2023-08-12 13:07:10
Time.news – Commendator Raimondi of the Ministry of Exchange and Currency had left Rome on 12 August 1943 for an exhausting train journey to Spain. The railway line had been chosen and certainly not the much faster air line to attract less attention from the German police.
That civilian, in fact, is actually General Giuseppe Castellano, the youngest of the General Staffon a secret mission and on the orders of the Chief of Staff Vittorio Ambrosio, in turn on behalf of Vittorio Emanuele III.
Castellano has in his pocket a letter of introduction issued to him by the British ambassador to the Holy See, Godolphin d’Arcy Osborne, to be delivered to the ambassador in Madrid, Samuel Hoare.
D’Arcy Osborne cannot conduct any negotiations with the Italian government because this goes beyond his diplomatic mandate, nor can he act as a direct intermediary because he has realized that Kappler’s German espionage has violated its codes.
Castellano’s mission, which is based on that letter alone, is delicate and very fragile: if something had happened it would have been immediately disavowedbecause officially the government knew nothing of his travel to a neutral country, moreover with false documents.
Things had been done as circumstances permitted and with a thousand precautions, so much so as to overlook the fact that the pseudo commendator Raimondi had to interface with the English and did not speak the language, and his diplomatic accreditation document was valid only for Spain, when instead the final destination was Lisbon, in Portugal.
The riskiest part therefore rested on his shoulders, since a good part of the railway journey, in France, was on territory controlled by the Gestapo in a state of alert on everything that moved from Italy, and because his credentials were of little note.
Who was he speaking on behalf of? And what negotiating power had he been given? Castellano had however managed to reach Madrid without problems and here he immediately contacted the consul Franco Montanari, a relative of Marshal Badoglio, who speaks perfect English (his mother is American), to whom the Foreign Minister Raffaele Guariglia had also contacted, coincidentally unbeknownst to the general emissary. The two are received in the British Embassy by Hoare: he is an expert diplomat, shows affability, assures that he will immediately inform Churchill who will speak directly to Roosevelt, given that the two are engaged in a political summit in Québec.
Then Hoare writes a letter of his own references to show to the ambassador in Lisbon, Ronald Hugh Campbell. From now on, Anglo-Americans know that Italy wants to get out of the war and that it has taken the first step in that direction, albeit in an adventurous and informal way. This, however, did not change their military plans in the least which, on the contrary, were intensified to speed up the surrender times.
On the same day of Castellano and Montanari’s arrival in Lisbon, August 16, the city of Foggia was violently bombed, and so was Viterbo.
The Allies know that the bombings are particularly disliked by the civilian population who pass the responsibilities on the government, and this is a further psychological weapon of pressure.
The first contact of the emissaries with Campbell took place on the evening of the 19th, when Lisbon was also reached by the plenipotentiaries sent by Roosevelt, namely the Chief of Staff of the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean, Walter Bedell-Smith, the charge d’affaires of the United, George Kennan, and the head of the intelligence service of the allied forces, the British general Kenneth Strong. We begin to get serious, in that completely unbalanced relationship: Castellano has nothing to bargain aboutthe Allies did not flinch from accepting unconditional surrender.
As things stand, the general must do his best not to be immediately shown the door because he has no delegation of representation, and formally speaks for himself.
To win over, the counterpart throws on the table some confidences and indiscretions of a political-military nature, in order to keep alive that slender thread that must lead Italy to exit the war. In Rome, however, they will manage to complicate his life by sending even two other secret paradiplomatic missions, obviously one without the knowledge of the other, as we will see later
#Castellanos #mission #armistice