Ortona Read Online Free Page A

arrived to secure the harbour. An order was issued placing all port facilities under German control. Notices were also posted throughout the town that it was now illegal for anyone to possess radio transmitters and that all civilian property was subject to the use of the army as required. Over the next few days, the residents of Ortona watched with growing fear as German supply trains rolled by on the main line, carrying arms, munitions, and soldiers south to face the advancing Eighth Army.
    Twelve days after the first arrival of German soldiers in Ortona, an engineering unit arrived. From trucks they unloaded twenty-eight tons of explosives and proceeded to blow about fifteen major breaches in the northern mole. Larger fishing vessels were sunk, as were several small freighters that were in the harbour when the Germans arrived. Within weeks, the destruction of the mole rendered the port too shallow for use as a deepwater harbour. At low tide, the tidal plain now stretched for several hundred yards out beyond the limits of its former extension. 8
    No fishing vessels were now allowed to put to sea. The few men of military age living in Ortona were subject to immediate draft for forced labour parties, as the Germans set about preparing fixed defensive positions on the ridgeline overlooking the Moro River andat key points between the Moro and Ortona. A risky cat-and-mouse game developed between civilians and Germans. Few young men willingly reported for duty when the Germans posted notices demanding workers for labour parties. The Germans, knowing there were some men who were fit and able, would begin searching houses. Antonio Di Cesare was still only a young teenager, but that was sufficiently old for the manpower-strapped Germans. So Antonio joined a clutch of men in playing the dangerous evasion. They would hide in one of the old buildings in the fishermen’s district. When the Germans entered the house and started searching the lower floor, the fugitives would pass a wooden plank from an upper window across the narrow street into the facing window of a house on the other side. The hastily improvised bridge provided a catwalk over which the men could cross to the safety of the other house. Once all were across, the plank was pulled in, the windows shuttered. Short of soldiers to carry out an efficient search, the Germans seldom caught the men in the act of escaping. When they did it was not uncommon for them to fire upon the fleeing men. Some were wounded, a few killed. Most, however, were able to avoid being picked up by the German search parties. 9
    Although none of the men wanted to help the Germans by providing free local labour, this was not the primary reason they risked their lives to escape the searches. In an utterly random pattern, the German roundups sometimes had a more ominous result. Occasionally the drafted men found themselves facing the scrutiny of dreaded SS squads. A few of the men would be bundled into a truck and would disappear to the north, usually to work as slave labour in German factories. Others, possibly informed on by Fascist neighbours, were sent to the death camps because they were suspected of being Communists, Socialists, or Jews. An older friend of Americo Casanova, Pascuale Angelone, was arrested by the SS and shipped to Buchenwald. He remained there until his liberation in 1945 and never knew why the Germans had spirited him away to that slaughterhouse. He was not Jewish and was too young to have had the chance to know anything of Communism or Socialism in Fascist Italy.
    Americo’s mother Angela was afraid of the Germans for another reason. One day a squad burst into their apartment. Luckily Mario, old enough to work in the labour parties, was not home. Still, theyhad searched the house and taken particular notice of the family’s American possessions and the letters from her husband that bore his address in Hershey, New Jersey. She explained that her husband had been caught