The CIC and ourselves both had the same job and we did it in more or less the same way. While the ordinary military police were concerned briefly with military matters such as convoy traffic control, drunks, deserters, POW cages, stockades and so on, we dealt with the problems arising from the presence all around our forces — and, in the towns and villages, among them — of large numbers of civilians who, until recently, had been actively or passively on the side of our enemies. Some of them, a few but some, still were. Our main task was to see that, in the forward areas where such things mattered, those who were against us and in a position to do something about it were either removed or neutralized.
Of course things were rarely as simple as that.
If a farmer stole a pair of army boots because his own had gone to hell and he had to start ploughing his land again, was that petty theft or sabotage? Was an old whore wounding a soldier by hitting him in an eye with the heel of a shoe merely defending her democratic right to the rate for the job, or was she giving aid and comfort to the Waffen SS division dug in across the river north of us? And then there were the black marketeers who flogged bottles of a turpentine-like liquid they called peach brandy to the troops in exchange for cartons of army rations. How did you cope with that sort of traffic? By telling the troops that they were ruining their lives?
Well, no. What you did was try to catch the black marketeers, and you did this by checking as constantly as you could on the driver and occupants of every civilian vehicle moving in your area. The CIC used jeeps with two men in them. We used one-man motorcycle patrols.
It was one of my patrols who brought in Carlo.
The first thing I heard of Carlo was the sound of his car, a clapped-out Opel that made more noise than the patrol’s motor-bike. When both engines had been switched off, I heard the corporal telling the owner of the car to stay exactly where he was. The corporal then came down to report.
‘Highly suspicious, this one, sir,’ he said. He called me ‘sir’ because I was by then a Warrant Officer 2nd Class, a sergeant-major. He also handed me a gasoline permit and laissez-passer issued in Naples by AMGOT.
I drew a deep breath and counted silently to ten.
AMGOT — Allied Military Government Occupied Territories — was one of the crosses the army had to bear at that stage of the campaign. AMGOT, it seemed to us, had been recruited by a committee of highly-placed saboteurs from the dregs of those ghastly pools, which both the American and British armies were obliged to maintain, of officers who had been commissioned in haste or ignorance and later rejected by unit after unit as unfit for any sort of responsible duty. Some were just stupid, some were alcoholics, a few were failed crooks and more remarkable, and from our point of view the more dangerous of these, were those amiable, personally charming and often cultivated eccentrics who, having served honourably in peace-time regular armies had, over the years, quietly become gaga without anyone ever having noticed the change. They were more dangerous not only because they were often of quite senior rank, but because many of them tended to hold political views which even Gabriele d’Annunzio might have found reactionary. Their tendency to form warm personal friendships with the former Fascist bosses they had been sent to replace, and also to confirm them in office, caused much resentment in the Allied armies.
Naturally, some of the AMGOT scandals were successfully hushed up. The Town Major in Sicily who used his authority to buy up all the best buildings, including the hotel, at cut prices for his own post-war account, was quietly court-martialled and sent home to serve a short prison term. Only a few ever heard about that. The gasoline-permit racket and the shenanigans that went with it were less easily covered up.
They reached their full absurdity when a CIC patrol on the outskirts of Naples stopped an Italian civilian driver whose car looked unusually well cared for and asked for his permit. The driver responded sullenly. He slowly produced a wallet from his pocket and was about to extract the permit when the CIC man reached in impatiently and took the whole thing. Inside, he found not only the AMGOT permit and a considerable sum of money, but also a Gestapo permit to operate the car issued less than three months previously. The driver was later identified as a senior Fascist Party official who had denounced Badoglio as a traitor for arresting Mussolini, urged his countrymen to stay loyal to the Nazi alliance and, when possible or convenient, stab the invaders in the back. He was on the Allied wanted list. The CIC put him in jail. Twelve hours later he was out, released on the orders of a senior AMGOT official.
This was too much for the CIC, who promptly leaked the story to war correspondents. Questioned by them, the AMGOT spokesman began, not too badly, by admitting the facts and agreeing that the whole affair was absolutely deplorable. But, he continued, they were all men of the world who knew that, in occupied territories where states of emergency existed, occasional compromises, distasteful though some might consider them, had to be made. AMGOT had been given the responsibility of governing the country pro tem, but no one had explained how it was to be governed without the aid of experienced local administrators accustomed to giving orders and seeing that they were obeyed. Where, might we ask, were the democratic administrators willing and able to take over the duties of those he was being urged to discard? We had had serious outbreaks of typhus. Was he now being asked to permit outbreaks of typhoid and cholera because the senior city sanitary department engineer had once been a member of the Fascist Party?
The spokesman had chosen that moment to pause for breath. Unfortunately for him, there had been one correspondent there who particularly disliked rhetorical questions. He was on his feet instantly. But what, he asked, about this man who had been arrested and then released? Was he a senior sanitary engineer? ‘Colonel, is he any kind of a sanitary engineer?’
That was when the spokesman had made his mistake. Instead of continuing to conceal his contempt for the newsmen, he had suddenly let it show.
He had smiled at the questioner. ‘No, my dear sir,’ he had replied sweetly, ‘the gentleman is not a sanitary engineer, but — ‘ a slight pause — ‘I happen to know that he plays an excellent game of bridge.’
Naturally, the whole story was at once censored, but the censors could not stop it spreading by word of mouth. It was at this time that some wag thought up the bitter little joke motto, Amgot mit Uns.
So, all that interested me about Carlo’s gasoline permit and laissez-passer was the name of the officer who had signed it. As the name was unfamiliar, I was unable to tell how much weight the permit-holder might have behind him. Accordingly, I rang signals and asked if they could put me through to CIC Venafro. Signals said that they would try. Venafro was then on the right flank of Fifth Army on the other side of the mountains from us, but signals could sometimes patch me in through HQ Caserta.
I called the corporal to come back down. There was still a faint possibility that he hadn’t made a complete fool of himself.
‘Was he carrying anything in the car?’ I asked.
‘No, sir, just himself. But he’s way off his permitted route, and out of his area as well.’
‘Did you ask him why?’
‘No, need to, sir. Standing orders. He shouldn’t be here.’
Hopeless. You could never persuade that kind of idiot that, in some circumstances, he might get better results by using standing orders as threats rather than by blindly obeying them.