WINSTON CHURCHILL was saved from a German sniper’s bullet in the Second World War by an Italian communist partisan, The Times has learnt.
The hitherto unknown episode has been disclosed to The Times by Giancarlo Iacchini, son of Nello Iacchini, a former partisan who died in 1977. Signor Iacchini, 45, a teacher who lives at Saltara near the Adriatic coast, where the incident took place almost exactly 60 years ago, said that he had found a letter by his father giving a detailed account.
He said that the partisans had captured a sniper lying in wait for Churchill while he was visiting Allied forces attacking the German Gothic Line on the Adriatic. Shortly after the incident Nello Iacchini was decorated by Field Marshal Alexander (later Viscount Alexander of Tunis).
The Gothic Line, a defensive belt 16 kilometres deep, was established by German forces as they retreated northwards up the Italian peninsula after the fall of Rome to Allied forces in June 1944. It ran 320km (200 miles) from La Spezia on the Mediterranean coast through the Apennines to Pesaro on the Adriatic.
Despite Anglo-American differences over strategy, Churchill ordered the Eighth Army under General Oliver Leese, with Canadian and Polish support, to attack the Gothic Line with the aim of destroying the German Army in Italy and freeing Allied forces for the Balkans, where Churchill feared a Russian takeover. Churchill arrived at the hilltop town of Montemaggiore al Metauro in a convoy of armoured cars on August 25, 1944, accompanied by Alexander.
Advertisement
“Despite the heavy bombardment, people came out of their houses and applauded Churchill,” recalled Quinto Ciacci, the Mayor of Montemaggiore al Metauro, who was 8 at the time. A monument to Churchill and Alexander now stands at the vantage point above the valley of the River Metauro from which they surveyed the fighting.
The valley is dotted with housing and light industry. Mount Nero looms to the left through the spectacular Furlo Gorge, while the resort of Fano is clearly visible on the sparkling Adriatic to the right. But 60 years ago, Signor Ciacci recalled, the valley was “an inferno of cannon fire”. Polish forces alone suffered more than 3,000 fatalities.
Signor Iacchini said that Churchill and Alexander left the front the following day, passing the town of Saltara, which had been an SS headquarters.
“My father, who was a communist in the partisan Garibaldi Brigade, thought all German troops had fled following an Allied bombardment of Saltara,” he said, “but he and two other partisans discovered a heavily armed German sniper lying in wait in an orchard beside the road leading up the hill from Saltara.”
In a letter sent to an Italian left-wing MP, Nello Iacchini describes how the partisans overpowered the sniper and handed him to Allied forces: “Shortly afterwards, two Jeeps stopped not 50 metres from where the sniper had been. Three Canadian officers jumped out of the first Jeep, and one politely asked us in perfect Italian to hand over our weapons, saying our job was done and we were to be disarmed. The second Jeep then passed the spot, and we immediately recognised Churchill and Alexander.”
Advertisement
Churchill waved to him in thanks: “After the first moment of astonishment, we realised we had captured the one German who could have been extremely dangerous. Without knowing it, we had saved the lives of both Churchill and Alexander.”
A few days later Nello Iacchini received a Patriot’s Certificate, signed by Alexander personally, thanking him for “bearing arms for the triumph of liberty”. Such certificates were normally issued jointly by lower-level Allied officers and local partisan commanders.
Giancarlo Iacchini, who teaches history and philosophy at a school in Fano, said that he had found the documents while going through his father’s effects in his attic. “He was a lifelong communist, but welcomed the British and Americans as anti-Fascist liberators,” he said. “In any case, he was really a social democrat: after the war he went into business running a shoe shop in Pesaro.”
Houses and gardens line the leafy road above Saltara where Churchill was targeted, but remnants of the orchard remain. In his diaries Churchill recalls his visit to the Adriatic front, saying that seeing Germans firing at close quarters had given him “a sense of modern warfare”. His visit is commemorated in a museum in a deconsecrated church at Montemaggiore al Metauro.