CHAPTER EIGHT

“THE MOST DEGENERATE SPECTACLE”

While Patton’s forces in Bavaria sliced through the fragile crust of German defenses, in Italy the allied armies completed their long-awaited breakthrough, out of the Apennine Mountains and into the valley of the Po. At last, noted a war-weary Geoffrey Cox, “the fruits began to tumble from this tree.” On the evening of Hitler’s birthday, Germany’s commander-in-chief in Italy, General von Viettinghof, ignored the dictator’s demand to stand firm and ordered a general withdrawal from the Bologna area. Early the next morning, the city was entered by Polish forces, followed soon afterwards by Americans and Italians.

At around the same time, General Freyberg issued orders for his Second New Zealand Division to continue their advance northwest in the direction of the River Adige. Acting as motorized cavalry, armored cars of the 12th Lancers would lead the way, while the rest of the division followed. Now, he promised, it would be like the way they used to do it in the desert: an advance so rapid that they would have to keep in touch by wireless. Only at night, when they stopped to rest, would the signalers have time to lay down the land lines they had been relying on recently.

In his intelligence truck parked at divisional headquarters, now safely across the Idice River, Cox took out his maps to examine the route ahead. Meanwhile, one of his unit’s photographic interpreters sought out aerial shots up to the Alps. Cox worked alongside four other intelligence specialists. Two of them were aerial photography experts with a specially equipped caravan of their own. Both belonged to the Mediterranean Air Interpreters Unit-Western Section. Its initials at the bottom of the steps to their caravan–MAIU (West)–gave rise to inevitable jokes about Mae West and “coming up to see them some time.” When visitors did, instead of the Hollywood bombshell, they encountered two bespectacled Englishmen. One was a peacetime furniture dealer from the Lake District, the other a former member of the Milk Marketing Board. But both were expert analysts. Between them, they spent hours poring over their maps to identify gun pits, slit trenches, vehicle tracks and hazardous topographical features of the landscape. Their calculation of river widths was so exact that the engineers trusted them implicitly when building the improvised bridges they had to throw across the numerous watercourses encountered by the New Zealanders.

Cox also studied maps of northern Italy captured from the Germans. Here, the Adige was called by its German name, the “Etsch,” and he recalled the line in the German anthem “Deutschland über Alles” urging Germans to guard the Reich “from the Etsch to the Baltic.” The second-largest river in Italy, it was more than a hundred yards wide and too deep and fast flowing to be forded. Along parts of it the Germans had constructed their last defensive barrier in Italy before the Alps, the so-called Venetian Line, which ran from just south of Venice to Lake Garda. Designed to close the forty-mile gap between the Adriatic and the Dolomites that provided the gateway into northeastern Italy, it could block the allied advance for days.

For the moment, however, the New Zealanders pushed on with little to stop them. If the only real problem facing Patton in Bavaria was the supply of gasoline for his tanks, for the allies in northern Italy the main brake on their advance now was the rate at which the engineers could build bridges. There was little sign of the gray-uniformed enemy, except for the occasional handful waiting patiently by a roadside to surrender.

Morale among the Germans was sinking fast. By late April, across the entire Eighth Army front, allied interrogators were reporting the same thing. Cox summarized the scene in one of his daily intelligence bulletins:

The fact that they [the Germans] are continuing to fight–and sometimes fight well–is not in general due to any conviction but rather to lack of initiative, general mental stagnation, and moral cowardice. Even though it is obvious to the vast majority that Germany has lost the war, they are quite prepared to fight on so long as it is the easiest thing to do and so long as there is somebody there to tell them to do it. The thought of mutiny does not occur to them–though as soon as the tactical situation makes surrender an “honourable” course to take and the easiest way out they are only too glad to do so. They have little stomach for the last man and last round theme.1

Sometimes the Germans appeared simply to evaporate. One of the New Zealand units consisted entirely of Maoris–the 28th Battalion, created in 1939 at the direct request of Maori Members of Parliament. A purely volunteer force, it was quickly joined by many Maoris who had already volunteered for other units. Maoris were keen to prove that they were the equal of their pakeha (white) comrades, as well as to earn the full benefits and privileges of New Zealand citizenship.

The battalion was organized on tribal lines under tribal leaders, although most of its senior officers were pakeha. It had acquired a fierce reputation in Greece and Crete, where the Maoris had once petrified the Germans with a bayonet charge after being taken by surprise while they were resting. “The instant Maori reaction–a haka [a traditional war dance accompanied by chants and gestures] followed by a charge made more terrifying for the hapless enemy by the sound of war cries,” writes one historian, “typified the Maori style of fighting throughout the war.” On that occasion, they killed about a hundred Germans and put the rest to panic-stricken flight. Similar episodes in North Africa had caused the German commander Erwin Rommel to complain bitterly that they were “scalp hunters.”²

Since the previous November, the battalion had come under Maori command in the shape of thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Awatere.

In peacetime, he was an accountant, but now, with his heavy and athletic figure girded with weapons like a Wild West sheriff, he belied every stereotype of the cautious, desk-bound pen-pusher. He was a strong leader with a close and thorough knowledge of both his own people and the pakeha. “Indeed,” wrote Cox, “I often wondered if he did not deliberately overstress his Maori characteristics in a sardonic belief that that was what the pakeha liked, and so he would give it to them in good measure.” If so, it worked. There was no doubting Awatere’s courage. He had already been awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order for bravery, and he and his men were never reluctant to take on the Germans. “After all,” he once said to Cox while explaining the Maoris’ reputation, “my father’s generation was the first in Maori history which had not spent most of its life under arms.”³

Now, aerial reconnaissance reported that there was no sign of the enemy for the next few miles ahead. But Awatere insisted that the Maoris should advance on foot and search every building on the way. About twenty Germans had, in fact, holed up in one of the houses, but as soon as they saw the Maoris coming, they fled before they got close.

Awatere, though, was still not satisfied. By this time, his men were wet to the skin from wading through canals, and because of the mud in their socks they had slung their boots over their shoulders. All around, houses had hung out white sheets from their windows. The Maoris finally clambered onto tanks and any other vehicles they could find and swept forward to the next river obstacle, the Reno. But still Awatere refused to give up. “Anxious to throw a company over,” records the official New Zealand history of the campaign in Italy, “he waded across and examined the empty [German] trenches. Then he yelled in Maori, ‘There’s no one here. Come over B Company.’ ”⁴ By that evening, the New Zealanders were all safely across the river and Cox was elated. That afternoon–Monday 22 April–he felt as if they had just come out of a long tunnel, or a dark green forest, into the sunlight. “The end of it all,” he wrote, “seemed suddenly in sight.”⁵

After a day’s regrouping, the Eighth Army and the New Zealanders resumed their advance, and the next day they reached the southern bank of the River Po north of Bologna. It was dead-flat country now, the roads lined with poplars and an occasional plantation of oak or pine. As the tanks and trucks rolled forward in the bright April sun, they raised clouds of yellow dust that reminded many of the New Zealanders–as Freyberg had promised–of the North African desert.

Yet this was a lush and heavily populated land dotted with villages and the towers of churches. “Every ditch was gay with yellow buttercups, white daisies and blue snapdragons,” recorded one poetic diarist of the campaign, “every field fenced with mulberry, poplar, elm, chestnut and oak trees, all supporting grape vines in full leaf. The populace waved to the speeding trucks or crowded around with flowers and wine at the frequent and unpredictable halts.” It sounded like a pleasant Sunday picnic.⁶

Cox saw it all with a different eye, though–that of the intelligence officer shrewdly calculating the damage inflicted on the enemy’s strength. He instantly noticed that the approaches to the Po were littered with mile upon mile of the abandoned matériel of an army, some deliberately destroyed, some just abandoned. The Germans had been under constant attack from allied aircraft in “a hundred local Dunkirks, each worse in its own way than the 1940 evacuation.” Trucks, horse-drawn wagons, cars, caravans and guns lay tipped into ditches or along the edges of fields. Hundreds of draft horses used by the Germans and their accompanying Hungarian units ran wild and free through the fields. Soldiers, along with civilians, hunted for loot among the wreckage and rounded up hundreds of the horses before bartering or selling them to the locals. Any of the German vehicles that could be repaired joined the column of northbound traffic heading towards the Alps.

Here, even at its narrowest point, the Po was three hundred yards wide and far too deep and rapid to ford. Allied aircraft had destroyed every bridge across it to hamper the German retreat, so the New Zealanders were faced with a crossing by assault boats, amphibious tanks and “ducks” or DUKWs (specially constructed six-wheel trucks equipped with propellers).

They did it at night, under cover of heavy artillery, and ran into only very slight resistance. Then followed the engineers to build a pontoon bridge for the heavy Sherman tanks and the other supplies and men that would carry the division north. “In the sunshine,” recorded Cox, “it was like a Regatta.” It was Wednesday 25 April, ANZAC Day, the thirtieth anniversary of the day when Australian and New Zealand forces had landed at Gallipoli in the First World War. “The enemy showed no stomach for a fight on the Po last night,” Cox reported with satisfaction.⁷

Meanwhile, American units of Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army advancing further west had reached the outskirts of Verona, and the Tenth Mountain Division was closing in on Lake Garda and the roads leading to the Brenner Pass, the last line of escape over the Alps for the Germans. The two allied armies in Italy had finally linked up, and their advance was gaining rapid momentum. “If we don’t stop now,” Freyberg told the New Zealanders, “the enemy won’t be able to fight again.”

That morning, Cox was called over to talk to the second-in-command of Divisional Signals. The man had just intercepted a radio message he wanted Cox to hear. He walked over to where the radio expert was bent over a small receiving set and put on the earphones. Through the static, he could hear a voice talking rapidly in broken English: “This is Genoa. Patriotic Radio Genoa. The patriots this morning captured all of Genoa. The German garrison has surrendered. We have many prisoners. Send help quickly. Allies send help quickly.”⁸

This was just a start. All over northern Italy, the partisans were rising in open revolt ahead of the approaching allied armies. In Genoa, the German commander had finally received orders just two days before to withdraw from the city into Lombardy, and had sought a promise through an intermediary that the partisans would let him retreat without a fight. But the secret was betrayed before any agreement could be reached, and the partisans immediately launched an insurrection. After two days’ fighting, the Germans had surrendered and the partisans had broadcast their appeal for help.

Until now, Cox had had little to do with the partisans, although he had seen plenty of signs of their presence. In the town of Forli, through which he had frequently traveled that winter on his way to and from the front, the Germans had hanged the local partisan hero in the town square along with his mistress, and the walls of the houses were plastered with their names, hailing them as martyrs of the resistance. North of Bologna, he had slept by the road where notices warned German convoys that they were traveling in a zone “infected with bandits.” Clearly, the partisans were a serious nuisance to the Germans, but Cox, like most regular soldiers, had given little thought to how they could provide significant help to the allies.

Now, though, things were changing. The partisans were starting to emerge from hiding and were helping the New Zealanders in practical ways. A few days before, they had built a bridge for the Maoris and taken part in a firefight against the Germans. Many New Zealanders who had previously been captured in Italy began filtering through the lines and singing the praises of the partisans, who had hidden them or helped their escape. Along with such stories came ample evidence of the frequently generous and self-sacrificing assistance given to evaders and escapers by the local peasantry, often at the risk of their own lives. The German Army was ruthless and murderous in dealing with Italian civilians it suspected of helping the allies, or of being involved in any way with the “bandits.” On the allied side, derogatory jokes about the Italians (the “Eyeties”) had at last begun to give way to a dawning appreciation of their value, as well as of the suffering they had endured at the hands of their erstwhile allies.

Cox felt an instinctive sympathy for the partisans, who were mostly drawn from the poor and dispossessed. As a boy and student, he had spent school and university holidays working on a farm on New Zealand’s North Island as well as on sheep stations in the mountains of Otago. This had given him an insight into the hard-working and outdoor pioneering life of farmers who were, as he put it, “the heart and soul of the New Zealand of the 1920s.” He had also learned to appreciate nature, observe details of the topography, and find comfort in the landscape around him.⁹

He was a man of strong egalitarian conviction. In the 1930s, like many of his contemporaries, he had been drawn towards communism. Indeed, during the Spanish Civil War he had come close to joining the party. “If Harry Pollitt [the leader of the British Communist Party] asks me to join, I shall,” he had once sworn. But the call never came, and the Soviet behavior he witnessed later in Finland transformed him quickly into an ardent anti-communist. Now, he thought of himself as a pragmatic social democrat.¹⁰

The evening they crossed the Reno, Cox talked with a New Zealand sergeant who had been hiding with the partisans north of Venice since 1943. The man was eager to join them in the final battle. For an hour, he and Cox pored over the maps while he pointed out where the partisan formations could be found. Along with the sergeant was an American officer who had fought with another partisan group near Venice. “Wait till you see them,” he told Cox. “We’ve a whole army waiting for you. These guys are good.”¹¹

Allied escapees such as these two also provided Cox with excellent intelligence about the state of the retreating Germans. Another New Zealander ex-POW he interrogated that week, an NCO, painted a vivid account of the scene he had witnessed along the road ahead: “Petrol was so short that each lorry hauled at least three or four others. Tanks and even horses and oxen were hauling MT [motor transport]. There were horse drawn and oxen drawn carts in great numbers, but few guns . . . The enemy took to the ditches the moment a plane came over.” The NCO had been there when allied artillery fire came in. “The enemy panicked and ran wildly into the fields,” he reported, “or fought to get aboard vehicles which were already packed to overflowing. Those on the vehicles fought savagely to keep the others off. It was plain that all the German troops felt the war was utterly lost.”¹²

A few days later, Cox saw with his own eyes what well-organized partisans could do. On Sunday 29 April he awoke to a cold, gray morning and the sounds of shots. The weather had turned, and heavy rain had begun to transform the ground to mud, hampering the work of the engineers and sucking at the wheels of trucks. Cox had not yet got used to the sound of partisan sniping so close, and had slept uneasily.

He was on the edge of Padua, the city that held the keys to the approach to Venice and beyond. The day before, the New Zealanders had breached the much feared Venetian Line with barely a skirmish to advance twelve miles north of the Adige–“enemy country,” Cox called it. Verona was already in American hands, and somewhere in the hills ahead lay the German parachutists. But exactly where, what they were doing and what they planned to do remained unclear. That they were getting desperate, however, was obvious. In one village the inhabitants told him that the Germans had demanded bicycles, and brutally shot half the menfolk to get them.

After dawn, he acquired a much clearer picture, thanks mostly to the partisans. The Eighth Army liaison officer with the Italian resistance fighters was a Montenegrin who spoke fluent Italian. He had caught up with the New Zealanders the day before, and Cox sent him ahead to find out what was happening. He returned with reports that the city was now in partisan hands. “Are the messages reliable?” asked another senior officer. Hoping they were, and taking a deep breath, the Montenegrin replied, “Yes.” On the strength of this assurance, the tanks edged slowly into the city, with the liaison officer clinging to the turret of the leading vehicle. In a small square, shadowy figures emerged carrying rifles. The Montenegrin shouted out some words in Italian, and back came the reply, also in Italian. These were the partisans. They had already seized control of the city, forced the Fascist authorities to surrender, and taken some five thousand German prisoners.

Inside the tank, the radio operator reported back: “City in partisan hands,” and soon Cox himself was debriefing the Montenegrin outside his caravan. Shots could still be heard from patrolling partisans, while in the small square in front of him women were calmly walking to mass and troops were quietly shaving in front of mirrors propped up against the sides of their tanks. The partisans were eager to hand over all their German prisoners, but the New Zealanders had the manpower to take only a handful of senior officers.

Cox sent his radio expert off to fetch the officers. He returned mid-morning, sitting on the front of a Sherman tank, Tommy gun in hand. Behind him sat four German officers hanging on with one hand and waving large white flags with the other. Clinging precariously to other parts of the tank were eager partisans wearing the red scarves of the mostly communist Garibaldi Brigades. Behind them walked a crowd of cheering civilians. Cox recognized one of the Germans as General von Alten, commander of the Ferrara area. He and others were then locked in a disused office building.

When he returned to arrange their transfer south, the Germans arrogantly gave Cox a Nazi salute, and he heard von Alten’s aide-de-camp making sneering remarks about the “Neger” outside the door–meaning the Maori guard. Angered by this, Cox curtly refused von Alten’s request that he be allowed to take with him a basket of cognac bottles. Instead, he gave the basket to the guard.

His dislike for the Germans had been running high since the Libyan campaign of 1941, when he had first started interrogating prisoners. “I don’t hate them,” he recorded, “I just dislike them as I dislike rats and snakes. They have been corrupted by Nazism into a hateful people . . . They are perverted by Hitler.” But now, his dislike had turned to anger which had finally reached boiling point. A few days before, his driver had appeared holding copies of the Union Jack and Eighth Army News, news-sheets produced for the troops. “There’s some real horror stuff this morning, sir,” he said. On the front page, Cox saw pictures from Belsen of corpses piled high like logs. Even with his knowledge of Nazism garnered from his prewar work as a foreign correspondent, he was shocked. “Stick this up in your truck,” he said to his chief interrogator, “and ask them what they say about it.”

Still angry, Cox went over to the POW cage to talk to a new group of prisoners among a batch of some two hundred recently captured parachutists–four Russian women and a German officer speaking perfect English, who claimed to be an anti-Nazi. The women were said to have worked in a hospital, but to Cox it seemed obvious they had formed a traveling brothel for the Germans. Aged between eighteen and thirty, three of them sat on the ground, red-eyed and weeping. The fourth was standing with her back to a tree, staring at the Germans in the cage and running her hands through the tangled mass of her unruly black hair. “All the fury of an enslaved and despised continent,” wrote Cox, “glowered in the eyes of that one Russian peasant girl.”

As he watched, the German officer approached him. He was a lecturer in English from Hanover, and Cox decided to test what he meant by being anti-Nazi, so he showed him the photographs from Belsen. The man shook his head, as though he thought them fake. “Why did you do nothing against Hitler?” demanded Cox. The German asked what he could have done. “My friends and I were not Nazis. We hated the Nazis. But we were powerless. We had to do what we were told. But you must realize,” he added, “that all Germans are not bad.”

Cox knew this well enough, but he was not going to let the man off that easily, so he goaded him about his service in the German Army. Why had he helped the Nazis? The man replied that he had never fought and had just been in charge of a ferry-boat across the Po. But that, responded Cox, simply meant he had helped other men, soldiers who had killed New Zealanders, his friends. The man said nothing, and his eyes dropped back to the photographs of Belsen. Suddenly, in front of Cox’s eyes swam a kaleidoscope of images he had witnessed in Italy: the blackened and swollen corpses of hostages shot outside Arezzo; the tiny pieces of flesh and clothing spattered in pine woods, where the Germans had blown up three partisans after tying them to a tree; and the scarred wall of a church outside Siena where, one Sunday, the Germans had pulled all the men out of mass and shot them.

As he turned to leave, the German officer asked what would become of them all. Overcome by an irresistible desire to strike back, Cox deliberately lied: “You will be handed over to the Russians,” he replied abruptly. As he walked away, he saw fear spreading rapidly across the man’s face.

Days later, he was still unable to control his feelings. Victory was now obviously close and an end to the killing was in sight. Defeat for the Germans was inevitable but still they kept on fighting. “Cecily darling,” he wrote in a brief, handwritten letter to his wife penned quickly on the outskirts of Padua:

We can see the Alps ahead of us, which is most encouraging. I find my contempt for the raw material of the German race grows as they keep docilely obeying the orders of a corrupt and beaten regime. Day after day I interrogate scores of young [Germans] whose minds have been shut to any fresh thought but Nazi obedience since Hitler took over. They are the most degenerate spectacle I have ever encountered.13

By the time they reached Padua, the New Zealanders had received their next set of orders. The target now was Trieste, at the head of the Adriatic a hundred miles beyond Venice. The capture of this major port, once the maritime gateway to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, could provide a vital lifeline for supplies to the allied armies as they headed across the Alps and into Austria. The Yugoslav partisans under Marshal Tito, who were now organized as a regular army, were also advancing on Trieste from the south. Between them, they would squeeze out the Germans. Venice was a mere sideshow and could be largely bypassed, leaving perhaps just a small squadron to make it secure. The quicker the New Zealanders could get to Trieste, the better. “We can get there in a day!” promised Freyberg.¹⁴

Cox was rapidly on the road again. While he was dealing with the obnoxious von Alten and his ADC, the tanks had headed off in the early morning darkness towards Trieste. On the Brenta River just outside Padua, they took the Germans by surprise, captured the bridge intact, and rolled on in the direction of Venice, twenty miles ahead. At one o’clock in the afternoon Cox heard a message come crackling in over the wireless: The 12th Lancers had crossed the causeway over the lagoon and entered the city.

He was already packed and ready to go with the rest of the divisional headquarters. Off they sped through the streets of Padua, lined with green, red and white Italian flags and banners, and civilians shouting, waving and cheering as they passed. The rain began again, lashing the windscreen of his jeep, and occasionally they stopped while ahead they heard the thump-thump of tanks or the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-guns twenty minutes ahead as they pushed aside some last-ditch and futile defiance from the Germans.

Here the country was flat and criss-crossed with canals, the roads lined with large houses and walled gardens belonging to the wealthy merchants and noble families of Venice. Partisans were rushing around in trucks, and as the sun came out again people streamed out of the houses to greet the New Zealanders. In one place, Cox stopped outside a small park and a man came out through the wrought-iron gates with his wife and two small daughters. His face had the pallor of the sick. “This is my first day out of hiding for a year. A year in a cellar,” he said. Then he repeated it: “a year.”¹⁵

This was joyful liberation. But death still traveled as its companion. At a small bend in the road Cox stumbled on a scene of carnage. Twenty minutes before, a group of retreating German coast guard troops had fired on the leading New Zealanders, who had retaliated with their heavy machine-guns. The fight was over in ten minutes. Propped against a tree by the side of the road lay a badly wounded German. His face was gray with pain, his lips barely moving. Fifty yards on, others lay in a ditch. “They lay as they had been hit,” noted Cox, “dying and wounded in a crumpled gray muddle . . . fifteen or twenty of them. The partisans had already taken away their weapons. One man looked up imploringly, saying nothing. Another, a middle-aged man, formed with his lips the words ‘Ich habe Schmerzen–Schmerzen [I’m in pain, in pain].’ The face of another, lying on top of two dead men, was gray already with death.” An Italian priest arrived to administer the last rites. Then a jeep full of photographers roared up and took pictures of the priest bending over the bodies. When they asked him, he changed his position so that the sun was just right for a better shot. Behind them, from a red-bricked campanile, a bell rang out with the sounds of liberation. Beyond, Cox could see the pale blue line of the Alps. Slowly, a wooden cart packed with straw trundled across the field to collect the wounded Germans.

Then Cox was off again. Within minutes, he spotted the dome of St. Mark’s away to his right across the Venice lagoon. But instead of taking the causeway into the city he swung inland towards the industrial city of Mestre and the road to Trieste. The streets were again packed with cheering Italian civilians and the partisans were out in force with their red scarves and neckties. Cox was mesmerized by the women. “Were there ever such girls as those of Mestre on this Sunday of liberation?” he asked.

Brown faced, aquiline, sunburnt, lithe girls with shiny hair and with greeting and invitation in their eyes . . . The Italian men greeted us warmly enough, with relief and thanks. But in the eyes of the girls there was something akin to ecstasy. Some threw us kisses, some threw their arms wide as if they would embrace us all, in their exultation; others smiled quietly, and called to us “Ciao, Ciao” as we moved eastwards through the winding streets. We smiled till our muscles were stiff, we held out our hands till they were almost tugged off. It was no mean reward, the greeting of these people of Mestre in the April sunshine.16

Out of the city, he drove on down the road that paralleled the Adriatic to his right. To his left rose the jagged, snow-covered peaks of the Dolomites. Between the sea and the mountains lay the Friuli Plain and Brazzà, the home of Fey von Hassell. He passed through a village, where the children were sitting on a grassy bank and chanting “Viva–i–nostri–liberatori” (Long live our liberators). He saw a group of terrified-looking German prisoners being escorted somewhere, possibly to their deaths, by partisans. And in the late afternoon, his eyes fell on a white-painted stone by the roadside announcing that Trieste lay just 125 kilometers ahead.

That night, the leading New Zealand units crossed the Piave River by boat. Once again, the hard-worked engineers, the true heroes of this Italian campaign, set about building a bridge to carry the rest of the division towards their final destination. “There should be only light resistance,” predicted Cox that night, as he reported that the Germans were now retreating north to the Alps rather than east to Trieste. “Once across the Piave, we should therefore have straightforward going until the [River] Tagliamento or the [River] Isonzo which should be crackable with one good blow.”¹⁷

The brief delay while the engineers built yet another bridge across yet another river gave Cox the chance to drive back into Venice. There was a partisan intelligence group in the city and he could pick up some useful intelligence there. It also gave him the opportunity to see the famed city of water at yet another milestone in its history.

With its maze of twisting canals, Venice sits on an archipelago of islands in a huge saltwater lagoon at the head of the Adriatic. The Venetian Republic, home of the great explorer Marco Polo, had once been the most prosperous city in Europe and the greatest sea power of its day. Its powerful merchant families dominated Mediterranean trade, built great palaces, and subsidized artists such as Titian, Tintoretto and Canaletto.

But Napoleon had put an abrupt end to its independence and handed it over to Habsburg control. Since then, as part of the new Kingdom of Italy, it had continued its long and slow decline into a backwater that drew increasing numbers of well-heeled tourists to its melancholy attractions. “Nothing in the story of Venice is ordinary,” writes one his-torian, “she was born dangerously, lived grandly, and never abandoned her brazen individuality.”

This, though, had not prevented the city from being “obediently Fascist” under Mussolini, and although there had been some sporadic resistance it had provided a safe and popular resting place for German officers and high-ranking Italian Fascists throughout the war. Nearby industrial Mestre had been heavily bombed more than once, but allied planes had left Venice intact. Almost the only casualties of war were its two hundred citizens who had fallen into canals during the blackout.¹⁸

At four o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday 29 April, two allied tanks raced along the causeway that linked the city to the mainland and parked by its railway station. The local population came out in force to greet the New Zealanders, and partisans rounded up almost three thousand German troops still remaining in the city and interned them in a huge garage. In Rome, Freyberg had been furious at being cheated by the Americans of the Hotel Excelsior as the New Zealanders’ officers’ club, and driving up from Trieste, US Army trucks had been noticed carrying placards for Venice’s premier hotel, the Danieli. Determined not to see a repeat of what had happened in the capital, Freyberg ordered his troops to seize the hotel and keep out the Americans. They did just that and it quickly filled up with New Zealand and British officers.

The Danieli was now Cox’s own destination too. After crossing the causeway, he boarded a gondola and proceeded majestically down the Grand Canal and past the city’s finest palazzos to St. Mark’s Square. The canals were eerily quiet. Here and there, people waved or cried out at them from a window, or looked down as they passed under a bridge, but it was hard to feel like a liberator seated in a gondola, and Cox felt rather embarrassed. He was glad when he arrived at the hotel.

In Venice, as elsewhere, the partisans had risen in revolt as the Germans left, and there had followed two days of fighting against the SS and the Fascist blackshirts. Some of Mussolini’s supporters were still being rounded up, and Cox saw one of them, surrounded by an excited crowd, being escorted by armed partisans across a canal near the Bridge of Sighs to the city’s prison. He was a thin man in his late thirties and was wearing a blue cap that made him look like a railway porter. “He carried a paper parcel under his arm and his face was white,” recalled Cox. “He grimaced constantly, either from fear or indifference.”

Apart from this, however, Venice appeared to be making a seamless transition from one set of occupiers to another, as it had done so often in its history. In St. Mark’s Square, things were astonishingly normal. Women were already selling food for the pigeons to a handful of New Zealand soldiers, and at the foot of the campanile someone was taking down the German price list and putting up another in English. All the shops were shut, but huge crowds were out walking, and the large flags of Venice and Italy flew in front of the church.

The city’s partisans, assisted by agents from the OSS, had set up their intelligence headquarters in a suite at the Danieli. Here, overlooking the Grand Canal, Cox spent the next few hours getting first-hand and up-to-date reports about German positions and the state of the bridges from towns and villages along the road to Trieste. As he plotted the details on his map, it seemed clear that the partisans had seized control of all except one.

Before night fell he drove back to his tent on the banks of the Piave to prepare for the next day’s advance. But he carried with him a scene from the Danieli that was lodged indelibly in his mind. That day at lunch, he had watched as suave dark men in smart linen suits accompanied well-coiffured women to tables glittering with cut glass and silverware. “To Venice,” he reflected, “the Republican Fascists had sent their wives and their mistresses for safety from the bombing. Here had gathered the wealthy of Northern Italy. Here, boldly enough, they waited to see what action we would take now that we, and not the Germans, were the masters.”¹⁹

Several hundred miles to the west, though, what was to become of collaborators in France was already pretty clear. Just days before, in the chill air of early morning, a convoy of nine cars had swept out of Austria and into the Swiss frontier town of St. Margarethen, close to Lake Constance. In the back of the lead car sat an elderly man with a bald head and a drooping white moustache. Beside him sat his wife, wearing a black coat and hat. In the car behind rode their daughter and her husband. The following five cars were packed with the man’s personal doctor, his aide-de-camp, his advisers and his household servants.

Bringing up the rear came two cars filled with suitcases, trunks and personal belongings. As the frontier barrier came into sight, a supercharged Mercedes which had been escorting the convoy turned back. Inside sat several black-uniformed SS troopers and a couple of Gestapo officials.

Once past the barrier, the convoy stopped outside the small Swiss customs house. The elderly man was helped out of the lead limousine. He was bareheaded and wore a dark gray overcoat. A young Swiss girl handed him a bunch of fresh purple lilac and bobbed a curtsey. “For your eighty-ninth birthday, Marshal Pétain,” she said simply.

Philippe Pétain, marshal of France and national hero of the great First World War Battle of Verdun, was going home. He had signed the humiliating armistice of 1940, met personally with Hitler at Montoire in Touraine to shake the Nazi dictator’s hand, promised him full French collaboration in building a new Europe, and ruled France as the Vichy government’s head of state for four years.

Then, three months after D-Day, the Germans had bundled him into a car and driven him to Germany. He had spent the last few months incarcerated as a virtual prisoner in a castle at Sigmaringen on the upper Danube. Now, he had decided to return to France to face whatever justice awaited him. He had long deluded himself that he had served as the protector of France against the Nazis and his role as a true French patriot, he believed, would be recognized.

“The fact that I find myself on Swiss territory is the most beautiful birthday present I could have wished for,” he said as the girl presented him with the blossoms, and he shed a few tears. After insisting that he had been taken to Germany against his will and that he had refused an offer to form a “French Quisling government,” he was kept waiting in his car while the frontier guards phoned through to Bern seeking instructions.

The Swiss authorities had already refused entry to Pétain’s first prime minister and arch-collaborator, Pierre Laval. The previous autumn, Laval had been condemned to death in absentia by a court in Marseilles. Desperate to escape French justice, every day over the last week he had tried frantically to cross into Switzerland. Each time, he had been turned back. He had even begged a Swiss Red Cross official to intercede for him. When the man explained it was beyond his authority, the increasingly panicky Laval burst into tears. “You condemn me to death,” he cried.²⁰ The Swiss had also refused entry to Marcel Déat, another pro-German French collaborator who was seeking asylum.

But Pétain was not seeking refuge. He merely wanted transit across the country into France. Eventually, after an hour and a half’s waiting, permission was telephoned through. An escort of motorized Swiss police drew up and the convoy headed off westwards, in the direction of France. As they left, Pétain waved to a silent crowd of curious Swiss onlookers.

Eventually, the convoy arrived at the border crossing into France. His entry had been agreed at an emergency meeting of the French cabinet, which had also fixed the exact time and place where he should turn up.

As Pétain stepped out of his car, he was formally arrested, and a customs official began to search his luggage and count his money. Waiting for him was General Pierre Koenig, de Gaulle’s faithful Free French chief of staff, commander of the Free French Forces of the Interior, and now the military governor of Paris. Pétain held out his hand in greeting, but Koenig impassively ignored it. Beside him, a representative of the French High Court read out the summons for the marshal’s trial. With the rituals completed, Pétain and his party were ushered aboard a special train. It was heavily guarded, and as it steamed out of the small frontier town its estimated time of arrival in the French capital remained a tightly kept secret.²¹

The France that awaited Pétain was very different from the one that had fêted him as the nation’s savior just five years before. De Gaulle and his Free French followers had rejected the 1940 deal with Hitler from the start, and the wartime resistance had long demanded that Pétain and other collaborators be brought to justice and purged from French society. Eventually, the harsh rigors of the Nazis and the excesses of their local collaborators had also led millions of others to give up on him. Now that he was a beaten man and a lost cause, they wanted nothing of him. Yet there were still plenty of supporters who argued that he had indeed shielded France from the worst and remained unapologetic about their allegiance to his regime.

Since the D-Day landings in Normandy, France had been liberated in stages and purges and trials had been under way for months. They had been accompanied by plenty of “rough justice”–unorganized reprisals against collaborators–and thousands of suspects had been lynched, murdered or beaten up. Hundreds of trials had already sent dozens of collaborators to prison or to the guillotine. However, even some ardent Gaullists were beginning to tire of the purges and were complaining about their often arbitrary and selective nature. For the sake of national unity, they argued, it was time for greater under-standing and leniency to be shown. But now, in April, as the allies overran the concentration camps, their inmates were returning home. Thousands were French, and many had been denounced by their own neighbors and taken off to Germany for months of incarceration behind barbed wire. France was shocked to the core by what it was starting to hear.

Two weeks before, de Gaulle had personally headed a reception committee at the Gare de Lyon in Paris to welcome back the first group of almost three hundred women liberated from the camps. Some members of the welcoming crowd carried lilac blossoms to welcome them. Others brought lipstick and face powder to hand out.

None of them was prepared for what greeted their eyes as the train disgorged its emaciated and traumatized passengers. “Their faces were gray-green with reddish brown circles around their eyes, which seemed to see but not take in,” recorded one journalist at the scene. A diarist noted that the returning deportees had a “greenish, waxen complexion, shrunken faces, reminiscent of those little human heads modeled by primitive tribes.” Some of the women were so weak that they were unable to remain upright. The rest remained standing, shakily, while they sang “The Marseillaise” in thin, cracked voices to the devastated audience.²²

One of those who’d become most critical of the excesses of the purges was François Mauriac. The sixty-year-old novelist and playwright had spent much of the 1930s attacking fascism in the columns of Le Figaro, and he was an ardent supporter of de Gaulle and the Free French, but even he now recognized a distinct and harsher mood in the country. “The allied advance into Germany,” he wrote, “has suddenly become a descent into hell.” Now, witnesses to inhumanity on a gargantuan scale were making their voices heard, and collaborators who had taken refuge in Germany were being captured and brought back. “All resentments,” he continued, “have been awakened or aggravated against those Frenchmen who collaborated with the authors and the accomplices of these crimes, and who favored their victory.”²³

Haunting images of the returning victims from Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen were plastered across every newspaper in France and the debate about what to do with the collaborators had grown more intense than ever.

In Normandy, Francesca Wilson was hearing first-hand accounts about Nazism and its collaborators from their victims. Eager to learn and voraciously curious, she talked to as many people as she could about life under occupation. She encountered a kaleidoscope of views.

Almost everyone she met had a relative in Germany, either as a prisoner of war or as a deportee. She talked to one woman she met on the sands gathering cockles and mussels. The beach had been out of bounds to civilians until very recently, so this was a tangible fruit of liberation. The woman told Francesca that one day a German officer had asked for her spare room. “But that is the room of my son, monsieur,” she had protested. “He is a prisoner of war in your own country; I cannot give it up.” The officer had not insisted.

Another woman was already disillusioned by the liberation. She had worked for a transport company in Paris, daily shipping out goods bound for Hitler’s Reich that were paid for with francs printed in Munich that cost the Germans nothing. After the Germans left Paris, she worked for the Americans. The trouble with them, she complained, was that “they thought France was a night club which never shut.” They appeared blind to the fact that most French people were profoundly shocked by drunkenness and licentiousness.

Others among the locals had done well out of serving the Germans. More than one contrasted the old occupiers’ “correct” behavior with that of the rude and robust Americans. But others offered an acutely different angle on the previous four years. “Boche politeness?” protested one Frenchman in astonishment. “Fifty innocent hostages seized in their beds, bundled through the town, made to dig their own graves and shot into them!”

Francesca also met a forty-year-old engineer whom she described as a “small, lean, dark, active realistic and true Latin.” He had evaded labor conscription to Germany by going underground and had got hold of a gun dropped by a British plane for the resistance. Most of the time he had ferried arms by night from Paris. Once, he had been shot at by German sentries but had managed to get away. “Men with children could not do that sort of thing,” he told Francesca. His wife had helped him and they were never caught. It had been a time of “risk, adventure, and a goal.”

A student fighter with de Gaulle’s Free French Forces of the Interior deplored the fact that most of their losses were due less to the Gestapo than to the treachery of his fellow citizens in the hated Milice, the Vichy paramilitary police force. He pungently described them as men tempted by high pay who “hunted in packs.”

Another young man had been arrested for helping downed allied airmen escape. He had been saved from the firing squad only by the arrival of British forces. During his months of solitary confinement, he confessed, his greatest source of consolation had come from reading Pascal. “I don’t understand it now,” he told her, “but while waiting for the Gestapo to haul me out for interrogation, I found comfort which I could not now . . . Perhaps because Pascal pours such scorn on ‘the perpetual agitations and tumultuous occupations of man’ . . . Why, [he] asks, does man fear of all things to be alone with himself? Does he not realize that the whole visible world is a prison cell?” He would recommend Pascal, the man said with a wry smile, for anyone facing solitary confinement.

Francesca was particularly struck by the testimony of a handsome middle-aged man who told her he had retreated to his estate to avoid seeing or having any dealings with the Germans. This, he told her, was akin to how Montaigne had retreated to his library because he could not bear the civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, stained as they were by treachery and inhumanity. Three hundred years later, he told Francesca, the Nazis had made a science of inhumanity and “put a premium on treachery.” She was lucky to be English, he pronounced. She had not had to see her friends making accommodations with the Nazis, or denouncing others for venal advantage.

This was sobering stuff, but there was much worse. One day, a group of Red Army soldiers came to sing Russian songs at one of the center’s impromptu Sunday concerts. They had been captured by the Germans, dragooned into forced labor or the Wehrmacht, and were now being held by the Americans in a nearby camp.

After they had sung, Francesca talked to one of them. He had what she described as a “tragic” face: “It had that half-animal look that the endurance of brutal treatment and long privations gives,” she wrote. Having fallen into German hands at Odessa, he had been marched in the snow through Romania and into Germany. The weak who could not make it were simply shot. But the scene he could not get out of his mind was that of seven sailors from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet who had been marched to the gallows naked except for a shift with their hands tied behind their backs. They waited in line as they were hanged, one by one, each watching his comrades die at the end of the rope. “And they sang,” the Red Army soldier told Francesca, “they sang till the last moment, with their hands tied behind their backs.”²⁴