Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

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  On January 13, 1944, with about three to four feet of snow on the ground, American planes appeared overhead and began strafing the area. Around 1215 hours, Sauro asked Panzarella and one of the French soldiers to go to a ridge nearby and find out what they could about the positions that the planes were attacking. They went to the ridge, keeping off the skyline to avoid detection. They could see the planes zooming down and strafing but could not see what they were hitting because of a hill in front of them. While they were focused on the attacking planes, they failed to see a German soldier who sneaked up from behind and surprised them.

  Panzarella was quick on his feet and was able to hide behind some rocks but the French soldier was not able to escape. The German asked him where Panzarella was, but the French soldier would not say. At this time, the German was about twenty-five yards from Panzarella’s hiding spot but only a few steps from the Frenchman. The German fired three shots at the French soldier, missing him each time. Panzarella looked up from behind the rock where he was hiding and tried to take a shot at the German but he spotted him and immediately fired at Panzarella. The bullet came very close to hitting Panzarella, whose ears were ringing from the report. A few seconds after that, Panzarella saw the French soldier lying in the snow with blood all around him. Panzarella heard the German threatening to kill him outright. Panzarella made another attempt to fire on the German who responded immediately with a shot at Panzarella and one at the French soldier. By this time, the Frenchman’s leg was beginning to stiffen up and he was losing a lot of blood. Panzarella thought the best thing to do was to surrender and save the Frenchman’s life. He hid his pistol behind the rock and covered it with snow. Then he called out to the German and came out from cover.

  Panzarella asked the German for a bandage, patched the Frenchman’s wounded leg and then proceeded to carry him on his back through snow that was hip deep. It took them three hours to get to the nearest house where they got some Italian men to help carry the wounded soldier using a ladder as a litter. While they were carrying the Frenchman, Panzarella told one of the Italians to go back and notify Sauro of their mishap and to recover his pistol.

  The Germans took them to a guardhouse, gave them something to eat, and dressed the French soldier’s wounds. On January 14, the Germans took them by truck about thirty miles south to a place near the frontlines at Manopello. They stayed there overnight and on the night of January 15 were moved again. The Germans dropped off the Frenchman at the hospital in Chieti and took Panzarella to a schoolhouse crammed with several other prisoners, frontline Canadian troops but also escaped POWs who had been recaptured. The Germans interrogated Panzarella several times but he did not disclose any information about his association with the OSS or why he was behind the lines.

  In between interrogations, Panzarella, three British soldiers, and a Canadian lieutenant hatched a plan to break out. Panzarella helped pry the screened windows open. He still had a few escape compasses concealed on him, some Italian money, and a map. He distributed the money and the compasses to the rest of the prisoners; the Canadian officer sketched out copies of the map outlining the escape route south. They were waiting for the dark to make their break when the Germans moved them from the schoolhouse, loaded them on trucks, and took them to a prison camp in Aquila, sixty miles west.

  Panzarella fell sick while in the camp and was too weak to attempt another escape, although opportunity knocked. On one occasion, he was in a transport train moving prisoners from Aquila to the Laterina POW camp, two hundred miles north. Fifteen prisoners out of the fifty-odd prisoners confined in his boxcar were able to escape but Panzarella could not move. From Laterina, Panzarella was taken to a camp in Germany, Stalag VII-A, where he arrived on March 13, 1944. Stalag VII-A was Germany’s largest POW camp, located just north of Mossburg in southern Bavaria. Panzarella spent the rest of the war in this camp until the American Third Army arrived at the camp’s gates on April 29, 1945, and freed eighty-thousand Allied soldiers held there.2

  Lieutenant Sauro managed to hide from the Germans who captured Panzarella on January 19, 1944. He moved from village to village for several months with the help of Italian sympathizers. At some point, he decided to shed his uniform and put on civilian clothes. His luck ran out on April 26, 1944, when he failed a document check at a German roadblock. Although in civilian clothes when caught, he managed to convince the Germans that he was a downed pilot. He received POW status and spent the rest of the war in captivity, first at Stalag Luft III, a Luftwaffe-run POW camp near the town of Sagan, about one hundred miles southeast of Berlin, and then at Stalag XIII-D in Nuremberg, northern Bavaria.3

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  The group of five OGs under the command of Technical Sergeant Phillip J. Arengi that split from Sauro and his group on October 10, 1943, proceeded slowly through the mountains because the ground was very muddy from the autumn rains. They were able to move freely in uniform at first. But as they got closer to the frontlines, the German troops were everywhere, even in small towns. It was too dangerous to travel by day, and they could not travel by night because they did not know the terrain. It had been different during the execution of the operation between October 2 and 10, when they had local guides and could travel continuously day and night.

  With difficulty, they made their way to the area near Catignano where they had parachuted on October 2. They learned from local farmers that they could use a bridge nearby to get on the other side of the Pescara River. They traveled with caution for ten miles to the town of Rosciano where the bridge was located to check out this information. They found that the Germans had posted sentries on the bridge guarding it at all times. Germans troops had occupied the houses on both sides. The Pescara River was too wide and murky to swim across at that time of the year, so they decided to go back to Catignano. They heard the British Eighth Army was advancing rapidly and figured they should stay in the mountains until the Allied troops reached the area. They waited during the latter part of October until November when they learned that the British had stopped their advance and had settled along the frontlines for the winter.

  The group decided to stay in Catignano where they had found shelter at a house that had good security. On Christmas Day, three Germans came to the house. The OGs saw them come from a thousand yards away and immediately took their equipment and hid in a ravine nearby. They were still in uniform. The Germans had just come to eat and left soon after, so the OGs returned to the house with their equipment. Not an hour had gone by when three more Germans came. The owner of the house said they might as well stay in the bedroom. The Germans just wanted to eat and did not bother looking around. But when they left Arengi felt it was best to move to another location. The Germans who were camped nearby were bound to discover them sooner or later.

  That same day they moved to another house where they stayed a week. On January 1, 1944, they moved again to another house nearby. They changed into civilian clothes and kept their .45 pistols. The villagers hid their Tommy guns, ammunition, and other military-issued articles, including their uniforms, in haystacks. Their group had doubled in size now to include other escaped prisoners. From the owner of the house they heard in January of a local organization known as the A Force that had established a series of safe houses and was leading prisoners through the lines. It took about a month to contact them. When they met at the beginning of February, the A Force Italian contacts said that the link was not completed and told Arengi to wait for their return. Then, at the beginning of March, three partisans returned and told the team to get ready for the journey to pass through the lines.

  The guides had pre-arranged posts where the escapees stopped each night to eat and sleep. One of them, called Peppino, led the way toward the frontlines until just south of the town of Guardiagrele, one half hour’s walk from the lines. He handed them to another guide with the nickname “Three Shirts,” who would be their guide near the lines. Three Shirts took them to his house to wait until the snow melted becaus
e they were too visible against the snow background even during moonless nights. The next night another guide called Umberto took the lead. Other escapees had joined the group of the Americans, including four British POWs and another thirty prisoners of mixed nationalities who all wanted to join the Allied Forces. Among them was a group of Yugoslavs who posted their own guard to make sure they would not be left behind while they slept. The group got on the move at two in the morning and mixed in with the stream of refugees from small towns nearby who were crossing the line as well. They passed by an abandoned machine gun nest and followed a stream to the left of Guardiagrele. At six in the morning, they met a British patrol and were safe in Allied territory.

  Thus, with the exception of Sauro and Panzarella, who became POWs, the rest of the OG team that parachuted together on October 2, 1943, managed to return across the lines. Although it took some of them months to complete the journey, they succeeded against the odds. The other nine OGs of mission Simcol who were attached to the British SAS teams were equally successful in fulfilling their initial mission and then making their way back with their lives. The story of Technician Grade 5 Joseph Padula represents well the experience of these nine operators in enemy territory.

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  Padula and his group of British parachutists dropped in the evening of October 2 at Porto Recanati on the Adriatic coast. They were the team that deployed the furthest inside German-held areas, over 170 miles northeast of Rome. The Germans went after them the moment they hit the ground, and they had to spend the first twenty-four hours in forced marches to evade capture. Eventually, they broke up into small squads of three men each and covered their assigned territories, returning every two days to the designated assembly area with the POWs they had collected.

  Their orders stated emphatically that they should not to engage the enemy until they had completed their primary mission. For the first several weeks, they were careful to evade the Germans and quickly leave the area if they were detected. On occasion, they raided Fascist warehouses, taking food, guns, and ammunition that they distributed to the POWs they encountered. They gave these POWs instructions, a compass, and money to buy shoes, clothes, and other items that would enable them to get back to the Allied lines. By the beginning of November, they felt they had completed their mission, but they continued to look for and assist POWs.

  Then, in Padula’s words, they “received a ‘Royal Rookin’ from the Italian people.” The Germans offered a reward for every Allied prisoner captured—1,800 lire for a soldier and 3,500 lire for paratroopers, dead or alive. Padula later said that many Italians were set on collecting the money. After several close encounters, they were convinced that they could not trust the Italians and must therefore stick closer to the mountains and caves. They trekked south for eighty miles until they arrived in the mountains of Grand Sasso, where they spent weeks waiting for the British Eighth Army’s advance to reach them. They moved frequently from one village to the other, collecting any escaped prisoners they could find and avoiding the Germans.

  No word came of the Allied troops’ advance, and the pressure from the Germans and the local Fascists became intense. Therefore, they decided to split—every man for himself. Padula established quarters in a small mountain village called Chiciardi. Every night he went out in search of POWs and found quite a few whom he brought back to the village. Whenever he could, he stole rifles and ammunition from the Fascists, and eventually most of the POWs were armed.

  On one such outing on March 26, 1944, Padula was picked up by three Fascists who were rounding up all available men in the area to fight in the Fascist blackshirt formations. Padula was in civilian clothes so they did not realize he was an American. They put him in a truck with six or seven other men. There was one guard in the back of the truck in addition to the driver and his companion in front. Padula knew that he would be finished if they took him to the Gestapo offices. He acted fast, wrestled the Fascist guard to the ground, ran away, and returned to the village of Chiciardi where the rest of his friends were.

  The following day, Fascist and SS troops surrounded Chiciardi. They took fourteen prisoners and burned down many farmhouses. A week later, there was another raid on the village and Padula again got away by “the skin of his teeth.” The Fascists and SS caught a couple more men and burned down more houses. The POWs escaped into the mountains. The Fascists and SS gave them chase initially, but turned back after the prisoners fired a few rifle shots and machine gun bursts at them. In Chiciardi the Fascists and SS rounded up the villagers, executed one of those who had been housing prisoners, and threatened the rest with more reprisals before they left the area.

  Not wanting to subject the villagers to more brutality, Padula and the rest of POWs moved to another mountain range where they met three Yugoslav escaped prisoners. They decided to wage guerrilla actions against the Germans. Padula later wrote, “Whenever small columns of trucks or other vehicles came along we attacked them, burned the trucks, and took prisoners. The Yugoslavs killed the prisoners.” A week after these hit-and-run operations began, the Germans sent a battalion and ran the guerrillas back into the mountains. The winter snows set in and shut them into the caves where they had taken refuge.

  A snow blizzard began on Christmas Eve 1943 and lasted all night and day. The following morning, the snow was about ten feet deep. The food was scarce, and some of the men, two British majors among them, decided to attempt to go down to the village. The snow had rendered the paths invisible, so they lost their way and fell over a cliff. Most of them died immediately except for one of the British majors who broke his leg in the fall. Padula and the rest of the POWs recovered him but they did not have any medicine in the caves. They moved the major as close as possible to Isila, the nearest village, where the Fascists found him and took him to the nearby town of Teramo. A priest later told Padula that gangrene had set in on the major’s broken leg. They amputated it, but the major died anyway in the middle of January.

  The three Yugoslavs attempted to move down the mountain next. They took off one morning and never returned. In the beginning of April, when the snow melted, Padula and his men found their bodies about six or seven hundred yards from the cave, where they had died of exposure. They took them to Chiciardi and buried them in a small cemetery in the mountains, together with the other POWs who had died earlier.

  In the beginning of May 1944, Padula and his group returned to Chiciardi, teamed up with another band of guerrillas, and coordinated a joint attack against Isila. They took the village with one heavy machine gun, about thirty-five rifles, and a lot of ammunition. They kept the area liberated for about two weeks but were forced to evacuate when the Germans sent in a cavalry company with eighty to one hundred men from Montorio, the principal town in the area situated about thirteen miles from Isila. Toward the end of May, the group established contacts with more patriots and drew up a plan to get rid of the Germans at Montorio. They attacked the town, opened up on the Germans, and kept firing all their weapons, hoping that “the Germans would believe there was a division of men attacking them,” Padula wrote later. Shortly after, the Germans and the Fascist troops left the area, having lost several men between those killed, wounded, and captured by the guerrillas. Padula and his group moved in to establish control of the zone. They rounded up the “trouble makers” who were dealt with by the British authorities when they reached the area.

  In the middle of May 1944, the British Eighth Army and the American Fifth Army made their decisive push at Monte Cassino, finally breaching the German defensive positions along the Gustav Line. The Germans began a precipitous withdrawal toward their next fortified line, with the Allied forces rapidly advancing northward. On May 23, 1944, Padula and his group met a small Polish motorized unit, the first Allied unit to arrive in their area. The Polish soldiers shared their cigarettes with Padula’s group and directed them toward the village of Penne in the rear where a British cannon company had its headquarters. Once there, everyone felt they were safe in
Allied territory and jubilation set in. Shortly after, the British brought trucks that took them to a recuperation camp where they received food, clothing, and medical attention. From there, Padula and the American POWs were transferred to Foggia, at the headquarters of the Fifteenth Air Corp Command, where they exchanged the British uniforms for American ones. After a few more days of rest in Foggia, Padula left the group of the rescued POWs and travelled to Bari, where he met Colonel Russell Livermore, head of the OG Command, and General Donovan. “Then I knew I was home,” he later remembered. From Bari, Padula took a flight to Algiers, where he spent a couple of weeks on a well-earned leave before rejoining his OSS unit.

  CHAPTER 6

  Operations from Corsica

  After the liberation of Corsica in October 1943, the OSS moved the entire Company A of Italian Operational Groups from Algiers to L’Île-Rousse on the western coast of the island. For the next several months, the OGs used L’Île-Rousse as their training and staging area. Bastia, only thirty-five miles from the Italian mainland and ninety miles from the strategic Ligurian coast, served as the headquarters and launch base for a number of operations harassing the Germans along the Tyrrhenian coast from Genoa in the north to the islands of the Tuscan Archipelago in the south. American PT boats of Squadron 15 and a flotilla of British motor gunboats moved up from Sardinia and began to operate out of Bastia by the end of October. Until the summer of 1944, the OGs enjoyed the distinction of being the northern-most American troops in the Mediterranean theater of operations.