Inferno - Max Hastings [292]
Such Allied excesses, matched by the effects of air and artillery bombardment through the long struggle up the peninsula, ensured that few Italians gained much joy from their “deliverance.” Two soldiers of the 4th Indian Division were chasing a chicken around a farmyard when a window of the adjoining house was thrown open: “A woman’s head appeared, and a totally unexpected English voice called out ‘—— off, and leave my ——ing ’ens alone. We don’t need no liberation ’ere.’ ”
Italy’s surrender precipitated a mass migration of British prisoners of war, set free from camps in the north of the country to undertake treks through the Apennines towards the Allied lines. A defining characteristic of these odysseys, many of which lasted months, was the succour such men received from local people. Peasant kindness was prompted by an instinctive human sympathy, rather than enthusiasm for the Allied cause, and deeply moved its beneficiaries. The Germans punished civilians who assisted escapers by the destruction of their homes, and often by death, yet sanctions proved ineffectual: thousands of British soldiers were sheltered by tens of thousands of Italian country folk whose courage and charity represented one of the noblest aspects of Italy’s unhappy part in the war. Farley Mowat arrived in the country with a contempt for its people, but changed his mind after living among them. “Now it turns out they’re the ones who are really the salt of the earth. The ordinary folk, that is. They have to work so hard to stay alive it’s a wonder they aren’t as sour as green lemons, but instead they’re full of fun and laughter. They’re also tough as hell … They ought to hate our guts as much as Jerry’s but the only ones I wouldn’t trust are the priests, lawyers, and the big shopkeepers, landowners and such.”
The wild Italian countryside and the hospitable customs of its inhabitants prompted desertions from the Allied armies on a scale greater than in any other theatre. The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men “on the trot”—overwhelmingly infantry, because they recognised their poor prospects of survival at the front. Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944–45—the equivalent of two divisions—and around half that number of Americans. These are quite extraordinary figures, which deserve more notice in narratives of the campaign, though it should be noted that official histories set the desertion numbers much lower, partly because they omit those who, by a technically important distinction, were deemed merely to be “absent without leave.” In a rest area behind the front, Lt. Alex Bowlby chanced on a man who had quit his own platoon dining with an Italian family. The errant soldier finished his meal, left the house and stole the bewildered young officer’s jeep before anyone thought to stop him. Amid the chronic discomforts and terrors of the campaign, Bowlby noted that most of his men performed their duties at the edge of mutiny. One would-be deserter removed by the military police shouted back defiantly at his comrades, “I’ll be alive when you’re all fucking dead.” Alexander itched to reintroduce the death penalty as a deterrent, and a British divisional commander, Bill Penney, agreed: “Shooting in the early days would probably have been an effective prophylactic.” But capital punishment was deemed politically unacceptable.
Both the Germans and the Allies