Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  General von Senger attempted initially to deploy his forces on the west side of the island to regain control of Ajaccio. He quickly realized that the French insurgents were determined not to let the Germans through and decided to avoid getting bogged down in deadly, uncertain guerrilla warfare. On September 13, von Senger moved to capture Bastia, the main port on the eastern coast of Corsica that held the keys to an orderly withdrawal of the troops and equipment. The Italian garrison initially refused to evacuate Bastia and elements of the Reichsführer SS brigade had to attack and take it by force on the night of September 13. Among the Italian prisoners, there were some two hundred officers.

  The next morning, von Senger received an order from his superior officer, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who commanded all the German forces in Italy. On Hitler’s instructions, von Senger had to shoot all the Italian officers in his custody and report their names that same evening. The basis for the order was a general directive issued by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the German Supreme Command of the Armed Forces. It directed the German military to treat all Italian officers captured fighting after September 10 as guerrillas and shoot them on the spot. Scores of German officers in the Balkans, Italy, Russia, and elsewhere, obeyed this order, leading to thousands of Italian officers and soldiers killed. One notable exception was von Senger, who later wrote:

  It was thus obvious that for me the time had come to refuse to obey orders. I at once spoke by radio-telephone with Kesselring, informing him of my decision. He accepted it without comment and agreed to pass it on to the OKW. I arranged for the officer prisoners to be returned immediately to the mainland, where they were at least safe from the gallows. I am grateful of Kesselring because he more or less accepted my decision and left it at that.37

  Starting on September 17, von Senger concentrated his actions on defending the east coast road network and the port of Bastia long enough to evacuate the units under his command. They consisted of the Reichsführer SS brigade and the 90th Panzer Grenadier division, which had arrived from Sardinia, in total some thirty-two thousand men with heavy equipment, including tanks, artillery guns, materiel, and various vehicles.38

  Donovan persuaded the French authorities in Algiers to allow a small token force of Americans to accompany the French Expeditionary Force to Corsica. On September 17, 1943, the entire fourth group of the Italian OGs, thirty men and four officers under the command of Captain James Piteri, left the OSS camp in North Africa and sailed to Ajaccio aboard an Italian destroyer.39 Anthony Scariano, one of the OGs from the group, described the enthusiastic reception the local Corsican population gave them when they landed: “They were shooting pistols and rifles in the air, singing La Marseillaise, yelling and screaming and dancing with joy. They were lighting matches and brandishing flashlights, houses were lighted up, and there was no attempt at a black-out or any other form of antiaircraft security. Obviously the Germans had pulled out and were retreating northward.”40

  Upon arrival, the OGs “borrowed” several Italian trucks and their drivers to move around the island. The drivers were so pleased with the Americans and the rations they received that they did not want to go back to their units. Since no one seemed to care, they stayed with the OGs for quite a long time. The OGs’ mission was to harass German vehicles as they retreated along the eastern coast of the island toward Bastia. Generally, they engaged in light skirmishes with rear guard elements. However, on the night of September 24–25, the Germans put up a stiff resistance near Barchetta, at a mountain pass that controlled the main highway approach to Bastia from the west.41

  The coalition of forces battling the Germans was a rainbow of colors and nationalities, which became the norm for the Italian campaign. Alongside the Americans were Corsican patriots in civilian clothes and North-African Goumiers—members of the feared djellaba-wearing crack troops from Berber tribes of the Moroccan Atlas mountains, also known as Goums. Italian gunners provided artillery support. Two nights before the battle, Captain Pitteri and Technician Grade 5 John Tessitore lay all night on their stomachs above a bridge that cut across the mountains and observed German positions a hundred yards below. The next night at 2300 hours, a group of eleven Americans carrying bags full of hand grenades and Molotov cocktails started with a unit of Goums across the mountains to Barchetta, nine and a half kilometers away. A veteran of the operation described the terrain as “fantastically tough, high rocky drops to span and thorny maquis to crawl through.” The Americans and Goums reached the heights above Barchetta at dawn and took up positions among the rocks above the German positions.42

  Then, they charged down the mountainside, weaving though the maquis and throwing grenades at the Germans below, the Goums chanting their blood-curdling death cry. The Germans responded with heavy mortar fire. A German tank rolled toward them. First Lieutenant Thomas L. Gordon, leading the Americans, jumped forward, hurled a grenade, caught the tank in the belly, and disabled it. Then, suddenly, came a German mortar burst, exploding directly in the midst of a group of Americans. Lieutenant Gordon fell and with him, a few yards away, Technical Specialists 5 Rocco Grasso and Sam Maselli. John Tessitore, although wounded, braved the enemy fire to come to the aid of the fallen comrades. The remainder of the men helped hurriedly with first aid and then worked on to better positions. The attack resumed after the men regrouped, but the Germans held and it took another two days of bitter fights to take Barchetta. When the Americans returned to the high mountainside spot where their comrades fell, they found the body of Lieutenant Gordon across that of T/5 Grasso. He had apparently died while trying to give first aid to his wounded comrade. The body of Maselli was never found.43 In early 1944, the French awarded Gordon the highest decoration in France, the Legion of Honor, Knight Degree. Grasso and Maselli received the War Cross with Bronze Palm, whereas Tessitore received the War Cross with Silver Star.

  From Barchetta, the OGs pressed on with the Goums, Corsicans, and Italians toward Bastia. They were divided into three sections, one removing mines from the beaches, the second and the third attacking enemy vehicles on the highways to Bastia and L’Île-Rousse. Lieutenant Victor Giannino led ten OGs on a reconnaissance and tank-destroying mission. They belly-crawled up a mountain totally surrounded by Germans and spend three days and three nights there in a cold, wind-blown rain. Lieutenant Vincent Russo and six men made a three-day forced march in soaking rain to conduct a demolition mission north of Bastia. On the way back, they rescued a number of wounded Goums and Italians encircled in a small cave near a fishing village. The OGs slipped down the cliffside shoulder to shoulder, over slippery rocks where one slip would be the last. They found the wounded and sneaked them out of the encircled village in a fishing boat.

  In missions like these, the OGs passed through high mountain villages, which had not seen an American in years. But the villagers had heard of Americans, and wherever the OGs went they were treated to warm receptions. The villagers improvised American flags and hung them out of the windows. At Farina, a tiny town high in the mountains between Saint-Florent and Bastia, the whole town turned out to throw a quick party. One of the OGs described the atmosphere: “There was dancing with the town belles. There were fresh eggs, hot soups. The Americans were enthusiastically kissed, French style, on both cheeks.”44

  At the end of September and during the first three days of October, the Germans sought only to protect their retreat to the port of Bastia and the evacuation of the troops and equipment to the Italian mainland. Their artillery slowed down the advancement of the Allied forces through the final pass before reaching Bastia. The narrow road through the pass wound in five sharp ascending S curves with steep brush and rock-covered inclines on one side of the road and sheer drops on the other. For two bloody days the Allies tried to force their way up the pass and onto Bastia, with gains often measured in inches. Finally, the Germans withdrew from their defensive positions and evacuated the last troops. Bastia was liberated on October 4, but had been devastated by the fighting and Allie
d bombings. All the bridges leading to the city were blown up, the water mains were broken, and the electricity system was shut down.

  The OGs set up headquarters in Bastia with a small auxiliary office in Ajaccio. The enlisted men were settled in L’Île-Rousse. On October 21, 1943, the entire Company A of the Italian OGs moved from Algiers to Corsica, which became their home for the next ten months.45

  CHAPTER 5

  Rescuing Escaped Prisoners of War

  After Italy signed the armistice on September 8, 1943, there was a brief period of power vacuum across the country until the Germans and Mussolini’s new puppet government moved in and established their control. Many thousands of Allied prisoners of war took advantage of the situation to escape from captivity, go into hiding in the mountains, and look for ways to travel south to Allied territory. The OSS Operational Group Command devised a daring plan to send a contingent of OGs into enemy-held territory to find and direct the escaped POWs to safety. The British were planning a mission along the same lines using elements of the Second Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment. The SAS was a special warfare force in the British Army very similar in structure and mission to the OSS Operational Groups. They were organized in small teams of parachute-trained soldiers who operated behind enemy lines to conduct harassing actions, disrupt supply and communication lines, and collect intelligence.

  Given the similarity of the British and American plans, the Allied command approved a joint mission, codename Simcol, to cover a two-thousand-square-mile area in central Italy that stretched from the Adriatic coast to the east to the Apennine Mountains to the west, and between the cities of Ancona to the north and Pescara to the south.1 Several teams of OG and SAS personnel would parachute by air or land from the sea at different pinpoints in the operational zone, collect escaped POWs, and direct them to rendezvous points along the Adriatic coast where Allied boats would wait to pick them up and take them to safety. Upon completion of the mission, the men would either take the last boat at one of the rendezvous, try to get back through the lines, or hide in the mountains until the Allied armies arrived.

  On September 25, 1943, a team of two OG officers, Lieutenants Peter Sauro and Paul Trafficante, and sixteen noncommissioned officers and enlisted men assembled in Algiers to prepare for the mission. They received clothing, equipment, arms, and ammunition. Each man received maps, 15,000 lire ($150) for operational expenses, one 9-mm submachine gun, one .45-caliber automatic pistol, and extra ammunition clips and cartridges. They left Algiers on September 26 and arrived at Bari, in southern Italy, where they reported to Lieutenant Colonel A. G. (Tony) Simonds, the British officer in charge, after whom the operation Simcol was named. Until October 1, they held joint planning conferences involving the OG personnel and all the British components (SAS, air, and navy) that would execute and support the mission. Realizing that the British lacked Italian-speaking personnel, Sauro assigned nine members of the OG team to support the British groups—one man for each of the four groups slated to go by parachute, and the five groups that would operate in boats.

  On October 2, at the Bari airfield, the OGs received instructions on how to jump from the plane, an English Albermale. The ground crews loaded the containers with supplies and fitted the OGs with English parachutes. Colonel Simonds provided a final briefing in late afternoon and then Sauro and his team of nine took off in one airplane.

  At dusk, they parachuted on their pinpoint near the town of Catignano, twenty miles west of Pescara, in the Abruzzo region. Everyone landed safely and, with the help of friendly local villagers, recovered four equipment containers dropped with them. One equipment chute containing food and an extra radio battery failed to open and the contents were smashed. Sauro ordered the villagers to bury all the chutes and containers, to distribute the food among escaped POWs in the area, and to alert them about their presence.

  The first fifteen POWs arrived in the morning. They represented groups of other POWs who had remained in hiding. Sauro told them that until October 10 British boats would arrive to pick up escaped prisoners every other night between 2400 and 0100 hours at a location on the beach south of Pescara. The boats would give light signals every fifteen minutes. The password to get onboard was “Jack London.” Sauro asked them to disseminate the information to all other prisoners in the area who they might meet. After this initial meeting, Sauro and the team took off toward their target area in the mountains of Gran Sasso. Sauro thought it best to split into two separate teams to cover more territory, make it easier for the escaped prisoners to approach them, and reduce the chances that the Germans would round up the entire team.

  As each team pursued their course, they found prisoners in groups of six or seven, and sometimes as many as thirty or forty. Their attitude was wary when first approached because they could not believe that uniformed Allied soldiers were this far inside enemy territory. Often the prisoners ran for the hills when they saw the OGs, thinking they were Germans. It worked best when the OGs were not out looking for the prisoners but instead remained at a house in the area for a day or two and let the villagers be sure that they were Allied troops. Then the families themselves would go with a mule or horse and bring the prisoners from their hiding places. By the last night of scheduled boat rendezvous on October 10, the two teams had contacted personally four hundred prisoners, and through them more escaped prisoners. Sauro estimated that his men were responsible for directing between eight hundred and two thousand men to boat rendezvous during those few days.

  On October 10, the two teams met near Farindola in the foothills of the Apennines, thirty miles west of Pescara and over one hundred miles north of the frontlines. The planned part of their mission was over. They chose not to take the last boat ride back to safety, and now they had to find a way to return to the Allied lines. They would have to make their escape on their own, because they had not been able to establish radio communications with the OSS base in Algiers or with the British base in Bari. Neal M. Panzarella, the team’s radio operator, discovered immediately upon landing that the receiver was dead. He tried to fix the broken receiver using his spare kit, changing tubes, and checking wires, to no avail. Nevertheless, he sent out his call sign and transmitted messages of their progress for several days at the times and frequencies agreed upon—once a day at 1500 hours to Algiers and three times a day at 1700, 1900, and 2100 hours to Bari. Now that the mission was complete, the radio equipment was a burden and liability, so they destroyed it and buried the pieces. Lieutenant Sauro ordered a group of five OGs under the command of Technical Sergeant Phillip J. Arengi to begin the trek south immediately. Sauro and the other four OGs remained in the area continuing to look for POWs and directing them toward the Allied lines.

  * * *

  Sauro and his team remained in Farindola until the end of October when they decided it was time to head toward the frontlines. The Germans had established firm control over the area and had set up strong checkpoints and patrols to capture escaped POWs making their way toward the lines. The Pescara River, the last natural barrier the POWs had to cross before reaching the Allied positions, became impassable due to the autumn rains and the strong security at the few bridges available. On the last day of October, Sauro ordered three of his men, Sergeants Giuli, Salvaggio, and DeLuca, to head west into the mountains for twenty to thirty miles and then to turn south toward the lines to eliminate the need to cross the Pescara River in the area that the Germans patrolled most heavily. The strategy paid off for these three men, who were able to reach the Allied lines after several weeks of difficult hikes.

  Sauro and Panzarella were not as successful. They started out to try to cross the lines on the morning of November 1. Like the previous group, they also headed west into the mountains and walked all day until ten thirty that night. They bedded down in a field and started out again early the next morning. They had covered twenty miles since they began the journey, staying undercover for most of the time given the large concentrations of Germans in the area. On the nig
ht of November 2, they approached a house and managed to get some sleeping quarters in a barn. The farmer and his wife told them they had helped many POWs who had passed through, but they warned them that it was almost impossible to continue through the mountains because of the cold weather and the snow that had started to set in on the mountains. Both Sauro and Panzarella were in pain by that time from walking and the cold weather.

  So on the morning of November 3 they began to make their way back slowly toward Farindola. They were forced to spend a night up in the Gran Sasso Mountains with only one blanket each for cover. It was very cold, and they got very little sleep. The next morning, they ran into three escaped prisoners who had taken refuge in a cave. One was a South African sergeant, and the other two were Free French troops from North Africa. They had taken to the hills because the Germans had raided the area where they were staying. Sauro and Panzarella were too weak to travel farther and needed some rest, so they stayed with the POWs. They saw several houses burning that morning in the town of Farindola. Germans had set them on fire because the people were harboring and feeding escaped prisoners.

  They remained in that cave for several days. It was very damp, and several inches of snow covered the ground. They managed to survive on food an Italian family brought them. After a few days—it was the middle of November now—they went down to the valley where they stayed in an unoccupied farmhouse near the river Agri, not too far from the town of Farindola. A local family kept them supplied with food, at great risk to themselves. There was not much to do but lay low and try to pick up information about the enemy movements in the area. Sauro kept in touch with several British officers, all former prisoners of war, and helped them whenever possible with money to buy shoes, clothing, and medicine for the sick prisoners in their area. It was a morale boost for the prisoners to find someone in uniform behind the lines who offered them information and encouragement.