For the time being it did the trick. Carlo was locked in a cave, where he spent the next few days waiting for word from Casalecchio. It gave him time to think. He’d never seen a man cut down before, and the reality of the life he had entered upon began to sink in. ‘Something that up until then had been fundamentally a romantic and ingenuous ideal,’ he noted, ‘had run up for the first time – but not the last – against the harshness of the clandestine fight.’64
Guarding him were two Allied POW escapees, who repeatedly quizzed him about his life, his beliefs and the choice he had made. It soon became clear to Carlo that they believed his story. They also knew that their leader, Lupo, disliked killing, and would avoid taking lives whenever he could. ‘They told me to have faith,’ says Carlo, ‘and that once information had reached headquarters that my story was true, all would be well.’
Three days later, he was finally taken to see the commander, ‘the famous Lupo who provoked fear in Germans and Fascists alike’. Lupo shook his hand and told him the information they had sought was just as Carlo had said. Also there to welcome him was the vice-commander, Gianni Rossi. He was given a Sten gun, five magazines, and two hand grenades and assigned to the company led by a partisan called Golfieri. For better or worse, Carlo was now a member of the ‘Stella Rossa’ – the ‘Red Star’ brigade. There could be no turning back.
‘There were three crystal clear choices,’ says Carlo about his decision to become a partisan. ‘Either go with the Fascists, the Germans, or choose to fight with the partisans.’ In making his choice, however, he had to discard his former life. He was given a new nom de guerre, de rigueur for any partisan: ‘Ming’, the name of a villain in a comic strip called L’Avventuroso, destroyed any means of identification, and cut himself off entirely from his family, a harsh necessity for their safety and his own.
Failure to report for conscription was seen as desertion, and desertion was punishable by death. In reality, such action was comparatively rare – after all, an executed twenty-year old was no use to Kretzschmann’s labour effort. But there were executions. Only a few weeks before, for example, three young men, one of them a nineteen-year-old boy, were shot in Florence for failing to report for military service. Word of such executions spread rapidly, exactly as the Fascists and Germans hoped, and men like Carlo and many others were not prepared to put the threat of execution to the test. But this did not mean they flocked to report for duty. Rather, large numbers fled to the hills and became partisans instead.
* * *
While undoubtedly a large number of men became partisans because of the stark choice that seemed to face them, there were a number who did so from a more pronounced political conviction.
Some forty-five miles to the south-east of Monte Sole, in the mountains of Romagna, south of the city of Forlì, the 8th Garibaldi Brigade of partisans were recovering from a devastating battle against the Germans in which, over Easter, a combined force of more than 10,000 German and Fascist troops had swarmed into the area, trapped the one-thousand-strong 8th Garibaldi Brigade and all but destroyed them.
At the beginning of May, however, the 8th Brigade began reforming once more with around 600 men. The commander of the 2nd Battalion, in an operational area known as the First Zone around the small town of Sarsina, was twenty-year-old Iader Miserocchi, a passionate young man who had already repeatedly cheated death, both in prison and during the Easter battle.
It was often the case in Italy that sons – and daughters – followed the political convictions of their parents, and especially their fathers. This was certainly the case with Iader, whose father had always been vehemently anti-fascist. Iader, the second of four sons, followed his father’s example. As someone who was strongly against the war, he only very reluctantly joined the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, when he was called up in 1942, and then, when his squadron was posted to Libya, he refused to go, claiming illness. Promptly arrested, he was sent to a military hospital in Bologna, where, by good fortune, he met a doctor who had served with his father in the First World War. The doctor chastised him, but agreed to help, declaring Iader unfit for active service and citing a ‘varicose problem’.
With that, Iader returned home to the ancient city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast. So many men were away that he managed to get plenty of labouring work. It was during this time that he joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party – the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) – a deeply illegal organisation. It was with a sense of mounting despair that he had witnessed German troops flooding into Italy that summer, and following the armistice, he was denounced by a neighbour for being ‘a Red’. On 14 September, six days after the armistice, his house was searched by German soldiers, his papers confiscated and his books and belongings destroyed.
Armed resistance was an inevitable next step for him, although initially the rebels in Ravenna had been poorly organised and largely ineffective. On 12 November, Iader and some others had started lobbing grenades into an RSI officer training school. Caught in the floodlights, Iader found himself being arrested by one of his former classmates from school and was flung into prison. Held there for forty-five days, he suffered nine days of twenty-four-hour interrogations, eight days without food, and a beating every two hours. His cell was big but had no furniture at all. Next door, a tap was kept running continually so that the floor of Iader’s cell was permanently wet and he had no means of keeping dry. Eventually he took a shutter off one of the window hinges and lay on that. ‘I was beaten even more for doing that,’ he recalls.
Eventually, Iader could stand it no longer, and so wrote a declaration that he was a member of the Communist Party and that he would never, ever adhere to the RSI. In doing so, he knew he was signing his own death warrant. ‘There was no other way out for me,’ he explains. ‘I was too ill to carry on in there. I had a very high temperature and could no longer continue with the torture.’
His family were informed that the following day he would be shot and then hanged in the main square in Ravenna as an example to others. The man charged with his execution was called Zanelli, a senior Fascist from nearby Faenza with a reputation for ruthlessness and as a torturer. Iader was taken from the prison and driven towards the town square. However, he then shocked Zanelli by reeling off a list of names of anti-fascists and draft dodgers whom he knew the Fascist had had imprisoned, tortured and even executed. ‘What happens to me will happen to you,’ Iader had told him. ‘I have plenty of friends. We know your movements and you will be killed.’
Alarmed by these threats, Zanelli began to dither, driving Iader around Ravenna. Iader continued his defiance, demanding a trial and pointing out places where Zanelli and his henchmen had murdered civilians. Eventually, Zanelli ordered the driver to slow the car, clearly hoping Iader would try and make a run for it, so that they could then shoot him as he tried to escape. ‘Of course, I wasn’t going to fall for that,’ says Iader. Zanelli had taken fright, and sensing Iader was not making idle threats eventually took him back to Ravenna prison, rather than carry out the execution.
There Iader remained another month, jailed with a number of other, mostly older, political prisoners, who looked after him and helped him regain some of his strength. Eventually, at Zanelli’s bequest, he was taken to the police station and questioned by a Fascist official and a judge. No sooner had the grilling begun than the air-raid siren rang out and bombs began to fall on the city. In great haste, the judge pronounced that he was either to join up or join the Organisation Todt. Understandably keen to hurry for cover, the judge bailed him on the understanding he report the following day to the Questura. Iader did no such thing. Instead, through the help of local Communists, he headed to the mountains of Romagna, south of Mussolini’s birthplace,