Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  It was also undisciplined. Most of them were intelligence officers who had not been subjected overlong to the grueling regime of infantry school, which induces in soldiers a proper respect for the military hierarchy. Boyle asserted his authority with a mixture of tact and firmness that won him lifetime friendship with many of the Americans, including Milano. The training exercises were partly lectures and exams but chiefly consisted of practical experience. The battalion remained at Fedala for four months, and its members were put to work at once censoring all mail from prisoners of war in the North African theater. Prisoners on both sides were allowed to write home, and their mail was collected and delivered by the Internation al Red Cross. Every letter was carefully scrutinized for any clues it might provide to the state of the enemy armies and their morale. MIS teams were sent out to POW camps to interrogate Italian and German prisoners. There were two big camps near Casablanca, and that was where the 7769th first studied the difficult task of questioning POWs to extract as much information as possible within the bounds laid down by the Geneva Conventions. Other teams were sent to the front to join combat divisions to interrogate prisoners as they were captured. This was the most urgent task. The information they gathered was relayed to the order of battle specialists, whose duty was to determine as accurately as possible the strength and position of enemy formations.

  The MIS also developed other skills. There was a secret ink laboratory that examined any suspicious mail from POWs that might conceal messages. The Forward Operations Section trained officers who were to be dropped into France for intelligence and resistance work and trained Italian specialists who would work with the Italian Resistance. There was also a section that analyzed aerial photographs.

  Another task was examining French civilians who had made their way out of France to reach North Africa and who often had important information of the state of German defenses along the Atlantic. This had nothing to do with the war in North Africa or future operations in Italy: it was part of the immense intelligence effort that went into preparing for the Normandy landings. On one occasion, Milano was introduced to a seventy-eight-year-old schoolteacher who had just arrived in Fedala by way of Portugal. It was an astonishing achievement, and Milano asked him how he had prepared himself mentally for such an arduous journey. The teacher glared at him and replied, "Have you ever seen the Germans in your home country?"

  After four months in Fedala, the battalion was moved to Algiers. Soldiers and all their equipment were loaded into boxcars. It was uncomfortable but stimulating: the men had straw pallets to sleep on and were supplied with jerry cans of water. They supplied themselves with a fine selection of local wine to help them on their way and soon established amicable relations with the train crew: the train would stop every three or four hours to allow the men to stretch their legs and inspect the countryside. One stop was at Sidibel-Abbes, the fabled headquarters of the French Foreign Legion. The MIS soldiers, intellectuals and college professors though they were, had all been brought up on Hollywood and the legend of Beau Geste and were delighted to discover that the reality far exceeded the Hollywood myth. The Legion was most hospitable and showed the Americans around and served them wine and sweets.

  This was a new way to go to war: most of the soldiers had never been abroad before, and after spending Christmas in Morocco they were now crossing half of North Africa, through utterly unfamiliar countryside, meeting people quite out of their experience. Travel, they concluded, broadens the mind. The whole trip took five days, and the unit was soon installed in its new quarters at Maison Blanche outside Algiers, where it remained until it embarked to take part in the Salerno landings in Italy.

  When the Germans in Tunis capitulated in May 1943, part of the 7769th MIS moved there to examine and report on the copious archives left behind by the German Army and Luftwaffe. A hundred thousand German soldiers and 150,000 Italians surrendered at the end of that campaign, and there was an immense job to be done sorting them out and analyzing the information they provided.

  After the conquest of North Africa, the Allies launched the invasion of Sicily, on July 10, 1943. The 7769th was not part of that operation, but a number of its members were sent over to Seventh Army Headquarters on the island to serve as interrogators, order of battle specialists, and photo interpreters. The battalion, meanwhile, prepared for the invasion of the Italian mainland.

  Among the consolations offered by the eclectic way the battalion had been recruited were the varied skills and interests of its members. One of the most popular officers was Lieutenant John Scheering, whose family came from Germany and who was a pianist who had made a living before the war performing in hotels and cafes in New York. He had been recruited as an intelligence officer because he was bilingual in German, but his chief contribution to the war effort in the early days was entertaining the troops with an upright piano he had acquired in Morocco. The transportation officer would never have allowed the piano to be shipped from Fedala to Algiers, so the troops had simply loaded it into the train without bothering to ask permission, concealing it in their other baggage. It survived the journey undetected and undamaged and was soon established in the mess. Scheering resumed his regular performances. If Colonel Boyle ever noticed that his men had miraculously produced a new piano so soon after supposedly leaving the old one behind in Morocco, he never commented on his observation.

  Getting the instrument to Italy was much more difficult. The 7769th was due to go over the beaches when the invasion took place and anticipated some rough fighting. They could hardly take the instrument with them on a landing craft under enemy fire. A committee was formed under Jim Milano's direction to consider the problem and concluded that the piano was an essential weapon of war and therefore had to be conveyed to Italy by any means, fair or foul. The MIS, by its nature and functions, had a wide circle of acquaintances throughout the Army, and the committee soon made a deal with members of a sympathetic ordnance maintenance unit. The sympathy was nourished with booze, cigarettes, and the universal desire of GIs to get the better of the system. The piano was boxed up, marked "spare parts," and confided to the transport unit to be picked up in Italy.

  The climax of the war in the Mediterranean was upon them. The Italian people and government, all but the die-hard Fascists, were desperate to escape from the war and Adolf Hitler's embrace. The government finally summoned its courage and deposed Mussolini on July 25, then opened negotiations to surrender to the Allies. The British and Americans were taken by surprise, even though the event had been anticipated. They did not react immediately, and Hitler was given time to make ready the occupation of Italy, Operation Axis, while the Allies busied themselves with completing the liberation of Sicily and preparing their next move. At last, on September 3, the British Eighth Army landed in Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot. Italy surrendered on the eighth, and the next day the Americans and British landed at Salerno, thirty miles south of Naples. But the Germans were ready, and in the next few days, they occupied the whole of northern Italy and Rome and rushed troops down to Naples and beyond, bottling up the Americans in Salerno. Four days after the invasion, they almost succeeded in driving the Americans back into the sea. There was heavy fighting for a month before the Fifth Army broke out from its bridgehead and linked up with the Eighth Army, which was fighting its way up the peninsula. By then the Germans had constructed a series of fortifications across the peninsula they called the Gustav Line, which held the Allies for the next nine months.

  The 7769th MIS was in the thick of the fighting after the Salerno landings, though not all together. Milano and others landed a week after D-Day, an interval they spent at sea, waiting for the infantry to clear the beaches. The whole unit did not follow until a month later, after the liberation of Naples on October 1. Milano and his colleagues were busy from the start at their task of collecting intelligence and interpreting it for the generals. By this time, the neophytes who had landed in Morocco a year earlier were hardened professionals. Like the res
t of the Army, they had learned their trade the hard way. In due course their heavy equipment caught up with them-and with the help of a lavish use of Italian wine the unit had liberated in its travels, John Scheering recovered his piano. It stayed with the 7769th for the duration of the war, as they moved up Italy through Rome, Caserta, and, eventually, Milan. When the Germans surrendered and the 7769th moved on to Austria, Scheering donated the instrument to an Italian orphanage. He assumed, correctly, that he would have no trouble finding a replacement in his new assignment.

  In the meantime, wherever the 7769th set up its camp, Scheering and his piano were installed in the mess, and every evening he would entertain his colleagues with Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, or Irving Berlin. It was a long, difficult campaign, and Milano never had any doubt that he had been right in designating the piano an essential weapon of war.

  The fighting in Italy lasted from the first Allied landings on the mainland, in September 1943, until the end of the war. The Wehrmacht held its line across the peninsula between Rome and Naples for nine months, until it was finally forced back by a huge British assault on Monte Cassino. After the retreat from Rome,. the Germans formed a new line north of Florence and held it almost until the end of the war. The chief Allied effort shifted to France, first with the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, then with the landings on the French Riviera, Operation Anvil, on August 15. The Italian front stabilized for the next ten months until the general German collapse in April 1945.

  Milano and his colleagues spent their time interrogating prisoners and civilians, censoring POWs' mail, tapping telephones in the occupied areas, and performing all the other tasks of Army Intelligence. The enemy order of battle was the unit's central concern. Tactical information came from prisoners, patrol leaders, aerial photography, and constant feedback from combat units on such matters as "sound and flash" reports and the sightings of artillery spotters. For several months, Milano was a member of a task force that supported partisans fighting the Germans and the Fascists behind the lines in northern Italy. The Allied intelligence teams debriefed partisans who came through the lines and prepared airdrops of supplies. This involved choosing which forces to support, selecting drop zones, coordinating the timing of the drops, and then getting together the weapons, ammunition, and other supplies that were to be sent over. The planes were then loaded and their crews briefed. The most important of all these functions was ensuring that the supplies went to the right group. Even at that early stage, the U.S. Army had no wish to send supplies to the Communist Resistance.

  By the end of 1944, the Army was planning for the postwar occupation of Austria. Milano's unit was designated to participate in intelligence activities in the proposed American zone of that country, and he spent a great deal of time preparing for his new task. He attended training courses at Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, including one directed by his old friend Lieutenant Colonel Boyle of British Intelligence, and studied such matters as telephone surveillance. The equipment arrived from the United States and was installed at the central telephone exchange in Naples to keep watch on any surviving Fascists and also to prepare the Americans for their future duties in Austria.

  The 7769th, as we have seen, started its war with eighty-five Italian-speaking officers. More joined later, and there were thousands of other Italian Americans in the U.S. armies that fought up the length of Italy. There was never any doubt of their loyalty: they were Americans, not Italians; but, all the same, fighting across their parents' or. grandparents' homeland was a painful task for them. Fortunately, there was never any doubt whose side the Italians were on: the Allied troops were met everywhere with flowers and cheers. The Allies came as liberators and noted sardonically how difficult it was to find anyone in Italy who had ever supported Mussolini.

  Milano, like many of his comrades in arms, had come to Italy with a personal objective. In the summer of 1942, when he was in training at Fort Myer, Virginia, it was obvious that he was due to be shipped overseas, though he was not officially warned of the transfer, nor of his destination. However, he was being trained to interrogate Italian prisoners of war and had no trouble imagining that his unit would soon find itself in Italy. His only error was in timing: he did not anticipate the detour through North Africa. Then came the unmistakable signs that his departure was imminent: he was vaccinated and issued with a sidearm and a gas mask. He therefore took a weekend pass for a last visit to his parents in Morgantown, where he told them they would probably not see him again for a considerable period.

  His father was not surprised and later that evening summoned him to the living room. He produced five hundred-dollar bills and told him, "I've no idea where you'll wind up, but I hope it's Italy. If you get there, go and see your grandmother. This is for her: you're to put it away safely and not to touch it. Don't get tempted by poker or craps or some lady of the evening. It's for my mother, and she'll need it. I've no idea what the situation is like in the paese, but it can't be any too bright after three years of war. So go find her and do what you can for her."

  Milano naturally promised that he would keep the money safe for his grandmother and that, if the course of war took him anywhere near her village, he would go looking for her. He had never been to Italy. Indeed, he had never left the United States, but he had been brought up on stories of his father's native village in Aquila and had seen many pictures of it. His grandfather had died just before the war, but Milano had many relatives there, besides his grandmother. When he finally reached Italy, more than a year after saying farewell to his parents, he began planning for his return to his ancestral village.

  Aquila is northeast of Rome, and it was months before the Allied armies reached it. The front had stabilized on the Gustav Line, whose key position was a network of fortifications at the celebrated Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino. The Americans attempted to turn the line by a second landing, at Anzio, south of Rome, on January 22, 1944, but failed to exploit their initial success and were contained in their beachhead. Rome finally fell on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day in Normandy.

  During those long months of war, from the Salerno landings to the capture of Rome, Jim Milano watched the pins showing the front line in the situation room. For weeks they never moved, but at last, as the Germans withdrew to their new lines north of the capital, he saw that the British had liberated Avezzano, the capital of Aquila. .His father's village, Collelongo, was about twelve miles away. The moment had come for him to set out. By that time he had collected several duffel bags full of medicine, candy rations, and other goodies from the PX and a selection of supplies for his grandmother, as well as letters from home. His was by no means the only family from Aquila in West Virginia, and many of his friends, knowing what he was planning to do, had given him mail to deliver. Finally he gave himself a leave of absence and set out on his quest.

  He took his driver, Sergeant Porter, and set out from Caserta, where the Allied Forces Headquarters were located. They drove north into territory just liberated by the British army, passing the ruins of Cassino and the monastery on its cliff top. It was an extraordinary and depressing sight. Monte Cassino had been one of the citadels of Western civilization, and its destruction had been one of the most controversial acts of war carried out by the Allies, certainly the most debatable in Italy. The two Americans pressed ahead, confronting all the difficulties of transport in the rear of an army fighting a major battle. They went through Sora, where Milano's grandfather had been born, but they did not stop. Their objective was Collelongo, and they reached the village in the afternoon.

  It had not been damaged by the fighting. Jim Milano left his jeep in the piazza and looked about him. It was an unremarkable Italian village with its church, village square, and houses huddled together under the blazing summer sun. This was the home his father had left at the age of fourteen, and these unknown people, looking curiously and nervously at the Americans, were his own father's contemporaries, friends, and relatives. One middle-aged woman approac
hed and looked intently at him-then screamed in recognition and threw her arms around his neck, kissed him, and began to cry. Milano was more than astonished. An old man came up and seized him by the hand: "You're Jim, aren't you?" and he replied, "Si, io sono Jim." Then the woman identified herself. She was his Aunt Marietta, his father's sister, and she had recognized him from the graduation photograph from West Virginia University that his parents had sent to Collelongo and that was displayed proudly on the family's fireplace mantel.

  His first question was to ask where his grandmother was. His aunt pointed to an old lady dressed all in black, standing in a doorway three houses down the street from the piazza. He walked briskly down to meet her, put his arms around her, and said, "How are you, Grandma?" She, too, recognized him at once. After a moment she looked up at him and said, "You know, almost every day the American bombers fly over, going north. Often I wondered if you were up there."

  Major Jim Milano and his driver, Sergeant Porter, drove over the Brenner Pass into Austria on May 9, 1945, the day after the war in Europe ended. They were following in the footsteps of the U.S. Army, which had occupied western Austria, unopposed, a few days earlier. The rest of the unit was to follow Milano to Innsbruck, their temporary headquarters. These were the interrogators, the censorship group, the technical staff with all their paraphernalia for tapping telephones, and the headquarters staff. Other members of the intelligence team had accompanied the Army across the Alps and had already arrived in Salzburg. They were the Intelligence Task Forces, whose role was to secure post offices, telephone exchanges, banks, local government offices, and any other buildings and facilities that might be of interest to intelligence operations.

  Milano and his driver had loaded a jeep and trailer with their personal belongings, C rations and a large supply of cigars. They had their sidearms, of course, and took the precaution of bringing a good quantity of ammunition in case of need. Their first encounter with the Austrians occurred high in the Alps and proved entirely pacific. They stopped for a picnic lunch in an orchard near a small cottage. Two little girls came out to observe them, and the Americans promptly waved them over and started sharing their rations. The children were delighted at the novelty of American army food, but the al fresco idyll was interrupted by a sudden scream from the cottage: the girls' mother had emerged and was horrified at the sight of her daughters quietly eating with uniformed foreigners. She shouted and gestured at them to return. They ignored her; they were having too much fun. The Americans waved at the woman to join the picnic, but she stayed back, paralyzed with apprehension. Finally Milano took pity on her, loaded the children with spare C rations, and sent them back to their mother. As Milano and Porter left, they waved at her and the girls, who waved back: their first meeting with civilian Austrians had gone well.