Free A Civil War by Claudio Pavone

See also G. Pansa,
Il gladio e l’alloro. L’esercito di Salò
, Milan: Mondadori, 1991. This reality is intuited by a Communist leaflet, n.d., which, urging the soldiers of the RSI to desert with their weapons and kit, exhorts them not to allow ‘a repetition of 8 September’ (ISRT,
Raccolta volantini, PCI Firenze
, clandestini 1943–1944).
    90 P. Vidal-Naquet,
Flavius Josèphe ou du bon usage de la trahison
, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977.
    91 Mazzantini,
A cercar la bella morte
, pp. 20, 22, 200, 112. The decision to join the RSI by a disbanded Belluno soldier who had wandered for three days around the hills above Salò was motivated by the rediscovery of ‘that security and that role that he had missed after the armistice’. A. Lotto, ‘Obbedienza a rivolta: motivazioni, forme, esiti 1919–1945’, in
Protagonisti
IX: 32 (July–September 1988), p. 13.
    92 See the file cited in Rizzatti. Another paratrooper stationed in Sardinia has recounted that ‘the idea of jumping up into one of the German trucks presented itself with the fascination of rebellion’, a fascination to which however he did not yield himself (Bianchi,
Un’isola
, pp. 28–9, quoted in M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis).
    93 See C. Dellavalle,
Operai, industriali e partito comunista nel Biellese, 1940–1945
, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978, p. 98.
    94 See M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis, as well as O. Barbieri,
Ponti sull’ Arno. La Resistenza a Firenze
, Preface by F. Parri, Rome: Riuniti, 1975, and G. Pisanò,
Gli ultimi in grigioverde. Storia delle forze armate della Repubblica sociale italiana
, Milan: FPG, 1967.
    95 See S. Setta,
Renato Ricci. Dallo squadrismo alla Repubblica sociale italiana
, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986.
    96 Memorandum to Giovanni Dolfin, Mussolini’s secretary, 27 December 1943, cited in M. Di Giovanni’s degree thesis.
    97 Pesce,
Senza tregua
, p. 139. The navy would number Di Nanni among its gold medal recipients (I thank Giorgio Rochat for this information).
    98 See L. Casali,
Il movimento di liberazione a Ravenna
, Ravenna: Istituto Storico della Resistenza, vol. I, n.d., p. 91.
    99 Report to the CUMER by the command of the Mario Gordini 28 th GAP brigade, 29 August 1944, sent after two punishing Nazi-Fascist reprisals that month (published in Casali,
Il movimento di liberazione a Ravenna
II [1965], pp. 276–8).
    100 Letter by a Milanese engineer, Umberto Fogagnolo, a socialist, to his wife, 31 July 1943, when he had begun the political activity that he pursued after 8 September (
LRI
, pp. 87–8).
    101 The article was published in January 1945 in
Giustizia e Libertà. Notiziario dei patrioti delle Alpi Cozie
; it is reproduced in Giovana,
Storia di una formazione partigiana
, p. 202.
    102 Mutilated, anonymous document of the northern Italian Action Party, n.d., sent to the party’s regional and provincial committees (INSMLI,
CLNAI
, envelope 8, folder 12).
    103 Bini (Giovanni Serbandini) spoke in these terms in Lazagna,
Ponte rotto
, p. 50.
    104 ‘There were the bands: to go, or not to go … and I decided’; ‘When that moment [the call-up for Germany] came you had to choose which road to follow’; ‘They almost obliged us to decide to go’. Testimony by Achille Vignolini, furnace-workman, Giovanni Carretta, Fiat worker, Silvestro Silvio Tedeschi, carpenter, in Bravo and Jalla,
La vita offesa
, pp. 84, 83, 82. It should be borne in mind that deportations from Piedmont reached their peak in the first six months of 1944 (40 percent of the total). Ibid., pp. 55–6. A public draft notice for those born in 1925, and for shares of those born in 1923 and 1924, were issued by Graziani, the defence minister, on 4 November 1943. See E. Piscitelli, ‘I bandi tedeschi e fascisti’,
Quaderni della Resistenza laziale
, Rome n.d., but 1975, vol. 4, pp. 14–43. See also Pansa,
L’esercito di Salò
, pp. 22–5ff. In Rome notices for officers to present themselves had already been appearing since 29 September