Eighty some years before the Israeli Defense Force became one of the most powerful armies in the Middle East, it was a flelging, disparate group of volunteers that were part of the Zionist movement in what was the Palestine Mandate established by the League of Nations and governed by the United Kingdom. When WWII began after Adolph Hitler began his blitzkrieg in Poland in 1939 and Italian Dictator Mussolini joined him by attacking France and the Balkans, some members of the Zionist movement joined the British Army. Facing constant pressure from those Zionist volunteers to have their own Jewish Brigade instead of serving within British units, the British military and government originally resisted. But when in 1944 the British and American governments began to receive witness accounts and intelligence about German extermination camps slaughtering Jews that had been rounded up from all over Europe, the British acquiesced and thus the first Jewish Army since Roman times was born. It was made up of approximately 5,000 soldiers - mostly men but some women from the Palestine Mandate - and it took up positions in March of 1945 in Italy on the Adriatic sector of the Gothic Line as part of the British Eighth Army. After participating in various battles along the Senio River in the April 1945 offensive to break through German forces and capture Bologna, the Jewish Brigade was moved to northern Italy in the mountains along the borders of what is today Italy, Slovenia and Austria. From there some Jewish Brigade members began unauthorized missions using British vehicles to rescue Jewish refugees who had escaped the Holocaust and bring them to ports in Italy so they could be transported to the Palestine Mandate. The Jewish Brigade soldiers would eventually return to the Palestine mandate and their experience on the Gothic Line was instrumental when tensions between Jews and Arabs erupted in war in 1948. After Israel was established as an independent nation in 1949 and the Israeli Defense Force was formed, the Jewish Brigade veterans were a core part. This included officers, who used their military training in the British Army to continuously overcome far larger and better-equipped Arab armies, especially the Egyptian Forces, as Israel evolved. This story is told by Stefano Scaletta, a native of Italy and resident of Tel Aviv, in a recent book titled La Brigata Ibraica tra Guerra e Salvataggio dei Sopravvissutti alla Shoah (1939-1947) or in English: The Jewish Brigade between war and rescuing the Holocaust survivors (1939-1947). And as part of the podcast's Past is Present theme, Scaletta also responded to questions about whether or not Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Force's policies in Gaza and the West Bank since the April 7, 2023 attack by Hamas have been disproportionate and, as some human rights groups and others claim, amount to a genocide against the Palestinians.
When you learn the story of some Polish soldiers and civilians' WWII saga including being imprisoned in the Soviet Union at the start of WWII, then escaping down through what is today central Russia, Iran, Syria, Palestine and Libya before arriving in Italy in 1943 to help Allied Forces end Nazi and Italian Fascist tyranny, it is easy to wonder how they survived such trauma. Surely, human perseverance played the biggest role. But they had a little help from a furry animal they found in the mountains of Iran. Named Wojtek - which means joyful warrior in Polish - it was a cub brown bear whose mother had been killed. Raised by the Poles during their saga across the Middle East and North Africa, he was enlisted in the Polish Army in late 1943 in order to get around British Navy rules forbidding the presence of animals on battleships that were transporting troops across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. By that time Wojtek was far more than a morale-boosting pet. He was a brave artillery brigade asset who transported ammunition in the heat of battle. Mimicking fellow soldiers , Wojtek also adopted their fondness for beer, cigarettes and wrestling. Although Wojtek's presence was not enough to save some Polish soldiers from desperate acts upon hearing the news of the betrayal by Roosevelt and Churchill at the February 1945 Yalta Conference, he did help keep a smile on many a face during the Gothic Line Offensive and well after the end of WWII in Italy and Europe.
For more info about this story and others in the podcast contact Joe Kirwin at the following email address: joekirwin@compuserve.com
When Leone Singer escaped Austria and Hitler's Jewish genocide the ever changing national borders in central Europe confused a bureaucratic in the city of Trieste. As a result he issued iin 1938 an identity card that determined Leone's nationality as stateless and, most important, it omitted his Jewish heritage. As a result he was able to begin a new life in Italy. But eventually the Fascist government caught up with him and had him arrested in mid 1943 - but not as a Jew but as a stateless refugee. When Mussolini was arrested and Italy signed an armistice in September of 1943 with the Allied countries, Italian police released Leone Singer and others at the prison and told them to flee before the Nazis arrived. Leone Singer and several others escaped to a small fishing village east of Rome on the Adriatic Sea and paid a fisherman to take them over the night to the port town of Ancona where the Polish army was preparing for the Gothic Line offensive. Leone Singer joined the Polish Army. In February when the fighting against the Nazis halted along the Senio River and the devastating news of the Yalta Conference arrived Leone Singer was able to convince bureaucrats in Rome that he had residency rights thanks to the faulty info on his 1938 residency card. Working In that Rome bureaucratic office was a former partisan from the Justice and Liberty group named Fortunata Romeo. Shortly thereafter, she and Leone would fall in love and son Enrico Singer was born in 1947. Enrico would go on to become a prominent Italian journalist where he served as a foreign correspondent in different European capitals until retiring 15 years ago. He tells the family story of tragedy (his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust) as well as luck, love and now dismay as refugees are scapegoated and war is raging in Ukraine where his family descended.
The story of war and the refugees it provokes is a story as old as homo sapiens. But few are as complicated, confusing and enduring as the story of how more than 100,000 Polish soldiers ended up fighting as part of the British Eighth Army in Italy in 1944-45 , including on the Gothic Line. The saga began when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 which triggered the start of WWII. The Soviet Union followed up with a Polish invasion two weeks later after the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union went into force. The dual invasions scattered hundreds of thousands of Polish refugees throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and other parts of the world. The heroic sacrifice to get to Italy and then again onto the battlefield climaxed in April 1945 when the second Polish Army Corp liberated Bologna in the final days of the Gothic Line Offensive and WWII in Italy. However there were no spoils of victory for the Polish Army in Italy thanks to the February 1945 Yalta Conference when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe control to the Soviet Union and its murderous dictator Josef Stalin.
Michel Zarychita, an historian with the Polish Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw provides the details of the complex Polish soldier diaspora triggered by WW II and how they ended up in Italy in this 2-part series about Poland and their contribution in Italy and the Gothic Line.
The second episode of this two-part series focuses on the story of the Jewish father of prominent Italian journalist Enrico Singer. Leone Singer escaped to Italy in 1938 from central Europe and the Nazis and then again from the Italian Fascists and joined the Polish Second Army Corp in Ancona on the Adriatic Coast of Italy as they were launching their part of the Gothic Line Offensive.
War and politics can make for strange bedfellows and that axiom was as true 80 years ago in WW II in Italy as it is today. One prominent example of that was Brazil joining the Allied Forces to end Nazi and Italian Fascist tyranny in Italy on the Gothic Line Offensive. Before and during WW II, Brazil was led by dictator Getulio Vargas who took power in Brazil via a coup d'etat in the 1930s. His authoritarian inspiration came from none other than Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However after U.S. State Department lobbying that followed the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941 and the subsequent sinking of Brazilian coastal merchant ships by German submarines, Brazil declared war in 1942 on the Axis Forces of Germany, Italy and Japan.
To help the Allied Forces, the Brazilian army formed a 25,000 soldier Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB). Unlike any other WWII army, the FEB was racially integrated - an example that would go on to help galvanize the U.S. African American civil rights movement.
However American military commanders were not impressed. The Brazilian military training and weaponry was based on WW I military doctrine and was therefore outdated and obsolete, especially as it concerned mountain warfare .
It was only when the U.S. Army Allied Command decided to move more than 25,000 U.S. troops out of Italy in mid-1944 to support the Normandy invasion in France and were desperately in need of replacements for the Gothic Line Offensive that the Brazilian FEB was deployed. That took place in the second half of 1944 in Tuscany. After their first combat training in WW II mobile and mountain warfare, the FEB was sent to the Apennine Mountains. Flanking them on their left was the segregated U.S. African-American 92nd Division ``Buffalo Soldiers'', who were also facing their first WWII combat. . The FEB's role was to work primarily with the U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division, which was also experiencing its first combat after more than two years of intensive mountain combat training in the United States.
The FEB suffered significant losses in its first combat when it was tasked with driving German troops off key strategic mountains that were blocking the U.S. Fifth Army from a breakthrough in its goal to reach Bologna before Christmas of 1944. Tactical errors were partly to blame for initial FEB failures. But strategically placed mountain-top German artillery also made their task difficult if not impossible.
By the spring of 1945, the FEB was, by all accounts, a much more effective fighting force and achieved major victories. One of those included the conquest of the mountain town of Montese west of Bologna where the FEB are feted annually.
Two authors - Brazilian Prof. Dennison de Oliveira and Italian museum curator Andrea Gondolfin - who have chronicled the story of the FEB in recent years - will provide in this podcast episode further insight to the Brazilian WWII story on the Gothic Line in Italy.
During the final segment of the episode we will fast forward 80 years when neo-fascism and war are threatening the European continent in eerily similar ways to what happened in the run-up up to WW II. As was the case in the 1930s, Brazil and its current Socialist President Lula da Silva has some ironical bedfellows. No. 1 on that list is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who President Lula da Silva has embraced and is indirectly supporting by buying diesel fuel from Russia even though Brazil has sufficient domestic supplies. President Lula has repeatedly rebuffed Western democratic country pleas, including from many that Brazil allied with in WW II, to join the effort to help Ukraine. Vitelio Brustolin, an international relations professor in Brazil and in the United States, will explain how by embracing Putin Lula is out of step with most Brazilians.
For more information about the podcast contact Joe Kirwin at joekirwin@compuserve.com or at 00 32 478 277802.
Ivy League envy is a familiar theme that has occasionally surfaced in American public and political life since the elite universities such as Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale and others opened more than 200 years ago. The current resentment wave led by U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA mob is a particularly pernicious, unwarranted inquisition and will surely backfire - just as happened in the past, including in World War II.
Moreover when U.S. Army General Mark Clark planned and commanded the 1943-44 winter American assault on the mountainous terrain of mainland Italy between Naples and Rome, he had at his disposal the first-ever specially trained mountain division of more than 20,000 soldiers. Known as the 10th Mountain Division, the troops had undergone rigorous training since 1941 - first on Mount Rainier in Washington state and then high in the Colorado mountains at a purpose-built training base where they honed their combat skills in frigid weather using skis and mountain climbing. But after more than two years of training - and despite a desperate need for infantry troops - the Tenth Mountain Division was rejected by Clark. Why? Because he considered them unreliable Ivy League ``elitists'' unsuitable for rugged combat. Indeed a large majority of the 10th Mountain Division were from Ivy League institutions, especially schools such as Dartmouth and others located in the New England mountains.
Clark's initial rejection of the 10th Mountain Division proved costly as the U.S. military struggled in the mountains between Naples and Rome . As it was, specially trained French and Moroccan mountain troops were employed when U.S. commanders withdrew some American troops to conduct the amphibious, Anzio surprise beach landing 30 miles southwest of Rome in early 1944. The French and Moroccan troops were fierce fighters but they also sexually assaulted thousands of Italian women - a controversy that still lingers today and is a shameful legacy that some Italians use to either ignore or tarnish the sacrifices of Allied Forces in Italy . As it was, the winter of 1943-44 was a bloody battle that cost the lives of tens of thouands of Allied soldiers, many of whom had never trained or fought in the mountains.
Despite that costly campaign, Clark continued to reject the 10th Mountain Division when he planned the U.S. Fifth Army assault on the Gothic Line, which began in early September of 1944. Again faced with the deadly challenge of assaulting German mountain-top fortifications in the northern Apennine mountains, Clark insisted on using U.S. army infantry divisions that had been on the front lines for nearly two years with minimal or no rest - unheard of in contemporary military doctrine. Military historians cite low morale and high deserationrates among those troops that Clark deployed with the launch of the U.S. Fifth Army's assault up the center of the Apennines between Florence and Bologna.
Finally Clark and other U.S. commanders, facing failure as the Gothic Line offensive stalled, relented and in December 1944 the 10th Mountain Division infantry arrived in Tuscany in the western part of the Apennines. They would go on to play a decisive role in breaking through German mountain-top artillery that had earlier slaughtered hundreds of American and Brazilian troops trying to break through the Gothic Line.
Ultimately, the 10th Mountain Division would not only break through the Gothic Line at a pace much faster than expected but would arrive in the Po Valley and then at the foot of the Alps when WW II in Europe ended in May 1945. They had achieved every objective assigned to them but at a cost. Of the approximately 20,000 10th Mountain Division soldiers that arrived on the front lines in Italy in December more than 1,000 soldiers were killed and approximately 3,900 were injured in six months.
By Joe Kirwin
There are numerous Gothic Line Offensive stories that are obscure and nearly lost to history but none more so than the more 7,000 South African black soldiers who helped to end Nazi and Italian Fascists tyranny in Italy.
Fighting in Tuscany between American and Brazilian troops in the mountains above the city of Montemurlo, the Black South African troops' role was restricted to menial labor and other service-related duties under the command of the White South African Sixth Armored Division. That's because South African law prevented the Black South African soldiers from carrying a firearm. Instead they could only arm themselves with spears and shields against German machine guns, artillery and mortar fire.
The firearm restrictions were part of the overall racial abuse imposed by white South Africans going back to the early 1900s when they confiscated from blacks most of the arable land in the country. In 1939 when South Africa agreed to join the Allied Alliance and declare war on Germany, Italy and Japan, the controversial decision caused political upheaval - especially among Afrikaans political factions that identified with Nazi Germany.
When the war decision was taken by the White South African government, it realized it had a big problem: a severe shortage of infantry troops. Reluctantly the white South African government realized their only option was to allow Blacks and Coloreds into the Army.
Many Black South Africans agreed to join a special Native Military Corp in the South African army hoping it would lead to civil rights and land reform rewards when WW II ended. Whereas most other soldiers of color who fought and died for democracy on the Gothic Line in Italy - even though they did not have it in their own country - there was a slow and minimal post-war dividends. Ssome, such as U.S. African American troops, eventually gained civil rights in some parts of the United States. In the case of the approximately 60,000 Indian troops, their Gothic Line war service did play a role in helping India gain its independence from the United Kingdom in 1947. Japanese American troops were were compensated for being imprisoned after the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan in 1941.
But it was the opposite for Black South African soldiers when they returned from Italy. Apartheid was codified into South African law in 1948. As a result Blacks were forced onto desolate homelands or township slums. When Nelson Mandela's was released from prison in the early 1990s and led the African National Congress into government, the story of the Black South African soldiers service in WW II in Italy was disregarded. To this day it is still absent from most history book sand museums in South Africa and Italy.
After a four-month search for this podcast I finally found a man who has arguably done more than any over the last 50 years to keep the Black South African WW II soldier story alive. That person is University of Johannesburg Prof. Emeritus Louis Grundling. In the early 1980s he wrote his PhD thesis on the Black South African WW II history including on the Gothic Line and taught it for the next five decades at South Africa's largest academic institution.
Some 80 years later after the end of the Gothic Line Offensive and WW II in Europe, Prof. Grundling said there is still no recognition in the South African education system or in museums about the Black Soldiers' role in WW II, which started in north Africa under British command and then continued in Italy. Grundling said it was only in January of 2025 that recognition was given to Black South African soldiers who fought in WW I.
``Hopefully sometime soon recognition for the WW II Black South African soldiers will come,'' he told me.
By Joe KIrwin
The ferocious 4-month battle that took place at Monte Cassino when Allied Forces attempted to break through the mountains between Naples and Rome and drive the German and Italian Fascist forces out of Italy will always be remembered as the bloodiest and most brutal chapter of the 1943-45 WW II Allied campaign in Italy.
Later in 1944, when Allied armies launched the Gothic Line offensive after the liberation of Rome on June 4, the fighting across the northern Apennines is not as steeped in folklore as Monte Cassino but there were a number of epic battles that equaled in intensity if not in length and casualties. The fierce fighting in the mountain-top town of Gemano overlooking the Adriatic Sea is often referred to as the ``Cassino of the Adriatic'' although some historians insist the battle over the old Roman coastal and port town of Rimini, which, like Gemano, was completely destroyed, was even bloodier. Between the two approximately 80,000 Axis and Allied soldiers were killed on Adriatic front in September 1944.
On the other end of the Gothic Line in Tuscany not far from where the Apennines and Apuane mountains meet, the battle of Monte Castello, Monte Torraccio and Monte Belvedere and nearby Riva Ridge involving American and Brazilian troops is sometimes referred to as the ``Cassino of Tuscany''.
In the center of Italy where the U.S. Fifth Army launched in mid-September of 1944 its part of the Gothic Line one-two punch, pincer movement to capture Nazi headquarters in Bologna, the struggle to control the strategic heights of Monte Battaglia (715 meters) above the Santerno and Valsenio river valleys is often referred to as the ``Cassino of the North.'' It was fought off and on over the course of several months starting from Sept. 27, 1944 when American 88th ``Blue Devil'' troops, aided by Italian Partisans, waged a week-long struggle. Later Welsh troops, under U.S. Allied Force command, battled the Germans near Monte Battaglia in the Santerno Valley and suffered significant casualties, with some of those killed in action buried in a Commonwealth Grave cemetery on the side of the steep mountain canyon walls.
Valerio Calderoni , 64, and a native of nearby Imola, has spent decades roaming the Santerno River Valley, especially over the last 40 years via his work as a veterinarian. For many years Valerio has heard the local stories about the battle of Monte Battaglia some of which clashed when it concerned the role of Italian Partisan freedom fighters and the U.S. Army troops and the relationship between the two. More than 20 years ago Valerio took it upon himself to do extensive research examining archive records in the United States, Italy and Germany to understand the true story of what happened on Monte Battaglia. In 2014 he published his results in a book titled ``Monte Battaglia 1944: from Myth to History. Valerio explained his conclusions and ongoing work in this podcast episode that includes ongoing forensic recovery of fallen soldiers on Monte Battaglia. Valerio is also a board member of the Gothic Line museum in Castel del Rio in the Santerno River Valley.
By Joe Kirwin
Soon after the surprise Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii when Japanese forces destroyed much of the U.S. Navy and Air Force Pacific Ocean presence, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the arrest of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States. They were forced from their homes, farms and businesses and locked up in internment camps in the deserts of the western United States. Yoshio Nakamura and his family were among those that lost everything. They were considered national security threats that could not be trusted.
Two years after the mass incarceration, the U.S. War Department, entering the third year of fighting WW II fronts in the Pacific and in Europe, faced a troop shortage. Suddenly imprisoned Japanese American men 18-years and older who were born in the United States were seen as a solution instead of spies. So the U.S. government allowed the Japanese-Americans men 18 and over to leave the prison camps but only if they agreed to join the U.S. Army and fight the Nazis in Italy or the Japanese in the Pacific. The injustice and hypocrisy was too much for many of the imprisoned Japanese Americans men and they refused . But for others it was an opportunity to prove their allegiance to the United States. Yoshio Nakamura was one of the latter. Even though his family members remained locked up in the desert until the end of the war, he would join the 442nd Japanese American regiment. It would go onto become one of the most decorated U.S. Army units in WW II.
The first Japanese American infantry troops arrived in Italy at Salerno in September of 1943 as part of the 100th Infantry Battalion. They would go on to engage in combat at Monte Cassino and suffered significant casualties and were subsequently referred to as the ``Purple Heart'' battalion. In the summer of 1944 the Nisei 442 Combat team would arrive in Italy north of Rome and were joined by the 100th Infantry Battalion and helped drive the Germans and Italian Fascists up the coast and into mountain-top fortifications on the Gothic Line. The Japanese American troops were then transferred to southern France and helped free territory that would allow American troops join Allied forces that had landed in Normandy. U.S. General Mark Clark, impressed by the Japanese Americans - or Nisei troops as they were known - by their short time in Italy - requested their return for the final Gothic Line thrust in western Tuscany. Their task was to scale the steep, white-marble Tuscan mountains overlooking the sea where German and Italian Fascist troops were hunkered down in artillery bunkers and had used the strategic redoubt to block Allied Forces from moving north up the Mediterranean Coast.
Now living in southern California, where he was born and raised, 100-year-old Yoshio Nakamura explained why he decided to join the U.S. Army and also recounted in vivid detail a crucial nighttime climb up Monte Folgorito to destroy one of the enemy mortar and artillery bunkers as if it occurred recently instead of 80 years ago. Yoshio also recounted how a half century later the U.S. government apologized for the gross injustice imposed on Japanese Americans during WW II.
For more information contact Joe Kirwin at joekirwin@compuserve.com or 00 32 478 277802
Over the past decade, author and U.S. Marine veteran Andrew Biggio interviewed more than 30 U.S. Army soldiers who fought on the Gothic Line as part of his research for his best-selling books The Rifle and The Rifle 2. Many were in their late 90s or older. But they had vivid, emotionally distraught recall of what happened from Sept. 1944 to April 1945 in the northern ItaIian Apennine mountains. As he describes in the podcast many of the soldiers had been on the front lines for almost two years - far longer than most other Allied Force troops fighting in other parts of Europe or in the Pacific theater. And as Allied Forces marched across northwest Europe towards Berlin, the Gothic Line U.S. Army troops attacking up heavily fortified mountain-top bunkers knew they were ``bait'' to keep German troops pinned down in Italy as the end neared in the six-year war. Morale was low and the death toll was high. Having survived North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Cassino, the mental and physical exhaustion drove many to either desert or even commit suicide. Upon the war's end and American veterans returned to the U.S. the country feted the heroes of the Normandy beaches, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal. But Gothic Line survivors were belittled by some fellow veterans who knew, like most Americans and Europeans, of the brutality and often futile task of combat on the Italian ``Forgotten Front.''
Biggio's work with U.S. WW II veterans on the Gothic Line in Italy and other theatres stems partly from his own military service. He has done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and upon returning to civilian life he started projects to help wounded vets rehabilitate and adapt to civilian life. He currently resides in the Boston area and works in law enforcement. He is also the founder of Boston's Wounded Vet Run, which is an annual motorcycle ride honoring and supporting vets. His two books The Rifle and The Rifle 2 are available online or your local bookstore.
When the U.S. Fifth Army launched its part of the Allied Force Gothic Line one-two punch pincer movement to capture Bologna it began with a one of WW II's most daunting tasks: conquer the imposing heights of Monte Altuzzo 50 kilometers north of Florence. After initial success the offensive bogged down and turned into a WW I type of trench warfare because of a snowy, frigid winter in the mountainous terrain. Eighty years on, the Gotica Toscana Museum, located just below Monte Altuzzo in Tuscany, holds annual day-long re-enactments to not only honor the bravery of the American soldiers but also as a way to engage younger generations who know little or nothing about this dark chapter of Italian history. As Andrea Gatti, a former chairman of the Gotica Toscana museum, said: Italian students learn in school about Roman Empire history or the history of the founding of Italy in the 1800s but the WW II story is still taboo for some because of the bloody civil war that raged in Italy when the Gothic Line offensive began. Tens of thousands of civilians were murdered in cold blood by retreating Nazis and Italian Fascists. And because there was never an Italian version of the Nuremberg trials where Nazi war criminals were tried and convicted, suspicion and vengeance still fester within families, communities and politics in Italy.
Gatti also explains why knowing the history of what happened on the Gothic Line in Italy as well as the rest of Europe in WW II is vital to understand and appreciate the value of the European Union, which grew from the ashes of the conflict.
More than 60,000 Indian troops served in the Allied Force armies that fought and died to free Italy from German and Italian Fascist tyranny even though the soldiers from India did not have democracy in their homeland. Serving as volunteers under British command in the Adriatic sector of the Gothic Line offensive, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Gurkhas and others fought side by side - primarily as fierce mountain fighters. They covered the flank of British soldiers on their right coming up the hills over looking the Adriatic Sea and American Fifth Army on their left, who began a campaign a few weeks after the British Eighth Army attack, up the center of Italy as part of a one-two punch, pincer movement to capture Bologna.
There are more than 5000 Hindu, Moslem, Gurkhas, Sikhs and other ethnic Indian soldiers buried or cremated in three Commonwealth grave cemeteries in and around the Gothic Line. Fifteen years ago Dhruv Ratti moved to Italy to work as a chemical engineer for an Italian company. He, like almost all other Indians of his generation, were never taught in school about the approximately 2.5 million Indian soldiers who volunteered to fight in WW II under British command, including the 60,000 who faced combat in Italy. Living near the Adriatic Sea, Ratti was told about a war cemetery near his house. He visited only to discover Indian soldier tombstones, some of whom came from villages near his home town and who had fought and died on the Gothic Line offensive - a battle that claimed more lives of his countrymen than any other in WW II. The emotion triggered by that visit launched Ratti on a two-fold mission that continues to this day: gain recognition in Italy for those Indian soldiers in the same way that American, Canadian, British, Australian and other Western nation troops are honored - a quest that he has yet to fulfill. That mission parallels an effort to counter anti-immigrant scapegoating by Italian and other European politicians as well as the general public who do not appreciate the fact that the "freedom they enjoy has been nourished by Indian blood.'''
The second goal of his mission is to bring awareness to more than 1 billion people on the Indian subcontinent whose forebears fought in Italy and in other parts of WW II.
In 2021 Ratti made important headway on the latter goal when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Italy. Ratti presented him with a display, including cemetery photographs, detailing Indian soldier sacrifice in Italy - a story that has been ignored in Indian history because it happened before the country gained independence from Britain in 1947. With Modi's encouragement, Ratti continues to work on various film and documentary projects in order to inform younger Indian generations of their ancestors WW II history.
Ratti has also worked tirelessly to get the British Commonwealth Grave Cemetery Commission to rectify Indian tombstone language errors in Italy as well as sacrilegious flaws listing Muslim soldiers at cremation sites.
In addition in this podcast episode, Ratti also tells the story of how there were also Indians, some motivated by their quest for independence from Britain, who fought on the Axis side in WW II. And how both the Indians who fought with the British in WW II and those that were part of Indian Nationalist Army that formed during WW II, helped accelerate India's successful drive for independence from Britain.
After U.S. Fifth Army General Mark Clark deviated from an Allied Force plan in early June 1944 to trap retreating Germans in central Italy and instead moved his troops to liberate Rome, the controversial decision outraged British commanders, especially Lt. General Oliver Leese. As a result, Leese rejected the original Gothic Line offensive plan for a joint American-British attack up the center of Italy in the Apennine mountains to liberate Bologna from Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation.
Instead, Leese launched one of the most complex and dangerous logistical exercises in WW II by moving at night in August 1944 approximately 100,000 British Eighth Army troops - an amount equal to those in the D-Day landing in Normandy. The convoy traveled from central Italy across a primitive, hilly road network to the Adriatic coastal plain. The coalition of soldiers under Leese's command included troops from India, Scotland, Poland, Greece, Palestine, New Zealand and Canada.
On Aug. 28, 1944, they launched the first wave of the Gothic Line offensive, which was part of a one-two punch, pincer movement instead of the original full-frontal, central Italy thrust. The U.S.-led Fifth Army, commanded by Clark, would launch two weeks later the second part of the one-two punch plan up the Giogo Pass north of Florence.
Author Mike Sommerville's father was part of the Sherwood Foresters infantry regiment of the British Eighth Army. Sommerville, a military historian, described how ``The Sherwood Boys'' - as his book is titled - had been transferred out of Italy to Palestine in February 1944 to rest and retrain before returning to Italy for the Gothic Line offensive.
However, like much of the Allied Force campaign in Italy that started in 1943 with a landing in Sicily, little went to plan. The British-led army suffered significant casualties from the start of the offensive and was often bogged down because of rain-swollen rivers and mud. In September, fierce fighting claimed the lives of more than 80,000 German and Allied soldiers. Low morale problems soon became an issue, especially after the British troops learned politicians and the tabloid press in the U.K. had labeled them as ``D-Day dodgers '' vacationing on the Adriatic Sea. The desertion rate multiplied as soldiers went AWOL to avoid being killed or injured when it had become clear the war was nearing an end. Ultimately, the British-led offensive ground to a halt in December 1944 on the Senio River because of limited and exhausted troops, low ammunition, poor weather as well as relentless German resistance made it impossible to achieve the planned Christmas-time victory celebration. As a result, they would spend nearly three months hunkered down on the fringe of a no-man's land by the Senio amidst constant artillery exchanges with German troops on other side of the river bank. Three and a half months later, the British Eighth Army under Leese's command would renew the offensive in April. The American-led Fifth Army, which also stalled for months, broke through from the west. After three weeks the German forces agreed to surrender at the end of April despite Hitler's order to fight to the death.
When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January of 2025 one of the first things his newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did was ban books in the Pentagon and Armed Forces academies and other libraries and schools that tell the story of institutional racism faced by segregated African American soldiers during WW II and when they returned to the United States. When American art teacher Solace Wales and her husband bought in the early 1970s a small house in the mountain-top village of Sommocolonia in Italy, she had no idea about the U.S. military institutional racism faced by U.S. black soldiers that fought on the Gothic Line in and around that part of Tuscany. But after a decade of spending summers in the small village the stories of what happened in 1944-45 set her off on a journey with notebook, tape recorder and pen in hand. She thus began a 30-year research journey including extensive interviews with many U.S. black veterans that served on the Gothic Line in Tuscany. Her story tells of black soldier bravery and as well as the treatment by white racist military commanders from the segregated U.S. south determined to prove their supremacist views that black soldiers were inferior. In 2020 Wales, now based in northern California outside San Francisco, published Braided in Fire: Black GIs, Tuscan Villagers and Italian Partisans on the Gothic Line 1944. Besides detailing the story of how Lieutenant John Fox gave his own life in Sommocolonia to save his fellow soldiers, the story also gives a compelling account of how local villagers - many whom were her neighbors - navigated the treachery of the Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation, roving bands of local bandits, Italian Partisan freedom fighters and their relationship with undercover American secret agents as well as the Allied Force Gothic Line armies. The latter included the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division Buffalo Soldiers, who were the first African American infantry soldiers to face combat in WW II, and an elite African American artillery battalion. Both were deployed in the second half of 1944 when the U.S. Army, desperate for replacement soldiers, finally allowed the African American infantry to enter the battlefield. Among the latter was Fox, who called in artillery fire he knew would end his life but would allow his fellow soldiers to escape a surprise Christmas-time German counter-offensive. In the podcast interview Wales tells how the white commander of Fox's battalion knew about the German counter offensive but did not inform the under-manned black troops stationed over Christmas in Sommocolonia. It took more than 50 years for Fox to posthumously receive the U.S. Medal of Honor when former U.S. President Bill Clinton awarded it to his widowed wife at the White House. Present that day were other African American veteran Medal of Honor recipients who also had been denied bravery recognition because of a racist narrative that lingered for decades in the U.S. military after WW II. Also present was Solace Wales and she recounts that emotional day in Washington, D.C.
Eighty five years ago Italy was on the wrong side of history after joining Adolf Hitler in declaring war against Allied countries including the United States and the United Kingdom. It took the most multinational and multiracial army ever assembled to finally end Nazi and Italy Fascist tyranny in Italy in April of 1945 when the nine-month Gothic Line offensive concluded and WW II ended in Europe with Germany's unconditional surrender.
Often referred to as the Forgotten Front, the Allied Force Gothic Line offensive took place after the liberation of Rome on June 4, 1944 and the D-Day invasion in Normandy. It was the final phase of a bloody battle up the Italian boot. Built by slave laborers, mercenaries, prisoners of war in the northern Apennine Mountains, Hitler ordered the construction of the Gothic Line as a last defense barrier against the capture of the Po River valley, which is the breadbasket of Italy. The Gothic Line consisted of 300 kilometers of bunkers, trenches and tunnels- many still in existence. Soldiers from more than 17 countries took part in the Allied Force Offensive. It marked the first infantry combat for segregated U.S. Army African American soldiers, who fought two enemies: the Nazis and racist American white commanders. Other Allied soldiers included Japanese-Americans, whose families were locked up in prison camps in the United States, Indian soldiers from all sects and religions, black South Africans and Maorians from New Zealand. All of them fought and died for democracy in Italy and Europe even though they did not have it in their home country. The first Jewish Brigade since Roman times joined the Allied Forces on the Gothic Line in January of 1945 and would go onto to play a controversial role in rescuing survivors of the Holocaust.
In addition more than 200 civilian massacres in villages across the Gothic Line were carried out by Nazi and Italian Fascist soldiers. Few were held accountable for those war crimes and they area festering political wound 80 years later. And as Italian President Sergio Mattarella stated in early 2025 these massacres are no different than what Russian President Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine in the past three years.
Meanwhile most Italians are unaware or have collective amnesia about this ugly chapter in their recent history. With Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni's political party Brothers of Italy tracing its roots back to Hitler's ally Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini the Fascist past regularly erupts today more than it has for decades. At the same time U.S. President Donald Trump threatens the post-WW II transatlantic economic and defense alliance that has fostered relative peace and prosperity for the last 80 years and Putin makes no secret of his ambition to rebuild the Iron Curtain. As a result Italy, a founding European Union member state, faces crucial security and defense questions. Considering so many foreign soldiers sacrificed their lives for Italy 80 years ago, solidarity with countries facing the same death and destruction today from Russian aggression would seem like an easy choice. However across the Italian political spectrum and among a majority of the population there is opposition not only to helping Ukraine with military arms but also plans to rebuild a European military defense capacity required due to Trump's pro-Putin appeasement policies.
The complacency against the threat of Russia is similar in Italy and other parts of Europe to what happened in the 1930s when Hitler threatened. Along with scapegoating immigrants their is denial about their vital role in keeping the Italian and European economy going in the face of an aging population, stagnant economic growth and a massive national debt. All of these issues and others are the subject of more than 15 episodes of this podcast that details the story of the Gothic Line ghosts that haunt Italy and Europe and where the past is present.
Russian emigre and Prague-based history professor Sergei Medvedev explains how the past is present in Europe as Russian President Vladimir Putin makes no secret of his plans to rebuild the Iron Curtain. In addition just as Hitler had European and Asian allies so does Putin. Today in Europe a growing list of far-right, far-left and centrist politicians either support Putin or are apologists. Whereas Japan was on Hitler's side Putin receives assistance from North Korea, China and Iran providing assistance in his war against Ukraine along with a growing cadre of far-right, far-left and centrists politicians in Europe.
Medvedev also explains today's political and economic similarities with the 1930s when a far-right, intolerant, anti-science political movement swept Germany. He also dissects how U.S. President Donald Trump's MAGA movement is simply bent on chaos and has attracted the anti-science climate change deniers and anti-vaccine movement - just as happened in the 1930s when brilliant minds such Albert Einstein were forced to leave Europe. As Trump makes a mockery of the blood and treasure countries such as the United States and others gave to save democracy in Europe in WW II, Medvedev also concurs that Trump and his territorial ambitions in Greenland, Canada and Panama have undermined the moral imperative to stop Putin's aggression in Ukraine. This Trump imperialism also helps explain his obvious appeasement approach toward the Russian leader. ``The post WW II international institutions are being battered from all sides,'' Medvedev says. ``It is a very dangerous time we are living in.''
Nazi and Italian Fascist troops committed more than 200 civilian massacres in WW II in Italy between July of 1944 and April of 1945. Few were held accountable for the cold-blooded murders, especially in Italy. Eighty years later the issue festers as Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni's political party Brothers of Italy has neo-fascist roots linked to Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini. He ruled Italy for two decades before he was killed by Italian freedom fighters at the end of WW II.
Carlo Gentile, an Italian native and history professor at the University of Cologne in Germany, explains his ongoing work to give closure to the thousands of massacre victims and their families as well as help Italians confront their WW II past. He also explains the complex Italian Fascist resistance movement that evolved during WW II including when Allied Forces fought a bloody battle to drive the Nazis and Italian Fascists from power in Italy.
In addition, Udo Surer, the son of a Nazi soldier, who participated in one of the civilian massacres in an Italian village, explains the peach and reconciliation campaign he began after he discovered his father's past.
