11. With Infantry and Tanks: The Canadians on the Foglia River

1. Oldfield, Westminsters’ War Diary.

2. In 2012, Shooting Times magazine listed the weapon in a series called “History’s Greatest Sniper Rifles”

3. Shooting Times, David Fortier, July 2012

4. Quoted in The Tiger Triumphs, chapter 10

5. Ibid., chaps. 5–7.

6. War diary of Canadian Artillery Lieutenant Stan Fowler, Veterans of Canada organization.

7. The International Documentation Centre of the Gothic Line, or CIDLG, was run by the exceptional Italian historian Amedeo Montemaggi, who made it part of his life’s work to document the battles for the Gothic Line, in particular the battle for Rimini. until his death in 2011. Drawing on the huge archives in the center—that he created—he wrote and published thirteen books about the battles for the Gothic Line, Rimini, San Marino, and Gemmano, and about partisan operations in Rimini. These include Gemmano: La Cassino dell’Adriatico/The Cassino of the Adriatic (bilingual) (Rimini, 1998); La Linea Gotica (Rome: Edizioni Civitas, 1985–1990; and Linea Gotica 1944: La battaglia di Rimini e lo sbarco in Grecia decisivi per l’Europa sud-orientale e il Mediterraneo (The Battle for Rimini and the Landing in Greece Were Decisive for Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean) (Rimini: Museo dell’Aviazione di Rimini, 2002).

8. The CIDLG in Rimini has the world’s largest collection of German, British, Canadian, American, Italian, and Polish documents, CDs, archives, maps, diaries, and books on the battles for Coriano and San Fortunato Ridges.

12. Green Devils on the Adriatic: The German Defense and the Fall of Rimini

1. CIDLG.

2. Duhaime was one of thirteen children, from Espanola in Northern Ontario; he married the widow of one of his best friends, who had been killed in the war.

3. Douglas Orgill, The Gothic Line: The Italian Campaign, Autumn, 1944 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967).

13. Mules, Bulldozers, and Bailey Bridges: The Indians on the Apennines

1. The Tiger Triumphs.

2. Quoted ibid.

3. D’Souza, A Saga of Service.

4. CIDLG, Rimini.

14. Alienating the Italian Population: The Massacre at Marzabotto

1. Speech by Mussolini, comments made to an aide after his first meeting with Hitler, 1934, quoted in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume I: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).

2. Interview with Walter Reder, 1956.

3. Ibid.

4. See chapter 24, “Justice for the Germans,” and the Italian Interior Ministry’s white paper in 1951 on the judgment of the Bologna military tribunal of Major Walter Reder.

5. Ibid.; see Ortner, Marzabotto.

6. Albert Kesselring, Kesselring: A Soldier’s Record (New York: William Morrow, 1954).

15. Fighting German Artillery and Jim Crow: The Buffalo Soldiers in Tuscany

1. The story of the 92nd Division in Italy is from Ivan J. Houston, Black Warriors: The Buffalo Soldiers of World War II (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2011; a lengthy personal interview between Mr. Houston and the author carried out in Tuscany in September 2014, records from the Resistance Museum in Lucca, the U.S National Archives; Hondon B. Hargrove, Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985); Mark Clark’s diaries, and the war record of the 442nd RCT.

2. Ivan Houston was a perfect recorder of information about the wartime training and operations of the 370th. He was the battalion and company clerk of his unit in Italy in 1944 and ’45, and kept the unit’s war diary. The author conducted a lengthy interview with Houston in September 2014 at the Villa Orsini, the old wartime headquarters of one of the 92nd’s companies, outside Lucca. Houston described his time in Italy in 1944 from the moment he arrived to when he left.

PART FOUR: BEHIND THE LINE

17. Behind Enemy Lines: The SOE and OSS Missions in the North

1. The details of Churchill’s time in Milan are drawn from his report on Operation Fairway in the British National Archives (previously the Public Records Office)—the National Archives. File number and code SOE Documents WO 204/7296; and, as noted above, from the extensive collection held privately by the Churchill family. David Stafford’s account in Mission Accomplished, pp. 171–208 draws on the same sources, although it has a broader range in terms of the wide variety of SOE wartime papers and reports available. The Museum of the Resistance and the Institute for the History of Lombardy in Milan at Via Garibaldi contain documentation from General Cadorna and the CLNAI, from Edgardo Sogni, La Franchi network, and others.

2. Quoted with permission from Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

3. Reports that Hitler ordered Wolff to lead an SS unit to occupy the Vatican and kidnap Pope Pius XII surfaced in interviews Wolff gave before his death in 1984. The American journalist Dan Kurzman, who had served in the U.S Army, wrote A Special Mission: Hitler’s Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007). In 2005, the Italian newspaper Avvenire, owned by the Catholic Church, published documents that it said were based on an interview with Wolff in 1974, in which he claimed he “tipped off” Pius XII to the possibility of a kidnap plot in May 1944.

4. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Interagency Working Group/Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency—Records of the Directorate of Operations/Analysis of the Name File of Guido Zimmer.

5. Complete records of the operations and personnel of the Ligurian partisan brigades are in the Liberation and Resistance Museum in Imperia, including the complete personal file of Paola Ordano and her father and mother, including photographs.

6. US. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group RG226: Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Entry 124, Box 30, Folder 235, declassified archival documents, CHRYSLER. The story of the Chrysler mission was heavily reported on after the war, particularly by the New York Times from 1951 to 1956.

18. Regular and Irregular Forces: The Fall of Ravenna

1. Westminsters’ War Diary.

2. CIDLG; the Imperial War Museum, London.

3. Peter Tompkins from the OSS detailed the partisans’ liaison mission in his wartime diaries.

4. Vladimir Peniakoff, Private Army (London: Jonathan Cape, 1950).

5. Oldfield, Westminsters’ War Diary, p. 136.

6. OSS Report.

7. ANPI, No.1 Demolition Squadron official operational account as written at the request of King George VI.

8. Imperial War Museum, London, caption to Edward Bawden’s painting based on sketches in Ravenna on December 5, 1944.

19. Christmas in the Serchio Valley

1. The 366th Battalion’s unit war diary, and the citation for the Distinguished Service Cross for Lieutenant John R. Fox.

2. Ibid.

3. The official war record of the 4th, 8th, & 10th Indian Divisions; The Tiger Triumphs.

4. Documentary interview on Italian television with Alpini Sergeant Gian Ugo Taggiasco from the Monterosa Division, 2010.

20. East Wind: The Different Flavors of Communism

1. Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust-encyclopedia.

2. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 371.

PART FIVE: AFTER THE LINE

21. Secret Surrender: Operation Sunrise

1. Aside from OSS, British, and Russian governmental records—and Churchill’s diaries—the most thorough book on the subject is Bradley F. Smith and Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise: The Secret Surrender (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Also Wolff’s colleague Eugen Dollmann, Call Me Coward (London: William Kimber, 1956), and Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper, 1966).

2. Quoted and cross-referenced in the CIA IWG report on Guido Zimmer, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Interagency Working Group, Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Records of the Directorate of Operations—Analysis of the Name File of Guido Zimmer.The OSS records of communications with Washington in 1945 are also filed under the IWG bracket heading.

3. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 361.

4. Ibid., p. 326.

22. The Last Battles: Colle Musatello and Chioggia

1. Inouye, Journey to Washington.

2. Ibid., p. 145.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 149.

5. OSS records; Diary of George M. Hearn; Peter Tompkins’s account of OSS operations in the Po Delta, April 1945.

23. The Last Day of Battle: Surrender in Italy and Operation Unthinkable

1. The original documentation of all the partisans who fought in Liguria, including all personal and partisan papers of Paola Ordano, are held by the Museum of the Liberation and Resistance in Imperia.

2. SOE Cherokee Mission records of the liberation of Biella, quoted in Mission Accomplished by David Stafford, pp. 313–14.

3. Alan Whicker, Whicker’s War, Harper Collins U.K, 2006.

4. SOE records quoted in Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

5. Daily Telegraph obituary of Captain Brian Thomas, July 28, 2014.

6. Thousands of them are still there today—the author worked between 2008–2010 with the International Commission on Missing Persons, an international organisation that handles all aspects of missing persons cases in the former Yugoslavia. During exhumations of burial sites of victims of the 1992–1995 wars across the former Yugoslavia, extensive sets of German skeletal remains from World War II are still unearthed, particularly in Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia.

7. The Tiger Triumphs, epilogue.

8. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 593.

9. Russia—Threat to Western Civilisation, War Cabinet File, National Archives, London. Number CAB 120/691/109040, from British War Cabinet Joint Planning Staff, May 22, June 8, and July 11, 1945.