The Pope at War, page 33
Seeing the cardinal’s reluctance, Bastianini stressed the danger the Vatican would face if a defeated Italy were at the mercy, as he put it, of “a coalition of communist forces in league with the anti-papists and Protestants.” The cardinal raised his eyes and pointed with his hand to the ivory crucifix on his desk. “Yes, we are in God’s hands.”
In the end, Maglione agreed to furnish the envoy with the documents and assured him he would inform the pope of the plan, although he added that he doubted it could succeed. The British and Americans had repeatedly made known their opposition to negotiating with Italy’s Fascist government. If that objection were raised, replied the undersecretary, Fummi would have a ready reply. The alternative to such a negotiation would be a “Russified” Italy and the end of Christian civilization in Europe.
Two days later Fummi appeared at the Vatican, where his papers were waiting for him. As the cardinal had predicted, his mission would go nowhere.[14]
* * *
—
Over the past months, Mussolini had been receiving a series of police reports detailing popular anger at the corruption surrounding his lover’s family. Clara’s brother, Marcello, was constantly getting into trouble with his shady business schemes, taking advantage of his government connections. His most recent escapade involved using contacts in Spain to organize an international trade in contraband gold. Clara’s father’s column in the local newspaper and her younger sister Miriam’s acting career—she had gotten her first starring role in the Italian film The Ways of the Heart the previous year—were both thought to be the product of the Duce’s influence. Meanwhile, the source of the family’s income for their lavish spending was generating much unwelcome speculation. Edda constantly complained to her father about the affair. Indeed, she had gone so far as to persuade a friendly member of the government to compile a dossier documenting the illicit dealings of Clara’s brother, which she brought to her father. “The woman will be liquidated, and all these swindles will be over,” Mussolini assured his favorite child. There followed a series of half-hearted attempts by the Duce to end his affair with Clara.
Early in May Mussolini ordered the police official stationed at the back entrance of Palazzo Venezia not to allow Clara to come in. Shocked when the policeman barred her way, she protested loudly but failed to convince the officer to admit her. Back home, she took to her weapon of choice, her pen, and wrote her lover a scathing letter: “You have tried to free yourself from me in the most brutal and definitive manner, creating a scandal…. You have treated me like a thief and a prostitute.” She would die, she said, “crushed by the pain forever.” Clara’s ever-protective mother wrote her own letter to the Duce. She told him not to believe the calumnies that Ciano, Edda, and others had directed at Claretta, as she called her, for her daughter’s love for him knew no bounds. “Claretta’s life lies in your hands.”[15]
Mussolini had put Clara under police surveillance, not least because of his suspicion she was cheating on him. But in the murky world of the secret police, the surveillance came not only at Mussolini’s direction but also on the order of others who found it profitable to gain more information on the Duce’s second family.
Shortly after noon on July 15, 1943, offering some pretext for his visit, a general of the intelligence services arrived at the Petaccis’ garish family home on Monte Mario. A crystal facade covered the entire ground floor of the enormous house, making the structure appear, observed the general, “like a large box sitting on a bar of ice.” His report offers a glimpse of what life was like at the Petacci mansion, built with funds widely believed to have been funneled from the country’s coffers by one of Mussolini’s enablers. After a family servant succeeded, with difficulty, in pushing open the massive crystal sliding door, the general was ushered into the vast living room, graced with twenty plush chairs, a grand piano, and a harp. “On one wall,” he observed, was “an incredibly ugly picture of an ugly girl.” All the floors in the house were marble. Told that Clara would receive him in her bedroom, he was able to offer a detailed description of its opulence, not failing to mention the fact that the attached bathroom was entirely constructed in black marble. On the bedroom wall was a large color photo of Mussolini, alongside a cabinet filled with a great quantity of medicines. Clara confided in him, he reported archly, that she suffered “from many imaginary illnesses.”[16]
Mussolini’s tempestuous relations with his lover came at a dramatic time for him. Italians were suffering, making do with rationed pasta, bread, and other foodstuffs. There was widespread discontent as people found themselves caught between the Anglo-American forces on the march and a distrustful but powerful German ally. Police reports told the Duce of efforts being made to convince the king to depose him. Two months earlier Clara herself, his staunchest defender, had warned him of the threat posed by Marshal Badoglio and the other generals: “Your general staff is a nest of filthy snakes.” She accused Edda and her husband of betraying him in league with Victor Emmanuel, or the “dwarf king,” as she called him.
On July 18, following the third time Clara was refused entry to Palazzo Venezia, she renewed her warnings: “If you fall like a Myth, like God, the only thing left for me to do will be to kill myself.” Her desperation stemmed not only from her exclusion but from her well-founded suspicion that her Ben was seeing other women. “You have the power of life or death over me,” she wrote in her typically melodramatic style. “The sentence must be worthy of our love.” Two days later she wrote again. “I would like to kill Ambrosio, Badoglio…Cavallero, the whole Military Command and all the ministers who are betraying you myself…. Save yourself…react, take supreme decisions, kill if necessary.”[17]
As Italian soldiers in Sicily were fleeing from battle, jettisoning their uniforms along the way, and Allied troops were beginning their rapid march across the island, a delegation of Mussolini’s longtime Fascist colleagues—Bottai, Bastianini, and Farinacci among them—took the unprecedented step of going together to Palazzo Venezia to press on him the precariousness of their situation and call for a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council. They found the Duce looking better than he had in a long time, but, as they regaled him with accounts of the disaster that was then unfolding, he listened in silence. “All right,” he responded, “I’ll convoke the Grand Council. In the enemy camp they’ll say that it’s being held to discuss surrender. But I’ll convene it.” He dismissed them without further comment. It would be the first time the council had met in over three years.[1]
Operation Husky had caught Hitler by surprise, for he had thought Sardinia the more likely Allied landing site. With only two German divisions in Sicily, and reports of Italian soldiers running from battle, the Führer was informed that the island’s defenses could not long hold. Alarmed, he asked Mussolini to confer with him immediately, even offering to meet in Italy. Their encounter north of Venice at Feltre, not far from the Austrian border, would be the last time Hitler set foot on Italian soil. On July 19 both men flew into the Treviso airport and then traveled another hour by car to the villa that had been reserved for their rendezvous.
Mussolini’s conceit that these were meetings of equals, longtime comrades, continued to be pushed by the Italian propaganda mill, but for the Duce they had become scenes of humiliation, as he sat through his erstwhile acolyte’s lengthy harangues. This time was no different, as Hitler, looking pallid, spoke uninterruptedly for two hours, like a man possessed. He proposed that the poorly functioning Italian military come under German command. Mussolini, only sporadically able to follow what he was saying, sat on the edge of a chair too wide and too deep for him, his hands folded patiently over his crossed knees. The Italian military entourage that the Duce had brought with him, men whose German language skills were rudimentary at best, understood even less. At times, Mussolini seemed close to dozing off, but as Hitler’s shrill tirade turned to Italy, he came back to life. Every so often he nervously passed his right hand over his mouth while his left hand briefly rubbed the pain radiating from his belly.[2]
The news that reached the Duce in the middle of the summit could not have helped his ability to pay attention. As the two dictators were in their cars headed for Feltre, American and British warplanes flying from Tunis and Malta had appeared over Rome and begun dropping bombs, in a daylight attack aimed at the city’s railyards and airport. Rome had been warned. At midnight the previous day, British planes had appeared over Rome, triggering antiaircraft fire from the ground while red flares and tracer bullets lit up the sky. As the Allied diplomats housed at the Vatican guesthouse ran outside to see the spectacle, they could hear the nuns in the nearby chapel raise their voices in prayer. What rained down on the city that night, though, was not bombs but leaflets warning that Rome would be bombed the next day and urging residents to remain far from the railyards and airfields.[3]
Seven hundred Romans would be killed in the Allied assault, sixteen hundred injured, and the homes of many more left in ruins. The first bombs fell at eleven a.m., the last bomber leaving Rome’s cloudless skies four hours later. Over five hundred Allied planes took part in the attack. They encountered little, wholly ineffective antiaircraft fire. A handful of Italian fighter planes initially flew up to meet them but quickly turned around rather than face obliteration. According to Eisenhower’s report the next day, 769 tons of bombs were dropped, yet “no damage is visible to historic or religious buildings except that preliminary interpretation of photographs indicate that the roof of church on edge of bombing area damaged, but strong possibility this resulted from blast rather than bomb strike.”[4]
While Roosevelt had long worried about the public relations disaster bombing Rome might cause, and the propaganda coup for the Axis powers that the pope’s threatened denunciation could bring, his British counterpart had few compunctions. When told that the bombing of Rome had begun, Churchill was delighted. “Good. And have we hit the Pope?” he quipped. “Have we made a hole in his tiara?” According to Pirelli, the Duce’s first comment on the bombing after his return to the city the next day was bittersweet: “And so ends the myth of papal Rome.”[5]
* * *
—
At the sound of the first bombs exploding across the Tiber, Pius XII went to his window, where he could see the swarm of planes against the clear blue sky and smoke rising from below. Later in the day, eager to show himself to his wounded flock, he ordered a Vatican car to be readied. Three hours after the last plane flew away, the pope made his way through the rubble-strewn streets to view the scenes of destruction.
What most drew the pontiff’s attention were reports that one of Rome’s major basilicas had been destroyed. San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, one of the seven destinations for Catholic pilgrims in Rome, lay not far from the railyards and, along with many of the buildings nearby, was heavily damaged. As the pope’s slow-moving car drew near the devastated basilica, people recognized the white-robed pontiff and began to follow along. By the time the car stopped and the pope opened the door, a growing throng of traumatized Romans surrounded him, hailing the man of peace. Unable to enter the church, whose facade had been largely destroyed and its roof caved in, the pontiff sank to his knees and recited a prayer for the dead. Rising to his feet and turning to the crowd, he called on them to pray “so that the Lord turns this pain into a blessing for you and for all of Italy.” As he raised his arms in benediction, hundreds of Romans dropped to their knees.[6]
On Mussolini’s return to the city, the German ambassador went to see him to express his solidarity. “You see, Mackensen,” the Duce responded, “I believe that the ruins of the Basilica of San Lorenzo will prove to be fatal to our enemies. It may be that from this very event their defeat has begun, and that from now on the wheel of fortune will turn in the opposite direction.” Unhappy to learn of the popular adulation that had greeted the pope on the city’s streets, Mussolini had initially ordered the newspapers not to publicize the pope’s visit to the scene of destruction. But the dictator’s resolve quickly crumbled, as he realized the propaganda value of featuring the pope’s anguished appearance amid the rubble of the sacred Catholic site.[7]
The day after the attack, Mussolini’s own paper led the way, with a large front-page photo of the damaged basilica, its banner headline reading “The Pope Kneels on the Ruins of the Destroyed Basilica of San Lorenzo.” No mention was made of the train station, railyards, or military airfield that were hit, for according to the paper, the Allies’ aim was destruction of Rome’s churches and homes. A subtitle referred to the “profanation” of the Verano cemetery, also hit by the bombs: “The impiety of the gangsters of the air…did not even spare the dead.” Another story told in loving detail of the pope’s arrival at the devastated basilica: “The Pope saw all of this, and his heart wept, while from his trembling lips a prayer poured out.” Afterward the pope let those close to him kiss his hand. As he drove away, the article concluded, in an embellishment that few but the most credulous Romans could have believed, “Those present erupted in a single enthusiastic shout: Viva l’Italia!”
Alongside the news article, Mussolini’s paper carried an editorial: “With Judaic impudence, Roosevelt had promised, in one of his special ‘messages’ to the Pontiff, that in the course of the increased air actions against Italian cities the churches would be spared.” It detailed the great religious significance of the basilica that the Allies had destroyed, recalling that it was the resting place of many of Pius XII’s papal predecessors. “The Pontiff did not let much time pass after the last wave of the assassins to leave his distant residence to visit the place that had been hit. The Christian and Roman greatness of this gesture will cause the meretricious man responsible and his clique of Jews…to sink into the slime of shame that will remain indelible for centuries.”[8]
* * *
—
Following through on his oft-repeated threat to protest the bombing of Rome, the pope directed his secretary of state to send a letter to all the principal nuncios and apostolic delegates of the Allied and neutral countries informing them of the bombing and of the pope’s “bitterness” at the devastation it had wrought in “the city that is the center of Catholicism.” The message concluded with the pope’s request that Catholics make their displeasure known: “The Holy Father would like to hope that this Episcopate, clergy, and Catholic people show that they share in such great unhappiness.”[9]
The pope’s own public protest came in the form of a letter addressed to the cardinal vicar of Rome and published not only in the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano but in Italy’s Fascist newspapers as well. After reminding the cardinal he had long lamented the carnage and ruin that war inflicted on innocent populations and on religious and cultural monuments, he then turned to his repeated efforts to spare Rome from bombardment: “But, alas, this so reasonable hope of Ours has been deceived. What we so greatly deprecated has now happened.”
Pius XII had felt it his duty to speak out should Rome be attacked, and indeed he had told the Allies so often he would do so that he could hardly remain silent now, but his words read as uttered more in sorrow than in anger. Osborne, the British envoy, deemed the pope’s response “singularly mild.” Likewise, Myron Taylor reported to Roosevelt that the pope had intentionally used moderate language so that it might not be used against the Allies by the Nazis or Fascists.[10]
Despite the pope’s caution, the Fascist press did its best to cast his letter as a ringing condemnation of the Allies’ barbarism and anti-Catholicism. “The Bombing of Rome: The Pontiff’s Condemnation Brands the Aggressors with Eternal Infamy,” read Farinacci’s headline. The article recounted how the “Anglo-Saxons” in London and Washington were all the more pleased with the bombing “because it struck, simultaneously, the capital of both Italy and of Catholicism.”[11]
The Jesuit Father McCormick, among the few prominent anti-Fascist clerics in Rome, was unimpressed by the pope’s letter. He noted in his diary that it made no mention of the targets of the Allied bombing. “But why did not the Vat[ican] let the world know more clearly, honestly, that the chief offenders are those who have delivered Rome over to the enemy by using it as a military centre!…There seems to be no courage for saying anything that might offend and show up Ger[mans] and It[alians] in a bad light.”[12]
* * *
—
The king could not wait much longer. On Thursday, July 22, news came that Palermo had fallen to the Allies. What resistance the American and British troops were meeting was coming largely from the German troops on the island, and embarrassing stories of Allied soldiers being greeted enthusiastically by Italian civilians were doing nothing to encourage the king to tie his fate to the Duce’s any longer. Men who had been central to the operations of the Fascist regime were now desperately looking for a way to distance themselves from it and begin the process that, over the next years, would rewrite their personal histories.
Among them was forty-eight-year-old Dino Grandi, one of the early Fascist bosses and president of the lower house of parliament. On the day Palermo fell, he met with Giuseppe Bottai, until recently minister of education. The two looked over a draft resolution Grandi had prepared for the meeting of the Fascist Grand Council planned for that Saturday. In light of the unfolding military disaster, the resolution called for returning authority over the military to the king, a constitutional role that Mussolini had taken from him earlier in the war. While the resolution called for restoring the authority of other institutions of government, it did not go so far as to ask directly for Mussolini’s removal.[13]
The country’s economic elite, too, were now rapidly deserting the Duce. Emblematic was Alberto Pirelli, who on July 23 met with Duke Pietro d’Acquarone, the king’s right-hand man, to see what the king was planning. Clearly, the industrialist now realized, Mussolini had to go, but the question was how he could be removed without creating dangerous unrest in the country. Although d’Acquarone would not say what the king had decided to do, Pirelli got the clear sense that Victor Emmanuel was finally about to act. It would be important, advised the industrialist, that the new prime minister, most likely a general, announce that Italy was continuing the war on Germany’s side. If Italy was to negotiate with the Allies, it should do so on behalf of its Axis partners as well. That way, if the Allies were to present reasonable peace conditions and the Germans rejected them, Italy could announce its withdrawal from the war without being open to accusations of betrayal.
