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American Boy in a Far-Off War
Former Millbrae mayor recalls life under Mussolini
Bill Workman
Thursday, June 25, 1998
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/06/25/MN19178.DTL

Like a lot of children in Italy during World War II, Tullio (Til) Bertini saw his share of death and destruction as Allied and Axis forces fought their bloody battles in the war-ravaged country.

What made Bertini's experiences unique was that he was an American citizen, born in Boston.

He was trapped along with his parents in a remote village where they were staying in the Tuscany region when war erupted in Europe in September 1939.

For more than five years, the young Bertini -- now a retired industrial arts teacher, former Millbrae mayor and city councilman and, until recently, a San Mateo community college district trustee

--was forced to live under Fascist and Nazi rule before he and his parents were repatriated to the United States after the war and came to the Peninsula.

What lends even more drama to his wartime saga is that Diecimo, an ancient Roman outpost in the Apennines mountains where the Bertinis made their temporary home, was liberated from German SS troops by the 92nd Infantry Division of the U.S. Fifth Army, the ``Buffalo Soldiers'' division comprised almost entirely of African Americans.

``We didn't think of them as blacks; we thought of them as American soldiers who had come to free us,'' recalls Bertini, a soft- spoken, blue-eyed man with steel-gray hair.

The house of his English-speaking family became a gathering place for the battle-weary Americans for several weeks in the winter of 1944 after they had driven the Germans deeper into the mountains behind the Gothic Line. The line was the defense front the Nazis had established to slow the Allies after the collapse of Benito Mussolini's Fascist government the year before.

Bertini's parents frequently invited the soldiers in for dinner, and some stayed overnight. Tullio, by then 14 years old, often gave them his bed. He became a part-time translator for the soldiers, ran errands for them and helped load military supply trucks in exchange for candy and cigarettes he shared with chums.

Bertini, 68, expands on his experiences in ``Trapped in Tuscany,'' a recently published book that he wrote largely to satisfy the curiosity of his own two sons about their father, but which is attracting growing interest from other Italian Americans.

The story begins in August 1939, when Bertini's father, Nello, who had recently lost his longtime chef's job at a Boston restaurant, took his family for a visit to his native Diecimo, where he owned several properties and where his mother still lived.

Soon after their arrival, Nello was stricken with a heart attack that left him an invalid for the next few years. Less than a month later, the Germans invaded Poland, World War II was under way, and, in the spring of 1940, Mussolini took his country into war as an ally of Germany.

Despite U.S. State Department warnings that Americans should leave Italy, Bertini's mother, Ada, was reluctant to leave her ailing husband behind. The family stayed on, hoping the war would not touch them.

Although food, clothing and fuel shortages made life uncomfortable, the Bertinis at first managed to get by. Young Tullio, who already spoke Italian, attended the village school and later a boarding school run by Catholic priests. Among his memorabilia is a 1942 report card that bears his Fascist Ministry of Education registration number and lists courses that include one on the history of Fascism.

Bertini says he was largely unfazed by life in a totalitarian society at the time. His school uniform included the required black shirt of Mussolini's Fascists. ``Before I left Boston, I wanted to be a Cub Scout and loved the idea of wearing a uniform. It all seemed the same to me.''

When the Germans occupied Diecimo and surrounding villages in September 1943 and began installing dynamite charges in two bridges that were to be blown up, the reality of war finally came home to Tullio and his family.

He describes playing soccer one day when two British fighter planes came zooming in at low altitude in front of the young players, opening fire on German soldiers at one of the bridges. Later, he watched as open-bed SS trucks rolled through the square carrying the blood-covered bodies of the Germans.

``I realized that this was the first time I had seen a person who died as a direct result of war,'' he writes, ``and that I also could have been killed by the airplanes if they continued to fire their machine guns as they flew over the soccer field.''

The dangers of war didn't dull the propensity of Bertini and his teen friends to take risks, however. He tells of staying out at night a number of times beyond the 6 p.m. curfew imposed by the SS and of dodging German patrols to hang out with his buddies at nearby homes or in the woods.

Like other parents in the village, the Bertinis were terrified their son would be seized by the occupiers and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany. One night when Tullio returned home, his ailing father took off his belt and strapped his backside.

Bertini's book isn't all about war. Whole chapters are devoted to detailed descriptions of the making of wine, sausages, and breads and of other facets of rural Italian life.

``You have to understand that I was an urban kid when I came from Boston, and all this was new and fascinating to me at the time,'' he says. Workman writes from The Chronicle's Peninsula bureau; he can be reached at (650) 961-2499 or by fax at (650) 961-5023. E-mail wworkman@sfgate.com.

©1998 San Francisco Chronicle  Page A15