Love and War in the Apennines

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To all those Italians who helped

me, and thousands like me, at

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The effect of the two shots was positively magical. Immediately the airfield was brightly lit by searchlights which were disposed around the perimeter – as if the man who had fired at us had his hand on the switches – and then pandemonium broke loose: lorries and trucks started up; Verey lights rose; the air was filled with the ghastly sounds of commands being issued in Italian and German; and there was the, to me, equally terrifying noise made by men in boots running on hard surfaces in step. It was difficult to repress the thought that we were expected.

I was not surprised. What had surprised me, had surprised us all, was that we had managed to land at all. This kind of operation had been successfully attempted so many times in the past and with such losses in aircraft to the enemy, that by now it was inconceivable that they would not be permanently on the qui vive, and on the very eve of a major action, doubly so. Probably the only reason we had got this far unchallenged was because not even the Germans could imagine that the sort of small party that had done such damage on their airfields in the past would be crazy enough to make a frontal assault on a target of this magnitude. We were lucky to have got over the wall into the farmyard. In this way we seemed to have avoided the official way in.

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