country,’ he says, ‘and we wanted to live in freedom.’ Not that they did anything much with the weapons except hide them; Carlo had a number of rifles stashed away in his attic.
But Carlo soon found himself on the wrong side of the Fascist militia, the GNR. One day he was on his way to Bologna when the tram he was on was stopped. A Fascist had been killed nearby and the GNR were carrying out a search. Carlo and two other men were immediately hauled off, and Carlo was accused of having a hand-grenade in his pocket – in fact, it was simply a bread roll. After being taken to prison, he was beaten up then released a few hours later. ‘From that time,’ says Carlo, ‘I told myself I had to make them pay.’
In early May, with the deadline for presenting himself for service drawing near, he was brought to the GNR barracks in Casalecchio, and accused of stealing and hoarding weapons. Among his questioners was a Fascist who lived on the same staircase as him. ‘He lived above me,’ says Carlo, ‘and the arms were right beneath his feet! They said, “If we find the weapons, we’ll send you to Poland”’. Somehow, Carlo managed to convince them he was innocent. But he was now beginning to feel seriously in danger, and so tried to join a nearby band of partisans. Unable to find them, however, he then went to look for another group of rebels in the mountains south of Bologna.
At five in the morning of 16 May, Carlo left his flat and headed first to Sasso Marconi at the confluence of two rivers, the Reno and the Setta, then headed south down the Setta valley to the small town of Vado, lying beneath the Monte Sole massif. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going, not even his parents. It was dark by the time he reached Vado, but he soon spotted four young men sitting outside a house by the side of the road. ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked.
‘I was looking for you,’ Carlo replied, tentatively.
‘And who are we?’
Carlo felt a wave of panic. What if they were Fascists out of uniform? But to his great relief the men then admitted to being ‘rebels’ and invited him into their house, a short way up the mountain above the eastern banks of the River Setta. There he spent the night, along with them and another man they had picked up that day. Early the next morning, at about half past four, he was woken and they headed out in the early morning gloom back across the river and up into the mountains to the band’s headquarters at a farmhouse called Ca’ Bregade.
As the sun rose, Carlo saw the ancient mountain landscape of the Monte Sole massif for the first time. Above him, standing sentinel, was the summit of Monte Sole itself. Either side were further peaks, wooded with small oaks and chestnuts, but with sheer escarpments too. There was also a high mountain plain, dotted with tiny farming communities, here a small village and church, elsewhere, as at Ca’ Bregade, just a few barns and buildings. And either side of the massif, the mountains fell away into the two river valleys of the Reno and Setta. Monte Sole was indeed an ideal place to hide a partisan band: plenty of woods and foliage, sandwiched by the two valleys, but with far-reaching views that would warn of any attack from below.
However, Carlo had not yet been welcomed with open arms. The partisans were deeply suspicious of anyone new: trust had to be proved and earned. No sooner had they arrived at Ca’ Bregade than the other new man was ordered to dig a pit, which Carlo assumed was to be a trench. A number of partisans, with Sten guns hung over their shoulder, gathered round to watch him. Suddenly Carlo understood what was about to happen. So too did the other man, who threw down his shovel and took off. He did not get far, as a volley of machine-gun fire cut him down. Carlo was horrified. A spy, they told him, sent to infiltrate them by the Fascists. They then turned to Carlo. His blood froze. In desperation, he told them to ask about him at Casalecchio. ‘I’ve stolen weapons,’ he told them, ‘and given them to the rebels. They’ll tell you about me.’
For the time being it did the trick. Carlo was locked in a cave, where he spent the next few days waiting for word from Casalecchio. It gave him time to think. He’d never seen a man cut down before, and the reality of the life he had entered upon began to sink in. ‘Something that up until then had been fundamentally a romantic and ingenuous ideal,’ he noted, ‘had run up for the first time – but not the last – against the harshness of the clandestine fight.’64
Guarding him were two Allied POW escapees, who repeatedly quizzed him about his life, his beliefs and the choice he had made. It soon became clear to Carlo that they believed his story. They also knew that their leader, Lupo, disliked killing, and would avoid taking lives whenever he could. ‘They told me to have faith,’ says Carlo, ‘and that once information had reached headquarters that my story was true, all would be well.’
Three days later, he was finally taken to see the commander, ‘the famous Lupo who provoked fear in Germans and Fascists alike’. Lupo shook his hand and told him the information they had sought was just as Carlo had said. Also there to welcome him was the vice-commander, Gianni Rossi. He was given a Sten gun, five magazines, and two hand grenades and assigned to the company led by a partisan called Golfieri. For better or worse, Carlo was now a member of the ‘Stella Rossa’ – the ‘Red Star’ brigade. There could be no turning back.
‘There were three crystal clear choices,’ says Carlo about his decision to become a partisan. ‘Either go with the Fascists, the Germans, or choose to fight with the partisans.’ In making his choice, however, he had to discard his former life. He was given a new nom de guerre, de rigueur for any partisan: ‘Ming’, the name of a villain in a comic strip called L’Avventuroso, destroyed any means of identification, and cut himself off entirely from his family, a harsh necessity for their safety and his own.
Failure to report for conscription was seen as desertion, and desertion was punishable by death. In reality, such action was comparatively rare – after all, an executed twenty-year old was no use to Kretzschmann’s labour effort. But there were executions. Only a few weeks before, for example, three young men, one of them a nineteen-year-old boy, were shot in Florence for failing to report for military service. Word of such executions spread rapidly, exactly as the Fascists and Germans hoped, and men like Carlo and many others were not prepared to put the threat of execution to the test. But this did not mean they flocked to report for duty. Rather, large numbers fled to the hills and became partisans instead.
* * *
While undoubtedly a large number of men became partisans because of the stark choice that seemed to face them, there were a number who did so from a more pronounced political conviction.
Some forty-five miles to the south-east of Monte Sole, in the mountains of Romagna, south of the city of Forlì, the 8th Garibaldi Brigade of partisans were recovering from a devastating battle against the Germans in which, over Easter, a combined force of more than 10,000 German and Fascist troops had swarmed into the area, trapped the one-thousand-strong 8th Garibaldi Brigade and all but destroyed them.
At the beginning of May, however, the 8th Brigade began reforming once more with around 600 men. The commander of the 2nd Battalion, in an operational area known as the First Zone around the small town of Sarsina, was twenty-year-old Iader Miserocchi, a passionate young man who had already repeatedly cheated death, both in prison and during the Easter battle.
It was often the case in Italy that sons – and daughters – followed the political convictions of their parents, and especially their fathers. This was certainly the case with Iader, whose father had always been vehemently anti-fascist. Iader, the second of four sons, followed his father’s example. As someone who was strongly against the war, he only very reluctantly joined the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, when he was called up in 1942, and then, when his squadron was posted to Libya, he refused to go, claiming illness. Promptly arrested, he was sent to a military hospital in Bologna, where, by good fortune, he met a doctor who had served with his father in
