Life had improved, however, albeit very slowly. In the subsequent months more men and materiel had arrived and talk of mutiny had died down. Training had become more organised and with it the enthusiasm of the men had grown. Even so, by the beginning of May 1944, Eugenio had little to cheer about. Rumours of disputes between the British authorities and their own superiors reached them, while there was still no sign of the Nembo paratroopers they, in the artillery, were supposed to be supporting; apparently, they were still in Sardinia. ‘The sense of our uselessness,’ wrote Eugenio, ‘which had never completely vanished, came back again.’36
If Eugenio and his colleagues felt side-lined, it was because they had been. Part of the armistice deal had been that Italian armed forces, more than 3 million strong throughout Italy, the Balkans and the Aegean, should fight on the side of the Allies, and indeed, the government had been assured of more favourable treatment if they ensured this. Unfortunately Badoglio had managed to make a spectacular mess of such plans when the armistice had been finally announced the previous September.
Admittedly, Badoglio and the non-Fascist government had found themselves in a very troublesome position during the forty-five days between Mussolini’s dismissal and the announcement of the armistice. As German troops had begun to pour into the north of Italy, they had been all too aware that if they turned on their ally, they could expect the full wrath of a jilted partner. But equally, they had realised their future position might be much improved if they could be seen to have helped the Allies. Judging which side to back had proved an extremely thorny problem, and so throughout most of August they had earnestly avowed their unswerving loyalty to Germany, whilst secretly negotiating peace terms with the Allies.
No one, apart from Kesselring, had been fooled by any promises from the Italians, however. The Allies, without ever revealing their hand, had allowed Badoglio to believe they had a far larger invasion force than was the case; they had also agreed to send in the US 82nd Airborne Division to help the Italians secure Rome. Had the Italians known that Clark’s Salerno invasion would see only three landing divisions and two close behind – rather than fifteen as they had been led to believe – they might never have signed at all. Nor had the Allies allowed the Italians to know the timing of the Salerno landings. Consequently, when Eisenhower had made his own announcement of the Italian surrender on the afternoon of 8 September and then sent a signal to Badoglio to do likewise by 8 p.m. that same day, it had caught them completely off guard. They had been expecting the invasion to be as much as a week later.
This had left the Italians in the position of their worst nightmare. Although they had been due to become ‘co-belligerents’, they had not had time to organise their armed forces properly. Badoglio had further complicated matters by failing to tell the Italian armed forces to begin fighting the Germans; instead, he merely told them they should no longer fight the Allies, which was not the same thing at all. Moreover, the Allies’ plan to drop the 82nd Airborne into Rome had been shelved just as the paratroopers were being loaded onto their planes. Badoglio had realised with mounting horror that they could not possibly expect to defend Rome. A far more realistic expectation had been that they would soon be rounded up, along with the King, and most probably shot for their perceived treachery.
With this in mind, fleeing to safety had seemed a better option than martyrdom. ‘For me, one question was of capital importance and overmastered all the others,’ wrote Badoglio; ‘that was the necessity to maintain at all costs a close and continuous contact with the Allies, so that the armistice might continue in operation.’ If the government remained in Rome, he reasoned, this could not happen. And so, the following day, 9 September, Badoglio, King Vittorio Emanuele III and the royalist government had fled the capital, first to Pescara and then on to Bari on the southern Adriatic coast, far, far away from the fighting.37
Whatever their motives, the flight from Rome had been appallingly handled and had left the country rudderless. Gripped by panic and fearing for his life, Badoglio had failed to keep a clear head. In the early hours of 9 September, he had even issued orders to all Italian military headquarters not to ‘take the initiative in attacking the Germans’. This had hardly been helpful to their new allies, especially since around Rome the Italians had been numerically superior to the Germans, and in the Ariete Division had had their best-armed units led by General Raffaele Cadorna, a highly experienced commander. How effective the Italian forces could have been against the Germans will never be known, but there were plenty of people who saw both the armistice and the abandonment of Rome as terrible acts of treachery and betrayal, including many of the officers and men surrounding Eugenio Corti in the Royal Army; their disenchantment had played its part in the breakdown of authority and discipline.
Finally, in his haste to flee, Badoglio had also completely forgotten to take Mussolini from his captivity on Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi Mountains and hand him over to the Allies as had been agreed. Instead, on 12 September, 120 crack German paratroopers had sprung him without a shot being fired and flown him, via Vienna, to Munich and then to an audience with Hitler himself.
If the Allies had taken a pretty dim view of the fighting qualities of the Italians, then this was doubly so in the opinion of the Germans, and the ease with which they had disarmed the vast majority of the Italian armed forces in the days that followed the armistice had only confirmed that opinion. Indeed, the Germans had been primed and ready and no sooner had the surrender been announced than Operation AXIS had been put into swift effect. German officers had reached the majority of Italian barracks within a few hours of the news of the armistice with instructions for the Italians to co-operate or else face German fire. A number of telephone lines had been cut to isolate the Italians further and misleading propaganda had been hastily spread about.
Cosimo Arrichiello, a twenty-three-year-old soldier based in northern Italy, had witnessed this utter confusion first hand. Brought up a good Catholic, he had gone to bed on the night of 8 September and had prayed hard that God would save Italy and especially those in the south around Naples, where he had been brought up and where much of his family still lived. He had also asked the Lord to restore peace and stability, not just in Italy but around the whole world. Having done this, he had felt better and had been dozing off to sleep when he heard a bugle. Glancing sleepily at his watch, he had seen it was half past eleven at night – perhaps, he had thought, it was an air raid. Within moments he and his colleagues had been ordered to hurry downstairs. Bleary-eyed, Cosimo and his fellow soldiers at Pellizzari barracks had fallen in, whereupon the captain, in an emotional voice, told them that the Italian government had signed an armistice with the Allies. ‘This is no time for rejoicing,’ he had warned them, however. ‘This is not the end of the war. We have a German army in Italy, which is determined to fight the Allies at any cost, and this will not make our lives easier.’ With that, they had been ordered back to bed.38
Cosimo’s feeling of relief at the news had been mixed with a sense of bewilderment which was in no way assuaged the following day. At dawn they had been ordered on a march and given emergency rations. After three hours on the road, they were brought to a halt, their mules unloaded and their ageing First World War-era howitzers assembled. Having eaten some lunch in the early afternoon sun, they had then been ordered to pack up once more and return to their barracks. By the evening they were told they were confined to barracks, although rumours had begun to spread that a number of troops garrisoned nearby had already disbanded and left, fearing otherwise that they would be captured by the Germans.
Cosimo had hardly known what to think, although it had begun to occur to him that it might be up to each individual to use his own initiative; certainly the officers had appeared to be in as much turmoil and confusion as everyone else. Shortly after he had gone to bed, a commotion