Free Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II by Nicholas Best

really quite an exciting little action while it lasted and quite spirited. Of course a lot of partisans fired off their pieces quite aimlessly and threw grenades just for fun. Indeed, these gentlemen and their curious assortment of rifles, grenades, tommy-guns etc caused me more alarm than our opponents. 13
    Afterward, Macmillan’s Jeep had come under sniper fire again as he tried to return to Bologna. He and his companions had had to abandon their vehicles and run for cover while the partisans tackled the sniper from a neighboring house. They had reached Bologna eventually, where girls with Fascist sympathies were having their heads forcibly shaved, and from there had continued to Rome. After a few more days at his desk, Macmillan had slipped away to Assisi with Robert Cecil, a wounded British officer who had been seconded to him as an aide-de-camp.
    It was evening when they learned that Mussolini had been hanged, as the first broadcasts had it. As night fell, they also received a message from Field Marshal Alexander, saying that the Germans had signed the surrender on the terms agreed. Afterward, Macmillan and Cecil switched off the wireless and went out for a walk, still unable to believe that the war was actually coming to an end. The night was lovely. The whole valley of Assisi was bathed in moonlight as they strolled. In his mind, Macmillan compared Adolf Hitler unfavorably to St. Francis and was quietly thankful that he found himself in such a beautiful place as the carnage of the past few years drew to a close at last.
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    IN THE HILLTOP TOWN of Sant’Ambrogio, overlooking Rapallo and the Gulf of Genoa, American poet Ezra Pound was in a very different frame of mind as he contemplated Mussolini’s death and the advance of the Allied army. As a U.S. citizen and a longtime supporter of fascism, he was terrified of what the future held for him once the Allies were in control. Pound had made no secret of his opinions during the war, signing his name to Fascist manifestos and making pro-Mussolini, anti-Semitic broadcasts on Italian radio. The U.S. government had indicted him for treason in 1943. The penalty for treason was death.
    Pound had lived in Rapallo since 1925. He had spent most of the war in the flat on the Via Marsala that he shared with his English wife, Dorothy. But the flat was on the seafront, in the way of the German coastal defenses. Ordered out in 1943, Pound and his wife had moved in with his mistress, Olga Rudge, who lived in nearby Sant’Ambrogio. The two women knew each other well, although relations were never easy. Olga had a daughter by Pound, who had been fostered out to parents in the Italian Tyrol. Dorothy had a son by an unknown Egyptian, conceived when she traveled alone to Egypt before the war.
    Pound was undecided about what to do as the Fascists fled from Rapallo and the partisans moved in ahead of the Americans. Like many others, he did not regret his Fascist leanings and remained convinced that time would prove him right in the end. He was aware, though, that Fascists were being hunted down and shot all over Italy. He knew, too, that he was wanted by the Americans, who had circulated his photograph and description. The problem for him was whether to run and hide—and, if so, where?—or whether to stay put and bluff it out.
    Pound had already fled once, abandoning Rome hours before the city’s capitulation to the Allies in 1944. Heading north on foot, he had slept rough for several nights, traveling a total of 450 miles, some of it by train, to join his daughter’s foster family in the Tyrol. From there, he had made his way several weeks later to Sant’Ambrogio, where his wife and mistress were waiting for him.
    He had also tried to give himself up when the Americans reached Rapallo. Presenting himself at their headquarters in the town, he had offered his services “as having lots of information about Italy which could be of use.” But the Americans were far too busy