CHAPTER NINE

DEATH OF A DICTATOR

We’ve really been having a madhouse here–you can read more about it in the papers, I guess, than I can tell you. But I’ve certainly been having experiences and I’ll tell you about them some day soon, I hope. It looks as though we’ll still have some stiff fighting though if these Heines hole up in the Alps.”

It was Wednesday 25 April. Robert Ellis and his company of the US Tenth Mountain Division had just crossed the River Po near the Italian town of San Benedetto Po, and he was seizing the chance to write to his parents. His father had quit Iran and was now working in Ohio as a country doctor. His mother had always believed firmly in perfecting all of one’s God-given gifts, and as a result his school days had been rigorously scheduled with piano lessons, violin practice and homework. But she remained, as always, generous in her praise and affection, replying to his letters whenever she could and circulating his responses proudly around the family.¹

Alongside the family’s ethos of stern self-improvement flowed a powerful internationalist spirit. Like millions of others during the dark decade of the 1930s, they had pinned their hopes on collective security as the guarantor of peace. One of the high points of a year he spent at the International School in Geneva had come when he and his mother sat in the great hall of the General Assembly of the League of Nations to hear Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia appeal for help against Mussolini’s invasion of his country. “I watched in awe as the tiny figure of the emperor came to the podium,” he remembered. “In an impassioned cry for help, he gave one of the great speeches of history . . . Alas, the great powers were too concerned with ‘peace at any price’ to rescue Selassie . . . Collective security was doomed,” he concluded, “and World War II became inevitable.”² This historic moment made a profound impression on Ellis. He signed up for courses in international relations at the Universities of North Carolina and Chicago before his education was cut short by his induction into the armed forces in 1943.

Since the division had broken out of the mountains he had hardly had time to catch breath as the American forces raced north to reach the Alps before the retreating Germans were able to turn the mountains into their final redoubt. At dawn four days before, he had begun a forced march to reach the river some fifty miles ahead. In addition to his normal pack and other gear, in each hand he carried a fifteen-pound box of belted machine-gun ammunition. The handles were made of steel, and they dug so fiercely into his palms that whenever he tried to uncurl his fingers they felt as if they would never be normal again. They marched rapidly through endless small villages in the blazing sun. Everywhere peasants showered them with flowers, wine, water, food and kisses. For the first time since arriving in Italy, he began to feel that what they had been through recently was worthwhile. He had been mostly trained for the bitter slog of mountain fighting, but now the division was spearheading the rapid advance across the flat valley of the Po and catching the Germans off guard by their sheer speed.

Like the rest of his comrades in the Tenth, Ellis had survived weeks of grueling training at Camp Hale, 9,500 feet up in the snowy mountains of Colorado outside Boulder. It was a legendary period in the division’s short history that was etched sharply on the memory of every ski trooper. “Sung of and cursed at once,” writes one historian, “[it] was a wild, terrible place, where each year half the men dropped out because of the rigors of climate and exercise.”³

Ellis admitted to finding the training fierce. “So far,” he wrote home soon after arriving, “the life here has been Hell. For a few days I thought I’d go AWOL . . . Everyone here has asthma, or rheumatic fever, or colds, etc.” Soon he fell sick, too, and was hospitalized for several days with a high fever. When he recovered, his daily regime proved punitive. “Up at 5:30. Breakfast at 5:45. Inspection from 6:30 to 7:00,” he reported home about one typical day. But that was merely the prelude to half an hour of calisthenics, an hour’s lecture on military discipline, and other lectures on such subjects as guarding prisoners. After lunch came a lecture and practice in digging foxholes, an hour’s drill, a mile-long run and, after supper, a two-mile march to observe a demonstration of night firing by machine-guns. Then they all walked back to barracks, took showers to kill off the Rocky Mountain fever ticks, and were in bed by eleven.⁴

Tough though this was, he could stand it. Sometimes he even enjoyed it. But, unlike British commando Bryan Samain, he loathed the loss of autonomy that joining the army involved. “This is a completely new existence,” he complained in only his second letter home. “I can hardly believe that it is actually me in an olive drab uniform sitting on an army cot. It seems so irrational for me to be here, with no will of my own or freedom of action . . . I hate regimentation and the crushing of individuality . . . I’ll certainly be glad when this war is over.”⁵ Although he adjusted–he had no choice–he continued to resent his existence as a mere cog in the greater military machine. For a sensitive and educated young man who liked nothing so much as to curl up quietly with a serious book, life in the infantry was something to be endured, not enjoyed.

Now, however, he was finally beginning to feel free and exhilaration set in, especially after he downed a glass of grappa handed to him by a roadside family, which he mistook for water. Then he and his buddy Larry Boyajian miraculously stumbled on an open-topped German staff car abandoned by the roadside. With Boyajian at the wheel and Ellis riding in the back seat, they roared up the road, stirring up clouds of whirling white dust, feeling like Erich von Stroheim in some Hollywood movie, and cracking jokes about the duty of saluting officers as they sped past footsore fellow infantryman.

When the car ran out of gas, they found an abandoned motorcycle and sidecar. It started up straight away, and off they sped on the next installment of their madcap ride. Theirs was typical of many such escapades, well captured in the laconic entry by the company sergeant in his official morning report that day: “In action. Racing across the Po Valley. Using German horses and vehicles.”⁶

Here, as Geoffrey Cox and the New Zealanders were finding further east, the Germans had left the roads littered with vehicles of every kind. Ellis and Boyajian passed trucks, cars, bicycles and horse-drawn wagons, as well as forlorn columns of German prisoners being marched to the rear. Bands of partisans were roaming everywhere, too, cutting German communications and supply lines, rounding up snipers and isolated pockets of resistance, destroying German equipment and installations, and seizing Fascists.

Blackshirts behind the lines could still prove a menace. Civilians in San Benedetto reported that someone in the tower of the church was ringing the bell as a signal. Whenever American troops moved up to the river’s edge to make a crossing, the bell rang out and German artillery batteries began firing. So the bell was silenced, and the artillery fire tapered off. The same day, two local Fascists were arrested while sending up flares.⁷

Outside Modena, other Tenth Division units overran Fossoli, the largest concentration camp in Italy. A former POW camp, it had been transformed by the SS after the Salò Republic’s savage anti-Semitic law of December 1943 into a transit camp for Jews on their way to extermination camps in Germany or Poland. It was through Fossoli that the Turinese writer Primo Levi had passed in February 1944 on his way to Auschwitz. “There were twelve goods wagons for six hundred and fifty men,” recorded Levi. “In mine we were only forty five, but it was a small wagon . . . The train did not move until evening. We had learnt of our destination with relief. Auschwitz was a name without significance for us at that time, but it at least implied some place on this earth.”

The train traveled slowly, with endless halts, and they all grew desperately thirsty. Through the slats they eventually spied the tall, pale cliffs of the Adige Valley and the names of the last Italian cities disappeared behind them. “We passed the Brenner at midday of the second day and everyone stood up but no one said a word,” he wrote, “and I looked around and wondered how many, among that poor human dust, would be struck by fate.” By the time the Americans reached Fossoli, only four of those in Levi’s wagon that day were still alive. A full third of all the Jews deported from Italy had left the camp for extermination.⁸

Even in full retreat the Germans could prove a nuisance, trying the temper of the infantry now exhausted by their long march and impatient for the end. Outside the villages and towns of the Po Valley the countryside was flat and open, but it was dotted with substantial farmhouses that provided excellent bases for rear guard action. Often the Germans were driven out by artillery fire, but if they dug in their heels the infantry had to flush them out. These fire fights could be expensive in casualties given the open nature of the ground and the lack of cover. Sometimes, having killed or wounded several American attackers, the Germans would put up a white flag at the last minute and try to surrender. Not surprisingly, the Americans seldom emerged with prisoners.⁹

When their motorcycle also ran out of gas, Ellis and Boyajian hitch-hiked a ride on a tank. “The Ities are mad with joy to see us,” he managed to scribble in his diary as they rumbled along. “Give us eggs, milk. Some girl just threw flowers on me and the church bells are ringing in freedom. People hug you.” A special task force of the division speeding ahead of Ellis reached the Po so rapidly that General von Senger und Etterlin, the German commander of the XIV Panzer Corps–and, like New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, a former Oxford Rhodes scholar–was forced to swim across at dawn to escape capture. “I had tried repeatedly to drive . . . stragglers back to their units still fighting at the front,” he plaintively recorded, “[but] when whole major units have been disbanded and the infantry troops are exhausted from long marches, swimming across rivers, and sleepless nights, there remains for psychological reasons but one alternative: to act in accordance with the instincts of the ordinary soldier and order the units to withdraw.”¹⁰

After two long days of marching Ellis was also dead beat. “The never-ending dust, the perpetual movement with no chance ever to settle down, and the food snatched on the run . . . all combined to form a depressing tapestry which seemed to have no end,” he remembered. Even the unbridged Po offered little chance for a rest. Just twenty-four hours after reaching its low sandy banks he found himself scrambling into a small canvas assault boat to paddle across the river at night. The water was just below the gunwale and the boat felt flimsy and unstable, so he loosened his boots and removed his backpack and ammunition belt in case it tipped into the water. Close by, another of the boats capsized, but it was too dark to see who was in the water, or exactly where, and he heard terrified screams and cries for help until they fell chillingly silent. Once ashore, they dug in, expecting a German counterattack, but it never came. It was then, during a precious few hours of sleep and relaxation, that he found time to write to his parents.

He also took the opportunity to make a personal confession. He kept it short, just a simple sentence of some fifteen words: “The other day, I killed a sniper at about 15 feet with my .45 revolver.” Several weeks later, he felt able to describe the details in a letter to one of his brothers. It had happened eleven days before, in the mountains, at the start of the division’s big push. He had been pinned down with Boyajian for hours on a mountainside by murderous shell and mortar fire when one of his platoon was shot in the foot. For some reason this made Ellis angry. It felt almost personal. So he crawled through the underbrush to try to locate the spot from where the shot had come. Just twenty yards ahead he saw two log bunkers. Keeping flat to the ground, he crawled to the first and found it abandoned. Then he edged cautiously towards the blind side of the second.

Suddenly, he saw the head and shoulders of the German sniper. His back was half turned, and he was bobbing up and down in a peculiar way. Ellis could not see a weapon, but if the German was unarmed, why had he not surrendered? Could Ellis risk calling out to him to raise his hands, only to have the sniper turn and either shoot or lob a grenade at him? He had to make a split-second decision. Everything he had absorbed from his missionary parents told him not to assume the worst about another human being, but his army training, not to mention his own fear and excitement, led him in the opposite direction. He rested both elbows on the ground and readied his .45 pistol in both hands.

The German must have heard him, because he turned. As he moved, Ellis pulled the trigger and shot him through the head. The man dropped straight out of view. Rather than investigate more closely, Ellis signaled to the others in his platoon to continue the advance. With a single shot, he had crossed his own personal Rubicon. Now he was a fully fledged member of what the famous American war correspondent Ernie Pyle described as the “ghastly brotherhood of war.”¹¹

Pyle had made his name through his vivid front-line reporting from Italy the year before, doing nothing to sugarcoat the brutal realities of life for the infantry, or to disguise the fact that clean-cut American boys were being transformed into killers. The boy next door, he constantly reminded his readers back home in the United States, had made “the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft.” His most moving and effective dispatch was about the body of a company commander being brought down a mountainside on the back of a mule and the effect that this had on his men. Only four days after Ellis’s encounter with the sniper, Pyle was shot dead by a sharp-shooter near Okinawa in the Pacific.¹²

The Tenth Division’s orders were to advance as quickly as possible from the Po to Verona on the River Adige, cutting the roads north of the city leading to the Brenner Pass and the Germans’ line of retreat into the Alps. To spearhead the advance, General George P. Hays, commander of the Tenth Mountain, formed a mobile task force. As its head, he appointed Colonel William Darby, who had previously led an elite force in North Africa and Sicily known as Darby’s Rangers, which was modeled on the British commandos. Ellis’s regiment was to follow immediately behind, mopping up any bypassed German forces and acting as a reserve in case the task force encountered heavy resistance. Hays’s plan was for his three infantry regiments to leapfrog one another. Each would march as rapidly as it could for eight hours, and then rest for sixteen while the others were brought up by trucks. This way, he hoped, they could advance about sixty miles a day and twenty at night.

The leapfrogging began that Friday from Villafranca, a town just south of Verona, and by six o’clock that evening Ellis had reached the shores of Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, thirty miles long and varying between two and eleven miles wide. Further ahead, advance units had run into a roadblock and fierce fighting with SS troops had followed. By now, northern Italy’s partisans were in open revolt and most of the German escape routes over the Alps had been closed off. The one exception was the road running up the east shore of the lake. Here, the Germans decided to put up as much resistance as they could, and it was ideal terrain for defense.

On the left of the narrow road lapped the lake itself. On the other side, at its northern end, loomed steep, gray, granite Alpine cliffs several thousand feet high into which the road had been cut, often disappearing into tunnels several hundred yards long. Ellis was familiar enough with recent history to know that thirty years before, during the First World War, the area had been bitterly fought over by Italy and Austria-Hungary. For very little territorial gain, casualties on both sides had mounted to more than two hundred thousand. So far, Ellis had avoided injury, and he certainly did not want to end up being shot during what, surely, was the last chapter of the war. But he had no choice. He had to do his duty.

It was cold, and raining heavily, when he and the rest of his regiment started its march along the lakeside. Quickly he discovered a trick that helped him along: if he walked behind a tank, its exhaust sent out gales of hot air that kept him relatively dry and warm. At midnight he reached the small town of Malcesine, two-thirds of the way up the side of the lake. Having completed their eight-hour stint and marched seventeen miles, the men were at last allowed to sleep. “Morale high,” recorded the company sergeant.

When Ellis awoke the next morning, he saw rugged mountains rising from both sides of the lake, reminding him of a Norwegian fjord. He had finally reached the Alps. “The Tenth Mountain Division, trained and equipped primarily for mountain warfare,” recorded the division’s historian proudly, “had outraced all other units of the Fifth Army to seal off the German escape routes.”¹³

Ellis was a lucky man. His regiment was due to set off again the next day, but stiff German resistance along the lake’s edge slowed the advance, and he remained in reserve for the next two days. The fighting yet to be done, notes the official American history of the war in Italy, “would in no way affect the outcome of the long campaign, but it continued nonetheless to exact a bitter toll of dead and wounded men.” It was not that the Germans at this stage of the war held out any hope of victory. On the contrary, the strategy of Field Marshal Kesselring, commander of all German forces in Southwestern Europe, including southern Germany, Yugoslavia and Italy, was to salvage what he could from inevitable defeat. The longer his forces held out, the more German forces retreating in the face of the Russians could reach American and British lines and surrender to them, rather than to the Red Army.¹⁴

Advance units of the Tenth Division pressed north to the top of the lake and the towns of Riva and Torbole. To make the advance as difficult as possible for the Americans, the Germans began blowing up the road tunnels, but the Americans foiled them by ferrying their men around the blocked-off sections of road. They repeated the process all the way north, and by the afternoon of 30 April, fighting off some fierce German counterattacks, they entered Torbole.

Here, the hand of fate intervened. Colonel Darby, head of the task force that had so successfully spearheaded the advance, was climbing into his jeep which was parked outside a hotel in the town when shrapnel from a shell fired by Germans across the lake hit him in the chest. He died an hour later.

Several others also perished in these final hours of the war when a German shell exploded ten yards inside one of the road tunnels. There was a crushing concussion, shell fragments ricocheted off the walls, and the blast turned fragments of rock into deadly shrapnel. Five of the Americans were instantly killed, and fifty wounded. To make matters worse, as the wounded crawled to the tunnel’s exit, they found themselves clambering over the dismembered bodies of German soldiers and horses killed just hours beforehand when the demolition charge they were laying had exploded prematurely.¹⁵

To Ellis, however, Malcesine offered a welcome safe haven. In peace-time, Lake Garda was a lush resort area dotted with villas, beautiful gardens, olive groves, citrus and palm trees, and comfortable hotels. The village itself was a picture-postcard fishing port dominated by a thirteenth-century castle, an idyllic spot where Goethe had lived and worked between 1786 and 1788.

Ellis luxuriated in a room on the ground floor of one of the hotels. After he caught up with sleep, he strolled around the town with buddies looking at boats in the harbor and talking to the locals. Not even the firing of enormous guns from the courtyard of his hotel disturbed him once he grew used to the noise. They belonged to an artillery unit of the British Army that was providing support to the division. Sometimes relations between the British and American allies could be difficult, but one of the artillery officers, a Scot, had nothing but admiration for the Americans of Ellis’s division. “We are having a magnificent time chasing the Hun,” he wrote home enthusiastically. “We are supporting some first class troops and, with them, have met with some amazing successes. I am sure the Hun has had it now and everything should be over, bar some guerrilla fighting, within the next fortnight.”¹⁶

Across the lake and a few miles to the south, Ellis could see the town of Gargagno. But by now its most famous recent resident, Benito Mussolini, was dead, shot by partisans on the shores of Lake Como.

Mussolini had passed his few days in Milan in a miasma of indecision. Surrounded by the tattered remnants of his supporters, he dithered about what to do next as the allies swept north from the Po and, one after another, the cities of northern Italy fell into the hands of the partisans. Sometimes he talked of surrendering in order to avoid the evils of a civil war. On other occasions, he reverted bombastically to his idea of making a last stand in the Valtellina. His actions appeared chaotic, and he seemed “to drift like a leaf in a storm.” From all parts of the country came news of the massacre of Fascists.¹⁷

At last, on the afternoon of Wednesday 25 April, with local partisans poised to seize control of Milan itself and a general strike already under way in the city, the situation came to a head. After an intermediary arranged for him to meet a delegation from the Committee for the Liberation of Northern Italy (CLNAI), the partisans’ controlling body, he made his way through the eerily quiet streets to the palace of the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster. Having once endorsed Fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism, the cardinal was now keen to avoid any further needless bloodshed.

The resistance delegates arrived late, so Mussolini spent an hour awkwardly making small talk with the cardinal. The stilted chat did not raise his spirits. The Catholic prelate reminded him how the defeated Napoleon had found comfort in God during his exile on St. Helena, and when Mussolini mentioned his plans for the last stand in the Valtellina with three thousand supporters, Schuster observed gently that three hundred seemed a more realistic figure. To this, Mussolini smiled weakly and agreed. He seemed, recalled the cardinal, a man bereft of will, listlessly accepting his fate.

Finally, the partisans arrived. After a stiff exchange of handshakes they made it clear that they expected nothing but unconditional surrender. Mussolini seemed close to agreeing, provided that his soldiers were guaranteed proper treatment as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Then Marshal Graziani suddenly interjected that nothing should be decided without first informing the Germans. They were, after all, Italy’s allies, and a unilateral surrender would be dishonorable.

This prompted a startling reply from General Cadorna, commander of the partisan forces. “I’m afraid,” he said, “the Germans haven’t been troubled by the same scruples.” Mussolini’s allies, he revealed, were already in negotiations for an unconditional surrender to the British and Americans.

This news came as a bombshell to Mussolini, who had been kept completely in the dark by the Germans. The SS in Italy had sent out feelers to the allies as far back as February. Discussions had been lengthy, tortuous and complex, but by this time they were on the point of fruition.

Mussolini exploded in fury. He abruptly stood up, denounced the Germans roundly for having always treated the Italians as slaves, and stormed out of the archbishop’s palace, declaring he needed an hour to think things over before resuming the talks. In a rage, though, he decided to leave Milan immediately and head for the Valtellina. Dressed in the uniform of the Fascist militia–gray-brown jacket and gray trousers with red and black stripes down both sides–and with a sub-machine-gun slung over his shoulder, he drove off in the back of his open-topped Alfa Romeo. Behind him followed a convoy of thirty or so cars packed with his supporters and the ubiquitous contingent of SS guards, who refused to be shaken off. Bringing up the rear came his mistress, Clara Petacci, and his son, Vittorio.

That night, he reached Como. The next day, instead of the three thousand Fascist fighters he had been promised and hoped for, fewer than a dozen joined him. His journey up the shore of the lake, once imagined as the prelude to a glorious last stand, descended into the disorganized shambles of an ignominious flight. At Menaggio, the dispirited group linked up with a German military convoy of about two hundred men heading north for the Brenner Pass and the safety of Austria. They were now in mountainous partisan country, a land where rough justice traveled hand in hand with liberation. As a precaution, Mussolini exchanged the comfort of his Alfa-Romeo for the safety of the convoy’s armored cars. Only twenty-four hours before, in the nearby town of Dongo, the funeral of four partisans whose bodies had been retrieved from the mountainside after being dumped by Fascists had been disrupted by members of the Black Brigades, a Fascist Militia force, who had fired wildly into the air.

Suddenly, just outside Dongo, the convoy was halted by a partisan roadblock and a brief exchange of gunfire took place. But at this late stage of the war neither side was keen for a serious fight, and there followed several hours of tense negotiation. Finally, it was agreed that the convoy could proceed, but without the Italians, who would be handed over to the partisans. Mussolini promptly disguised himself as a German soldier, donning a helmet and a military overcoat. Then he clambered into one of the trucks at the rear of the convoy and pretended to be asleep.

The ruse failed. When the convoy was stopped in the town square of Dongo for a more thorough search, he was quickly recognized by one of the partisans. Hauled out unceremoniously, he was held for several hours in the office of the Mayor. Later, to ensure that there would be no repeat of his 1943 rescue by Otto Skorzeny, he and Petacci were secretly moved to the farmhouse of a partisan sympathizer in the hills nearby. It was not just German efforts to liberate Mussolini that were feared by the partisans. The allies–or at least the Americans–were also interested in getting hold of him. “We made strenuous efforts to intercept and rescue him,” claimed General Lucian Truscott, the Commander of US forces in Italy, “but without success.”¹⁸

Mussolini and his mistress finished the last stage of the journey on foot, scrambling up a steep and stony mule track from the village of Giulino di Mezzegra below. It was raining heavily and soaked the blanket Mussolini was wearing to keep himself warm. That night, amid a violent thunderstorm, he and Petacci slept in a double bed in the loft of the simple building.

At about four o’clock the next afternoon–Saturday 28 April, while Robert Ellis was enjoying his break from fighting on the shores of Lake Garda and Geoffrey Cox and the New Zealanders stood poised to enter Padua–a tall man wearing a brown raincoat arrived at the house. He was carrying a sub-machine-gun. “I have come to rescue you,” he declared. “Hurry up.” Petacci began rummaging around among her clothes. “What are you looking for?” asked the man impatiently. “My knickers,” replied the thirty-three-yeargd brunette, who was well known for her heavy make-up and smart appearance. “Don’t worry about that,” snapped the man. “Come on, hurry.”

They stumbled down the rough mountainside to a car parked on the road below and climbed into the back seat. In addition to the driver and the man in the raincoat, there was another man seated in the car. It drove a few yards down the hill, then stopped in front of the wrought-iron gates of a villa. The two passengers were bundled out and pushed in front of a low stone wall.

What happened next remains in dispute. According to their “rescuer”–in reality their executioner–he read an official death sentence in the name of the Italian people and then shot them. Mussolini, he claimed, said nothing, but cowered in terror in the final seconds of his life. However, a later report by another member of the death squad recorded that Mussolini rose to the occasion, defiantly tugged open the collar of his coat, and shouted, “Aim for the heart!”

Irrespective of whether Mussolini died bravely or as a coward, what followed next is undisputed. The bodies were bundled into the car and it drove off at speed towards Dongo. Here, fifteen of the Italian group that had traveled with Mussolini up the lakeside had already been shot, and their leader’s and Petacci’s corpses were added to the pile. It included several ministers of the Salò Republic, top Fascist Party officials, and Petacci’s brother, Marcello.¹⁹

The man who shot Mussolini, Walter Audisio, was a peacetime accountant and communist member of the CLNAI who went by the name of “Colonel Valerio.” On hearing the news of Mussolini’s capture, a hurriedly convened and partial gathering of the CLNAI in Milan had agreed that he should be shot, and it sent Audisio and another dedicated communist, Aldo Lampredi, to carry out the mission. Ever since the murder by Fascists of the left-wing member of parliament Giacomo Mateotti in 1924, the dictator’s assassination had been high on the agenda of his opponents, the price he would have to pay for the criminality of his regime. He survived several attempts to kill him during his two decades in power.

The bodies remained overnight in Dongo. Then they were loaded into a removal van and driven to Milan, the birthplace of Fascism a quarter of a century before. Dawn was breaking as the vehicle entered the Piazzale Loreto and the corpses were unceremoniously dumped in a heap on the ground. The site was electric with symbolism. Eight months before, fifteen political prisoners had been dragged from Milan’s jails and shot by a Fascist squad on SS orders in reprisal for a suspected partisan attack. Their bodies had then been dumped in the piazza for everyone to see, a practice of displaying the political dead that had become almost routine in Fascist Italy. The square had since become highly significant for the resistance and a place that cried out for vengeance. A wreath of flowers covered the spot where the bodies had lain, and a hand-lettered sign read, “Square of the Fifteen Martyrs.” The Fascists, Mussolini had declared presciently at the time–and more accurately than he could ever have imagined–would “pay a high price for the blood of Piazzale Loreto.”

In the square, his corpse now lay next to that of his mistress. Her dark hair and the lace ruffles of her blouse were caked with mud. As the news spread, a huge crowd gathered, pushing, shouting, screaming; people began to kick, spit and urinate on the bodies. Mussolini’s skull took several heavy blows, and shots were fired into his body.

Milton Bracker, a New York Times war correspondent, arrived in the middle of it all. Mussolini’s eyes were still open, he reported, “and it was perhaps the final irony that this man who had thrust his chin forward for so many official photographs had to have his yellowing face propped up with a rifle butt so as to turn it into the sun for the only two Allied cameramen on the scene.” Their photographs were flashed around the world, presenting irrefutable proof that the Italian dictator was dead.²⁰

After a while, Mussolini, Petacci and two others were strung up on a rusty iron bar in front of a petrol station in the corner of the square. As the ultimate insult, they were hung upside down by their heels, like animals in an abattoir, their names on paper pinned to their feet. Petacci’s dress fell down over her head. In a fleeting act of decency, someone tucked it back up. This, though, did not prevent the crowd from continuing to rain blows at Mussolini’s skull until his head was a bloodied mess, spattered with pieces of brain.

Not long afterwards, at about 10:30 a.m., an open truck made its way through the crowds and pulled up in the square. Standing in the middle of it, surrounded by armed guards, was a lithe, square-jawed and surly figure wearing a black shirt. This was Achille Starace, one-time secretary-general of the Fascist Party as well as chief of staff of the hated Fascist militia. The truck paused for a second in front of Mussolini’s corpse, and Starace shot it a rapid glance. He appeared to sag forwards, until the guards roughly pulled him up. The truck edged further forward and then stopped.

Starace was taken out and placed near a white wall at the back of the petrol station. Beside it were some baskets of spring flowers–pink, yellow, purple and blue–that people had placed in memory of the anti-Fascists who had perished there a few months before. Then a firing squad of partisans shot Starace in the back. Another partisan, perched on a beam high above the crowd, made a broad gesture of finality with his arms.

“There were no roars or bloodcurdling yells,” reported another American war correspondent who witnessed the scene. “There was only silence, and then, suddenly, a sigh–a deep, moaning sound, seemingly expressive of release from something dark and fetid.” Two minutes later, Starace’s corpse was strung up alongside that of Mussolini. “Look at them now,” an old man standing next to the journalist kept saying. “Just look at them now!”²¹

Eventually, the American military authorities, who had just entered the city, ordered the bodies cut down and taken to the city’s morgue. Yet still onlookers followed to watch while a US Army photographer carefully placed Mussolini and Petacci in each other’s arms to make a better shot.

The date was Sunday 29 April 1945. That same day, at allied head-quarters in Caserta near Naples, the tortuous weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations finally came to an end when two German delegates formally signed the surrender of all German forces in Italy. It was to come into effect at noon on Wednesday 2 May.

Robert Ellis heard the news of Mussolini’s death over the radio while he rested on the shores of Lake Garda. The next day he found time to jot down some notes in his diary and write a longer letter home, giving a thumbnail sketch of his recent march across the Po Valley and the frenzied welcome they had received from the local population. “At first the newly freed are a little frightened,” he told his parents, “but the moment they realize we’re Americans their joy reaches no bounds.” In short, he noted, the war news was sensationally good. That, and the fact that Lake Garda was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, made him almost euphoric. Yet the upbeat mood also heightened his sense of the fearful proximity of death. Men were still dying in Italy, he reminded his father and mother, and “the load will be lifted from none of our soldiers until the last shot is fired.”²²

That same day, another company in Ellis’s regiment was dispatched on a potentially hazardous mission across the lake to its western shore. Its target was the Villa Feltrinelli, Mussolini’s recent personal home at Gargagno, as well as the nearby offices of ministers and officials of the Salò Republic. After taking control of these buildings, along with any remaining Fascists they might capture, the company would head north to neutralize any German forces still occupying the far side of the lake.

Shortly after midnight, the small force of two hundred men crossed the open waters of the lake in twelve DUKWs, cutting the engines as they approached the shore and gliding in silently to land two miles north of Gargagno. Roadblocks were quickly set up, and at dawn the entire force headed on foot into the town. By eight-fifteen they had occupied Mussolini’s villa and his office in the town. They met with no resistance, and a dozen or so German prisoners were handed over by the partisans.

The Villa Feltrinelli stood on the lakefront, a spacious building with three dozen rooms and a bomb shelter. In the garage the Americans found two limousines, but the engines had been blown up by grenades. Inside the villa, there was a room stuffed with pills and medicines, as well as a large kitchen. Very quickly, the villa became the temporary billet for one of the American platoons.

Two American agents had accompanied the small task force to the villa. These were members of the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) who were looking for any of Mussolini’s personal files that might substantiate criminal activity by him and the Fascist regime. Since Italy’s surrender in 1943, finding Mussolini and war criminals in Italy had been an allied priority, and even as he fled from Milan American and British agents were actively hunting him down. In this search, they were thwarted as much by the partisans as by Mussolini sympathizers. The reason was simple: the partisans would deal with Il Duce themselves, in their own way. “In no case,” admitted General Cadorna, the partisan military commander, “would I voluntarily have proceeded to bring Mussolini into the hands of the allied forces for him to be tried and executed by foreigners.”

But whatever form post-war retribution took, and whoever delivered it, documents could prove vital in establishing innocence or guilt.

The Americans were not alone in considering the capture of such documents important. During his three-day odyssey between Milan and Dongo, Mussolini had carried with him two leather briefcases that he never let out of his sight. Inside were several files he hoped to use in his defense, documents that would establish how hard he had tried to avoid civil war in Italy and to resist German pressure.

Before he left Milan, he also withdrew a large amount of cash from the Salò Republic’s bank account. This, too, traveled with him in the convoy up the side of Lake Como. Even when he transferred to the German armored car outside Menaggio, he took the suitcases with him, and after his arrest in the town square at Dongo he managed to carry at least one of them into the Town Hall with him. But he was not permitted to take it any further. On the last night of his life, in the simple farmhouse bedroom at Giulino di Mezzegra, he slept in the knowledge that the last slim evidence for his defense had finally been taken from him.

The documents in the suitcases, however, represented only the “cream of the cream” of Mussolini’s files. Before quitting the Villa Feltrinelli, he had filled two large tin trunks with files that were sent to Milan, and it was from these that he extracted those that were in the suitcases. The trunks themselves followed on a truck in the convoy to Como, but this was intercepted by partisans, and at least one of the trunks disappeared. This, as well as the suitcases captured at Dongo and the money, ultimately fell into partisan hands.

So it was hardly any surprise that the American agents uncovered little of interest at the Villa Feltrinelli. Apart from some dossiers on Fascist Party personalities, a few items of historical interest, and some useful and up-to-date intelligence about Fascist organizations in Turin and Milan, the vast bulk of the files had, in the words of one of the agents, “all been cleared out.” Here, again, it was clear that the Italians themselves were determined to deal with Mussolini and his legacy in their own way.²³

Back on the other side of Lake Garda, Robert Ellis finished off his letter home. He had learned that his brother Edwin was about to be inducted into the armed forces, and he was sorry about that. On the other hand, he did not see why any of the Americans serving in Europe had to go and fight the war in the Pacific. Ellis’s division had suffered one of the highest casualty rates per combat day of any American division during the war. Approximately one of every three infantrymen who had landed with him at Naples had been killed or wounded in action. “Those of us who have been lucky enough to survive,” he told his parents, “should get a break.”²⁴