Ortona Read Free Page B

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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 ofGerman 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.” 4
    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. 5
    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