Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  Anton Ukmar was born in 1900 in Prosecco, Trieste, in a family of farmers of Slovenian descent. He joined the Italian Communist Party in 1926 and was sent to Genoa to organize the railroad workers there. Pursued by the Fascist police, he escaped to Yugoslavia, then moved to France and the Soviet Union. Ukmar went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, first as a counterespionage officer and then as political commissar of the 12th Garibaldi Brigade. After the defeat of the Republican cause in 1939, he fled to France. Ukmar returned to Italy after the fall of Mussolini and assumed command of the Sixth Zone under the battle name Miro.11

  Fausto Cossu was born in 1915 and had been an official of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, in Yugoslavia since 1942. The Germans captured him after the armistice of September 8, 1943, and deported him first to Zagreb, Croatia, and then to Germany. He was able to escape and return to Italy where in January 1944 he organized a resistance unit affiliated with the Action Party in the mountains near Piacenza, which later grew to become a full-size division.12

  The word about the Walla Walla mission spread, and partisan leaders from outside the Sixth Zone contacted the OGs to request supplies. One of these leaders commanded a division in nearby Lombardy and went by the name of Americano. His true name was Domenico Mezzadra, and he was born in Windsor Lochs, Connecticut, in 1920 to a family of Italian immigrants. When his father died in 1933, the family, mother and three children, returned to Italy. Mezzadra was drafted in the Italian army in 1941 and became an officer in 1943. He was able to evade capture by the Germans after the armistice of September 8, 1943. He joined the resistance in February 1944 as a commander of a Garibaldi platoon and by the summer of that year had taken command of an entire brigade in the area around Pavia, in the region of Lombardy known as Oltrepò Pavese, south of the River Po from Pavia and southwest of Piacenza.13

  At Americano’s request, Captain Wheeler met with him to assess the strength and needs of his brigade. He coordinated a drop of supplies for Americano’s division, but the supplies were accidentally sent to a drop zone that belonged to the Fausto division. Efforts by Wheeler to convince Fausto to share the supplies with Americano were not fruitful. At one point, Fausto said he did not need Allied aid, after which drops to Fausto’s zone were suspended. On November 19, the “Big Three”—Miro, Americano, and Fausto—met to try to resolve the issues. Americano was invited and agreed to join the Sixth Zone command at which point Fausto boiled over and said he was considering an armistice with the enemy. After the war, Fausto said that the armistice had been a hoax by one of the partisans under his command. It had been so convincing that the Germans and the Fascist authorities had sent money and emissaries to negotiate the terms of surrender for twenty-five thousand partisans,14 but he did not share any of this information during the conference. Afterward, the CLNAI considered Fausto a collaborator and severed the ties with him. Cut off from American supplies and the headquarters of the CLNAI, Fausto dissolved his Giustizia e Libertà division at the end of November. After the worst of the winter passed, he reconstituted a new division in the Piacenza area in February–March 1945, which operated independently of the Sixth Zone command or the CLNAI until the liberation of Piacenza.15

  The enemy too had gotten word of the presence of the Walla Walla mission among the partisans. Partisans guarding the mission captured a Fascist spy near the Sixth Zone headquarters who was asking the civilian population questions about the whereabouts of the mission. They took him to the headquarters and promptly shot him.

  * * *

  At the beginning of November, the Nazi-Fascists prepared another mop-up operation. In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the march on Rome that brought him to power, Mussolini announced an amnesty for all those who had dodged the draft in military service, deserted, or failed to enroll in the obligatory labor service of the Fascist republic. He gave all the partisans across northern Italy until November 11, 1944, to surrender, promising that all would be forgiven. The partisans took no notice but began to prepare for the strong action that would come after the deadline. Mission Walla Walla coordinated a massive drop of almost six thousand pounds of supplies on November 16. Thirty planes flew over the drop zone in the mountains, sending down 195 containers and 13 packs that dispersed over a large area. It took thirty-six hours to collect all the supplies, but in the end, they accounted for 100 percent of the containers due to excellent partisan cooperation.

  An early onset of cold weather and fierce resistance of the Germans all along the Gothic Line forced the Allies to stop their efforts to push through the Apennines and settle for a second winter of bitter fighting in Italy. The lull in the frontlines was propitious for the Germans and their Fascist allies in that it allowed them to concentrate their forces in cleaning up the rear areas from the partisan bands. The German operation in the Sixth Zone began on November 23 initially against the Giustizia e Libertà division. After offering scattered resistance, Fausto withdrew, leaving the Americano division’s north and east flank exposed. Miro rushed reinforcements to the north to plug the gap. Heavy battles occurred between November 23 and 30 in the Americano zone.

  The Walla Walla mission made desperate attempts to secure a flow of supplies to reinforce the partisans. On November 28, seven aircraft flying two separate sorties dropped over 240 packages with over twenty-eight thousand pounds of material. A daylight drop of mortars went to Americano on November 29, in plain view of enemy troops of the 162nd Turkoman Division, composed of Soviet prisoners of war and deserters from the Caucasus fighting under German officers and NCOs. These units were particularly cruel against the population in the area, looting and raping the town of Zavaterello in a vicious manner. There and elsewhere, the Germans massacred civilians with pitchforks and meat hooks, leaving the corpses exposed and forbidding the burial of the killed. “You could see that it didn’t make a difference to them, partisan or not, we were all rebels for the Germans,” recalled a survivor.16

  The Americano and Miro divisions put up a strong resistance through the middle of December. They met every thrust of the enemy with determination, unlike the meek opposition and the quick collapse of the partisan units that occurred during the August rastrellamenti. Even though the partisans lost control of the liberated areas when faced by an enemy equipped with armor and artillery, they made the Germans pay a heavy cost for their operations measured in hundreds killed and wounded. As the partisans retreated up the mountains again, they made sure this time to destroy all the strategic bridges in the area, which effectively blocked the roads to enemy traffic for the remainder of the war.

  On December 15, the Walla Walla mission received urgent orders from the Sienna headquarters to head south immediately toward the Allied lines. Traveling with the help of partisan guides, they trekked through the mountains, leaving the Sixth Zone on December 20 and arriving at an American outpost near Carrara at 0930 hours on December 26, 1944. All fifteen OGs of the Walla Walla team returned safely.

  During their nineteen weeks with the Italian partisans, the OG team accomplished all the objectives of its mission. The Sixth Zone command considered the officers of the mission, Captain Wheeler and Lieutenant Smith, as its own staff officers, frequently consulting them and adopting their recommendations about the overall strategy and organization of the units in the zone. The support that the team provided to the partisans of the Sixth Zone brought a notable increase in activities and a marked improvement in the efficiency of their operations against the Nazi-Fascists in occupied Italy. In addition to the supplies provided to the partisans, weapons specialists with the mission instructed partisans in the function and use of Allied weapons being sent to them. Demolitions specialists demonstrated the use of explosives and demolition devices for sabotage. The OGs gave instructions in scouting, patrolling, and setting up raids and ambushes. Aside from the military considerations, the presence of an American mission served as a constant reminder of the Allies’ desire to aid the partisan cause and also as a significant factor in unifying t
heir efforts against the common enemy.

  The German mop-up operations and the onset of winter would have been valid reasons for the headquarters to order the withdrawal of the Walla Walla mission. What influenced the decision the most, however, was very disconcerting news from northern Italy about the fate of another mission, code-named Mangosteen-Chrysler, that had operated in the area north of Milan since the end of September 1944.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mission Mangosteen-Chrysler

  In mid-August 1944, under the supervision of General Donovan himself, the OSS Secret Intelligence branch in Siena, Italy, planned a mission, code-named Mangosteen, to be parachuted in northern Italy in the area between Milan and the Swiss border. The objective of the mission was to establish contact with the CLNAI leaders in Milan and facilitate their communications with Allied headquarters. Donovan trusted the command of Mangosteen to Captain William V. Holohan, a forty-year-old cavalry reserve officer who had joined the OSS only recently. Holohan was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Manhattan College in 1925, entered Harvard Law School in the same year, and earned his law degree in 1928.1 He went into government service and successfully tried the first Securities and Exchange Commission’s stock manipulation case.2 Holohan was called into service shortly after Pearl Harbor and served in Fort Riley, Kansas, and then in the Army Air Forces before volunteering to join the OSS.

  Donovan knew Holohan personally and put him in charge of the mission despite the fact that he lacked the training, experience, or language skills of OSS operatives sent behind the lines for this type of mission. On the other hand, Holohan was trim, fit, calm, and had a commanding personality. He was a devout Catholic and a fervent anticommunist in politics. In Donovan’s view, “the mission might come under pressure, and Holohan could be counted on not to play any political games.”3 To boost Holohan’s standing with the CLNAI, Donovan promoted him to major on the spot, which allowed Holohan to wear the golden oak leafs on his uniform before he left, although his promotion was confirmed in October when he was already deployed on the mission.

  The second member of the team was Lieutenant Aldo Icardi, a twenty-three-year-old Italian American from Pittsburgh who had been one of the early recruits of the OSS Special Operations and Secret Intelligence Italian branches. Icardi was fluent in Italian and spoke it with the Piedmont accent of his parents. Because of his language skills and operational experience, Icardi was to be Holohan’s translator and right-hand man in the field. In early September, the Mangosteen team merged with a team of three OGs, code name Chrysler, composed of Lieutenant Victor Giannino, Technical Sergeant Arthur Ciarmicoli, and Sergeant Carl Lo Dolce. They had tried a dozen times to parachute into the mountains north of Milan and organize the partisan units in that area. Each time they had to return to their base because of bad weather, enemy activity along their flightpath, or failure to identify the drop zone. Giannino was a veteran of the Italian OG operations in the Mediterranean, including the liberation of Corsica and other islands in the Tuscan Archipelago. Ciarmicoli was a demolition and explosives expert. Lo Dolce was a skilled radio operator who had participated in a number of raids behind enemy lines. He had spent several months in a rest camp recovering from a close encounter with the Germans on the island of Gorgona during a raid at the end of March 1944.4

  The combined team Mangosteen-Chrysler left the Maison Blanche Airfield in Algeria in the evening of September 26, 1944, aboard two B-17 Flying Fortresses. Three Italian intelligence agents working for the OSS shared the ride on the way to their own assignments in northern Italy. One of them, Tullio Lussi, a professor of literature and philosophy at the University of Trieste who went by the code name Landi, would provide the initial introductions between Holohan and the CLNAI leaders in Milan. While the three Italians were in civilian clothes, the five Americans were in military uniform and had orders to remain so throughout their mission.

  In addition to the eight men, the Flying Fortresses carried several containers of arms, ammunition, and supplies for the mission and for the partisans on the ground that had organized their reception. Giannino carried $4,000 on him. Holohan carried another $16,000 worth of currency, most of it in Italian lire but also in Swiss francs and US dollars, hard currencies that were in high demand in northern Italy. The Americans carried $3,000 worth of gold in Louis d’Or coins, rolled in cartridges. They called this “blood money,” to be used to bribe their way to freedom in case they fell into the hands of Germans, especially the Gestapo, who were known to covet gold.

  On the night of September 26, the team parachuted on Mount Mottarone, between Lake Maggiore to the east and the smaller alpine Lake Orta to the west. It was a pristine area then, as it is today, with a number of hotels that the Germans used as convalescing and rest centers for their troops. It was also teeming with partisans, who held remote villages, like Coiromonte, where the mission set up base after landing. Only a dozen miles to the north of their location began the free territory of the Republic of Ossola, which stretched to the border with Switzerland. Partisan brigades of multiple affiliations, including Christian Democrats, Socialists, and Communists, had liberated the area and declared it a republic on September 10, 1944. They had set up a civil administration in the regional capital, Domodossola, and ran the zone like a functioning democracy under the eyes of international journalists who could enter the liberated territory from Switzerland.

  Giannino and Ciarmicoli immediately began training the partisans in the Coiromonte area in using the explosives and weapons they had brought with them and from a second drop that arrived on October 2. Holohan and Icardi met with the partisan commanders in the area, all of whom asked for more arms and ammunition. Ferruccio Parri, one the three leaders of the CLNAI, arrived from Milan to meet with Major Holohan. Everyone believed the end of the war was imminent, so the discussion focused on how the CLNAI would take control of the area immediately upon the surrender of the Germans and protect key assets of the infrastructure there.

  But the Germans had no plans to quit fighting any time soon. At the beginning of October, they began amassing troops in preparation for a mop-up operation of the entire area. Alfredo Di Dio, the partisan leader of the Christian Democrat “Val Toce” division, came to visit the American mission with a plea for arms that his men needed to protect the Ossola valley. Di Dio was only twenty-four years old but had been leading his group of partisans since 1943.5 He told Holohan that British SOE and American OSS contacts from Switzerland had encouraged him to launch his insurrection in Ossola. Now, he asked for supplies, arms, ammunition, and air support from the Allies to protect his men and his positions. Holohan transmitted the request to the OSS Italian headquarters in Sienna, but the Allied headquarters did not find the objective strategically important enough to satisfy Di Dio’s request.6

  From the beginning, Holohan noticed signs of friction between Di Dio’s Christian Democrat partisans and Communist partisans led by Vincenzo (Cino) Moscatelli. Moscatelli was thirty-six years old at the time. He had joined the ranks of the Communist movement when he was still a teenager and had been sent by the party to attend political courses in Switzerland, Berlin, and Moscow in the late 1920s. He returned in 1930 to organize the communist resistance against Mussolini but fell into the hands of police and spent thirteen years in Fascist prisons until the fall of the regime in 1943. Immediately after the armistice, he began to organize the partisan movement in the area between Novara and the Swiss border. He became the political commissar of all the Garibaldi units in that area and earned a reputation for showing no mercy toward the Germans and Fascists.7

  In a message sent to Sienna, Holohan wrote, “The Communist chief Moscatelli is putting pressure to take control of all the patriots in Val d’Ossola but is unlikely to succeed because his group is in minority. Communist bands have much more money that the others because they receive funds from Russia and Tito.” Although Holohan could not do much to help Di Dio, he consented to allow Giannino and Ciarmicoli to go with him to Oss
ola to offer what assistance they could in preparing to defend the area. They left on October 8 and arrived in Domodossola the next day.

  On October 10, the enemy launched the attack against the Republic of Ossola with thirteen thousand troops, only five hundred of which were Germans and the rest Italian Fascists. From the heights of Mottarone, Holohan, Icardi, and Lo Dolce could see the troops advancing from Lake Maggiore through valleys leading to Ossola. Giannino, who was caught in the valley with the partisans, later described six days of heavy fighting during which the partisans were under continuous fire from 88-mm artillery and mortar pieces. The Germans brought an armored train to shell the partisan positions in the mountains. Commander Di Dio fell into an ambush and was killed on October 11. On October 14, facing an enemy that enjoyed a four-to-one superiority in numbers, the partisans began an organized retreat toward Switzerland. Delaying fights allowed the evacuation by train of thirty-five thousand civilians from Domodossola, half the population of the city, which was semi-deserted by the time the Fascist troops arrived. On October 23, the last partisan units, with Giannino and Ciarmicoli among them, crossed into Switzerland after exhausting their last ammunitions. The Fascists had the entire area under control.8

  * * *

  After clearing the Ossola valley, the Nazi-Fascists turned their attention to the areas they had bypassed, including Mount Mottarone and Coiromonte, where the Mangosteen-Chrysler mission resided. Holohan made a fateful decision not to attach the team to any of the partisan units in the area, most likely to maintain independence of the mission. This created the impression among the local partisan commanders that the mission was aloof and did not support their needs at a time when they insisted on having arms and supplies parachuted to them.