Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  Among the first missions the OGs launched from Corsica were a series of raids against a group of small islands in the Tuscan Archipelago, off the Italian coast.1 The objective of the raids was to occupy the islands and establish observation posts manned by OG personnel who monitored German air and sea activities and reported them to Bastia headquarters. The OSS established the first of these observation posts on Capraia, a small island about forty miles northeast of Bastia. On October 15, 1943, two Italian ships had arrived in Bastia with the commandant and fifty-two soldiers of the Capraia Italian garrison aboard, together with twenty-five political prisoners freed from the penal colony on the island. Also onboard was all of the island’s military defense equipment that the Italians could carry away. The officers were taken to the OG base in L’Île-Rousse, where they provided detailed information about the layout of the island. In the afternoon of October 19, a small group of OGs headed by Colonel Russell Livermore set sail from L’Île-Rousse aboard a British minesweeper to reconnoiter and occupy Capraia.

  They arrived off the Capraia harbor at 2200 hours and, finding no sign of activity in town, quickly secured the post office and shut down the communication lines with the island of Elba and the mainland. A handful of Italian Carabinieri still in the island expressed satisfaction at the arrival of the American troops. The OGs examined papers, journals, and records in the post office and carried a number of technical publications related to telecommunication equipment that they forwarded to the OSS headquarters in Algiers. An officer and nine enlisted men set up quarters on the central square—they would stay behind to maintain a permanent presence on the island. By 0100 hours of October 20, Livermore and his party began preparations to return aboard the British minesweeper, greeted effusively by the island’s inhabitants, most of them fishermen. They left Capraia at 0130 hours and arrived at L’Île-Rousse at 0800 hours.

  The OGs that remained on the island established an observation post at the Italian naval semaphore station atop the island. They transmitted weather and shipping observations by radio to the OSS headquarters in Bastia, which relayed the information via a direct telephone line to the Allied Forces war room at the 63rd Fighter Wing headquarters. At least three times a day, they sent weather reports covering sea conditions, precipitation, visibility, and wind direction and velocity. Enemy plane spotting was particularly useful for protecting the Allied airfields in Bastia and elsewhere in Corsica from surprise attacks from aircraft flying under the radar. Pilots and ground crews at the Borgo airfield on the eastern coast of Corsica, only five minutes flight time from Capraia, trained to disperse or take all the planes in the air within five minutes from receiving a warning from the island.2

  On December 8, 1943, Livermore led a similar operation to establish an observation post on the island of Gorgona, twenty miles from Livorno off the Italian coast. The OGs captured a party of seven Fascist militia blackshirts as they slept and took them back to Bastia as prisoners. They seized useful communications equipment and codebooks. The OGs placed large binoculars at the semaphore station on top of the island, which they used to monitor enemy activity at the port of Livorno. Carl Lo Dolce, a twenty-year-old New Yorker born to a family of Sicilian immigrants, was the team radio operator who transmitted the observations daily to Corsica. In one instance, the OGs reported considerable activity at large fuel storage tanks in the harbor, which the Allies believed to be unused. An air raid was mounted and the OGs were able to report that the planes had destroyed the targets within two hours of the attack.

  Shortly after, the OGs established a third observation post on the island of Elba. The heavily fortified island was firmly in German hands, so an all-out attack was out of question. Instead, a small team of OGs landed by boat and established a clandestine base on the summit of Mount Cappane, the westernmost peak overlooking Portoferraio, Elba’s main city. The team reported ship movements and the conditions on the island for six weeks. The Germans, using directional finding equipment, pinpointed their location and attacked. The team was on the run for several days but were successfully evacuated on February 1, 1944.3

  * * *

  In addition to the raids against the islands on the Tuscan Archipelago, the OSS Italian Operational Groups carried out a number of reconnaissance operations and small-scale attacks on coastal installations in the last months of 1943.4 They were intended to draw fire from enemy coastal defenses and simulate commando raids along the coast between Pisa and Livorno to make the Germans believe that preparations were in the making for an Allied landing in that area. Lieutenant Albert R. Materazzi, executive officer of the Italian OGs, led two such operations in November and December. In the first one, a group of OGs left Bastia at 1800 hours on November 1, 1943, and at 2320 hours reached the pinpoint between Livorno and the mouth of River Arno. They lay about a mile offshore merely observing and listening. Visibility was very poor, and there was very little chance that the boat would be noticed, so they decided to make their presence known. At 0050 hours, they transmitted simulated conversations between a pickup boat and a beach reconnaissance party over the ship’s radio telecommunications equipment on a frequency common to walkie-talkie radio sets that they knew the Germans monitored.

  After a while, acting very distressed about the fate of the beach party, they sent up flares, flashed lights, and blinked Morse messages with the boat’s signal lamp. Then they made a loud crash start sweeping the area for several minutes as if they were searching for a small boat. As a final distress signal, they fired a burst of tracer bullets vertically and sped away at full speed.

  About a month later, when the moon cycle was right again, Materazzi and crew returned to the same area between the mouth of Arno and Livorno and stopped the boat a half-mile offshore. The weather was clear and the full moon setting in the ocean silhouetted the boat for an observer from the coast. To make sure they were noticed, they displayed lights on the deck of the bridge and fired tracers against the coast that was completely blacked out. Then, they turned all the engines on and headed for Bastia making as much noise as possible.

  Although these initial missions were not stressful, the OGs spent the time between them exercising to stay fit and training for the more difficult missions they knew lay ahead. The training was realistic and sometime even dangerous. On December 2, 1943, several OGs were practicing landing operations with rubber boats off the coast of L’Île-Rousse. The seas were rough, and several OGs were washed overboard by a high wave. Another OG, Salvatore Di Scalfani, was walking along the beach when he heard one of the men in the water calling for help. Di Scalfani plunged into the rough sea fully clothed and went to the assistance of his fellow soldier, who had lost consciousness and was in danger of drowning. Di Scalfani battled the rough sea and fought his way to shore carrying the limp body of the soldier. For this act, Di Scalfani received the Soldier’s Medal in March 1944.5

  The OGs filled their free time with polishing weapons, writing letters home, talking to locals, and listening to the radio. They, like the rest of the Allied soldiers in the Mediterranean theater of operations, often tuned to German radio stations that mixed their propaganda broadcasts with very good music. A soldier wrote home:

  As a matter of fact the best jazz programs are usually Jerry ones. Between 7–8 P.M., we always tune in to “Axis Sally” who has been broadcasting to GIs for two years now. Although she is known as “Midge” now she’s the same silky babe the boys used to pick up at Anzio. First comes a German news report remarkably true, although their defeats are minimized and the number of allied losses stressed. Then follows the usual divide and conquer psychological attack. Last night the commentator explained how … American officers as well as British are having the time of their lives … carelessly scribbling out orders for the rain-soaked boys in the trenches to attack superior German positions, etc. Roosevelt is playing up to Stalin to get the huge communist vote in America, but when elections are over he will drop Stalin, who will then commence to over-run the world with Bolshevism unless G
ermany is spared to stave off this scourge. Their propaganda is pitifully weak now and the cornered-rat whine is all that is left.

  This is followed by a sexy voice, which goes something like this: “Hello, all you GIs sitting in your wet foxholes. Are you feeling blue? Do you wish you were back in the arms of your wife and girl? Well, Midge is here to cheer you up again, calling from Berlin every night to all you brave boys crouching out there in your muddy foxholes. Come on Joe, how about a little tune like you used to dance to back in the good ol’ States? Let’s listen to Fats Waller playing Bye-Bye Blues.” Then follows about a half hour of good jazz, mostly blues, each recording followed by comments such as “That last piece was ‘I’ve Got the Blues’ and I bet you do have them, you pooooor deaeaears.” It’s really a riot and a lot of fun to listen to!6

  There was one song that the men always greeted with cheers whether it came over the waves of German radio stations or the Allied ones. “Lilli Marlene” is the curious case of a song that “went viral” seventy years before the expression had any meaning. Hans Leip, a German World War I veteran, wrote simple lyrics in the 1930s that told the story of a private who used to meet the young and fair Lilli Marlene under the lantern by the barracks’ gates. Then orders came for deployment and soon the private found himself in the trenches reminiscing about Lilly’s sweet kisses, her sweet face haunting his dreams, and Lilly waiting for him “where the lantern softly gleams.”

  Norman Schultze set the verses to music in 1938 and a Swedish singer, Lale Anderson, recorded the song in 1939 with the title “The Song of a Young Sentry.” Anderson’s husky voice formed a perfect counterpoint to the military march theme to which the music was set. Nevertheless, the song went unnoticed and would have been forgotten had it not been for German broadcasts to the Balkans and North Africa from Radio Belgrade. One night in 1941, the director of the program for Rommel’s Afrika Korps found himself short of records to play because the station had been bombed. So, he gave the song some extra playing time. Shortly after, letters began arriving from soldiers in North Africa requesting that the song be played again and again. Legend has it that Rommel himself wrote to the station asking that they incorporate the song into the regular broadcasts. After that, every night at 2200 hours Radio Belgrade played the song.

  The song’s popularity reached Berlin and Frau Goering, an opera singer herself, sang the song to a select group of Nazi leaders. By now, hummed by soldiers across the Third Reich, the song had gained additional lyrics with a new meaning, far different from the original one. While the private was away at the front thinking of Lilli Marlene, she kept going back to the lantern post. Soon she met a sergeant who fell in love with her, but he went to the front as well. Then it was the turn of a lieutenant, then a captain, and so on. Finally, Lilli Marlene met a brigadier general, which was what she had wanted to do all along. The irony and cynicism with which the troops now sang the song did not escape the Nazi leaders, who tried to kill the song without much success.

  In 1942, the fortunes of Rommel’s Afrika Korps turned and the British Eighth Army began capturing German prisoners, who brought with them “Lilli Marlene.” When the Americans landed in North Africa, they picked up the song from the British. There was concern initially among the Allied authorities that a German song about a girl who did not have sterling virtues was becoming the favorite song of the British and American armies. Soon they realized that the phenomenon was out of hand. John Steinbeck, who experienced the popularity of the song among the soldiers firsthand as a war correspondent in the Mediterranean, wrote, “It is to be expected that some groups in America will attack ‘Lilli,’ first, on the ground that she is an enemy alien, and, second, because she is no better than she should be. Such attacks will have little effect. ‘Lilli’ is immortal. Her simple desire to meet a brigadier is hardly a German copyright. Politics may be dominated and nationalized, but songs have a way of leaping boundaries.”7

  In the United States, the Office of War Information overtly and the OSS Morale Operations branch covertly decided to turn the song into a propaganda tool in favor of the Allies. Marlene Dietrich, who had fled to Hollywood to escape the Nazis, recorded her own English and German versions of the song and performed it in dozens of concerts for the GIs throughout Europe during the war. Summing up the effect of the song, Steinbeck wrote, “And it would be amusing if, after all the fuss and the heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the world by the Nazis was ‘Lilli Marlene.’”8

  * * *

  The beginning of 1944 found the Allied armies in Italy stuck on two fronts, unable to penetrate the German defenses no matter how hard they tried. One of the fronts ran across Italy along the heavily fortified Gustav Line, anchored in the Cassino massif and protected by the natural obstacles of the Garigliano and Rapido Rivers. Cassino controlled the southern entrance to the broad Liri River valley, which lead straight to Rome. Field Marshal Kesselring entrusted the defense of Cassino to battle-hardened troops entrenched in strong positions and determined to hold every inch of ground. Key to the defense of the Gustav Line at Cassino was the XIV Panzer Division under the command of General Frido von Senger.

  Following the successful extraction of German troops from Sardinia and Corsica, von Senger received a promotion to General der Panzertroopen, a rank equivalent to a three-star general commanding armored troops in the United States Army. Despite concerns about his loyalties to the Nazi regime, the German Supreme Command approved Kesselring’s plan to give von Senger command of the XIV Panzer Division and entrust him with the defense of Cassino. Von Senger proved himself an excellent student of the Italian terrain and strategic use of armor and for several months frustrated the attempts of the American Fifth Army commanded by General Mark Clark to break through the Gothic Line.

  The second front was at the Anzio and Nettuno beaches. The Allies had tried to make an end-run around the German defenses in Cassino by landing the US VI Corps north of the Gustav Line on January 22, 1944. The strategic intent was to roll up the German front and go straight for Rome, which lay ahead less than forty miles to the north. The landings were a complete surprise and met no opposition from the Germans, but Lieutenant General John P. Lucas, the American commander of the invasion force, decided to reinforce the beachhead before breaking inland. The momentum was lost, the Germans were able to move reserves to block the advance, and another stalemate situation was created. An exasperated Churchill, with his knack for summarizing situations said, “I had hoped that we were hurling a wild cat on to the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.”9

  While they were holding the frontlines at Cassino and Anzio, the Germans were working hard to prepare the next defensive line using local Italian laborers and Fascist forces from Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic of Salò. The project was the responsibility of the Todt Organization, the construction consortium responsible for prewar civil engineering feats, such as the Autobahn system, and for massive military works during the war, including the Siegfried Line and Atlantic Wall fortifications, built using prisoners of war and forced laborers from occupied countries. Known as the Gothic Line, the defensive fortifications started on the Tyrrhenian with strong coastal artillery positions at Punta Bianca just south of the naval base of La Spezia and ran southeast along the Apennines to Pesaro on the Adriatic. Combining heavy fortifications at strategic mountain passes with the rough terrain of that area of Italy, Kesselring created a barrier that would grind away the Allied superiority in men and equipment and force them to halt the advance.

  The German High Command considered the possibility of an Allied landing from Corsica on the Ligurian coast a big threat to the German defense strategy at this time. There was fear that the Allies would attempt another end-run as they had tried to do at Anzio. To protect from this eventuality, Kesselring stood up an army group led by General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen to defend the entire territory of northern and central Italy north of Livorno, which constituted the rear area of the German forces
at the time. Within Army Group von Zangen, the 75th Army Corps led by General Anton Dostler was responsible for defending the western sector along the Ligurian coast between Genoa and Livorno. Both von Zangen and Dostler had traversed a similar path to reach the position they enjoyed in the Wehrmacht at the time. They were the same age, born in 1892, had entered the military in infantry units in 1910, had received their first officer commissions in World War I, and then had served in the 100,000-men army that Germany was allowed to keep after the war. They were not members of the Nazi party—military rules forbade soldiers from joining political parties—but their careers benefited from Hitler’s re-militarization of Germany and the victorious campaigns of the first years of World War II. They had commanded infantry divisions and corps in France and Russia. By the time they received their assignments in Italy in January 1944, both von Zangen and Dostler had the rank of General der Infanterie, equivalent to three-star general commanding infantry units in the US Army.

  Along the Ligurian coast, the Germans selected strategic points and turned them into fortified long-range artillery positions intended to hold the Allies’ advance from a distance and continue resistance even if the Allies overran the territory around them. The German military doctrine called these strong positions fortresses. The Germans built one such fortress on top of Monte Moro overlooking the city and port of Genoa. The artillery fortifications at Punta Bianca, the starting point of the Gothic Line near La Spezia, received the fortress designation as well. The responsibility for building and defending these strongpoints fell to the 135th Brigade, known as the 135th Fortress Brigade, a unit under Dostler’s 75th Army Corps, under the command of Colonel Kurt Almers.