7

Best-Laid Plans: The SOE and OSS in Northern Italy

August 1944

The partisans on the Monte Sole plateau above Bologna had no idea that Hauptsturmführer Walter Reder and his SS panzergrenadiers were on their way. Their colleagues who operated in the mountains above Milan, however, had ample warning that a four-man party from the British Special Operations Executive was due to arrive. The team was going to bring three things with it. First, a well-known Italian figure who could potentially unite the different political factions among the partisans in the north. Second, a promise of regular airdrops of weapons to fight the Germans. And third, stowed in bandoliers and in linen wrappings under their flying suits and jackets and in an equipment container, 2 million lire in cash. On the night of August 12, the SOE team stood by the tarmac airstrip outside Brindisi at the bottom of the Adriatic seacoast. It was a typically hot summer’s night, and the men were soon sweating heavily as they struggled with their parachute harnesses and flying suits, stowed personal weapons and possessions, and prepared for an uneven, bumpy flight five hundred miles over the Adriatic and then due west into northern Italy. They were just one of four teams that would fly north that night and parachute into enemy-occupied territory.

By August 1944, the SOE was running operations in the country from two locations. Directly behind the western front line in the Tuscan town of Siena, and from the far south in the heel of Italy, from a castle headquarters at Monopoli outside Brindisi. A British Royal Navy commander was in charge of Number 1 Special Force, as the Monopoli detachment was known. Before the invasion of Sicily and Italy, the SOE and the American OSS had been headquartered together at a beachfront training camp outside Algiers. As the Allies had advanced up the Italian mainland, SOE chose the castle at Monopoli because it was close to Brindisi’s port and airfield, it had instant access to the Adriatic for maritime operations, and it was in aircraft range of the whole of northern Italy, the Adriatic, and Yugoslavia.

The SOE team had had to wait several days in a safe house before an RAF Halifax bomber became available. The Warsaw uprising was now at its height: as the Red Army stood just miles outside, the Germans were destroying the Polish resistance in the capital. The Russians had halted because Stalin wanted the Germans to crush the noncommunist Poles leading the rebellion. The RAF was desperately trying to supply the Poles with arms, medical supplies, food, and ammunition, but Stalin consistently refused to allow the British aircraft permission to land, refuel, or overnight in territory held by his men. The allegiance among the Americans, the British, and the Russians was starting to show large fracture lines as the Soviet Army advanced into Europe. Those lines would soon stretch and widen and reach Italy. One side effect was that the RAF couldn’t supply transport aircraft for both Poland and Italy simultaneously, so the SOE team had to wait. It was not until eleven o’clock on the night of August 12 that the four men stood in the hot Adriatic night, stuffing bundles of hundreds of thousands of lire into their Sidcot flying suits, then strapping on their cumbersome and uncomfortable X-Type parachutes.

General Raffaele Cadorna and the CLNAI

There were three Italians and one British officer in the group. The eldest was a fifty-five-year-old former general in the Italian army named Raffaele Cadorna Jr. The name Cadorna was familiar to all Italians, especially those who were now resisting Mussolini, his residual Fascist troops, and the Germans. Cadorna’s grandfather had led Garibaldi’s troops into Rome in 1870 during the Risorgimento, the resurgence, or political, social, and military unification movement that resulted in the Kingdom of Italy. His father, Luigi, had been a field marshal and commander in chief of Italian forces in the First World War: like so many commanders on all sides, he was unpopular for sending thousands of men to unnecessary deaths. Cadorna Jr. had commanded the Ariete armored division, which had been among the only Italian antifascist army units to put up any effective resistance to the Germans in September 1943 when they occupied Rome.

The former general had been chosen by the Allies to drop into northern Italy to oversee the military training and supply of partisan groups there. He was also to try to cement workable allegiances among the different political factions, each with its own armed group. Cadorna was a national figurehead of the old Italy that had existed pre-Mussolini. The Christian Democrats, the Communists, the Liberals, and the Action Party—the main political groupings on the left, right, and center—preferred him to anybody else, and he was the best the Allies had. He had been personally requested by the leaders of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (CLNAI), the National Liberation Committee for Upper Italy, in Milan, the umbrella group that loosely bound the partisan groups and their political objectives together into one cohesive whole with one self-explanatory priority: the liberation of Italy from the Germans and Mussolini’s Fascists. All sides—the Allies, the Fascists, the CLNAI, and each individual partisan leader—knew the unspoken subtext. Once Italy was liberated, the political landscape was almost certain to be dominated by the partisan grouping that controlled the most territory, had the most arms and the most money, and controlled the labor unions that ran northern Italy’s economy—and also enjoyed the temporary support of the postwar Allied authorities. So there was intense jockeying for political and military power among all the partisan groups, each of them wanting priority when it came to supplies of Allied arms, food, supplies, and money, and the OSS and SOE agents who delivered them.

The Royal Navy commander in charge of Number 1 Special Force made the Allies’ operational, strategic, and political priorities clear to the CLNAI. They would support all partisan groups that contributed directly to the main war effort, but anytime political infighting interfered with this, material help would be suspended. The Allies defined the goal of the partisan resistance groups: “to harass German lines of communication by sabotage and guerrilla warfare and eventually to impede the withdrawal of German forces from Italy in order that the Allied armies may be able to get at them and destroy them.”

As a central piece in the jigsaw of Allied and partisan aims and objectives, the Allies thought Cadorna fit better than anybody else. He was well connected to the partisan networks in Rome as well, particularly to the group that had carried out, and then suffered the reprisals for, the bomb attack in Via Rasella in March of that year. He was linked to Arrigo Paladini, now a political coordinator between the partisans and the Allies in Rome, as well as to the network that had been run by a former military colleague of Cadorna’s, Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo. This officer had been among those whom the SS shot at the Ardeatine Caves in March. He had occupied the cell at Via Tasso next to Arrigo Paladini after the Germans arrested him in January 1944. Although Herbert Kappler’s Gestapo men had pulled his teeth and fingernails out with pliers, Montezemolo never talked. General Harold Alexander wrote a letter of thanks and congratulation to his widow, all she had to remember her husband’s work by.1

Major Oliver Churchill and the SOE

Number 1 Special Force outside Brindisi answered to SOE headquarters in London as well as to its European office in Berne, Switzerland. In London, the SOE briefed the British Foreign Office about Cadorna’s mission, which had been given the code name “Operation Fairway.” They hoped that the arrival of the former general in Milan would keep the partisan effort “on the right lines.” It was just one of some forty missions that the SOE was to run across northern Italy as the Allies advanced, from the far western border with France on the Alps to the frontier with Yugoslavia in the east. But Fairway was vitally important because Cadorna was the Allies’ senior liaison with all of the CLNAI. He had two Italian agents who would parachute with him. One was a lieutenant named Augusto de Laurentiis, code-named “Ferreo.” He would act as the link between Cadorna and the CLNAI; there was also an Italian radio operator, Sergeant Nicola Delle Monache, code-named “Alfieri,” while Cadorna himself was to be called “Valenti.” The fourth member of the team, and the only non-Italian, was given the code name “Peters.”

The night drop over northern Italy would not be the first operational parachute descent of the war for Peters, whose full and real name was Major Oliver Churchill of SOE. On the left chest of his military battle dress, when he wore his uniform, was the silk medal ribbon—an inch and a quarter in width—of the British Military Cross. The tall, black-haired, thirty-one-year-old officer had won it on the Greek island of Corfu the previous year, helping support the Italian garrison after their army switched allegiances to the Allies. Churchill came from a British diplomatic family and already had one brother working for the SOE in neighboring France. He’d been born in Stockholm in 1914, the son of William Algernon Churchill, a consul at the British embassy in Sweden. His father’s diplomatic postings had variously included Mozambique, Brazil, Holland, Italy, and Algeria. Churchill senior was also an art connoisseur and the author of the standard reference book on early European paper and watermarks. Oliver studied modern languages and architecture at King’s College, Cambridge. He had joined the British Territorial Army in the late 1930s, and when war broke out in 1939, he got a reserve commission in the Worcestershire Regiment, an English county unit. His two brothers joined as well. Walter, the eldest, had been a Royal Auxiliary Air Force pilot since 1932 and won the Distinguished Flying Cross piloting Hurricanes in combat during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Then posted to the besieged Mediterranean island of Malta in 1941, he was responsible for seven destroyed German aircraft and received the Distinguished Service Order. The Germans shot down his Spitfire during a raid on the airfield of Biscari in southern Sicily in 1942. Oliver’s second brother, Peter, had also been selected to join the Special Operations Executive, and by 1942 was working undercover in southern France.

Oliver’s ability to speak Italian and French and his international upbringing attracted him to SOE recruiters, as did a recommendation by his brother. He was detached from his infantry regiment to the fledgling secret army, and in early 1941 he underwent commando training at the bleak outpost of Arisaig in the and Lochailort in the Scottish Highlands. Here recruits to the Special Operations Executive lived in canvas tents on the grounds of shooting lodges, swam in bitterly cold lochs in battle dress, learned rope climbing and an early form of jujitsu and knife fighting taught by two former police officers from the Shanghai Municipal Police, called Sergeants Fairbairn and Sykes. The two invented the Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife, a fighting dagger with a seven-inch tapered blade, issued to commandos and special forces. Fairbairn had spent some twenty years with the Shanghai Police, being involved in hundreds of street-fights involving knives. The SOE recruits ran up Scottish mountains, they learned about explosives, and every morning began with a cup of tea, some powdered egg, and white bread—sometimes thinly spread with margarine—and a run. Ironically, the cerebral Churchill, who hated destruction and killing, took to it. The whole program was a complete contrast to anything he had ever done before in his life, and the physicality of it made a refreshing break from the intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge. And it wasn’t that different from his public school in Buckinghamshire, except the food was often better. He liked to use his ingenious, flexible brain to try to outthink the instructors, and they spotted it. Further training in tradecraft and parachuting followed, and then Churchill was passed ready for operations.

The SOE posted him to Malta and then to Cairo. Churchill’s first mission was Operation Acheron, a code word derived from the name of a Napoleonic-era French man-o’-war. When the Italians surrendered under the 1943 armistice, General Eisenhower and Allied planners decided that some of the islands in the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, east and west, respectively, of the Greek mainland, had strategic priority. The beautiful island of Corfu, lying only nine miles off the coast of Albania, was a potential jumping-off point for any future invasion of the Adriatic seaboard of Yugoslavia. It was manned by an Italian garrison. The SOE decided that Major Oliver Churchill and a radio operator, Signalman Harrison, should be inserted by parachute to contact the Italian commander and assure him that Allied help was on the way. And in the meantime to urge him to resist any German attempts to occupy the island. Churchill’s briefing from the SOE, as recorded in his war record, gave some idea of the ad hoc nature of their mission. It was remarkably similar to the “suck-it-and-see” tactical approach the Allies were often obliged to take at that stage of the war in the Mediterranean, when reliable intelligence on the ground was sparse or nonexistent. Combined operations, amphibious landing techniques, multinational command and control among nationalities as disparate as the Americans, French, British, Greeks, and Brazilians were all being honed and tried out, often for the first time in action. Each operation was a rehearsal for the next one. The American landings in North Africa, Operation Torch, had been preparations for the invasion of Sicily, with all of its attendant successes and failures. The British tended to bring flair, flexibility, imagination, and derring-do to operational planning; the Americans, economic and military muscle, and a lot of perseverance and common sense. Like nitroglycerine, it was a volatile mix. If the British and American commanders got on, it worked well.

The briefing for Operation Acheron was simple. Churchill noted, “Little was known of the situation in Corfu. Fighting was to be expected anywhere. We might be fired on by either or both sides.”

Germany promptly invaded Corfu in mid-September 1943. Churchill and Harrison parachuted in a week afterward, but their landing on the hard, rocky ground damaged their radio equipment. This made contact with headquarters in Cairo at first difficult, and then impossible. The two men contacted the Italian commander of the island, who was defending a shrinking perimeter centered on Corfu’s capital. Four days after the arrival of the SOE team, the Italians surrendered to the Germans, who shot the Italian commander and his senior officers. Churchill and Harrison had to run for their lives. Their only way out? To buy, borrow, steal, or build some form of boat that they could use to cross the whole of the Adriatic Sea, diagonally from Corfu in the northeast to Allied-controlled territory at the bottom of the eastern coast of Italy. It was a distance of some three hundred nautical miles.

One of the numerous exercises that SOE recruits at the Scottish training centers in Scotland had practiced was E&E, escape and evasion. Pursued by their instructors, the trainees had to trek across the Scottish Highlands. They would have little or no food or water, be living off the land, dressed in shabby military clothing, boots laced with old wire, with no compass, maps, weapons, money, or equipment. On Corfu, Churchill and Harrison had to do it for real. They borrowed some Greek peasants’ clothing, hid in outhouses, rocky gulleys, and caves, and made their way to the island’s coast. They finally found a motorboat. The captain was seventy, and Churchill described the three crew members as “one dotard, one drunkard, and the father of a thief.”

Eleven Italian soldiers and sailors joined them, fleeing the Germans. The shoddy, incompetent crew rowed the boat to three offshore islets and then raised sail. The following day, after a chaotic night at sea, one of the Italian sailors—luckily for all aboard—recognized the Gulf of Taranto. The drunk captain couldn’t read the compass, and his bosun couldn’t handle the sails. The captain thought they’d sailed in a circle and were off the coast of Albania, but the Italian seaman saw that they had sailed into Italian coastal waters. Sunburned, hungry, and very thirsty, they finally landed at Otranto, in far southern Italy. Churchill was taken by ship to Brindisi, debriefed, and then returned to Cairo.

As an operation, it was a disaster. Force majeure and bigger events had simply gotten the better of the two men. But Acheron demonstrated the boundless initiative and flexibility, the ability to think on their feet deep within enemy-occupied territory, that SOE recruitment and training first selected and then nurtured among its agents. Churchill was awarded the Military Cross for leading the mission.

Operation Fairway

Parachute jumps are very hard work at the best of times. In World War II, parachuting was still in its infancy, and everything about it, from the equipment to the modified aircraft, was being constantly developed on the move. Churchill, Cadorna, and the two Italian team members of the Fairway mission pulled on British X-Type parachutes, one-piece flying suits, and rudimentary helmets. These had large circular rubber rims so that when the men exited the Halifax bomber through a hole in the floor of the fuselage, they didn’t crack their skulls on the facing rim of the hatch. Churchill had a large and heavy Webley .45 revolver, which he put down the front of his Sidcot suit, where it sat trapped by the straps of the parachute. Their Halifax took off just before midnight. The flight took three hours. Then the RAF crew chief pulled back the hatch in the floor, the aircraft slowed to just above stalling speed, and the first team member sat with his feet dangling out. He could see the dark mountainous terrain of far northern Italy speed past six hundred feet below. Then the jump lights on the inside of the fuselage flicked from red to green as the pilot cut over the start of the drop zone, and the men half fell, half slid through the exit hatch. Operation Fairway was under way.

The drop zone, or DZ, was on the side of a mountain above Lake Endine, which sits north of the town of Bergamo, above Milan. Waiting for the SOE men on the ground were partisans from the Fiamme Verdi (Green Flame brigade), a well-organized group of some three hundred men led by former soldiers from the Alpini mountain troops. But the team landed in the wrong place. A rival group had almost certainly supplied incorrect details of their landing zone. Churchill twisted his ankle as he hit the ground, hardly surprising given the drop zone was on the steep slope of a mountain. Parachute drop zones are ideally sited on long, wide stretches of flat, dry land with no trees, boulders, houses, rivers, or obstacles of any kind. But in mountainous northern Italy, such terrain is found only in valleys, where roads and centers of habitation are located. And in 1944 in the occupied north, those areas contained Germans or Fascist Italian troops. So the SOE agents would be landed high up on hill- and mountainsides, with grid coordinates supplied by radio from partisans whose map-reading skills ranged from the workable and reliable to the nonexistent.

The first major obstacle faced by any incoming SOE or OSS team was for the RAF or American pilot to find the right drop zone. There was also a perpetual risk that the teams would be guided onto a false DZ by fires lit by rival groups—or Germans—although a system of recognition lights had been devised to prevent this. Then the men had to be dropped onto the actual DZ, not onto a neighboring mountain. An idea of the hazards faced by SOE agents parachuting is illustrated by a typical—and comparatively successful—operation at the end of August 1944.

Two SOE missions, code-named “Simia” and “Gela,” consisting of nine men between them were dropped into mountainous areas of northern Italy. Their aircraft took off from Brindisi and flew to the drop zone and back to Brindisi three times before they found it. One team jumped on the first pass over the DZ, then cloud cover forced the pilot to circle nine times before the second SOE team could parachute. From the first team, one man landed in a forest half a mile from the landing zone, another in a clump of rocks, another a mile beyond it, and the remaining men nowhere near the recognition lights. From the second team, all four men missed the DZ, two were injured, and another landed in a tree. The RAF pilot of the Dakota DC-3 circled the area again three times because of bad visibility before aborting the drop of the team’s personal equipment, which included their guns and radios. The next drop took place four months later. Luckily, another team on the ground had a spare radio set. Sometimes it seemed a miracle that any of the covert missions were inserted successfully.2

For agents stuck isolated in the wilds of northern Italy, the broader picture could seem a distant one. The only reality was the immediacy of inhospitable and unsuitable DZs, halfway up mountains, at night, marked and illuminated by mostly amateurish partisans, all competing with each other, with the ever-present threat of betrayal to the Germans or Fascists. Compounding the risks, there was bad weather, cloud cover—a constant worry at high altitudes—aircraft engine trouble, enemy activity in the drop area, and high wind. All these factors combined to make dropping SOE and OSS agents often impossible and always dangerous.

Another constant complication was that Allied planners at their castle at Monopoli, hundreds of miles south of the areas of operations, often had little or no information about the drop zones. They were entirely dependent on information from partisans transmitted by radio, or from firsthand descriptions from Italian agents, sympathizers, or POWs who had lived in the area. The suck-it-and-see factor ran very high. One British SOE officer, Captain John Ross, described his premission briefing at Monopoli castle in August: “We went down to our headquarters in Monopoli to be briefed, which was really pathetic … The staff there knew virtually nothing about the area we were going to work in … and they had very little knowledge of what the resistance movement was doing there and they had very little idea of the geography. They had dreadful maps and sort of pre-war picture postcards of the attractive areas, but nothing much else. So as a briefing it was hopeless.”3

Unforgiving terrain, unreliable partisan groups, bad weather, ever-present German troops, and an inability to carry out aerial reconnaissance made it inevitable that some agents wouldn’t arrive in the right place at the right time in one piece. Getting parachutists onto a flat, well-marked drop zone in broad daylight with no enemy activity is hard enough. No surprise, therefore, that the nighttime mountains of northern Italy proved such elusive targets.

By August 1944, the Allies were also under the impression that the war in Italy could be over in a matter of weeks. Lieutenant General Oliver Leese had telegrammed in late July suggesting that the 8th Army could be through the Gothic Line defenses in seven weeks. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, wondered if the Nazis could last the winter. Brussels had fallen to the British, and American units were close to the German border. SOE and OSS planners had an optimistic vision of taking over a large, open swathe of land in northern Italy—one of the main valleys, perhaps—where they could parachute large amounts of supplies and establish forward operating bases. The truth, as Oliver Churchill and other agents were discovering, was rather different.

Once on the ground, there were two things that SOE agents feared the most. One was a rival partisan group stealing their supplies, leaving them stuck “blind” in enemy territory without weapons or an ability to talk to base. The second was Germans and Italian Fascists carrying out a rastrellamento, a “raking” operation. Enemy troops would surround huge areas of ground and physically walk and drive across it to flush agents and partisans from their hiding places. By late summer 1944, rastrellamento meant only one thing to most Italian civilians: death at the hands of the Germans.

So when Oliver Churchill with his sprained ankle discovered that it was not the Green Flames who were waiting for him, but another partisan group, the first fear was realized. He lost all of his personal equipment—apart from the two radio transmitters and his pistol—when the second fear, an SS unit on a search-and-destroy operation, also materialized. The SOE men’s equipment was hurriedly loaded onto a number of mules, which the rival partisans drove into a field of head-high yellow corn. The Allied agents had to hide from the SS before making their way to a safe house—only to discover on arrival that the Germans had burned it down. Returning to the cornfield the following day to track down the mules, they could find nothing. The rival partisans had stolen their supplies. They also had to cover their tracks. So, with each of the four men carrying a forty-pound unraveled parachute, flapping like a vast sailcloth, they marched eight hours across the mountains to meet their hosts from the Fiamme Verdi. En route, Churchill had to take refuge for several days in a mountain hut to rest his ankle. Up in the mountains, a long way from Milan and General Cadorna, he felt lost and ineffectual.

The best-laid plans often go awry. But whether the individual SOE and OSS missions were tactical and intelligence successes or failures—and they were mostly a bit of both—they were part of a larger, more successful strategic whole. German atrocities like the killings by the SS at Sant’Anna di Stazzema were fast pushing the Italian civilian population over to the Allied side, with males from fifteen to sixty joining the partisans in ever-increasing numbers. Second, an edict that Mussolini’s puppet government of the Socialist Republic of Italy issued in July 1944 increased the guerrilla strength. It said that any men of military age within the area of Italy controlled by the Salò Republic had to join Fascist units or face imprisonment. Tens of thousands of men headed for the mountains, and to the partisans. By August, very rough estimates of their strength numbered 100,000. Often unarmed, sometimes with no shoes, or holding political affiliations and aims that conflicted with the Allies’, they had one overarching aim: to beat the Germans. This boom in partisan recruiting coincided with the Allies’ wave of optimism about a fast end to the war in Italy, and the increase in numbers of SOE and OSS missions launched during the fine summer flying weather of 1944. Regardless of whether their agents and arms found the right recipients, the British and Americans started dropping increasing numbers of guns and advisers to increasing numbers of partisans in increasingly large areas of northern Italy, just when the German defenders needed all of their tight-stretched resources to defend the Gothic Line against a massive Allied assault. The bigger plan was working, as seemingly unrelated events pushed each other forward: the cogwheels of war were spinning faster.

Cadorna headed for Milan, as did his liaison officer. The team radio officer was terrified of operational life on the ground and frightened that the Germans would use radio-tracking equipment to find them. For the first thirty days behind the lines, he failed to make contact with base at Monopoli. The SOE’s most important liaison mission with the CLNAI was “blind.” Once his ankle was less painful, Churchill spent a month living with the Green Flames, building up his strength, marching on observation and reconnaissance treks, improving his Italian, and listening to the Alpini officers as they described the other partisan groups in neighboring areas. The food consisted of roast goat and lamb, polenta, milk, water, and blueberries. After a month, Churchill decided to head down into the dangers of Italy’s second-largest city, swarming with Fascist spies, German soldiers, SS officers, and the Gestapo. General Cadorna advised him not to attempt to infiltrate his way into the city. He warned that, at best, he would last a few hours. Another senior partisan leader in Milan, however, told him to come at once. The letter had come by mail from Milan to Bergamo and then was hand-carried up to his mountain hideout with the partisans. As late August arrived, Oliver Churchill, still limping slightly, decided to head for Milan. Unbeknownst to him, the Germans in the city were on the highest level of alert.4