First SEALs

by Patrick K. O'Donnell

  “Halt!” the men shouted.

  Two complied, but one frogman clad in a dark green rubber suit continued walking. Thompson and the others fired a warning shot near his feet, and he came to a sudden stop. The Americans searched the three men for weapons, found only their knives, and hauled them back to their post for interrogation.

  The frogmen were clad in multiple layers for protection against the elements. Closest to their skin they had a set of woolen clothes for warmth. Next came a rubber suit and rubber shoes. On top of that were dark blue coveralls. On their heads “all three wore dark green felt skull caps of the Balaclava helmet type, with dark green camouflage netting attached.” They had blackened their faces with paint, and each wore a set of flippers and an underwater breathing apparatus. They also had weighted belts with two hanging clamps, and they carried fifty thousand lire each.

  After inventorying their belongings and noting their rank badges, U.S. Navy personnel began interrogating the three men. Initially “all three prisoners made clumsy attempts to mislead and deceive.” But a quick look at their dog tags revealed their names: Sub-lieutenant Bruno Oswaldo Malacarne, Petty Officer Marcello Bertoncin, and Sailor Edmondo Sorgetti. All three were members of the part of the Decima MAS who, along with their leader, Borghese, had joined the German cause rather than the Allies when Italy switched sides in the war. The Black Prince and his Gamma men were back in action.

  For six days, the Navy interrogators questioned the trio. Thanks to intelligence provided by the Decima MAS men now working with the OSS, the interrogators had files on all three, which helped coerce the truth out of the frogmen. By talking to each of the men separately, the Navy was eventually able to piece together a story that “in the opinion of interrogators, approximates the truth.”

  The OSS learned that planning for the Decima MAS mission had begun in October when an Italian reconnaissance plane took photographs of the port at Livorno. On November 8, their German handlers gave the Gamma operatives a final briefing and they left the city of Valdagno the next morning by truck. On November 10, they reported for duty at the German Navy base in Varignano, a village on Italy’s northeastern coast. They intended to set out on the mission immediately, but bad weather delayed them until November 18. That evening they set out in a small, high-speed motor-boat, eventually stopping about two or three kilometers northwest of the entrance to the port at Livorno.

  Around 10:30 p.m., the three men slipped into the frigid water, each “towing two bilge keel bombs of a new type” as well as civilian clothing, identity cards, money, and other effects that would enable them to survive and establish a base in Italy. They planned to attach the limpets to at least two Allied ships. Sometime during the long swim one of the frogmen tore his rubber suit, and he “was suffering from muscular convulsions” due to hypothermia by the time they approached the breakwater. They paused there for a rest, when Thompson spotted them. As soon as the Americans began firing on the frogmen, they dropped their limpet mines and other gear and surrendered.

  The interrogation also revealed a future planned human torpedo attack on shipping at Livorno. In response to this intelligence, the Allies set up “artificial moonlight,” created with “a series of searchlight beams in a cone.”

  COMPANY D’S NEWLY MINTED executive officer, Ted Morde, was present at the interrogations of the Italian frogmen.

  In an agency filled with colorful characters, Lieutenant Ted Morde stood out as one of the most vibrant. Before joining the MU, he had been a radio announcer and journalist, but the most notorious episode in his past, by far, was his work as an archaeological explorer. In 1940, Morde led an expedition to Honduras in search of “The Lost City of the Monkey God.” Five months later he returned to the United States, claiming to have found the site. He brought back thousands of artifacts in support of his claim and also published a record of his adventure in The American Weekly. The headline proclaimed, “Explorer Theodore Morde finds in Honduras jungles a vanished civilization’s prehistoric metropolis where sacrifices were made to the gigantic idol of an ape—and describes the weird ‘Dance of the Dead Monkeys’ still practiced by natives in whom runs the olden blood.” Morde wrote, “I am convinced that we have found the site of the legendary Lost City of the Monkey God, the ancient capital of the vanished Chorotegans—of a civilization older perhaps than those of the Mayas and Aztecs—tales of which have lured explorers for years deep into the jungles of Honduras.” He went on to explain local customs and legends in graphic detail before concluding, “That we can hardly wait for the weeks to pass before we can reenter the City of the Monkey God and begin to uncover the wealth—archaeological and perhaps other kinds as well—goes without saying.”

  However, Morde never made a return expedition, nor did he ever tell anyone else where to find the lost city. When the war broke out, he joined the OSS and was detailed to the Cairo headquarters. Morde eventually worked on a high-profile mission in Turkey where he met the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz Von Papen. During World War I, the United States had expelled Von Papen for allegedly sabotaging rail lines. Back in Germany he rose in politics to become chancellor.

  In 1944, Morde became executive officer of the Maritime Unit in Italy and began serving as its eyes and ears on the ground, reporting on the activities of the Decima MAS units for Commander Woolley and Marine Major Alfred Lichtman, who was then serving as Area Operations Officer for the MU. Morde had a very favorable opinion of Richard Kelly’s unit, which had been renamed “MU of Company D.” In a letter to Major Lichtman, Morde wrote, “Frankly I am pretty proud of OSS in this theater. It is my opinion that some day long after the war, when permission is given to present the facts about OSS accomplishments to the public, or for the judgement [sic] of historians, there will be utter amazement that OSS has been able to accomplish so many magnificent deeds for the good of the cause. We have over here a group of men who live, eat and breathe this war.”

  DESPITE THE THWARTED ATTACK on Livorno and the capture of key Decima MAS operatives, enemy underwater sabotage in the harbor continued. On several occasions the German-controlled Italian swimmers of Decima MAS attempted limpet attacks against MU and other Allied craft in the area. Another Company D officer wrote, “Mines go off almost every day, and shooting takes place at reconnaissance planes . . . air raids are expected anytime, and limpeteers swim in, as they have twice in the last three weeks, to blow up the harbor.” The Allies would need to be on high alert to prevent future underwater sabotage missions.

  In addition to defending against attacks from the Axis frogmen, MU of Company D continued to launch missions into northern Italy. On October 10, 1944, they received a shipment of “ten Lambertsen Diving Units Model #10, complete with extra type B oxygen cylinder to each unit” and some extra soda lime absorbent material to aid in these efforts. The MU continued to entertain the thought of converting the San Marco commandos into underwater swimmers like their brethren Gamma men in Decima MAS; but the war came to an end before it could happen.

  THROUGHOUT THE FALL AND WINTER of 1944, the MU conducted numerous clandestine missions, such as the Lupo (“Wolf”) Mission. On December 16, 1944, in the dead of night, Ward Ellen transported three Italian OSS-trained agents to a point just north of the Po River. The three operatives then paddled a small rubber boat to the desolate beach. Once ashore, a “boatman” who was supposed to guide them to a pinpoint and reception committee of partisans “disappeared.” After hiding all day, the men got back in their boat and rowed, unguided, to locate the rendezvous location. Keeping about three hundred yards from the shore, they fruitlessly searched until exhaustion set in. They beached the craft, and “forgetting to be careful,” they succumbed to sleep in the unprotected sandy dunes near the Po.

  A German patrol surprised the three men at dawn. Attempting to protect their gear, they shot their way out, fleeing into a nearby swamp. “All day on December 18th we wandered about in the swamp, followed by the Germans, who gave us no peace. The water reached our chest
s.”

  Evading the Germans, the “Wolves” stumbled upon a local with a boat who took them to dry land and shelter. But the man, a collaborator, returned with a patrol of Fascist Italians. Near the door of the house, Lupo’s team leader drew his pistol and fired several shots. Simultaneously, bullets tore through his chest and spine.

  With their team leader dead, and suffering grievous gunshot wounds of their own, the other two men of the Lupo team hid behind a table with their pistols drawn, waiting for the Fascists to enter the house. The men anxiously waited, planning to play dead, aided in their deception by the streams of blood flowing profusely from their wounds. No one came. After losing several men in the firefight with the OSS operatives, the Fascists had fled. Eventually, the two remaining OSS agents crawled out of a window and escaped to a nearby hut and later into a thicket. “[One agent] lost a great deal of blood. Having no bandages to stop the bleeding, and thus able to go no further we decided to spend the night there.”

  The men hid in the thicket “entirely surrounded by Germans, who kept beating the bushes to find us.” Somehow evading the dragnet, the wounded men continued on the run until December 20, when they were stopped by a patrol from the Italian Republican Guard, who demanded their papers. When they were unable to produce the proper papers, the Fascists stripped the agents and uncovered their wounds. The Republican Guard turned the two men over to the Gestapo for torture. “The methods used by German SS troops to wring confessions from Patriots were like those used in the Middle Ages; they used hot irons, steel rods and chains, and made us drink salt water. Their most modern device was passing a wire charged with an electric current over our genital organs.” Despite the SS’s cruelty, the brave men of the Lupo mission survived the war.

  Kelly and Ellen conducted countless missions like Lupo. Many of them were joint operations between the MU and one of the most successful OSS units of the war, the Eighth Army Detachment.

  *Sometimes referred to by English speakers as Leghorn.

  22

  THE EIGHTH ARMY DETACHMENT

  THE BRIGHT LIGHT OF A FULL MOON shone through the fuselage windows of the cramped Italian bomber as it made its way deeper into occupied Italy. On board a team of Italian spies geared up and prepared to drop into the darkness. With them was twenty-five-year-old American OSS Captain Alphonse P. Thiele, the leader of an extraordinary team of Italian agents committed to the Allied cause. Like many of his fellow OSS officers, he liked to accompany his men as they prepared to venture behind the lines, conducting many of the infiltrations himself:

  Captain Thiele personally made twenty-five landings and infiltrations behind enemy lines, five of which were by PT boat through heavily mined and German-patrolled, Adriatic waters, as well as numerous flights for air-supply and agent-drops into enemy territory. On these numerous operations he was constantly in danger of discovery by enemy patrols and on many occasions narrowly missed capture. Several times during amphibious operations Captain Thiele and his crew were fired upon by German patrol craft and in one instance struck a floating mine; the speed however, of his PT boat prevented any serious damage.

  Thiele was born in Constantinople shortly after the close of World War I, the son of a German army officer who married an Italian. The family immigrated to America in the early 1920s, and he became a naturalized citizen. Prior to the war Thiele led an ordinary existence, working as a welder and mechanic and later owning his own gas station at 113 Wales Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey. At the end of 1940, Thiele packed up the business and enlisted in the U.S. Army, eventually becoming an officer in the 458th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion (later attached to the 13th Airborne Division). Not long after his parachute qualification and during his brief time as an instructor, the OSS recruited him. His fluency in Italian and German made him ideal for deployment to the Mediterranean. The five-foot-six, brown-eyed man with a medium build had a “flair for handling [Italian] agent personnel.” For most of the war he “led his own team, agents, and airplanes.”

  Walkiria Terradura, a beautiful Italian partisan, assisted Thiele throughout the war. The two fell in love and would later marry. She helped Thiele develop key contacts and relationships within the Italian resistance that were critical to the success of the Eighth Army Detachment’s activities in the Adriatic. Although the Italian men first had doubts about a woman’s ability to conduct guerrilla operations, Terradura proved her worth, taking part in several operations to blow up bridges. In fact, her name inspired fear in the Fascists, who referred to her area of operations as “Walkiria Territory” and carefully avoided it. Less easily frightened than their Italian counterparts, the Germans issued no less than eight different warrants for Terradura’s arrest, but she managed to stay one step ahead of them. Of this time in her life she wrote, “I lived through hours of unbearable anxiety, a nightmare that would stay with me for years to come.”

  Originally formed from the British X Corps, which fought with U.S. General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army shortly after the Salerno landing in Italy in December 1943, the Eighth Army Detachment was assigned to aid the British Eighth Army. It was one of the smallest yet most able detachments in the entire OSS. It originally consisted of one officer (Thiele) and four enlisted men. The men in the unit all spoke Italian fluently. They included Frank Monteleone, a burly, down-to-earth Italian American from Staten Island, New York. Considered by OSS leadership to be “unusually frank and engaging,” Monteleone was a “motivated and highly reliable” agent. He began his military service as a radio operator with the U.S. Navy but later volunteered for the OSS. He put his language and radio skills to use on many missions within the Italian Theater, including a special mission with OSS superspy Moe Berg, who was assigned to track down Axis high-tech and atomic secrets. Berg’s most famous mission involved the potential assassination of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the man in charge of the Reich’s quest for a nuclear bomb.*

  The British Eighth Army aided in the bloody fighting around Monte Cassino in March 1944. The Allies relentlessly bombed the mountaintop monastery, but the rubble and ruins only formed built-in fortifications for the defenders, who spent months tying up the Army’s advance. The Army then moved to the Adriatic coast. The detachment’s missions followed the Eighth Army as it fought up the entire eastern side of Italy into the mouth of the strategic Po Valley. Italy’s terrain made it particularly easy for the Germans to defend. The mountains running down the center of the country gave them plenty of access to high ground. To get to their enemy, the Allies had to cross numerous rivers, making them easy targets. In this environment it was nearly impossible to overcome the Germans without solid, actionable intelligence. For that, the Brits turned to the OSS.

  Like most OSS groups in Italy, Thiele’s group improvised and learned to be very resourceful, eventually gaining four Italian air force planes that were manned by Italian personnel. As the Allies progressed further and further up the spine of Italy, it became more difficult to insert agents because the coastline was strongly held by the Germans and laden with mines. Richard Kelly’s San Marco men worked closely with Thiele’s Eighth Army Detachment to insert agents by parachute or maritime landing. The OSS operatives came to respect these former enemies and highly valued their work. “The San Marco guys had balls,” explained Monteleone. “They were tough sons of bitches. They were like our paratroopers or Rangers. These commandos did everything and were extremely reliable. We trained them, but they hardly needed to be trained.”

  At first the Eighth Army Detachment sent in single operatives without any radio equipment. As soon as they obtained operational intelligence, the agents would make their way back across the enemy lines to give the information to the Army. Although it looked good on paper, this plan had major flaws when put into practice. “The men would be infiltrated all right but 90% of the time would be picked up by the enemy.” Thanks to good cover stories and documentation, the agents were eventually released, but “the information would be received too late by the parties conce
rned.”

  To avoid such delays, the detachment developed an alternate, innovative plan: teams would be sent in behind the lines with radio gear “so that their information would be immediately acted upon and questions asked and answered. They would prepare their intelligence system with a view of the area’s becoming a tactical zone. Meanwhile, they would report troop movements, targets, defenses, etc.”

  This new strategy proved “highly successful.” One of their most successful missions was called “Bionda.” The goal of the operation was twofold: “to secure data on German mission and supply dumps in the Ravenna and Porto Corsini area for the Desert Air Force, and [then] initiate sabotage measures against the German shipping in the Ravenna-Porto Corsini Canal.”

  The daring mission began on September 17, 1944. Three Italian operatives from the Maritime Unit’s San Marco Battalion—Lieutenant Anelo Garrone, NCO Giuseppe Montanino, and Private Antonio Maletto—were transported by boat deep into German-held northern Italy, landing them on the beach around one in the morning. From the beginning the perilous nature of the mission was clear. Monteleone recalled, “We landed the San Marco guys after seeing the flashlight signal. As we were landing these guys, we could hear German boats in the distance and voices. Voices carry on the water; they were German voices.”

  The OSS men spent the night hiding in the woods. The next morning Garrone sent the men out to explore their surroundings. “As soon as they returned it was ascertained that [the men] were at about one kilometer north of Porto Corsini and only 300 meters away from a German battery.”

  In this precarious position, the San Marco team didn’t dare set up their radio and report in. Those back at the Eighth Army Detachment base became increasingly uneasy. Monteleone recalled, “We didn’t hear from them for a couple of days, and we began to worry. With the German voices and boats we figured maybe the jig was up and they got captured.”