In the 1950s, less than ten years after the most horrific European war sparked off by an illegally re-armed Germany, the NATO countries were obliged to push for and obtain the rearmament of West Germany to make the bulwark against feared Soviet expansionism more credible.
Now, notes AEJ member and former Financial Times Rome correspondent and East Europe editor Tony Robinson, we are back in a world where the new German government has sloughed off decades of military neglect and plans to recreate a powerful German army, albeit within the wider framework of a re-armed NATO, to ward off, once again, the threat of Russian imperialism.
Robinson has this perspective in a review of Operation Bowler, a new book by journalist and war historian Jonathan Glancey, which touched several themes from his own journalistic experience in Italy and Eastern Europe and a few days recently spent in Trieste and neighbouring Slovenia, formerly a bitterly contested part of Yugoslavia.
Review of Operation Bowler by Anthony Robinson
Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav partisan who backed Tito’s determination to defy Stalin and build an independent national communist state after pushing German forces out of the battered Balkan country, became disillusioned. He fell out with Tito and was jailed. His book “The New Class” an unblinking, critical analysis of communism in practice, became a key text in the intellectual struggle to roll back Soviet control and influence in Europe and beyond.
Less well known is his judgement that the disciplined retreat of the Nazi armies from their vast occupied territories all the way back to Berlin was one of the greatest feat of arms in history. During a conversation in Belgrade not long before his death he recalled the Germans ferocious fighting retreat through Yugoslavia, in the midst of a bitter civil war.
. When the partisan forces reached the border with Italy in April 1945, Trieste, Venice and the Brenner pass escape route to Bavaria were still in German hands. This was 20 long months after the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 kicked off what was meant to be a diversionary sideshow to tie up Axis forces and mollify Stalin.
Operation Bowler, by Jonathan Glancey, a journalist and war historian, describes, often in minute detail, the excruciatingly slow and painful advance of the Allied armies, despite increasing domination of the skies. The sea-borne assault on Sicily took the Italians, stiffened by German armour, by surprise and Italo-American links ensured Mafia co-operation. But German tanks and heavy equipment were successfully ferried across the narrow Messina straits to the mainland and things took a severe turn for the worse for the allies after Mussolini was deposed in September and Italy changed sides.
Hannibal may have started his invasion of Rome in Carthage on the Mediterranean. But he took his elephants through Spain and France before crossing the Alps to invade from the north. Allied commanders had no choice but to start in the Italian deep south and “crawl like a bug up the Italian boot” as Churchill despairingly described the unforeseen difficulties of the mountainous terrain, appalling weather, swollen rivers and determined German resistance.
After Mussolini was dismissed by the king and Italy changed sides a vengeful Hitler sent crack armoured divisions south to round up and disarm remnants of the fascist army and stiffen resistance to the allied invaders. Many terrible months lay ahead.
Hitler replaced Mussolini as the ruler of Italy and Glancey recalls the dramatic reversal of roles between the two dictators. Italian Fascism and Mussolini’s bombastic personality greatly influenced not only Hitler but the whole Nazi paraphernalia of goose-stepping marches, faux-Roman symbols and of course the sinisterly elegant Nazi uniforms and caps copied from Italian stylists by Hugo Boss and others.
While the early Hitler was infatuated by Mussolini, the Duce originally despised the nondescript little Hitler. On his first visit to Mussolini in Venice, arriving by the tri-motor Junkers plane in a drab raincoat, Mussolini sneeringly described him as “looking like a plumber in a mackintosh.” But after Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned Hitler sent airborne commandos to “liberate” Mussolini from his hotel-prison in the bleak Abbruzzi mountains the diminished dictator was wrapped up in an army greatcoat with a black felt hat covering his distraught face as Hitler met him on landing and obliged the once swaggering Duce to become titular leader of the phantom rump fascist Republic of Salo on Lake Maggiore.
Whatever the fighting qualities of the German divisions implementing the inspired but ruthless defensive strategy of General Albert Kesselring, known as “smiling Albert”, their gradual retreat to successive well prepared defence lines across the peninsular and the vast damage done by increasingly heavy allied bombing, destroyed innumerable historic towns, cities, churches and monuments. The carpet bombing of the great hilltop monastery of Montecassino and densely populated cities such as Naples cried out for future restraint. Rome was declared an “open city.” Bombing was focused on the railway marshalling yards even though sparing the historic city, its population, and the Vatican, allowed the Wehrmacht to evacuate its armour – and fight on for another year.
By April 1945 the war was clearly coming to an end. But Venezia was still in German hands, the fate of the unique city was in the balance and the culmination of Glancey’s re-telling of the war is a detailed account of how Allied commanders succeeded in choking off the German’s last supply route, without collateral damage.
After allied bombing cut access to the onshore industrial port of Venezia-Mestre German commanders switched to re-supplying their battered forces through the smaller and older port just north of the city itself. RAF Air Vice Marshall Robert Foster drew up meticulous plans to bomb the port no larger than eight football pitches, avoiding collateral damage to historic Venezia next door.
To underline how closely this delicate operation was followed from very high up it was code-named Operation Bowler. If bombs went astray and hit the city, heads would roll and those responsible would face dismissal – and return to wearing the Bowler back in civilian life.
The raid was successful. Shortly afterwards fighting around Venice came to an end, formally when SS General Karl Wolff handed over the keys of the city to a young Anglo-Italian working with the Resistance called Peter Tumiati. He was the son of a famous Italian actor and an English mother who became Rome correspondent for the Financial Times after the war. With Venice spared, allied attention shifted to Trieste, the grand Hapsburg port city founded in the 18th century by the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa but now infiltrated by Tito’s victorious partisans.
Although Churchill and British intelligence had supported Tito as he fought against Nazi and Italian forces and domestic rivals, the Croat Ustashe and Serbian Cetniks, Tito’s split with Stalin still lay in the future. His partisans were still seen as a part of the broader Soviet steamroller sweeping all of East and central Europe into Moscow’s sphere of influence. The risk of Trieste falling into communist hands set alarm bells ringing.
British troops were hurriedly sent east from newly liberated Venice and came face to face with the partisans at Monfalcone, some 20 kms west of Trieste. After a tense stand-off a new Italy-Yugoslavia border was established just east of Trieste and the city was effectively ruled by a joint US/UK mission as an autonomous region, before being re-incorporated into Italy in 1953.
By then Tito had defied Stalin, the Cold War and nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union was entrenched – and western capitals were already preparing to re-arm West Germany to help deter Soviet expansion. Ironically, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and desire to re-establish Moscow’s imperial sphere of influence is obliging western Europe to re-arm and repeat. It remains to be seen whether Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself as farce will eventually apply to Putin’s war. But Glancey’s book is a reminder, if still needed, of how terrible war is, and how unpredictable the outcome.
