By now the armies were beyond Rome, approaching the Arno River in Florence. During the journey this time I saw that a good part of the country south of Rome was beginning to rebuild with a certain amount of hope and quiet and even a little enthusiasm for the future on the part of the Italian civilians. It was amazing how just a little improvement sparked the renewed energy and hope of a population so devastated by war over the years. In Rome I sat down to try to make notes describing what I had observed along the way.
"The other afternoon we were in Cassino, which while small in comparison to the mighty battles fought, and yet to be fought, will probably be remembered as the scene of some of the most desperate and heroic fighting of this war. The town has not been merely destroyed, stone from stone, but the stones have been literally ground to powder by the force of the artillery barrages. In a town which once housed several thousand people in stone buildings, hardly a wall in the whole town stands six feet in height."
Farther up the road we stopped on what a few days before was a battlefield. Burned out and blasted tanks rusted in the rain. Trucks, burned and blasted, littered the roadways and the ditches. Needing some gasoline, we stopped before the lone tent of a single British soldier who kept what they called a "Petrol Point."
As we drew up beside the pile of fuel cans a shot rang out and far over on the Rapido, a mine disposal crew had exploded a mine. We both jumped with the crack of the pistol shot and the explosion of the mine. The English lad shrugged and said, "We call them ghost shots. So quiet around here."
I arrived in Rome at 5:55 PM on July 11th, entering the city through the south wall of the old Roman Acqueduct which had sent water into Rome in Caesar's time. It needed repair but was impressive.
The entrance through the walls had been blasted away some by one of our army units in order that it might accomodate the heavy equipment that was to be paraded through the city. This was about the only war damaged I observed in the ancient capitol. The streets were clean and the people strolled in the sun; there was an occasional automobile and many bicycles along the winding streets leading into the heart of the historic city.
In Rome we were billeted in plush Albergo Flora (although the furniture, draperies, and paintings had been stored and replaced with GI blankets and equipment). We had new and almost luxurious offices, high upon the tenth floor of a modern building. I had visions of settling down to something of the life and routine of a Washington bureaucrat, but my recall of those early "routine days in Rome" however is quite different.
Our role as military governors of Southern Italy changed with the fall of Rome and the establishment of a free government. We were now advisors to this new government. Roem was full of bureaucrats and the new government was busy separating the Fascists from the non-party functionaries. Italian law was going into force and a vast reshuffling of personnel, financial institutions, taxing authorities, police, commerce and the appratus were taking shape.
Despite this resurrection of Italian rule, it must be remembered that this new government was strangely dependent on the whims and authority of the Allied High Commission and the Allied Armies. As an example, railroads, transport and communications were still tightly controlled by the military. The food supply to Rome, in theory, was a responsibility of the Italian government, but nothing could move without military permission and assistance. When the Germans were in Rome and the Mussolini government was in power the city functioned about as usual, except fro a certain amount of austerity in food and consumer goods. But with the fall of Rome, normality was swept away. An entirely new set of rules and circumstances developed. In short order, Rome felt the pinch of low food supply.
Under the German-Mussolini-Italian system, normal transport plus literally thousands of bicycle riders kept Rome supplied with food and a limited quantity of fuel. Vatican City -- which under Mussolini's regime had a concordat permitting its trucks and transport services to purchase food in certain provinces in Northern and Eastern Italy -- was the prime place of refuge for the hungry and those who wanted to save their property, household goods, and machinery. Both Germany and the Allies respected the Vatican area as a separate state.
Rome was the first world capitol to be liberated from German-Italian control and US and British were anxious that this capitol reflect the finest traditions of British and American conduct and administration. Soldiers were cautioned and ordered to be on best behavior; great respect was to be given to all local religious and cultural institutions. Government was to be conducted in the best tradition of Democracy. Though a King was at this time the nominal head of government, he was a figurehead. In spite of attempts at orderly transition, there was disruption of transportation and business brought on by the changeover in government plus the inevitable dislocations caused by armies, and our problems were the same as those we experienced in North Africa, Sicily, and Southern Italy. Availability of food was the critical problem and the black market with all the other ills which accompany it was increasingly flagrant.
Despite the fact that most correspondents were anxious to "put the best face" on the new Rome the desperate situation began to leak out in press dispatches and those reports brought almost instant reaction from Washington. President Roosevelt dispatched Brigadier William O'Dwyer (later Mayor of New York City) to Rome to look at and take over the economic section of the Allied High Commission. He had orders, he afterwards told me, "to feed and clothe Rome, even if the rest of Italy starved."
General O'Dwyer was a fast-talking, table-pounding, New York Irishman and a politician who viewed most things in political terms and acted for political effect. He represented a country where goods from the field found their way to the dinner table with little conscious effort. He seemed to think that by pounding the table and giving orders Rome would be fed.
My Chief of the Agricultural, Forestry and Fisheries Division Lieutenant Colonel William A. Hartman would come back to the hotel livid, shaking his head at the "Damn fool demands of O'Dwyer." Hartman left the office for several days and it was I who had to tussle with O'Dwyer and convince him somehow of a few facts of life in Rome. After one exceedingly stormy session with the General, I came back to the office and noted in my little book, "I'm having a helluva time with General O'Dwyer who seems to want to haul potatoes on my back from Southern Italy to feed Rome."
As a Brigadier General, dispatched to Italy by the President of the United States, and head of the economic section of the Allied High Commission for Italy, composed of British, American, and in theory Russian officers, he was, on paper, all powerful. Yet with Rome still strictly under Army control, and Italians merely shuffling papers among each other. General O'Dwyer, with really nothing tangible to take hold of, was very frustrated.
The man who ad been O'Dwyer's political rival, back in the United States, now Colonel Charles Poletti, was the Military Governor of Rome and as such had great independence and authority, with a sort of an Italian carabineri responding to his orders. We on the agricultural side had most firm instructions to try to maximize food production and to collect as much from farmers as possible and see that it was distributed as equally as possible to all of the population notwithstanding General O'Dwyer's order "to feed Rome even if the rest of Italy starved."
O'Dwyer wanted all of the food corralled and placed under his control ... an impossibility on many counts. The very real fact was that the fighting forces controlled all transport and communications, so nothing moved anywhere without an allocation of the necessary transport by the army transport service. An army corporal, in charge of a train under proper military orders, could defy any order that a General or Colonel in the Military Government or Allied Commission set-up might try to give. There was rivalry of sorts between O'Dwyer and his former side-kick Poletti, former Mayor of New York City and it was soon apparent that O'Dwyer was aspiring to that office or higher after his stint in the Army.
All during our painful and trudging move from Sicily up the Peninsula to Rome and beyond, there had been a continuous pressure and the strongest policy against the so-called black market in food products. Valiant efforts were made to stop this traffic with little avail. Perhaps that was as it should have been. Many people in Naples in the winter of 1943-44 would have starved save for the black market and the scrounging of thousands of people in the countryside for food for themselves and to sell to the illegal markets.
With all normal transport and distribution systems stopped with the Allied takeover of Rome, the black market was the only source of food for some people. It was simply not possible to bring in enough food with the transport avialable to feed the city of Rome much less build up the necessary reserve stocks so as to keep an even flow of food through normal channels.
Colonel Poletti, the Military Governor I first encountered fourteen months before in Sicily ran the show, even though there was an Italian Mayor of sorts. Poletti, in a move to stamp out the black market, had posted US Military police and Italian carabineri on every roadway around Rome with orders to stop and search every vehicle, bicycle, and footman entering the city and to confiscate all food weighing more than two kilos (about four and one half pounds). If police discovered evidence of black market, they were to seize the cargo, confiscate the vehicle, and arrest the driver.
Until that time some 30,000 persons on bicycles, in ox-carts, or on foot daily left the city to scrounge food, potatoes, newly harvested wheat, previously stored olive oil, chestnuts; anything edible. They usually held out enough for their own family and brought in all they could carry for the black market. This system actually fed the people of Rome. The elaborate sidewalk markets, open stalls and municipal markets, once the centers of Rome's food supply were bare. This illegal system of distribution was stopped cold by Poletti's order. It almost starved Rome. O'Dwyer and Poletti were vying, I suspect, for future political favor. The war between O'Dwyer and Poletti was almost as bad as the pulling and tugging between the Italians and the US Army.
South of Rome, and in the far South which had been taken over in mid 1943 giving time for preparations for planting in the spring of 1944, there were bumper crops of almost everything. With a good potato harvest, fine grape crops, vegetables and more than an average wheat crop there was food to spare. But the question was -- how to get it to the municipal market and the dinner tables of Rome? On Colonel Hartman's return, he asked me to continue to handle O'Dwyer. I finally convinced the yelling Irishman that the only way food was going to get into Rome in any volume was to rescind Poletti's orders. He accepted my argument that some way we had to wrangle train and truck transport (and some communications) from the army so that a normal commercial operation could function. Already I had my share of battles with the military, and I was reluctant to take on another one. So it was that O'Dwyer went after the military -- hammer and tong.
As a result of O'Dwyer's efforts we were, in time, alloted two trains daily out of Southern Italy. They steamed straight through, under military control, to the Rome Municipal market. Buying and selling was done by Italians in a strictly commercial manner. This meant that a Rome firm would have to contact a buyer in the south for whatever supplies he wanted and in what volume and at what cost. When loaded in cars the military was responsible for seeing that the train and the goods reached the Rome market.
With a new government in Rome, this part of Italy was counted as free Italy, and yet all kinds of problems developed. For instance, the army would not release the telephone lines for civilian traffic without a censor or a military man standing by at both ends of the line. When an Italian firm wanted to talk to its agent in Southern Italy about potatoes, citrus, olive oir, or wheat, the talking had to be done by an Allied officer at both ends.
This order, of course, complicated matters and slowed down traffic. At times the lines were held for hours by the military, and civilian traffic had to wait. Finally, however, the trains began to arrive and the municipal markets were filled with dark Lecce wine, stalk cabbage, potatoes, wheat, poultry, and other edibles. Everything was rationed, but Rome ate pretty well that fall and the next spring -- thanks, perhaps, to the blustering of Brigadier General O'Dwyer.
In due course, General O'Dwyer left with a flourish, and in a much later and quieter period a young civilian economist, Dr. Harlan Cleveland, came in as head of the Economic Section of the Allied Commission. This was part of Washington's plan to "civilianize" the Allied Commission, a plan which foundered for months both in Italy and later in Germany. The reason was that both the British and American military commands resented civilians taking over.
Our food problems in Rome did not go away by breaking the bottle neck on transportation and distribution. Under Mussolini's regime a Concordant with the Vatican provided that the Vatican could disregard the ration and collection policies of the Central Government in several provinces east of Rome to the coast. But it was the policy of the Allied Commission and the new Italian Government that all food was to be rationed and shared equally.
As the U.S. and British armies moved toward the Arno, quite a surplus of grain, poultry, livestock, and corn were found. Shortly after the armies passed over the Abruzzi area, a very rich agricultural section almost untouched by war, Vatican trucks proceeded to the sector and began buying produce and food supplies. The buyers and drivers were promptly arrested by the army and their cargoes and trucks were confiscated.
This brought a swarm of English-speaking priests and bishops from Vatican City to our door in protest demanding an explanation. We had to tell them that Vatican City was getting its share of Italian food based on its population. Our orders were to continue to control Italian resources and divide them on the basis of the population with no favors to any groups. This, we told the priests, was the policy of the New Italian Government. Afterward, I learned that when the protest was made to the Italian Government bureaucrats, they simply passed the buck back to us.
In the course of our discussions, we told the Vatican representatives of the wonderful work which the local priests and nuns had done in helping to divide the food resources among all the people as we moved up the peninsula. We asked for their continued cooperation. We reminded the Vatican representatives that the United States had a special representative at Vatican City, Mr. Myron C. Taylor, and he was the man to contact in case the Pontiff's enclave required food above the Italian ration.
After considerable argument and not a little nervousness on the part of yours truly, deeply conscious of the political and persuasive powers of church high officials, my office arranged to release the trucks and drivers, but the U.S. Army kept the food and sent the problem higher up for resolution. In the meantime, my Chief, Colonel Hartman, had requested and received an audience with Pope Pius XII. He took with him our little blue book manual which set up the Commune Committee System in the south and which placed responsibility for food collection and distribution at the lowest possible level.
As a further step, Colonel Hartman, in an unusual move toward the Vatican, asked the Pope for a directive to all priests and nuns in the north instructing them to cooperate with the Commune Committee System -- thus making these committees just a bit more official in the military areas. Hartman argued that this was local democracy in action. The Pope replied that the church must refrain from politics and he could not issue such a directive. He did, however, bless the ... (page 57 of the original manuscript is missing)
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