Giuseppe Giannola, the soldier who was shot three times in a day

Giuseppe Giannola.

Giuseppe Giannola, a 26-year-old Sicilian from Palermo, was serving as an airman in the Regia Aeronautica, stationed at the Santo Pietro airfield near Biscari, at the time of the Allied invasion. He became the only survivor of one of the two Biscari massacres, the mass shooting of 37 Italian and German POWs carried out by Sergeant Horace T. West of the 180th Infantry Regiment.

Giannola’s “baptism of fire” took place on 11 July 1943, the second day of the invasion, when he and another airman captured two American paratroopers. Two days later, he and the rest of his Air Force unit were turned into infantry as the Santo Pietro airfield came under attack by American troops of the 45th Division. On the evening of July 13, his position, garrisoned by Sicilian airmen and Lombard infantrymen, he later recalled, armed with some rifles and a few machine guns, was attacked by the Americans for the first time. After heavy shelling during the night, and fighting in the following morning, the Americans captured the airfield; Giannola, along with a dozen of his comrades, was surrounded and taken prisoner at dawn, after running out of ammunition. Sergeant Horace West was given charge of the group, escorting them towards the rear for interrogation. Along the way, the prisoners were joined by another 37 POWs, 35 Italians and two Germans. After walking for about one kilometre, the prisoners were ordered to stop and arranged in two lines, then West opened fire on them with his submachine gun. Giannola was at the center of the first line. In 1947, in his report to his superiors, he would write: “We were marched till near Piano Stella, where we were joined by another group of Italian prisoners from the Royal [Italian] Army, these were about thirty-four. We were all arranged in two lines, facing each other – an American non-commissioned officer [West], while another seven were pointing their rifles at us so that we would not move, mowed down the ca. 50 soldiers who were lined up there with his submachine gun. I was wounded in my arm and remained for about two hours and a half below the corpses, in order to escape more rifles hots, as the Anglo-American [sic] soldiers remained on the spot for a long time in order to finish off the wounded and dying men”. Many years later, in an interview, he recounted: “I only had the time to stare at the vision of that gigantic sergeant, with a tattoo on his arm, who was shouldering his SMG. Then the bodies of the others fell on me. I could not see anything, I only heard the shots that never seemed to end. Long bursts at first, then quick shots, more and more sporadic. The coups de grace”.

Giannola had a wrist shatterd by a bullet and waited for more than two hours before moving, then he tried to get away; but as soon as he rose, someone fired his rifle at him from a rather long distance, grazing his head and causing him to fall down and lose consciousness. He regained consciousness and crawled till a tree, where he saw some American soldiers wearing red crosses on their arms and asked help from them. Those soldiers gave him first aid, then told him that an ambulance would soon come to pick him up, and left. Giannola saw a jeep approaching and gestured for it to stop. Two American soldiers came out of it; as Giannola was no longer wearing his uniform (he and the other prisoners had been ordered to take it off), they initially mistook him for an Allied soldier, but when he did not understand their language they became suspicious, and one of them asked him if he was Italian. When he answered positively, the soldier shot him point blank with his Garand rifle, then left. This time the bullet had hit Giannola below his shoulder, piercing a lung. Soon after, the promised ambulance came and took him to a field hospital near Scoglitti. These Americans operated him and save him from his near-fatal wounds. Two days latr, Giannola was shipped to Bizerte, Tunisia, where he underwent further treatment in a British hospital. He spent some time in other Allied hospitals in North Africa until 18 March 1944, when – having Italy by then surrendered and become “co-belligerent” with the Allies – he was repatriated and sent to an Italian military hospital in Giovinazzo, Apulia. For some time after his capture, Giannola had been initially considered missing in action and later even suspected of desertion, as he was Sicilian and many Sicilian soldiers had deserted during the campaign. After the war, Giannola reported what happened to him to his superiors; on 4 March 1947 he submitted a detailed report to the Italian Air Force Command in Sicily, but the story was quickly “forgotten” for reasons of political opportunity.

After the war, Giannola worked as a mailman. His story was finally made known in 2004, when it was published on many Italian newspapers. After cheating death for three times in a day, Giuseppe Giannola died in his native Palermo on 4 December 2016, at age 99.