ARTICLE: An Adolescent Under the Bombs Part. III, 1945

Today you get the final part of my feature on the diaries of one boy from Milan during the Second World War. We first dropped in on Paolo Grassi as a 10 year old in Milan on the outbreak of war in 1940. Then, we stopped by to see how he was doing in 1943, in the month the Allies landed on Sicily. Today, it’s the latter stages of the war, in the spring of 1945; his fifteenth year and his stint as a ‘last-minute partisan.’ Having seen his home bombed out, he is in Lumellogno, just southwest of Novara, in Piedmont…

Tuesday 10 April 1945

In Milan and its surroundings the bombings and machine-gunning continue, leaving dead and wounded almost every day. The city of Novara is practically immune, but its surroundings are not: the Allied pilots machine-gun everything they see on the roads, even if they are farm carts or groups of people on foot or on bicycles. I don't remember where, but even a funeral procession was machine-gunned. However, the ones targeted above all are the bridges, subject to heavy bombing by squadrons of four-engined planes, and the trains, which are machine-gunned by fighter-bombers.

Practically every journey now, even the most modest and by any means, presents risks of various kinds. The greatest and most frequent risk is that of ending up under a bombing or machine-gunning by Allied aircraft, but the risk of finding yourself outside the city in the midst of gunfire between Germans and fascists on one side and partisans on the other has also become frequent, or of finding yourself in the middle of a raid and perhaps being captured and taken to prison, without any guilt, as hostages. Not to mention the increasingly frequent bicycle robberies… that are carried out in the streets by fascists and Germans to the detriment of innocent civilians who use this means of transport to go to work, to school or, as recently happened, to the hospital to visit a relative.

ARTICLE: An Adolescent Under the Bombs, 1940

ARTICLE: An Adolescent Under the Bombs, Part.II, 1943

A German tank in the Piazza Duomo, Milan. (Bundesarchiv)

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