First SEALs (29 page)

A German patrol surprised the three men at dawn. Attempting to protect their gear, they shot their way out, fleeing into a nearby swamp. “All day on December 18th we wandered about in the swamp, followed by the Germans, who gave us no peace. The water reached our chests.”

Evading the Germans, the “Wolves” stumbled upon a local with a boat who took them to dry land and shelter. But the man, a collaborator, returned with a patrol of Fascist Italians. Near the door of the house, Lupo's team leader drew his pistol and fired several shots. Simultaneously, bullets tore through his chest and spine.

With their team leader dead, and suffering grievous gunshot wounds of their own, the other two men of the Lupo team hid behind a table with their pistols drawn, waiting for the Fascists to enter the house. The men anxiously waited, planning to play dead, aided in their deception by the streams of blood flowing profusely from their wounds. No one came. After losing several men in the firefight with the OSS operatives, the Fascists had fled. Eventually, the two remaining OSS agents crawled out of a window and escaped to a nearby hut and later into a thicket. “
[One agent] lost a great deal of blood. Having no bandages to stop the bleeding, and thus able to go no further we decided to spend the night there.”

The men hid in the thicket “entirely surrounded by Germans, who kept beating the bushes to find us.” Somehow evading the dragnet, the wounded men continued on the run until December 20, when they were stopped by a patrol from the Italian Republican Guard, who demanded their papers. When they were unable to produce the proper papers, the Fascists stripped the agents and uncovered their wounds. The Republican Guard turned the two men over to the Gestapo for torture. “The methods used by German SS troops to wring confessions from Patriots were like those used in the Middle Ages; they used hot irons, steel rods and chains, and made us drink salt water. Their most modern device was passing a wire charged with an electric current over our genital organs.” Despite the SS's cruelty, the brave men of the Lupo mission survived the war.

Kelly and Ellen conducted countless missions like Lupo. Many of them were joint operations between the MU and one of the most successful OSS units of the war, the Eighth Army Detachment.

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Sometimes referred to by English speakers as Leghorn.

22

THE EIGHTH ARMY DETACHMENT

T
HE BRIGHT LIGHT OF A FULL MOON
shone through the fuselage windows of the cramped Italian bomber as it made its way deeper into occupied Italy. On board a team of Italian spies geared up and prepared to drop into the darkness. With them was twenty-five-year-old American OSS Captain Alphonse P. Thiele, the leader of an extraordinary team of Italian agents committed to the Allied cause. Like many of his fellow OSS officers, he liked to accompany his men as they prepared to venture behind the lines, conducting many of the infiltrations himself:

Captain Thiele personally made twenty-five landings and infiltrations behind enemy lines, five of which were by PT boat through heavily mined and German-patrolled, Adriatic waters, as well as numerous flights for air-supply and agent-drops into enemy territory. On these numerous operations he was constantly in danger of discovery by enemy patrols and on many occasions narrowly missed capture. Several times during amphibious operations Captain Thiele and his crew were fired upon by German patrol craft and in one instance struck a floating mine; the speed however, of his PT boat prevented any serious damage.

Thiele was born in Constantinople shortly after the close of World War I, the son of a German army officer who married an
Italian. The family immigrated to America in the early 1920s, and he became a naturalized citizen. Prior to the war Thiele led an ordinary existence, working as a welder and mechanic and later owning his own gas station at 113 Wales Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey. At the end of 1940, Thiele packed up the business and enlisted in the U.S. Army, eventually becoming an officer in the 458th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion (later attached to the 13th Airborne Division). Not long after his parachute qualification and during his brief time as an instructor, the OSS recruited him. His fluency in Italian and German made him ideal for deployment to the Mediterranean. The five-foot-six, brown-eyed man with a medium build had a “
flair for handling [Italian] agent personnel.” For most of the war he “led his own team, agents, and airplanes.”

Walkiria Terradura, a beautiful Italian partisan, assisted Thiele throughout the war. The two fell in love and would later marry. She helped Thiele develop key contacts and relationships within the Italian resistance that were critical to the success of the Eighth Army Detachment's activities in the Adriatic. Although the Italian men first had doubts about a woman's ability to conduct guerrilla operations, Terradura proved her worth, taking part in several operations to blow up bridges. In fact, her name inspired fear in the Fascists, who referred to her area of operations as “Walkiria Territory” and carefully avoided it. Less easily frightened than their Italian counterparts, the Germans issued no less than eight different warrants for Terradura's arrest, but she managed to stay one step ahead of them. Of this time in her life she wrote, “I lived through hours of unbearable anxiety, a nightmare that would stay with me for years to come.”

Originally formed from the British X Corps, which fought with U.S. General Mark Clark's Fifth Army shortly after the Salerno landing in Italy in December 1943, the Eighth Army Detachment was assigned to aid the British Eighth Army. It was one of the smallest yet most able detachments in the entire OSS. It originally
consisted of one officer (Thiele) and four enlisted men. The men in the unit all spoke Italian fluently. They included Frank Monteleone, a burly, down-to-earth Italian American from Staten Island, New York. Considered by OSS leadership to be “
unusually frank and engaging,” Monteleone was a “motivated and highly reliable” agent. He began his military service as a radio operator with the U.S. Navy but later volunteered for the OSS. He put his language and radio skills to use on many missions within the Italian Theater, including a special mission with OSS superspy Moe Berg, who was assigned to track down Axis high-tech and atomic secrets. Berg's most famous mission involved the potential assassination of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the man in charge of the Reich's quest for a nuclear bomb.
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The British Eighth Army aided in the bloody fighting around Monte Cassino in March 1944. The Allies relentlessly bombed the mountaintop monastery, but the rubble and ruins only formed built-in fortifications for the defenders, who spent months tying up the Army's advance. The Army then moved to the Adriatic coast. The detachment's missions followed the Eighth Army as it fought up the entire eastern side of Italy into the mouth of the strategic Po Valley. Italy's terrain made it particularly easy for the Germans to defend. The mountains running down the center of the country gave them plenty of access to high ground. To get to their enemy, the Allies had to cross numerous rivers, making them
easy targets. In this environment it was nearly impossible to overcome the Germans without solid, actionable intelligence. For that, the Brits turned to the OSS.

Like most OSS groups in Italy, Thiele's group improvised and learned to be very resourceful, eventually gaining four Italian air force planes that were manned by Italian personnel. As the Allies progressed further and further up the spine of Italy, it became more difficult to insert agents because the coastline was strongly held by the Germans and laden with mines. Richard Kelly's San Marco men worked closely with Thiele's Eighth Army Detachment to insert agents by parachute or maritime landing. The OSS operatives came to respect these former enemies and highly valued their work. “
The San Marco guys had balls,” explained Monteleone. “
They were tough sons of bitches. They were like our paratroopers or Rangers. These commandos did everything and were extremely reliable. We trained them, but they hardly needed to be trained.”

At first the Eighth Army Detachment sent in single operatives without any radio equipment. As soon as they obtained operational intelligence, the agents would make their way back across the enemy lines to give the information to the Army. Although it looked good on paper, this plan had major flaws when put into practice. “The men would be infiltrated all right but 90% of the time would be picked up by the enemy.” Thanks to good cover stories and documentation, the agents were eventually released, but “the information would be received too late by the parties concerned.”

To avoid such delays, the detachment developed an alternate, innovative plan: teams would be sent in behind the lines with radio gear “so that their information would be immediately acted upon and questions asked and answered. They would prepare their intelligence system with a view of the area's becoming a tactical zone. Meanwhile, they would report troop movements, targets, defenses, etc.”

This new strategy proved “highly successful.” One of their most successful missions was called “Bionda.” The goal of the operation was twofold: “to secure data on German mission and supply dumps in the Ravenna and Porto Corsini area for the Desert Air Force, and [then] initiate sabotage measures against the German shipping in the Ravenna-Porto Corsini Canal.”

The daring mission began on September 17, 1944. Three Italian operatives from the Maritime Unit's San Marco Battalion—Lieutenant Anelo Garrone, NCO Giuseppe Montanino, and Private Antonio Maletto—were transported by boat deep into German-held northern Italy, landing them on the beach around one in the morning. From the beginning the perilous nature of the mission was clear. Monteleone recalled, “
We landed the San Marco guys after seeing the flashlight signal. As we were landing these guys, we could hear German boats in the distance and voices. Voices carry on the water; they were German voices.”

The OSS men spent the night hiding in the woods. The next morning Garrone sent the men out to explore their surroundings. “
As soon as they returned it was ascertained that [the men] were at about one kilometer north of Porto Corsini and only 300 meters away from a German battery.”

In this precarious position, the San Marco team didn't dare set up their radio and report in. Those back at the Eighth Army Detachment base became increasingly uneasy. Monteleone recalled, “
We didn't hear from them for a couple of days, and we began to worry. With the German voices and boats we figured maybe the jig was up and they got captured.”

Given their limited options, Lieutenant Garrone decided to take a risk. He approached a farmer working in his fields and told him they had escaped from the Germans and needed a place to hide. The farmer turned out to be an enthusiastic anti-Fascist and eagerly agreed to help. Because the Germans visited the farmhouse nearly every day, he suggested the men stay in a shed, where they soon set up their radio and began communicating with their base.

The operatives quickly discovered that anti-German sentiment was strong in the region. They requested that the OSS send in supplies for the partisans in the area and arranged to meet a supply boat on September 23. Unfortunately, German activity in the area made the rendezvous impossible that night and for several successive nights. “
Since the last night we awaited the landing an armed encounter occurred with a German patrol, we decided to leave the zone for a Partisan area before the Germans started to mop up the region,” reported Garrone.

Deprived of their resupply, the former Axis commandos suffered through the next couple of weeks. The men reported that they were “
scarce in clothing, many times suffering from malaria fever.” Despite the cold and sickness, the men “continued in [their] work until 12 October,” when Garrone and Maletto returned to the OSS base in a boat a partisan sympathizer provided. Montanino remained behind to continue the mission. Less than a week later Maletto returned to the area with a full load of weapons and other supplies for the partisans in the region. For several months the San Marco men served as intermediaries between the Allies and the partisans to coordinate attacks on German targets. Although the poor winter weather conditions canceled many planned supply runs, the mission provided critical resources to the Italians fighting the Germans.

The Bionda Mission also enabled the team to carry out important espionage missions, including the destruction of key bridges and roads used by the enemy. During one such incident Montanino received intelligence that three German armored cars would be traveling down the road to Porto Corsini. He recalled, “
I immediately reached the road and mined it with German mines, then I watched if the charges would have done their work; a few minutes after a truck loaded with German troops coming from Porto Corsini was blown to bits by an explosion.”