That night, in the rather palatial and comfortable Excelsior Hotel, I noted:
"There seems little question that the Sicilians in the larger towns and cities will starve. It becomes a question of who we should let starve. Some should starve and some should be shot. But could Allies let either of these things happen? Two classes here ... very, very desperately poor and very, very rich."
We worked until late at night on our oral report to be made the next morning. We were over at headquarters to report around ten o'clock on January 9th. We had only briefly gotten into this when an orderly came asking for a special mission to report to Naples. Without trying to find out very much about the mission, I volunteered. By then it was eleven o'clock and I was told to report to the docks to board an LST by 3:00 P.M.
Our report was rather brief and probably over-simplified. It was our recommendation to get some grain from the outside -- maybe divert some ships going to the Italian mainland if there were any in the convoys moving that way; raise the price of grain to at least 4000 lira per quintal; open up the Consoricios and Alimentari, and go ahead with the raids if they thought that would scare the Sicilians into action. A final item had to do with transport and of all things, horseshoe nails!
All motor transport had been seized and most of the trains in operation were carrying military supplies to Messina and other ports for shipment to the mainland. Farmers were complaining that they had no horseshoe nails to shoe their donkeys and oxen which were the chief transport power for getting wheat and farm produce to markets. The hilly gravel roads or trails simply cut the unprotected hoofs of the donkeys and oxen to the blood.
Our investigation had determined that village blacksmiths could hammer out scrap iron make something that might do for a horse or oxen shoe, but the nails to put them on were something else. I promised to see what could be done about this when I got to the mainland if that was where I was supposed to be going.
Major Hammar, in whose lap I had left the Sicilian food problem, saw me off at exactly 4:00 P.M. on a landing craft, loaded with tanks and artillery. Aboard were a few enlisted men and a Lieutenant Colonel in Military Government, a former deputy warden of a Pennsylvania prison, who had volunteered with me. We put out to sea headed for Naples, and were told that if we were lucky we would make it by about ten o'clock the next morning.
Our old LST, flat-bottomed, diesel-powered, headed up along the north coast. All night and into early afternoon we edged toward Salerno where our troops had landed some weeks before, in the mainland invasion. We rounded the Sorrento peninsula and as we headed toward Naples in late afternoon we at last saw the famous and truly beautiful bay of Naples. Some distance ahead black smoke was curling from the cone of Vesuvius. As we moved further into the harbor, about sunset, this smoke turned to a warm red glow, and later that night, occaisional flames shot upward. It was in Jeremiah, "The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud (smoke) to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire."
The old LST duck, as the Navy crew called our boat, had been more comfortable than any accomodations since leaving the States. Good beds or bunks and Navy meals, plus the luxury of hot showers. Our Captain said we would remain aboard in the harbor overnight. This was greeted with enthusiasm as I noted:
"this means a warm bed, a good shower, and two more good meals."
Promptly the next morning, Jan. 12, we were herded off the ship as the tanks began clanking out of the open maw at the bow.
I immediately reported to a Colonel Adams who was in charge of the special detail. As we soon found out, the assignment was to look after thousands of Yugoslav refugees being pushed into the sea by the retreating partisans of Hitler and Tito. King Peter, who had passively resisted the German occupation of Yugoslavia, had long since fled, and General Mikhailovich, the leader of the Chetniks, the Serbian guerilla forces, carried on his campaign against the Germans as a minister of war of the Royalist government in exile.
Mikhailovich's forces had often clashed with the partisan forces of Tito; but his army gradually dwindled against the Tito drive and the Chetniks were being driven literally into the sea. For many months the Serbian Chetniks had served as a sort of an underground gateway for Allied airmen shot down over the Balkans. It had been an Allied policy to help out this force as much as possible. However, early in 1944 the Chetniks had lost Allied support and our mission, supposedly, was to try to organize the tranfer of these people out of Yugoslavia, get them on islands in the Adriatic, and move as many of them as possible to camps around Bari, on the east coast of Italy.
I had received orders and was headed for the airport to take off on the initial hop to Bari, where we were to get transportation either by boat or parachute drop to the Yugoslavian mainland, where I decided to stick my head in the door of the Food and Agriculture Section of the Allied High Commission for Italy. At the desk sat and old friend and co-worker from Agriculture Department days, then Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, William Hartman. He greeted me like a long-lost friend and asked, "Where the devil have you been? We've been looking for you to show up for a month!"
"I've been in Sicily," I told him, "and am now on my way to Yugoslavia on a special mission."
Immediately, he began pressing buttons and making telephone calls. The long and short of it as that he called Colonel Adams, said something about my being a needed person on his staff, and that any Second Lieutenant could do what I was supposed to do anyway. My orders were cancelled and a Second Lieutenant was the goat in this instance. In my own case, I noted:
"I had missed the opportunity for some real adventure to talk about when it was all over."
Ths had been the second time that I had been alerted for a so-called special mission and was cancelled out. While over at Tizzi Ouzzou rumors were that two or three of us were to join a parachute drop on Rome as our landing forces invaded the mainland north of Rome. For some reason, this was cancelled and a landing later was made south of Rome without parachuting into Rome.
I was not long getting into action. It was now January 14th, and my first assignment was to be prepared to leave Sunday the 16th for Bari, Italy, to work with the newly-appointed Minister of Agriculture of the new Italy under King Victor Emmanual and the Badoglio government.
I bunked that night with one of the fellows on Hartman's staff. The food and agriculture setup was the pattern to be followed all the rest of the war. A mixed staff, roughly one Britisher for one American.
In the case of the Food, Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry Division, one Lieutenant Colonel Dickey, a delightful Scotchman, who had been Minister of Agriculture of Scotland and now, in His Majesty's Army, was Hartman's counterpart. So on Sunday the 16th, I took off in a Command car, with a British driver and an Italian interpreter, for Bari to help organize the new Italy. I noted in my book:
"Badoglio, King Victor, here I come ... may the Lord help Italian farmers!"
We took off early that Sunday morning by way of Benevento, over the mountain passes of the lower Appenines, which run like a giant backbone down the spine of Italy.
As we drove over the snow-covered and icy-slick mountain passes, literally hundreds of men, women, and children were weaving up the slopes and along the roads with sacks of wheat on their head, moving towards Naples. Men carried fairly large sacks around 50 to 100 pounds, the women lesser amounts but often with a blue-nosed baby slung in a blanket over their back. This we learned later was the human break line which kept Naples in wheat that winter. Whole families and communities picked up the wheat on the Foggia plain, carried it in a rather well-organized system over the mountains and into the black market at Naples. This was first: a manner of surviving; second, it was good business.
Up to this point, the Morgenthau Boys, as we later called them, had insisted that no Italian be paid more for food or articles than the official government price had been under Mussolini. Wheat price had been fixed at 200 lire a quintal: and the black market price in Naples at that time was 4000 lire a quintal. There was good money in the business.
On our arrival in Bari we looked up the new Minister of Agriculture, one Dr. Segatti, a professor of agronomy at Bari University, and Captain Walt Shriber, an American, formerly with the Office of Foreign Agriculture Relations USDA. Capt. Shriber was the olive oil, fruit and vegetable expert for that organization. He had been assigned to the new Ministry, and was familiar with Italy and a fluent speaker of the language.
Since our assignment at this point was to try to help set up an Agriculture Department for the new Italian government, our conversation was largely on organizational problems and availability of Italian agriculture experts. We soon found there were none and Segatti, at this point was it, as far as an agricultural ministry was concerned.
Segatti was an agronomist, and with no particular food problem having hit the Bari area up to now because of the closeness of the ample supplies on the Foggia Plain, his concern was planting of the new crop. He was worried about the Contradini, or farm workers, who under the zest of liberation were running rather wild, squatting on the large estates, taking over this and that property, or simply refusing to work.
Italy, and Southern Italy in particular, had a semi-feudal system of agriculture. First, there was the large landowner, who usually lived in Rome, or at some of the more pleasant places on the coast. Next was the resident representative of the landowner's interest; next came the operator, or the man who got together the seed, fertilizer, machinery and generally supervised and made the decisions as to what would be produced and how. Finally there were the direct tillers or Contradini, who did the work, planted and harvested the crops, either on a day wage (about 23 cents per day at the time) or got a portion of the crop for their work.
This system had pretty well broken down under the strain of war, with battles being fought all around. Those who could, ran for safety further north; others hid out until the army passed, and others simply could not get hold of anything to start things moving again. There was no transport; it had been seized by the armies. Input supplies were virtually nonexistent and with the so-called freedom, political chaos prevailed. The workers were enjoying their freedom and the bosses were looking on in dismay.
We did not get very far in our first round with Segatti because he was simply out of communications with things; he had no staff, and most ministers are helpless without one. We went back to Naples, promising to return when we got a better look at our problem.
On the 19th we returned to Naples to look at things. This was the center of Military Government under the Allied Commission in what was then the only free part of Italy. My assignment in the picture was Chief of the Agriculture Division of the Department of Food and Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry of the Allied Military Government of Italy. This included the total agricultural picture from plowing and planting until the product reached its first processing to the marketplace. Here the Food Division, which was a sort of separate Ministry took over. We were expected to facilitate production and to see that the production reached market channels.
The Badoglio government had set up shop in a luxury hotel in Salerno that somehow had escaped the bombardment and destruction of the Allied landing there. People were moving in all directions giving orders and issuing decrees since this was free Italy and subject to the new Italian government control. However, the government was pretty much helpless at doing anything since nearly all transport, communications, and commercial activity was actually controlled by the military.
We went to Salerno to see if we could find anybody with any idea of what to do about the food problem. The black market situation was out of hand and the food situation was growing steadily worse. On top of that, no wheat ships were coming across the Atlantic to take care of the critical situation. The first job then seemed to be -- after getting seeds and fertilizer started toward Italy -- to determine how much wheat and other food supplies were available in Italy to meet the problem in the months ahead.
During most of the Mussolini regime, no provincial agricultural statistics had been given out by the agricultural ministry. All statistics were kept by the National Institute of Statistics in Rome and when issued at all were in press releases or in the total volume of statistics for the whole economy. There were simply no books, reports or other material anywhere in Naples which we could find reflecting agricultural production after 1936 in the four southern provinces of Italy under our control.
By this time, Major Hartman had raided the infantry casual companies near Naples and had found a couple of young Second Lieutenants and wrangled them on to the staff. One of them, Ralph German, wounded and convalescing in a hospital had been a county agent in Kansas and was an agricultural economist by training. The other, Harold Koeller, was an agricultural economist and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. We armed these young fellows with the 1936 statistics on agricultural production, put them in a jeep with an Italian interpreter and told them to make a commune-by-commune tour of the four provinces, if possible, and to ask farmers along the way how their 1943 crop compared with the 1936 crop ... if they remembered that crop.
The answer was usually a shrug or a "bono bono" or "basta," but with this sort of survey the fellows got some inkling of what was still out there to be collected. This was vital on two counts; one, we had to have some idea of what was available for the immediate critical days ahead; second, we had to have some sort of an estimate to send over to Algiers headquarters for requisition of grain, especially from the United States.
In a matter of this kind, the Pentagon was always reluctant to act except on the momst detailed justification since every bushel of grain that had to have ship space meant that much less space for munitions and other materials for the war. In the meantime we were battling the army for transport to bring wheat from the Foggia area and conducting the most inhuman raids on the people who were carrying the wheat over the mountain to the black market. These carriers had a system of depots where each segment of the human train deposited their wheat to be picked up by another carrying party to take to the next depot and so on.
The authorities, those whom we had put in office, under the prodding of our military, would use the new Italian carabineri to raid these small caches and bring them to Naples much to the despair of the men and women who trudged through the ice and snow to get the wheat up the mountain passes.
This black market racket was not confined to the Italians alone. We finally secured a fleet of trucks from the army manned by British and American GIs to go up to Foggia and haul in the grain which had been collected there using the old Mussolini force system to get the grain. Some twenty of these trucks never did reach Naples with their cargo and the flood of wheat which hit the black market was sure indication that it had been diverted. Later investigation revealed that the British Lieutenant in charge said some of the drivers got lost and they simply turned the grain over to the Italians.
During the next ten days we settled down at a desk to try to figure out what tools we had to work with and how we would go about, getting crops planted, collecting in wheat, getting seed and other agricultural supplies. The Italian farmers in the Naples area were screaming for sulphur and copper sulphate for sprays on their lemon, orange, apricot, grape, and other crops. In addition they needed seed wheat, hemp, and potato seed and either tractor or horses, mules or oxen. The man and woman with a hoe symbolized more than anything else the farming in the Naples area at the time.
By some astute wrangling on the part of our British potato expert we got some shipping tonnage jarred loose from the military. Two cargoes of potato seed from Scotland were soon on the way. By some more wrangling on the American side, we got a Navy destroyer to go to Beirut, Lebanon and pick up five tons of hemp seed. Hemp was a big crop in the Naples area. The area swarmed with small hand-operated rope factories which produced most of the industrial rope for that part of Italy, not to mention a variety of towels, rugs, sacks, and other containers.
Our argument for the procurement of this hemp seed was that by producing hemp this would off-set some of the very scarce rope material which had resulted from the Japanese cutting off Asian supplies of sisal and abaca. As it turned out, later that year, the little factories, almost in the fields where the hemp grew, produced literally tons of hawser rope for the Royal Navy.
We had a fishery expert on the staff as well as a forestry man. They got busy trying first to do something about reviving the fishing industry especially around the Sicily coast since war activity had somewhat subsided in that sector. They then turned to the matter of fuel. Much of the Italian fuel is charcoal and methane gas plus imported coal. Since the methane gas was produced mostly in the North, still occupied by the Germans, and most of the coal was imported from England or down from Germany, almost the only heat available was from wood or charcoal burning equipment. Here again, transportation, organization, and distribution were the problems. On top of that with our armies bogged down before Cassino and a cold and chilly winter in the mountains facing them, were screaming for heat.
Gasoline supplies for the army were being held to a minimum in this period largely due to the big build-up going on for the invasion of France. As a result the army came to the Agiculture, Forestry and Fisheries Division for help. What they wanted was a batallion of Italian workers to go up on the sides of the mountain in the Rapid Valley, cut down the timber and gather it in dumps along the road where army could pick up the timber in trucks and allocate it to the military units for small in effect camp fires in their dugouts, fox holes, and bunkers in blown-up buildings.
Major Fuller, a former US Agriculture Department forestry man, got on the job. He organized a detail and most of the winter, Italians, both men and women, cut down the small trees, tied them in bundles, and skidded them down the mountain sides on a cable stretched from the top of the mountain to the dump at the roadway.
Our ten days in the office up to January 20th had been devoted almost day and night to getting things moving in some direction. Our effort to get some sort of an Italian ministry under way suffered. The grain situation became worse and worse. January 29th we took off by air for Bari and another fling at the Agricultural Ministry. We were on very good terms now with Dr. Segatti, who was just as bewildered as we were about his position. Things were boiling up all around but no clear indication from Badoglio over in Salerno as to what was supposed to do.
On a Sunday we left Bari for a look at King's Italy whhich consisted of four Southern provinces. We had driven around the countryside and ended up around noon at the village town of Matera. This was high flatland country, near the center of the lower part of free territory. Largely devoted to grains, potato and general agricultural production, as against the citrus, vegetables, olive, apple, peach and apricot crops of the Naples area.
In the town it was church day and market day. After going to churcch in the morning the peasants gathered in the Piazza to display their ducks, geese, chickens eggs, vegetables, flowers and so on. Some of the more progressive merchants displayed the few wares they had to sell. The day was sunny with a sort of chilly warmth for that part of Italy on this January day and the Piazza was abuzz with activity.
We picked up a ten year old boy who was tagging along with us, to walk about the town and along the roads leading into Matera. We sat by a small stream, deeply eroded in the limestone surface, and across the stream were rather high limestone banks underneath the flat lands beyond. Caves had either formed or had been cut in the sides of the limestone walls and literally hundreds of families had lived in them for centuries. Now they were overcrowded with refugees from other areas blasted out by the recent invasion. This contrast to our way of life at home was thought-provoking and served to emphasize the urgency of the task that faced us in this war-torn country.
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