Endnotes

 

Preface: Attacking Germans in Defensive Positions: “a most unpleasant and hazardous operation”

1. The 15th /19th first operated with the 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne on September 18–21, 1944, around the town of Son, on the Eindhoven–Veghel highway. Their enemy was the 107th Panzer Brigade, led by Major Berndt-Joachim Freiherr von Maltzahn, itself part of General Kurt Student’s 1st Paratroop Division. The 101st also operated with British armor from the 44th Royal Tank Regiment.

2. The word “Easy,” along with Alpha, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and Fox, were letters in the military phonetic alphabet used to denote A, B, C, D, E, and F, and was the sequential coding for the different company-sized units in any given WW2 U.S. infantry battalion.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION—THE ROAD TO THE GOTHIC LINE

1. Beware of the Rabbit

1. The information on Arrigo Paladini comes from the extensive archives of the Via Tasso Museum in Rome. His messages are still preserved on the walls of the old cells. After the war, he was the first director of the museum set up in the old Gestapo HQ.

2. Taken from the citation for the Medaglia d’Oro al Valore Militare for Paladini, signed by General Angelo Odone, which is in Via Tasso.

3. Gavin Mortimer, Stirling’s Men: The Inside History of the SAS in World War II (London: Cassell, 2005).

4. Online archives of the ANPI, the Associazione Nazionale di Partigiani d’Italia (National Association of Italian Partisans). The ANPI is linked to the sizable network of the ISSMLI, the Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia (National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy). In seventy-five different towns and cities in Italy there is a museum of the activities of the Italian partisans, the liberation, the resistance, and the history of the German occupation. Each museum contains the personal wartime files of many members of partisan units that fought in that area; the museums also contain huge archives of original German and Italian Fascist materials, documents from the Allied forces, along with books, CDs, hard copy files, photographs, and film footage. (Hereafter cited either as ANPI, or as a specific museum and archive. The archives at the former Gestapo headquarters at Via Tasso in Rome will be cited as Via Tasso Archives.)

5. Charles Foley, Commando Extraordinary: Otto Skorzeny (New York: Putnam, 1955).

6. Personal experience. The author suffered twice from malaria in 1998, transmitted by Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes in southern Sudan. He is the author of The Deadly Air: Genetically Modified Mosquitoes and the Fight Against Malaria (London: Guardian Books, 2013).

7. Alan Axelrod, Patton: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

8. Mark W. Clark Collection, Citadel Archives and Museum, the Military College of South Carolina, Charleston.

9. Rudyard Kipling, The Irish Guards in the Great War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1923), vol. 2.

10. David Hunt, A Don at War (London: Frank Cass, 1990).

2. The Torturers of Via Tasso

1. Museums of the Liberation and Resistance in Rimini and Florence. Paladani edited a book after the war about the Via Tasso prison, simply called Via Tasso, about OSS and partisan activities, drawing on a number of sources, some of them contradictory. His own account of his arrest, torture, and escape was published in Il Messagero newspaper on 11 July 1984, and then included in this book.

2. Peter Tompkins wrote a memoir of his time in the OSS: A Spy in Rome (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962).

3. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 64.

4. Another, slightly conflicting account has Paladini arrested at a checkpoint outside Rome, where he was traveling in a car accompanied by two partisan colleagues. In this account, partisan women on bicycles riding ahead of them as lookouts had failed to alert them to a German roadblock. This account is questionable, not just because Paladini himself says he was arrested inside Rome. For one thing, as the Germans knew that partisans often used bicycles as a swift and simple means of escape, they had, on December 29, 1943, issued orders to the German and Italian military, and Italian Fascist police, to shoot anybody seen on bicycles at any time of day anywhere. So it seems unlikely that six months later, in broad daylight, Paladini’s partisan colleagues would be riding bicycles as lookouts.

5. SS Service record of Herbert Kappler, U.S. National Archives, trial transcripts of his postwar court hearings, captured SS documents, Via Tasso Archives.

6. An original copy of Kesselring’s declaration is in the Via Tasso Archives.

7. The original of her letter is in the Via Tasso Archives.

8. Via Tasso Archives.

9. ANPI; Via Tasso Archives.

10. Via Tasso Archives.

11. Tompkins, A Spy in Rome.

PART TWO: BEFORE THE LINE

3. Italy: A Country Made for Defensive Warfare

1. See picture illustrations.

2. Interview with the author.

3. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 64.

4. Nisei Soldiers and the Battle for Belvedere

1. The information on Daniel Inouye’s life and military career is taken from several sources: media interviews conducted since the late 1960s; his autobiography, Journey to Washington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1967); Daniel K. Inouye Institute, Honolulu, Hawaii; the official history of the 442nd RCT, published by its veterans; online interviews with 442nd RCT veterans; and ANPI records in the Resistance Museums of La Spezia, Biella, and Carrara.

2. A Pocket Guide to China (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942).

3. Speech by President Roosevelt announcing the formation of the 442nd RCT, February 1, 1943.

5. Indians on the Road to Florence

1. This is drawn from Eustace D’Souza’s A Saga of Service: A History of 1st Battalion: The Maratha Light Infantry. Also The Tiger Triumphs: The Story of Three Great Divisions in Italy (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, India, 1946), and a history of Castello di Montegufoni. The story of the statues, paintings, and the Indian soldiers is also recorded by Eric Linklater in The Art of Adventure (London: Macmillan, 1947). The BBC correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas also wrote about it, in an article in the British magazine Everybody’s Weekly, March 4, 1950. An alternative account is provided in Robert M. Edsel, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

2. The Tiger Triumphs.

3. Lieutenant General Vijay Oberoi (ret.), former vice chief of the Indian Defence Staff, quoted in the Times of India, March 9, 2014.

4. John Masters, Bugles and a Tiger: My Life in the Gurkhas (London: Cassell, 1956).

5. The Tiger Triumphs.

6. Mark W. Clark diaries, Citadel Archives.

7. The U.S. Army’s World War II Medical Research Center documents the wartime activities, illustrated with personal testimonies, of almost every medical unit, evacuation, and general hospital that served in every war theater.

6. Blood and Honor: Partisans and the SS on the Road North

1. Museum of the Liberation and Resistance, Turin.

2. Museum of the Liberation and Resistance, Florence, La Spezia, Lucca.

3. War Diary of the 1st Derbyshire Yeomanry, July 16 and 17, 1944; War Diary of the 1st British Guards Brigade, July 17, 1944.

4. Documentation of Walter Reder’s actions at Marzabotto can be found in several main locations: The International Documentation Centre for the Gothic Line at Rimini (hereafter cited as CIDLG). The records of his postwar trial in Bologna in 1948, by an Italian military court. The Report of the British War Crimes Section of Allied Forces Headquarters on German Reprisals for Partisan Activities in Italy (Washington, DC, 1946). The Museums of the Liberation and Resistance in Florence, Lucca, and Bologna. Reder also gave an interview to a German magazine in 1956 from his prison cell in Naples. (6) The Austrian journalist Christian Ortner published a biography of Reder: Marzabotto: The Crimes of Walter Reder, SS-Sturmbannführer (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichschen Widerstandes, 1986). Ten members of the 16th SS Division were tried in absentia by a court in July 2005 in La Spezia in connection with other war crimes committed in Tuscany, notably the killings at Sant’Anna di Stazzema in August 1944. The court passed sentence on June 22, 2005. The documentation of the trials is held by the Italian Ministry of Interior in Rome. The events that took place at Marzabotto were documented by an Italian government white paper in 1961. (9) Janet Kinrade Dethick’s The Arezzo Massacres: A Tuscan Tragedy, April–September 1944 (Lulu.com, 2013) provides a good overview of the climate of reprisals in the summer of 1944 in central Italy. Subsequent footnotes on Walter Reder will be referenced to one of the above sources.

5. Ortner, Marzabotto.

6. The word means guerrilla or partisan or bandit, and was at the center of Himmler’s “Anti-Bandit” dictats

7. The court proceedings that took place at La Spezia, in Tuscany, in 2004 and 2005 against ten members of the 16th SS provide some of the most accurate testimony of the killings above Lucca in those four days. As does the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, RG 238, Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, Location: 190/10/34/25, Entry 2, Box 10, Case 16–62 (Santa Anna). Also the Italian writer Carlo Gentile, “Le SS di Sant’Anna di Stazzema: azioni, motivazioni e profilo di una unità nazista,” in Marco Palla, ed., Tra Storia e memoria (Rome, 2003).

8. Resistance Museum, La Spezia.

9. Photographs exist in Italian archives of that day.

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

1. The letter is in the Via Tasso museum in Rome.

2. Quoted in Mission Accomplished by David Stafford, p. 190.

3. David Stafford, Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943–1945 (New York: Random House, 2011), pp. 190–191.

4. The information on Oliver Churchill, Operation Fairway, the SOE in Italy, and the CLNAI in Milan comes from six main sources: the War Office and Foreign Office records of SOE operations and wartime activities, including personal files, on Operation Fairway and Major Churchill held by the National Archives at Kew, in London. And or from similar and in many cases identical documents held by the Churchill family. From the Resistance Museums in Milan and Turin, from the Imperial War Museum in London, from numerous books on SOE’s wartime activities, the most detailed and authoritative of which is David Stafford’s Mission Accomplished—SOE and Italy 1943–1945, Vintage 2012. Some of Professor Stafford’s information also draws on similar or identical documentation, so in some cases the narrative of Operation Fairway, and the operations with the CLNAI in Milan are similar, if not the same. The information is also drawn from documents and personal testimony of partisans who fought with the Fiamme Verdi group, including Tani Bonettini, whose wartime diary La Neve Cade Sui Monti—del Diario di un Ribelle was republished in 2014. And from personal research carried out by Andrea Cominini, an amateur historian from outside Milan who has traced the progress of Op.Fairway on the ground in Italy.

PART THREE: ON THE LINE

8. Dug-In Defense: The German Plan

1. CIDLG Rimini; Museums of the Resistance Museum in Rimini and Bologna; Tompkins, A Spy in Rome.

2. Online documents originating from the Historical Museum of the Resistance in Lucca.

3. Diary of 1st Parachute Division chief of staff.

4. Among other sources, including archives and Wehrmacht and British documents, mention of this is made in Carlo D’Este’s Fatal Decision: Anzio and the Battle for Rome (New York: Harper, 1991).

5. The documentation about the battle for San Lorenzo in Strada is best found in the CIDLG. Records of the Royal Canadian Regiment’s operations around Rimini include details, as do the enormous German archives at bundesarchiv.de

9. The Complexities of Command: Lieutenant General Leese and Operation Olive

1. London Gazette, November 14, 1916.

2. Richard Mead, Churchill’s Lions: A Biographical Guide to the Key British Generals of World War II (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Spellmount, 2007).

3. Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (New York: Harper, 1952).

4. Paul Douglas Dickson, A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2007).

5. The author’s family home as a child, Avisford Park, in Sussex in the south of England, became a temporary billet for Canadian units in 1943 and 1944.

6. Major J. E. Oldfield, The Westminsters’ War Diary: An Unofficial History of the Westminster Regiment (Motor) in World War II (New Westminster, B.C.: Mitchell Press, 1964), chaps. 4–7.

7. Victoria Cross citation for Major Jack Mahony.

8. Field-Marshal Viscount Slim, Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945 (London: Cassell, 1956), pp. 377–78.

10. A Multinational Assault: Ten Armies on the Gothic Line

1. Inouye, Journey to Washington.