Ian Fleming's Commandos by Nicholas Rankin

Author:Nicholas Rankin [Nicholas Rankin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571277803
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

It was a brilliant US stitch-up. General Bill Donovan had got together with the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, to try and finesse the surrender of the Italian navy and to capture their technical secrets. Donovan knew Mussolini’s replacement, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, of old, having visited him on campaign in Abyssinia in 1935. Eager to distance themselves from the Germans and to cement the new alliance, the Italian authorities were only too keen to trade their technology with the Americans, and OSS field teams like the ‘Macgregor Mission’ led by Tarallo and North were there to facilitate it. The need to find out about the German guided missile that hit USS Savannah galvanised the process.

Donovan himself doubtless played a key role in pinching Minisini. The Medal-of-Honor-winning General turned up at the Salerno beachhead in late September 1943 expecting to eat K-rations and sleep in a foxhole with his helmet on, but found himself instead in a comfortable bed with sheets in the Hotel Luna on Amalfi, once a monastery founded by Francis of Assisi, but now entirely commandeered by the OSS. Donovan met all the OSS agents around the Bay of Naples including the ones who were handling the Italian defectors. Minisini and his Italian submarine engineers all ended up at the American Naval Torpedo Station at Goat Island, Newport Bay, Rhode Island, working on improving American underwater weaponry. This wholesale removal of foreign scientists and technicians in 1943 is important because it became the template for Operation paperclip in 1945, when many German technicians – especially rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun – were accepted into the USA without being scrutinised for Nazi war crimes.

The USA pinched Minisini, Germany pinched Mussolini, and the UK got the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. The SOE officers who rescued Croce went on to other adventures. Adrian Gallegos was captured by, and escaped from, the Germans several times in Italy, Germany and Austria. Malcolm Munthe was severely wounded by a German mortar on Sunday 6 February 1944 at Aprilia on the road to Rome, and took no further part in the war. The friend who was with him was killed instantly. He was Michael Gubbins, the head of SOE’s eldest boy.

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