Allied assistance for Ossola’s partisans
Without the help of the British and Americans, resistance against the German and fascist occupation of Ossola would have come to nothing. However, the region’s partisans had hoped for more in the way of support.
Raphael Rues
Raphael Rues is a historian and specialises in Ticino and the German-fascist presence in Northern Italy.
Partisans as escape helpers
Early partisan groups such as the Brigate Cesare Battisti facilitated the crossing of the border for a fee. This particular partisan unit, based on the shores of Lake Maggiore, had the advantage that its commander Armando Arca Calzavara spoke good English. But this ‘service’ did not come for free. Records kept by the Swiss authorities show that people were secretly guided across the border for a price of around 10,000 Italian lira per person, equivalent to one month’s wages for a simple labourer at the time.
Allied intelligence services in Switzerland
However, there was a certain amount of competition between the OSS, headed by Allen Dulles, who would later go on to become the first director of the CIA, and the SOE, whose station chief in Switzerland was John McCaffery. This repeatedly led to coordination problems rooted in the reluctance on both sides to share any information. Moreover, neither intelligence agency initially expected a strong resistance movement to emerge in Italy ‒ a conclusion the Americans and British arrived at independently. As a result, the support they provided never surpassed a level that would have allowed the movement to stand up to the German and fascist occupiers for any length of time.
The historiography of the Resistenza, the Italian resistance movement, has a tendency to aggrandise the Allied presence in the Ossola region. In reality, the Allied representatives were little more than common soldiers with experience of field conditions, who were raised to the rank of officer ‘on the spot’. This deception was intended to create the impression that the partisans were highly valued partners. Which was only true to a certain extent. And only when they proved useful to the Allies by acting in line with Allied wishes. This reveals another problem facing the resistance struggle in the Ossola area: the Allies had no interest in opening up a second front in the north of Italy. They were equally reluctant to build up a strong army of partisans that leaned politically to the left. Countless British would have been happy enough to see the monarchy restored in Italy. More or less the opposite of what many partisans were fighting for.
On 7 September 1944, the powers in Bern took another step closer to the resistance fighters. The Weisung der Armeeleitung betreffend Aufnahme einzelner fremder Wehrmänner, a directive issued by the chiefs of the armed forces on the admission of certain foreign soldiers, decreed that partisan groups could now be admitted to Swiss territory so long as they were not criminal, i.e. no ‘bands of robbers’ were allowed. However, this remarkable move proved of little benefit to the Ossola Republic, not least due to the lack of material supplies from the Allies.
