The fall of Palermo and the story of Second Lieutenant Sergio Barbadoro

An American M.P. standing on a pile of Italian rifles and helmets after the fall of Palermo, July 1943.

Palermo, while having a great moral and propaganda value due to it being the capital and largest city of Sicily, held a low strategic importance for the control of the island. Consequentially, the forces allocated for its defense – codenamed Difesa Porto «N», «N» Harbour Defence – were scarce both in number and armament: four coastal battalions; a group (battalion) of dismounted cavalry; two machine gun companies; one 81 mm mortar company; one group of 100/27 mm guns from the 25th Artillery Regiment, "Assietta" Division. The city was also defended by four coastal batteries and seventeen anti-aircraft batteries, three of which could be used both in anti-aircraft and anti-ship fire.

Overall, these troops equalled about two regiments in number. Their commander was Brigadier General Giuseppe Molinero, a former Bersaglieri officer who had fought during World War I, when he had received a scar that disfigured his left cheek, but now he was 59 years old, his days of glory well behind him.

Molinero had been ordered by General Guzzoni, commander of the Sixth Army, to defend Palermo to the last, but the Navy, the Air Force and the Germans had cared to show him how much faith they had in his possibilities of holding the city: the Port Captaincy personnel left on a ship headed for Naples; the commander of the Boccadifalco air base had the fuel and bomb dumps set afire without even asking him; and at dawn on 22 July Colonel Mayer, in command of the 88 mm German batteries that had been deployed to Palermo to bolster the meagre Italian anti-tank defences, had his artillery pieces destroyed and left the city with all his men. As it happened almost everywhere during the Sicilian campaign, the Fascists were among the first to flee: the prefect and the federal secretary of the Fascist Party had quietly left the city on the night between 19 and 20 July, having sought permission to do so by Molinero right after hearing the news of the landing. The rumors had spread, and half of the personnel manning the anti-aircraft batteries – belonging to the Milizia Difesa Contraerea Territoriale, a locally recruited branch of the Blackshirt militia – had deserted on the same day and gone home.

After all of this happened, one may imagine what could be the state of mind of the ragtag defenders of Palermo.

The defense plan called for a series of roadblocks on the roads that led to the city from different directions; each roadblock was manned by an infantry company, plus one or more artillery companies with anti-tank functions.

General Patton’s corps, after overcoming the Italian resistance in the Agrigento area after a week of fighting, advanced along the road towards Palermo. The American troops converged on Palermo with a pincer movement, from the west and from the east. On 21 July they captured the commander of the 208th Coastal Division, General Giovanni Marciani, and his entire staff in their headquarters in Alcamo.

General Molinero had placed a company of infantrymen and a battery of artillery in Portella della Torretta, on the road to Montelepre, and had a few pieces of carriageway blown up.

The Americans were getting closer and closer.

On July 22, the Americans advanced on two columns. The first column, after noon, defeated the defenders of Portella di Mare and then proceeded from Villabate, rather slowly, towards the city. At five o'clock in the afternoon, it stopped in a coastal village.

On the other side, in the morning, the second column advanced on the road to San Giuseppe Jato, and was stopped for several hours on those turns by an infantry company supported by a 100/17 gun, commanded by Second Lieutenant Sergio Barbadoro, of the 25th Artillery Regiment, "Assietta" Division. They passed when they had killed almost all of them, a memorial stone forgotten by most recalls the heroic and useless sacrifice of Barbadoro and his men. Every year, someone puts a bunch of flowers next to the small monument, last year there was a red rose. Who is it? 
Dr. Salvatore Demma, a surgeon, has been wondering about this for years. From family history, he knows something more about Barbadoro than the fragments of history contained in some books. Dr. Demma says: "My father Antonino Demma, a doctor, in those years was, in additional to the political secretary of the Fascist Party in Monreale, also the orthopedic consultant of the Casa del Sole (House of the Sun), the institution that took care of polio children or other serious orthopedic problems. In the summer, the Casa opened the colony of Giacalone. On that morning of July 22nd, Second Lieutenant Barbadoro, a Tuscan from Sesto Fiorentino, (who knew him remembered him as an handsome young man), had gone to the colony.

He was engaged to a nurse. The poor girl tried in every way to convince him not to go away, in tears she asked my father for help, to help convince him. My father, even if he had been a Fascist since 1923, had not willingly accepted the alliance with Germany and the war had seemed to him a senseless adventure. All the more so now that the impossibility of resisting the tide of men and tanks of the Allies was evident. “Stay here with your men, take off your uniform, I'll give you a white coat, it's easy to pass you off as nurses. What's the use of going to die?” The Second Lieutenant shook his head and left. His men followed him. They went to die. In Giacalone we have a house, in the country, we go there in summer. I always go to Portella della Paglia, visiting the memorial stone: in memory of my father, who by coincidence strangely died on July 21 ten years ago, sometimes I even bring his daughters. Every year, those flowers. Who knows who brings them. 
Perhaps the fiancée of that time, of which I never knew the name and I would not know who to ask, those who worked at the Casa del Sole, are almost all dead. After overwhelming the post of Barbadoro, the Americans passed by the barracks of the Colony. They could be mistaken for a military camp and gunfire started from the leading tank, which crossed the entire field without doing too much damage. The Americans remained bewildered when the children came out of the barracks. When they left, they left a lot of presents... ». Lieutenant Barbadoro was posthumously awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor. The soldiers taken prisoner were taken to Giacalone, where they were seen by the war correspondent of the “Life” magazine, Jack Belden, who in his article on those events he wrote: "Amid the cheering and welcoming, a column of Italian soldiers marched up the side of the road with their arms raised on their heads. I saw one violently cursing as a civilian joyously threw a watermelon in my lap. Another soldier walked with tears streaming down his face. Other soldiers dragged their feet uphill toward our rear, with dumb and stupefied expression on their faces as they saw the people acclaiming the invaders and conquerors whom a few moments before they had been trying to keep out of this town. Never had I seen a more pitiful sight. The Italian soldiers, as they marched through ranks of their countrymen who were cheering for soldiers of another nation, must have felt bitter indeed." (It is of note that, in Belden’s article, Barbadoro’s gun and its defender become “German” – evidently Allied wartime press could not concede that such a spirited resistance could come from Italians). The same concepts, in an unadorned military – bureaucratic prose, were read by General Badoglio on the report that the Supreme Command submitted to him at the end of August: "Object. Morale of the troops ... The news on the far from proud and patriotic behavior of some fractions of the Sicilian population, brought by the units that escaped from Sicily, have spread. It is also in the public domain that some units made up of Sicilian elements dissolved before meeting the enemy (among others, an entire Blackshirt battalion, commander included)".

The first American patrols entered Palermo in the afternoon: they came from different directions, so they challenged each other over the “conquest” of the city. Around seven o'clock in the evening, General Keyes accepted the unconditional surrender of the Commander of Defense Port "N", General Molinero. "Go," Patton had told him, in an impetus of magnanimity, "take it..."

General Molinero, right, surrenders Palermo to General Keyes, left. Photo by Robert Capa

In Palermo, as in all of Sicily, the truths were many. There were the soldiers who, doing their duty, fought the Allies and there were those who, doing a specular and opposite duty, did something to stop the already troubled Italian-German war machine, which for them was Nazi - Fascist. One of them was Franco Grasso, a professor and art critic and at the time a young leader of the clandestine Sicilian Communist Party. In addition to going around the countryside riding a horse to distribute a flyer signed by the Liberation Committee - "Sicilians, welcome with friendship and dignity the Allies who come to free us from the Fascist dictatorship" – he had prevented the destruction of the quays of the harbor. A shipyard worker had been instructed by the Germans to transport and bury some very heavy and very suspicious crates in the port area. He was certain that there was explosive: he spoke with the trade unionist Aurelio Attardi. Attardi spoke to Grasso who, together with his companion Ignazio Dell'Aira, decided to act. They had learned that the Germans had passed a system of electric cables, which ran from the Boccadifalco airport, into a railway tunnel that connected the harbour and the Lolli station. From the balcony of his apartment on Piazza Amendola, Franco Grasso pointed to the place where the tunnel led, a few meters after the intersection of Dante Street with Sammartino Street. Grasso and Dell'Aira waited for the two Germans to go to dinner, entered the tunnel and cut the cables. Of course, it was not just that cable that connected the destruction system for the port area, the fuel depots, the infrastructure. The destruction had been planned since July 15: the south pier, the breakwater and the north pier had been mined; and the Navy had been requested to block the entrance by scuttling ships. A swarm of orders, as peremptory as unheard, for «the immediate destruction» was branched out between July 21st and 22nd by the Army General Staff and by the commander of the 6th Army to the various sector commands. Some orders did not arrive, others perhaps yes. The fact is that no mine was detonated. The Americans found the docks of the port intact, apart from the damage caused by aerial bombardments. After the last skirmishes with the dismounted squadrons of the Palermo cavalry regiment and the pathetic companies of motorized machine gunners, commanded by Major Mistretta (from the name, perhaps Sicilian), the American motorized armored columns made their "official" entry into Palermo. At half past seven on the 22nd of July, the Port Defense Command ceased to exist. And Patton had his first city: strategically, insignificant; psychologically, a bad blow to the faltering fate of Fascism and its leader, who in fact three days later received a vote of no confidence by the Grand Council, resigned from his position and was arrested by the police.

The bombing of Messina and the recollections of Francesco Alliata di Villafranca, Italian Army's cinematographer

Francesco Alliata di Villafranca, a young member of the old Sicilian nobility, had been called up for service as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Sixth Army. Having always had a burning passion for filmmaking, he had managed to persuade his superiors to put him in charge of a small Army film and photographic unit; in this role, he found himself in Sicily, his birthplace, at the time of the Allied invasion. He was not the only member of the Alliata family to participate in the battle for Sicily: his cousin Giovanni Alliata di Montereale was also serving as a Lieutenant in the 54th Infantry Regiment, 54th "Napoli" Division, and would be wounded in action and captured on 13 July 1943, near Solarino.

Francesco Alliata narrates his experience of those days in his autobiographic book “Il Mediterraneo era il mio regno: Memorie di un aristocratico siciliano”. He had already been stationed in Palermo for many months before the Allied landing, witnessing the increasing intensity of the Allied bombings, aimed both at destroying and disrupting Axis military installations and communications in the island, and demoralising the Sicilian population. Then the Allies landed:

“On 11 July [1943] I was trying to reach, along with my subordinates, the southern coast of Sicily, where the invasion had just begun, when [the soldiers] at a roadblock between Licata and Gela confiscated all my filmmaking equipment. Colonel Faldella, who had given that order, which I found incomprehensible, would later explain to me: “Frankly, Lieutenant, it seemed absurd to me that we should record our own defeat on film”. Sicily was, by then, completely worn-out. Even Messina, after Palermo, had been turned into a pile of rubble, its fault lying in being located on the Straits, home to the myths of Ulysses and Peix Nicolau, but also a strategic passage for shipping lanes between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Sea. They said it had been the most bombed city in Italy: four time from the sea, and 2,805 from the sky (in the first week of August alone, the Flying Fortresses carried out 346 attacks, overall dropping 6,452 tons of bombs).

In June 1943 I had been right in Messina, to film the bombings. Almost every evening, as the British aircraft attacked at night – the American ones, instead, did it during daytime – I climbed on the mountain till Fort Gonzaga, where the spotters of the Anti-Aircraft Defence had installed themselves. The fort owed its name to the Spanish viceroy that had built it in 1540. There, in 1861, four thousand soldiers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been besieged for months, awaiting for the royal permission to surrender, but Francis II of Bourbon was already in exile in Rome and his Kingdom did not exist anymore.

The spotters, ingenious and very good at their work, belonged to the “Voluntary Militia for National Security” [aka the Blackshirts, a.n.], “Mussolini’s Army”, in endless competition with the Italian Armed Forces.

They detected the sound of the [bombers’] engines, coming from the sky, with an extravagant sound collector: a World War I helmet that, being turned towards the low wall that delimited the fortress’ emplacement, reflected the noises. Then, they just had to analyse the sounds and phone the data in to the AA defense headquarters, that along with the guns was hidden in the caves at the foot of the rock. The language was conventional: “Lieutenant, sir, they are three aircraft coming from the south, eleve o’clock”. The British air force, heavily committed to the war against Hitler, only sent against Messina two or three aircraft at most, but the attacks weren’t any less savage than the ones carried out by the Americans and, since they came at night, in order to locate the areas where they thought they would to the most damage the British dropped some sort of “lanterns” that, hanging on a parachute, descended slowly, lighting little by little the areas that were to be bombed.

(…)

When the British, on 13 June, hit the Messina Cathedral, I was already at Forte Gonzaga, so, upon seeing the flames from up there, I hurried down to film… Those were upsetting shots, but wonderful from a professional point of view: the Cathedral had caught fire, the church’s beams burned and collapsed, in the chapels the sculptures crumbled, disfigured by the heat. The firefighters tried to chase me away, even by pointing some hydrants against me. My soaked boots made “grisc-grosc”. The firefighters kept making wild gestures to me: “Go away, go away!”, and they shot water on me. I was soaked wet,  but I only left the Cathedral when I thought it suitable, to do some shots from the outside. At dawn I saw the Archbishop of Messina, Monsignor Paino, whom had just recently finished rebuilding the Cathedral, that had been destroyed by the 1908 earthquake. He was coiled up on a bench, sitting out there among the new ruins of “his” cathedral, and he was weeping, weeping desperately. I did not dare say anything to him, I did not dare to speak at all, in respect of so much pain. I did not even get close to him. I waited for some time an then, witht he films I had just filmed, I boarded the first train to Rome that I could find on that morning. There, I delivered the films to the Special Film Unit of the General Staff, located in the barraks of the 6th Engineers in Cecchignola, where they were immediately developed and showed in the “Luce” neswreels.

Satisfied of the praie I had received from my superior and from all the personnel of the Film Unit, I went back to work in Sicily, where in the meantime the bombings had increased in intensity, in preparation for the 10 July landings, “our defeat” that the regime prevented me from filming, confiscating all of my equipment.

As I was thus left without the essential equipment for my work, I welcomed the order that recalled me to Rome. Captain Cogliati Dezza came down [to Sicily] specifically to deliver it to me.

I crossed the straits with my subordinates and the two cars on a motor barge, the only available means (ferries and ships had all been sunk by the enemy). This was a two-engines floating platform that the Germans used to carry fresh troops and weaponry intended to oppose the advance of the newly landed American forces. I was allowed to use the barge, that was leaving empty for Scilla, after lenghty negotiations, thanks to my Royal Italian Army officer’s badge”.