The capture of Siena

At around six in the morning on 3 July 1944 soldiers of the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division under General Joseph de Goislard de Monsabert, part of General Alphonse Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps, entered Siena through the Porta San Marco. The last German units had left the city a few hours earlier by the opposite side, through the Porta Camollia, heading for Florence. Not a single artillery round was therefore fired in Siena itself, and the Gothic city – with its cathedral, the Palazzo Pubblico and the Piazza del Campo – came through the war almost untouched. The inhabitants greeted the soldiers by hanging out the flags of their contrade, the city districts that compete each year in the Palio.

War chronicles record briefly that Siena fell to Algerian soldiers of the French forces. There is a good deal of truth in this: the core of Monsabert’s division consisted of two regiments of Algerian tirailleurs and a regiment of Tunisian tirailleurs, in which local Frenchmen served alongside Muslim soldiers from North Africa, and whose officers were mostly French. The capture of Siena, however, was not an assault but the occupation of a city abandoned by the enemy – the culmination of two weeks of hard fighting to the south of it.

The French in pursuit through Tuscany

After the Allied entry into Rome on 4 June, the commander of the Allied Armies in Italy, General Harold Alexander, wanted to reach the Pisa–Rimini line as quickly as possible, before the Germans could organise a defence in central Italy and complete the fortifications of the Gothic Line in the Apennines. The task in the western half of the front fell to General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army. It advanced along two routes: the American IV Corps along the Tyrrhenian coast towards Livorno, and the French Expeditionary Corps inland, through southern Tuscany, towards Siena. East of the French the British Eighth Army was attacking, and on 20 June it entered Perugia. The French were not fighting only on the mainland, either: on 17 June units of the 9th Colonial Division landed on Elba, and by 19 June they had taken the island.

Juin’s corps was at that time the most experienced part of Clark’s army. In May it was his divisions – the Moroccan divisions, the Algerian division and General Augustin Guillaume’s goumiers – that had crossed the Aurunci Mountains and been the first to break the Gustav Line, opening the road to Rome. In June 1944 the corps comprised four divisions: the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division, the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division and the 1st Motorised Infantry Division (formerly the 1st Free French Division), together with three groups of Moroccan tabors. The last-named division left the front as early as 20 June, the first to be withdrawn for the landing in southern France. It was an army made up mostly of soldiers from North Africa – Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians – under French officers.

Facing the French stood the German I Parachute Corps under General Alfred Schlemm, part of General Joachim Lemelsen’s Fourteenth Army. The Germans were no longer trying to stop the Allies for good, but were falling back from line to line, making use of rivers, hills and hilltop towns. In the second half of June they held a line they called the Frieda Line and the Allies the Trasimene Line, anchored on Lake Trasimeno. On its western wing the French were held up by fighting in the valley of the Orcia and around the mountain town of Radicofani, where the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion was among the units engaged. According to findings cited in the literature, the German paratroopers broke contact with the French on the Orcia only on 27 June, and then the road to Siena lay open.

The fighting in the southern part of the province of Siena was hard on its inhabitants. According to Italian historians of the region, the first communes of the province – Piancastagnaio and Abbadia San Salvatore – were liberated on 18 June and the last, Radda in Chianti, only on 20 July; Radicofani, Chiusi and Brolio castle were each fought over for several days, and shellfire fell on villages and small towns. The entry of the corps’ troops into many places – Montalcino, San Quirico d’Orcia, Abbadia San Salvatore, and later Poggibonsi and Colle di Val d’Elsa – was accompanied, as Italian researchers have established, by rape, looting and violence against civilians, attributed above all to the goumiers, though not to them alone. These so-called marocchinate, known earlier from the Ciociaria, prompted official Italian protests in July. In a letter to Clark of 22 July General Juin described them as a campaign calculated to discredit the French troops, and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny wrote to de Gaulle that the facts had been exaggerated. The scale of these crimes cannot be established precisely; the estimates of historians and victims’ associations differ widely.

A city nobody defended

Siena was not a safe city in June 1944. The head of the province for the Italian Social Republic, Giorgio Alberto Chiurco, and Archbishop Mario Toccabelli tried to have it recognised as an open city – a “hospital city”, since many military hospitals were operating there. The Allies did not agree, because the Germans and the Fascists had not fully demilitarised Siena. According to the city’s historians, the Germans merely assured the archbishop, through the Vatican Secretariat of State, that after their departure Siena would retain its status as a hospital city. Between January and April 1944 the city was bombed several times by Allied aircraft. The main target was the railway station, far from the historic centre; among the buildings destroyed was the suburban basilica of the Osservanza, and there were casualties in the districts near the Porta Camollia. The historic centre, however, suffered little.

According to Italian researchers, three circumstances ensured that Siena was spared the fighting. First, the Germans decided not to defend the city, because it was unsuitable as the pivot of any of the defensive lines they were laying out where the terrain favoured them – from the Amiata massif to the Farma stream, from the river Merse to the Chianti hills. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring presented himself after the war as a commander who had cared for the historic cities of Tuscany and Umbria; in Siena’s case, however, tactical considerations were what mattered most. Second, the local Committee of National Liberation (CLN) chose a compromise with the Fascist authorities rather than an uprising: together with the podestà, Luigi Socini Guelfi, it set up a civic guard whose only task was to keep order in the days when the front passed through. The partisans of the Garibaldi Brigade “Spartaco Lavagnini”, who had been ordered to approach the city, had earlier been broken up in a German sweep near Tegoia and did not manage to enter Siena before the French.

The third circumstance was Monsabert himself. The general, a lover of art, knew Siena and its Gothic monuments. When his gunners complained that their target maps were strewn with precious buildings, he is said to have ordered them: “Fire wherever you like, but if you hit anything older than the eighteenth century, I’ll have you shot.” These words, in a softened version (“I forbid you to fire beyond the eighteenth century”), were carved on a plaque placed by the Porta San Marco, through which his soldiers entered. According to accounts cited by historians of the region, Monsabert was confirmed in his decision by an officer of the partisan Monte Amiata Patriots’ Group, who crossed the front line and reported that the Germans were leaving the city.

On the morning of 3 July, then, the French entered the city without a fight. The journalist Paolo Cesarini remembered seeing from a window above the Piazza del Campo a German car drive off in an almost unreal silence, and a moment later an Allied jeep arrive. The same day the partisans made one more unsuccessful attack on the German rearguard. Nor did the peaceful liberation of the city erase the memory of what had happened there earlier. Local Fascists had rounded up Siena’s Jews, who were then deported; partisans had been tried and executed; and the retreating Germans had destroyed infrastructure and looted shops. Today the anniversary of 3 July is marked in Siena by the ringing of the Sunto bell in the Torre del Mangia.

The corps’ last weeks in Italy

Beyond Siena the French pressed on northwards, towards the valley of the river Elsa and the Arno. On their left the Americans were advancing: on 8 July the US 1st Armored Division took Volterra, and IV Corps was approaching Livorno. The French took Colle di Val d’Elsa, but beyond it they ran into stiff resistance from German paratroopers and panzergrenadiers. On 9 July a German counter-attack with some twenty tanks drove the goumiers off a hill north of the Volterra–Poggibonsi road; the hill changed hands several times before battalions of Moroccan infantry retook it on the night of 10 July. The 4th Moroccan Mountain Division took San Gimignano, the town of medieval towers, on 13 July, and on the morning of 14 July Moroccan soldiers entered Poggibonsi. After a brief lull the Germans fell back again; on 19 July the French took Certaldo, and according to the history of the US Fifth Army, on 20 July Castelfiorentino on the Elsa (some studies give 22 July) – a dozen or so kilometres from the Arno.

This was the final chord. Since the spring the Allies had been preparing a landing in southern France, later named Operation Dragoon, and the French divisions were to form its core. As early as 7 July the corps was ordered to have all its units in the Naples area by 30 July; units left the line one after another, taking care not to give this away to the enemy. The French sector was taken over by the British Eighth Army: on the night of 21/22 July the Moroccan soldiers were relieved by units of the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 8th Indian Division, and at midnight on 22 July command passed to the British. At midnight on 22/23 July the French Expeditionary Corps formally ceased to exist, and its divisions became part of General de Lattre de Tassigny’s Army B, later the French First Army. Soon afterwards General Juin became Chief of the General Staff of National Defence in de Gaulle’s government, and at the end of August Monsabert took command of Army B’s II Corps.

According to the same history of the Fifth Army, in the 43 days of pursuit from Valentano in northern Lazio to Castelfiorentino the French took 2,080 prisoners and themselves lost 6,680 men: 1,342 killed, 5,016 wounded and 322 missing. The balance of the corps’ eight months of fighting in Italy, from November 1943 to July 1944, was heavy: according to French figures, some 6,500 killed, more than 2,000 missing and more than 23,000 wounded out of some 80,000 soldiers who passed through the front line. At the military cemetery at Venafro an inscription was placed stating that the corps had “marked with the blood of seven thousand of its soldiers the victorious road that led it from Naples to Siena”.

Place in the war

The entry into Siena was one of many successes of the July pursuit in Italy. The Allies had broken the Trasimene Line, advanced more than 200 kilometres in the month since the fall of Rome and were nearing the Arno. On the same day, 3 July, the Red Army liberated Minsk, and in Normandy the Americans launched their attack in the bocage – against the background of these events the Italian front was by now a secondary theatre of war, from which troops were being taken for other tasks.

For the French, Siena was the symbolic end of a campaign in which an army rebuilt in North Africa after the defeat of 1940 and the divisions of the Vichy period had regained its reputation on the battlefield. A month later, in August, the same divisions landed in Provence, took Toulon and Marseilles, and in the autumn fought in the Vosges and Alsace. In Italy the corps left behind a more difficult legacy: the violence against civilians in the Ciociaria and Tuscany has remained one of the most painful strands of Italian memory of the liberation.

Siena itself was spared by the war. It escaped the fate of Florence, where at the beginning of August 1944 the retreating Germans blew up the bridges over the Arno and the old houses by the Ponte Vecchio. The Palio, suspended during the war years, returned to the Piazza del Campo soon after it ended, and in 1995 the historic centre of Siena, with its cathedral and Palazzo Pubblico, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.