Donovan's Devils

by Albert Lulushi

  At about 2300 hours on March 25, Koerbitz and Rehfeld visited Baumgarten in the prison and told him to have the Americans ready and handcuffed by five o’clock the next morning for execution. Baumgarten asked for permission to inform the prisoners a short time before the execution about their fate, but Rehfeld refused and directed him to tell the prisoners that they would be transferred to a POW camp. At 0300 hours in the morning of March 26, a telegram arrived from the headquarters of the 75th Army Corps. It was addressed to Almers and stated that the previous order was confirmed. Shortly afterward, Baumgarten informed the Americans to prepare for transfer to a POW camp. According to Baumgarten, a technical sergeant among the prisoners, most certainly Livio Vieceli who was the only member of the Ginny mission with that rank, said he did not believe his story. Vieceli asked Baumgarten to send word to their families and gave him a list of the names and addresses of their relatives for that purpose.

  Sessler recalled after the war that when it became clear that the Americans would be executed, he brought Joseph Farrell back in the interrogation room. He told him that everything had been done to avoid their execution but that the decision had been made and there was no chance now to change it. They then began to talk about family affairs and Sessler asked if there was anything he could do to help Farrell’s family. Sessler said he was deeply touched by the way Farrell took the news and decided to offer him the means of a personal escape. He had hung his pistol in a belt holster on the handle of the door leading from the interrogation room. He told Farrell to try to take it on his way out the room, but he had to promise not to shoot anybody. Sessler told Farrell to head for the mountains once he had gotten out of the stalls where he would encounter Italian partisans who were in touch with the Allies.

  Farrell initially refused to take advantage of the offer, but eventually changed his mind. Sessler dismissed Farrell and distracted a German sergeant who was in the room to take notes of the interrogation. On his way out, Farrell pushed hard on the door handle and caused the belt to drop on the floor. He removed the gun from the holster while picking the belt from the floor and placing it on a hook on the wall nearby. When Farrell returned to the stalls, he turned the pistol over to Lieutenant Trafficante. The group must have decided to try to escape during transport. At dawn on March 26, when the trucks arrived and the Americans were led to them, Trafficante attempted to draw the gun from the pocket of his jacket. A guard nearby noted the movement and covered him immediately. A scuffle must have ensued in which Trafficante, Alfred DeFlumeri, and Farrell must have tried to overpower the guards, but without success. The Germans searched the whole group for weapons. They removed the outer clothing from Trafficante, DeFlumeri, and Farrell, leaving them only in their undershirts and underwear. They tied the hands of the fifteen Americans securely with wire behind their backs. Then, they loaded them in trucks and took them to the place of execution.

  * * *

  First Lieutenant Rudolph Bolze was commanding officer of the First Company, 905th Fortress Battalion, with responsibility to defend the coastal artillery fortifications built ten miles southeast of La Spezia, at Punta Bianca, along Boca di Magra, and on top of Monte Marcello. A naval artillery battalion manned the weapons installed at these positions, which included a battery of 490-mm antiaircraft guns on Monte Marcello and a battery of the formidable 1,120-mm and 3,150-mm naval guns, called the De Lutti battery.

  On March 25, 1944, Bolze received orders from the 135th Fortress Brigade headquarters to dig a grave measuring three meters wide, six meters long, and one-and-one-half meters deep in which to bury dead saboteurs. Bolze called Sergeant Fritz Borowski to his headquarters and ordered him to dig the grave near an ammunition dump called La Ferrara using Italian laborers from the Todt Organization who had been building fortifications in the area. Then Bolze processed some paperwork and did some writing before going to the canteen to drink wine with his subordinates. Around 2100 hours, Borowski reported that the grave was finished. Bolze told him to be ready with six other soldiers at the grave at 0600 next morning to help bury dead saboteurs. At 2200 hours, the phone rang. Lieutenant Koerbitz from the Almers headquarters wanted to confirm that the grave had been prepared for the burial of the saboteurs the next morning. Koerbitz asked whether there was a place in Bolze’s area suitable for shooting future saboteurs. “What saboteurs?” Bolze asked. “Americans,” Koerbitz answered. Bolze hesitated for about thirty seconds, and then answered, “It is very hard to find a suitable place in this area, but if there is no other way and if it has to be done, they can be shot at Punta Bianca.” Bolze later remembered staying in the garden outside his house until past midnight. “Thinking about the prospects for the morning, I could not sleep that night,” he said. He had thought the men were already dead and that his only duty would be to bury them. Although he had fought in Russia and had seen hundreds of dead soldiers, this burial got on his nerves.

  Bolze woke up at 0500 on March 26. It was dark. He washed, shaved, and at 0530 set off on a bicycle for the grave location where Borowski and six soldiers were waiting. Bolze told Borowski to bury the saboteurs as fast as possible after they arrived because he himself could not stand seeing the burial and would go away. Then Bolze rode in the opposite direction toward Punta Bianca to find a suitable execution spot. At about 0630 hours, a car arrived. Captain Rehfeld, commander of the 906th Fortress Battalion, sat next to the driver and Lieutenant Seidenstuecker, commander of the First Company, 906th, sat in the back. Two four-ton trucks covered in tarpaulin followed the officers’ car. Rehfeld and Seidenstuecker came out of the car and began walking with Bolze toward the execution place. They realized that no doctor was present, so Seidenstuecker went with the car to get the medical officer of the 905th Fortress Battalion, who lived a couple of miles away. Rehfeld said that the executions would take place in two groups, and Bolze pointed out two suitable locations about fifty yards apart.

  Bolze and Rehfeld agreed to place the men with their back toward the sea rather than against the stone embankment to avoid ricocheting bullets hitting German soldiers. Then, they returned to the trucks about 150 yards away. Twenty-five German soldiers with steel helmets and guns stood next to the trucks. Bolze told them to lift the covers of the trucks and noticed that seven or eight men were sitting in each truck. Bolze remembered their brown uniforms—brown shoes, brown pants, brown shirts, no headgear. “What have they done?” Bolze asked. “This is a group of American saboteurs who most likely wanted to dynamite a town,” Rehfeld answered.

  Bolze then walked away about 150 yards around a bend on the road to wait for the medical officer. The doctor arrived at 0715 hours in an Italian Topolino car painted white with a red cross. The doctor stopped the car in front of Bolze, got out, and greeted him, “Morning, Rudi. What’s new with you?” “They are making a cemetery keeper out of me,” answered Bolze. Then he told the doctor that the execution would take place farther down the road but he, Bolze, would stay where he was because he wanted nothing to do with it. The doctor got in the car and drove off. Five minutes later, Bolze heard a salvo of about ten rifles. In ten minutes, there was another salvo. Bolze said later that he sat behind the curve all this time and did not see the execution. Immediately after the second salvo, Bolze realized that the men of the De Lutti battery nearby had not been warned of the execution and might have been alarmed by the salvos. Bolze started toward their positions and walked past the executed men. They lay in a row, some fallen forward, some backward. Blood was rushing out of them in many places and “on some of them you could still hear it pumping out,” Bolze recalled later. Ten feet from Bolze, the doctor was bending over the last man.

  As Bolze had feared, soldiers from the battery fortifications were coming down to see what the noise was about. Bolze ordered them to return to their position and to inform their commander that American saboteurs had been executed. As more soldiers kept coming, Bolze sent them away with the remark that they should not be so inquisitive but instead should watch for saboteurs in their
own battery. In the meanwhile, the soldiers of the execution details finished loading the dead in the truck. Bolze ordered soldiers from the De Lutti battery who were still around to get shovels and cover the blood that was on the ground, which they did immediately.

  Bolze went in the officers’ car with Rehfeld and Seidenstuecker, and they drove in the direction of the grave. The truck with the dead Americans followed behind. When they arrived at the grave, the truck pulled up right at the edge, where Sergeant Borowski and his men were waiting. Two men went into the truck to move the bodies and hand them to four solders on the ground, who carried the dead to the grave. Three or four other soldiers from the firing squad helped to move the bodies and fill the grave. As this was going on, Bolze walked toward the doctor who was standing near Captain Rehfeld. Looking into the truck, he saw four pairs of brown shoes that the German soldiers had removed from the Americans. “At what time I do not know,” Bolze said later. The doctor, who had witnessed the execution, told Bolze, “The executed men died quietly and calmly and bravely.” Bolze stood at the gravesite until the soldiers finished filling it. They covered the fresh earth with grass sod and tree branches for camouflage. No markers of any kind were placed on the grave. Bolze told Borowski to keep all civilians away from the grave and the area for a while. At 1100 hours that morning, he called together the whole company and said, “None of you who may fall into enemy hands is to say anything of the shooting early this morning of two American officers and thirteen men.”

  * * *

  That same morning, Koerbitz called Sessler at the Almers brigade headquarters to interrogate him about the pistol that had been found on Trafficante. Sessler admitted that the pistol was his but explained that it had been late at night, he was tired, and had placed the pistol holster on the door handle where a prisoner could have gotten it. He was not able to explain to Koerbitz why he had not noticed the unusually light holster when he had put it on his body. After the war, Sessler said that he was interrogated for the next thirteen days about the incident.

  Klaps wrote an angry report to the Abwehr Italian office about the events that had transpired, complaining that he had not been able to gather the necessary intelligence from the American prisoners. “The investigation was interrupted because the prisoners of war were shot,” he wrote in the report. Three days later, the naval commandant for the Tyrrhenian Area called Klaps to his offices to explain his part in the affair. Shortly after, Klaps was removed from his position as chief of naval intelligence in La Spezia.

  Two weeks after the execution of the Americans, the Abwehr offices and the Almers Brigade headquarters in La Spezia received an order from Kesselring’s headquarters to destroy all the documents pertaining to the case and to report completion of the order. Clearly, someone in the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht was not comfortable with leaving traces of what had transpired in La Spezia between March 24 and 26.

  * * *

  On the night of March 27, 1944, two hundred German commandos raided the island of Gorgona, which OGs had taken over and held since December 1943. The strong German force overwhelmed the garrison of ten OGs and destroyed the observation post at the semaphore. Carl Lo Dolce, the radio operator of the team, remembered shooting it out with the Germans for five or ten minutes, then, realizing that they were hopelessly outnumbered, scattering in search of a hiding place. He spent the night lying on his back, half submerged in an icy swamp, with his .45 pistol on his chest, waiting for the Germans to find him.2 Fortunately, the Germans withdrew before dawn. The OSS casualties included two killed and three wounded. One Italian agent was also killed. OG forces inflicted some damage to the enemy, but its extent could not be ascertained definitely because the Germans withdrew immediately.

  Lo Dolce later said that he believed the Germans had pinpointed the location of the observation post by tracking his radio transmissions with triangulation equipment. It is not known whether the information Klaps and Sessler gathered from the interrogations of the Ginny team was used to prepare for the attack on Gorgona. The close timing of the two events suggests it may have been.

  Reflecting on the disappearance of the Ginny mission and the German strike on the OSS garrison on Gorgona, the Allied authorities in Italy decided to put an end to the “hit-and-run” operations against targets in the Tyrrhenian and the Ligurian coast. Soon, the situation at the front changed dramatically. After repeated offensives against the German defenses between January and May 1944, the American Fifth and British Eighth armies were finally able to break through the Cassino front and out of the Anzio beachhead. On June 4, 1944, they liberated Rome and continued their push up the Italian boot. The Germans retreated to the Gothic Line and by August 1944 had reestablished a firm frontline, cutting off the Allied advance across the peninsula.

  At the end of August, the Operational Group Command left their base in L’Île-Rousse, Corsica, and on September 1, 1944, settled at the new OSS headquarters in Sienna, Italy. The OGs were now much closer to the areas of operations for their new missions in the Apennine mountain ranges and in northern Italy. These new missions would operate behind the frontlines in enemy-held territory for months on end.

  Reflecting on the experience of the Ginny mission, Donovan and Livermore became increasingly concerned with the continued association of the OGs with the OSS. OGs were military units that operated in uniform. Everyone assumed that if taken prisoner they would be entitled to the same treatment afforded to regular members of the armed forces by the Geneva Convention about the prisoners of war. Since the Germans were fully aware of the intelligence gathering and espionage purposes of the OSS, they would consider any captured OGs as spies and shoot them outright. On August 4, 1944, Donovan reorganized the OGs in the Mediterranean theater of operations into a separate battalion. The 2671st Special Reconnaissance Battalion Separate (Provisional) had no reference to OSS and was placed under the operational control of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3, Allied Force Headquarters. An OG veteran after the war explained the aim behind the new name: “No enemy interrogator would be likely to figure out that this gobbledygook stood for ‘Guerrilla Fighter, U.S.’”3

  The failure of the Ginny mission drove another change in the way the OGs operated. Instead of sending teams into an operational area blind, without knowing what to expect, all future missions were coordinated closely with intelligence agents on the ground from OSS Secret Intelligence or British SOE networks. Working with local resources, these agents identified suitable landing zones for infiltrations by sea or drop zones for parachute drops. They organized reception parties, signaled the pinpoints, collected the operational team members, and were responsible for the teams’ initial security until they were able to execute their mission independently.

  Such improvements in operating procedures ensured that the OGs and members of other OSS Special Operations teams had an almost perfect survivability rate during the infiltration phase. During the rest of the war in Europe, the very few casualties suffered at this stage of the mission were due to equipment malfunction or rough terrain, but never to enemy action.

  Thus, going into the summer of 1944, the OG personnel in Italy were ready to fulfill one of the primary objectives of their original mission—support and organize native resistance against the Germans in their rear areas. This was an objective that their brethren in the French OGs and other OSS Special Operations teams in France completed with great success between June and October 1944, as they supported the landings in Normandy and the ensuing battles on the western front.

  CHAPTER 8

  Operational Groups in France

  The military campaigns in the Mediterranean theater of operations, beginning with the landings in North Africa in November 1942 and continuing with the protracted engagements in Italy throughout 1943 and into spring 1944, were important in paving the way for the success of the landings in France. They tied down significant German troops in Italy who would otherwise be free to deploy in France to counter the invasion. They provided combat ex
perience for the US and other Allied troops that participated in the landings. And they allowed the OSS and its British counterparts to develop, test, and validate scenarios for the use of Special Operations units in support of regular military forces. General Eisenhower, the commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), had been an early supporter of OSS activities in his theaters of operations in North Africa and Italy and embraced the use of Special Operations in Operation Overlord, the code name for the invasion of France in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Such operations played an even more important role in the second Allied landing in German-occupied France, known as Operation Dragoon, on August 15 in the French Riviera.

  The OSS Special Operations command and its British counterpart, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), had worked together since 1942 from their base of operations in London to promote the resistance in occupied countries in Western Europe, especially in France. As D-Day approached, it became clear that their actions needed to be coordinated closely among themselves and with other military units participating in Operation Overlord. In January 1944, the SOE and OSS Special Operations organizations in London merged into a combined SOE/SO headquarters that would jointly run the resistance activities in Western Europe. This headquarters organization established close relationships with the G-3 (Special Operations) and G-2 (Intelligence) staffs of the Allied armies preparing for the invasion of France to ensure coordination between the armies and the resistance organizations behind enemy lines. On May 1, 1944, the joint headquarters was designated Special Forces Headquarters (SFHQ) to remove any distinction between British or American operations, and it was attached to the SHAEF’s G-3 Branch to fully integrate the Special Operations teams with the invasion plans.