Operation Neptune like most special sabotage operations was based out of a secret compound known as “il Castello” the “Castle.” It was a bizarre cluster of buildings around a main twenty room structure originally built at the end of the nineteenth century as the private Shangri-la of a rich banker. Perched on a rocky spur overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea a few kilometers north of the ultra secret Bocca del Serchio divers’ training facility, the Castle was almost completely hidden from view because of the way it had been carved into the rocks. Even the amazing natural swimming pool had been cut deep into the boulders so that it would be partly shaded and was effectively invisible from the sky. Trees and shrubs were cleverly used as camouflage and no one could approach the area from any direction without running into patrols of a few heavily armed men in commando uniforms without any formal insignia.
The only access by land was up the steep winding road that Spada had taken blindfolded; circling the spur for five kilometers, and ending in what could have been a scenic view on top. Guards were hidden behind the bushes and in a makeshift house also carved into the rock formations at the entrance of a dimly lit corridor that ended in a steel door. An elevator then took passengers some three hundred meters below to sea level where a series of tunnels and stairs led to an indoor grotto large enough to accommodate a twin engine seaplane and two submarines. It was ideal for underwater testing and diving because of the unusually deep thirty meters’ sea floor. The land south of the Castle belonged to a wildlife preserve owned by the Italian royal family, a magnificent estate where the King of Italy entertained his guests every October during the fabled hunts for wild boar, a local specialty that Julius Caesar mentions in his writings.
Guards, attack dogs, deep ditches and a double row of electrified barbed wire invisible from any angle except if the intruder was lucky enough to have slipped past the guards, all surrounded the Castle. Access from the sea was sealed by anti-submarine nets and underwater mines and six Gamma Group frogmen patrolling the waters leading to the grotto on a continuous basis. The area was effectively cordoned off from the rest of the world.
Many of the main rooms retained their rough cave-like ceilings, complete with occasional dripping water. The original owner had an adolescent fixation with Jules Verne and Captain Nemo whose underwater retreat he had attempted to reproduce. There were a few oversize conference rooms used for meetings by Admiral Calamai, Commander Ferri and a number of transient instructors. Operational planning was conducted in small teams on long map tables and mostly at a model swimming pool simulating the positions of various ships in a specific harbor down to the smallest detail.
Fred Spada was privileged to spend his first and only night in luxury in the company of an enthusiastic aspiring actress from Florence with whom he retired immediately after dinner. That test required no preparation and he passed with flying colors.
The Admiral got right to the point a few minutes after dawn the following morning:
“Captain Spada, as you know I am in command of secret underwater operations of the ‘Gruppo Gamma,’ which includes your mission. Commander Ferri, whom you already know, is your commanding officer. We have selected you to lead a very important secret operation that will take you into New York harbor. This is an extremely dangerous and vitally important mission to carry out a sabotage operation in a neutral port in peacetime. You and your team will be completely cut off from home base, out of range of any possible rescue especially if war should break out officially during your transfer to the target area. You will therefore be on your own should anything go wrong.
If and when it is deemed necessary, the Service may proceed with your arrest or summary execution and order you to commit suicide in the interest of the mission. Should you collaborate with the enemy both you and your family will be held physically accountable for your actions. I assume you fully understand what this implies. I must formally ask that you swear to accept these guidelines and this mission without having any prior knowledge of its details. Do you accept?”
“Admiral, I sear to complete secrecy and accept the orders. I fully understand the consequences.”
“Well then, at ease, Captain. You should know from the start that this mission has been approved at the highest level.” –he paused and pointed to the sky with a vague smile as he looked at both men to make sure they understood who he was alluding to. ---“So now let’s get to work!”
That first morning was spent on the driving principle to be followed without fail throughout the mission as Commander Ferri pointed out,
“Total compartmentalization is the guiding rule: complete autonomy of each element of the team. This means you will have no contact with the other two group members until you are on location and only four days before the first operation. You will not see them here while in training nor will you know how or where they enter the United States. You will know only the essential facts you need in order to fulfill your mission at specific times. This is the only way the operation can continue even if one or two elements are missing. No contact among team members is to take place before the attack stage and not until the formal signal is given. Should a security risk materialize within the team you as leader must proceed with that individual’s immediate and radical termination. This is an order for preemptive execution that you shall carry out in your best judgement. Is that absolutely clear?”
Spada was amazed at the kind of discipline and planning that surrounded the mission to a far greater extent than any of the sabotage actions he’d been involved in so far. The Admiral added:
“Specific objectives will be assigned in due course and may change as the mission evolves. Commander Ferri will have you train with the new equipment. It is now April 29 training will end in less than two months by early July. You must be on location and fully operational by September. We will need a long lead time to get you and your team into position and that portion represents the most difficult part of the entire mission. Good luck Captain!”
The Admiral saluted stiffly, shook hands all around and hurried out to board the seaplane that was warming up its engines inside the grotto.
For three months Fred Spada was completely absorbed in training covering every aspect of the operation in almost total isolation except for two days’ leave to visit his family. During that time he was closely shadowed by a team of secret policemen who recorded every move he made.
His only regular contact was Commander Ferri and the occasional instructors for the equipment and his gear or to drill him on the exacting intelligence procedures he needed to follow. Most of the underwater training took place after dark to simulate actual operational conditions while mornings were dedicated to espionage techniques and location study. He also received instruction on the situation along the East Coast of the United States, the Caribbean and in Cuba along with Spanish language training.
The instruction program included a detailed study of daily events in the U.S. since 1935, the year he returned to Italy. His “textbooks” were almost exclusively the collection of the New York Times and the New York Sun and a few other popular dailies from various cities up to May 1941. He memorized the main highlights of the two presidential campaigns, especially the latest one where Wendell Willkie proved to be such an effective adversary to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hollywood movies, Broadway shows, baseball and football scores, boxing bouts and the stuff of small talk people exchange on a daily basis. The foreign ministry date stamps on the front pages of the newspapers showed they had been received in the diplomatic pouch. A young diplomat from the foreign ministry would show up every morning after his diver’s training for two weeks to grill him incessantly about a mass of trivia in typical American slang.
One day he asked:
“Fred when you gotta have lunch you either go to the counter at Woolworths or to the Horn and Hardart Automat. What do you order at Woolworths?”
“I…I never went to Woolworths.”
The instructor frowned and pointed to an ad from the Daily Mirror:
“Look, this is a “blue plate lunch” it comes on a specially designed tray with separate sections just like the army. A typical meal is meat loaf and mashed potatoes with a thick brown gravy and apple pie. The price today is 35 cents including a small glass of Coca Cola. You might also order a chocolate ice cream soda for an extra 5 cents.”
He also memorized the best public locations for dead drops in Manhattan, The Bronx and Brooklyn and the techniques required to set up meetings working out all the details in advance including seating arrangements, signals and cut outs.
Communications were the key problem and a lot of time was spent on how to send and receive information. The afternoons were dedicated to equipment and ordnance. He was amazed at the degree of sophistication of the experimental weapons he was training with. In specific areas Italy was far more advanced than Germany or Great Britain. The special Pirelli diving suit for example had been designed with newly developed synthetic fibers to operate in freezing temperatures typical of much colder and deeper waters than the Mediterranean. The material had been tested off the coast of Norway in extremely cold temperatures at depths of over 30 meters.
Early one afternoon Fred was summoned down into the grotto. Commander Ferri was in conversation with two civilian engineers from the Ansaldo San Giorgio naval works at Riva near Genoa. In the water, tied up to the pontoon he noticed a black steel raft no more than seven meters long by one and a half meters wide.
“Spada this is a new experimental attack boat that has just passed initial testing at the shipyard. You must become very confident about this craft before we decide to assign it to the mission. It may not look like much but, believe me, it is an awesome weapon.”
One of the engineers opened a large portfolio filled with sketches and diagrams. Unfolding a blueprint sheet he proceeded to describe the workings of what was called officially the SLC- III as opposed to its earlier versions, the SLC -I and -II that were currently operational in combat areas and that Fred had successfully used in attacks on Malta and Gibraltar. SLC, which stood for siluro a lenta corsa or ‘slow running torpedo,’ was a generic term to describe what newspaper reporters popularized as a “human torpedo.” It looked like a large underwater motorcycle with a long thick rounded nose that was in fact a 300-plus kilo bomb capable of sinking a major battleship or even an aircraft carrier if applied at the right spot directly under the center of the keel.
The craft was designed for two crewmembers wearing lightweight diving gear navigating just below surface level with their heads at the water’s edge, which was known in the jargon as ‘quota occhiali’ or ‘goggle depth’. In less than three seconds the SLC could dive and remain submerged for a little over three hours. The mission was to attach a single large bomb of over three hundred pounds of TNT contained in the forward portion of the craft attached to a steel wire under the keel of an enemy ship. A timing device allowed the crew two and a half hours to clear the area before the blast that would easily rip apart the hull of almost any target. The SLC-I had a major drawback in that it required two men working as a team to operate it efficiently and attach the bomb accurately under the target. That specific part of the operation was extremely delicate and required over thirty minutes. The engineers at Ansaldo had just designed and tested a slightly longer boat that could easily be operated by a single crew man offering far greater firepower.
“The new version is designed primarily for one man although it does have space for two.” Said the engineer, “The torpedoes are flexible and multi task: you may fire them from a distance of up to three hundred meters or attach them to the target’s hull as in the SLC-I and -II. The torpedoes will not detonate on impact but only five to ten seconds after hitting the target and sinking under the water line. The fastening operation of the active part of the torpedo no longer requires steel attachments but uses magnetic suction pads affixed to four locations of the hull in a square where you thread the wiring that holds the bomb in position for detonation.”
Commander Ferri pulled out a strange looking round device about the size of a medium sized saucer.
“This little instrument” he said handling the round timer with three superimposed interlocking dials “changes our entire system of underwater warfare. The three rotating dials are interconnected.” The rotating timer had three separate rotors each one having a fourteen-hour dial.
“How long can this delay the explosion?” asked Fred.
Cdr. Ferri smiled and answered:
“You have asked the key question, captain! The answer is a total of 41 hours.”
The engineer was impatient to explain in more detail.
“In a sense this timer is similar to a perpetual clocking device, once you set one rotor for fourteen hours and lock it into position the next rotor is ready to be set for a second fourteen hour cycle. You decide when to lock it in by using a magnetic wire. If you need to delay the explosion until the 30th hour for example, you turn the third rotor to that point and lock it in and so on. The device is connected to the detonator of the bomb so you can swim quietly away and have the explosion a day and a half later.”
“There should be nothing to prevent adding more rotors or creating a single 24-hour rotor, correct?”
Ferri smiled and looked at the two engineers.
“That is exactly what these gentlemen are working on, captain. They are confident they can have enough of the current devices available when you are scheduled to operate.”
Spada carefully inspected the boat’s steering device. Just below the surface two three-meter torpedo tubes were affixed to either side of the craft with detachable connecting rings so that the bombs could be removed from the torpedo tubes. By opening a hatch on top of the raft the diver eased himself into a seat with all the instruments required to navigate on the surface, fire the torpedoes and dive. Fred put on his wet suit and within one hour was able to navigate underwater at a speed of five knots in and out of the grotto. Over the next few days he learned to perform all the operations the SLC-III was designed for. Two weeks later he could take the entire boat apart and reassemble it single handedly in less than twenty hours. The components easily broke down into amazingly small parts, no more than 4,500 in all, so that stripping the boat down was not a difficult operation.
In addition the engineers had devised a new kind of explosive mine the size of a brick that used the same timing device attached to the detonator. The mines or “mignatte” would stick to the hull of merchant ships or navy vessels, one of them alone could sink a small freighter and two placed under the hull would seriously damage a destroyer. During operations a diver could swim up to the target while transporting six or more mines at any one time. Since the ships were usually moored to the pier or along side each other in rows, the diver could place the mines on ten ships in a convoy in less than one hour. Each diver would carry up to six mines as “luggage” during an attack.
By the end of June, eighteen hour days under extremely stressful conditions were the rule, including ten-hour stretches in freezing cold waters in the artificial swimming pool to simulate the temperatures commonly found in New York harbor in the dead of winter when the divers could be swimming around large blocks of floating ice. By then training was considered to be complete and espionage techniques made up most of the curriculum: border crossings, disguises, legends, false documents, currency manipulation, communications, and above all, contact. Fred would use up to a dozen identities, over half of them even before reaching the target.
Ferri told him one day that the mission had political ramifications and originated as an order from Mussolini himself: “Operation Neptune” was to remain a purely Italian operation so there would be no contact with the Germans even coincidentally, this was an integral part of his mission orders. He therefore would use a much longer route in order to safely infiltrate the heavy equipment into the United States.
In late May Commander Ferri suddenly disappeared for almost the entire month. The problem of reaching the target had been narrowed down to a question of speed and convenience which meant traveling by air. They would use three planes: one to carry the team leader and one complete set of hardware and explosives; the second to carry a back up sub and its torpedoes; and the third as an additional back up duplicating all the equipment contained in the first two planes. The second diver and the naval engineer were to reach the United States using different itineraries that had already been arranged. Their identities and routes were to remain unknown to Spada until they met on location. Ferri traveled ahead to survey and prepare the logistics for each stop on the way to the target area. The first two were simple enough, Tetouan, the capital of Spanish Morocco where Italian intelligence had been operating since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, then Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, another friendly Spanish territory where procedures were easily set up at the military airport.
Then at Conakry in French West Africa, a much more problematic location where agents had to be infiltrated secretly and the logistics required careful planning. The capital of French Guinée was a midsized colonial city of one hundred thousand built on a lagoon jutting out into the Atlantic. Geographically the location was perfect, offering the shortest possible range for the three large P.108T four engine transports specifically modified for an ocean crossing. From that point to the outskirts of the big Amazonian village of Macau in northern Brazil between Natal and Fortaleza, there were 28 to 30 hours of flying time over 2300 miles of the South Atlantic, or several hundred miles more than the plane’s range. The P.108T could cover the distance only with additional fuel tanks that were being fitted at Pisa military airport hangars. The additional fuel tanks would add 700 miles to the range with a normal load. The main mechanical issues concerned the reliability of the Piaggio engines that were still at the experimental stage and needed more testing. But there was no time for absolute perfection since Operation Neptune was on such a tight schedule that it had to proceed without delay using the available equipment.
After one week in Conakry posing as a businessman interested in export import, Ferri managed to locate an unpaved airstrip in the jungle some thirty kilometers north of the city that had been used occasionally by the French air force before the war. The main negative aspect was that the planes had to land and take off in daylight and the hard earth abruptly ended to become a thick uphill jungle that was a challenge to the pilots. They had to clear the trees by climbing full throttle at an unusually steep angle very quickly then level off for a more regular climb once over the ocean some ten minutes later.
Ferri used a cut-out to negotiate with the owners of the land that happened to be the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas in Conakry. The bank had repossessed the location from a failed business venture and the local managers were more than happy to get some money back. The cut-out also reported that the bank officer was having trouble hiding his pro-Gaullist sentiments so he cleverly used that angle to secure his approval. He made sure that once the operation was completed a rumor went around that the Free French were shipping supplies to guerrillas in Gabon and Madagascar so that the bank manager was promptly arrested for sedition. In a few weeks the Italians had set up a makeshift hangar and secured enough airplane fuel for the final jump across the south Atlantic. By late June Ferri had returned to the Castle sporting a deep African tan and a confident smile. He had fulfilled the first part of his mission and the operation could now proceed as planned.
On June 23, 1941 Fred Spada was summoned to a meeting with the Admiral:
“Captain Spada you may not have heard” –said the Admiral – “since you are in almost complete isolation here, that as of yesterday Axis forces have preventively attacked the Soviet Union. Germany has committed three and a half million men to this colossal operation and Italy will dispatch a large contingent of troops. This new chapter changes nothing to your mission, but it is important that you be aware of the new realities. Ferri will explain the details.”
Spada sensed that the Admiral was less than enthusiastic about having to fight the Russians.
Ferri pointed to a map of North America:
“You will receive detailed orders that you must memorize and destroy each time. In a few days you will proceed to the target: New York City. Once you are safely on location you will make contact with your case officer and receive new orders but always remember that these may be superseded up to 48 hours before any operation begins as the situation develops. We are keeping our options open until the whole team is on location and ready to operate. After considering several possibilities we opted for you and the main part of the equipment to fly on a southern route across the south Atlantic. It will take some twenty or more days to reach New York from South America. Actually this will be the critical part of the mission when you have almost no control over events until you cross into the United States.”
Ferri then explained in greater detail how the complicated trip would be handled.
Fred’s family still thought he was stationed up the coast further north, at the submarine base at La Spezia and couldn’t imagine that he was only a twenty minute motor launch ride to the south instead.
The transportation problem remained daunting. Even when reduced to a manageable number of crates for the SLC-III-A with ten 400 kilo torpedoes and over one hundred mines, the planes were still overloaded. A second crated SLC III-B identical to the A class as a backup was scheduled to fly in a few hours later. Brazil was mostly pro-American and openly unfriendly to the Axis so flying in with such sensitive equipment was a risky proposition. But the country’s immense size made any effective surveillance by the British or the Americans very difficult. They would fly out of Pisa military airport to Tetouan, the first stop in Spanish Morocco to refuel for no more than two hours then on to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands where the planes would be repainted as Brazilian ‘Panair do Brasil’ commercial aircraft. Then on to Conakry just before the big South Atlantic crossing and a secret landing strip deep in the jungle, three hundred miles north of Natal, and fifty miles west of a tiny Amazonian town called Macau. The range of the aircraft was therefore stretched to the limit.
By July 20, 1941 Captain Federico “Fred” Spada was ready. He had packed his equipment and had carefully inspected each one of the two sets of 150 crates with the mechanics and the engineers and knew exactly where every last part of the SLC-III-A, B and the back-up was stored, how it was labeled, numbered, and placed on board the planes. One complete SLC per plane, just in case something should go wrong. The unused units would be flown back to Italy. A layer of farm machinery replacement parts manufactured in Chicago, Illinois was carefully placed on top of the contents of each crate in the event of a “hostile” inspection.
Immediately following his last trip outside the compound Fred began growing a mustache and full beard for scores of identity photos for many sets of forged documents and passports he would be using during his mission. Then there were more delays because of timing and connections. Finally the crates were loaded on a military truck early one morning. Fred Spada and Cdr. Ferri drove to Pisa military airport in a staff car and security was kept at the highest level for several kilometers around the air strip. The Admiral was superstitious and never attended mission departures, he said it was bad luck to be photographed outside the submarine or the plane taking you to the war zone. On the tarmac the three large four engine P.108T military transport planes were revving up their propellers. There had been a final ten day delay because the third plane was on a mission in the Aegean and required additional maintenance to install the extra large fuel tanks. Finally Ferri and Spada saluted and shook hands as the engines roared and the planes with three engineers on board for emergency maintenance taxied for take off one by one.
“Operation Neptune” had entered its critical path.