In memory of the boys of the "Folgore" Regiment

25/05/16

Almost all of them not yet twenty, the young paratroopers whose memory we honor voluntarily chose war after Italy's surrender to the forces of "allied" countries and, abandoning family affections, schools and jobs, took up arms retracing the road of other young Italian heroes, such as those of the "Company of Honor" and the "Pisano" battalion.

 On impulse, without any hesitation, they crossed the thresholds of barracks, often dilapidated, to dress the "last green gray" and went to meet unparalleled experiences, full of ideal meanings, full of intense emotions, under the pressure of motivations that they drew their substance from the deepest sphere of the soul of an entire generation.

The sad and glorious story of the boys of the "Folgore" Regiment, aware of facing a desperate war, and not by their will, fratricidal and contrary to any honored principle of national unity, seems to echo the Greek epic of Thermopylae and deserves a revisitation objective, if only so that the memory does not fade and history remains incomplete.

In a tragic historical moment of the Italian nation they left, with a youthful impetus, for a war now lost, but which they felt were not confined to ideal motivations and ethical reasons. 

It has been biasedly argued that the determination of these boy-soldiers was nothing more than a choice moved by imposing automatisms, psychologically forced impulses and therefore emptied of meaning. It was actually a dramatic, for many fatal, story, an exciting ideal adventure, faced with conviction and full adherence, in the name of deeply rooted values, but vilified and betrayed.

That tragic historical moment showed a hallucinating panorama of moral and material ruin; especially if observed with the eyes and perceived with the feeling of young people who, by education and habits, were oriented towards the absolute. Then, at first perhaps instinctive and indistinct, but then more and more powerful and weighted the desire for redemption, the will to react.

 The sense of humiliation inflicted on the "Honor of Italy", experienced as a shame to be erased at any cost, resulted in a burst of pride. A state of mind, which is well described by the words of a great commander of those days:

".... They wanted to bring to light and beautifully the spirit of Italian combativity which did not resign itself to an armistice considered objectionable, but intended to show that it knew how to die fighting against the enemy. This was a little what lay at the bottom of the spirit of these men ... ". 

This therefore embodied the "Folgore" Regiment: a courageous reaction, made of honor and youth, indifference and generosity, and rebellion against all that was perceived among the folds of "unconditional surrender ".

A profound disappointment: those young people compared the past with the present and measured the real dimension of the void, the distance between the abandonment of ideal patriots and the tenacious affection for the inalienable values ​​of which their youth was embodied. This frightening dimension could not fail to provoke a movement of revolt and the consequent reaction that led them to physically oppose the shame in progress, to seek its redemption with its own participation, at any price, even that of life.

Thus it happened that those young people, with high foreheads and open faces, entered the heart of History to be its authors, and with their actions they became interpreters of the words of a great philosopher of their time:

"Peoples do not die if their will to independence survives their defeats. Do not destroy this will, this is the condition for not perishing ”.

 Moved by this noble intent, they found, without having consciously sought them, parallels and paradigms capable of linking them to national history and substantiated their choice, alien to any bias, of a spirit that strictly connects their action to the patriotic enterprises of the past: from the Risorgimento , up to the Municipalities, the Pontida oath and Roman times. A sort of crepuscular Renaissance, strongly desired and carried forward with unshakable decision. 

They chose the desperate war, it didn't matter how this would end, but it was imperative to fight with honor and to the extreme against the foreign armies that were violating the soil and the ideals of the homeland. It was this motivation to give their work, in addition to the ethical one, an undeniable historical legitimacy.

History, the partial one written by men, has overshadowed the heroic gesture of these young people, but History, that traced by humanity in its long journey, preserves it intact in its purity and in its substantial honesty and no one can, in any way, delete it.

Faced with the silent glory of the "Folgore" Regiment, a moral duty is imposed on our consciences: to recompose historical truth and pass it on to the memory of those who will come later. To them the arduous sentence, to them the task of bringing back in the right light the work of those who gave their lives, no matter on which barricade, to save the "Honor of Italy".

Adriano Tocchi (ANPd'I Rome president)