The Conte Verde had been a fixture on the Shanghai waterfront for three years, a big white Lloyd Triestino liner moored directly opposite the Shanghai Club, so familiar that no one paid her much attention. Built for the passenger run between Italy and the Far East, she had carried Jewish refugees out of Trieste to the one great port on earth that asked for no visa before being caught in Shanghai in June 1940 when Italy entered the war. Two years later, the Japanese chartered her for a single voyage carrying exchanged diplomats and civilians down to East Africa and back. Then she returned to her mooring on the Whangpoo River and sat there, a floating hotel for a skeleton crew, with the clubs and banks of the Bund across the water.
Two small Royal Italian Navy gunboats, the Lepanto and the Carlotto, lay in the river near her, and about 180 San Marco Marines had barracks on Robinson Road, with more up the coast at Tientsin and Peking guarding a concession held since the Boxer years. Time magazine later put the entire Italian community in the Far East at about 1,000 people, nearly 900 of them in Shanghai. To the Japanese, all of this belonged to the Axis. A ship from Rome in a Japanese harbor was an Axis hull, and an Axis hull could be borrowed, requisitioned, or counted on.
Her crew had their own faith, and it ran in a different direction. They were sailors under their own flag, and they assumed that whatever their government told them to do, an honest navy would recognize them as men following orders. Both ideas died in a single night, and the deaths came in stages. The first message came from Rome on the evening of September 8, 1943.
Marshal Badoglio announced the armistice on the radio at about a quarter to eight in the evening. Rome was on summertime, and Shanghai, Tokyo, and Singapore were all seven hours ahead, so in the Far East the news landed at about a quarter to three in the morning on September 9. A few hours later, the naval staff in Rome sent its signal to the Italian command in China. The text was short.
Ships and submarines were to try to reach British or neutral ports or else scuttle themselves. For anything moored in the Whangpoo, the honest reading was the last three words, because no ship in that river could get down to the sea past the Japanese. The senior Italian naval officer in the Far East, Captain Giuseppe Prey, was in Tokyo that night. Command in Shanghai fell to the naval attaché, Captain Giorgio Galetti.
Rome had given its order in the dark, and in the dark it was carried out. Commander Giuseppe Morante of the Lepanto had the order before dawn, and accounts from his own side say he took it across to the liner himself. Her captain was a reserve commander, identified in the Italian Navy’s own history as Ugo, though independent crew history gives the name as Edmondo, and nothing in the accessible papers settles which is right. In the first hours of daylight, both gunboats were opened to the river.
The Lepanto went to the bottom, and the Carlotto was flooded where she lay. The Conte Verde rolled onto her side at her mooring in full view of the waterfront, and the same newspaper that had noted her position for three years later reported that her crew went ashore and gave themselves up to the waiting Japanese. The Hong Kong diarist William Carrey heard the news a fortnight afterward and wrote four words about it: a pity but necessary. At Kobe, the Italian freighter Calitea II, which had begun life as the auxiliary cruiser Ramb III, went down the same day.
Her commander, Pasquale Mazzella, was hurt in the scuttling, hurt enough to need a hospital, though the Japanese did not send him to one for six days. Naval sources date her loss to September 8 and Italian sources to September 9, and the clocks explain the difference, since in Kobe it was already the 9th. At sea, the colonial sloop Eritrea was in the Malacca Strait on her way to Sabang. She had the same signal, but she also had fuel in her tanks and open water ahead.
Her captain, Marino Januccelli, turned west. He hid in every rain squall the strait could offer, slipped between Sabang and the Nicobar Islands on the night of September 10, and kept going for Ceylon. That left the submarines, and here the Japanese got what they wanted, though they did not get it from the Axis. The cargo submarines Giuliani and Torelli lay in Keppel Harbor at Singapore.
The Torelli had no fuel and was in the middle of an overhaul, and the Giuliani lay alongside her loaded for the voyage home. Both crews slept ashore at Pulo Brani about five and a half miles away, and the Italian Navy’s own account puts an officer and two men aboard each boat. The Cappellini lay in the same harbor. The Italian Navy’s history calls the seizure that followed a capture achieved by deception and by force.
The Japanese held the boats, confined the crews, and within a few months handed all three hulls to the Germans. By the end of September 9, three ships were on the bottom in China and Japan. One sloop had gone over the horizon, and three submarines had been taken by men who had to lie to get them. The Axis had delivered next to nothing.
Japan turned to the men. The Shanghai sailors were disarmed and confined under guard in the Marine barracks on Robinson Road. The officers went elsewhere. Eleven of them, Galetti, Morante, the Conte Verde’s captain, the Carlotto’s young captain Roberto De Leonardis, and seven others, went to a military prison and stood trial before a Japanese naval court for the scuttlings.
Accounts from their side say a Japanese lawyer argued for them on the plain ground that they had obeyed their own government, and that argument kept them from the firing squad. They stayed in that prison until April 6, 1944. The next message came from Tokyo on September 10. It was a formal note of complaint to Rome, and it said nothing about fuel, overhauls, or clocks.
It accused Italy of holding back the armistice announcement so that its ships in East Asia would have time for sabotage, and it called that treason. Four days later, a government communiqué told the public that on September 9 the army and navy had immediately carried out the disarming of the Italian troops and the detention of the Italian warships. The warships in question were lying in the mud of two harbors, and one of them was on her way to Colombo. The note and the communiqué are the hinge of the story.
One government had issued an order in plain words to sink the ships. The other answered with the vocabulary of betrayal and set about treating every Italian sailor in its reach as a traitor in person. The men in Japan felt it first. On the afternoon of September 10, police surrounded the embassy in Tokyo and cut it off.
They took Captain Prey and Major Gino Bonanti away, made them sign interrogation statements written in Japanese, and held them in two underground cells. From September 14, both men sat at Ofuna, and Commander Mazzella of the Calitea joined them there on the 24th with three of his men. Ofuna was a Navy interrogation center near Yokosuka, and the International Red Cross did not know it existed. No list that a family or a neutral inspector could see carried the names of the men inside.
The Italian Navy’s history says police and senior naval officers put the Calitea’s whole crew through barbaric reprisal treatment, questioning them over and over. Then came the offer. German commandos had pulled Mussolini out of captivity, and he had declared a new fascist republic in the north. The Japanese put a choice to every Italian sailor in their hands.
He could declare for that republic and for the Axis and go back to work, or he could stay loyal to the king and stay behind wire. Most of them signed. The crew of the Calitea, put to work at a steel mill at Hirohata near Kobe, had almost all joined the new republic by July 1944, and some volunteered to go to sea again on German supply ships. In Malaya, the submarine crews swore their loyalty to Mussolini on October 28, 1943, and marched out of their camp three days later.
In Shanghai, the Marines and the liner’s men did the same for the most part. A hungry man in a foreign country with no government left to feed him tends to become a practical man. Two years later, the Italian ambassador asked for some 570 Marines and 300 men of the Conte Verde to be sent home under compulsion and described their behavior as harmful to the country’s prestige. The Japanese were practical, too.
Work on raising the Conte Verde began on September 21. The Lepanto came up and became the Okitsu. The Carlotto became the Narumi. The Calitea was refloated at Kobe and renamed Ikutagawa Maru, and she lasted until American aircraft sank her off Saigon in January 1945.
The liner herself was sunk again at her old mooring by an American bomber in the summer of 1944, raised once more and named Kotobuki Maru. The men who would not sign were a small group. Twenty-eight in Malaya, 29 in Shanghai, 34 at Tientsin, and a handful of officers in Japan. What Japan did to them is the real answer to the question of what happened to those who refused.
In Singapore, the loyalists went to a camp at Sime Road. Guards strip-searched every man and took everything he owned. Each received one sleeping mat. The camp’s builders had made the barracks for 45 men apiece, and each submarine crew numbered about 60.
The firewood ration was a kilogram a head, too little to cook the food with. Pay came to $50 for a senior officer and three for a sailor. Dysentery came, and then tropical ulcers. Later, the guards moved the officers through Kranji and into Changi, and in October 1944 they sent every Italian officer in Changi to the prison block because one of them had not stood up fast enough for a Japanese officer.
The Allied prisoners already there, the Italian Navy’s history notes, took them in with cordiality. From Ofuna, the officers went on to Omori and then to Shinagawa. There, according to the Navy’s history, the ration each day came to three small cups of boiled rice and grass. There was no Red Cross, and there were no letters, and there were beatings.
Mazzella, the commander who had sunk his ship at Kobe, developed pellagra. Lieutenant Ernesto Saccida was already sick with beriberi when a Japanese army doctor injected him with soy milk as an experiment. He died on July 1, 1945. The doctor’s injections on prisoners appear in the war crimes files of the occupation, and the Italian Navy’s history says the Americans later shot him.
No paper found for this account confirms the manner of his death, and the war crimes courts in Japan usually hanged the men they condemned, but the death of Saccida is documented. The Japanese held the Shanghai men who would not sign in two private homes for months, then sent them north in April 1944 to a civilian camp. The 34 from Tientsin went that September to Kiangwan outside Shanghai, a camp beside two Japanese airfields. Kiangwan already held about 550 American Marines captured in North China and on Wake Island.
At first, the Marine officers treated the Italians as enemies. It was a fair reading of the uniform and a poor reading of the men inside it. In May 1945, the guards moved the camp to Fengtai near Peking, where the rations were at times flour and nothing else. In June came the cattle cars.
The guards carried the Italians down through Korea and across the strait and delivered them to Tokyo at the start of July 1945. Some went to the Omori camp. Forty-four went to a camp at Kawasaki. They arrived in Japan at the worst possible time, because three weeks later, on July 25, 1945, American bombers came over Kawasaki and destroyed the camp.
Seaman Giovanni Manuyolo died in the wreckage. Twenty-two other prisoners died with him. Two of his shipmates, Omero Colinetti and Luigi Santi, were hurt. Far to the south, the loyalists at Changi had waited a full year, until September 1944, for permission to send a single postcard home, and the card had room for 24 words.
Liberation came on August 30, 1945, when men from Omori and Shinagawa went out to the American hospital ship Benevolence in Tokyo Bay. Aircraft flew them south to Manila. There, in the middle of September, a clerk listed them as prisoners of war of the United States, and the army put them to work in a motor pool. One of them wrote home.
His letter came back marked insufficient postage. They sailed in January 1946 on a Dutch ship by way of Honolulu and reached Naples on February 13, two and a half years after the order from Rome. The Malaya group came home a week earlier aboard the sloop Eritrea, the one ship that had got away. That leaves the 29 men of the Conte Verde.
The figure rests on the same independent crew history, and neither source says how those men died, where, or under which flag. Some may have been signers who went to sea again for the Axis, and some may have died in the Shanghai camps or on the long journey north through Korea in a cattle car. The Italian embassy’s papers from 1945 count the living who had to be sent home, and much of the Japanese paperwork on prisoners was burned in August 1945. The number survives, and the names and causes behind it have not been found.
The morning of September 10, 1943, was ordinary in most of the places this story touched. In Shanghai, the liner’s crew sat under guard in the Marine barracks on Robinson Road, and the Conte Verde lay on her side in the river opposite the Shanghai Club. In Tokyo, the police would ring the Italian embassy before the day was out, and the foreign ministry’s note calling all of it treason would carry that day’s date. In Kobe, Commander Mazzella was nursing an injury no doctor would see for five more days.
And off the northern tip of Sumatra, the Eritrea was still steaming west, waiting for nightfall and the next squall.
