Ortona (8 page)

As Americo grew older, tensions in Ortona also grew. Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was calling ever more men to the services and then the war started. This one was bigger than the one fought in Abyssinia or the undeclared incursion of the army divisions into Spain to assist General Francisco Franco in crushing the godless Republic. As the war spread and finally the Americans joined against Italy, the flow of money and presents from America slowed and then ceased altogether. But there was still the apartment rental and the family lived comfortably enough, even with the growing food shortages that plagued all of Italy as the nation's fortunes worsened with each passing month.
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Antonio Di Cesare, a couple of years older than Americo Casanova, was not so lucky. In 1942, his father had been one of the thousands of conscripted soldiers who surrendered in Africa to the British Eighth Army when Tunisia fell. Antonio's father was sent to a prison camp in South Africa, his meagre soldier's pay stopped coming as Italy fell into chaos, and Antonio's mother and the boy became entirely dependent on assistance provided to the families of prisoners by the International Red Cross. They lived in a little house 400 yards from the southern outskirts of Ortona in a community marked
on no map but known locally as Porta Caldari. Able to grow some vegetables, the small family eked out a difficult life that might have bordered on starvation had it not been for the generosity of their extended family and neighbours. This was particularly true after the Italian government surrendered and the German army moved immediately to occupy most of Italy.
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On July 25, 1943, King Vittorio Emanuele III had accepted the resignation of the head of the government, his Excellency Cavalier Benito Mussolini, after an extraordinary ten-hour session of the Grand Fascist Council demanded that the dictator step aside so that Italy could sue the Allies for peace. Immediately after the king accepted Mussolini's resignation, Il Duce was taken into protective custody. The king then called upon seventy-one-year-old Marshal Pietro Badoglio to form a government, which promptly dissolved the Fascist Party. Until Mussolini's resignation, the German army presence in Italy was concentrated in Sicily, where the Axis forces were attempting to throw back the Allied invasion. On July 30, with the Italian government obviously poised for a surrender to the Allies, Hitler ordered the nation occupied by German infantry and armoured formations.

Throughout August, the Allies and the new Italian government undertook complex and secret negotiations to secure a peace accord that would not only remove Italy with honour from the war but also ensure the Germans did not arrest and remove Badoglio's government from power, replacing it with a puppet administration of its own choosing. Plans were hammered out for a strong Italian army force supported by the American 82nd Airborne Division, which would be parachuted near Rome, to protect the government on the day it was scheduled to announce Italy's surrender.

The date of September 1 was initially agreed upon for the armistice announcement, but it took two more days of secret haggling before the armistice was formally signed. Even then it had yet to be made public because the Italian government was not safe from German reprisal. On September 8, the 82nd Airborne was scheduled to land near Rome, dropping on airports supposed to be secured by Italian troops. But at the last minute, Badoglio radioed the Allies to cancel the operation, claiming that a public announcement of the armistice was impossible, as was the airborne operation, because of the presence of
German divisions in and around Rome. Stunned at first by this reversal in plans, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean, finally responded at 6:30 p.m. by proceeding with a planned broadcast announcing that the Italians had signed an armistice agreement. The Italian government was caught entirely by surprise. When Badoglio's foreign minister burst into his office and told him the news, Badoglio said, “We're fucked.”
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Within a couple of hours of the broadcast, German divisions near Rome began encircling the city. Badoglio, his family, and the Royal Family locked themselves into the main Ministry of War building, while scattered skirmishes broke out between German and Italian troops at the gates of Rome. In the early morning hours of September 9, a convoy of five vehicles fled through Rome's eastern gate onto the highway from the city via Avezzano to Pescara. Having slipped through the tightening German net, Badoglio, King Emanuele, and their families and immediate aides spent a tense day hiding in the small mountain town of Guardiagrele before entering Ortona on the evening of September 10. That night they were taken aboard the Italian corvette
Baionetta
and whisked by sea to Brindisi, which had already been captured by Allied forces. The first the people of Ortona learned of the passage of their king through the community was the discovery the following morning of the vehicles abandoned by the northern mole.
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Only days after the surrender, the International Red Cross aid to the Di Cesare family stopped, as the Germans' tightened occupation of Italy disrupted the operations of the international aid organization. The Di Cesares' situation worsened, but so did that of most of the people of Ortona and all of Italy. As the Germans appropriated the transportation network for their military operations, and Allied aerial bombing began causing extensive damage to communication and transportation systems, normal movement of food and goods became virtually impossible. Each community was forced to draw in upon itself and look to its own limited resources of food and fuel to ensure the survival of its population. But making life more difficult was the absence of young men to work the fields and crew the fishing boats. Most were away, serving in the army, navy, and air force.

The chaos that descended on Italy in the immediate wake of the surrender swept up twenty-eight-year-old Antonio D'Intino. In 1940 he had been called back to duty by the Italian navy, in which he had served from 1933 to 1935. D'Intino, a small, slight man, wanted only to stay on his family's land to the immediate west of Ortona and tend the olives and grapes, to find a good woman, to marry and establish a family. But the war cared little for his dreams, so he reported for duty. Initially he served aboard a destroyer, but by early 1943 Allied blockades had locked the majority of Italian ships in the two major naval harbours at La Spezia and Taranto, so he was set to work transporting naval shells from La Spezia to reinforced underground bunkers in the inland hills.

On September 11, his commander called D'Intino and the rest of the unit together and told them the war was over for the Italian military. “You're on your own now,” the officer said. “If you stay here the Germans will probably imprison you or send you north to work in their factories.”
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He left quickly, without looking back, seeking his own safety. D'Intino and four other men, all from the Adriatic coastal regions of Abruzzo and Molise, decided to try to make their way home. La Spezia was south of Genoa, on the wrong coast, and several hundred miles from Ortona. The better part of two German armies stood between the two places. The men realized the journey would be hard, if not impossible. But they could see no alternative. If they could reach their homes, they might be able to pick up the threads of their lives and avoid capture and forced labour.

Still wearing their naval uniforms, the five managed to catch a train north to Parma, an inland city on the rail line that led to Bologna. From Bologna a line ran direct through Pescara. Arriving in Parma, the five were told by a sympathetic rail official that there were Germans in the city who were picking up anybody wearing a military uniform. The men found some civilians willing to swap a few ragged clothes for the good cloth of the uniforms. They also learned that no civilian trains were running out of Parma to Bologna. They would have to proceed on foot. Sticking to back country roads and trails recommended by peasants, the men slipped through the ever tightening German military net to Bologna. It took a week for them to cover a mere seventy-five miles.

In Bologna, luck was with them as they learned that a civilian
freight train was preparing to depart from a station just south of the city. D'Intino and his friends rushed across country to the station and arrived in time to board the southbound train. Dirty, unshaven, hungry from seven days with barely any food, the men hid in a boxcar and passed a fearful journey as the train rolled slowly down the coast, passing through several cursory military checkpoints manned by bored German soldiers. It was night when the train reached Ortona. D'Intino bade farewell to his friends and jumped off onto the gravel siding. He walked home and slept outside the house for the remainder of the night because he did not want to waken his aging father. Despite his hunger, filthy state, and weariness, D'Intino was happy. He was home and determined to stay no matter what the war chose to visit upon Ortona.
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On September 24, thirteen days after the flight of King Vittorio Emanuele III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio from Ortona and within days of D'Intino's return, German soldiers arrived to secure the harbour. An order was issued placing all port facilities under German control. Notices were also posted throughout the town that it was now illegal for anyone to possess radio transmitters and that all civilian property was subject to the use of the army as required. Over the next few days, the residents of Ortona watched with growing fear as German supply trains rolled by on the main line, carrying arms, munitions, and soldiers south to face the advancing Eighth Army.

Twelve days after the first arrival of German soldiers in Ortona, an engineering unit arrived. From trucks they unloaded twenty-eight tons of explosives and proceeded to blow about fifteen major breaches in the northern mole. Larger fishing vessels were sunk, as were several small freighters that were in the harbour when the Germans arrived. Within weeks, the destruction of the mole rendered the port too shallow for use as a deepwater harbour. At low tide, the tidal plain now stretched for several hundred yards out beyond the limits of its former extension.
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No fishing vessels were now allowed to put to sea. The few men of military age living in Ortona were subject to immediate draft for forced labour parties, as the Germans set about preparing fixed defensive positions on the ridgeline overlooking the Moro River and
at key points between the Moro and Ortona. A risky cat-and-mouse game developed between civilians and Germans. Few young men willingly reported for duty when the Germans posted notices demanding workers for labour parties. The Germans, knowing there were some men who were fit and able, would begin searching houses. Antonio Di Cesare was still only a young teenager, but that was sufficiently old for the manpower-strapped Germans. So Antonio joined a clutch of men in playing the dangerous evasion. They would hide in one of the old buildings in the fishermen's district. When the Germans entered the house and started searching the lower floor, the fugitives would pass a wooden plank from an upper window across the narrow street into the facing window of a house on the other side. The hastily improvised bridge provided a catwalk over which the men could cross to the safety of the other house. Once all were across, the plank was pulled in, the windows shuttered. Short of soldiers to carry out an efficient search, the Germans seldom caught the men in the act of escaping. When they did it was not uncommon for them to fire upon the fleeing men. Some were wounded, a few killed. Most, however, were able to avoid being picked up by the German search parties.
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