Growing up under Mussolini

John Maneschi’s Italian father and Australian mother met and married in Europe. The Depression brought them back to Milan, where John was born in 1932. He was an engineer in Australia and abroad. He lives in retirement at Mosman, Sydney, where Robert Murray interviewed him in July.

We might as well start with the date which sticks in my mind, which was the date of the declaration of war by Mussolini on England and France. I was attending the Gonzaga Institute, a private school run by the Christian Brothers in Milan. On that particular day, a Monday I remember well, there was an announcement from the principal through the classrooms on the PA system: “Boys, this is an important day in the history of the Fatherland. Everybody can go home because this afternoon at three o’clock the Duce is going to speak on the radio and we’ve been asked to send everybody home.” I thought this was a good way to start missing out on some school, because normally we would be working right through until four o’clock. So we went home, and when I got home to our apartment building, everybody was in great excitement and the caretaker said we had to put the flags out. There was going to be a big speech and we hadn’t put our flags out for a long time. That was a rule under Fascism that every house had to have its flag, to be flown by law on various national occasions. So the flag, a big long banner, was put up on the terrace. We lived on the fifth floor.

At about 2.30 or so, some of my father’s colleagues—he had invited colleagues from the factory to come and listen to the speech—proceeded to sit in the living room. He sent the maid down to buy some bottles of beer for the men, which was a very strange thing because my parents never drank beer. It was a first. It was about three o’clock, and my father had recently bought a fairly expensive radio set, which he then proceeded to try and tune—he never could quite get the tuning correct—to get it tuned for the station of Rome to get the speech of the Duce when it came.

We all gathered around. The speech was very famous and it has been broadcast, repeated many times. It was basically announcing that Italy was now engaged in some sort of great struggle for existence, because the Mediterranean was being closed off—the British and the French were closing off the Mediterranean, and we had to make a stand at this point.

He called on everybody in the community to support him, and that included us children, because since the age of six I had been a member of the Mussolini Youth, which was something like, I suppose, the Boy Scouts, except it was a much more military affair. We all wore little uniforms. My school chose to have us as part of the navy. We all wore sailors’ uniforms with our Fascist badges, and we had received quite a bit of indoctrination over several years, on the exploits of the Italian Army in Africa, in Ethiopia and in Libya. So we were asked also to be supporters of the declaration of war. All we had to do as was to go every Saturday afternoon—it was compulsory—to a parade of Mussolini Youth in our various uniforms, and then sing Giovinezza, the triumphal hymn of the Fascist party. Quite a few songs were used, and some of them were very good. They were stories for youth.

After the speech my father and his colleagues sat around very quietly. Nobody said anything, and my mother broke into tears. She ran out of the room because it meant that Italy was at war with England and she was Australian—Australia was really still considered part of England. My father went and comforted her. It was a striking day and the details are still clear in my mind, though I was eight years old.

For the next couple of years, nothing changed in Milan very much. Life went on as before, except that in the news, of course, we would now hear about army movements and bombings being carried out on Malta, and pretty soon the French Army had surrendered. The Italian Army had gone to safeguard the colonies in Africa, Libya and Ethiopia. The news was pretty much sanitised. We didn’t quite know what was going on until November 1942, when suddenly things changed and the war arrived in Milan in the form of air raids, which we never expected would happen. The blackout was enforced, the houses and apartment buildings had to be equipped with air raid shelters. We had one in our building which was a communal cellar, and then of course sirens were blasting out and the rule was as soon as you heard the siren you had to get out of bed and get down to your cellar. This began to get us tired and weary because sometimes we were called out of bed two or three times per night to go down to the cellar.

From then on things became more difficult. There were shortages of food but the population as a whole kept going, whatever their various occupations were. My father was manager of a factory that made telephone equipment, so he kept on going to work. As far as possible, many families and children were trying to get out of Milan to avoid the air raids, so at the end of 1942 my father decided that he would try and get the family out.

We didn’t know anybody in the countryside. He was able to find a small apartment in a three-storey building at Varese, a town about sixty kilometres north of Milan, up towards the mountains. We lived there for a couple of years. My father used to commute—every day he used to get the train and go back into the city. My mother was pretty nervous about it because sometimes there were raids, but then the raids were only at night and he was on his train back home.

We came fairly close to losing our lives in 1944. This little village near Varese we thought was very quiet, well protected, there would be no problems with air raids or whatever. In fact, we were only about two kilometres from the Macchi aircraft factory, which had closed two years earlier. Allied intelligence didn’t know that and the RAF carried out a night raid in April 1944, which got most of us pretty frightened because we were fairly close to where the bombs were falling.

We thought that was it, but the Allies apparently considered it not a very successful raid, because a month later, in full daylight, the Americans did what they would call a carpet bombing of the area, which meant dropping a bomb in every square in a chequerboard pattern. This happened at twelve o’clock on a Sunday when we were coming back from church, and again the family all rushed into the little shelter and we huddled there until 12.30 or so.

There were bomb blasts all around and then suddenly everything went dark. I remember being pretty frightened. We found ourselves in a lot of dust. A bomb had fallen not on the house itself, but right in the front garden, pulling down the three storeys of this house, and we were under it in a sea of rubble. It took about an hour for us to get out, but we were able to see a little bit of daylight through the rubble. We all crawled out, twelve of us or so. Fortunately nobody got badly hurt, though a timber beam, I think, fell on my leg and hurt my leg a bit. A woman who was a friend of our maid, who had come for the weekend, got a brick on her head and had to have stitches.

When we got ourselves out and were in reasonable shape, some friends of ours nearby said, “You can use our house to stay until you find somewhere. We’re getting out of here,” and they handed us the keys. We stayed there and the situation then was pretty grim because most of the village had been destroyed and we were without electricity or water. I’m not sure exactly how we managed or what we did for the next few days, it’s a bit blurry in my mind. Eventually my father found another place, another couple of rooms further north of Varese at a place called Besano, about two kilometres from the Swiss border. We moved there and stayed there until the end of the war.

Robert Murray: What would you have thought the average—if you can think of an average Italian—what were the Italians’ real views about Mussolini at that time, in as far as you can estimate them?

John Maneschi: It was divided. A section was very patriotic and supportive. But the majority, people generally speaking, were not pro-Fascist. They had to conform to Fascism but were not particularly militaristic and there was no feeling of hatred for, say, English people, because English people had come to Italy for generations and had lived there. So it was by no means wholehearted support. There had been much stronger support until about 1936 or so, when Mussolini created the African empire. After that things cooled off.

There was no great enthusiasm for Mussolini’s empire building?

There never was. He had a very hard time convincing migrants. His idea was to stop migrants from leaving Italy and going to America, to Australia, to Canada. He wanted them to settle in Africa, and a few did, but it was never a very successful installation.

Was it at all regional? Were some parts of Italy much more enthusiastic about Mussolini than others, or was it a fairly general feeling around the country?

No, it was general. One thing that Mussolini achieved was to eliminate the regional differences that had been one of the problems. Each region had kept very much to itself, they considered themselves to be Lombards or Venetians or Florentines more than Italians. Fascism changed a lot of that, trying to put the Italian veneer over various regions.

Did the racial thing, particularly strong feelings against Jews or coloured people and so on, have any impact? Was it an issue?

The feeling against Jews was never very strong. It was a very half-hearted agreement that Mussolini gave to Hitler when Hitler really wanted to start eliminating Jews from all over Europe, and there were edicts that everybody had to report Jewish people, their movements and where they lived and so on. My father, who had Jewish employees in his factory, never did. Things got worse when Germany entered the Italian peninsula after Italy surrendered in 1943 and took over the conduct of the war. Then they got much tougher on Jewish people.

We were living up in the country. My father used to stay in our apartment in Milan, which never got really hit by any bombs. At night he had five of his Jewish employees living there and hiding for the duration of the war.

The Italian Jews were pretty much integrated people who were only Jewish by religion, weren’t they? They weren’t very foreign.

No, they were local people. Rome had a strong Jewish population. In the north Ferara had a strong Jewish population. They were Italian-speaking. It’s always been part of Italy to have a certain number of Jews.

Was there much fear of the secret police?

Not really. My father ran into some problems when his factory was commandeered by the Germans and told to produce equipment for the German Army. My father hit on the idea of sabotaging the orders by hiding reels of copper wire, which was used for the telephones. He had them carted to a farm outside Milan and buried in a pig enclosure. The German commanders couldn’t understand why his factory wasn’t producing these telephones on time. It would have worked except that he had a spy he wasn’t aware of, who dobbed him in. One day when he wasn’t at the office the spy reported him, and the Germans went out to the farm and the workers were ordered to dig up the pig enclosure and the wire was found. My father got a warning saying they’ve found the wire and they’re coming after you. So he came home that evening—we were back in Varese then. He stayed in hiding for a couple of days, but decided to go back because he felt that if there were to be any reprisals they would be against the workers.

He reported himself to the German High Command in Milan and was told to come back the next day. When he did, to his very good fortune, the officer in charge on that day wasn’t aware of the incident about the copper wire. It turned out that he was an engineer himself, a telephone engineer who knew my father from before the war, so my father got off fairly lightly. He got a stiff reprimand and was ordered to co-operate, but by then it was close to the end of the war.

Did the Germans have any sympathy at all from amongst the local people?

No. The Germans were always kept at arm’s length and avoided—not too unusual as Italy had had German occupation for hundreds of years before that.

The Austro-Hungarians?

Yes. To give you an example, that last little village where we stayed near the Swiss border, Besano, had a German patrol consisting of two soldiers and an old German shepherd dog. These two soldiers walked up and down the main street every day and the population just disappeared. Nobody would talk to them, they’d stay away from them. The day the war ended in April 1945, these two completely disappeared. In the garden of the house where we were staying, we found their military insignia and buttons and some of their decorations.

Was Italy highly censored throughout the Fascist period?

Yes, yes. The press was absolutely censored. It was only reporting successes, no failures. It wasn’t possible to buy foreign newspapers.

That’s throughout the whole Fascist period?

No, just from the time the war started. My father listened to the BBC late at night, although it was illegal to do that. My parents used to turn the volume down. There were news bulletins from London, some in Italian giving the British version of how the war was going.

Was there much censorship before the war started?

Generally not. In fact, it wasn’t clear which side Italy was going to come out on. There was pro-French press, as well as pro-German, but they co-existed for quite some time. As we got closer to the declaration of war, it became just pro-German.

But there was no real enthusiasm for the war at all among the Italian people?

Absolutely none.

Even the Fascist-inclined didn’t like it much?

The dedicated Fascists were more concerned about the political party. The army itself, the regular army was never really imbued with much Fascism. That’s what made the breakaway movement of the army possible when Italy surrendered in 1943. All of a sudden the army found the Germans considering them traitors, but they took their arms and started attacking the Germans. Many of them disappeared and became partisans. My uncle was one of these. He had come back and been demobbed from the army, but the Germans were after him, because he was considered to be a traitor. He was eventually rounded up and sent to a forced labour camp in German, but luckily he came back after the war.

Was there much of a cult of Mussolini when you were growing up?

Yes. We all had to wear the uniforms, we had parades once or twice a week. We had to fly the flag on national days. The schools particularly took up the propaganda. My fifth-grade reader, which I still have, is very much a Fascist propaganda document, talking about the great successors of the Fascists in Libya, Ethiopia, and also preparing us to have a few doubts about the wisdom of having Jews and coloured races among us. The propaganda was very well orchestrated. Mussolini had a number of sayings which were displayed on all the walls of country houses. Some of them were almost like short poems, and we had to memorise these as well.

Were there many statues of him about?

Not that I can remember.

No great big pictures?

Yes, in the schools, in every classroom. We went to the Christian Brothers, so above the teacher’s podium there was a crucifix in the middle and there was a portrait of the King on the right, and Mussolini on the left. Every morning we had to say our prayers and then we did salutes to the King and to Mussolini.

The atmosphere was much the same in the Catholic and the state schools, was it?

Yes. Mussolini had reached an agreement with the Vatican in 1929, whereby the schools were asked to conduct propaganda for the state and in return for that, the state allowed prayers and religious services in the schools.

There was no great enthusiasm for empire building among the Italian people?

No. Generally speaking the Italians preferred America or Australia or Canada as places to migrate to. It was always a failure to try and get people to go to Africa. Some settled in Libya, but it didn’t last long.

Whether it was north or south, the feelings were much the same?

There was more sentiment for the King in the south. The King was sort of a figurehead almost, in the north, because Mussolini was really making all the decisions, although we were a monarchy. There was a stronger feeling for the King and for the Savoy Dynasty south of Rome.

Were the communist or socialist movements of much account there during those years?

No, they were underground at that time. There had been of course communist and socialist parties before Mussolini, and they’d gone underground when they were outlawed. They re-appeared after the war. Before Fascism got started there was a lot of civil unrest and the communists were involved in that.

Tell us about when the war ended.

There was much celebration. I remember very well the day, April 25, 1945, when the Mussolini saga came to an end.

To backtrack to 1943 when Italy formally surrendered: the way that happened was that the Great Council of Fascism, comprising a number of the people who had established the Fascist regime, got together. They hadn’t met for twenty years or more. By unanimous vote they deposed Mussolini. They voted him out of office. The army took charge of him and he was held in various places with the intention eventually to hand him over to the Allies in negotiations. He was hidden in a mountain resort in the Apennines, where the Germans rescued him by means of a very daring glider raid. A glider pilot who landed at very high altitude was able to get him off, and get him back to Germany, where Hitler was there to welcome him and ask him to continue the war in northern Italy, where he established a republic. My mother got very angry, thinking we had seen the end of the war, but all of a sudden it had re-appeared.

That republic was never very effective and towards the end of the war, the last days of April 1945, Mussolini tried to escape to Germany in a German convoy, dressed as a German soldier. He was recognised by one of the partisans, taken off the truck and held for a couple of days near Lake Como, where the communists took over, and he was executed there. His body and that of his mistress were taken down to Milan and hung in one of the main squares. All the population came out to welcome the end of the dictator. That was pretty much the end of the war.

Did many people feel anger or upset about the defeat, or were they just happy it was all over?

There was a lot of anger because Mussolini was seen as responsible for a war that should never have happened. Fascists had to go into hiding because now they were being persecuted themselves.

It wasn’t just the communists, it was a general public feeling?

It was a general public feeling that it had been a terrible mistake. The country was pretty much destroyed and things had to be rebuilt. Nothing good was said about Fascism for years after that.

It later became one of the splinter parties, the remnants of it. The grand-daughter of Mussolini became a member of that party, the MSI (Italian Social Movement). But it was never very significant, more a kind of nostalgia. They never came up with a program that would appeal to the masses.

It was more Pauline Hanson than Adolf Hitler, so to speak?

Yes. There was a fair amount of publicity given to her, but it never had a very strong appeal.

Do you think Fascism did much economically—did it do much for Italy economically, or did it make things worse?

It helped a lot. There were some ambitious programs, like draining the marshes north of Rome, which had been beset by malaria. That gave agriculture a big push. Many new villages were built. Generally speaking, prosperity came back to Italy—and of course the trains were running on time. Italy being short of raw materials, they had to import a lot of coal, usually from England and Germany, but under Mussolini a lot of hydro-electric work got done in the Alps, and all of the railways of northern Italy were electrified.

How much of that would have happened anyway with any reasonable government, and how much was Mussolini’s particular flair?

Under a dictatorship you can get things done. He just issued orders and it was done. One of the weaknesses of the previous democratic parties was that there were too many splinter parties, it was difficult to get agreement and get things done. Europeans, French people, many British people, thought that maybe democracy is not all it’s made out to be. If you have somebody like Mussolini with this prodigious energy and ability and charisma—he had charisma—to galvanise masses of people, you can get a lot done.

The war was his undoing?

Oh yes. In hindsight, as the people said, he made the mistake of getting onto the wrong side and getting Italy into the war. He took a whole year to make up his mind. The war started in 1939 and Italy was neutral for a year. There were thoughts that perhaps Italy was going to come in on the Allied side as they had in the First World War. He went against the advice of his military chiefs that the army wasn’t ready, there were serious shortages, lack of armaments and they were ill-equipped to go into Africa without proper uniforms, without proper bases. Planning for any sort of campaign was lacking.

What made him, do you think, decide to go over to Hitler?

The example. He watched Hitler gobbling up all these countries in Europe, one at a time, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium. He just felt, “I’m going to get left out of all this if I don’t hurry up. There’ll be nothing left to get.” In a very ill-advised episode, he tried to conquer Greece. That was a disaster. I think he was just pushed by some of his cohorts saying if you don’t hurry up there’ll be nothing left.

Were any of his cohorts prosecuted after the war?

Yes. I can’t remember the names, but there were trials. Many of them—a great number disappeared completely, they went to South America and other countries. It wasn’t the same as happened at Nuremberg because there wasn’t really a sentiment that these were war criminals, they just happened to be part of the Fascist party. It was mostly communists wanting to square the accounts.

Finally, what were your reactions when you got to Australia in 1948?

Australia was still very much an Anglo-Saxon country in 1948. Italy was considered a bit of a joke. There was still the image of the Italian as a worker, a builder, a greengrocer, or sometimes a musician or an artist, but never soldier. So the Italian soldiers never had a good reputation in Australia. The Australian view was influenced by so many Italian prisoners of war being captured at Tobruk and working on farms here. It was also pretty well known that they were not convinced that the war was worth fighting and were quite happy to put down their arms and get taken to another country.

Did you find Melbourne too suburban and miss the European type of city, the street life?

I never really missed that. I liked the idea that every house had a garden, which we were not used to. We had a number of friends and my mother’s relatives there. We had a very good feeling for Australian life. When my father came, he had no idea, for example, about the whole ritual about mowing the lawn. He didn’t know what that was all about. My mother, who was Australian but had lived in Italy for many years, was the one who after a few years in Melbourne missed a lot—the cultural life, the ability to get around to different countries quickly. My early impressions of Australia are still very, very pleasing. I had a bit of nostalgia for Italy from time to time I must say, but it was at a stage in my life where I was interested in new things anyway, a new culture, a new civilisation.

I presume your English was much better than the average Italian migrant?

Yes, I was lucky. My father and mother always spoke English at home, so I was brought up hearing English, but at first I couldn’t speak it very well. They spoke English so the boys couldn’t understand what they were saying, originally. Then they had to switch to French, and then the boys learned French in order to find out what was going on.

In my first few weeks at Xavier College, I just did not understand what the teacher was saying. I didn’t understand what the kids were saying. I didn’t understand the Australian accent. When they said, “What’s your na-y-me?”, I didn’t know what na-y-me was. The worst problem I had was in writing. We had to write an English essay every week, and I had been pretty good at writing essays in Italy, but in Italian—never in English. I used to write a whole essay out in Italian and get the dictionary out and translate it, word for word. And I used to get some comments from the teacher saying, “It’s not bad, but there are some strange expressions here.” During that year the strange thing that happened was—and it must have happened subconsciously—that I suddenly switched from thinking in Italian to thinking in English. When that happened, I was suddenly able to start writing in English. That very first year, if I remember correctly, I won the essay prize for Xavier College. The others couldn’t understand how I had got it, but I suddenly was able to start writing.

But you were able to read English before that?

Not well. I could understand what my parents were saying, but I couldn’t understand what the Australians were saying. The accent really had me perplexed. The following year it was really no trouble at all.

I liked the climate, I liked the open air, I liked the idea of a school that had lots of playing fields, because the schools in Italy don’t have any playing fields. Probably what influenced me to continue living here.

But your parents went back and made the rest of their life in Italy?

My father and mother went back in 1951 and my brother as well. I lived for some of the time with my mother’s brother and sister in Melbourne and their families while I did my engineering course. My mother eventually returned to Melbourne after my father died.