Francesco Alliata di Villafranca and the Sicilian campaign
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], “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”.
Bombing damage to the Messina Cathedral |
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