The Pope at War, page 22
“That would not be in your interest,” Ciano replied, “because he has recently been talking to me, in a tone I have never heard before, in a rather violent way against the Vatican.” Ciano explained that he was doing his best to calm his father-in-law down. “I do it happily for you as a fascist, as an Italian, and as a Catholic, and I would like to have the Holy Father know it. However, at moments like this it becomes difficult to do even for me.” What had prompted the Duce’s ire, said Ciano, was a recent police informant report claiming that a clique revolving around the director of L’Osservatore Romano was secretly conspiring against the regime. It would be well to be careful, Ciano warned. “I wouldn’t want the Duce to take some disagreeable action. You know his style when he intervenes.”[5]
Ciano’s mood was not helped by the fact that his father-in-law, in an effort to tamp down public grumbling about the war, had decided to send the government’s ministers to the front as ordinary military officers. Ciano himself was only partially spared, ordered to go south to the air force headquarters in Bari. A police informant from inside Vatican City offered a glimpse of the souring public mood: “Catholic circles are becoming increasingly impressed by the continually growing cost of living and the difficulty of finding many basic foodstuffs. Naturally all this leads to a pronounced unhappiness and sharp criticisms against the Government’s policies.”[6]
With signs that public support for the war was weakening, Father Gemelli, rector of the Catholic University of Milan, published a proposal to build up support for the war effort in the national magazine devoted to the nation’s clergy. He called on every parish in the country to hold a special Mass on Sunday, February 2, 1941, to pray for Axis victory. Accepting the sacrifices imposed by the war, and praying regularly, declared Gemelli, “make us await with faithful certainty the hour of God and brings closer the dawn of victory.” The country’s Catholic newspapers offered enthusiastic support for the initiative, as did Italy’s cardinals. The resulting ceremonies, held in churches and cathedrals throughout the nation, were deemed a great success, as parishioners crowded into the pews behind the black-shirted local luminaries of the Fascist Party who filled the front rows.[7]
Yet the war, or at least the Italian part of it, continued to go badly. In early February British ships entered the waters outside Genoa uncontested and, with their planes circling overhead to identify targets, subjected the port city to sustained naval bombardment. Genoa’s historic cathedral came close to being destroyed when an errant projectile pierced its muraled wall and skidded to a stop unexploded along the marble floor. Another shell hit one of the city’s hospitals, killing seventeen inside. Although half of the projectiles fell harmlessly into the ocean, twenty-nine of the fifty-five ships anchored there were damaged or sunk. In all, well over a hundred genovesi were killed, and many more injured. The propaganda ministry told the nation’s newspapers to omit any details of the destruction. They were encouraged instead to feature stories about President Roosevelt’s alleged Jewish ancestry.[8]
Although news of the bombardment of Genoa was kept out of the Italian press, it circulated through the country, further depressing public morale. Mussolini uncharacteristically acknowledged the setbacks in a speech later in the month, but he offered hope that the country’s fortunes were about to improve, no doubt based on the messages he was getting from Hitler that help was on the way. Indeed, in mid-February the German general Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” arrived in North Africa and launched an offensive against the British. There is “a growing conviction,” Ambassador Phillips wrote President Roosevelt, “that the war will be over by September next with a complete German victory.”
Recognizing that Italy’s fate depended on its obtaining help from Germany, public opinion toward the German troops who were increasingly streaming into the country was also changing. The Germans were helping shore up Italy’s defenses and stopping in the country on their way to North Africa. It seemed, reported the American ambassador, “that the Italians, rather than resenting their presence, are beginning to be grateful to them for helping them out of a bad situation.” Pius XII, too, was hosting more German military men, who were eager to boast of having had an audience with the pope. “On February 12,” read one police informant report from Vatican City, “the Holy Father received a group of German officers and soldiers in private audience. He met with them for a while speaking with them in German. This audience, like the other one a few days ago, has made a great impression in the Vatican, and is being commented on favorably as one of the many signs of a German-Vatican rapprochement.”[9]
But in his audience with Pius XII in early March, the French chargé d’affaires found the pope more depressed than ever about what the future would bring. The combination of German air supremacy and its lethal submarine blockade was proving, or so it seemed, fatal to the British cause. The likelihood that the United States could or would intervene in time to save Britain seemed small. With spring approaching, a German landing on British soil appeared imminent.[10]
While the pope despaired, Italy’s churchmen continued to do their part to bolster their countrymen’s support for the war. In late February, in one of countless such events taking place through the country, Rome’s Catholic Action University chapter sponsored a Mass on behalf of its members who had been called up for military service. In his sermon, the officiating priest prayed that “the God of Armies smile on and bring very soon the most radiant victory of Italian arms, which will bring peace and justice to Europe and to the world.”[11]
Each spring Italy’s ambassador to the Vatican closely monitored the Easter messages the country’s bishops sent their flocks.[12] Of all those sent by the bishops of Italy’s 284 dioceses that year, reported Attolico, only two were deemed problematic. And of the Easter messages sent by the pastors of the country’s twenty-seven thousand parishes, only about ten were judged objectionable.[13] At the same time, the ambassador called attention to the recent patriotic initiative by Bologna’s archbishop, Cardinal Giovanni Nasalli Rocca. The cardinal had proposed holding regular masses in all the churches of his archdiocese “for our glorious dead who sacrificed their lives for us and for our well-being.” Catholics, in this time of war, explained the archbishop, should see themselves as soldiers “in the Christian militia.” He had concluded by invoking the pope’s call for a “new order.”[14]
The nation’s largest circulation newspaper, Corriere della Sera, featured the Easter message of another, albeit less prominent, bishop, whose calls to rally to the Fascist cause could hardly have been more strident: “The Man sent by God who now guides the Fatherland’s destiny was the first one to understand the need for extending a friendly hand to Germany in order to see so many injustices righted.” What was so regrettable, the bishop lamented, was that so many Christian nations had allowed themselves to hold out a hand “to the descendants of those Jews who had crucified Jesus.” In “the new European world,” he vowed, there would be no place for Jews.[15]
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Mussolini had initially dismissed his generals’ worries about the country’s limited war supplies by telling them the fighting would be over in a matter of months. Now, with the likelihood it would drag on for some time, reports of shortages kept streaming in. With bronze among those resources in short supply, he turned his eye to the country’s seemingly limitless number of church bells. Conscious of the delicacy of the request, the government devised a plan to proceed incrementally, where possible finding churches with multiple bells, so that some might be taken while leaving at least one in each to ring. In any case, the bells of the nation’s cathedrals were to be spared. Prefects were instructed to meet with the local bishop or archbishop in each province to coordinate a census of the bells and prioritize their removal. Authorities were then to report on the weight and composition of each of them, and to list those that the bishops proposed to exclude, along with their rationale for leaving them in place. Lists were to be sent to Rome by the end of March 1941.
In early February, after discussing the matter with Cardinal Maglione, the Italian ambassador drafted what he described as “the basis for a possible agreement between state and ecclesiastical authorities regarding the contemplated requisition of the church bells for use in the war.”[16] Maglione had told him that if it proved necessary to take the bells for this purpose—which of course he hoped it would not—it was important that in each case an agreement be reached with the local bishop to determine which bells were to be selected. It would be best, the cardinal suggested, to begin by reaching agreements with the archdioceses presided over by a cardinal, for once that was done, it would be easier to convince the bishops who came under their authority to go along. Maglione drew the line at Rome. No church bell could be taken from the city whose bishop was the pope himself. The cardinal had one last request: no public notice should be made of the Vatican’s collaboration in crafting the measures. Over the following two years, government agents removed more than 13,600 bells from Italy’s churches, to be melted down to make weaponry. Many had been crafted by artisans centuries earlier.[17]
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After a series of Italian defeats at the hands of the British in North Africa, the Axis war there was now turning around thanks to the arrival in February 1941 of Germans troops led by General Rommel. Over the next months, Germany’s Desert Fox would drive the British from the positions they had gained in Libya and capture two top British generals in the process. But the situation in Italy’s prized East African colonies was very different. In declaring war on Britain the previous June, Mussolini seems to have given little thought to the implications for Italian East Africa, as Italy’s colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland were collectively known. In fact, it was completely cut off by enemy forces, its 3,900 kilometers of coast immediately blockaded by superior British naval forces, and its 4,800 kilometers of land border all exposed to attack from British colonies having open supply lines.
In the six weeks from the beginning of the British East African offensive in mid-January to late February, commonwealth troops occupied over six hundred thousand square kilometers of Italian East African territory. The Somali capital of Mogadishu fell to British Commonwealth forces on February 25, Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, on April 1. A month later Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, having been chased from his capital by Italian troops five years earlier, made his triumphant return to Addis Ababa. Italy had begun the fighting with a great numerical advantage, with over 90,000 Italian troops augmented by close to 200,000 indigenous troops, arrayed against approximately 20,000 British troops, mainly coming from the British dominions, India among them. By the end of the fighting, over 15,000 Italians had been killed and many more taken prisoner.[18]
Mussolini would get much better news from the Balkans, as German troops poured in to rescue the embattled Italian forces. With Luftwaffe support, the German army needed only eleven days to conquer Yugoslavia. The country was quickly divided between Rome and Berlin, along with an independent Croatia. Two months later Croatia, under the rule of Ante Pavelic´, champion of Croatian Catholic Fascism, would formally join the Axis. Germany’s Twelfth Army then crossed the border into Greece, occupying Thessaloniki on April 9. Two and a half weeks later German motorcycle troops entered Athens. Although fifty thousand of the British Commonwealth soldiers who had tried to shore up Greece’s defense succeeded in escaping, several thousand others were captured. The ease with which the Germans conquered Greece, after the hapless performance of the Italian military there, made a mockery of Mussolini’s earlier boasts of Fascist military might.[19]
While elsewhere this turn of events was making the Duce an object of ridicule, the same was not true in Italy, thanks in good part to strict government censorship. The American ambassador, writing in mid-April to President Roosevelt, explained, “Since the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Italians have begun to feel greater confidence and of course are not permitted to be aware how little their own forces have done in this connection.” He added that there was a “great deal of ‘wishful thinking’ in government circles,” where people were now convinced that the war would be won by the end of the summer. Romans who, thanks to the presence of the pope, thought they had little reason to fear British bombings themselves, were doing the best they could to forget an unpopular war. Early each evening they filled the city’s bars, theaters, cinemas, and brothels before hurrying home in time for the nightly blackout at eight-thirty p.m.
Although censorship meant that Italians had a distorted picture of the war, returning soldiers brought word of the weakness of their own army and the overwhelming strength of the Germans. But if people were unhappy with the war, they had to be cautious about expressing it openly. “The police are everywhere,” reported the American military attaché in Rome, “especially the plain-clothes-men, who are, as always, the backbone of the local espionage service. Every hotel, restaurant, apartment house, etc. has its police agents. Many telephone lines are tapped and people are naturally afraid to speak freely.” Although Italians feared what the overweening Germans might visit on their country, everyone, reported the American adviser, expected Germany to win the war. The only impact Italians thought American entry would have would be to prolong the misery before that inevitable victory came. At the same time, America’s ambassador in Rome offered his own assessment to President Roosevelt: “Paradoxically enough, Mussolini’s failure in the war has temporarily strengthened his hand; most people feel that Fascism and the Duce are finished but they feel that if they fell they would be replaced by a Nazi régime.”[20]
Indeed, the Fascist system of censorship and surveillance was ramping up. In mid-April the military intelligence service informed Mussolini that all telephone calls coming from Vatican City were being monitored. Bowing to government pressure, the Vatican was itself collaborating in the surveillance, having its own gendarmes spy on the movements of diplomats from enemy countries living in Vatican City.[21] Responding to government protests about Vatican Radio running news stories in some of its foreign broadcasts reflecting unfavorably on the German military, the pope quietly allowed the papal police to spy on the movements of the Jesuits involved in the broadcasts. “As a result of a campaign of menace and intimidation,” Osborne, the British envoy, wrote, “the Secretariat of State issued orders that the Vatican Radio should not mention Germany at all.” Osborne complained to Pius XII, handing him a note arguing that “a policy of appeasement with Hitler led nowhere.” The pope denied having made any agreement with the Axis powers to muzzle Vatican radio, but Osborne did not believe him.[22]
Britain’s envoy might have been even more skeptical had he known that Hitler had a secret channel to Pius XII through Prince Philipp von Hessen, for the pope’s meetings with the Führer’s envoy had not ended with Ribbentrop’s visit a year earlier. Again, these meetings have come to light only with the recent opening of the Vatican archives, but even from these newly available documents, we do not learn why Hitler kept sending the prince to meet secretly with the pope, other than perhaps to string him along and help keep him silent. One of these encounters was arranged, by the usual channel, in late March 1941, and took place in early April. The prince, Cardinal Lauri explained to the pope in passing on the request for the meeting, would as usual be accompanied to the pope’s antechamber by his Italian Order of Malta shadowy go-between, Raffaele Travaglini.[23]
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Belief in the likelihood of Axis victory was widespread in the halls of the Vatican. In late April Harold Tittmann, Roosevelt’s envoy to the Holy See, ran into Monsignor Bernardini, papal nuncio to Switzerland, who was visiting the Vatican. Even if the United States did enter the war, said the nuncio, Germany could not be defeated. It would be better to arrange a compromise peace. Tittmann asked how he, as a churchman, could favor a compromise that would mean a “Hitler-controlled” Europe. Bernardini replied that the Vatican had no reason to be alarmed, for he was “certain that within a few years the Nazi prejudice against Catholics was destined to die out.”[24]
Even those who had been critical of tying Italy’s fate to the Nazis were now trying to get on the Germans’ good side. Emblematic was the artfully worded letter, marked “personal,” that Bernardo Attolico, Italy’s ambassador to the Vatican, sent Hitler’s ambassador in Rome in early May. Attolico, who kept to himself his belief that Hitler was a warmongering madman, wrote, “I listened to the Führer’s speech on the radio yesterday not once but twice. It is the most elevated, most noble one that he has ever given and such as to leave all who hear it an absolutely unforgettable and everlasting impression. Permit me to express, as a simple citizen, the most fervent and heartfelt congratulations.”[25]
Amid the growing certainty of German victory, the pope was unsettled by a troubling rumor. Ribbentrop was said to have told Ciano that once the war ended, the Axis powers should evict the pope from Rome. The new Europe, the German foreign minister was alleged to have said, would have no place for the papacy. Cardinal Maglione immediately summoned the Italian ambassador. Although Attolico dismissed the report as preposterous, he promised to speak to Ciano about it. Ciano then sent his own heated denial.
Still nervous, the pope took the unusual step of making a direct inquiry of the Duce. Knowing of a monk who, as chaplain with the Italian troops in Albania, had spent time with the Duce there, the pope called on him to tell Mussolini how astonished he was to have heard such a report. Mussolini, who was sitting at his desk as the monk recounted the rumor, stood and pounded on it with his fist. “I am astonished too,” he said. The account, he insisted, was a complete fabrication, undoubtedly planted by Italy’s enemies.[26]
