On the other hand, the Germans managed to rescue Mussolini from captivity on September 12 in the daring commando operation led by SS officer Otto Skorzeny at Gran Sasso. Installed in power to administer the German-occupied Italy, Mussolini declared the puppet state Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic) supported by the most fervent Fascists organized in blackshirt units that terrorized the civilian population. Thus, the Allied divisions that landed in Salerno and Taranto confronted not neutralized Italian troops but hardened Germans and hardcore Fascists determined to defend every inch of terrain. Under these conditions, the Allied commanders could not spare combat troops to capture and secure the other two major islands in the western Mediterranean, Sardinia and Corsica. The OSS stepped in to fill the void.
After withdrawing from Sicily, the Germans moved a portion of their troops to Sardinia and Corsica to shore up the Italian garrisons on these islands. With the Italians out of the war, the German High Command decided it did not have sufficient troops to commit to their defense. They sent General Frido von Senger, fresh from his experience in Sicily, to organize evacuation to the mainland in a methodical and organized way to minimize losses in personnel and equipment. Von Senger did not fit the mold of the typical German general of World War II. While most of the German corps of general officers were Nazi supporters or tied to the Prussian military tradition, von Senger came from a Catholic family from Baden, in southwest Germany. He was born in 1891 and studied in England between 1912 and 1914 as a Rhodes Scholar, which gave him an affinity for the English language, customs, and culture that he maintained throughout his life. He fought in the trenches in World War I as an infantry reserve officer and received a commission as a cavalry officer in the German army after the war. At the outset of World War II, he took command of a panzer brigade and supported Rommel’s drive through France in 1940. After the collapse of France, he spent two years in Italy as the German liaison officer in the Franco-Italian Armistice Commission. In fall 1942, already a two-star general, he took command of the 17th Panzer Division on the Russian front. At the beginning of December 1942, he began a desperate sixty-mile drive to break through Soviet-held territory and relieve the Sixth Army of Friedrich von Paulus encircled in Stalingrad. In face of the fierce Russian resistance and temperatures 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, he called off the push on Christmas Day, 1942, twenty-five miles from this objective. In June 1943, he returned to Italy as chief German liaison officer with the Italian army in Sicily. It was in this capacity that he had a front-row look at the massive power that the Allies unleashed upon the island when the Sicily invasion began.26
Upon receiving command of the German forces in Sardinia and Corsica, von Senger immediately decided to evacuate Sardinia and then gradually move the forces up the eastern Corsican coast to the port of Bastia and from there to Italy. The fact that the Germans planned to conduct an organized withdrawal from the islands simplified the task of occupying them for the Allied command, which had no troops to spare. But still hundreds of thousands of Italian troops in Sardinia and Corsica needed to be controlled and disarmed. No one was sure of their allegiance and whether they would surrender peacefully or throw their lot in with their former allies and the resurgent Fascist puppet regime.
The mission of convincing the Italian garrison in Sardinia to lay down their arms was entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Serge Obolensky of the OSS Special Operations division in Algiers. The OSS gave the mission the code name Bathtub. Obolensky, a former Russian prince and Czarist officer, was a prominent figure in New York social circles. He was born in 1890 in Saint Petersburg, married the daughter of Czar Alexander II, and fought in World War I in the First Cavalry Regiment of the Czar’s Imperial Guard. He left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in the United States, where he was married a second time, albeit briefly, to an heiress of the Astor family. He described himself a “confirmed bachelor,” and others described him as “a natural-born hand shaker”27 and as someone who “could charm the birds off the trees.”28
At the age of fifty, he tried to join the Army, but was told it was not considering volunteers of his age. So, he joined the Seventeenth Regiment of the New York National Guard as a private instead. He rose rapidly in rank and was a major by the time he volunteered to join the OSS in 1942. Obolensky took the British Commando course, during which he earned his paratrooper wings by completing the rigorous training program and the required five jumps within the same day. He set up the training program for the OSS Schools and Training Division and in 1943 moved to the OSS Algiers headquarters where he continued to conduct field training of OSS personnel assigned there.
Together with Obolensky, the Bathtub team included Lieutenant Michael Formichelli of the Italian OGs, who would serve as an interpreter, and two radio operators, James Russell of the OSS and William Sherwood of the British Army.29 The team’s mission was to land by parachute in Sardinia and establish liaison between the commander of armed forces of Sardinia, General Antonio Basso, and General Badoglio’s staff at the Allied headquarters. Obolensky carried a letter from General Eisenhower introducing him as “the bearer of a special message from his Majesty, the King of Italy, and Marshal Badoglio to the Commanding General of Troops in Sardinia.” He also carried a personal letter from General Giuseppe Castellano to General Basso urging him to side with the Allies.
The team left Algiers in a Halifax bomber at 2100 hours on September 13, 1943, and parachuted fifteen miles from Cagliari, the island’s capital, at about 2330 hours. Obolensky would later say this about his drop, “It was a beautiful moonlight night in September. We jumped into the middle of a valley. The idea was to avoid the Germans and contact the Italians. We hit the spot just five hours after the Germans moved out, a very lucky coincidence.”30 “It was the best of all six jumps I’ve made,” he would say proudly after the war.31 Once on the ground, Obolensky and Formichelli asked the radio operators to stay hidden in the foothills with their equipment until they sent for them. Then, the two officers set on foot for Cagliari with help from friendly inhabitants and soldiers they encountered on the way.
By 0900 hours of the fourteenth, they arrived at the airbase of Decimomannu, outside Cagliari, where they contacted officers of the Italian Air Force who immediately notified General Basso of the Americans’ arrival. Basso’s headquarters were in Bordigali in the central part of the island about one hundred miles north. The roads were not safe and there was a good chance they might run into German rearguard units, so Obolensky travelled under the escort of a platoon of Carabinieri on trucks with mounted machine guns. He arrived at Basso’s headquarters at 1700 hours the same day. The officer on duty received him with great courtesy and took him immediately to see the general.
Obolensky presented to Basso General Castellano’s letter and explained that the Allied Headquarters expected him to press the Germans relentlessly and destroy them in the process of their evacuation from Sardinia. Obolensky offered special units to help fight the retreating Germans. Basso said that he was doing all he could to push the Germans out of Sardinia and that his troops had been given orders to exert pressure wherever they could. He objected to American troops being sent in. Obolensky ascertained later that except for one or two small skirmishes, the Italian troops never really fought the Germans but just moved up when the Germans had evacuated a place. Basso was not certain of the loyalties of some of his units and had turned down the offer of American troops for fear of possible clashes between Italian and Allied soldiers.
After the meeting with Basso, Obolensky spent what he described as “a few very trying hours” waiting for Formichelli, whom he had sent to the drop zone near Cagliari to contact the radio operators and bring them to Bordigali. The roads were not safe and straggling German patrols still drove through the area. “I will never forget the happy moments of our reunion,” he said. They established the first contact with the Algiers base station the next morning, after which they sent regular reports about the order of battle of the Itali
an divisions in Sardinia, the progress of the German retreat to the north of the island, and their evacuation to Corsica across the Bonifaccio straits.
When Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., arrived on September 18 as the official head of the Allied Military Mission to Sardinia, Obolensky provided detailed information he had collected about morale of troops and population, condition of airfields, and condition of ports and unloading facilities available to the Allies. Roosevelt appointed him as his executive officer on the spot. Roosevelt brought with him two OG officers, First Lieutenants Rocco J. Benedetto and Joseph J. Benucci. They worked as interpreters and contributed immensely to establishing goodwill with the officers and men of the Italian Army. They also collected valuable information from both military and civilian sources that they passed on to the Allied mission.
An emotional reunion took place between the recently arrived OSS personnel and five OSS men whom the Italians had held captive since the end of June 1943. They were members of the first special operations mission launched by the OSS against Fascist Italy. Anthony Camboni, a scale salesman from Chicago, and John De Montis, a Detroit grocer, were born in the village of Ozieri in the north-central part of the island. Despite having lived in the United States for years, they knew the local dialect perfectly and had many friends and relatives in the area. Two privates, Joseph Puleo and Vincent Pavia, supported the team. Lieutenant Charles Taquay was the radio communications officer. Their mission had been to set up an intelligence network in eastern Sardinia and to build up an armed resistance group.
The men infiltrated by PT boats on the eastern shores of Sardinia on the night of June 29, 1943. All five were in regular US Army uniform. Almost immediately after landing, they ran into an Italian patrol. Having never seen American troops before, the Italians did not recognize the uniforms and the two groups parted amicably after exchanging a few pleasantries in Italian. After a while, the Italians realized that something was amiss, so they went back to search for the OSS team. The OSS men had orders not to engage in a firefight, so a comic negotiation ensued in which an almost apologetic Italian sergeant asked for and received their surrender. Higher headquarters were alerted and a major with one hundred men armed to the teeth arrived to pick up the Americans and take them to Porto Torres for interrogation. The OSS men promptly “confessed” that they were an advance party of a larger US invasion force. They were turned over to the Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM), the Italian military intelligence service, and taken to Sassari, where they were held in individual cells during the initial in-depth interrogations.
The SIM officers decided to use the team as double agents against their base in Algiers, a possibility for which the OSS had prepared. In the first message that Lieutenant Taquay sent on July 31, he transmitted a pre-established danger code to indicate that the team was under enemy control and he was transmitting under duress. OSS played along by continuing to exchange radio messages, which probably saved the life of the team. The SIM kept the members of the team under their custody and did not turn them over to the Germans. When the armistice was announced on September 8, the Italians set the Americans free and dressed them in civilian clothes so they would not be recognized by the Germans who were still in Sassari. When Obolensky showed up at General Basso’s headquarters, he inquired about the OSS men and they were brought under the protection of a police escort together with their radio equipment. The reunion coincided with the arrival of General Roosevelt in the island, who personally thanked the men for having volunteered for the difficult mission.32
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Immediately after Roosevelt’s arrival, he and Obolensky inspected all available airfields and ports of Sardinia, the main population centers, and the economic situation in the island to provide the Allied Headquarters with an accurate picture of the contribution of the island to the war effort and the resources that would be required to govern it.33 The good graces of Obolensky as “a natural-born hand shaker” matched perfectly with Roosevelt’s own natural charm and great knowledge of human nature to create friendly relations with all the Sardinians and to make the Allies welcome. This was very important given that there were about two hundred thousand armed Italian troops in Sardinia at the time and only a small token force of Allied military personnel had been sent to take control of the island. During the tour, the local population was exceedingly friendly, always greeting the Americans with shouts of “Viva l’America” and “Viva la Libertà.” They met a number of people who had lived in Brooklyn or Chicago or had relatives in the States. Some came a long way to meet them and produced old citizenship papers and dollar bills kept hidden for years for fear of reprisals by the Fascist regime.
Two major problems that Roosevelt’s team faced in the initial days of Allied control of Sardinia were feeding the island inhabitants and putting the army to work. A survey of the available resources showed that while people were adequately fed for the time, supplies were running very short and the pinch would be very serious unless shipments were made within fifteen days. Roosevelt provided the Allied Chief of Staff a list of necessities for the next three months, mostly grain, which he considered essential since it formed the basis of the Sardinian diet. He requested other items, like sugar, tobacco, soap, and coffee, as “luxuries that are not strictly necessary but would make the people happy.” With regards to the treatment of the Italian soldiers in the island, Roosevelt arranged for two hundred million lire, about two million dollars, to be sent in small notes to ensure continued payments. He suggested that they be put to work in a number of projects including clearing up the debris in Cagliari, which had been heavily bombed by the Allies and was practically uninhabitable. They could also improve roads and fix runways in the airfields, which the Allies would be soon using against the Germans in mainland Italy.
While in Sardinia, Roosevelt and Obolensky paid special attention to the remnants of the Nembo division, a unit of elite Italian parachutists that had been posted in Sardinia to counter the Allied invasion. Most of the Nembo men were new recruits that had no battle experience, but the nucleus consisted of hardened veterans of the Italian Folgore paratroop division who had fought in Rommel’s Panzer Army in Africa and had close affiliation with the Germans. A group of six officers and one hundred men had decided to leave with the Germans after shooting the division chief of staff who tried to stop them. They followed the retreating Germans to Corsica and from there in mainland Italy where they became part of the German Fourth Parachute Division.
Roosevelt reviewed the Nembo and talked personally to a number of officers and men. Obolensky, as a US paratrooper, had many topics in common to discuss with them. He got along particularly well with the commanding officer, General Bruno, only four months older than himself, who was pleased enormously to hear how Obolensky had become a paratrooper in his fifties. The Italian paratroopers proudly described their unique style of jumping, which they called the “angel leap.” Rather than jumping feet first in a perfectly vertical position, the Italian paratroopers plunged earthward in a spread-eagle position. Their parachute was attached at the lower back and had a special tulip-like design, which gave the paratroopers a higher rate of descent thus shortening the time they were in the air and vulnerable to ground fire. When he was within seconds of landing, the paratrooper pulled a control rope, which converted the tulip shape of the canopy to the traditional umbrella shape and slowed down the fall. The angel leap often caused the trooper to land on all-fours, so the Italians had developed special leather pads, gauntlets, and a sausage-like helmet visor to protect the paratroopers’ knees, knuckles, and nose from the impact. An Italian paratrooper said proudly that while the British, Americans, and Germans jumped like automatons, “the Italians invested even this unnatural act with inspiration and imagination—and a pinch of artistry.”34
All the officers and men of the Nembo expressed their desire to fight against the Germans. The division was well supplied with submachine guns, heavy mortars, and machine guns. Roosevelt and Obolens
ky felt that some very good guerrilla units could come out of Nembo. In Obolensky’s judgment, they needed parachute and ground training in the American way of jumping, a short course in demolitions and explosives, and about two weeks of tactical training to be ready for deployment. They were included in the Italian Co-Belligerent Army together with other royalist forces and fought on the side of the Allies for the duration of the war.
Obolensky and the other OGs who had joined Roosevelt’s staff in Sardinia returned to Algiers within a few weeks when Roosevelt’s mission was replaced by the permanent Allied Military Government structures in the island. During the brief duration of their mission, they demonstrated courage and the unique traits that Donovan had envisioned for the OSS personnel engaged in special operations.
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The landing of the Allies in Sicily and the fall of Mussolini raised the hopes of the French patriots for the liberation of Corsica. On September 8, 1943, when the BBC evening news bulletin announced that the Italian government had signed an armistice, the Corsican Liberation Committee headed by Colona d’Istria ordered a general insurrection. A telegram from Colona d’Istria in the evening of September 9 informed the French headquarters in Algiers that the insurgents were masters of the capital, Ajaccio, and needed armed reinforcements.35
The Allied Forces Headquarters made it clear that if the French wanted to intervene in Corsica, it would have to be with their own means—all the Allied resources and means of transportation were tied up supporting the beachheads in southern Italy, still in a precarious situation at that time. The French decided to send the First Army Corps, commanded by General Henri Martin, to help the resistance forces using two submarines, the Casabianca and the Aréthuse, as well as two destroyers and two torpedo boats that were available to them. Operation Vésuve began when 109 French commandos from the First Shock Battalion stacked aboard the Casabianca, converted into a troop transport, crossed the Mediterranean, and landed at Ajaccio on the night of September 13. In the next ten days, the bridgehead was reinforced with six thousand troops from French North Africa, four hundred tons of weapons, jeeps, antiaircraft guns, fuel, and food.36
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