Pritchard and his party, which included Deane-Drummond and Picchi, travelled above the snowline at first and kept going until dawn. Then, worried about being spotted in daylight, they dropped down the mountainside and hid for the day in a wood. After dark they set off again, pushing steadily west, skirting the village of Sant’Andrea di Conza, and pressing on along a road for a few more miles before heading up the mountain again. By dawn on 12 February, struggling through mud and snow and up and down steep slopes, they had covered twenty miles.
The going was difficult enough for young commandos in peak physical condition: Deane-Drummond would remember that his whole body by now was ‘limp with exhaustion’.56 But it was a terrible ordeal for a man like Picchi. At one point he approached Pritchard and asked to be left behind, for he was struggling with the pace and feared he would jeopardise the others’ escape. His offer was refused but impressed his companions. Pritchard would recall that Picchi pressed on with ‘renewed vigour’.57 Deane-Drummond, too, remembered how ‘Picchi kept up very well, although he appeared to be suffering from some chest disorder and coughed continuously’.58 This was possibly his appalling asthma.
While searching for the next daytime hiding place, Pritchard’s party ran into trouble. The maps they carried showed a suitable wood high on the mountain above them. They climbed over and above the snowline but to their alarm and dismay found only bare slopes and a farm. As dawn broke, men scrambled in the snow to conceal themselves behind boulders and juniper bushes, but the tracks they had left had been seen. First a farmer hove into view and stared hard at the British before shuffling off. Picchi was sent to talk to him, returning with the news that, although the man was no threat, some local women and children had also spotted the party and, worse, had gone to inform the police. Then more locals began to appear. ‘First came the village dogs,’ Deane-Drummond would report, ‘led by three pointers; then the village children, wondering where the dogs were going; then the women, racing after the children to bring them back, followed by the men going out to protect their womenfolk.’59 By the time a frightened peasant finally levelled a shaking shotgun at Pritchard and said he wanted the British to lay down their weapons, a sizeable crowd had gathered.
Seeing that resistance would see innocents killed, Pritchard told his men to surrender. ‘There was dead silence for a moment,’ Deane-Drummond recalled,
and then one man asked in an incredulous voice: ‘Aren’t we going to make a fight for it, sir?’ I had never seen such a look of anguish on anybody’s face as on Tag’s at that moment. He just looked at the women and then at the man who had asked the question, and said that he was sorry but that they would have to give in. Our hearts ached as we put down our pistols and told Picchi to tell the Italian that we were giving in because of the women and children.60
Eventually the local police arrived. Pritchard and his men were taken down to the village of Tearo where they were held in police cells and told by a Fascist officer that they would be shot the next day. In the evening they were driven by lorry to the town of Calitri where, in the foul-smelling waiting room of the railway station, they dozed on the floor and were reunited with the two British parties last seen when leaving the aqueduct: both groups had also been caught that morning. Finally a train arrived and all were taken to Naples where waiting trucks ferried them to cells in the city’s military prison. A few days after that, they were joined by the injured man they had left at the aqueduct and then by Gerry Daly’s party. Dropped in the wrong gorge and too far from the aqueduct to take part in its destruction, Daly and his companions had heard the detonations while pushing hard to reach the target and had resolved straight away to make at once for the coast by a series of night marches. They were still at liberty four days later, but they were also eighteen miles shy of the sea with only hours remaining, or so they thought, to rendezvous with the submarine. Pretending to be German airmen who had crashed in the mountains and hoping to negotiate the use of a vehicle, they tried their luck in a village café but were recognised as being British and arrested. With that, every member of Colossus was in enemy hands.
It was in Naples that the interrogations began. It was also in Naples that the Italians became particularly interested in Fortunato Picchi. In an attempt to prevent his true identity from being revealed, the commandos, once captured, had immediately ceased to use him as an interpreter. But when Deane-Drummond, waiting to be interrogated, saw him in the corridor outside their cells, Picchi seemed poised to abandon his cover story. ‘The officers were questioned first and, just before going in, Picchi spoke a few words to me,’ Deane-Drummond recorded:
He said that he would tell ‘them’ who he really was and that ‘they’ would understand, as nobody liked the Fascists. He was not fighting Italy, he said, but only the Fascists. I told him that our orders were quite definite, we should say absolutely nothing except our rank and name, and that I thought that his other course would be very dangerous for him. I was then called in to be questioned and I did not see Picchi again.61
The last of the parachutists to see him were his cellmates. Concerned about his agitated state after he returned from one interrogation, they tried to raise his spirits. ‘I think it is all up with me,’ he told one of them, Lance-Corporal Doug Jones, a young Devonian, ‘They know who I am.’62 That night Jones sat with his arm round Picchi’s shoulders, gave him his blanket and tried to persuade him to sleep. In the morning Picchi was taken out again. This time he did not come back.
Tag Pritchard would remember that Picchi had shown ‘no apprehension’ when told in Malta that they were heading for Italy,
which was not surprising, as throughout our short acquaintance we were most impressed by his singleness of purpose in making every effort required of him to defeat Italy … In our opinion he was an extremely courageous man, with a great urge to work for the downfall of the Fascist Party. This spirit was enough to cause him to return to Italy the way he did, fully realising the implications of failure to get away again.63
But perhaps Picchi had been unwilling, or felt unable, to show concern or try to pull out. Or perhaps, as Deane-Drummond’s testimony suggests, he may simply have failed fully to grasp the gravity of the risks he was running. Reading the reports of his Italian interrogators, it is certainly difficult to believe that planners in London had given sufficient consideration to his cover story and fate if he was caught.
During his first interrogation, Picchi tried to stick to that story and said that he was Private Dupont, a Free French soldier. The Italians suspected immediately that this was a lie, and in his next interrogation he gave up his real name, parents, birthplace and date of birth and tried to explain what he was doing there. He told the Italians that he had moved to London in 1921 and had worked for years at the Savoy. He described himself as a bachelor who lived alone and he gave them his home address: 175 Sussex Gardens. He said that he had been interned in June 1940 before enlisting in the Pioneer Corps in December ‘out of gratitude to England’. Training had followed at various locations in England, he said, though he claimed not to know exactly where, and he had learned to parachute, after which he had been attached as an interpreter to a group of paratroopers and dropped into Italy. ‘He would have had the chance to withdraw since he was aware of the mission’s destination,’ Picchi’s interrogators noted, ‘but he did not do so on account of his true love for, and adopted duty to, the English.’64
If Picchi had hoped that a version of the truth might help him, he was to be fatally mistaken. The official machinery turned, fast, as the Italian authorities began the search for corroboration of his story. A dossier compiled in Florence by the Questura, the general police headquarters, shows that family members in Tuscany, including his brothers, sisters and ageing mother, were quickly run to ground and visited. Letters and photographs were demanded, unearthed and taken away. Investigators even traced old colleagues at the Grande Albergo Reale in the Tuscan resort in Viareggio, where, as a young man, Picchi had worked as an assistant po
rter. Shown a photograph, these men confirmed that, yes, this was Picchi.
Soon the Italian authorities had no doubts about his identity. Nor had they doubts about his nationality, the terrible implications of which were realised on 5 April when, having been brought to Rome, he was put before the feared Special Tribunal. As Il Messaggero, the city’s daily newspaper, reported afterwards, Picchi was accused of having served, ‘although an Italian citizen, in the armed forces of the English State which is at war with the Italian State’, and of having assisted ‘during wartime … the military operations of the enemy’.65 The proceedings of the tribunal were brief. They concluded the same day with a death sentence.
Before dawn the following morning, Picchi wrote to his mother. Hurriedly handwritten on both sides of a single small sheet of lined paper, the letter still survives. ‘Mia carissima Mamma,’ it begins, ‘Dopo tanti anni ricevete da me una lettera …’ Translated, it reads in full:
My dearest Mamma
After so many years you receive from me a letter.
I’m sorry dear Mamma for you and for all at home for this disaster, and the pain it will bring. By now it is over for me, all that remains is the world of pain or pleasure. I do not care much about dying. I repent of my actions because I have always loved my country and must now be recognised as a traitor. Yet in all conscience I do not think that that is so.
Forgive me dear Mamma and remember me to all. I ask you especially for your forgiveness and your blessing which I need so much. Kiss all my brothers and sisters and to you dear Mamma a hug, hoping with the grace of God to be reunited in heaven.
With many kisses
Your child
Fortunato
Long live Italy!!
Sunday, 6 April 194166
It was Palm Sunday. In the cool and quiet of the still-dark early hours, Picchi was removed from the prison of Regina Coeli and driven through the empty streets and into the countryside south of the city. Usually trips like this were made with the prisoner handcuffed in the back of a van, with ropes, stakes, a simple wooden chair and perhaps a priest sharing the journey. Always they ended at Forte Bravetta, a remote, squat, grey-bricked fortress, empty and obsolete, that had been built in the nineteenth century as part of a great defensive chain around Rome. Here the prisoner would be removed and led to a spot inside the fortress walls. And it was here, by a high bank of earth built as a berm to protect the entrance from enemy bombardment, that Picchi was seated and bound in the chair with his face towards the bank, leaving his back and the back of his head exposed to the rifles of the firing squad: the Fascist way of disposing with traitors. As dawn broke, he was shot.
During the planning for Colossus, the hope had been that success would have ‘far reaching effects upon the course of the war’ and an ‘incalculable’ impact upon enemy morale.67 Afterwards it was learned that the Italians had repaired the aqueduct within days and the temporary shortage of water had caused little disruption. When the first reports reached him of the probable capture of the party, Winston Churchill expressed regret at the raid having been allowed to go ahead. ‘I do not remember having been consulted in any way upon the proposal,’ he told Sir Hastings Ismay. ‘The use of parachute troops was a serious step to take … and I would rather not have opened this chapter.’68 While gently reminding the Prime Minister that he had in fact approved the operation, Ismay acknowledged that it had failed.
In fact, although no lasting physical damage was done, there had been positive results. There were benefits for British planners, for example. Lessons learned ranged from the vital need to improve methods of dropping containers of kit, to the disadvantages of men using reflective parachutes in moonlight. Moreover, the sheer fact that a British commando party had made a successful landing disconcerted the Italians considerably. Fear of future raids led to hundreds of Italian soldiers being deployed around the country to guard and camouflage potential targets, from aqueducts to dams and bridges.
The operation also had a sizeable propaganda impact. Once the Italians had broken the story with their communiqué from Rome, British newspapers spent days presenting the raid in a wholly positive light, with front-page reports telling at last of offensive British exploits and encouraging a Blitzed and war-weary British public to recognise the courage and initiative of the men who had taken part. ‘BRITISH PARACHUTISTS LAND IN ITALY’ read the headline of the Evening Standard when Rome’s broadcast was heard.69 ‘PARACHUTISTS NOT TO DIE’, it declared the next day when more news from Rome reported that the captured soldiers would be treated as prisoners of war since they had been caught while wearing British uniform.70 ‘The veil is lifted this morning on an amazing British secret,’ the Sunday Pictorial proudly announced:
Without a word leaking out we have trained parachute troops – and dropped them in Italy … Despite the capture of some of our men, the news that we are not only up to date in this branch of warfare, but have actually carried out the first paratroop landing ever made across sea and over a hostile coast, will gladden every Briton. When they floated across the sea, when they floated down on to enemy soil and set about their tasks, they were making a new page in our history.71
The same sentiment was expressed, with more reserve, in The Times:
The landing of parachute troops in Southern Italy is a small matter in itself. Yet it is not surprising that it should have excited world-wide interest or that it should have been embroidered with speculation. Obviously, to drop parachutists in a country which is not in the process of being invaded is an act of exceptional daring, demanding the highest qualities of determination and abnegation in the troops concerned.72
Even the German press commented on the raid, apparently. The Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s daily newspaper, was said to have declared uncharitably about the British use of parachute troops: ‘This imitation of German methods was one of the worst examples of stealing ideas in war.’73
Press interest was revived when Rome radio announced on 6 April that a traitor, Fortunato Picchi, had been shot in connection with the raid. Picking up the broadcast, the BBC Home Service repeated it. British newspapers drafted stories. The Ministry of Information stopped almost all. By then the War Office in London knew that Picchi had been captured: the name ‘Private Dupont’ had appeared on a list passed by the Vatican to British diplomats in neutral Switzerland. But it also seemed possible that the Italians might not have killed him and were simply reporting his death as a means of fishing for a British reaction.
The story was not spiked for long. Listening to the Home Service when it repeated Rome’s report had been Florence Lantieri, Picchi’s landlady in Sussex Gardens. Afterwards she telephoned the BBC to confirm the dead man’s name. Then she placed this death notice in The Times:
PICCHI. On Palm Sunday 1941 Fortunato Picchi sacrificed his life for the cause of freedom. A brave man of high ideals. Until the day breaks, dear. – F.74
The notice appeared on 15 April. Later that day she rang Frank Snow, a finance officer on SOE’s London staff with whom she had had some contact, and asked ‘very tearfully’ if he had time to speak:
She told me how it had come as a great shock to her when she first heard the BBC broadcast that an Italian had been executed by the Italians. She went into a very pathetic description of her feelings, and how her heart had stopped and how nice the BBC people had been to her when she phoned them to ask the name of the Italian … The whole [of our] conversation which did not last three minutes was purely [because] the good woman wanted to talk to someone and perhaps find a little comfort in doing so.75
Although a brief report in the Daily Telegraph on 7 April had named Picchi as the man whom Rome claimed to have shot, it was the publication of the death notice that prompted the Ministry of Information to release the stories prepared previously about him. ‘SAVOY’S PICCHI DIES FOR US’ declared the front-page headline of the next day’s Daily Express. ‘[I]t has been established that the 5-ft.-nothing Italian whose bald head, fringed with b
lack hair, had bobbed to most European and American celebrities was the Fortunato Picchi the Duce claims to have shot as a traitor …’76 Under the title ‘MR FORTUNATO PICCHI – LIFE SACRIFICED FOR FREEDOM’, The Times even published a brief obituary.77
In later months, others were inspired to spread Picchi’s story further. Time magazine printed an article about him entitled ‘Little Fortune’.78 Bulletins from Britain, a news-sheet produced by the British Information Service for circulation in the United States, included an account. So did Free World, a monthly magazine aimed also at an American readership. The Remaking of Italy, a Penguin paperback published in 1942, was dedicated to his ‘glorious memory’.79 Also in 1942 a chapter was devoted to Picchi in Went the Day Well, a book of pen-portraits of men and women of different nationalities who had all died fighting the Axis, ranging from British and Commonwealth servicemen to a Luxembourger, a Norwegian, a Chinese, a Greek, a pair of Yugoslavs and a Czech. Picchi was the book’s only Italian.80
The Savoy Hotel probably played a role in seeing at least some of these accounts printed. The hotel’s press officer, Jean Nicol, would later recall having done all she could to alert editors to Picchi’s story after she received a sudden visit from:
a little old lady, trimly dressed and with neat tight curls, [who] came into my office and announced herself as Picchi’s landlady; she had, she said, been notified of his death and she had called about some belongings of his in the hotel … When I heard the full story I was anxious that it should become widely known, not only as tribute to Picchi, but also it was a matter of pride to the hotel and the rest of the staff that one of their number – and, indeed, one of those very Italians whose presence [in Britain] had been questioned – should have died so heroically.81
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