CAPTAIN HALL’S MISSION

The story of the Jeds and the story of Detachment 101 describe two large-scale operations to the resistance. Both operations required a great deal of planning and supply, and the services of some hundreds of people. The story of Roderick G. Hall is the story of an operation carried out by one man—like the story of Billy. The difference between Billy’s operation and Hall’s is that while Billy went behind the lines alone, in search of intelligence, Roderick Hall’s primary objective was to harass the German lines of supply, using the resistance to help him when he could.

Some people within OSS regarded Hall’s mission, solely on the basis of his own final plan, as a failure. Others pointed to the early work which he accomplished, and disagreed.

On this question there is one point which has been overlooked. It concerns an intangible, but is none the less important. Hall was a man of initiative and courage. These are ideals to which all men subscribe. Yet they become meaningless, empty, much worn by lip-service only, unless they are constantly demonstrated anew, unless they are constantly made real because someone realizes them. Hall did realize them. Even if he had accomplished nothing else, he would still have accomplished that. Therein lies the real success of his mission. His own end, whether he lived or died, could not have heightened that success nor detracted from it.

There was, in the years following the first World War, a group of scholars and poets who prophesied that the next war produced by modern civilization would be a clash between machines. They looked back upon the unskillful slaughter which they had witnessed in the trenches; they looked forward to the future of the tank, the airplane, and the bomb, and they said that never again would human courage, human initiative, and the moral strength of human beings be deciding factors in battle.

They made this prophecy rather sadly, for they saw beauty in the dignity of man, in his resourcefulness and courage, and the moment of his decision for sacrifice. The war of machines, they foresaw, left nothing to the dignity of man except its destruction by mass murder.

It is strange that they could have been at once so right, and so wrong. The second World War was a war of machines, exactly as they had foretold. The tank, the artillery barrage, the airplane, the unpiloted bomb; these were the principal weapons of destruction upon which the antagonists relied.

Yet, in no war in history was there more opportunity for individual courage, individual cunning and skill and decision, than in the recent war. Perhaps there will always be room in any world, in any war, for the type of individual action we know as heroism. Perhaps man is no more capable of destroying his own ideals than he is of realizing them. Heroism existed in the second World War, not only in spite of the machine, but because of it.

A case could well be made that the archer who crept into the camp of the enemy during the Battle of Hastings to aim his arrows was less heroic than the man who took a machine aloft to shoot down another machine. Both depended upon their own skill and knowledge; both made the great decision to chance it, but the man in the air had the greater skill and took the greater chance because he was fighting with and against the machine.

It was the machine which made possible the war behind the lines. The airplane and the radio did not decrease the chances for heroism but increased them. Not that all OSS men were heroes. Of the small percentage who actually went on operations, only a few of them had opportunities for heroism, and of these there were even fewer who seized the opportunities.

Nevertheless, in every theater of war, there were moments when the men behind the lines made lonely decisions for which they were responsible to themselves alone, for which no order could be given, no credit received. It is in such moments that heroes are made. In every theater, OSS men had their hero. In Italy, he was Roderick G. Hall.

“Steve” Hall, as his family called him, was a captain in the Corps of Engineers. He was 28 years old, stocky, husky, an athlete. He had the slightly protruding forehead, and the heavy, almost Neanderthal eyebrows of the professional tough man. Yet he would not have been considered bad-looking in any society, and Hall traveled in circles sometimes known as “society.” He had some means. He had attended both Harvard and Yale, and finished at neither. Afterwards he divided his time between working in Boston and skiing and mountain climbing in New Hampshire, with the Appalachian Mountain Club.

In 1938 he went to Italy to ski, and he lived there long enough to add some Italian to his knowledge of French, and to know parts of the mountain country well.

Hall had always been interested in geology. Skiing in the mountain passes during that unconsciously fateful year, he would frequently wander away from his group of friends to roam alone in the rocks all day, noting and studying the shale formations. Sometimes he would become so intent in his study that he would forget about lunch, and would arrive at the mountain camp at night, bearing quantities of sample stones. The rest of his party laughed at him good-naturedly. Hall was a student, and 1938 was still a year for fun.

It was perhaps a queer quirk of fate, this summer skiing expedition in 1938. For the area in which Hall skied and climbed and studied, and which he came to know as well as the slopes of his native New Hampshire, was to become, in the space of a few years, one of the most important single pieces of ground in the whole of Europe. It was the area of the Brenner Pass.

Meandering high in the Italian Alps for a distance of more than 150 miles, protected on each side by towering walls of sheer mountain rock, the Brenner Pass became almost the sole means of supply and communication between the German nation and its armies on Italian soil. The Brenner was invulnerable. If it could have been blocked permanently, the German Army in Italy would have been forced to stand against the Allies with little hope of retreat to home, with its back to nothing but mountain wall.

But the Brenner was impossible to block permanently, or to blow. Blowing it up would be like blowing up Pike’s Peak. There is no explosive yet known to man which can obliterate a mountain.

There was, however, another way. The Brenner Pass is the key to a series of smaller passes which lead into the main highway from the plains of the Po Valley, near the ancient town of Verona. If the Allies could strike at some of these side roads and passes, the majestic, invulnerable Brenner could be rendered at least partially useless for as long as its tributaries were put out of action.

But there was difficulty, even here. Narrow passes make small targets. Allied air forces might blast away at them for months without causing more damage than the Germans could repair in a few days.

To the men who knew Allied strategy in Italy, it was obvious that one good engineer on the ground, who knew the rock formations and could place his charges skillfully, where they would blow landslides across these smaller passes, could do the work of a whole air force, and probably do it better. Of course, it would be more than difficult to get a man into such a heavily guarded area, and to keep him there—even provided that such a man could be found.

In the month of October, 1943, there came to the desk of a personnel officer within OSS, a more interesting letter than usually falls to the lot of personnel men. Like many a letter of application which came to OSS in those days, this one bore the postmark of an Army camp in the South. Like all the rest, it began with a brief biography. Then:

“I have a suggestion to make to OSS. Drop a man by parachute in the open country between Pacal and the Falzarego Pass, and drop enough personal equipment to sustain him indefinitely in the peaks. Drop TNT and a tool kit. I believe one could get away with it, if the jump were made in the early dawn when mist rises profusely over the terrain, or through a snow fall.

“This man, if he were a good rock and snow climber and skier, would have no trouble in moving about the valley unnoticed, even in the daytime. The matter of tracks in the snow is of no consequence; paths and brooks could cover his movements, and he could always take to the mountain rock.

“Operating, even under adverse conditions, this man could, I believe, block the Ampezzo highway and railroad beyond use during the winter, within three days after he landed. It should be possible for him to blow out the Drava River roads within another 10 days. Thereafter he could work on whatever opportunities presented themselves.

“I would be willing to do the job,” the writer ended, “and I think I could.”

It was signed, “R. G. Hall.”

OSS men who remember Hall in the various camps in southern Italy in which he waited out the summer of 1944 say that he was a quiet man, not rude, but seldom volunteering conversation; that he traveled alone, without ever seeming to be lonely. He spent his time in training on long hikes, and in studying maps. Unlike the men with whom he was assigned, he did not seem particularly excited when word came from headquarters to get ready to go.

He had been assigned to a mission to northern Italy some time in July. It was the first Allied mission to northern Italy which was to drop in uniform. Hall had spent a year in waiting and training. Now, instead of going alone as he had asked, he was to form part of a group of five men. And instead of going to the area of Ampezzo, as he had also asked, he was to drop far to the south.

The letter in which Hall had volunteered for duty had been considered carefully, and was in fact the basis for which OSS recruited him from the Army. But the Brenner country in which Hall had named his targets was heavily guarded with German troops. A parachute landing to the partisans in that country was out of the question. In the Brenner area, partisans were lying low.

Therefore, OSS had decided to assign Hall to another mission in Italy, in a country somewhat to the south, where it was possible to be received by the partisans.

There was, however, an unusual proviso, or rather, a tacit understanding, about Hall’s orders. OSS told him that if, after he landed, the coast to him looked clear, he could, if he desired, detach himself from his group, and work north toward the Brenner, and the country which he knew. The men with whom Hall was assigned understood this. He was to be a part of their mission for as long as he wished, or for the whole time. But, if he decided to go on alone, he could do so.

On the night of August 2, 1944, Hall, with Major Lloyd Smith, Lieutenant Joe Luckitsch, and two enlisted men, jumped from a Liberator plane onto a pin-point near the town of Clansetto. The drop was made at midnight. The Germans had left the field just three hours before.

The American mission was charged with organizing the partisans, supplying them with arms through parachute drops which were to be arranged, and with leading the partisans in an effort to destroy and hamper German communications wherever possible.

Looking back now, over the long, desperately slow war in Italy, the purpose of the mission seems unfortunate. For the partisans to come out in the open and fight as early as August, 1944, was to prove in the end disastrous to many of them. But looking back now is second guessing. In the fall of 1944, the Allied High Command thought it probable that the whole of Italy might be liberated before the year was out. In France, Patton was breaking through. Everything pointed to a quick victory, or, at the very least, to a German withdrawal in Italy to bolster the armies in France. As late as two months after Hall and the other Americans had gone into the field, Field Marshal Alexander, the Allied commander in Italy, broadcast a message to the partisans in Bologna, urging them to renew their efforts and predicting that the city would fall in a matter of days. Bologna fell six months later. In the meantime, these first American soldiers in northern Italy were to discover at first hand that the Germans did not always fight according to Allied plan.

Almost immediately after landing, the teams split up: Smith and the two enlisted men remaining in the Clansetto area, Hall and Luckitsch moving north toward the town of Tolmezzo in the province of Carnia.

Hall was fortunate in Luckitsch. A dark curly-headed man of about 25, with an easy manner and a slow, laughing speech, he had boundless endurance, and was impervious to that plaguing disease which OSS men behind the lines knew as the “bad case of nerves.”

Luckitsch remembers now that their work at first was remarkably easy. There were 300 German troops and 200 of Mussolini’s Fascist Army garrisoning Tolmezzo, keeping open the line of supplies to German general headquarters in the south.

Hall and Luckitsch soon closed that particular supply line. They organized 50 partisans into a small army, armed them with light machine guns, grenades, and rifles, which were dropped by parachute from OSS, and drove the garrison into the town. After that they blew up all the roads and bridges leading into Tolmezzo, stationed their soldiers to watch them, and recruited more men for their army.

It was easy then. The army swelled to 2,500 men. The Italians had been waiting a long time for their liberation, and now it seemed imminent, it was difficult for two Americans to hold them in line. The partisans had their own method of dealing with Fascists in the neighborhood and with the Fascist spies whom the Germans sent out from Tolmezzo. By twos they would take each Fascist off in to the woods and by twos return without him. “Fare una cominata,” it was called; “taking a walk.”

Somehow, Luckitsch knew that Hall would not stay long with him. As the life grew easier around Tolmezzo, as they moved their camp from deep in the woods to a house on a country road, as organizing and training the army became the daily routine, Hall grew impatient and restless and talked more and more to Luckitsch about a highway he knew in the north. It was a secret highway, Hall said, that the Germans had been building from Austria south to Ampezzo and he had seen its beginnings when he had been in Italy six years ago. It was a long way off to the north, near the Brenner, and it was one of the main routes into the Pass. He knew a place, he said, where a good demolition job would block it up for good.

The two men discussed the highway often in private conversation. Hall never mentioned taking Luckitsch with him, and Luckitsch sensed that he was not included in the plan. One morning they said good-by and Hall went off alone.

Two weeks later, a former Italian Army officer trekked into the camp with a message for Luckitsch from Hall. On his way north, Hall’s message said, he had found a defile near the town of Pararola where a main railway line was trestled high over an important highway. He needed only some explosives to dump the railway right over the road.

It was a 40-mile journey, and a risky one, but Luckitsch borrowed a doctor’s sedan, loaded the back seat with plastic explosive, and with the Italian officer as a guide, drove it through to Hall. The job was well done. It was three months before the Germans were able to repair the damage, and the effects of the explosion are plainly visible to this day.

When it was over, Hall set out north again toward the Brenner. That was in November, 1944. Luckitsch remembers the month well because it was the last time he ever saw Hall.

It is here that for a period the facts of Hall’s mission are vague. Once he left Luckitsch, there was no one to know his adventures or his troubles except himself. Luckitsch knows that, after watching his explosion, he set out north through the hills for Ampezzo. It is probable that his handiwork at Pararola first put the enemy on his trail. He was certainly hunted, and on the run for weeks. He hid in the mountains and in shepherd huts, moving always farther north toward the country which he knew. The winter came. There are Italian peasants in the country southeast of the Brenner who remember him, and say that they hid him for a night, or for a week, until he moved on.

Then, for the last time, he again established contact with an OSS group. That was in January. The OSS group was a demolition squad, well to the north of the area where Hall had left Luckitsch, in a region not far south of his persistent destination, Ampezzo. He appeared one day at their camp in the woods, with frozen feet, and they helped him to nurse them back to usefulness. Through them, he established radio contact with OSS headquarters in Florence.

On the morning of January 26, he left them, taking with him skis, explosives, and a carbine. A sergeant in the group remembers him saying something about a highway near Ampezzo. The sergeant asked him about his feet, even suggested that he stay awhile until he was certain they were well. The snow was falling at the time, the sergeant remembers. Hall’s reply was about the snow. He said it was good cover for the job he wanted to do.

That was the last time any American ever saw Roderick Hall. What happened after that can be pieced together only through the bits of evidence accumulated in OSS headquarters in Florence, in German headquarters in Milan, through interviews with a German general in Switzerland, and through the word of Italians who saw him or heard about him in the months to come.

In Florence, OSS headquarters, when it learned through Luckitsch of Hall’s decision to carry his mission north toward the Brenner, tried to get a radio operator to him, so that he would have constant contact with base. The first man dispatched was shot down. The second was waiting to leave when word came through from the OSS group south of Ampezzo that Hall had left that morning, and had not returned.

In January, Luckitsch and Major Smith returned to Florence. The work they had begun near Tolmezzo ended in partial tragedy. German headquarters had moved north; the Allies had failed to breach the Gothic Line; the war was stalemated for another winter; and the Germans began a systematic cleaning up of the partisans. Some of the men who had formed Hall’s army had gone back to civilian clothes and anonymity. Most were known by that time to the Fascists who again had the upper hand. They took to the mountains in uniform to await another year and another Allied push. Many of them, of course, were killed. Luckitsch and Smith and the two enlisted men escaped by walking for 22 days through Yugoslavia, to be evacuated by air. By that time, they knew very little of what might have happened to Hall.

OSS men at headquarters were naturally worried. The Allied miscalculation—counting upon a German withdrawal or an Allied break-through and consequent strong partisan support—had made the chances for safety of an American in uniform behind the lines virtually nil. On November 13, Field Marshal Alexander had been forced to send a heartbreaking message to the partisans admitting that the Allied campaign had ground to a halt, and ordering them, with what seemed to them a certain crassness, to “refrain from large-scale organized activity, and hold yourselves in readiness for fresh orders.” The Allies had been forced to change their plan. But the message came too late for the lives of many of the partisans, and certainly too late for Hall to change his plan. Even a man operating alone in enemy territory must count on the support of strong friends among the population. Hall had evidently found few.

In the office at Florence where the mail from home piled up waiting delivery to men in the field, the largest stack was for Captain Hall. The months passed, and still there was no word, and nothing anybody could do.

The first opportunity to rescue Hall, or at least to find out where he was, came in March. OSS in Switzerland had been approached in the month before by a man who claimed to represent the German SS commander in Italy, General Wolff. He asked for surrender negotiations. To test the good faith of Wolff, OSS, after securing permission from Allied headquarters, asked him to release from prison two Italian partisan leaders, one of whom was later to became premier of Italy. OSS in Florence sent a special request to Switzerland, asking that to those two men be added the name of Hall.

On March 8, Allen Dulles, OSS chief in Switzerland, was called to Zurich, where in a hospital he met the two partisans whose release he had requested. They had been taken out of prison by SS guards and shoved across the Swiss border without explanation. But Hall was not with them. Wolff later said that he had been able to account for only one man named Hall in all of northern Italy, though he had looked everywhere. “This Hall we discovered,” Wolff said, “was a stateless person, who was killed in an Allied air raid.”

That was the last chance OSS had to save him. Looking back now, over the evidence which has since been discovered, the probability is that by this time it was too late. The person whom Wolff had called “stateless” was undoubtedly Roderick G. Hall.

The evidence is what OSS men, scouring the countryside after the German surrender in May learned from witnesses among the Italians.

On the morning of January 27, they learned, a priest in Ampezzo who stepped outside the door of his chapel to brush away the snow found a man sprawled on the steps. He wore the uniform of an American soldier, but he had lost or thrown away his shoes. His feet were swollen, and frozen stiff. A few yards away, his carbine lay in the snow. He was alive. The priest dragged him inside, lifted him to a cot, and poured hot coffee through his lips. The man was just beginning to revive when there came a pounding on the church door. It was the Fascist police. Without explanation, they entered and carried the man away.

Later OSS men found a prison and wrung from the jailer another piece of the story. Hall had been tortured, tortured badly. But as far as they could learn, he had never talked.

And finally the investigators found a grave, and a death warrant, and in an Allied enclosure for displaced persons, an Italian doctor who had signed it. The death warrant gave the name, Roderick Hall, and the cause of death, “Heart failure.”

But the doctor was at pains to point out that he had known it was not heart failure. “The Gestapo made me say that,” he said. “They handed me the death warrant, and told me what to write. All I saw was the body of a man in the bottom of a cart. But I noticed that he had a rope around his neck.”

The case of Steve Hall was already closed, the men responsible for his death had been arrested, a posthumous legion of merit had been awarded him, and his family had been told how he died when another piece of evidence came in.

It was a letter to his father, the last letter which Hall ever wrote. It had been sealed in a bottle and given to two Italian peasants in the village of Vellada, Belluna. Hall had asked them to save it, and mail it to his family after the war. The letter was dated January 12, 1945, and though it only corroborates his plans and his trials, the last two paragraphs show that he knew his chances and had accepted them:

“The Alpini are good men. We are shaping up to try something pretty big.… But hell knows if we’ll ever get this mission through.

“Looks like a baby volcano for sure: to wit, Kesselring will move back to the Alps here soon and you can’t do much when you are plunk in the middle of their damned battleline—that is, not for more than about 20 minutes, and my function, among other things, is to live, if possible. If there were two of us, it might be different. Oh, well, as I say now, I’ll cross that mountain chain when I get to it. Maybe I can get out, if the Teutonic population gets too numerous.

“If not, I’ll be saying good-by and thanks for giving me life. I’ve made mistakes and haven’t got very far as standards usually go, but no one can say I haven’t done a lot of things with that life, or enjoyed it.

So long, Dad,

Steve”