel mugs deep purple but did nothing to raise our spirits. From there by air to Egypt and Helwan camp, another wait and then finally by ship from Alexandria to Durban and an overnight train back to Johannesburg where the mayor would welcome us at the station. From there we would be marched off to the old Wanderers Sports Ground nearby, where our families would be waiting.

That year the mayor was Jessie MacPherson, one of the last honest, down-to-earth Labour Party socialists. She was on the platform wearing her mayoral chain and her usual black ‘garden party’ hat. Hilda, now a city councillor, was on the platform with her. Nepotism has its uses. We embraced to the good-natured chorus of catcalls and cheers from the men who were forming up to march to the Wanderers. My daughter Toni hid her face in Hilda’s skirts, wishing this unknown stranger in khaki would go away and leave her alone with her mother – as she had been ever since she had learnt to walk.

I tried to get friendly with her in the weeks before I was formally demobilised. We spent a holiday week at Uvongo Beach in Natal, where I became a handy porter to carry her over the rocks and dunes. Most of the time it rained and we were confined to the glazed hotel veranda. Children played between the rattan chairs and tables, tripped over adult feet, knocked their heads and shins and cried.

We took the train home. On Durban station friends came to greet us, carrying a gift of greenish bananas. While we chatted we left the bag on the seat next to Toni. She ate her way quietly through several of them while our backs were turned. Stomach pains hit her just as we reached Pietermaritzburg. She started screaming, and screamed her way across Natal and into the Transvaal. Distressed passengers kept coming up to ask why we were torturing the poor child.

It was not a memorable holiday. But within days of our return I was out of the army for good. VE Day was almost a year behind us as I began to pick up the threads of life as a civilian.