"Trapani! Trapani, donâ??t you see?â? Capt. Edward Croft-Murray exclaimed as the skyline of the Sicilian coastal town first appeared through the porthole of the Allied aircraft. Sitting next to him, Maj. Lionel Fielden, who had been drifting off into daydream for much of the flight from Tunis, opened his eyes to the landscape below. â??And there, below us,â? Fielden later wrote, â??swam through the sea a crescent of sunwashed white houses, lavender hillsides and rust red roofs, and a high campanile whose bells, soft across the water, stole to the mental ear. No country in the world has, for me, the breathtaking beauty of Italy.â?
It was the fall of 1943. A couple of months earlier, the Sicilian landings of July 10 had marked the beginning of the Allied Italian campaign. The two British officers, who had met and become instant friends during the recently concluded push to drive the Germans from North Africa, were assigned to the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), which took over control of Italy as the country was being liberated by the Allies. Edward â??Teddyâ? Croft-Murray, who in civilian life was a curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum in London, belonged to the small Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) unit inside AMGOT. Its taskâ??dramatized in George Clooneyâ??s new film, The Monuments Men, celebrating the unitâ??s exploitsâ??would be to safeguard landmarks and works of art from war damage. Croft-Murray had, Fielden wrote in his memoirs, a â??twinkling eye in a large face which was attached to the most untidy imaginable body...the Ancient Monument he called himself. God be praised, I said, for someone like this.â?
Fieldenâ??s enthusiasm wasnâ??t shared by all in the Allied armies. AMGOT officers, who were considerably older than the average G.I., were rather unkindly dubbed â??Aged Military Gentlemen on Tourâ? by their own army. The Monuments Officers in particular stood out as an oddity. They were art historians, architects, artists, archaeologists and archivists: a straight civilian lot who had no business, in the eyes of many soldiers, moving around a theater of war telling colonels and generals what not to bomb. The unit consisted of two men at the start of operations in Italy; their numbers would reach 27 by completion of the campaign there. Almost as soon as they set foot in the country they were nicknamed â??the Venus Fixers.â?
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