Inferno - Max Hastings [293]
Full of fear, she asked what they wanted, to receive an unexpected answer: “ ‘Please—wouldn’t the children sing for us?’ The children sing O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht (which they learned last Christmas)—and tears come into the men’s eyes. ‘Die Heimat—it takes us back to die Heimat!’ So they climb into their lorry and drive away.” Less than two weeks later, the area was occupied by French colonial troops. Origo wrote bitterly: “The Goums have completed what the Germans begun. They regard loot and rape as the just reward for battle, and have indulged freely in both. Not only girls and young women, but even an old woman of eighty has been raped. Such has been Val d’Orcia’s first introduction to Allied rule—so long and so eagerly awaited!”
Allied forces sustained a sluggish advance up the peninsula, but from the summer of 1944 onwards, it was a source of some dismay to Alexander’s soldiers that Mediterranean operations and sacrifices commanded diminishing attention at home. “We are the D-Day dodgers in sunny Italee,” they sang, “always on the vino, always on the spree.” The world saw that the outcome of the war hinged upon events much farther north, in France and Germany. But the Italian front occupied the attention of one-tenth of Hitler’s ground forces, which would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern Front or in France. Allied air bases in Italy made possible a heavy and effective bomber assault on Germany’s Romanian oilfields. It is hard to imagine how the campaign might have been accelerated, avoided or broken off. But it yielded neither glory nor satisfaction to those who fought, or to the hapless inhabitants of the battlefield.
3. Yugoslavia
THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN prompted a surge of British enthusiasm, with tepid American acquiescence, for raising the tempo of anti-Axis operations in neighbouring Yugoslavia. Throughout the war, Churchill embraced every nation which displayed a willingness to join the struggle against Hitler: this was a fundamental tenet of his foreign policy, lent urgency in 1940–41 by Britain’s desperate circumstances. The consequence was to make bedfellows of some societies with which the democracies had little or nothing in common, of which Yugoslavia was a striking example. From 1943 onwards, its accessibility from Italy, together with the wider strategic significance of the Balkans, made it the focus of many British hopes.
Granted statehood in 1918 amid the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, the country was an ill-assorted ragbag of mutually hostile ethnic groups and conflicting ideologies, ruled as a dictatorship until 1941 by Prince Paul on behalf of the teenage King Peter. Most of the country was extraordinarily primitive. A communist partisan described a typical peasant community: “Many had never been even in the nearby towns. [The women] wore hand-woven dresses open down to the navel, so that their breasts flopped out. They greased their hair with butterfat, parted it in the middle, then tucked it up over their foreheads. Their vocabulary was meagre, except concerning livestock and the like … The men were on a markedly higher level than the women, for they had seen something of the world in the army, on jobs and through trade.”
“The country was very, very wild indeed,” wrote Capt. Charles Hargreaves, who served among the Serbs as an SOE officer, “and there