The Last Day of Battle: Surrender in Italy and Operation Unthinkable
Northern Italy, April 26–May 2, 1945
When Private Ivan Houston went to see Pope Pius XII on April 25, 1945, there were only about a hundred other Allied soldiers in the audience. They represented a cross section of the multinational armies that had fought in Italy. There were Poles, French, Brazilians, South Africans, British, and others. The pope was carried in on a litter by the Swiss Guards and spoke to the men in Polish, Italian, and English. Afterward, Houston walked across Rome with another soldier from the 92nd, went to see the spot where Julius Caesar’s funeral pyre had been erected, and then a Roman street artist drew his picture for a few lire and some cigarettes. Halfway through drawing, the artist looked up at Houston and said, “I’m sorry for your president.” (Franklin Roosevelt had died two weeks earlier of a cerebral hemorrhage, and now Harry Truman had been sworn in.)
The following day, Houston and his friend returned north to Barga to find their unit—and discovered that it had disappeared. It took them three days to find their battalion, and they linked up with them only on April 30. During Houston’s leave, the Buffalo Soldiers of the 370th had decided to break the line northward. Accompanied by the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and around a thousand partisans, they had stormed north in one of the most aggressive and tactically successful advances of the whole war in Tuscany. They cleared out the Serchio valley, fought the Germans off the mountains overlooking it, and suddenly, like a hole appearing in a dam, the flood began. The Germans started retreating all the way up toward Genoa. The 370th arrived in the town of Pontremoli, sixty-five miles north of their start line, five days later, thousands of retreating Germans in front of them. Houston joined them on the last day of the month. Partisans were shooting in the air. There was a lot of celebrating. Houston asked what was going on. The answer stunned him. “Ah, Benito Mussolini and his mistress were caught trying to go to Switzerland. They were shot—their bodies are in front of a gas station in Milan!” one partisan told him.
The 92nd Division stormed north. A British SOE officer, working as official liaison, and a stream of partisans accompanied them. He arrived in Genoa ahead of the unit, just after the Ligurian partisans had liberated it. Men jumped on his jeep as he arrived in Piazza Verdi. Flowers poured down. There was shooting into the air, and women embraced him. There was, he said, something theatrical about the scene, “the half-light of approaching night, the sea of upturned faces, the flowers, the noise … it only lacked Verdi’s music to complete the opera.”
This scene was repeated all over northern Italy as it was liberated. The following morning, the SOE officer was awakened by the sound of running feet, shouting, and the noise of a very angry crowd. They surrounded a man they recognized as a member of the Fascist Black Shirts. He was completely enveloped by the mob in the middle of Piazza Verdi; they closed in on him, he disappeared beneath their feet, and that was it. “A gory mess of human flesh lay in the square, bathed in the bright sunshine, and I turned away from the square duly sobered by my first taste of mob violence. By the time the American advance guard arrived that evening, the Piazza Verdi was clean again.”
To the west of Genoa, partisans liberated Imperia, running down from the mountains that crowd above the port, and driving in commandeered German trucks and civilian cars along the seafront that stretches and winds for two miles. The oleanders were starting to bloom, and the city was warm under the platoons of huge palm trees that march in stately fashion along the sea. Revenge for German and Fascist atrocities, and the occupation, was not slow in coming. Behind a makeshift partisan police station, a terrified and screaming middle-aged woman was being dragged, hands tied behind her back. Imperia rises out of the sea and holds tight to the hills and mountains behind it; there are plenty of walls that back into the slope. Partisans pushed the woman up against one of them, a line of six men noisily cocked shells into the breeches of their Carcano rifles, and opened fire, blowing her backward, dead, against the blood-splashed wall. The woman was Ernesta Ordano, the wife of the Fascist officer Vittorio, and mother of the partisan, Paola. The execution warrant was simple, taut, and precise: “On the 28th April 1945, the Fascist spy Ordano Ernesta was shot. The execution took place at 22.30.” It was signed by the commander of the 6th Partisan Assault Division, Garibaldi Liguria. Her husband was shot as well. As her fellow partisans were executing her mother, Paola was with her colleagues from her guerrilla brigade, driving in open-topped cars along the seafront, shooting weapons in the air, waving flags, drinking wine. Later, she, like every other partisan who was demobilized, would receive a certificate from Field Marshal Alexander congratulating her on her exemplary performance and bravery. She would also receive a notice from the partisan social welfare committee that she would be allowed to go to Milan to continue her studies once hostilities had finally ceased. And as an orphan, she would learn, she was allowed an extra ration of seven ounces of marmalade per month.1
The Partisans from Piemonte had attacked Turin two days before on April 27 at dawn. And by the middle of the day, full-scale fighting between them and German and Fascist Italian units raged throughout the city. A British sergeant radio operator from the SOE was with the rebel units advancing into the city. Trying to control their efforts to liberate the town, he said, had been like King Canute’s efforts against the tide. The German commanders in the whole region of Piemonte of northwestern Italy surrendered to the British SOE station chief in Biella, a town near the Alps. This British officer was just about to enjoy his first postliberation hot bath in five months. The Germans didn’t want to surrender to the partisans, so under a white flag, a German oberst surrendered to the SOE officer and to an American colonel from an armored unit whose first tanks and armored cars had just driven into the streets of the town. When the shooting died down, and the American tank and armored car hatches opened, the Italian crowd was ecstatic, dancing, throwing flowers, offering wine to their liberators. Then they were completely and momentarily taken aback. Emerging from the vehicles’ turrets were “unmistakeably Japanese heads.” The Nisei had arrived.2
The efforts by the partisans and the SOE and OSS to carry out anti-scorch operations were largely successful. Partisans captured twelve Germans in civilian clothing trying to sneak into a power station. They were shot on the spot. In Milan, the news of the liberation came on a fast transmission of Morse code from the SOE: “Free Milan here, Free Milan here…” The CLNAI, now united after its sombrous December declaration to Field Marshal Alexander and the heads of the SOE and OSS in Europe, appeared on the streets, some in ad hoc uniform. One of the first actions they had taken on April 27 was to sign a document establishing war crimes tribunals and commissions of justice. They sentenced members of the Fascist government to death. That evening, Mussolini and his mistress fled the city, with 2,000 Fascist and German soldiers accompanying them. But when stopped at a roadblock and confronted by a heavily armed and determined group of partisans, the number of men who actually voted to fight for Mussolini was just six; the rest surrendered or fled. The partisans took Il Duce away, and a message was passed back to General Cadorna in Milan: What should we do with him? The CLNAI, including Cadorna, said he should be shot. The following morning, a huge crowd was coursing through the piazzas and boulevards of Milan: the bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci were hanging bloody and bruised upside down outside a gas station in the center of the city.
On the afternoon of April 29, the first American units appeared in the center of Milan: a large group of SS men had barricaded themselves in the Hotel Regina and refused to surrender to the partisans. They threatened to open fire on the huge crowd outside unless American or British officers appeared. The first Allied officer to arrive outside the hotel in a commandeered staff car was a British captain, Alan Whicker, who operated as a war reporter with one of the 8th Army’s Film and Television units. Whicker knew that the first American units were not far behind him, but before they arrived, the SS men in the hotel wanted him to sign for, and take safe delivery of, their entire vault of cash. They wanted it to be given to the Allies, not to the partisans. A stunned Whicker, holstered revolver on his hip, stood at the bottom of the staircase inside the hotel Regina. SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff’s men dragged a huge cabin trunk toward him and told him it was his to take away. In it, said Whicker, were millions upon millions of dollars, Swiss francs, Italian lire, and British pounds. He signed a piece of paper as a receipt, saluted, took the trunk out to his car and, feeling desperately lucky not to have been shot, drove around the corner, wondering what to do next. The Americans arrived and took the Germans’ surrender an hour later. The following day they, and representatives of the new Allied Military Government, took over the administration of Milan and the province of Lombardy.3
In the town of Piacenza, forty miles southeast of Milan, three American Sherman tanks attached to the American 135th Infantry Regiment joined the partisans fighting against five hundred die-hard SS men: after a night of combat, the Germans pulled out, heading north as fast as they could. The partisans took over the town. It was a scene repeated dozens of times across northern Italy as Allied divisions advanced furiously, and the German and Italian defense crumbled. A British SOE captain found himself in the middle of newly liberated Piacenza with some partisans, CLNAI officials, and an American major who represented the fledgling Allied Military Government. The major turned to the SOE captain and said clearly that they what they most needed there and then was a local election. “I vetoed the election … this was no time for a sudden outbreak of democracy,” wrote the SOE captain afterward.4
Far northeast of Piacenza, SS, Wehrmacht, and Italian Fascist units were streaming north. The Allies were about to issue an order commanding every unit from all sides to freeze in a line exactly where they were, but before this happened, the Germans and Italians were fleeing, chased, ambushed, blown up, killed, harassed, looted, shot at, robbed, imprisoned, and ignored by thousands and thousands of partisans. On the lagoon off Venice, several small Allied landing craft chugged across the sea, each one flying the flag of the British Royal Navy. Two days before, on April 29, a British Royal Navy and Engineers unit had met up with Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Peniakoff—“Popski”—in the newly liberated Chioggia. He was waving a large, shiny chromium-plated hook that had replaced his left hand, which he’d lost in action near Ravenna, where he had also won a Distinguished Service Order. Canadian troops were going to go into Venice from the north, but Peniakoff wanted to take part too, so he turned to the British engineer officer and said to him, “We’ll go in from the south—by water! Nobody is going to stop us now, boys!”
The landing ships thundered right up to the edge of the medieval jetty beside St. Mark’s Square and put down their ramps. For the first time ever in the history of Venice, wheeled vehicles went into the beautiful historic piazza. Six armed jeeps from Popski’s Private Army, cheered on by Italian civilians, drove around and around St. Mark’s Square in celebration. The British Royal Engineers officer who had captained the landing craft that brought them in to Venice summed up the moment in his diary: “The thrill of that moment can never be told properly. There were a few snipers to sort out and then we were going to experience something that no man had ever done. We were going to drive a vehicle around St Mark’s Square. The whole of the population of Venice seemed to be in the square cheering us as we went round. This was a marvellous moment—perhaps the most marvellous one experienced by any of our Allies in the war.”5
Then on the other side of Italy at twenty past seven on the evening of May 2, in the town of Pontremoli, the headquarters of the 1st Battalion, 370th Regimental Combat Team of the 92nd Infantry Division—the Buffalo Soldiers—received word the war was over. Ivan Houston saw in the battalion log the words “Finito le Guerra in Italy.”
Operation Unthinkable
The Yugoslav partisans beat the Allies to Trieste by a day. The city was no stranger to German or Italian Fascist atrocities—the only concentration camp in Italy that had a crematorium was in a suburb of Trieste called San Sabba. Built in April 1944, about 3,000 Jews, Yugoslavs, and Italian antifascists were killed there, and thousands of others were imprisoned before being transferred to other concentration camps in the Reich. The Allies had bombed Trieste, as it was an important port and naval base. On April 30, 1945, the National Liberation Committee—a subbranch of the CLNAI—started a riot in the city. Thousands of Yugoslav partisans arrived shortly afterward—the final Germans surrendered to a New Zealand Division that arrived the next day. The Germans were handed over to the Yugoslav partisans, who controlled the city until June 12. An Indian and an American division arrived to reinforce the New Zealanders. Thousands of Germans and Fascist Italian troops and sympathizers just disappeared—the caves and ravines and chasms of the rocky Dalmatian coast, and the mountain plateau above it, were littered with their bodies.6 Tito and Harold Alexander eventually oversaw the withdrawal of partisan forces from Trieste, after which it came under joint British, Yugoslav, and American military administration until 1947, when the Paris Peace Treaty established the Free Territory of Trieste. And after two years of nonstop combat, the Indian 4th Division found its time in Trieste in May 1945 a very welcome diversion:
Fortunately force was not necessary.7 The Yugo-Slavs stood their ground but sedulously avoided incidents. There were many opportunities for friction in this double occupation: the common use of crowded roads; different curfews (Yugo-Slav time being two hours ahead), contiguous billeting areas, incessant propaganda in which the Italians participated, an abundance of pretty girls and harsh wines. British commanders refused to allow villages to be searched for Fascists and alleged enemies of the state. British medical officers insisted upon a standard of field hygiene with which the Yugo-Slavs were unfamiliar. At times these irritations prickled, and hot-headed local commanders bluffed. Mortars were mounted to command British airfields. An 88 millimetre gun was trained at point blank range on a park of British tanks in a village piazza. But always good sense prevailed and the spectacle was witnessed of men deployed to thwart each other mounting double guards, chatting over handfuls of cherries, kicking a football together in the village streets, and side by side examining with horse-lovers’ eyes animals lately “requisitioned” from White Cossack prisoners. This forbearance in the first days of impact bore bountiful fruit. Second thoughts succeeded first impulses, and the two forces settled down in amity to the joint occupation.
Unfortunately, this respite was temporary. Winston Churchill, meanwhile, found the moment of liberation and triumph very hard to reconcile with his increasing fears about Soviet belligerence. He was surrounded on every side by congratulation, decoration, salutation, and admiration from politicians, generals, admirals, presidents, and millions upon millions of average civilians and soldiers, airmen, and sailors. But fears about a salient Russia, more powerful now that the Germans had surrendered, willfully disregarding obligations and promises made at Yalta about Poland, frightened him in his moment of victory. When news came at the beginning of June from Bulgaria of the alleged torture of one of the prime minister’s secretaries, a man who had been a British agent, Churchill noted furiously in his diary: “Wherever these Bolsheviks think you are afraid of them they will do whatever suits their lust and cruelty. But the Soviet Government has no wish to come out into the world smeared with such tales. Let them behave, and obey the ordinary decencies of civilisation.”8
In his mind, the situation was getting worse. And he feared that the Americans, exhausted by five years of war, of coming to the assistance of Europe, might pull out and depart the continent after a year or two. So, not taking any chances, and assuming that the Russians would break promises and renege on deals, he instructed his chiefs of staff to come up with a plan. He decided to code-name it “Operation Unthinkable.”
“RUSSIA—THREAT TO WESTERN CIVILISATION,” said the clumsy, pencil-written capital letters on the outside of the resultant War Cabinet File.9 It was a plan to attack the Red Army in Poland, Germany, and across central Europe if the Russians didn’t stand by their agreements about Poland. And if the Americans decided to pull out of Europe, leaving the British exposed and vulnerable, it was the plan for the definitive preemptive strike against the Red Army. In this, Britain and her Allies would co-opt up to 100,000 remaining German forces onto their side in the attack.
Great Britain and the United States have full assistance from the Polish Armed Forces and can count upon the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity. The date for the opening of hostilities in 1st July 1945. The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire. “The will” of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment. A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being—but it might not. If they want total war they are in a position to have it.
The British envisioned a first strike of enormous strength, designed to cripple the Red Armies. They were stronger in physical numbers of men, aircraft, and tanks, but the quality of the Allies’ men, training, and air power was so superior that the British estimated that, in real terms, the Russians outnumbered them only three to one. This really was to be the first battle of the Cold War, of World War III. Churchill was going to impose his way on the Soviet Union in the only language they understood—by force. “The only way in which we can achieve our object with certainty and lasting results is by victory in a total war … Apart from the chances of revolution in the USSR and the collapse of the present regime, the elimination of Russia could only be achieved as a result of … the occupation of such areas of metropolitan Russia that the war-making capacity of the country would be reduced to a point at which further resistance became impossible.”
British equipment and morale were much better, the report estimated. It was written by a very small group of generals, admirals, and experts in the Cabinet War Office. The number of people, including Churchill, who were allowed to see the draft plan was only about twenty. Britain was just finishing the largest conflict known to mankind, and the military and civilian governing complex in the country was huge. Here, though, was a plan so secret that its title was drafted in pencil, its distribution list limited to almost nobody. On June 8, the British chiefs of staff said to Churchill that “the less put on paper on this subject the better.” To get around the problem of Russia’s vast manpower, the Allies would need the resources of the United States and the reorganization and reequipping of the German armed forces, some 100,000 of them. “The defeat of Russia in a total war would be necessary … To win it would take us a very long time. We must envisage a world-wide struggle.”
The Red Army was going to be the most formidable foe for the Allies. Its submarines and bombers could not inflict damage on Britain like the Germans did. But the Russians could occupy Norway up to Trondheim, down to Turkey, close the Black Sea, with southeastern Europe the worst hit in terms of a major disruption of Britain’s influence and commerce. There was a possibility that they would also lose the Iraqi and Persian oil fields, a major supplier of fuel oil. The Russians had eleven divisions in the region, opposite three different Indian brigade groups deployed by the Allies. But the British didn’t think the Russians would go as far as India or Egypt. Instead they would ally with Japan, which would attack China again, and there would be stalemate in the Far East.
The principal theater of war would be central Europe with probable confrontation in Iran. The Royal Navy and Royal Air Force would have a distinct superiority over Russia at air and sea, which would allow them to control the Baltic. The launching of an offensive against the Russians is described in characteristically understated terms—“a hazardous undertaking.” The Allies would deploy 47 infantry divisions, of which 14 were armored, against 170 Russian ones, of which 30 were tank units. The war would mainly be fought in central Europe. There’d be an aggressive reaction from Yugoslavia, the Russians would attack Austria, and the Allies would defend this from Italy. Only 10 German divisions would be reequipped at an early stage, with more following later. The Russians had in total 540 brigades of varying strengths in Europe—the Poles would be mostly anti-Russian. The documentation of the plan continued, covering almost every single contingency, but with one overarching aim—“total war” against the Soviet Union, designed to cripple the country’s militarily once and for all.
The Czechs would support the Russians, sabotage in Europe was to be expected by Communists, and above all, the Allies wanted “one great engagement.” But they realized that up against estimates of 6 million Russian troops and 600,000 NKVD personnel in Europe, this would be difficult, and a longer-lasting “total war” would be the result. But with the Russians, lack of discipline and drunkenness were huge problems, and they would worsen with a new war. The British and Americans would cut off all supplies to Russia, including the estimated 50 percent of aviation fuel the Soviet Union got from the Allies: this would cripple their air capacity unless they could occupy Persian and Iraqi oil fields. “We should be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds—the odds would become fanciful if the Americans withdrew, distracted by the Pacific.” The document was signed by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who was First Sea Lord; General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Douglas Evill.
Churchill’s reply to the three on June 9, after having looked at their assessment and draft of Operation Unthinkable, was that he had had a study made about “how we could defend our islands if the Americans move to the Pacific and US, this remains a precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency.”
General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had one reaction when he looked at the planned attack on the Soviet Union: “Oh dear, Winston already wants another war.”
Provisions were made in case of a Russian invasion—it would take them several years, and most of Europe would have to be abandoned by the British. The Russians couldn’t achieve their ends with airborne forces alone, and the greatest threat was from rocket attack. On August 30, 1945, the British commander in chief in Washington, Sir Henry Maitland Wilson—nicknamed “Jumbo”—who had previously commanded Allied forces in the Mediterranean, had lunch with his American counterparts. By this point, Winston Churchill had just lost a general election to the Labour Party in July 1945 and was now an outgoing leader. The Americans, in their telegrams in response to the plans for Operation Unthinkable, immediately identified the area around Trieste and Friuli–Venezia Giulia as the most dangerous flashpoint in Europe. In that area, they said, there was a very real possibility of new general conflict in Europe with Russia as the main aggressor. Italy, the battles for the Gothic Line, and the strategic developments since 1944 had led to the first confrontation and nearly the first battle of the Cold War. Down on the Adriatic coast, near Trieste, as early summer 1945 arrived, it felt as though the thunderclouds of new conflict were approaching. Europe was shifting its allegiances like a suddenly changing chessboard where black and white pieces have quickly been swapped over. The Second World War was finished, and now it was time for the liberation, and the complex internecine conflicts that were to accompany the peace, and the first days of the Cold War.