* * *
The experiences of the Maquis of Vercors, the pitched battle it put up against the Germans during the assault of July 21–23, 1944, and the bloody reprisals that followed have been a source of debate and controversy in France since the end of the war. The prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, under the charge of “senseless destruction of cities, town, and villages, and devastations unjustified by the military necessity,” cited the example of numerous villages destroyed in their entirety in France, among others “Oradour-sur-Glane, Saint-Nizier, and in the Vercors: La Mure, Vassieux, La Chappelle-en-Vercors.” Nevertheless, not a single soldier of the Wehrmacht who participated in the operations against Vercors was held accountable for war crimes.52
Countless accounts have been written to discuss whether the French authorities in Algiers gave false hopes to the leaders of Vercors on their support for the Plan Montagnards. The fact is that this plan was never part of the Allied strategy for using the French Resistance in coordination with the landings in Normandy and Provence. The reprisals in Vercors left the participants in the Resistance with a feeling of having been misunderstood, abandoned, and even betrayed by the Allies. Historians have established that there were not sufficient means among the French officials in Algiers or among the Allies who supported them to match the enthusiasm of the members of the Resistance.53 Several members of the Resistance have pointed out that shortly after the reprisals, the region rose up again when the Allies landed in the south of France, which they would not have done had they felt betrayed.
The military choices of the Maquis leaders have been questioned as well, and their decision to engage in frontal battles against a much stronger enemy has been called in various degrees a tragedy, a disaster, and a mistake. Alain le Ray, one of the proponents of the original Plan Montagnards, rejected the aura of disaster and strategic error. In a debate in 1975, he suggested that guerrilla tactics in Vercors might have provoked even more reprisals and that the battle of the Vercors tied down an important section of the Germans army. It “induced in the German war machine a kind of paralysis, both moral and material in the very locality where the Allied forces would penetrate into France after the landings in Provence.”54
In the end, General Koenig probably summarized best the story of the Maquis of Vercors when he told an enquiry commission in 1961:
Due to circumstances that were quite unfortunate at the time, you became soldiers assigned with a true sacrificial mission. You became, pardon the expression, “laboratory rats …” I tell you this to remove a little bit of the bitterness that you who lived through those hours feel. There are moments when we find ourselves, pardon the expression, in deep s … and unfortunately the story has a sad ending, meaning no one is able to escape.55
CHAPTER 10
Mission Walla Walla in Italy
The declaration of the armistice by the Italian government on September 8, 1943, marked the beginning of the partisan movement in Italy to resist the German occupation as well as the reborn Fascist state, Republicca Sociale Italiana (RSI), or Italian Social Republic, which Mussolini proclaimed on September 14, 1943, two days after Skorzeny’s commandos liberated him from captivity. The first partisan bands popped up spontaneously and included former Italian officers and soldiers who took to the mountains to avoid capture by the Germans. Their ranks grew with former prisoners of war and political prisoners who escaped detention in the first days after the armistice. A third major source of recruits was Italian civilians who wanted to escape forced conscription into the new Fascist military structures or in the Todt Organization. Armed resistance was not limited to the mountains and remote villages. Urban guerrilla groups, known as Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), or Patriotic Action Groups, operated in all the major cities of occupied Italy by the beginning of 1944.
Like elsewhere in Europe where partisan movements developed, partisan units in Italy were affiliated with political parties, most of which were anti-monarchist as well as anti-Fascist in nature. Formations linked to the Communist Party were called Garibaldi units; those affiliated with the Action Party were known as Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) units; those affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party were called Fiamme Verdi (Green Flames); and those affiliated with the Socialist Party were called Matteotti units. Other minor political parties that supported the resistance included the Liberal and Republican parties. Despite their differences, these parties coordinated their actions in local national liberation committees that reported up to the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale per l’Alta Italia (CLNAI), or National Liberation Committee for Upper Italy with underground headquarters in Milan. By April 1944, CLNAI had become the supreme authority for resistance in occupied Italy and it assumed the stature of an underground government.1 CLNAI partitioned the territory into operational zones in which all partisan formations coordinated their actions. One of the largest zones was the Sixth Zone, an area centered around the city of Genoa that covered parts of the Piedmont, Lombardy, Liguria, and Emilia regions of Italy.
Early partisan activities consisted of aiding downed Allied airmen, passive resistance to occupation directives, and minor acts of sabotage. Starting in the early months of 1944, these activities became increasingly more organized and with tangible effects. Between March 1 and 8, the resistance coordinated labor strikes in all the major centers of Northern Italy, in which hundreds of thousand of workers shut down factories and production sites despite strict measures put in place by the Fascist government and the German occupation authorities who had a keen interest to keep Italy’s industrial machine running at full capacity. Over two hundred thousand workers participated in the strikes, according to the estimates of the Fascist Ministry of Interior, whereas post-war accounts by Italian historians put the numbers between 500,000 to 1.2 million. The Germans arrested and deported about 1,200 workers, including 400 to 600 from Fiat factories alone.2
The Germans countered the armed resistance in Italy with ferocity. With the Allies stalled at Cassino and Anzio, units of the Wehrmacht, with the support of the SS and Fascist blackshirt troops, spent the early months of 1944 methodically cleaning up the areas in the rear of the partisans and their supporters. Raking operations, known as rastrellamenti, aimed to kill as many partisans as possible but also to terrorize the civilian population in the mountains. The Nazi-Fascist troops killed on the spot family members of the partisans and other civilians suspected of aiding them. They burned thousands of houses, farmhouses, stables, and other property to punish any sign of solidarity with the partisans.
In the area around La Spezia, units of the 135th Fortress Brigade conducted such operations with an ever-increasing regularity. Between May 3 and 5, 1944, Colonel Kurt Almers himself lead a joint operation of troops from his brigade, the “Herman Goering” armored parachute division, and several Fascist units in the area of Fivizzano in the Apuan Alps about twenty miles northeast of La Spezia. The German monthly report of activities in the area summarized the results of the operation. The German losses included one dead and two wounded; Fascist losses were similar. The operation resulted in “143 dead, 170 prisoners including a lieutenant colonel of the US Air Force; the Italian prisoners were shot the day after.”3 In the village of Mommio, the Germans destroyed seventy out of seventy-two houses. Erminia Pierotti, a survivor from the village of Sermezzana described the actions of the blackshirts on May 4 as follows:
At Sermezzana, they went to the house of Pietro and Geremia Gherardi near the church. Pietro was married with two children and the wife expected a third one. Both of them worked for the Todt but it rained that morning so they were home. The blackshirts wanted to know the whereabouts of the partisans and the Gherardi’s third brother, Ottavio, who was with the partisans. Pietro and Geremia said they knew nothing, and how could they give up their brother! Given that they were not telling, the blackshirts cut off one ear from each brother then took them near the cemetery where they shot them. They put the ears in a little bag for their commander. The
two brothers Trippalla, also Todt workers, suffered the same fate. They threw one out of the window, shot him on the ground and cut off the ear. They took the other brother, 19 years old, to show them the way to the next village. They shot him in the pinewoods and off with his ear as well!4
Through terror, the Germans were successful in dispersing some of the most important partisan units especially in the mountainous areas where the partisans had to contend with the winter weather in addition to the ferocity of their Nazi-Fascist pursuers. Despite the heavy losses, the partisans who survived the rastrellamenti had become by the end of spring 1944 a serious fighting force, with the experience and skills necessary to absorb and organize the new influx of volunteers that headed to the mountains as soon as the weather improved. More importantly, they were hardened in battle and thirsting for vengeance.
* * *
In the first half of 1944, the OSS established and nurtured contacts with several partisan units along the Tyrrhenian coast. Initially, these contacts were mainly for intelligence-gathering purposes. The OSS Secret Intelligence branch put ashore from fast boats or parachuted into the mountains several teams of Italian agents, most of them recruited from SIM, the Italian military intelligence service. Along the Ligurian coast alone, there were several teams composed of an agent and a radio operator each, with code names Lobo, Valentine, Otto, Piroscafo, and Maria Giovanna. Italian SI agents working for the OSS also organized two networks, known as Locust and Meridien, each counting about thirty individuals among agents, informers, sympathizers, and guides.5 At the beginning of the summer, these teams reported a significant increase in the numbers of partisans in the Sixth Zone. The reports came at a time when the area had become of strategic importance for the Allied command.
After finally breaking through the Cassino and Anzio fronts, the Allied forces liberated Rome on June 4, 1944, and moved swiftly up the Italian peninsula. Fighting delaying actions, the Germans fell back toward the heavily fortified Gothic Line on the Apennine Mountains, where at the beginning of August they stopped to make their next stand. The Sixth Operational Zone was immediately behind the Gothic Line and in the rear of the German units countering the advance of the American Fifth Army. General Mark Clark, commanding officer of the Fifth Army, recognized that the partisans could tie down significant enemy troops who would otherwise fight his men at the frontline. Clark welcomed any relief he could get at this point. Almost overnight, he had lost half the strength of his army when seven battle-hardened divisions of the French Expeditionary Corps commanded by General Alfred Juin and the American VI Corps commanded by General Lucien Truscott left Italy to conduct Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France that began on August 15, 1944.6
The Italian operational groups were finally able to step in and fulfill a significant part of their original mission and became “instrumental in harnessing resistance groups throughout northern Italy and forging them into a weapon that created a major diversion of the German military effort on the Italian front.”7 The first OG operation to establish contact with Italian partisans was a fifteen-man team, code-named Walla Walla, under the command of Captain William C. Wheeler, Jr., and First Lieutenant Quayle N. Smith. It also included Technical Sergeant Angelo Galante, a veteran of the OG operation to rescue Allied prisoners of war in September 1943.8 The team departed for the mission at 2100 hours on August 11 from Brindisi airport. In the early hours of the morning, they parachuted on Mount Aiona, about thirty miles northeast of Genoa, where the OSS SI team Locust had arranged the reception with the help of two squads of local partisans. About fifty containers with war materials for the partisans followed the OGs to the ground.
The terrain was rocky and filled with crevasses and precipices. A light but troublesome wind from the mountains complicated the descent. The wind blew the parachutes, with their men and containers, away from the drop zone onto locations that were hard to get to among the cliffs. Some of the OGs were hurt upon landing, but a doctor was at hand among the reception party to offer first aid. The partisans prepared rudimentary stretchers to help evacuate the wounded parachutists. It took until eight in the morning to collect all the men and material and move them to sheltered storage areas that the partisans had built near the drop zone. The Americans were welcomed with great joy and open arms. There was an immediate spirit of fraternizing and, after the preliminary introductions, Captain Wheeler ordered his men to distribute chocolate, whisky, and cigarettes among the partisans.
The OGs wasted no time in teaching the partisans how to use the weapons they had brought with them, including 60-mm mortars, bazookas, and Bren guns. After a while, the equipment and the wounded OGs who could not walk were loaded on sixty mules. In the early afternoon of August 12, the entire column, including eleven of the fifteen Americans and thirty partisans escorting them, set off from the barracks at Mount Aiona. Lieutenant R. T. Smith and three OGs remained on Mount Aiona to set up the radio transmitter for the mission and provide follow-up training in the use of arms, plastic explosives, and preparing booby traps for sabotage.
When Albert Materazzi, the executive officer of the Italian OGs, briefed the team for the mission before departure, little was known of the partisan activity in the area. He told them to expect to contact a small band of partisans, live with them in the mountains, and make raids upon targets as they presented themselves. So Wheeler and his men were surprised when, once they reached the roadway, the partisans unloaded the equipment by the side of the road and dismissed the muleteers and their mules. In a short while, a modern passenger bus and several trucks arrived to transport the group over nearly twenty miles of road to the partisan headquarters in the town of Rovegno. Several partisan commanders welcomed them to “liberated Italy,” which the OGs soon learned comprised an area fifty miles long by thirty miles wide between Genoa and Piacenza from where Nazi-Fascists had been completely driven out. The partisans were in full control of the area, which they called the Republic of Torriglia, and could move freely throughout the region by motor transport.
The partisan activities included raiding enemy garrisons and attacking major highways and secondary roads. The actions were limited due to the acute shortage of arms, ammunition, and explosives, although the partisans hoarded a lot of material that they kept for defensive actions against the enemy during their mop-up operations. The partisan commanders regarded the OG mission as their saviors and asked them to do their best to secure adequate supply drops and air support during fights. When the OGs asked to get involved in the fighting, the partisans said they had the men to do the fighting as long as the Americans would supply and train them. Lieutenant Smith and the three OGs that remained at Mount Aiona coordinated daily drops of war materials, equipment, food, and medicine between August 12 and 26.
OSS map depicting Italian OG operations between August 1943 and May 1945.
On August 26, the Germans began a serious cleanup operation aimed at retaking control of areas they considered of strategic importance for the defense of their positions. The Germans were particularly weary of the liberated areas behind the Gothic Line, which the Allies could use as bridgeheads for end-run operations that would bypass the German fortifications. Two German divisions went into attack, supported by artillery and mortar fire, against five to six thousand partisans defending the territory. The partisan units dispersed in different directions to avoid annihilation. The OG mission split up into groups of two or three attached to different partisans to evade capture. The parachuting of supplies at Mount Aiona stopped in order not to attract undue attention of the enemy to the storehouses and hiding places the partisans had built around that drop zone.
The German all-out assault made clear the limitations of partisan warfare. An eyewitness of the events at the time wrote, “500 men carried the brunt of the battle, 2,500 (a generous number) participated marginally but remained with their units, and the remaining 2,000 threw their weapons away and ran without firing a shot.”9 As usual, the fights with the partisans gave wa
y to reprisals against the population, in which the Fascist units often distinguished themselves for their ruthlessness. Nuto Revelli, one of the partisan commanders, wrote in his diary:
The Fascists we hate, I emphasize, “we hate,” because they arrive always after the battle, they arrive always after the rastrellamenti, following the Germans. The Fascists are ferocious in their reprisals against the population, against the defenseless. They surpass the Germans these clumsy Italians, scoundrels that specialize in burning, blackmailing, and hanging, dirty in their souls as in their uniforms, with their black shirts of mourning and terror on their grey-green uniforms.10
* * *
The Italian partisans showed a lot of resiliency. By the end of September, with the wave of rastrellamenti receding, they regrouped and resumed their actions against the Germans. At this time, the OGs of Walla Walla began again receiving drops of supplies for the partisans of the Sixth Zone. The supplies were initially dropped during the night, but the mountainous terrain made it very difficult to retrieve all of them. During a drop on November 4, for example, the materials were dispersed over eight kilometers, with the nearest container landing seven kilometers from the designated drop zone. As the partisans began to re-occupy the ground they had lost during the summer, the drops began arriving during the day.
The mission used the promise of supplies and support to implement the policy of military unification of all resistance fighters under the common command of the Sixth Zone and the CLNAI. Those groups that refused to accept the common command were dissolved and the personnel absorbed into the regular units. At the time, there were two major partisan divisions in the zone, a Garibaldi division under Anton Ukmar, also known as Miro, and a Giustizia e Libertà division under the command of Fausto Cossu, known simply as Fausto.
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