Unique?

This is coolbert: From an informant of mine currently living in Italy - - comments to "Rampage on Cassino" and the actions of the goum.

[thanks here to Buti]

Curzio Malaparte followed the Allied troops from Naples and reported how Italian women in Naples valued black Americans more than whites and were not reluctant to bring them home as "fiancès". Malaparte further chronicles an incident with the Moroccans (goumiers) in the French army before the Allied troops marched on Rome:

"When news of the goumiers' arrival spread throught the district, all the peasants fled, crossing themselves...and a number of monks immediately hurried forward from the neighbouring monasteries to convert the goumiers ...they had orders to baptize all the Moroccans because the Pope did not want Turks in Rome. The Holy Father had in fact sent a radio message to the Allied Command in which he expressed his desire that the Moroccan Division should be halted at the gates of the Eternal City".

[the term Turk is used to describe in a generic manner any Muslim, regardless of nationality. The goums of course were not Turks, but Morroccans.]

It was not black American troops, but Muslims in the French Army that he feared. The reason "why the Pope didn't want Turks in Rome" was that "there were three thousand women refugees in the papal villa". "It has devolved upon me, said General Guillaume (the French general), to throw a cordon of sentries round the outer walls of the papal villa so as to prevent the goumiers from going in to pay their addresses to the Pope's wives".

[it seems the goum not only committed rape, pillage, and murder on the slopes of Cassino, but intended to do the same on the grounds of the Vatican?? Seek out the refugee women and have a repitition of what previously transpired? As for converting the goum and baptizing them, well, forget it!!]

Curzio Malaparte was a person perhaps uniquely suited to report events as they occurred. Was first in the 1920's an ardent fascist, then ran afoul of the Mussolini regime, later rehabilitated by Count Ciano himself [the son-in-law of the Duce'], ended up his life as a communist!!??

[Malaparte was certainly a man of varied political beliefs. Did not see the democratic, Christian, capitalist institutions of the western world as AS HAVING answers for the problems of the common man? Saw either fascism or communism as viable alternatives.]

Wrote extensively as a journalist and author. Authored several books during the war years. Again, was perhaps uniquely qualified in the manner with which he reported the war.

"From November 1943 to March 1946 he was attached to the American High Command in Italy as an Italian Liaison Officer."

"Malaparte extends the great fresco of European society he began in 'Kaputt'. There the scene was Eastern Europe, here it is Italy during the years from 1943 to 1945; instead of Germans, the invaders are the American armed forces. In all the literature that derives from the Second World War, there is no other book [this is 'The Skin'] that so brilliantly or so woundingly present triumphant American innocence against the background of the European experience of destruction and moral collapse."

Again, thank you Buti!

coolbert.