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| Vice capo squadra Colombo Tabarrini (foreground, with moustache) posing with some of his comrades next to one of their anti-aircraft guns (part of the 19th Anti-Aircraft 76/40 Gun Battery) near Santo Pietro airfield (from the collection of Angelo Augugliaro) |
In the morning of 15
July 1943 Colonel William E. King, a Chaplain in the 45th Infantry Division of
the U.S. Army, was driving his jeep up the Biscari road towards the captured
airfield, when he noticed a dark mound near and olive grove, and he stopped to
investigate. The dark mound consisted of dead bodies – Italian soldiers. They
had not been killed in action. ‘Most were lying face down, a few face up,’ King
later recalled. ‘Everybody face up has one bullet hole just to the left of the
spine in the region of the heart.’ A majority also had head wounds; singed hair
and powder burns implied the fatal shots had come at close range. A few
soldiers loitering nearby joined the chaplain, protesting that ‘they has come
into the war to fight against that sort of thing,’ King said. ‘They felt
ashamed of their countrymen.’ The chaplain hurried back to the division command
post to report about what he had found.
King had come across
the traces of the Biscari massacre, the murder of two groups of seventy-three
Axis prisoners – seventy-one Italians and two Germans – by some members of the
45th Infantry Division. But this was not the only massacre that had taken place
on that day in the 45th Division’s area of operations. A few hours after making
his report, King was driving back to the rear when he came across another group
of dead bodies lined along the road, about two miles south of Caltagirone.
These, too, were
Italian soldiers. Six were lying face down, two face up; they had been killed
in the same way as their countrymen near Biscari, with the difference that
these had not received any finishing shots to the head, and many of them had
more than one wound in their back or their chest.
Luigi Lo Bianco, in
1943, was fifteen and lived in Santo Pietro, a fraction of Caltagirone (the
Italian name of the Biscari airfield – Santo Pietro airfield – came from that
village). Sixty-nine years later, in July 2012, he recounted what he had heard
at the time: “Around the airfield there
were anti-aircraft batteries manned by the Militia [MVSN, Milizia
Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale: “Voluntary Militia for National
Security”, the official name of the Blackshirt militia] and horse-drawn batteries belonging to the Army, both field artillery
and anti-aircraft guns. During the invasion, these batteries always fired on
the invaders, for three days they held their ground against the Americans and
then, when the Americans tried to encircle them, they fled and, at least
according to what the people who lived there said, before Caltagirone, near
Villa Cona, they caught seven soldiers of the Militia and they shot them near
the road, against a wall next to the gate”.
Three of these
murdered soldiers have recently been identified. They were militiamen belonging
to the M.A.C.A., Milizia Artiglieria
Contraera (Anti-Aircraft Artillery Militia, a branch of the MVSN tasked
with anti-aircraft defense), and more precisely to the 19th 76/40 mm battery,
31st Group, stationed in Santo Pietro: blackshirt Luigi Poggio, born in Genoa
(Liguria) on 21 June 1905, blackshirt Angelo Maisano, born in Messina (Sicily)
on 30 September 1891, and vice capo
squadra (Blackshirt rank for Corporal) Colombo Tabarrini, born in Foligno
(Umbria) on 2 June 1895. They had officially been declared missing in action
after the Allied landings. Tabarrini was married and lived in Genoa; he was a
disabled veteran from World War I, who had lost toes to frostbite. He had been
recalled for service during World War II and initially assigned to the
anti-aircraft batteries around Genoa, but had been sent to Sicily following an
argument with a capomanipolo
(Lieutenant). It is not hard to imagine his end: during the retreat from Santo
Pietro, he probably lagged behind due to his foot problems and was captured
along with his comrades, who perhaps had stayed behind to help him. Then they
were all shot.
(Main source: “La
battaglia degli Iblei” by Domenico Anfora)
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