The fighting in San Marino

On 17 September 1944 the land war reached San Marino – the tiny republic on the slopes of Monte Titano that had proclaimed its neutrality throughout the war. That day, or more precisely on the night of 17–18 September, units of the 4th Indian Infantry Division, part of the British Eighth Army, crossed the border river Marano and attacked German positions on the hills near Faetano. After several days of heavy fighting, on 20 September, the Germans were driven out of the republic and its capital passed into Allied hands. The British and Commonwealth troops entered a neutral state, but the first to violate the republic’s neutrality had been the Germans, who had moved onto its territory a few days earlier. The clash, known as the Battle of San Marino, and in Italian literature also as the Battle of Monte Pulito, was a minor episode in the great offensive of the British Eighth Army against the Gothic Line. On 21 September San Marino – according to press reports of the time and later compendia of constitutional law – declared war on Germany.

A republic in the shadow of the Gothic Line

San Marino, a republic of some 15,000 inhabitants entirely surrounded by Italian territory, remained on the sidelines for most of the war. From 1923 it had been ruled by local fascists closely linked to the regime of Benito Mussolini. After Mussolini’s fall, on 28 July 1943, a large demonstration in San Marino led to the dissolution of the Sammarinese Fascist Party; after the creation of the Italian Social Republic, however, the fascists regained power in the republic (on 1 April 1944, according to some accounts), without altering its declared neutrality. In 1944 the British Foreign Office took the view that Britain had never declared war on San Marino but had never formally recognised its neutrality either – and that it would consider military operations on its territory justified if Axis forces were making use of it.

At the end of June 1944 Allied aircraft bombed San Marino in the mistaken belief that the Germans were stockpiling supplies and ammunition there; several dozen people were killed. In the summer the republic also became a refuge for civilians fleeing the coast of Romagna, which was being bombed from the air and cleared of its inhabitants by the Germans as they built fortifications. According to Sammarinese estimates, more than 100,000 refugees found themselves in the republic – many times the local population – including a large part of the inhabitants of nearby Rimini. People lived in palaces, churches and the tunnels of the railway to Rimini, which bombing had put out of action.

The Germans on Monte Titano

From the summer of 1944 San Marino’s neutrality was increasingly under threat. On 27 July the German command informed the republic’s government that its sovereignty could not be respected if military considerations required the passage of troops and vehicles, though it gave assurances that occupation would be avoided as far as possible. A few days later the Germans demanded buildings for a military hospital, and on 31 July the government of San Marino sent protests to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. In mid-August German units were ordered to respect the republic’s neutrality, subject to the right of passage for supply and medical services. At the beginning of September, however, the German command conceded that it would send troops in if necessary, because – as it was put – no battle could be lost on account of this small state.

The necessity soon arose. On the night of 25–26 August 1944 the British Eighth Army under General Oliver Leese, secretly regrouped on the Adriatic, launched Operation Olive: a thrust along the coast towards Rimini and on into the plain of Romagna. At the end of August its divisions broke through the main position of the Gothic Line on the river Foglia, but at the beginning of September the advance stalled in front of the Coriano ridge and at the village of Gemmano, in the hilly country south of Rimini. The left wing of the Eighth Army – the British V Corps with the 56th and 46th Infantry Divisions and the 4th Indian Infantry Division – was then facing west, a few kilometres from the borders of San Marino.

On 12 September the British and Canadians resumed the attack. On 13 September strong detachments of the German 278th Infantry Division entered San Marino: they were to cover one of the main roads of the region and occupy the summits of Monte Titano, from which artillery observers could see the whole approach to Rimini. The republic, which for months had been taking in people fleeing the front, had itself become part of the German defensive line. On 15 September units of the 46th and 4th Indian Divisions finally took Gemmano, and the 46th Division captured Montescudo, a few kilometres from the republic’s border; a day later the 56th Division entered neighbouring Mulazzano. The 4th Indian Division was ordered to attack the German positions on the territory of San Marino.

The fighting of 17–20 September

The attack began on the evening of 17 September. The division’s leading battalion, the 3rd Battalion, 10th Baluch Regiment, crossed the border river Marano and entered the territory of San Marino; the 1st Battalion, 9th Gurkha Rifles, then passed through its positions and attacked two hills near Faetano, marked on maps as Points 343 and 366. They were defended by two battalions of the German 993rd Grenadier Regiment. The first hill was taken at about 5 a.m. on 18 September. The companies that had taken the second had to withdraw when they ran out of ammunition. Their withdrawal was covered by Rifleman Sher Bahadur Thapa, who held the crest of the hill alone for about two hours and was killed trying to carry wounded comrades out of the line of fire. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross; he lies in the Rimini war cemetery.

The Gurkhas held Point 343 throughout 18 September at a cost of 63 men; in the evening tanks reached them and, with the help of the artillery, the situation was stabilised. Meanwhile the 4th Battalion, 11th Sikh Regiment, went round the Gurkhas to the north and covered the northern slopes of the massif, and the 11th Indian Infantry Brigade passed through its positions to encircle the republic’s capital. Local Italian literature calls this fighting the Battle of Monte Pulito – after the hill between Faetano and the City of San Marino, above the Cando stream in the Marano valley.

On the evening of 19 September the 2nd Battalion of the Scottish Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, of the 11th Brigade, entered the outskirts of the city from the north. On the morning of 20 September it was held up by positions in the north-western part of the city, where the road to the upper part of the capital, perched high on the slopes of Monte Titano, begins. Tanks drove into the outskirts, and one company of the Scots climbed towards the summit in pouring rain. By early afternoon on 20 September the city was in Allied hands. According to British figures, in this final phase the attackers lost about 30 men and the defenders 20 killed and 54 taken prisoner. The sources give no reliable figures for the total losses of both sides in the battle as a whole, nor for the losses among civilians and refugees.

On 21 September the republic’s local police forces helped round up scattered German soldiers, and the 4th Indian Division, in a violent gale, moved on to the north-west and left the territory of San Marino. For the fighting in the republic three units of the division – the Gurkhas, the Sikhs and the Cameron Highlanders – received the battle honour “San Marino”, as did two battalions of the British 46th Division that had fought on its fringes.

The declaration of war of 21 September

On 21 September 1944, the day after the fighting ended, San Marino, according to the available sources, declared war on Germany. The news was carried in press reports at the time and is repeated in, among other places, Amos Peaslee’s compendium of the constitutions of the world’s states published in 1956. The sources speak only of Germany; nothing is known of any declaration against the Italian Social Republic or Japan. The step is also poorly documented: it is not mentioned in the detailed British accounts of the battle or in the popular outlines of the republic’s history, which tend rather to emphasise the continuity of Sammarinese neutrality. Earlier reports of San Marino’s involvement in the war had, moreover, sometimes been misleading – in September 1940 the press reported that the republic had declared war on Britain, which the government of San Marino later denied.

Whatever its form, the declaration of 21 September had no military significance. The German troops had already been driven out of the republic and the front was moving north. The gesture signified rather a break with the previous political course: in September 1944 the revived fascist party disappeared from the Sammarinese political scene, and power passed to a government made up of representatives of the democratic parties.

A brief Allied occupation

After the Germans had been driven out, San Marino came under Allied control, although its legal status was ambiguous. In view of the republic’s neutrality no Allied military government was set up there; only a liaison officer of the Allied Military Government in Italy was sent, and it was announced that the troops would be withdrawn as quickly as possible. When the Allies asked the republic’s authorities to impose a curfew, the government of San Marino refused, and the British did not insist. Visitors to the republic included the British Minister Resident in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan, the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces in Italy, Harold Alexander, and General Leese. The occupation lasted about two months according to most accounts, and three according to some Italian ones.

The Allies helped restore the water and electricity supplies destroyed by the retreating Germans, who had also taken almost all the lorries out of the republic, and they provided food for the inhabitants and the refugees. Italian Carabinieri manned the republic’s border. In October an epidemic of typhoid broke out – more than 800 cases in San Marino and about 340 among refugees who had returned to ruined Rimini; 93 people died in all. After the war San Marino demanded compensation from Britain, including for the damage suffered in September 1944. London rejected responsibility for the fighting, pointing out that the Germans had been the first to violate the republic’s neutrality, and agreed only to an ex gratia payment for the June bombing.

Significance

On the scale of the Italian campaign the fighting in San Marino was a minor but telling episode: it showed how little the neutrality of a state lying on the front line counted once both sides regarded it as an operational obstacle. For the Eighth Army the capture of Monte Titano meant the elimination of a German observation post overlooking the whole Rimini plain and cover for the left flank of the advance. The Germans being pushed out of the republic were at the same time withdrawing behind the river Marecchia. On 21 September troops of the Eighth Army entered Rimini, abandoned by the Germans, and the Gothic Line was broken on the Adriatic coast. There was, however, no decision: the autumn rains turned the river-crossed plain of Romagna into a quagmire, the advance on Bologna stalled, and the campaign in Italy dragged on until the spring of 1945. San Marino, for a few weeks a refuge for tens of thousands of people fleeing the fighting and for a few days a battlefield, returned after the war to its policy of neutrality.