Unto the Sons (98 page)

Now that Nicola had returned to Maida, Marian had help in caring for Sebastian. Nicola, who became more cordial and comfortable with Antonio as the evening went on—keeping Antonio’s wineglass filled, and sitting next to him after Antonio’s mother had vacated her chair to help in the kitchen—asked Antonio if he thought Joseph would come back to Maida after the war. Joseph had never once indicated any intention of doing so in the letters he wrote regularly to Antonio, although their correspondence had of late been interrupted by the war; Joseph might send his clothes to Maida, but that was as close as Antonio guessed Joseph’s presence would be felt.

Joseph’s father had left Maida more than fifty years before, and even though Gaetano’s bones rested in the nearby cemetery, he had never intended to remain in Italy. Joseph had once written Antonio from America that he wished his mother had followed Gaetano to that wonderful country; it was a wish that Antonio knew Joseph would have expressed only to him. Antonio also knew that Joseph wanted his brother Nicola to join him in America; but Nicola was destined to be a victim of bad timing. Just as he was old enough to set out on his own, the United States’ immigration restrictions became all but insurmountable. In 1925, Nicola was drafted by the Fascists, and he had been liberated from military service only in 1940, by which year he was the father of four children. Nicola’s marriage to Angela Paone, whose family in the valley was close to the Rocchinos, had been arranged by his mother when he was home on leave. Marian wanted to root him to the village, and to the position of head of the family, since Sebastian was incapable of that role. As Antonio now heard Nicola express his relief on being away from the battlefield, he thought sadly that his cousin had most likely not escaped at all; even as dinner was ending, the Allies were probably preparing to cross the Mediterranean Sea and bring the war home to Nicola and the rest of his family on their native soil.

Antonio returned to Paris in mid-January 1943 with Adelina and their three children; he enrolled the children in an Italian school, and brought his wife into his business—both to make use of her accounting abilities and to have at his side the only person in the city he knew he could fully
trust. Paris was now a city of intrigues and duplicity, and everywhere Antonio went, he assumed he was surrounded by spies and double agents. Nazi officers came into his shop more to browse than to buy, and civilians Antonio had never seen before often seemed to be eavesdropping along the counters where the Germans stood. The cafés were filled with military officers speaking German to blond-haired women, perhaps their wives or mistresses, but there was no touristlike informality in their manner; they spoke solemnly, rarely laughed, and said nothing at all when the waiters were nearby.
But from what I can tell, there are still some French people who don’t mind the Germans’ being here, Antonio wrote in his diary. A few French people continue to stress the good things the Germans have supposedly brought to Paris during these years of occupation. The Germans have disallowed smoking in the movie theaters, for example, which used to be polluted. They have made the traffic patrolmen, who used to be stracciati [raggedy], put on neater uniforms, and enforce the road rules and regulations. At night, there are fewer aggressions and robberies in the streets. Many criminals have emigrated. The concierge in our building on the Rue de la Paix, who used to hate the Germans—and hated me, because I’m Italian, in spite of all the good things I did for him—now sometimes sounds like a German propagandist. This is also true of the superintendent at our apartment on the Avenue Rachel. He used to curse the Germans, but now he speaks of their impeccable uniforms, and how they’ve cleaned up the city. The streets are cleaner. There are no strikes
.…

A number of high officials in the prewar French government, among them the onetime premier Léon Blum, had for months been confined as prisoners of the French state. Although the Vichy government had tried to convict him of treason in a court trial that had ended inconclusively in 1942, they had recently surrendered the seventy-year-old Socialist to the Germans (under whom he would barely survive the war at Buchenwald and Dachau). The Nazi collaborators in Vichy, a group whose most notable citizen continued to be Marshal Pétain, had instituted a French version of the Gestapo during the winter of 1943; called the Milice, it was headed by Joseph Darnand, and it immediately began to wage an anti-Semitic campaign rivaling that of the Nazi masters. Numerous French Jews were rounded up on false charges by the Milice and turned over to the Germans, who transported them long distances to labor camps and often to extinction. The anti-German resistance movement in France was thus greatly enlarged by Jews hiding from the Milice, joining underground Communists who had been increasingly active since Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin in 1941—a betrayal that Russia would avenge in February 1943 by beating the German army at Stalingrad. Still, the conviction that
Germany would win the war was not openly questioned by Nazi allies and collaborators in Paris, and if Antonio was beginning to have doubts, as he was, the Italian ambassador who summoned him in the spring of 1943 sternly emphasized the inevitability of Hitler’s triumph.
The ambassador was hostile to me for the first time
, Antonio wrote
. My name had gotten on a list of anti-Fascists, and he warned me that I had important enemies in France, and had better watch my step. He said I should never doubt that the Hitler–Mussolini victory is a sure thing, and it was necessary for me to believe it, and to obey. I think he was embarrassed to be so rude to me, but I thanked him for his warning. As I left the building I was shaken, mortified. The guards, who always used to greet me pleasantly, now looked at me in a different way. I’m suspected of something.… Yes, I must be careful. But how can I be more careful than I am? The whole city is nervous. Everybody suspects somebody. The German officers who come into the shop have lost their confident and relaxed manner. The war in Russia has not helped German prestige. And the United States is helping Russia. It’s another case of strange bedfellows in wartime. The United States entered the First World War to destroy German imperialism. But after the war, the United States and Britain helped Germany to revive itself. What was the use of that war that claimed so many victims? Can the same thing happen again?

47.

B
y mid-May 1943, the German and Italian armies in North Africa had been defeated; by July, the Allies were ready to invade Sicily. The Allied plan was to transport its troops across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa to the southern shores of Sicily, and attack one hundred miles northward, against 240,000 Axis defenders, toward the ancient port city of Messina, nestled along a narrow channel at the northeastern corner of the island. Messina had been seized from Carthage by the Romans in the First Punic War, which ended in 241
B.C.
Now in the first week of July 1943, at his advance headquarters near Carthage in North Africa, the Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was scheming to take it. (The military importance of Messina, which had a population in excess of a hundred thousand, was its nearness to the toe of the Italian boot. To possess Messina was to have access to its twenty-four-mile-long channel,
the Strait of Messina, which in some places separated Sicily from the mainland of Italy by only two miles.)

The best-known among the celebrated American officers under Eisenhower’s command was General George S. Patton; but the most renowned of all the generals was Britain’s Bernard Montgomery, an Anglican clergyman’s son who, as commander of England’s Eighth Army in North Africa in 1942, had defeated Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Rommel had since been reassigned to northern Europe, where Hitler foresaw an Allied invasion coming from the English Channel; and Sicily’s defense was entrusted to the Italian Sixth Army, under the command of General Alfredo Guzzoni, a portly officer of unheroic credentials who wore a black wig. But a quarter of General Guzzoni’s 240,000-man contingent were highly trained, well-equipped, and motivated German soldiers, and these were Eisenhower’s main concern. The Allies would at first be outnumbered, having only 150,000 in the early wave of invaders. But they would be supported by battleship artillery lobbed in from the Mediterranean Sea behind them, and by swarms of bombers and fighter planes; the Allied infantry planned to fight its way across the island, and finally to converge upon Messina from different directions simultaneously.

Field Marshal Montgomery’s army, composed largely of British and Canadians, would strike from the southeastern tip of Sicily and move up toward Messina via the eastern edge of the island, a scenic route through cliffside towns abundant with classical ruins and vacant tourist hotels, past such cities as Syracuse and Catania, and, beyond the fuming crater of the ten-thousand-foot Mount Etna, through the lofty aesthetic community of Taormina (known in peacetime for its cultured international travelers and its beautiful native boys) and the town of Bronte, with its ducal estate that had been granted by the grateful Bourbons to Lord Nelson for his efforts against Napoleon. Nelson and Lady Hamilton had used the estate as a love nest.

General Patton’s army, whose American majority would be joined by multinational units, including some from Free France, would depart from the southern coastline west of Montgomery’s landing site and head toward Messina via the center and western areas of Sicily, a less picturesque, more rugged, and very parched landscape of sun-bleached villages that rarely saw tourists, and where the minimum of existing government was frequently under the control of organized crime. And yet Allied intelligence agents were predicting considerable support in these
areas from the civilian population; indeed, once the shooting began, the agents expected pro-American support from most of Sicily’s five million inhabitants throughout the island. The Sicilians, whose often brutal and always condescending treatment under Mussolini’s regime was characteristic of what the islanders had come to expect from Rome, were decidedly anti-Fascist, if not outright anti-Italian. Often they had campaigned for autonomy from the Italian government; and during World War II and the postwar period, Sicilian separatist sentiments would be vigorously kept alive by a young folk hero named Salvatore Giuliano, the enterprising leader of a gang of bandits who stole from the landowners and shared with the poor, and who urged that Sicily bolt from Italy and annex itself to the United States.

There were now two million residents of the United States with blood ties to Sicily (a group that included the singer Frank Sinatra; the writer, teacher, and anti-Fascist Jerre Mangione; and the future author of
The Godfather
, Mario Puzo); and while it was not publicly known during the war years, the godfathers of Sicily had volunteered their services to the American military even before the island had been invaded. In contributing their skills as intimidators, cutthroats, saboteurs, and underground escorts for advance patrols, the Sicilian
mafiosi
were respecting the wishes of a Sicilian-born Mafia boss in America, Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano. In 1943, Luciano was serving a thirty-to-fifty-year prison term in New York State for his profiteering in the prostitution industry; and, quite apart from whatever American patriotism might have motivated his secret appeals relayed to his Sicilian friends by Allied intelligence agents, he also believed his cooperation with the Allies might shorten his jail term; and he would be right. After the war, Luciano’s sentence would be commuted by New York’s governor, Thomas E. Dewey; and the deported Luciano would be observed in 1946 at a Palermo hotel, along with other leading
mafiosi
, attending yet another Sicilian separatist rally.

Having Sicilian gangsters as cobelligerents against Nazi and Fascist soldiers did indeed contribute to an American military success on the island—or so was the conclusion of writer Norman Lewis, who served with British intelligence during the war, and who would subsequently write a book about the Mafia’s role in Sicily entitled
The Honoured Society
. As Lewis would point out in his book, the Sicilian Mafia worked closely with the American-led, not the British-led, units; and as a consequence, the path followed by General Patton’s charges would be traversed more swiftly and safely than that of General Montgomery’s men, who had to fight without local gangster support.

General Patton’s invasion of Sicily began on July 9, and, after minimal opposition, part of his forces had linked up with the
mafiosi
eleven days later; from then on they overcame the Fascist–Nazi opposition with amazing ease. As Norman Lewis would explain in his book, certain forward elements of Patton’s army, which included American military personnel of Sicilian heritage, arrived on July 20 in the town of Villalba, the home base of the island’s top Mafia chief, sixty-six-year-old Calogero Vizzini, known to his colleagues as Don Calò. Six days before, an Allied fighter plane with a yellow flag on its cockpit bearing the letter L had circled over Don Calò’s town; and inside a packet dropped by the pilot—which fell near the town church and was delivered by a villager to the home of Don Calò—was a smaller replica of this yellow L flag.

According to Lewis, the L referred to Lucky Luciano; and while the Allied military would never know what Luciano had communicated to Don Calò, the arrival of the message to Don Calò set in motion a series of events that would help weaken the Axis hold over Sicily. Italian soldiers began to defect from their units in increasing numbers. Many Italian POWs later admitted that their ranks had been infiltrated at night by
mafiosi
who convinced them that the Fascist cause was lost, that the Allies would absolutely overwhelm them (indeed, the Allies had by now landed four hundred thousand troops on the island); and these
mafiosi
frequently provided Italian deserters with civilian clothing, concealed them temporarily in private houses, then smuggled numbers of them off the island.