Chapter Twelve

An English Lord against the Mafia

The work of AMGOT – the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory – began almost immediately after the Allied invasion of Sicily. The day after the landings, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Wellesley took over the civil government of Syracuse. It took three more weeks of hard fighting before Wellesley could take command of the city of Catania, capital of the province of the same name in the east of the island. Then, he walked into a minefield of problems.

Catania normally contains a quarter of a million people [reported Wellesley]. For three weeks it had been pounded by air, sea and land. There were 60,000 people in it when I took over administration. Of these, 12,000 were living in huge underground shelters without light and without sanitation. There was no food in the town and 20,000 houses were uninhabitable. At first there was water, but the Germans in their retreat cut the main and within twenty-four hours this failed.

Straight away, Wellesley organised an emergency delivery of 50 tons of grain. Royal Engineers started work on fixing the water supply and the Signals Corps restored electricity. The return of refugees who had fled the city put tremendous pressure on Wellesley who had to place them in barracks which his own soldiers had considered too insanitary to use. Garbage was piling up in the streets and there was a real fear of an outbreak of typhoid. At the same time, Montgomery was insisting Wellesley clear the roads so tanks and lorries could move northwards in pursuit of the Germans.

In Catania I had a staff of 6 Officers to help me [said Wellesley], and units of the Engineers and Signals to deal with water mains and wires. But imagine the position of a young and inexperienced AMGOT Officer, not speaking a word of Italian, entering a captured town alone. He finds hundreds of dead to bury, thousands of living to feed. There is no light, no food, often no water and often not more than one house in five habitable.

This was the challenge faced by AMGOT officers across Sicily. Fortunately, in the centre and west of the island the devastation of war was far less than it was along the east coast. There, trouble would come not so much from helping refugees but maintaining law and order.

Wellesley dealt with this in Syracuse by allowing the Carabinieri to be armed so they could prevent the looting of food stores. Even the archbishop of the city complained about the widespread theft, having had his own car stolen. Food queues had to be controlled, a curfew enforced and Wellesley had to settle a strike of grave diggers.

On top of this, political factions within Sicily were already seeking advantage over each other by putting their cases to AMGOT. In Syracuse, Wellesley was visited by an anti-Fascist group, while in Catania, that city’s archbishop was ‘a very unpleasant old man who has come to ask for the release of all the Fascists who have been interned. I am as civil as I can be but find it very difficult to get rid of him.’

In the middle of his work, Wellesley fell ill with a high temperature and was diagnosed with sand-fly fever. He rested briefly but then pushed on. Wellesley continued his work into September, but then it came to a halt. His nephew was killed during the Allied landings at Salerno on the Italian mainland on 9 September. He died childless and that meant Wellesley inherited his title. He was now the 7th Duke of Wellington – the inheritor of an illustrious military reputation that stretched back to the battle of Waterloo. Wellesley left his post in Sicily shortly afterwards and returned to England. His son remained on the front line in Italy and fought through to 1944 – he is the present 8th Duke of Wellington.

Before Wellesley left, he attended a meeting of senior AMGOT staff at their headquarters in Palermo in late August. He gave an upbeat account of the situation in his province of Catania. ‘The popularity of the Allies is quite extraordinary’, said Wellesley. He had witnessed flag raising demonstrations with cheers, which had impressed him greatly, and he found that all Fascist records had been burned. Another AMGOT administrator reported that already the Sicilians were forming political parties.

Lieutenant-Colonel Irish, responsible for the province of Caltanissetta, in the south of the island, said that ‘In addition to the usual Independent Sicily movement he had come in touch with another organisation entitled Christian Democrats. One of the leaders with whom he had come in contact had hardly given him the impression of being either a Christian or a Democrat.’

Wellesley was not the only English peer to serve in Sicily. On 24 July, Major-General Francis Baron Rennell of Rodd arrived on the island. He had been appointed head of AMGOT in Sicily. Rennell and Wellesley knew each other well. Rennell’s father had been British Ambassador to Rome and was godfather to Wellesley’s son. Senior to Rennell was General Sir Harold Alexander, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean. He became Military Governor of Sicily, but it was Rennell, as Chief Civil Affairs Officer of the Occupied Territory of Sicily, who was expected to oversee day-to-day life on the island. An American, Brigadier General F. J. McSherry, was appointed deputy to Rennell.

The 48-year-old Lord Rennell was an impressive figure and would come to dominate the Allied administration of the island for the next few months. He did not tolerate fools and had sharp words for many of his colleagues. But he was generous too and praised those he considered worked hard and well. Rennell had been educated at Eton and Oxford and served in World War I in the Royal Field Artillery but was later seconded to intelligence duties in Italy. In 1919, he entered the Diplomatic Service, operating in Rome and Sofia. In 1924, he resigned to work in the City on the stock exchange and in banking. During this period, he took up exploring and visited the Sahara twice, making a study of the Tuareg nomads that won him the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal for 1929.

Foreign service and exploration ran in the Rennell family. His father, James Rennell Rodd, the 1st Baron Rennell, was a senior diplomat in Rome and British East Africa, but he was also an archaeologist and published poet and moved in London’s bohemian circles, being a friend of the artist James Whistler. An earlier ancestor was James Rennell, dubbed the father of oceanography, who, among his many achievements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charted the Gulf Stream.

Lord Rennell would need all his family skills of diplomacy, plus his personal courage as an explorer, to deal with the criminal forces ranged against him in Sicily in late 1943.

A draft directive for the Allied administration of Sicily was in circulation on 1 May 1943. It came from the Civil Affairs Division of the US War Department and was sent to the British War Cabinet for their comments. Politically, it proclaimed that all Sicilian prefects and mayors of major settlements should be replaced by Allied military officers. The local Fascist party should be dissolved and the entire Fascist party leadership removed from all posts of authority. This would mean, of course, there would be a rush to fill the political vacuum left by the Fascists – a process that would attract the Mafia. Economically, the directive promised rationing and a maximum prices system for all major commodities. Black market practices and hoarding would be punished severely. Again, any concerted effort by the Allies to stamp out the black market would bring them directly into conflict with the Mafia. So, on two fronts at least, a major confrontation with the Mafia could be expected.

When Lord Rennell arrived on the island, he made it his priority to break the black market. He also restricted the movement of civilians, setting up a system of permits. Cars were kept off the road, unless driven with a permit.

AMGOT headquarters was in Palermo. Under Lord Rennell, there were nine provincial administration units. They were run by Senior Civil Affairs Officers (SCAOs), five Americans and four British. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Poletti was SCAO for Palermo.

Poletti noted the different ways in which US forces used their Civil Affairs Officers (CAOs) in western Sicily:

The General commanding the 45th Division from the first realized the value of keeping a Civil Affairs detachment with his advanced headquarters to take over the towns immediately after capture . . .

The General commanding 3rd Division adopted a procedure somewhat different from that obtaining in the 45th Division areas. He was not embarrassed by the presence of a Corps Headquarters in his rear and retained control of his L of C [Line of Communications] from the beaches to his advanced troops . . .

Sometimes CAOs were the very first Allied agents into a Sicilian town. In a report of 31 July 1943, Poletti was proud of their closeness to the front line:

Throughout the operations, we have kept a certain number of civil affairs officers at the very front. In fact, in several instances, where troops were pushing ahead fast and bypassing places, civil affairs officers entered towns before troops had actually occupied them.

This put them in close proximity to the local Mafiosi.

One British CAO faced the stiff challenge of establishing Allied control in the notorious Mafia hill-town of Corleone and its neighbouring communities. His first task was to end the black market by getting grain directly from the farmers to the town – without the local Mafia intervening to hoard it and sell it at higher prices. He reported:

For transport I was assigned a Jeep and an American soldier as general aide and interpreter. I called together all producers and explained to them the situation, appealing at the same time for co-operation, many of them responded well, others ignored the appeal . . .

When invited to open locked doors on the farm usually the excuse was ‘I cannot find the key’. Our reply was three minutes to open the locked doors, if in that time they were not opened we cut them open neatly with the jeep axe. In the majority of cases we found large quantities of grain hidden away.

The British CAO was disappointed by the performance of the local Carabinieri and had to work largely on his own with his American assistant fighting the black market and searching for hidden guns. Every Saturday, he held a Summary Court at Corleone to try all offences against the Allied Proclamation. Black-market offences were punished by imprisonment. He was unimpressed by the performance of many of his towns’ mayors and had to change some, but he was not the only Allied power in his region and described one intervention by the CIC:

The CIC from Palermo (7th Army), as the result of some agitators in Balestrate, and quite unknown to me as CAO, swooped down on this sea-side town and after a few superficial enquiries put the Mayor and his Communal Secretary in the local prison and appointed new officials to replace them. The new Mayor resigned his functions after only 4 days of office.

The Marshal of Carabiniere who gave me the information about this peremptory action, also informed me that members of the American Army came and released the former Mayor and Secretary. I informed the SCAO [Colonel Poletti] of what had taken place without my authority, and asked for some information. The matter was taken up to higher levels and the CIC were found to have acted ‘ultra vires’ and duly censured.

Poletti was aware of inter-Allied problems and mentioned this in his report of 31 July:

There is grave danger of a lot of free wheeling on part of officers of AMGOT Hq. Confusion, misunderstanding and dispersion of responsibility will result. In my opinion, the provincial seat of government must be strengthened. Functions, previously stemming from Rome, will now have to be centered in the respective provinces.

This suggestion was music to the ears of the Mafia-backed Sicilian separatists.

Lord Rennell made his first detailed report on the Allied government in Sicily on 3 August 1943 in a confidential letter to a Colonel French:

I do not wish you to think that anything has broken down yet, but I am acutely conscious of how near to breakdown we have been . . . The only thing which has not broken down or shown signs of breakdown as yet, is Anglo-American relations.

The American officers in Amgot have done very well. This applies to the younger as well as the older. They have shown enterprise, ingenuity and tremendous keenness. They have generally exceeded expectations. The young British officers are generally up to expectations. The older ones are disappointing and are breaking down. I have one senior SCAO in charge of a province who has succeeded in making a first class mess already and one which has compromised the issue of wheat prices all over the island. This type of life is not an old man’s job.

In the British House of Commons, Labour MPs were openly critical of the Allied administration established in Sicily. They questioned the use of the Carabinieri as police by AMGOT, believing them to be agents of the Fascist regime. Lord Rennell denied this strongly. He saw the restored Carabinieri as his principal weapon against the Mafia:

In a country like Sicily where the Mafia is far from dead, it requires an intimate local knowledge which is only possessed by the Carabinieri to keep Mafia activities in bounds; as it is there has been a recrudescence largely due to the fact that in the first few days after the occupation of an area the Carabinieri were disarmed, which led to the unruly elements, for which Sicily is notorious, assuming that the local police force had been disbanded.

The fact that they were not disbanded has checked what might have been, and may yet be, a serious menace to good administration. Both I and my officers, including the London police officers as well as the officers of both Seventh and Eighth Armies, are entirely satisfied with the behaviour of the Carabinieri as a whole.

Lord Rennell did, however, admit to early mistakes in the appointment of new town mayors to replace Fascist community leaders:

The word Podesta has been abolished and replaced with the older Italian title of Sindaco who was elected but is now nominated by the Allied Military Government . . . Unfortunately owing to the zeal which Allied Military Government Officers have shown in the removal of Fascist Podesta they have fallen into the trap of appointing the most pushing and obvious person, who in certain cases are now suspected as being the local Mafia leaders.

In certain parts of Sicily there is no doubt that the election of Sindaco will result in virtually unanimous voting for local Mafia leaders. It will take quite a long time for the Allied Military Government to weed out the good from the bad. I am convinced that even if municipal elections had been possible, the elective system would have produced chaos.

In a second secret report of 20 August 1943, sent to the War Office in London, Lord Rennell drew attention to the volatile political situation on the island. From the first moment he landed, he was aware of certain elements calling for Sicilian Separatism:

Within a few days of the occupation of Palermo a Committee for Sicilian Independence was formed. A manifesto was printed as a handbill and posters were put up in the streets. This was stopped and the persons concerned warned that all forms of political activity were forbidden . . .

Among the leaders of the movement are, as might be expected, members of the Tasca family who have always been associated with Sicilian Separatism and have equally always been Anti-Fascists. Finocchiaro Aprile a pre-Fascist Under-Secretary of State and a Sicilian by origin is also in the forefront of the movement. He served in Italian pre-Fascist governments in the departments of War and Finance. He is somewhat garrulous and not very outstanding in ability . . .

I have personally warned Alessandro Tasca and Finocchiaro Aprile. But I do not flatter myself that these warnings will have much effect; from the point of view of the leaders, the moment is clearly not one to be lost if they are to achieve anything.

British Vice-Consul Manley also noted that the Separatists were fast off the mark. Lucio Tasca was a prominent Separatist with links to the Mafia. Together with the Duchess of Cesaro, he was quick to contact the Allied authorities in Palermo, including Poletti. They wined and dined them, presenting themselves as leading anti-Fascists. Tasca’s prize was to be appointed Mayor of Palermo, with a number of his Separatist friends gaining other public appointments.

Lord Rennell was under no illusion that the Mafia had their part to play in this movement. It is also clear that he viewed them as a major problem – he would not succumb to their dinner party offensive – and certainly had no intention or plan for working with them. He observed:

The other element which may be of considerable importance is the Mafia. Many of the long sentences which were awarded in the trials which followed Mori’s campaign have recently come to an end and many of the prisoners are probably once more at large.

These who have not been liberated are probably still in convict stations or in compulsory domicile in the islands. Generally speaking these men will be reputedly, and really, anti-Fascists; but they are not people to whom clemency can safely be extended on the grounds that they are political prisoners who have suffered at the hands of the Fascists.

While the Mafia is primarily a ‘racket’ organisation for blackmail, protection, and robbery, it formerly also played a considerable political part in elections. I would expect the Mafia to be associated with the Sicilian Independence Movement.

It is certain from Lord Rennell’s tone that, as far he was concerned, the Allies owed nothing to the Mafia for any help given during the invasion. He should have known – he was the senior officer in charge of the Allied military occupation of the island. It is worth emphasising that point. He saw the Mafia primarily as a threat to Allied law and order – not a help in securing it:

There is some evidence of Mafia activity increasing. There has been one murder of a land owner which looks like Mafia work. The aftermath of war and the breakdown of central and provincial authority provide a good culture ground for the virus.

The only formation capable of dealing with the Mafia with proper support is the Corps of Carabinieri. These with Civil Affairs Police Officers and military patrols may be able to check a recrudescence of activity. I say deliberately ‘may’, because with the ‘Omerta’, or Sicilian code of honour, which precludes recourse of the injured parties even in cases of murder to the Government, it has been notoriously difficult to secure evidence of guilt, or even willingness to make charges.

With the senior military administrator in Sicily calling the Mafia a virus, it looked as though the Mafia could expect little mercy from the Allies.

In a report issued in October 1943, Lord Rennell repeated his belief that the Allies had been too keen to remove any trace of Fascism without thinking who would take over the administration of Sicilian towns:

I also fear that in their exuberance to remove Fascist Podestas and Municipal officials in rural towns, my own officers have in certain cases by ignorance of local personalities appointed a number of Mafia ‘bosses’ or allowed such ‘bosses’ to propose suitably malleable substitutes.

Here my difficulty resides in the Sicilian Omerta code of honour. I cannot get much information even from the local Carabinieri who in outstations inevitably feel that they had better keep their mouths shut and their skins whole if the local AMGOT representatives chooses to appoint a Mafioso, lest they be accused by AMGOT of being Pro-Fascist.

The local Mafiosi, who of course had no love for the regime which persecuted the Mafia, are naturally not slow in levelling accusations of Fascist sympathies against their own pet enemies.

Here, we can see, from the evidence gathered by the chief Allied Civil Affairs Officer in charge of Sicily that there was no Allied conspiracy to put the Mafia back into power. Instead, through misunderstanding and administrative overstretch, the Allies – by mistake – allowed the Mafia to put themselves back into positions of power.

Corrections, however, were being made. In Palermo province, said Lord Rennell, a ‘number of unsatisfactory municipal appointments made in the first few weeks have been removed, as have several suspected Mafiosi and bad characters who were appointed Sindaci of townships. Some remain to be removed.’

Lord Rennell also saw that the rebirth of the Mafia was being enforced by a campaign of murder:

The fact of the matter is that while ordinary civil crime other than black market offences is at a satisfactory level except in Trapani province and in most provinces has been decreasing, homicide has undoubtedly increased in the provinces reported to be Mafiose [sic].

Many of these homicides are of the Mafia type or bear indications of Mafia antecedents. In these cases arrests are infrequent and evidence unobtainable. In Agrigento province there were six homicide cases; arrests have been made in four cases but only in one which has Mafia antecedents has good evidence been obtained. In this case the witnesses have all been locked up to ensure their security and in order to ensure expedition the case has been transferred to an Allied General Court on which Italian assessors will sit. If a conviction is secured the effect on the Mafia in that province, where it has been rampant, may be considerable.

As a result of the Fascist operations against them, many Mafiosi were still locked in prison on punishment islands off the coast of Sicily. Lord Rennell was aware of this and careful not to make any further mistakes. All prisoners had their cases analysed and those awaiting trial for minor offences were released. But the wholesale release of prisoners awaiting trial for more serious charges was halted. ‘The risk of releasing Mafiosi without investigation is not worth taking in present circumstances’, said Lord Rennell wisely.

The same wary view of the Mafia was taken up in the Narrative for Official History of Civil Affairs in Italy written by D. S. Duff and intended as the British government’s summary of the occupation of Sicily. Duff felt the weak point lay in American relationships with the Mafia:

Stress must be laid upon the number of Mafiosi who managed to get themselves incorporated into the administration in the early days on account of their former trans-Atlantic residences (often enforced) and their knowledge of a certain amount of American gangster speech. They were incorporated into the [Allied] regime because a number of non-Italian speaking American officers discovered, quite rightly, that they were anti-Fascist, having frequently enjoyed enforced residence in Italy also, and on account of their sometimes elementary knowledge of English. While there was a lull in Mafia crime after the landing, it poked its ugly head up very quickly . . .

Reports from local people indicated that Mafia activities had begun again now that the Fascists had gone, and it was necessary to take a firm line at the beginning. In Provinces there were a number of Mafia members released from prison, and some were still in prison. It was suggested that as many as possible should be deported.

From the British point of view, at least, it is clear that the Mafia in Sicily should be no friends of the Allies.

A London Times correspondent was in Sicily in September 1943 and he described the feeling on the streets of the newly liberated capital:

Palermo, the capital of Sicily, has already the appearance of returning to normal. Much of it is illusory. The shops, for instance, succeed in making great display with little and tawdry material. The main streets are full of people, but in reality not much more than half the population has returned. You can get a tolerably good meal in certain restaurants, but the communal food situation is not good; there is a shortage that becomes more acute as the population returns, ‘Following the food’.

The Times correspondent noted that there was a general distrust of government among the Sicilians, wherever it came from. ‘There is perhaps more stubborn aversion to government in general’, he wrote, ‘in the interior of this island than there is on the mainland, for the spirit of the Mafia is not wholly dead.’

With shortages of food and other essentials, the black market in Palermo and elsewhere in Sicily was growing rapidly under Mafia patronage. Tough action was needed and it was up to AMGOT to deliver it.

On 10 September 1943, the New York Times printed a sensational story about an Allied clash with the Mafia near Palermo:

The Mafia, Sicilian extortionist gang that fascism tried for years to rub out and then incorporated as one of its criminal appendages, has been smashed from the top. Two of its notorious leaders, Domenico Tomaselli and Giuseppe Piraino, and seventeen district bosses were nabbed in a joint British-American coup in which Scotland Yard had a hand.

With these gangsters behind bars, the Allied authorities had further leads on other leading regional Mafiosi, which it intended to follow up:

The Mafia men already jailed and those on the way to joining them controlled the black market, which still has a stranglehold on Sicilian life. It follows that breaking the Mafia gang means breaking the black market.

The newspaper report claimed that the Allies had been helped by other Mafiosi who were anti-Fascist and wanted to see an end to Fascist-backed profiteering. Of course, what may well have been really happening was that one Mafia faction wanted to take over the black market in their area and so informed on those Mafia who had colluded with the Fascists. It was a classic take-over strategy using a third party to do the dirty work. The Mafia in both Sicily and America were not averse to using the authorities to knock out a rival on their behalf.

The military operation against the Mafia was said to have begun when the US 3rd Division was on its drive towards Messina and chose Castel d’Accia for its rear echelon headquarters. It was located inland from Trabia, about twenty-two miles from Palermo. The newspaper gave credit to Louis Bassi of Stockton, California, a ‘technician in the special service staff’, for discovering that the tiny hamlet was in fact a Mafia fortress. He investigated it by himself until he had enough evidence for an open and shut case against the racketeers and then reported it to his colonel.

The New York Herald Tribune, which also published the Associated Press story, added another dimension: ‘A major who also had the distinction of helping Mike Fiaschetti bust the New York markets racket was drawn into the case from the food-supply angle and was in on the kill . . .’

Michael Fiaschetti – known as ‘Treat-‘Em-Rough Mike’ – was an experienced anti-racketeer investigator in the New York Police Department. As deputy commissioner, he was credited with smashing a racket centred around the supply of artichokes in 1935. From this, it is clear that AMGOT took the problem of the black market in Sicily seriously enough to turn to specialist police agents to help them crack it. A subsequent newspaper article also commented on the affair:

Dispatches from Sicily telling of the arrest of bosses and sub-bosses of the Mafia probably surprise most of us. That powerful criminal gang was thought to have been put out of business by the Prefect of Sicily, Cesare Mori, who died last year . . . Now we hear that the Mafia is caught running the black market. The Fascists hadn’t suppressed it. They had annexed it. We are not told exactly on what basis, but presumably on some regular division of territory and profit. You feel a little sorry for the Mafia. It has got into trouble by keeping bad company.

Unfortunately, all these articles were hopelessly optimistic. The Allies had not smashed Mafia control of the black market in Sicily. They had replaced one set of bosses with another, apparently more pro-Allied bunch of Mafiosi.

In the swoop on the Mafia bastion at Castel d’Accia, the New York Times and the Herald Tribune reported the involvement of Scotland Yard – headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police – in the Allied assault. The London Times correspondent also noted the presence of the ‘London bobby’ on the streets of Palermo. ‘Each department is staffed by equal numbers of British and American officers’ he wrote, ‘and British police officers are almost wholly drawn from the Metropolitan Police Force’.

As part of its readiness to face crime in Sicily, AMGOT had recruited sixty-five Metropolitan Police officers to patrol the streets of the occupied cities. AMGOT’S plan for law and order relied on reestablishing the Carabinieri as the main police force on the island. To use a military police corps would have been to go against the primary purpose of AMGOT, which was to maintain public order without diverting military manpower. The sixty-five London bobbies were intended to work alongside other specially trained Allied officers who would supervise the actions of the Italian police.

‘The Metropolitan Police contingent proved itself astonishingly versatile in the role of Civil Affairs Officers, Supply Officers and in any other administrative job on which they were employed’, said C. R. S. Harris, who served with AMGOT in Sicily and later wrote a government book on the subject. ‘It would be no exaggeration to describe them as more responsible than any other element for such practical success in military government as AMGOT undoubtedly achieved.’ Lord Rennell was also impressed by them:

I am particularly pleased in the 8th Army area, with the good work of my police officers drawn in large part from the London (Metropolitan) Police. In spite of language difficulties and no foreign experience they have proved themselves adaptable and efficient and have got on well with the Carabinieri and the American officers with whom they are associated.

A later booklet, The Metropolitan Police at War, mentioned that ‘Much of the work these officers were called upon to do was quite outside the normal range of police duties . . . However, a British bobby seems to able to turn his hand to most things, and they carried out their tasks, by all accounts, most efficiently.’

Most of the policemen sent to Sicily were older officers, some of them having seen military service in World War I. Bertram Hefford MBE was one of them. He was a 47-year-old Superintendent at Scotland Yard when he volunteered, much to the annoyance of his wife. He went to Palermo with a close colleague and joked that AMGOT really meant ‘Aged Military Gentlemen on Tour’. Metropolitan police officers were given an equivalent military rank in AMGOT and Hefford was even promoted to lieutenant-colonel. After Sicily, he went to Genoa and then returned home as a Chief Superintendent, retiring in 1956. Hefford’s family are the proud owners of two very impressive two-foot high statues presented to him by grateful Carabinieri. The inscription reads:

The Italian Carabinieri, VI Brigade, being very grateful to Major Bertram J. Hefford, who in painful and difficult moments knew how to understand and assist them cordially and to infuse into them new self confidence and fortitude, offer this souvenir, Sicily, July 1943 – February 1944.

Some younger Metropolitan policemen were recruited directly into the army. Corporal William Capp was a 24-year-old policeman in Islington when he was given the harsh choice of being either a rear-gunner in the RAF or an army commando. After commando training in Scotland, he ended up in Sicily in August 1943 in No. 2 Commando taking part in raids behind German lines. ‘In Scaletta [on the way to Messina], we had to hold up a German train’, he remembered, ‘but a few of our blokes got hit by snipers.’

From Sicily, Capp went to Salerno where he took part in the landing that killed the then Duke of Wellington. ‘They had tanks lined up on the promenade shelling us. We went in with 350 men and by the time we took a hill on the coast we had 73 of us left.’ In northern Italy he captured a Tiger tank – ‘a round got stuck up its barrel and its crew ran off, I still have the swastika flag from the tank’. After more raids behind German lines along the Dalmatian coast, Capp returned to Britain where he resumed his police service in 1946, clocking up thirty years as a bobby on the beat.

In his behind-the-lines raids in Sicily, did Capp ever work with the Mafia? ‘No, we never heard of them’, he said decisively.

At first, in Sicily, because the Carabinieri wore military uniforms, they were mistaken for Italian soldiers by the Allies. Some were taken as prisoners of war and shipped over to North Africa. AMGOT got these men released and dressed in civilian clothing but with police armbands. They then set about re-building their morale by arranging for Allied military police to go on patrol with them so as to raise their status in the eyes of the Sicilian public. SCAO Colonel Poletti described this process in his report of 31 July:

At beginning of the occupation we proceeded slowly in rearming Carabinieri and local police. Thereafter it was ordered that they be rearmed at once because the population has little respect for a policeman without arms. We also pursued the practice of having one MP accompany two Carabinieri so that our soldiers would become accustomed to them.

‘The restoration of the morale of the Carabinieri was the notable achievement of the Metropolitan Police officers,’ claimed C. R. S. Harris, ‘who managed to command not only the professional respect but, what was even more important, the personal loyalty of their Italian colleagues.’ The same could not be said for the Agenti di Sicurezza Pubblica, the criminal investigation officers of the Italian police force. They had been closely associated with the Fascist regime and commanded little respect among Sicilians. Many of their commanding officers were interned by the Allies.

The respect for the law had been considerably diminished [concluded Harris]. This showed itself in a number of ways at first, in a considerable increase in crimes of violence and of robbery, and an enormous increase in the whole range of black market offences, and, later, what was much more significant, in a revival of the Mafia . . . The removal of the heavy hand of Fascism gave rise to a freer use of the dagger and pistol – which Allied Military Government was wholly unable to prevent.

Lord Rennell sometimes had to intervene personally to break the rule of omerta in the countryside. On one occasion, Baron Genuardo, a wealthy landowner from Agrigento, was shot five times and stabbed seventeen times. The local Mafia were suspected of his murder and two suspects were arrested by the Carabinieri. To avoid the intimidation of a local jury, Lord Rennell had the case transferred to an Allied military tribunal. Death sentences were passed and rapidly carried out by a firing squad. It was a clear and strong message to the rest.

The English Lord had ordered his first strike against the Mafia.