Introduction
‘I was leaving Alexandria [Egypt] with great hopes […] but I did not regret the time spent there […] the group in Alexandria had been a lively thing, in which a whole group of youngsters was able to cultivate, in that cultural climate, an anti-fascist civil conscience’ (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1981, 22). In this way, Paolo Vittorelli (whose real name was Raffaele Battino) recalls his departure from his home in Alexandria to reach Paris in March 1937. In Alexandria he had made his first contacts with the anti-fascist world, thanks to his childhood friend Renato Mieli and his brother Edwin Mieli who, in 1935, was able to smuggle from Milan nos.7 and 8 of the Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà, together with books by anti-fascist intellectuals Carlo Rosselli, Silvio Trentin and Francesco Fausto Nitti (Bagnoli Reference Bagnoli1996, 242).
Giustizia e Libertà (GL) was an organisation founded in Paris in 1929 by a group of socialists, liberals and republicans, united by a strong anti-fascist sentiment. Led by Carlo and Nello Rosselli, the group included men like Emilio Lussu, Alberto Cianca, Fausto Nitti and Gaetano Salvemini. All of them were political exiles from Fascist Italy: some of them, like Lussu and Rosselli themselves, had spent some time in prison, before being able to make their escape to France. The aim of GL was to prepare an anti-fascist revolution in Italy, not to restore the pre-Fascist state, but to institute a new one, founded on principles of social justice. While the secondary literature on the leading figures in GL is considerable and growing, relatively little attention has been devoted to Vittorelli himself. In this article I propose a detailed analysis of Vittorelli’s vicissitudes in the period, offering a case study which will also reflect on wider issues related to the transnational nature of Resistance and anti-fascism.
Vittorelli became engrossed with the Quaderni; this first contact with the ideology of the Rosselli brothers was to be a turning point in his life. As he wrote: ‘I started bombarding one of my grandmothers and an aunt who lived in Paris, to get them to subscribe to the “Giustizia e Libertà” publications.’ It took a few months, but finally Vittorelli was able to receive his first number of the weekly Giustizia e Libertà a few days after the Italian annexation of Ethiopia. From that day onwards, Vittorelli and others began gathering at the Mieli household, where Vittorelli had to read the publications aloud ‘from the first to the last line’ (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1981, 18). Vittorelli joined GL in the summer of 1936 and, less than nine months later, decided to leave Alexandria to finally meet the Rosselli brothers in Paris.
In Paris, Vittorelli had the chance to meet his mentor and deepen his affiliation with GL. He firmly accepted the ‘liberal socialism’ of GL, abandoning the Communist ideology he was then following (Vittorelli, Reference Vittorelli1981, 28–29). It was during this period that he decided to change his name to Paolo Vittorelli, in order to protect his family. However, his stay in France was cut short by the Second World War. In March 1940, while France was still standing against the Axis, Vittorelli was sent back by GL to Egypt, in order to find money and recruits for GL among the local Italian community there. The decision had been taken not only because of Vittorelli’s origins, but also to copy the strategy of the Communists, who had sent one of their Jewish members, Laura Levi, to Egypt, where she had been able to raise sizeable funding from the local Jewish community (Bagnoli Reference Bagnoli1996, 244). Vittorelli and his friends in Paris had estimated that no more than three weeks would be necessary to attain these goals (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1981, 205). Little did he know when he first disembarked in Alexandria harbour in 1940, that Egypt would be his home for the following four years. In this land scorched by the sun, Vittorelli led his war against Fascism and had to face the complicated issue of preserving his own agency, as he tried to find a way to collaborate with the British authorities of Cairo and the local J section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British secret service that Churchill had bombastically appointed to ‘set Europe ablaze’.
Vittorelli’s war
When the first news of the war in Europe reached Alexandria, Vittorelli did not immediately understand the implications. As he noted in his memoirs, ‘I must admit that I did not understand right away that it would be impossible for me to go back to France’ (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 5). However, soon the war in Europe reached a turning point. The French and British armies were crushed by the Nazi advance: Paris fell, the French government surrendered soon after. France was no more the safe haven for many of the exiled Italian anti-fascists. The Italian groups were forced to scatter around the world: some went to the United Kingdom, some to the United States and South America, others remained in France and joined the local Resistance. As such, communications between the exiled Italians, already difficult due to the necessities of secrecy, were made even harder. To Vittorelli, France’s collapse meant not only the loss of any guidance from his friends, but also the fact that he was now stuck in Egypt (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 5–6). The collapse of France, however, was not a net loss for the Italian anti-fascist emigration. As David Stafford has pointed out, the collapse of France meant for the British, now left to ‘stand alone’ in the face of the Axis, a significant re-shaping of their plans for the war. ‘In the context of these plans, the encouragement of and dependence on resistance movements and secret armies in Europe played a central role’, which led to the creation of the SOE to put these plans into action (Stafford Reference Stafford1975, 208–209). This meant that, for the first time, Italian anti-fascists were considered a feasible option to conduct a strategy against Mussolini’s regime,Footnote 1 prompting the creation of joint Italo-British operations.
As for Vittorelli, he started planning his actions on the basis of a long stay in Egypt. The core of his plan was the creation ‘an anti-fascist political force, like de Gaulle’s Free France’ (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 7) and even, perhaps, an Italian legion, similar to the one that had fought in the Spanish Civil War. His principal target was the relatively large Italian community in Egypt which, at the start of the war, numbered around 60,000 and comprised mainly clerks, labourers and artisans (Turiano and Viscomi Reference Turiano and Viscomi2018, 1–2). However, his first attempts at organising an anti-fascist group in Egypt clashed with the reality of the situation. The Italian community was, in fact, riddled with Fascist elements and dominated by Fascist ideology (Williams Reference Williams2006, 128). As Vittorelli’s brother, Joe Battino, remembers in his memoirs, Fascism enjoyed a large following with the Italians residents in Egypt, especially among those of low social standing who worked as construction workers, carpenters and plumbers.Footnote 2
This community had been the object of intense Fascist propaganda since 1927, when the Under-Secretary of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, Dino Grandi, claimed that Italians outside the borders of the country were simply ‘Italians abroad’ and no longer ‘emigrants’. The Regime plan was to expand Italian influence beyond Italy’s borders and to create a connection between the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) and the various Italian communities around the world. The Fasci all’estero were thus reorganised to give a framework for Fascist foreign policy (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 49–50). A number of Fascist newspapers were already circulating in Egypt and in 1923, Giovinezza had been launched by the local Fascio (Marchi Reference Marchi2010, 113). After its closure in 1926 Fascist propaganda found a new outlet in the Giornale d’Oriente, launched in 1930 (Marchi Reference Marchi2010, 116). Moreover, during the period 1931–1932, school curricula were revised and enforced to adhere to the Fascist notion of italianità (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 51). This project culminated in 1933 with the visit of King Vittorio Emanuele III to Alexandria, to inaugurate the Italian state school (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 30–31). The recent conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, as well, had enflamed spirits with dreams of an ‘eldorado’.Footnote 3 The Italian community in Egypt responded with great enthusiasm to the Regime’s plea for gold to be collected during the Giornata della Fede one year later (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 52), to mitigate the effects on the Italian economy of the international sanctions imposed on Italy for the invasion of Ethiopia.
This sense of pride and community was fuelled even more by ‘the frequent and provocative marches of youngsters in black shirts, which gave to the more uncultivated mass of the community a sense of importance.’Footnote 4 As Joe Battino remembered, Vittorelli noted with dejection that very few anti-fascists were present and those had little will to fight. The majority of the Italians ‘were convinced that Mussolini would enter Egypt as a conqueror’ (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 6). Vittorelli was downcast: ‘[I] was finally persuaded, after an infinite loss of time and the complete exhaustion of my patience, that it was hopeless to expect from these [the Italians in Egypt] either serious collaboration or concrete action.’Footnote 5
Even more pressing for Vittorelli was the issue of his own survival. He was jobless and had no way to secure money for himself. Concerned with his financial situation, Vittorelli agreed at first to teach public law in the French public school in Alexandria and at the Ecole Française de Droit in Cairo. Finally, following the advice of the French ambassador in Cairo, Vittorelli was able to get in touch with the British military authorities. The British had all the adult male Italians put in prison camps when Italy declared war in June 1940 (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli2001a, 9). In fact, Italians were considered potentially dangerous aliens by the British and plans to intern them were already in place from 1935, under the label of the ‘Tombak Plan’. However, Vittorelli, a Jew and a proclaimed anti-fascist, was protected from being put into a prison camp (Turiano and Viscomi Reference Turiano and Viscomi2018, 2–4).
Fascist hostility towards Great Britain had already led to friction in the Middle East, with the attempts of the Fascist Regime to disseminate Arabic-language propaganda to undermine British rule (Fiore Reference Fiore2010, 69). In this context, the Fascist Regime supported various groups of Egyptian nationalists before and during the anti-British demonstrations of 1934–1935 (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 57–58). For these reasons, the British put great pressure on the Egyptian government for the immediate arrest of all Italians (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 108).
Moreover, after the disastrous Italian campaign in North Africa, Egypt was flooded with Italian prisoners of war. Immediately after the fall of Benghazi, some 200,000 Italian prisoners were captured (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 9). Those prisoners were put in camps separated from those for civilian internees.
To the British, these men were a potential source of recruits for the SOE to be deployed in Italy. The SOE, in fact, was desperately searching for Italians to carry out sabotage operations in Fascist Italy. Initially, the British had concentrated their efforts on the small Italian anti-fascist community in the United Kingdom. However, after the failure of this initiative, they expanded their efforts to the Italian civilians kept in camps in England, as well as the prisoners of war (Berettini 2008, 410). Results were so poor that they soon tried to recruit Italian agents in Commonwealth countries like Canada (Berettini 2008, 413), with similar outcomes. However, they did not abandon this idea and made attempts to recruit internees and POWs from the Middle East and even India, where the soldiers captured in Ethiopia had been shipped. Despite these increasing efforts, results remained unsatisfactory; as late as 1943, it was noted that ‘nothing good’ had come from these attempts (Berrettini Reference Berrettini2008, 415).
At first, given the previous failures with Italian anti-fascist emigrés, the British were sceptical of Vittorelli’s proposal. He only got permission to print a news bulletin with no fixed schedule. However, the bulletin was a rather remarkable success, increasing from its initial distribution of 3-4,000 copies to 25-30,000.Footnote 6 At this point, the British agreed to turn the bulletin into a proper newspaper (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli2001a, 9). For the newspaper’s HQ, Vittorelli requested and obtained the former offices of the Fascist newspaper Giornale d’Oriente that had been closed at the outbreak of the war. On 18 March 1941, the first issue of the Corriere d’Italia was printed and distributed. At first, only Vittorelli and his brothers worked on the paper. They were later joined by two helpers who, unfortunately, did not speak Italian very well. Another addition to the team was a Piedmontese called Millul (later anglicised into Miller), a former captain in the Italian army, who had been expelled because of the racial laws in 1938. Miller proved himself extremely useful in the first phase of the newspaper’s life, because of his dedication and his good education (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli2001a, 10–11).
To alleviate the problem of the lack of proper journalists and intellectuals, Vittorelli concentrated his recruitment efforts on the POWs and internees. Thanks to the letters written by prisoners to the paper he was able to find two suitable men to employ as editors, and the writer Stefano Terra, who was taken on as an author. The latter was also in contact with a clandestine GL group in Turin, allowing Vittorelli to get some news from Italy (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli2001a, 11). Terra, in particular, seemed to Vittorelli ‘extremely useful in that intellectual desert that was Egypt’ (Bagnoli Reference Bagnoli1996, 249). Later on, Vittorelli was also able to get the services of Umberto Calosso and Enzo Sereni for his paper. Calosso had been a member of GL since 1933 and Vittorelli had met him in Paris. The problem was that the last known position of Calosso was Malta, where no traces of him remained. He was finally located in Lisbon by the British and shipped to Cairo only in the late spring of 1941 (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 11). Calosso, after the end of his experience in Egypt, was involved in Radio Londra’s transmissions from London, together with other Italian emigrés in the UK. As for Sereni, another Italian Jew and a Zionist, he spontaneously joined Vittorelli (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 12). Sereni was later recruited as an undercover agent by the SOE; he was parachuted into Italy in 1944, captured by the Germans and sent to Dachau, where he died. Together, Vittorelli and Sereni were deemed by the British as the ‘most virile and active individual[s] available’Footnote 7 amongst the Italians in Cairo. Finally, a woman, Marcella Biagini, completed the group (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli2001a, 14). As Joe Battino noted ironically, this group was a little Armata Brancaleone (an ill-assorted bunch).Footnote 8
It is important to notice that the Corriere was, to all intents and purposes, a real newspaper. Vittorelli never intended it to be a propaganda pamphlet: his ambition was for it to be a true cultural outlet whose aim was to nurture anti-fascist ideas among the Italian captives. The paper comprised news concerning economy, the artistic sites of Italy, as well as pieces of literary criticism (Bagnoli Reference Bagnoli1996, 250) and even a column dedicated to the Italian football league.Footnote 9 This underlines the fact that Vittorelli saw his work as a fully-fledged cultural operation, and not just a mere propaganda action under British tutelage. Vittorelli (as he himself proclaimed in one of the essays he published in the volume Contro Corrente in 1944) saw propaganda as an ‘arte minore’, a ‘new type of political education, suited for the great masses, a collective message’ (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli2001b, 126). And this was the great misunderstanding which continued during all of Vittorelli’s activities in Egypt. While the British hired him to feed propaganda to Italian prisoners, in order to help them to select suitable recruits for deployment in Italy, Vittorelli was launching a cultural operation designed to attack the very basis of Fascist culture. This shows Vittorelli’s loyalty to Rosselli’s idea of ‘turning the Fascist war into a social revolution’ (Rosselli, Reference Rosselli1933). Vittorelli kept faith with this aspiration for the whole time he worked for the British in Cairo. In a response to a reader in 1944 he explained how he had founded his paper (his second one, at this point) with an ‘educational aim’: to teach Italians to ‘read and trust newspapers again, after so much deception’Footnote 10 and emphatically not as a conduit for British propaganda. This overestimation of his capacities was a typical trait of the anti-fascist emigrés (Croce Reference Croce1946, 113). And Vittorelli was surely no exception.
For almost all of the Corriere’s editorial life, Vittorelli enjoyed the support of the local J section chief, Colonel Thornhill, who was, as Joe Battino recalls, ‘a bizzarre character, but with a very open mind’. The first trouble arose when Thornhill was recalled to the UK and replaced by Colonel De Salis, who tried to impose a ‘pro-monarchical attitude’ on the paper, which clashed with the political ideas of the editorial staff’.Footnote 11 Moreover, when the USSR was attacked by the Axis during the summer of 1941 Vittorelli wrote a long article claiming that Communists and the democratic opponents of Nazi-Fascism were finally reunited in their fight on a common front, after the disgraceful Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. This did not escape the keen eye of British censorship, which considered Vittorelli’s position to be too openly pro-Soviet, and the Corriere was abruptly shut down (Bagnoli Reference Bagnoli1996, 247). The Corriere’s last issue was published on 28 September 1941. Meanwhile, the Axis offensive led by Rommel reached the road to Alexandria, and the British decided to evacuate Vittorelli’s group to Palestine.Footnote 12
Vittorelli, however, was eager to restart the publication of a paper or a bulletin destined for the Middle East and even asked the British for Emilio Lussu’s collaboration. On 26 March 1942, Vittorelli wrote a long letter to Lussu, summarising his activity in Egypt and his plans for the future, and asking Lussu to join him.Footnote 13 Lussu, however, had already made his decision concerning his role in the war, and sitting in Cairo while Europe was being ‘set ablaze’ was not on his list of priorities. Despite the British personnel in the Middle East asking for, at least, ‘a letter of encouragement’Footnote 14 from him, Lussu considered Vittorelli to be too young and inexperienced to assume any first-rank position, despite his intelligence. As he stated: ‘I would employ him to write an article, but not to edit a newspaper.’Footnote 15 At this point (late spring of 1942) the personnel in London started to get annoyed with Vittorelli’s insistence. On 7 June they wrote to the Middle East section asking for clarification about Vittorelli’s role. Was he to ‘run propaganda’, ‘organise a movement’ to recruit agents or ‘plan and direct actual operations inside Italy’? As far as London could tell, Vittorelli had ‘given no indication of being capable of that [recruiting agents or directing operations]’.Footnote 16 The men-on-the-spot replied that while they had to agree, it was also true that amongst the ‘crowd of talkative anti-fascists’ Vittorelli seemed the most ‘virile and active’ man available. However, they were not really able to provide a convincing role for Vittorelli. They found a temporary use for him as a consultant for the propaganda office. They also hoped to send his brother to Istanbul in order to create a local network. However, they claimed, this was only an ‘experiment’ to encourage Italians there to create their own network.Footnote 17
On 31 July 1942, the proposal to create an Italian propaganda daily paper for the Italian community in Turkey was made and Vittorelli’s group was indicated as ‘the most satisfactory group of Italian collaborators that we [the British] have in the Middle East’. The proposal was so enthusiastically endorsed that the British even promised to grant Vittorelli and his men ‘firmer footing than they have hitherto enjoyed.’ This new project had two immediate advantages for the British: it kept Vittorelli’s group available for future useFootnote 18 and encouraged the circulation of propaganda amongst Italian prisoners of war in the Middle East.Footnote 19 The infiltration of Vittorelli’s brother (codenamed ‘Kaffir II’) into TurkeyFootnote 20 , however, did not bring the expected results. Apparently, the cover was not well thought through and the Turkish police intercepted him. ‘[They] are most intrigued by the fact that although possessing a Greek passport he cannot speak Greek.’ The Turkish police were persuaded he was an Italian spy, and this hindered his possibilities of contacting other Italians.Footnote 21 Vittorelli, however, seemed as enthusiastic as ever. In a letter from Tel Aviv on 12 August 1942, he describes in great detail the structure of his new newspaper, emphatically titled Secondo Risorgimento. It was to have ‘eight pages, of the size of The Times […] [it] will be printed in six columns; the title will be in red.’ The articles were to include political pieces, book reviews, art reviews, economic critiques, reports from the Italian communities abroad and even ‘a permanent column of extracts from the Fascist press, commented upon sarcastically.’Footnote 22 Once again Vittorelli showed all his ambition: he had no desire to publish some half-baked propaganda pamphlet for the British. His daily paper would be a means of discussion and cultural enrichment, even more than the Corriere d’Italia had been.
At the end of 1942, with the menace of Rommel gone and the ever-growing number of Italian prisoners of war in camps in Egypt, Vittorelli and his group were relocated back to Cairo. Their role, however, remained unclear. The Cairo Special Forces (SF) section intended to use the group and the name of Giustizia e Libertà ‘to give a ‘trademark’ to our [the British] propaganda and thereby aim to let it be known that there was an ITALIAN active subversive group in Cairo’ with the aim of contacting possible anti-fascists in Italy.Footnote 23 However, the British had little hope for this plan, as they worked on the assumption that GL had not been able to survive the Fascist round-ups of 1934.Footnote 24 The response they had from their contacts inside Italy, instead, far exceeded their expectations. ‘Giustizia e Libertà are possibly more alive than we thought.’ As such, future broadcasting and operations had to be planned with a much greater attention to detail. The obvious advantage was that, while Italians seemed to know about Giustizia e Libertà, they did not know what its strength was. The British, thus, could ‘make them feel that it is much more powerful’ than it really was.Footnote 25 At this point, the J section was eager to launch a much larger plan. They kept on hold the broadcast from the Vittorelli group, trying to put together a larger number of émigrés. The ‘group will consist of Cianca, Tarchiani, Garosci, Zevi, Gentili and, if possible Simon (Lussu).’Footnote 26 Enthusiasm grew, and GL was labelled as ‘the only good element that one can find in the Italian anti-fascist milieu abroad.’Footnote 27
However, an agreement between the British and the Italians on how much freedom the group was supposed to have while running its clandestine propaganda operation was contentious. The British in Cairo had to remind their superiors that the Vittorelli group would work under the name of Giustizia e Libertà only ‘if they [the Italians] are given sufficient liberty of action to exclude [the] charge of being foreign agents.’Footnote 28 This key proviso, predictably, bogged down the project. On 2 March 1943 the J section telegraphed Cairo that, despite the fact that the PWE (Public Warfare Executive) was ‘enthusiastic’, the most important thing was to make clear to the Italians that ‘although every appearance must be maintained that the station is clandestine, one cannot let aliens have a completely free hand.’Footnote 29 Autonomy was at stake and both groups found themselves unable to fully communicate with one another. The discussion continued during March 1943 with ‘endless joint meetings’ which were unable to produce any results. While these ambitious projects were discussed, Vittorelli was kept on hold as the British were persuaded that: ‘it would be a mistake for your boys to start broadcasting until we [know] whether this project is to go forward.’Footnote 30 The more time passed, the more restless the Vittorelli group became. They were finally allowed to resume their work with a propaganda paper in Egypt, in the form of a bulletin under the name of Giustizia e Libertà to be distributed in camps. However, Vittorelli and his friends were eager to move forward and reunite with their GL comrades in Europe after a long exile. In April, they wrote to a former member of the Paris anti-fascist group, Alberto Cianca, who was in London at the time, a letter which the SF section of Cairo judged as quite detached from reality. As they stated in a telegram to the J section: ‘Our Giustizia e Libertà group is rather inclined to take their wishes for realities. They are exceedingly good in their letters do [sic] their own publicity!’ The British agents in Cairo also warned their superiors to evaluate with caution the results that Vittorelli claimed to have attained during the past three years. As they stated: ‘most of the work they [Vittorelli’s group] did was initiated by us under our control and, in several cases their activities consisted only in giving us an indication which led to a specific action being taken by us.’Footnote 31 The battle for autonomy is apparent here. Vittorelli and his group evidently wrote to Cianca to underline their independence from the British in Egypt, while the local section of the SF was concerned to underline the total dependence of the Italians’ action on British tutelage.
The situation got even worse after the armistice of 8 September 1943. At this point, the aims of the British and the Italians diverged even more rapidly. The Italians wanted to return to Italy to join the reborn political life in the southern Italian Kingdom or the armed Resistance in the North. The British, on the other hand, were still pursuing their illusion of being able to recruit them as agents for infiltration in the North. It seems that some discussion was undertaken amongst the J section during October 1943. The idea of employing the Vittorelli group as agents, however, was discarded. Despite the J section remarking that ‘[we] know these men and the work they are doing in Egypt and [...] believe they are OK’, they fully understood that the Italians had no will to operate as fully-fledged British agents. At this point, finally, the British understood that ‘they [the Italians] have [not] shown any desire to do active work for us.’Footnote 32 The reply from the Egyptian SF section, dated 14 October 1943, left little room for doubt concerning the situation: the Italians were ‘getting very restive. And they suggest that if we cannot use them, they should be allowed to try to get back to Italy under their own steam.’ The British agents in Cairo did not know exactly how to approach the situation and asked their superiors for directions.Footnote 33 London took a week to reply, stating bluntly what was becoming quite obvious: ‘There is no purpose for which we can employ the [sic] Vittorelli at the present nor do we anticipate any.’ This did not mean, however, that the Italians were free to leave. The instruction was ‘neither oppose nor approve their effort to return’.Footnote 34 Without any real use for Vittorelli and his friends, the British kept them occupied with the publication of the GL bulletin; the failure of this initiative in recruiting agents or volunteers to be deployed in Italy was more and more evident. As Vittorelli recalls, he made ‘one hell of a scene’ trying to convince the British command to let him go back home. The situation dragged on until autumn 1944, when Vittorelli was finally able to leave Egypt, thanks to the intervention of Cianca, who, in the meantime, had become a minister in the Bonomi government (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 2–3). Vittorelli and what was left of his group embarked for Italy to carry on the fight in their homeland.
A difficult assessment
An overall assessment of Vittorelli’s experience in Egypt is difficult to make. It is, however, worth at least making an attempt, as the analysis of the results and failures of the group and its actions will reveal the fundamental issues behind Vittorelli’s failed collaboration with the British.
From a moral point of view, Vittorelli’s action was surely positive, as it kept alive the presence of anti-fascism in the Italian community in Egypt and had a moderate degree of success in spreading the liberal ideology of GL among the POWs and internees. As Joe Battino noted, it had a widespread circulation and a ‘not negligible influence’.Footnote 35 From the letters preserved in the GL archives in Florence (regarding the last phase of Vittorelli’s activity, during 1944), it seems that the GL bulletin was widely read in the camps. A prisoner named Luigi Barone wrote to Vittorelli about the rapid dissemination of the bulletin: ‘a month ago I was the only reader in my camp and now the paper is in high demand.’Footnote 36 Pietro Contreras was particularly enthusiastic and he claimed that the paper ‘was read a lot and requested a lot’ and that he and his friends were finally able to breathe ‘good air’.Footnote 37 Lastly, Arnaldo Santandrea claimed that the paper was well-received in his camp and also lamented the scarce number of copies available.Footnote 38 The diffusion actually seemed to have gone beyond the camps. A Franciscan named Giulio Basetti, from the convent of Sekket el Daher, wrote to Vittorelli to congratulate him;Footnote 39 a doctor from Alexandria, De Meo, did the same with Terra.Footnote 40
However, it is hard to assess how much of this interest was due to actual political awareness and how much to pure boredom. Sandro Pizzorno wrote that he and his friends wanted to be educated about ‘everything that happened in the world during the past 20 years’, because ‘we are all in the most terrible ignorance’.Footnote 41 On the other hand, Galdo Batistini seemed to be uninterested in the political aim of the paper and wanted to congratulate the authors because of a nostalgic tale about Florence, his home town.Footnote 42 On average, it seems that there are more letters concerned with the political mission of the paper than about its ‘cultural’ articles. Moreover, we must also consider that many probably saw Vittorelli as more influential than he actually was and as a possible way to be released from their captivity. The aforementioned Contreras wrote asking to be released as he had deserted and fought alongside the British in the Aegean SeaFootnote 43 . Another soldier, Antonio Lantini, complained in June 1944 that he was still stuck in the camp, despite the fact that Italy had been declared a co-belligerant of the Allies.Footnote 44 An even more interesting case is that of Francesco Buccianti, who was the Italian representative for the Fayed camp of civilian internees. Buccianti wrote twice to congratulate Vittorelli. He also asked for more copies (‘20’) to be distributed to different camps: however, he did not have the money to pay for them.Footnote 45 What is worth pointing out, however, is that Buccianti was also a member of the PNF. He had been appointed as the camp’s representative by the British in 1941 and was disliked by the other internees, who saw him as an opportunist. Under his management, the Fayed camp was organised on military-like lines, much like the PNF was accustomed to run its organisations (Viscomi Reference Viscomi2016, 127). His congratulations to Vittorelli cast a shadow over the words of Joe Battino concerning the reach of Vittorelli’s actions.
Moreover, like many Italian anti-fascist émigrés, Vittorelli struggled to push forward anything more than a moral stance against Fascism, failing to take an active role in the fight (Garosci Reference Garosci1953, 239). If we consider Vittorelli’s experience on a more practical level, the assessment is far from satisfactory. Vittorelli and his group failed in the task the British had assigned them. Even taking for granted Vittorelli’s claim that ‘some hundred soldiers […] were attracted by GL’s ideas and expressed the desire to join us, in anticipation of the struggle that will be carried on in Italy’Footnote 46 , the figure of ‘some hundred’ of ‘converted’ (out of more than 300.000 prisoners in almost four years of propaganda work) seems unsatisfactory. Moreover, these people were claimed by Vittorelli to be interested in becoming partisans, or at least part of the Italian army of the southern Kingdom. Indeed, what the British wrote about Vittorelli and his friends – that they were ‘rather inclined to take their wishes for realities’ – seems to be true.Footnote 47 The failure in recruiting Italian prisoners to the Allies’ cause may seem strange after what we said about the letters written by the prisoners themselves to Vittorelli. The issue was that, despite the fact that the newspaper did represent a sort of moral compass for the prisoners, it did not contain any practical indication regarding how to act. In fact, the ideology that Vittorelli was trying to spread was so abstract that the British themselves had serious problems in working it out. In the autumn of 1942, they tried to pinpoint the GL programme to the command in London, without much success. ‘It could be defined as a sort of political Buchmanism, calling to all classes in society, but with a slight bias towards the poorer classes. Terra and his friends talk and act like left-wing Socialists. Kaffir and his brother are apparently much more to the Right, and very near in their ideas to the Liberals.’ All of them could be described as ‘sincere idealists, of a rather pleasant (if at times inexperienced) type.’Footnote 48 The vagueness of Vittorelli’s political position was tied to his ideological reluctance to take more concrete action. He himself clarified this point in a letter responding to a prisoner, in which he claimed that GL did not have any form of ‘tie with any local organisation’ – especially in Egypt, where he ‘did not search for nor accept members’, because of the ‘peculiar situation in which the political struggle is carried on’.Footnote 49 The elephant in the room here is the fact that the Italians were in no position to negotiate with the British as political peers, and did not want to be labelled as ‘British agents’. The only escape route they were able to conceive, therefore, was the forfeit of the political field.
Some noticed this problem: Sergio Galli, (who was an internee in the Fayed camp) wrote a long, strongly-worded letter to Vittorelli in June 1944. Galli was a supporter of Vittorelli’s work (‘I’m an avid reader’), however, he proved to be also quite blunt in his critique: ‘Can you imagine the civilian captives’ situation after four years?’ he asked. After four years of ‘unjust’ imprisonment, Galli argued that ‘just saying: “organise yourself”’ was not enough for them. Freedom was the basic prerequisite. Political debate and talks of an abstract ‘organisation’ were of no concern at the present moment.Footnote 50 Vittorelli’s reply was not able to placate Galli; his response contains only general reassurances.Footnote 51 Galli wrote again on 5 August 1944 stressing that ‘today the prisoners of Fayed are completely unable to think of any organisation, save the one which aims for their liberation.’Footnote 52 The letters between the two continued until October 1944. The central problem remained the distance between Vittorelli, primarily concerned with ideology, and Galli, who was far more practical. This deep incompatibility remained even after Galli’s liberation from the Fayed camp. While facing a severe scarcity of funds Galli wrote to Vittorelli asking for help in organising a GL group in Alexandria. Vittorelli replied with only general assumptions, unable to give any real support, stressing that Galli’s group should have been ‘100 per cent autonomous’ not only politically, but also financially.Footnote 53
Finally, we must stress the failure of Vittorelli’s group not only as regards the prisoners of war, but also in organising the free Italian anti-fascists present in Egypt. Anti-fascism in Egypt, in fact, remained a fragmented reality, not only because of the differences between GL and the CommunistsFootnote 54 but also between the liberals themselves. As late as the spring of 1944, Stefano Terra wrote to local medic Luigi Adinolfi of having high hopes for ‘the unification of anti-fascists in Egypt’.Footnote 55 Moreover, the Nazi aggression of the USSR in 1941 led to a fiery debate inside Vittorelli’s group itself. Calosso, who had always been a fierce anti-communist, repeatedly quarrelled with Vittorelli, who wanted him to stop his attacks against the Italian Communists, now that they were on the same side as GL. Eventually, Calosso left the group in 1942 as his positions were impossible to reconcile with Vittorelli’s personal friendship with Renato Mieli, one of the leaders of the Italian Communist Party in Egypt (Vittorelli Reference Vittorelli1998, 14). This kind of fragmentation was another typical trait of Italian anti-fascist emigrés (Gentile Reference Gentile2000, 259; Pugliese Reference Pugliese2004, 9).
Conclusion
The topic of resistance to Fascism in Europe has been often portrayed within a national framework. As Oliver Wieviorka notes: ‘the Resistance protagonists undertake their effort for their country and, in the majority of cases, in their country’ (Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka2018, 5). This is especially true in Italy, where the mainstream narrative had always depicted the Italian anti-fascist struggle as something with unique characteristics in the European scenario (Cooke Reference Cooke2011, 191). However, Allied support played a key role in nurturing these Resistance movements (Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka2018, 7). This fact brings the implication that, if we want to properly interpret the anti-fascist Resistance, a transnational approach is in order. The role of the British, in particular, had a deep impact on the policy towards European Resistance, as they launched their campaign to ‘set Europe ablaze’ in 1940. The British themselves adopted a transnational approach to the Resistance in Europe, ignoring national borders in favour of an overarching strategy for the whole Continent (Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka2018, 7).
The experience of Paolo Vittorelli in Egypt is an interesting case study of such a transnational approach. Vittorelli represents an intersection of various identities and ideologies. He was an Italian, but born and raised outside Italy, in a Jewish family. He was part of the early emigration to Egypt and had little or no connection to the majority of Italian emigrés, made up of workers and artisans. He fought for his country but outside it. He did so with the help of the local British personnel. However, such collaboration was severely hindered by the ideology that Vittorelli had brought back from his stay in Paris, where he joined GL.
One major problem that GL had to face, similarly to many organisations of political exiles, was the constant negative campaign carried out by the Fascist Regime to depict them as traitors of their own country. The émigrés were portrayed as on the payroll of foreign countries, and they were accused of tarnishing Italy’s reputation abroad to justify other nations’ intervention in Italian affairs, as this was the only way they had to overthrow Mussolini, since they lacked the courage and the skills to do it themselves (Giannini Reference Giannini1970, xi). Pietro Maria Bardi, a Fascist reporter who managed to partially infiltrate the anti-fascist circles in Paris, described them as good-for-nothings who were not even able to feed themselves (Bardi Reference Bardi1934). The Fascist paper Il popolo d’Italia never failed to remark how the émigrés were just ‘fools’, ‘venduti (sell-outs)’, who wrote on ‘paper scraps’ outside Italy and were all talk and no action.Footnote 56
Giustizia e Libertà replied to this accusation by constantly reaffirming its independence and, in a sense, by promoting a new sense of italianità, opposed to the one championed by the Regime. The aim of GL was not to simply topple Mussolini, but to reshape Italy and her people. Key to this narrative was the connection that GL built between itself and the Risorgimento, thanks to the works of Piero Gobetti (Pavone 1995, 23). The independence of GL members from foreign tutelage was affirmed over and over again. In an appeal addressed to all Italians in 1930 GL proclaimed how ‘the liberation of Italy must be the result of action by the Italians themselves.’Footnote 57
Even the Spanish Civil War, an international conflict which saw the enthusiastic participation of GL to help the Spanish Republic, was ideologically constricted inside the framework of the national struggle. It encouraged in the Italian anti-fascists abroad a more militant way of confronting Fascism (Prezioso Reference Prezioso2007, 91) while providing GL with a bit of ‘revolutionary glory’, according to Emilio Lussu,Footnote 58 However, Carlo Rosselli’s famous speech ‘Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia’, shows how much the emigrés viewed the Spanish Civil War as a ‘first act’ in the liberation of Italy (Rosselli Reference Rosselli1992, 424). Episodes like the battle of Guadalaraja, which saw Italian anti-fascists fight Italian fascists, only strengthened this idea.
The Second World War was also filtered through this lens. As early as 1939 Silvio Trentin posed the problem of the anti-fascists’ role during the impending war, concluding that it was not acceptable for an Italian to fight under another country’s banner (Trentin Reference Trentin1985, 481). Ennio di Nolfo has stated how the main point of contention at the time was how to save independence from international pressure.Footnote 59 GL’s conclusion was that Italian anti-fascists were fighting a ‘parallel war’ to the one fought by the Allies. They shared with the Allies a common goal, but they wanted to keep their position separate (Delzell Reference Delzell1961, 206). Ironically, the same position was adopted by Mussolini when he first tried to emulate Hitler’s military successes. Emilio Lussu, when asked to work as an agent for the British in 1942, replied bluntly that ‘collaboration excluded that an Italian anti-fascist could became a British agent’ as the anti-fascist war was ‘a national war’ (Lussu Reference Lussu1956, 55). In many ways, this trapped GL in an ideological dead-end, crushed between Fascist rhetoric that depicted them as traitors, and their own which identified independence as a non-negotiable value. It was, however, essentially an ideological issue, as the case of Massimo ‘Max’ Salvadori clearly shows. Salvadori, in fact, agreed to work as a British agent and had little consideration for his fellow emigrés’ doubts. As he sarcastically remarked: ‘My anti-fascist friends are horrified at the idea of wearing Allied uniform. […] I see things differently. [...] If one is convinced that the war is right and necessary, one should take part in it as a combatant’ (Salvadori Reference Salvadori1958, 146). Nevertheless, men like Salvadori were the exception, rather than the rule.
As for Vittorelli, the letters between him and Sergio Galli are a clear example of this point. Vittorelli seems unable to get his point across to Galli, as the latter is uninterested in politics and concerned only with practical problems. On the other hand, Vittorelli seems unable to grasp the sentiment expressed by Galli, especially as regards the long imprisonment that Galli felt unjust.
It is especially important to point out this attitude among the members of GL and those close to them, as it informed the way in which the leaders who led the Resistance in Italy during the war chose to represent their struggle. Many of them were, in fact, former members of GL or members of the Partito d’Azione, the party born from GL’s ashes in 1942. After the war, moreover, many of them became the first producers of historiography on the Italian Resistance. Ferruccio Parri, vice-commander of the CLNAI (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia) was one of them, and he himself claimed this continuity after the war (Parri Reference Parri1990, 45). In this sense, many elements that later Claudio Pavone would categorise under the term ‘Guerra patriottica’ were born before the Resistance and were developed chiefly by the exiles. It should not be a surprise, thus, if the connection between the Resistance and the Risorgimento and the claim that the Resistance was in many ways a spontaneous phenomenon, born independently from the Allies, were two of the main themes of early Italian historiography. The notion of the Resistance as a continuation of the Risorgimento in particular still survives today in Italian public memory as a low-level ‘secondorisorgimentalismo’ (Cooke Reference Cooke2012, 81). This exclusion of the role played by the Allies and even open accusations made against them after the war can be seen as a spill-over product of this ideology.
The problem of independence, therefore, ran far deeper than the British had imagined. While they thought that Vittorelli simply did not want to be depicted as a ‘British rajah’ by the Fascist press, they failed to understand that this was a matter of self-representation as much as one of representation. A further hint of this might be the fact that Vittorelli is quite buttoned up about his experience in Egypt working with the British. In his memoirs, L’età della tempesta and L’età della speranza, there is only a brief description of the events and no mention of the SOE or the J section. Indeed, to a reader it might very well seem that Vittorelli was working independently, with only vague guidance from the British who allowed him more or less the freedom to do what he wanted.
Vittorelli, therefore, represents a precious case study to widen the discussion on the topic of Resistance as a transnational phenomenon, free from the bounds of national narratives and putting emphasis on the key contribution of the Allies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Philip Cooke for his diligent and insightful comments on the various drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Modern Italy’s anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms that went a long way to making this article better. I am also very grateful to Andrea Torre from the archives at Istituto Parri in Milan for scanning and sending me the diary of Joe Battino. Without this contribution, the article would certainly be less detailed. I would also like to thank the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana and, in particular, Mirco Bianchi, who was kind enough to guide me through the documents concerning the activities of Paolo Vittorelli in Egypt. Finally, I would like to thank the National Archives in London for the permission to reproduce many vital documents.
Nicola Cacciatore is a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde and holds history degrees from University College London and the University of Padua. His doctoral research focuses on the Italian Resistance and the Allies during the Italian Campaign of 1943–1945, focusing on issues of this complex relationship at ground-level as well as on memory, legacy and historiographical representation. He is currently the Association for the Study of Modern Italy’s communications officer.
