Beneath a Scarlet Sky

But he didn’t think about any of that for very long. Pino was in love, and as love does, it had warped his sense of time. Each moment with Anna seemed breathless and brief, and filled with endless yearning when they were apart.

March turned to April of 1945, and it was as if some cosmic switch flipped. The cold, snowy weather that had plagued northern Italy and the Allied advance gave way to late spring temperatures and melting snow. Pino drove General Leyers to the Brenner Pass road nearly every day. There were backhoes at work on the road by then, and dump trucks hauling away the snow and avalanche debris. The sun beat down on the gray men digging beside the mechanical shovels, their faces burned by its brilliant reflection off the snow, their muscles twisted by the weight of the slush and ice, and their wills broken by the years in slavery.

Pino wanted to comfort them, to tell them to take heart, that the war was almost over. Weeks left, not months now. Just hold on. Just stay alive.



Long after dark on April 8, 1945, Pino and General Leyers reached the village of Molinella, northeast of Bologna.

Leyers took a cot in a Wehrmacht encampment there, and Pino slept fitfully in the Fiat’s front seat. By dawn, they were on higher ground, west of the village of Argenta where they could look down on the flatter, wetter terrain on both sides of the Senio River, which ran into Lake Comacchio, an estuary near the coast. The lake blocked the Allies’ ability to flank around fortifications Leyers had built on the river’s north side.

Tank traps. Minefields. Trenches. Pillboxes. Even from several kilometers away, Pino could see them all clearly. Beyond them, on the other side of the river in Allied territory, nothing moved beyond the odd lorry heading to or from Rimini and the Adriatic Sea.

For many hours on that hill that day there was little sound save that of spring birds and insects, and a warm breeze carried the scent of fields under plow. It all made Pino realize that the earth did not know war, that nature would go on no matter what horror one man might inflict on another. Nature didn’t care a bit about men and their need to kill and conquer.

The morning dragged on. The heat built. Around noon, they heard distant thuds, the echoes of explosions coming from the waters off Rimini, and soon, in the distance, Pino could see smoke rising far out to sea. He wondered what had happened.

It was as if General Leyers heard him.

“They’re bombing our ships,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’re choking us off, but down there is where they’ll try to break me.”

The afternoon ticked on, and soon it was as hot as a summer’s day, but not as dry. Instead of baking heat, all the moisture that had fallen during the winter steamed from the ground, making the air thick and oppressive. Pino sat in the shade of the car while Leyers kept up his vigil.

“What will you do after the war, Vorarbeiter?” Leyers asked at one point.

“Moi, mon général?” Pino said. “I don’t know. Maybe go back to school. Maybe work for my parents. And you?”

General Leyers lowered his binoculars. “I can’t see that far ahead yet.”

“And Dolly?”

Leyers cocked his head, as if wondering whether to reprimand him for his impudence, but then said, “When the Brenner opens, she’ll be taken care of.”

They both caught a rumbling, droning noise to the south. Leyers threw up his glasses and studied the sky.

“It begins,” he said.

Pino jumped to his feet, shaded his eyes, and saw the heavy bombers coming out of the south, ten across and twenty deep. Two hundred warplanes flew right at them until they were so close Pino began to fear they’d release their payloads over his head.

A mile out, and a mile up, however, they banked in formation, showing their bellies as the bomb bays opened. The lead flight of bombers dropped altitude, set their wings, and swooped above the Gothic Line and German territory. They released bombs that whistled and trailed behind them, looking like so many fish diving from the sky.

The first one struck well behind the German defenses and erupted, hurling debris and throwing a rainbow of fluorescence and flame. More bombs started blowing up behind the Gothic fortifications, leaving charred blastholes and copper-red fires stitched in a carpet of violence and destruction that rolled east toward the estuary and the sea.

The last of the birds in the first wave were followed ten minutes later by a second, and a third, and a fourth—more than eight hundred heavy bombers in all. The lumbering planes let loose their ordnance in that same rhythmic pattern, only off by a degree or two so the new bombs struck in different parts of the German rear guard.

Armories exploded. Petrol supplies erupted. Barracks and roads and lorries and tanks and supply dumps evaporated in the initial assault. Then medium and light bombers flew in low over the river, attacking the defensive line itself. Sections of Leyers’s tank traps blew up. Pillboxes disintegrated. Cannon emplacements fell.

In the course of the next four hours, Allied bombers dropped twenty thousand bombs on the area. In the gaps between the aerial assaults, two thousand Allied artillery pieces shelled the Gothic Line in thirty-minute-long barrages. When the late afternoon sun shone into the smoke plumes up and down the river, the spring sky looked hellish and low.

Pino glanced at Leyers. As he scanned the battleground south of his broken defenses through the field glasses, the general’s hands trembled and he cursed in German.

“Mon général?” Pino said.

“They’re coming,” Leyers said. “Tanks. Jeeps. Artillery. Entire armies are advancing on us. Our boys will hold as long as they can, and many will die for that river. But at some point, not long now, every soldier down there will be confronted with the inevitable loser’s choice: retreat, surrender, or die.”

As the day gave way to gathering dusk, Allied soldiers with flamethrowers invaded the German trenches and the pillboxes. A black and starless night fell. As hand-to-hand combat waged out there in the darkness, all Pino could see were explosive flashes and slow whips of fire.

“They’ll be overrun by morning,” Leyers said at last. “It’s over.”

“In Italy, we have a saying that it’s not over until the fat lady sings, mon général,” Pino said.

“I hate opera,” the general grunted, and walked toward the car. “Get me out of here, back to Milan, before I’m caught without options.”

Pino didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he eagerly climbed behind the wheel. The Nazis can retreat, surrender, or die now, he thought. The war itself is dying. Only days now from peace and, well, Americans!

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