What Became of the Characters in the Book?
Captain Daniel Inouye, 442nd U.S. Army Regimental Combat Team DSC
After leaving the army as a captain, he returned to Hawaii, studied law, and in 1959 was elected to the U.S. Senate, being reelected eight times. He died in 2012. In 2000, President Clinton upgraded his Distinguished Service Cross, won at Colle Musatello, to the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Lieutenant George M. Hearn
He returned to North Carolina, left the Marines, and worked for a car dealership.
1st Lieutenant John Fox, U.S. 92nd Division
In 1997, President Clinton upgraded Fox’s Distinguished Service Cross to a Congressional Medal of Honor. He is buried in Whitman, Massachusetts.
General Mark Clark, U.S. 5th Army
He fought in Korea, then served as president of the Citadel military academy in South Carolina, dying in 1984.
Peter Tompkins
He wrote four books—an account of his time in wartime Rome and three books about ancient civilizations. He died in 2007 in Athens, Georgia.
General Eustace D’Souza, Maratha Light Infantry
He became one of India’s longest-serving and highest-ranking generals, serving for fifty-nine years before leaving the army in 2002. He died in 2012.
Major Oliver Churchill, Special Operations Executive, DSO MC
After leaving the SOE, he married one of the senior code-breaking officials from Bletchley Park in England. They moved to Cambridge, where he worked as an architect until his death in 1997.
Lieutenant General Sir Oliver Leese, British 8th Army, KCB CBE DSO
He retired from the army in 1947 and became a horticulturist, known for his collection of rare cacti. He died in 1978.
Lieutenant General Sir Richard McCreery, British 8th Army, GCB KBE DSO MC
After the war, he became commander in chief of the British Forces of Occupation in Austria. He left the army in 1949 and spent the postwar years as a gardener and horseman. He died in 1967.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Horsbrugh-Porter, 27th Lancers, DSO and Bar
He retired to Oxfordshire in England as a landowner, and spent time writing for the Times as a polo correspondent.
Major Vladimir Peniakoff, Popski’s Private Army, DSO MC
After the war, he became the liaison officer between the British troops and the Russians in Vienna. He later moved to England, where he became well known for his radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. He died of cancer in 1951 at age fifty-four, and is buried next to his wife at Wixoe in Suffolk.
Major Jack Mahony, Westminster Regiment, VC
He retired from the army in 1962. He returned to Canada and became a lawyer. He died in 1990. His family donated his Victoria Cross to the Canadian War Museum.
Sergeant Len Bailey, Westminster Regiment, MM
He moved back to British Columbia as a farmer and died in 2005.
Paola Ordano
The partisan from Imperia lived all her life on the Ligurian coast after studying in Milan.
Arrigo Paladini
He was a director of the Via Tasso Museum and Archives after the war, then became a professor of philosophy and literature. He died in Rome in 1991.
Operation Chrysler Team
Vincenzo Moscatelli, an Italian Communist partisan commander who after the war became an Italian senator, admitted to the murder of Major William Holahan in 1944, but only after two other members of the Chrysler team had been indicted, tried, and acquitted on a variety of charges, including murder. The case became a cause célèbre between Italy and the United States in the early ’50s.
Arrigo Boldrini
After being the first director of the National Association of Italian Partisans, he was a senator for many years in Emilia-Romagna and the author of six books on military history. He died in 2008.
Helmut Bücher, 1st Fallschirmjäger Regiment
He is buried in the Futa Pass war cemetery, which is built on the Gothic Line outside Bologna.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Luftwaffe
He was sentenced to death for war crimes by a British military court in Venice, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because Italy had abolished the death penalty, and he was released in 1952. Several Allied figures, including Oliver Churchill, Harold Alexander, and Oliver Leese, had lobbied for the commutation of his execution. He died in 1960.
Major General Ernst-Günther Baade, 90th Panzergrenadier Division
He was wounded in the last days of the war in Europe after an Allied fighter-bomber strafed his car in Germany. He died of his wounds on May 8, 1945, the last day of the war in Europe.
Ivan Houston, Buffalo Soldiers
On September 4, 2014, eighty-nine-year-old Ivan Houston sat with his son and daughter-in-law on the terrace of Villa Orsini outside Lucca. Now called Villa la Dogana, the beautiful rambling Tuscan house had been the headquarters of K Company of the 1st Battalion of the 370th Regimental Combat Team in early September 1944, as they advanced on Lucca. Since the war ended seventy years before, Houston had revisited Italy often. The weather in late summer was warm and balmy and his welcome was assured; the Italians were delighted to see him. This year, there was going to be a launch of his book, Black Warriors: The Buffalo Soldiers of World War II, at an art gallery in Lucca, as well as speeches by the mayor, a civic welcome, a large commemoration for the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Lucca.
On the terrace of the house, overlooking the gardens filled with magnolia, palm, and olive trees, lunch was being served. Grilled fish, green salad and, in tribute to the Americans’ place of origin, Southern grits. Their hostess was Mattea Piazzesi, who, along with her husband, ran the villa as a classy old-style pensione. Things were done at a measured, stylish pace. The warm summer air trembled lightly in the afternoon heat. Cats basked on the lichen-covered graystone of the terrace. The occasional train clicked across the level crossing outside, en route from the seaside at Viareggio to Lucca itself, two miles away.
Piazzesi was, curiously, dressed in full 1945 American military uniform, as were two dozen men in her large garden, military reenactors from a local society celebrating the liberation. Houston himself was a celebrity: Italian men dressed as GIs and paratroopers, in full original uniforms, posed with him for photographs. A convoy of original American military vehicles was parked in the garden, ready to drive out to Lucca for a celebratory parade. Garands and .45 Thompsons were clipped across the bonnets of Willys Jeeps; reenactors sported M1 carbines. Somebody even had a flamethrower. Some of the reenactment society were dressed not in American military uniforms, or as U.S. nurses, or as partisans, but as German soldiers. In the shade of a pine tree, a man dressed in the full summer uniform of the Wehrmacht lugged a deactivated MG-42 across the garden. The atmosphere was easygoing and relaxed. At dusk, leading the way, spearheading the crowd, Ivan Houston climbed into a Willys Jeep and rolled into Lucca for the 70th anniversary of its liberation.
Arriving back in the United States shortly afterward, he received a letter from an old colleague from the 92nd, Emmett Chappelle, whom he had last seen seventy years before. They had sat together on the train to basic training, and after that, Houston had never seen him again. Now here he was, back in touch. In the intervening seventy years, Chappelle had become a well-known engineer at NASA, designing ways to keep astronauts alive in space. But as he said to Houston on the telephone that evening, “So much of who I became—and who I am now—was determined by my years as a Buffalo Soldier.”