Read Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis Online
Authors: Robert M. Edsel
DECEMBER 1943
T
he Allied Army’s process of delivering Monuments officers to the war zone
after
combat operations commenced made “protection” work impossible. Mason Hammond and the handful of officers who finally disembarked in Sicily weeks after the invasion spent their time largely on salvage operations. Sicily had hundreds of buildings needing attention. There were too many monuments and too few Monuments Men. Events on the ground prevented them from solving the problems of transportation, staff, and supplies. They wrote reports—lots of reports—explaining the situation and their needs, but no one in authority in Washington initially paid any attention. As Hammond humorously observed, “Military channels are like a tunnel (I won’t say sewer)—you put stuff in one end but most of the time you never know where or when it comes out.”
In late November, just a few weeks into his assignment in Palermo, Tubby Sizer gleaned a sampling of what Mason Hammond had dealt with for months:
It’s a curious city of poverty & plenty, breadlines & marvelous pastry cakes, telephone wires strung by the Signal Corps on the heads & outstretched arms of marble saints, mounds of uncleared rubble in alleys, bombed Baroque churches, hot roasted chestnuts, walnuts, almonds & oranges, salvage dumps & hospitals, blackouts & bomb shelters. The things which effect [
sic
] life most are the lack of glass—most windows were shattered, shortage of water (I have to fill my helmet & wash in it morning & night), constant G.I. food (all restaurants are off bounds) & the cold (one is never quite warm).
Experiencing the situation firsthand left Sizer in awe of Hammond’s accomplishments in Sicily. Within a few days of landing, he observed, “Everything worthwhile has been already magnificently accomplished by Mason Hammond.” (Still hoping to cross paths with Deane Keller, he added, “No Keller as yet.”) By early December, however, Hammond’s ordeal had taken its toll. After ignoring his health all summer long, Hammond grew so ill he finally had to admit himself to a hospital in Palermo. Sizer wrote their mutual friend, Paul Sachs, to share the distressing news: “M.H. [Hammond] literally worked himself to death & has been in the hospital the past 10 days—out soon.” Besides exhaustion, Hammond also suffered from severe dysentery.
Hammond attributed his health problem to “the mess at Syracuse [Siracusa], where the flies had feasted equally with the humans on the food that was served.” Two very miserable weeks later, the hospital discharged him. Nevertheless, Hammond remained in good spirits. “He ran into a WAC [Women’s Army Corps] officer who studied archaeology,” Sizer wrote Sachs, “found she was a mess officer, took her & all the cooks sight seeing & has had a deep dish apple pie every other day in consequence.” Sizer added one other comment: “Mason Hammond has done the longest—& best job.”
MUCH TO THE
surprise of the earliest-arriving Monuments Men, changes in the late fall of 1943 bolstered their authority and improved their effectiveness. A new organization, known as the Allied Control Commission (ACC), divided Italy into regions (Region I, Sicily; Region II, Southern Italy; Region III, Naples; and so on), then ordered Civil Affairs staffs, including Monuments officers, to each region. While some Monuments officers would be working out of MFAA Headquarters, others would be directly attached to the Military Governments of U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies in the field. This change in structure broke the logjam at Tizi Ouzou and resulted in a sudden influx of Monuments Men in the combat areas.
By early December, the number of Monuments officers in Sicily increased from the initial army of one—Mason Hammond—to include Fred Maxse, Tubby Sizer, Norman Newton, Lieutenant Perry Cott, Major Bancel LaFarge, as well as British officers Major Paul Baillie Reynolds and Captain Teddy Croft-Murray. Their request for staff support had also been heard. Three enlisted men received orders to report to work as clerks: Sergeant Nicholas Defino, Corporal D. Pascale, and Sergeant Bernard Peebles. Additional officers completing their training at Tizi Ouzou would soon arrive.
During these structural changes, the Monuments operation received a new name, which surprised Mason Hammond more than anyone. “I was told in Sicily that my Boston accent made [Fine Arts and Monuments] sound to our British Colleagues like ‘Finance and Monuments,’ so the name was changed to ‘Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives,’” or MFAA.
Other changes were afoot. British Professor Solomon “Solly” Zuckerman, head of the RAF Special Air Mission, under orders from the Commander-in-Chief of the North African Air Force, British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, requested preliminary lists of cities of exceptional cultural significance that should be balanced against military objectives in future operational planning. This signaled a sea change in the existing procedure. Now the Monuments officers enjoyed direct communication with Army Air Command. No one wanted another embarrassing incident, such as the recent bombing of Pompeii. The Allies had flown at least eleven missions, dropping 156 bombs on suspected German command posts around the ancient archaeological site. This accomplished little beyond killing Pompeii’s dead, again and again. The southern portion of the site lay in rubble; the Pompeii Antiquarium was “half demolished” with “serious losses to the collection.” Adding irony to insult, the date of the first Allied raid—August 24—marked the 1,864th anniversary of the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Monuments officer Fred Maxse learned that Zuckerman requested revised lists because the original submission didn’t plainly indicate the priority of importance of each site. This was exactly the kind of engagement and feedback the Monuments Men had been seeking. It marked the first time someone within Army Command had expressed interest in their expertise. Zuckerman was anything but subtle in his parsing of targets: “If the whole of Italy had to be destroyed except one city, which city would you choose? If two cities were allowed to remain, which would they be? etc.”
On December 8, Maxse, Sizer, and Baillie Reynolds submitted the revised list, containing the names of forty-six Italian cities plus three on the Dalmatian coast, to Zuckerman. Beyond satisfied, Zuckerman expressed his hope that future operations would be coordinated through the Monuments officers. By this time, the Monuments Men had submitted more than five months of reports to Washington and sent numerous letters to associates back in the States, all pleading for someone in authority to consider their proposed changes. Their effort had finally paid off—and not a moment too soon, given the reports coming out of Naples.
Major Paul Gardner was the first Monuments officer to arrive in Naples. Gardner withdrew from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to serve in the U.S. Army during World War I. Upon his return, he spent nine years as a ballet dancer and co-owner of a dance school. Only then did he resume his studies. A man of varied interests, Gardner later enrolled at Harvard Graduate School, where he attended Paul Sachs’s Museum Studies program. In 1932, while still a graduate student, he accepted a position as assistant at the new William Rockhill Nelson Gallery and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, to help oversee incoming shipments to the collection. His Harvard pedigree made him quite a catch; the following year, he became the museum’s first director.
To his surprise, Gardner received orders to report to Ischia, a mountainous volcanic island in the Gulf of Naples with a relatively small population and even fewer monuments. While Allied forces battled to liberate Naples, Italy’s third most populous city, Gardner had little more to do than count the island’s thermal spas. From his perspective, the Monuments, Fine Art, and Archives operation seemed to be getting worse, not better.
Gardner didn’t reach Naples, one of the most-bombed cities in Italy during the war, until October 19. The city lay in ruins, part of the cost of gaining a foothold on the mainland and access to Naples’s excellent port facilities. In an effort to deny the Allies use of the port, German forces sank every vessel in the harbor. What the enemy hadn’t willfully gutted, Allied bombing had smashed. Every essential utility had been damaged or destroyed, including oil refineries, steelworks, sewer lines, the telephone exchange, the city’s electrical generators, and, of most immediate concern, the main aqueduct. An absence of running water and shortage of food placed an additional burden on Allied troops, now responsible for feeding the city’s hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Italy’s change in allegiance had been a bitter blow to German soldiers, especially those who later fought and survived the battle for Naples. They had lost comrades during the fight. Scathing remarks from Berlin about the “Badoglio treachery” fueled their sense of betrayal. The resulting anger claimed a prominent and innocent victim: the University of Naples. Founded in the year 1224, the institution boasted Thomas Aquinas and many other legendary scholars among its former faculty. The school’s rector, Dr. Adolfo Omodeo, described the events of September 12:
Some German patrolmen [came] upon two poor Italian sailors just outside our gate; they stripped them of their uniforms and beat them up. One of them showed fright; and it was decided to shoot him on the spot so as to have a pretext to rage against the university buildings. The Germans ran through the neighboring houses, hounded their dwellers down and compelled them to look on, kneeling, while the cruel execution was performed. By gun fire from their armoured cars, they burst our gates open, and on entering they started by wrecking the inscriptions on which the university had recorded the names of its dead in the first world war; they then poured torrents of petrol everywhere . . . and, when the lecture rooms burned as pyres, they went off dragging away the unhappy hostages with them to a neighbouring borough where on the next day, the fourteen carabinieri were shot whose crime had been to resist the destruction of the central telephone station. . . . No haphazard incident; no irresistible outbreak of war fury, but rather a careful plan, drawn up with icy perversity, scarcely camouflaged by a crime entailing the shooting of a guiltless sailor.
Gardner could do very little to help the university, but the experience served as added incentive for the Monuments Men to protect the surviving buildings—not only from the Germans but also from well-intentioned Allied troops. Most of these young men, especially the Americans, had never traveled outside their home countries; many hadn’t ventured far from their homes or farms. Achieving “personal immortality” by inscribing their names on an ancient building or picking up artifacts as souvenirs was a constant temptation. As Tubby Sizer noted, “a locked door is an irresistible challenge to an American GI.”
Upon learning that the Museo Nazionale had been requisitioned for use as a medical depot, Gardner wrote a sobering report. After explaining the importance of the museum’s collection, Gardner noted: “The continued requisitioning and pillage of historical monuments in Naples is furnishing just the type of propaganda that the Germans and Fascists use with telling effect.”
Despite the successful launch of Monuments work in Sicily and Naples, the Monuments officers still had no command authority other than to observe and report. They didn’t even have a patch to identify them or their assignment. They could post
OFF-LIMITS
signs on historic and cultural structures, but since no one other than a few Civil Affairs officers knew who or what a Monuments officer was, most troops ignored them. After all, it is very hard to order a dirty, dog-tired, frustrated field commander, much less a GI, lucky enough to have found a building with an intact roof and some form of running water, to vacate the premises and bunk elsewhere just because some old structure might be important to an art historian. Five hundred miles and countless towns and villages separated Naples from Italy’s northern border; this was only the beginning of the struggle.
THE BILLETING PROBLEMS
in Naples highlighted another recurring issue. Without higher rank, or endorsement of their mission by senior Allied military leaders, the Monuments officers did not have authority to give orders. Members of the Roberts Commission issued appeals to the staff of General Eisenhower. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had already cabled Ike on October 14, stating: “Protection of artistic and historic monuments in Italy is a subject of great concern to many institutions and societies.” Accounts of Allied soldiers living in some of Naples’s most famous cultural monuments, treating them like saloons, were not what the Chief of Staff had in mind. That General Marshall would make a point of stating something so obvious underscored its importance and served as a reminder for Ike to proceed very carefully. A great many people on all sides were watching; mistakes would be very costly.
In late November, British Monuments Adviser Lieutenant Colonel Sir Leonard Woolley, who finally secured Priority transport from Tizi Ouzou to Italy, made an inspection of Palermo and Naples amid horrific reports of damage and, of more immediate concern, looting and inadvertent destruction by Allied soldiers. At sixty-three, Woolley had long since established himself as one of the world’s leading archaeologists, but since 1941 he also had become a respected staff member at the British War Office. On three separate occasions in 1943, Woolley met with Prime Minister Churchill concerning his work on cultural property. He returned to Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers in early December to inform General Eisenhower’s staff about the damage being done to monuments by Allied troops in Naples. “I suggest . . . a General Order to the effect that no buildings registered as a historic monument in the short lists printed in the Zone Handbook may be used for military purposes without the special permission of a C in C.”
Just a week later, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy weighed in with a memorandum to Eisenhower summarizing observations from a recent inspection tour he had made of Sicily and Naples. His memo addressed the very issues raised by Woolley, noting the “unnecessary use” of historic monuments by troops.