The BUF had declared itself neutral during the war but many Blackshirts had chosen to fight. The first two RAF pilots to be killed in the war had been Blackshirts. The rest, including Mosley, had been interned. William Joyce, who had been kicked out of the BUF a couple of years before the war, had gone to Germany to broadcast sneering anti-British propaganda as Lord Haw-Haw.
Cortone left me to rejoin his original partisan group near Chiusi and I made my way to Rome. I stayed there doing what I could until the Allies liberated it in June. Reporting to Allied command, I was ordered to attach myself to the Sixth South African Armoured Division right bloody sharp for a special mission.
The Sixth was the most powerful individual formation in Italy because rolled into it were the Guards Brigade Group plus British, Indian, American, Polish and even Brazilian divisions.
I was briefed on my mission by a Major Rampling. Rampling was tough, gnarled. He sat bolt upright behind his makeshift desk although I doubted he’d been to sleep for twenty hours.
My destination was Chiusi. My mission was not assassination, as I had assumed, but protection.
‘Chiusi is currently in German hands but we are expecting a withdrawal any day,’ Rampling said in his upper-class drawl. ‘Your job is to protect a fascist count — Alfonso di Bocci — and his family from partisan reprisals when the town is liberated. He’s been the mayor of the town both before and during the German occupation. The partisans have him marked down as a fascist and a collaborator — both of which are undoubtedly true — but we’re instructed that he is needed for the first Italian post-war government. Winnie, as you may know, doesn’t care whether he is fascist, just so long as he isn’t a Red.’
Two things occurred to me. The first, that once again Mosley’s views were widely shared amongst Britain’s governing elite. The second, that I was undoubtedly going to come into conflict with my travelling companion, Fabbio Cortone.
Three weeks later I was with the 12th Motorized heading for Chiusi. I’d joined the massive convoy a week earlier in Orvieto. The rest of Di Bocci’s family lived there. In heavy rain the convoy headed north, winding its way across hills covered with thick forest. Along a road reduced to a muddy track we came upon the remote village of Allerona, high above the tree line.
It seemed impossible that war should have reached so high, yet the village was in ruins, its inhabitants already sorting rubble for good bricks and stones for rebuilding.
We occupied Chiusi railway station below the town and found about twenty civilians hiding in the cellars. Captain Miller from ‘A’ Company went up the road past a large albergo to reconnoitre the town and returned with half a dozen prisoners.
I was sitting under an olive tree smoking a roll-up when Miller came over to me and squinted down. He was a chubby man with a handlebar moustache that suggested he had joined the wrong service by mistake.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but could you help us with some prisoners we’ve taken. We can’t understand what they’re saying.’
The other officers were wary of me but they knew what a useful linguist I’d turned out to be. I’d started the war proficient in German but by now I could get by in Russian, Polish and Czech. I towered over Miller when I put out the roll-up and got to my feet. I looked at him and he looked away. I knew why. He, like everyone else, thought I was an assassin.
The prisoners were cowed but well fed. Two, neither of them older than eighteen, were wearing snipers’ camouflage jackets and the blue armbands of the Herman GOring Division. The other four were Czech deserters from the 362 Infantry Division. I spoke with them quietly for ten minutes, then went with Miller to see the commander, Major Ian Moore.
‘Their officer deserted the snipers yesterday,’ I reported. ‘They say there are two companies of the Hermann Goring Division in the area. The Czech deserters say they saw thirty Mark IV Panzer tanks north of the town yesterday. Looks like Chiusi is more strongly defended than HQ realizes.’
Chiusi was an irritation to Moore, who was eager to be in on the main push to dislodge the German army from central and northern Italy. He shook his head vigorously.
‘Tanks in such force? No, no. They aren’t going to hang around to defend Chiusi. They’ll be heading north to support Kesselring’s Gothic Line. My intelligence has it there is only a parachute division in the town itself. I intend to have taken Chiusi and be advancing north within forty-eight hours.’
THIRTY-NINE
Victor Tempest exercise book four cont.
At five that evening ‘B’ Company arrived to support our advance on Chiusi. Moore frowned and tutted when I repeated to its commanding officer, Major Arlington, what the deserters had told me about the strength of opposition in the town. Moore gave his own view. Forcefully.
Arlington frowned at me.
‘I tend to agree with Major Moore,’ he said. ‘Chiusi has no strategic value. There is nothing there to warrant defence in depth. We will proceed as planned. I understand, Captain Tempest, that you are in something of a hurry to get there. Do you wish to join us this evening?’
It was a fresh night. As ‘B’ Company moved cautiously up the road, I felt alert and vigorous. I could smell honeysuckle and wet earth, feel the cold wind on my face. I walked lightly, carrying a machine pistol I’d taken from one of the Czech prisoners.
When the Company was within five hundred metres of the town, Arlington sent three patrols ahead to reconnoitre. One got to within ten yards of an Etruscan arch at the entrance to the town before it was challenged by a sentry and quickly withdrew. The other two walked into German posts and came under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire. One man was killed, others wounded.
It was two in the morning. Arlington had the company dig in and rest for a couple of hours. Near dawn he invited me to lead a six-man patrol to observe enemy movements.
The mist lay heavy on the road. I sent two men ahead to act as a listening post. When the mist dissolved with the coming of the dawn, I saw the two men were completely overlooked from a church tower to the right and the tower of an old fort to the left. A couple of minutes later the Germans spotted the exposed soldiers and began rapidly firing down on them. The four of us laid down covering fire as the two men made a dash back down the slope, bullets slashing the air around them.
We withdrew. At six in the morning, I commandeered a bench in the station waiting room. I don’t know how long I slept — possibly only minutes — before I was woken by the deafening roar of the Allied artillery opening up on the town. Ten minutes later there was an ear-splitting explosion and I was thrown off my rudimentary bed. The Germans were responding with concentrated Nebelwerfer and mortar fire on the station.
Nebelwerfers were always alarming. The name suggested they fired smoke mortars but the Germans often used them to fire chemical weapons. These seemed to be delivering smoke and low-grade explosives. For the moment.
I gave up any idea of sleep. I withdrew with other soldiers to the shore of Lake Chiusi and waited there, exhausted but awake, whilst the heavy brigade rolled up: the 11th South African Armoured. The tanks of the Natal Mounted Rifles clanked up the road, but within half an hour were bogged down. They were being pounded by heavy artillery, mortars and anti-tank fire — thickened by Nebelwerfers, of course. Individual tanks on reconnaissance stumbled on to well-protected anti-tank posts or were ambushed by heavily armed roving tank-hunting parties. By noon, with a hard rain falling, the South Africans had retreated.