CHAPTER FIVE

“TO FALL HEROICALLY”

Are the Germans never going to crack?” On Hitler’s birthday a New Zealand intelligence officer was sitting on the steps of his caravan at divisional headquarters in Italy, an encampment of camouflaged vehicles parked between the rows of vines and poplars. Geoffrey Cox was wondering what to write in his intelligence report for the daily situation conference. It was another gloriously sunny day. A slight breeze was ruffling the trees. Purple and yellow flowers bobbed softly in the grass. High above him in the hazy blue sky he could hear a lark singing. Italy had never seemed more beautiful. Yet he was weary, and the beauty failed to move him.

To the west, US Fifth Army troops, among them the Tenth Mountain Division and an exhausted Robert Ellis in his foxhole, had conquered the worst of the high Apennine peaks and were closing in on Bologna. The Russians had reached the outskirts of Berlin. British and American forces were racing through west and central Germany, where Robert Reid and a small army of other war correspondents were tracking their advance.

But here, along the Adriatic coast of Italy, the British Eighth Army seemed stalled. Arguably, this was the most famous army of the Second World War. Beginning its life in the Western Desert in 1941, it had experienced bitter defeats as well as hard-won victories fighting its way from the valley of the Nile across the North African sands to Tunisia, through Sicily, and up along the spine of Italy to the Alps. It has also been described as the “British Empire at war,” because it included numerous and famous divisions and units from New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa and Australia.¹ Yet, in Italy, its progress seemed labored. But that was hardly surprising. The main allied thrust centered on Germany. To supply it, the armies in Italy had been forced to give up thousands of men and much valuable equipment.

The sharp-featured Cox, with his swept-back dark hair and ever-alert eyes, was a veteran not just of war but of the tough and competitive world of peacetime journalism. He had been born in Palmerston, a small community on New Zealand’s South Island, thirty-five years before. Like many of its population, he had Scots ancestry–his mother was a MacGregor. A frustrated career woman, she gave him a burning desire to be at the heart of everything. She sent him as a small boy to read and report back on the captions of First World War photographs in the local newspaper, the Otago Witness, and ever since he had wanted to explore the world outside New Zealand.

After graduating in history from the University of Otago, he won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. History was his passion, but he had no desire to become some ivory-tower academic. “I wanted to be at the sharp end, where history is in the making,” he said of his decision to become a foreign correspondent after leaving Oxford. “Journalism?” exclaimed a horrified Lord Lothian, secretary of the Rhodes Trust, when Cox told him he had changed his original plan of becoming a diplomat. “That’s no career for a university man!”

But Cox persisted and found work as a correspondent for major newspapers such as the News Chronicle and the Daily Express. He instinctively headed towards the front line. Scouting out Nazi Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, he spent three weeks with the Hitler Youth draining marshes outside Hanover and was arrested by Stormtroopers in Berlin for failing to give the Nazi salute. He also enjoyed a privileged view of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally thanks to a chance meeting with a pro-Nazi bookseller who let him watch the march from the window of his shop. What he saw made him an ardent opponent of Nazism.

Cox also covered the Spanish Civil War and nearly got himself shot. Challenged by a patrol, he reached in his pocket for a white handkerchief to show his neutrality. Thinking he was reaching for a gun, the patrol leader fired but fortunately missed. Thereafter, he was in Vienna for the 1938 Anschluss, and two years later, traveling north of the Arctic Circle, he witnessed Finnish ski troops taking on the Soviets in the “Winter War” and giving them a hammering. The following spring he left Brussels just hours ahead of the invading Germans, and escaped from France by the skin of his teeth.

Then he joined up. Being a correspondent in other people’s wars was one thing, he decided, but it was different when his own country was involved. He enlisted in the British Army, went through officers’ training, and joined the New Zealand Second Division, fighting in Crete, North Africa and now Italy.

When at Oxford he had met and married a fellow student, Cecily Turner, and they had two sons: Peter, aged eight, and Patrick, six. Cecily came from Sussex, but for the first two years of the war she lived in New Zealand with the boys and watched as tank traps were built outside Auckland in case the Japanese tried to invade. Inside his army pay book, Cox carried three treasured photographs of them all. He wrote to Cecily often, and cherished her replies. Often he told her what he had been reading. A few months before, he had been stuck in hospital for a month or so with an attack of jaundice. “Cecily darling,” he wrote after receiving one of her more than welcome letters, “I was getting pretty down . . . Reading Margaret Mead on The American Character . . . Have read all Shakespeare histories except Henry VIII and am halfway through Hamlet.” Over the previous few months he had finished James Joyce’s Ulysses as well as Jane Eyre. Currently, he was reading a polemic by the left-wing British journalist Michael Foot entitled The Trial of Mussolini, an attack not just on the Italian Fascist dictator but on those in Britain who had appeased him before the war.

The New Zealand Second Division had just emerged from a bloodletting battle that prompted Cox to wonder whether he would ever see an end to the killing. The Germans were conducting a stubborn fighting retreat at each of the rivers that crossed the allied path of advance. Just three days before, Hitler had issued an uncompromising order to his commanders and officers in Italy: “Under no circumstances must troops or commanders be allowed to waver or to adopt a defeatist attitude. The Führer expects now as before the utmost steadfastness in the fulfilment of your mission, to defend every inch of the north Italian areas of your command.” He ended with a barely veiled threat by pointing out the “serious consequences” for all those who did not carry out his orders to the last word. In other words, anyone who wavered would be shot. His commanders were following orders.

Two nights earlier, on the banks of the Gaiana River, the New Zealanders had engaged in a head-on confrontation with several battalions of German parachute infantry. These were an elite of the German Wehrmacht, tough, brutal, battle-hardened and all too willing to die for Hitler. “I hate these paratroopers,” confessed Cox’s boss, General Bernhard Freyberg, commander of the division. “They represent all that is worst in the whole Nazi system.”

He hated them because he feared them. “Tiny” Freyberg stood six feet tall and was New Zealand’s most distinguished military figure. He lacked nothing in personal courage, having won the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for swimming ashore during the Gallipoli landings in 1915 to light diversionary flares, and a Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest battlefield award, for bravery in carrying out an assault during the Battle of the Somme. On the day the First World War ended, he won a bar to his DSO by seizing a bridge in France precisely one minute before the armistice came into effect. But from bitter experience, Freyberg and his men knew the odds they were up against. At Monte Cassino the year before, the most savage of all their battles in Italy, they had been mauled by the paratroopers and suffered heavy casualties. Now it was payback time, a chance to even the score.

“The battle of the Gaiana river,” observed Cox, “was to attract little attention in those late April days of 1945 . . . yet we can claim, I believe, that few nails were driven into the coffin of Nazism more thoroughly than this.”²

The description “river” was something of a misnomer. In reality, the Gaiana was little more than a straight irrigation ditch crossing the road between Ravenna and Bologna, a black muddy stream easily crossed by infantry. But tanks could not traverse it because it was channeled between parallel flood banks fifteen to twenty feet high. Here, the German parachutists had dug themselves in. They were ready to prove that they could hold the line where regular infantry could not.

Two days before the battle, the New Zealanders had held their usual morning battle conference to assess the scene. It took place in a spacious stone farmhouse, and out of the window Cox could see shells bursting on the far side of the river.

“Are you sure the parachutists are there in force?” asked Freyberg.

“Yes,” replied Cox, confident that he and his intelligence staff had identified six full German battalions either in the line or held back in reserve, along with half a dozen Panther tanks.

“Are you sure they’re going to stand and fight?” asked Freyberg.

Cox was certain they would. They had committed all their reserves and were fighting hard everywhere else in Italy. They had even summoned back a Panzer grenadier division that had earlier set off for the front line in Germany. A breakthrough, it seemed obvious to Cox, would threaten all the enemy’s fronts.

“Very well, then,” said Freyberg when Cox had finished. “We will break him here.”

There was no doubt that they had a serious fight on their hands. There was heavy sniping, and the Nebelwerfers had been hard at work. These were German multi-barreled rocket launchers with a four-mile range. Allied troops called them “screaming meemies” because of the noise the siren-equipped rockets made while in flight. There had also been some fierce counterattacks by the Germans. These had mostly come on the left flank of the New Zealanders and were aimed at the Gurkhas. Cox was glad to have these men close. They had shown their mettle fighting alongside the New Zealanders that winter. “They were pouring into the area already,” noted Cox, “their small round yellow faces peering like the faces of children from the backs of their many trucks, their shoulders marked with the badge of crossed kukhri knives, their equipment neat and soldierly.”

The long sunny afternoon wore on. Guns steadily moved up to take part in the bombardment while from the clear blue sky allied bombers continued to pound the enemy lines. Dusk came, and the air rapidly cooled. Cox was summoned to Freyberg’s caravan. He found the general pacing nervously on the grass.

“Give me your estimate of the enemy strength again,” said Freyberg.

“A maximum of a thousand, sir,” replied Cox.

Freyberg did a quick sum in his head. “That gives us a hundred rounds for each individual paratrooper from the field guns, without counting the mediums,” said Freyberg. “I wouldn’t like to sit under that–it’s a worse barrage than any other there’s been this war.” This, he told Cox, “will be the most important battle we have fought in Italy.”

At 9 p.m. the allied artillery let loose with a massive barrage. To Cox, it sounded like a hundred thunderstorms. “The trees around us,” he wrote, “changed from lumps of soft, slumberous darkness to shapes of green and yellow.” He watched from a distance as the flamethrowers went in. It was just after 10 p.m., and dark. “Their spurts of flame, red under the lightning flashes, showed again, again, again,” he wrote. “All along the line of the river they glared, red and ugly. The black smoke mounted up into the stars.”

At first he feared the attack had failed. Very few prisoners were brought in, and it was above all prisoners that he wanted to see. Not just to interrogate, although to a front-line intelligence officer like Cox they could provide invaluable information about enemy dispositions. It was rather that capturing men, rather than ground, would do the most to destroy Hitler’s army in Italy and prevent its retreat to the Alps for a final stand.

Yet, when dawn broke, Cox realized he had been wrong. He drove up to the river bank and suddenly understood why the prisoners’ cages were half empty. In front of him lay a scene of utter carnage. “Along the banks, in the stream, in their trenches, in houses and holes beyond,” he recorded, lay the massed dead of the German Army’s elite. The paratroopers had been burned to death in their foxholes, caught by the relentless curling and scouring flames that “sought them out like vermin.” They had been spattered into fragments by the barrage of heavy artillery, decapitated, delimbed and eviscerated. They had been shot and machine-gunned by the advancing New Zealanders. They had died their deaths in a hundred other ways, too.

Now they lay with matted and lifeless hair, eyes staring sightless into the spring sky, or doubled up fetus-like and fast stiffening in the black, oily waters of the Gaiana. It was like a scene from the Western Front, a mini-Somme or Paschendaele, death on a grotesque scale. “There they lay,” noted Cox grimly, “in all their ghastliness, the youth of Germany, the pride of Hitlerism . . . they were utter waste, wasted and dangerous in life, wasted completely in death, the final price of Hitler and the forces who had brought him into being.”

But was the slaughter enough to make the enemy give up? Or did more of the same lie ahead? Sitting there in the sun on Hitler’s birthday, Cox seized on a sliver of hope, a small sign that at last the Nazis were losing faith. Among the handful of prisoners they had taken was one genuine deserter, an officer, and the first from the parachutists the New Zealanders had ever encountered. The man was an old-time Nazi and a veteran of the Condor Legion, the German unit that helped Franco seize power in Spain. Cox gave him a cigarette and chatted to him in the prisoners’ cage. The man confessed that the flamethrowers, not the artillery, had broken the back of their resistance.

“What is your strategy?” asked Cox.

“To fight you to a standstill,” replied the German. “But if you keep the battle moving, we’ll break.”

“Why did you desert?” queried Cox.

The man shrugged. Whatever happened in Italy, the war was lost anyway. So why wait and perhaps be sent back to Germany and fall into Russian hands? From here, at least, he might get to America. He had been there as a seaman on board a liner in the 1920s. America, the women, what a country!

After this exchange Cox believed the Nazi spirit was breaking. Even the zealots were finally looking for escape routes. He retreated to the cool of his caravan and spent the next few hours carefully compiling his report. It was finished and typed up by six in the evening. The Germans had already withdrawn towards the Idice River, and everyone in the division expected them to make another stand there. But in the course of the day, as Cox was composing his assessment, two Maori companies crossed the Idice with hardly a fight. Meanwhile, tanks splashed across further upriver. Obviously, reported Cox, the Germans were on the run. Even “parachutist fanaticism” was not enough against heavy artillery and flamethrowers.

Yet, hard-won experience also warned him against complacency. From a code list captured that day, Cox learned that a new parachute division, relatively fresh but certainly experienced, had been moved into the area by the Germans. Moreover, to safeguard their line of retreat, the enemy would have to protect a corridor of territory that lay ahead of the New Zealanders. “We must therefore expect tomorrow stubborn and skilful fighting in true parachutist style,” warned Cox.

Obstinate resistance and dogged defense by the Germans had characterized the fighting since the Italian campaign had begun with the July 1943 British and American landings in Sicily. Devised to make the most of the allied victory in North Africa, it quickly got bogged down in the harsh terrain of Italy proper, a land that cruelly belied Churchill’s optimistic talk of it being “the soft underbelly of Europe.” The long spine of the mainland consists of inhospitable mountains up to 6,500 feet high that are perfect for defense, not attack, with only narrow coastal plains on either side of the peninsula for the allies to exploit. This terrain gave most of the advantage to the Germans and very little to the allies. Swelteringly hot in summer, in winter torrential rain and snowstorms turned the mountains into Hell on Earth.

Hitler and Field Marshal Kesselring, his commander in Italy, resolved to defend every inch of ground and poured in several divisions containing some of the Wehrmacht’s best fighting men. Instead of the envisaged rapid campaign that would reach Florence in weeks, the allies found themselves fighting a remorseless and attritional grind over two winters of unforgiving snow, rain and mud. To make matters worse, six allied divisions were withdrawn from Italy for the invasion of southern France following the Normandy landings of June 1944.

It was scarce wonder that by the spring of 1945 the allies had not yet crossed the Po. Robert Ellis, fighting with the Tenth Mountain Division, was relatively lucky as his division had arrived in Italy only that January. But Reg Roy, now fighting in Holland, had originally landed with the Canadians in Italy and had survived bitter encounters with the Germans there. Only in February had he been shifted to Holland. Geoffrey Cox had even more experience of the Germans’ fighting abilities in and around the Mediterranean. One way or the other, he had been fighting them there since 1941.

The skills that made him a successful journalist made him an exceptional intelligence officer: a sharp, incisive mind; a keenly observant eye for the revealing detail; an ability rapidly to absorb and synthesize great amounts of material; a rare ability to write clear and uncluttered prose; and a nose that smelled out the action wherever it was. “You always knew,” said one of his wartime colleagues, “that when Geoffrey appeared the Germans were just over the hill.” It was simply, Cox said, like being the editor of a busy news service.

Except that he was also a star reporter. Little of any tactical importance escaped the scrutiny of his sharp, blue-green eyes. “How level is the military horizon,” he jotted down in his notebook,

how lacking in the sense of the size and immediate operation in which one is involved. Alamein, Cassino are just another day’s operation. To the man in the field a minor patrol may, for him, contain more of personal drama than any great battle. For an Intelligence Officer the day on which the presence of a new formation is discussed can be of greater note than the victory to which the discovery leads.

Cox found it all fascinating and exhilarating. “It required both intellectual discipline and judgment,” he observed, demanding an approach as critical, as cautious and as curious as that of “any scholar approaching a newly discovered classical text.” There was no margin for error, either. The slip of a single figure in a map reference, for example, or in some hastily dictated description over a scratchy telephone line, could mean at least wastage of ammunition and at worst accidents and disasters. “It was the best mental training,” he admitted, “that I have ever known.”³ He rose rapidly up the ladder, and by April 1945, as we have seen, Freyberg was relying heavily on his advice.

So were others. Everyone gravitated to Cox’s “I” truck at night. Well lit and warm, it could comfortably hold half a dozen senior officers–or double that at a squeeze–and Cox kept up a tradition of open hospitality that had been established by his two predecessors. On many an evening it resembled “a blend of a newspaper office and a small Paris bistro,” but here, in an atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke and resounding with laughter, officers brought in reams of information that he could never have collected on his own. It made Cox and his truck–“the café”–an indispensable source of intelligence.⁴

The morning after interrogating the deserter, Cox was woken early by Captain Colmore Williams, the Royal Air Force liaison officer with the New Zealanders, who was responsible for calling in air strikes to support the men on the ground. Slowly, as dawn came up and color started to drench the landscape, Cox walked to Williams’s truck while the youthful British officer explained the problem. On the road between the Gaiana and the Idice, the Germans’ natural line of retreat, lay the small town of Budrio. Would it help, asked Williams, if the RAF bombed it? They had twenty-four fully loaded up aircraft at the ready and could easily block the roads coming in and out of the town to obstruct the Germans’ retreat. But it really depended on the enemy’s position.

As he stood at the tailboard of the truck, his trouser cuffs still soaking with the morning dew, Cox pondered the question. The only way the bombers could block the road was by destroying the houses on either side of it. On the grounds of military need they had done this repeatedly in other Italian towns, and the route of the allied advance now formed a great scar of devastation across the landscape. But now Cox thought of the civilians cowering in their cellars, wondering if their homes would survive and whether they would even emerge alive. Was it really necessary? “I found it hard to believe that it was,” he confessed. “I could not honestly say that we could damage the enemy to any extent by going for those roads.” He saw in his mind’s eye again the misery of war. In his own hands he held the power to smash yet more homes to pieces. He had only five minutes to make up his mind.

He rapidly ran through the options, factoring in everything he knew about the Germans. Most of their heavy artillery would already be across the Idice. Moreover, the hardened parachutists would hardly be stopped by a few piles of rubble littering the road. So why bother to send in the bombers and make even more misery for innocent civilians?

Was this simple sentimentality? He was a hard-nosed realist with no illusions about Nazism and the perils it posed, but he was also exhausted and sickened by the destruction of war. He had not seen Cecily and the boys for more than a year. He thought about them constantly and wondered how their life together would turn out after the war. What sort of world would his children inherit? He had dedicated the book chronicling his experiences during the bitter fighting of the Winter War to his children “in the hope that they may grow up to know struggle but not war.”

A few months before, he had written the boys a touching letter trying to explain what the war was about: “You must both work hard at school and learn all your words so that when you grow up you can learn to make all sorts of things. There are thousands of things to make–houses which have been knocked down by bombs, bridges which have been blown up, ships which have been sunk. We will all have to work very hard to make them all.” Just three weeks ago he had sent another letter to Peter: “This war is nearly finished,” he told his son, “and we will soon be able to be all together and start building our new house together. We will have to work very hard.”⁵

Was this emotional side now getting in the way of a decision that might be vital to save the lives of his own men? That, after all, was his first and overriding duty.

Williams was obviously wrestling with the same dilemma. “What do you say to this alternative target,” he suddenly asked, “plaster the main lines north of the river?”

Cox seized on the idea with an overwhelming sense of relief. “Yes,” he answered. “Let Budrio stay put.”⁶

The decision made, the two of them drank their morning cups of tea from chipped enamel mugs. Then Cox returned across the grass for his morning shave. Budrio was saved. One town and its inhabitants, at least, would be spared from joining the lengthening list of Italy’s victims of war.

That same day in Milan, in makeshift offices on the first floor of the city’s prefecture in the Palazzo Montforte, Benito Mussolini, the man who had taken his country so eagerly into the war in 1940, was meeting for the last time with his cabinet. Outside, German SS sentries stood guard.

The Fascist dictator and long-time ally of Adolf Hitler was now aged sixty-two. Gone was the bluff and bluster that had marked his great propaganda victory over Abyssinia in 1936, his triumphant proclamation of the “Pact of Steel” with Hitler in 1939, and his ebullient and cynical declaration of war in June 1940 as France collapsed: “I need several thousand dead to be able to take my place at the peace table,” he had declared. Since then, Italy had suffered defeat after defeat, and the numbers of dead ran into the tens of thousands. Now, far from being an ally of Hitler, he had become a hopeless dependent.

In July 1943, after the allies had landed in Sicily, King Victor Emmanuel and the Fascist Grand Council removed him from office and he was briefly held prisoner. Then, in a daring raid by German paratroopers led by the legendary Otto Skorzeny, he was rescued and installed in northern Italy as head of the newly formed “Italian Social Republic.” Its offices were scattered along the shores of Lake Garda near the small town of Salò, from which it derived its popular designation as the “Salò Republic.” Mussolini himself took up residence nearby, in the Villa Feltrinelli, in the pleasant lakeside town of Gargagno.

The writ of the Salò Republic, such as it was, only ever ran in the part of Italy controlled by the Germans. Not entirely a German puppet, but certainly far from independent, Mussolini spent the next eighteen months as “head of state with neither power nor authority” and pretending to govern, a habit that came easily to the former journalist who had a weakness for words and rhetoric. He washed his hands of tough decisions, such as the execution in Verona of his son-in-law and heir-apparent, Count Galeazzo Ciano, husband of his favorite daughter, Edda, for having voted against him in July 1943; he failed to control the many Fascist militias that sprung up to wage an increasingly brutal war against his domestic opponents; and although he occasionally raised himself to protest, he was unable to prevent the Germans from deporting a hundred thousand workers to Germany, shipping out the country’s Jews for mass murder, and looting Italy’s gold reserves and art treasures. The Germans also accompanied his every move, spied on him constantly and tapped his phones.

By the spring of 1945 Mussolini was alternating between despair, resignation, self-pity and frantic outbursts of hope. At times he appeared calm and composed; at others apathetic; and at others almost manic. “He lives by dreams, in dreams, and through dreams,” said one of those close to him. “He does not have the least contact with reality.” Sometimes he exploded in rage against the Germans; sometimes he railed against the British and Americans. Invariably, he blamed others for his fate. “I am like the captain of a ship in a storm; the ship is broken up and I find myself in the furious ocean on a raft which it is impossible to guide or govern,” he told a journalist, forgetting that it was he who had launched his vessel into the storm in the first place. “No one hears my voice any more.”

His departure from Gargagno, along with other members of his government, was precipitated by the imminent breakthrough of the American and British armies across the Po. In the garden of his villa he said farewell to his wife, Rachele, promising he would return for her later, and then left with an escort of German troops led by two SS officers. But his mistress, Clara Petacci, who had been living in a nearby villa, was determined to remain at his side. She too left for Milan that night, along with her own SS guardian.

Heading the agenda for the cabinet meeting in Milan was the question of what to do next. Various schemes had been discussed endlessly over the past few days without any decision being taken. Alessandro Pavolini, the secretary of the Fascist Party, was all in favor of making a last stand in Milan, and talked enthusiastically of turning the city into “the Italian Stalingrad.” But Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the commander of Mussolini’s army and the most reliable and loyal of his senior officers, brushed aside Pavolini’s idea by brusquely pointing out that American and British bombers would simply obliterate the city. Instead, he suggested a direct approach to the allies for an end to the conflict. Graziani was a former Viceroy of Abyssinia and commander in Libya, and had suffered several bruising defeats in the desert at the hands of the British. He was all too aware of the devastating nature of allied power.

But by this stage Mussolini had already secretly tried a direct approach to the allies through the mediation of Cardinal Schuster, the Archbishop of Milan, and had been rebuffed. So the idea of a last stand now held a powerful attraction for him. “Whatever the place,” he declared, “Fascism has to fall heroically.” At first he thought of Trieste for the honor. The city on the Adriatic was a potent symbol of Italian nationalism. Ceded to Italy after the First World War as a reward for joining the conflict on the allied side, the former Austro-Hungarian port had been showered with subsidies and rewards by Mussolini after he came to power in 1922 as a bastion of “Italianness” against the sea of Slavs in neighboring Yugoslavia and the rest of the Balkans. But the Germans had knocked this idea firmly on the head. They had their own claims on the city, which was now under German administration. They had even established a concentration camp in an old rice factory, San Sabba, on its southern suburbs.

Mussolini’s second choice was the Valtellina, a slice of Italian territory close to the Swiss border, north of Lake Como. This idea had already garnered some support in the cabinet, and now Mussolini confirmed that at the right moment he would retreat there. Pavolini, thwarted in his designs for Milan, promised three thousand troops drawn from the most enthusiastic Fascist militias.

At 10 p.m. that night, an apparently cheerful Mussolini received an Italian journalist to whom he had promised an interview in his office. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I would like a signed photograph,” replied the visitor.

Proudly, Mussolini handed one over, signing and dating it, in Roman numerals, “Year XXIII of the Fascist Era.” Then he launched on a lengthy self-justification of his political life, claiming to have done everything he could to defend Italy’s interests in difficult circumstances. He finished by declaring that while his own career was over, neither Fascism nor Italy would die.

The journalist asked if this meant that there were German miracle weapons.

“There are,” replied Mussolini. “I had news a few days ago.”

Face-to-face meetings between Il Duce and the Führer had by now become rare, but the two dictators still kept in touch, bolstering each other’s illusions with increasing doses of fantasy. Indeed, two days later, Mussolini received a private telegram from the Berlin bunker full of similarly empty rhetoric. Bolshevism and Judaism had brought destruction to Europe, declared Hitler, but the “unparalleled heroism” of the German people would yet change the course of the war.

Yet, in his more rational moments, Mussolini believed none of this, and knew full well that the end was close. Increasingly, he talked of death. The last stand in the Valtellina was not designed to fulfill any useful military purpose. Instead, it would act as a “moral triumph” of Fascism: his political philosophy would go down fighting. Angrily, he rejected proposals from colleagues and friends to flee to Spain or Switzerland. No, he insisted, he would die gloriously in the Valtellina. In the meantime, though, he stayed put in Milan, awaiting events. Now that Rome was lost, he declared, the northern city, where he had first formed his Fascist squads a quarter of a century before, and where–to his and the Germans’ admitted surprise–enthusiastic crowds had cheered him on an impromptu visit the previous December, was the only true capital of the Italian Republic.⁷

Meanwhile, in Rome, the official capital from which Mussolini had been expelled so ignominiously a year and a half before, Italian politicians were already jostling for power. Geoffrey Cox had witnessed the liberation of the city in June 1944, just hours before allied forces had stormed ashore on the Normandy beaches.

Early in 1943, he had been briefly seconded to Washington, DC, to serve as First Secretary and Chargé d’Affaires at New Zealand’s newly established legation. It was a prestigious position that led him to the White House to meet Roosevelt, placed him at the heart of deliberations of the Pacific War Council, and gave him a front-row seat at the opening conference of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. Then, in April 1944, Freyberg had urgently asked for him back in Italy, where his son had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp and found refuge in the Vatican. Freyberg wanted Cox to make certain he was safe.

The question on everyone’s mind about Rome had been whether the Germans would defend the city. There were plenty of signs to suggest that they would and it could become a bloodbath: the Wehrmacht was fighting a bitter rear guard retreat towards the city, and the Fascist police and the SS were massacring prisoners. Then, suddenly, the columns of men and artillery which had been streaming south out of Rome reversed their direction and headed north. German officers started checking out of their Roman hotels, while partisans began oiling their rusty carbines. Some two million people waited, the city’s population swelled by half a million refugees. All were hungry. Water and electricity were in short supply.

Then an ULTRA intercept revealed to the allies that Field Marshal Kesselring was seeking Hitler’s approval for an evacuation without a fight. Hitler agreed, but to keep the withdrawal secret, Kesselring ordered several of his more prominent officials to attend the opera, where Gigli was singing in Un Ballo in Maschera.

A few German units and stragglers were still in place when the Americans arrived. Some had to swim across the Tiber while others commandeered Rome’s horse-drawn cabs to make good their escape, and a few snipers remained on rooftops. The Fascist chief of police sped off north in his Alfa Romeo, taking with him a quantity of jewelry, watches, pound notes and lire.⁸

Several allied advance parties, scouts and spearhead units claimed to be the first into the city. General Mark Clark, commander of the US Fifth Army, drove his jeep up to St. Peter’s and posed for his photograph alongside a priest. Crowds of flag-waving Italians swept up the Corso, hoping to meet the commander-in-chief, and many more paraded with Old Glory, the Union Jack, the Tricolor or the Hammer and Sickle. Mussolini had hoped, it was said, that the Romans would die defending the city. They did not, although there were a few acts of vengeance and some immediate retribution in the streets.

Hitler had put the best face on it all by assuring his people that in truth the loss of Rome was an advantage, as the Germans no longer had to feed two million Italians. In Washington, President Roosevelt beamed, “One up and two to go!” referring to Berlin and Tokyo, and the New York Times announced that the Tiber had shrunk almost to insignificance as “the rivers of power flow elsewhere.”

Cox had landed on the Anzio beachhead on 4 June 1944 and raced up the road towards Rome in one of Freyberg’s staff cars. On the way, passing through towns that were now little more than stinking heaps of rubble, he overtook advancing American troops. He arrived in the city on the morning it was liberated, quickly finding himself surrounded by people surging out into the streets in wild celebration, cheering, clapping and throwing roses. Some were rejoicing at the prospect of peace. Others were glad to see the back of Mussolini after two decades of Fascism. One young man jumped onto the running board of Cox’s car and flung his arms around his shoulders, shouting, “We are free, at last we are free!” An older man wept. “Free at last,” he sobbed, “after twenty years we are free again.” At the Palazzo Venezia, Cox saw civil guards taking over the building from which, eight years before, Mussolini had declared war on Abyssinia. The next day he met a woman whose son had filmed the arrival of American troops at the Vatican. She asked him to write his name in the back of a book. He noticed on the flyleaf, translated into Italian, Abraham Lincoln’s words: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Afterwards, he described the scene in a letter to Cecily, who by now had moved with the boys to Massachusetts to teach at Dana Hall, a girls’ liberal arts school connected with Wellesley College, where she was also trying her hand at writing short stories. He typed:

Darling, I know I have seen this at its flood tide, and that these people are destined for disillusion and much bitterness, but even so we are a stage further in life by having fought and freed them to this extent. Please darling believe that, and tell it so to the boys when they can understand, for though they cost us dear it is something to have helped liberate these people from what they have been through–something to us as well as to them.⁹

In the mountains of Italy, though, Robert Ellis was less sure it was all worthwhile. He had started off with a romantic view of war, dreaming of being a dashing fighter pilot. He passed all the tests but was then discovered as being red-green color blind, and rejected.

Next he fell for the glamour of fighting on skis. Like millions of others, he had been beguiled by newsreels from the Winter War showing daring Finns on skis dressed in white hoods swooping down on Soviet columns, overwhelming them with their skill, and then speeding away to safety. There had been a flood of magazine articles and documentaries on the subject, and all too easily Ellis had been seduced by the images of tanned young men, as he put it, “skiing down sunlit trails in defense of their country.” With some skiing experience from his year in Switzerland, he eagerly volunteered for the newly formed Mountain Division.

But dreams of individual combat while speeding down slopes quickly dissolved, especially after he became a machine-gunner. He imagined the weapon would give him some powerful personal protection on the battlefield with its high rate of fire, but initially failed to recognize that it made him less mobile and more vulnerable than ever. “It impeded one’s movements in combat because of its weight,” he quickly learned, “and it [was] a preferred target of answering fire from artillery and mortars.”¹⁰

This explained why he spent so much of his time in Italy dodging hot steel and sheltering in foxholes. His first few weeks of combat were almost a literal baptism of fire that tested his youthful ideals to the extreme. “War is certainly a shock when you first face it in its stark nakedness,” he wrote home to his sister Margaret.

For instance the first time you step over an old friend lying there bloody and still as you press forward in the attack. You wonder if you’ll be next . . . you think of all your hopes and dreams, memories, the things you want to do–your awful love of life–hang there unprotected, all to be lost with the whine of a ’88 and the rain of shrapnel death. This is when you wonder if anything, any ideal, is worth to you the price of life.11

One of his dreams concerned his girlfriend, Pat, the sister of one of his fraternity brothers at the University of Chicago and now in her sophomore year at Oberlin, a distinguished private college in Ohio. He wrote to her regularly, even though he could not see them getting engaged or married for another four years or so. “She’s pretty independent and has strong ideas, and I admire that,” he confided to his mother. He was keen to get back to her and his family.

But that would come only when the fighting ended. And what sort of peace would that bring? On the day he wrote to his sister, he also sent a letter to his elder brother, Paul, who was in a Chicago seminary. He used some Indian ink he had found in a German foxhole. “I think we should hurry now and make the world safe from all future threats of war and pestilence,” he penned. “To use the foxhole as a simile, we should build, construct, and dig deep into solid foundations of brotherhood, and be protected like the walls of Mother Earth by cooperation and amicable discussion.”¹²

Amicable discussion remained a distant possibility, though, and his idealism was wearing distinctly thin. Back in early February, when he had only just arrived, he had heard news from the “Big Three” conference at Yalta between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill that seemed to promise a brave new world through the establishment of a United Nations organization to replace the ill-fated League of Nations. “Looks like we’re on the road to lasting peace,” he scribbled in his diary. “I feel as though if I’m killed I’ve at least died for something worth while.”

Yet, after his first experience of battle, the savage assault to capture Mount Belvedere, he was already starting to question that. He was praying and reading the New Testament, which he kept always in his pocket. Phrases such as “Scared to death” and “Horrible slaughter” began to pepper his diary. Once, as men died around him and he cowered from heavy German artillery, he became convinced the end had come. “I had my Bible in my hand,” he told his parents, “and read Paul’s letter to the Galatians.”¹³

Could this scale of slaughter ever be worthwhile? Afterwards, he was not sure. “I remained uncertain whether the horror I had experienced,” he later wrote, “given its effects on those who had lost their lives or suffered such terrible wounds, justified a continuation of the insanity we had encountered.” At the very least, he vowed that he would never let time or memory falsify or soften the grisly reality of war.