Alamein to the Alps War in the Piedmont with Mission Cherokee and the Lost Anzacs 1943-45 By Ken Fenton.

Publisher: Frontier Press, 2011, First Edition. SCARCE.

Very good softback, no inscriptions.

When the first units of the 2nd New Zealand Division landed at Taranto in October 1943, a rebellion against Fascism was already under way. Following the unilateral Italian Armistice made known in September 1943, much of Italy was quickly occupied by German troops, and the Italian Army of the then Rome Government was soon being disbanded. This gave an impetus to the developing civil-type war, in which Italians fought each other over a period of twenty months, while New Zealanders fought up the Italian Peninsula in a conventional war against the German Divisions. Most of its members were unaware of the nature of a much smaller civil war taking place beyond the front lines, one that came to affect thousands of Commonwealth servicemen. This book is about those Commonwealth POWs who escaped the prison work-camps of the Piedmont Region, and then endeavoured to reach Allied Lines or cross the Alps into Switzerland or France. Some quickly got out of Italy, others remained until the summer of 1944 or later. Some served with the rebels for short, or in a few cases, lengthy periods. Some found refuge in the pre-Alps and valleys of the Piedmont, but were eventually captured by Mussolini's Republicans or by the Germans. Some evaded their hunters and came out of hiding in 1945. This book is also about the very successful British Mission Cherokee sent by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to support and direct the partisans and to connect with the evading POWs. Having had almost no contact with Allied authorities, these evaders had become a 'Lost Legion', and prior to Cherokee's arrival, many were witness to the intensity of the local civil war in the Piedmont.

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