©A STEP AT A TIME…A WORLD WAR II BUCK PRIVATE SPY

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist



On a warm June day in 1994, amidst Middlefield, Connecticut’s rolling hills, a solemn military funeral at St. Sebastian Cemetery culminated the life of seventy-four-year-old World War II veteran, Biagio “Max” Corvo. Sicilian Jesuit priest, Father Joseph Sibilano commemorated Max as a “quiet hero…a man of God and country…[who] devoted himself to a mission greater than himself and gave to his country and family a living legacy…a cause of freedom he so cherished and fought for in his lifetime.”[1]

                Max was not a native-born son. He had emigrated to Middlefield from Augusta, Sicily when he was nine. His father, Cesare Corvo, in 1923 was forced into exile from Sicily when Benito Mussolini’s Fascist tide swamped Italy. Leaving his wife and children in the care of his mother, Cesare fled the political persecution and sailed to the United States, where, earlier in his life, he had worked as a member of a traveling troupe of Italian actors. He settled in Middlefield among a group of his immigrant fellows who had taken up residence in the town’s “Little Italy.” Aided by powerful friends in the old country, and after having gained his American citizenship, Cesare secured passage to America for his family. October 29, 1929 was the arrival date: “Black Tuesday,” the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed and the United States plunged into the Great Depression.

                Dominated by his thatch of curly black hair and soulful dark eyes, the under-sized, nine-year-old Max stepped foot in his American school ignorant of the English language and local customs. A segregated school by today’s standards, the student body was comprised almost entirely of Italian-Americans. But a teacher, a true-blue American pacifist, free of prejudice of any kind, who perceived her students as the “natural descendants of Dante, Raphael, Michelangelo and other geniuses of the Renaissance”[2] imbued in her young charges a burning desire to be open-hearted and fair-minded world citizens. She was young Max’s touchstone, and he thrived in and adapted with gusto to his new environment. The difficult economic era took its toll on the Corvo family, as it did on nearly everyone, however. As a result, Max was forced to terminate his education in his junior year of high school and to do his part in helping his loved-ones to navigate the Great Depression.     

                Cesare, Max’s father, raged against the oppressive Fascist system in Italy on the pages of an Italian language newspaper he published in Middlefield and that enjoyed wide distribution in Connecticut. He also maintained contact with fellow anti-Fascist expatriates in New York, Chicago, and other major cities in the United States. He stayed in constant contact with friends in Italy, active partisans of the underground movement against the Mussolini government. A firm hatred of unjust and oppressive regimes was drummed into Max’s consciousness, and coupled with his elementary school teacher’s sensibilities, he grew to be a man who could not sit on the sidelines and lament the state of affairs. Even before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Max enlisted in the Army, hell-bent on routing the world of Fascism.

                Extraordinarily intelligent, quick-witted, and clever to the point of startling accuracy, Max had ideas about underground warfare in Italy. He hatched an espionage plan whereby secret agents would infiltrate Italian and German Axis strongholds in areas of the Mediterranean. Like Winston S. Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, Max believed that the key to victory in the European Theater of World War II was a second front in the Mediterranean, an operation that would force Mussolini and Hitler to scatter their forces in defense against the Allies in the south, thereby relieving the Soviets whom the Germans were trouncing in the east. Securing the Mediterranean would also give the Allies the tremendous advantage of controlling the oil fields in Egypt and the Middle East, a coup that would go a long way in starving the Axis forces of the means of running their machines of war. Max presented his proposal to senior officers at the Quartermaster Training Center at Camp Lee, Virginia where he was assigned as a trainee in clerical duties. His scheme had its intended impact, and soon the twenty-one-year-old buck private found himself working in the Italian Secret Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington D.C. Max’s first major assignment in what later was known as the “Corvo Plan” was to recruit personnel, “volunteers who would be willing to put their lives on the line in the fight against Fascism.”[3] His and his father’s lifelong anti-Fascist contacts, both at home and abroad, proved more than handy in that regard. His simultaneous duties included shaping future espionage actions, setting up the permanent staff, and training the new recruits in specific intelligence targets in Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily. 

                Promoted to second lieutenant, by age twenty-two Max headed the military operations of the Italian Secret Intelligence espionage unit he had formed, comprised mainly of Italian-Americans and Italian-citizen partisans. Having raced the clock against the deteriorating situation in the Mediterranean, the initial members of the unit were in training by the time of “Operation Torch,” in North Africa, which was the first combined British-American invasion against the enemy in World War II. By the time of the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), the unit was the “only pool of manpower and expertise in the U.S. Army which was familiar with both the language and terrain of Sicily.”[4] But it took a while for commanders to trust it and put it to use, which didn’t occur until the Allies were in Sicily eight months later.

                No more a nine-year-old boy with the green grass of Middlefield tickling his toes, he was a man now, his soldier’s boots coated with the dust of the ancient, rocky soil of his early childhood’s Sicily. There was no time for reminiscence, however. There was a great big world before him needing saved. He and a compatriot went in search of a place to set up a command center for themselves. At present, a luxury seaside hotel, Falconara Castle’s biography began in 1392, granted initially by King Martin I of Sicily to a subject in reward for loyalty against an enemy. Then as now, it served as coastal defense, and Max put it to use once more. It was the first OSS headquarters in Italy. Perched on a promontory high above the sea, it gave view of the coastline for miles in every direction. The caretaker of the place explained that only a matter of hours before it had housed the commander of a coastal division of Italian troops. The men had quartered in adjoining buildings. Following a token resistance against the Allied invaders, the commander and his men had fled, some eluding capture and others taken prisoner. The Allies were corralling so many prisoners, both Italian and German, that long lines of them were marched to the beaches and loaded onto empty Allied ships and transshipped to Tunisian and Algerian prisoner-of-war camps.

                Max and his fellow officer set off by Jeep once again, this time on the road to Licata to report to General Patton’s headquarters to get assignments and to check on communiques from Washington and/or Algiers. Having been taken by Allies only days earlier, although dirty and unkempt, the city was open for business again. It was apparent that Fascism had planted itself so deeply in the people, dragging them down to despairing hunger and neglect. But they smiled and waved at the American G.I.’s, and an old Sicilian barber blubbered with pleasure when Max stepped across the threshold of his shop, and in his own tongue, asked for a haircut. On the same street, an American doctor was already busy treating droves of children, their rail-thin legs encrusted with oozing red sores.

                Max didn’t “Get to Berlin,” which was the goal of every fighter for freedom in those times. But for more than three years, he planned and directed high-risk, behind-enemy-lines operations for the OSS, which was America’s first central intelligence agency, missions that made all the difference in the success of Allied actions in the Mediterranean theater of the war.              

MAX CORVO, OSS ITALY 1942 – 1945, A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom, is a fascinating read of the formation, training, and missions of the espionage unit, as well as intriguing descriptions of the Italian people and geography.  The “Corvo Plan” was the model for all future OSS undercover operations in the war. The book is available for purchase at prominent booksellers.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase in eBook and soft cover on Amazon.com and other booksellers.



Image: Max Corvo      

---

[1] https://larouchepub.com.

[2] MAX CORVO, OSS ITALY 1942 – 1945, A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom, Max Corvo, Enigma Books, New York, NY, 1990, pg 3.

[3] MAX CORVO, OSS ITALY 1942 – 1945, A Personal Memoir of the Fight for Freedom, Max Corvo, Enigma Books, New York, NY, 1990, pg. 21.

[4] Ibid, pg. 65.

©A STEP AT A TIME…COMING OF AGE IN WORLD WAR II

By Linda Lee Greene, Author and Artist



Born in 1920, farmboy Bob Gaffin’s formative years had been Great Depression years. At the age of sixteen, he had conned his way into the Civilian Conversation Corps (CCC), passing himself off as the required age of eighteen to get in. The extra few CCC bucks every month had contributed mightily to his family’s coffers: they had helped to pay for his brother Bussy’s medical bills, repaired farm equipment, and purchased lumber for the larger house his father had been building, a necessary project to accommodate the ten members of his family. Living in the deep country of Southern Ohio, USA with their large garden, orchard, as well as forest and farm animals as sources of food, the Gaffins had kept their bellies full at least, and as such had fared better than most city folks who had relied on soup kitchens and the Salvation Army for sustenance during those bleak economic times. Still, Bob had suffered in his heart over the awful poverty so many of his family’s neighbors and friends, and even some relatives, had borne with such dignity.

Bob’s two CCC stints had widened his world far outside of the 586 square miles of his Adams County, Ohio home. He had been sure that the natural wonders and colorful ethnic cultures of the Northeastern United States in which he had been immersed had acquainted him with all the remaining planet had had to offer. But then, Confederate country had loomed on his horizon and he had breathed in the DNA of the Civil War battlefields on which he had imagined his grandfather might have fought. Many more new things had been revealed to him there—not just the ways and means of war he had learned in military boot camps, but also how white people had lived so very differently than had black people, and how a flag other than Old Glory had so often whipped in the hot and humid subtropical air of that Rebel lair.

Who would have thought that Bob would have sailed the Atlantic Ocean in an enormous ship stuffed shoulder to shoulder and knees to knees with his fellow G. I.s and come to ground in North Africa just two months before his twenty-second birthday? How had it been that in a combined British-American invasion in World War II’s “Operation Torch,” Bob had entered his baptism of fire among the American troops at Casablanca in French Morocco? As explained by Winston S. Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, the invasion had not been the “…beginning of the end,” but the “end of the beginning.” And so it had been for Bob, whose innocence had been shattered by the explosions and gunshots of that confrontation; as he and his Allied counterparts had rolled forward into a long and dirty war with their German and Italian enemies, and as during the muddy winter lull in the fighting, he had observed in that place overt slavery still practiced, Jews bullied and persecuted with impunity, and in their flight from the Nazis, terrified and desperate and tattered European refugees bulging the streets and sleeping on floors of public buildings.

It hadn’t stopped with North Africa. It couldn’t have ended there. In Southern Sicily a few weeks later, which was a barren and arid geographical extension of North Africa, the wheels and serpentine tracks of Bob’s half-track pulverized the bodies of dead Germans and Italians lying in the way of vehicular progress, each humped carcass pitching the half-track up and down like a bucking horse. Tears flooded Bob’s eyes, and the contents of his stomach gorged his throat. But then he saw the hollow eyes and bloated stomachs and protruding bones of the children, gorgeous, innocent, raven-haired Sicilian children lining the roadways of that stingy Fascist state, their little filthy hands reaching out, their noses running in anxious beseeching: “Acqua! (Water) Pane! (Bread)”

Never had he seen such destitution. As he and his compatriots of the 2^nd Armored Division captured and assembled thousands of Italian Prisoners of war (POWs) nose to shoulder, Bob thought about the soup lines he had seen back home in Cincinnati and Louisville. Returning to that part of the world was far, far in the future. Wiping the world clean of these Nazi bastards would be a long and difficult job, but Bob was up for it. Every step of his journey to that hour had prepared him for it.   

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com. Her novel of historical fiction titled GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS features a far-reaching look at Bob Gaffin’s childhood and young life.



Image: Bob Gaffin in casual military attire

©SNAKE - PEACE LILY - ENGLISH IVY PLANTS

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist



An article in ‘Martha Stewart’s Living’ magazine tells us that “aside from being low-maintenance and low-thirst, Snake Plants, Peace Lilies, and English Ivy plants scored among the highest in a NASA test for air-cleaning ability. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into energy, and take in volatile benzene and formaldehyde, and other gases.”

A Peace Lily in our bedrooms is a good idea, preferably in a pot placed on the floor, or suspended from the ceiling from a beaded or macramé hanger. An English Ivy in our bathrooms tucked on a sunny window sill or hanging from a pot helps to keep the space fresh. The plant also will love the moisture-laden air. Sitting Snake Plants on floors and other surfaces throughout our homes wherever possible is highly beneficial. It is helpful that Snake Plants can thrive in lower light than many other plants.

Since reading the article, I’ve been shopping for these plants, and finding them to be kind of pricey. But lucky me! I found this little Snake Plant the other day at Aldis for only $3.00!

   

Books by Linda Lee Greene are at Amazon.com.

A STEP AT A TIME…BIRTH AND DEATH IN WAR

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist



At precisely 6:30 PM on Friday the thirteenth, August, 1943, the cry of a newborn child shattered the hot and sluggish summer air of tiny Peebles, Ohio, USA, located just thirty miles north of the Ohio River. It was a girl-child, born in a farmhouse bedroom of her maternal grandparents, a place that sat atop a wooded knoll in the center of town. The firstborn child of her parents, she was delivered by “Old Doc Ellison,” the bent-shouldered and white-haired physician whom for many years had seen the family through much illness and strife. Wrapped in a new quilt that her grandmother had made for her, Doc Ellison placed the rosy-faced baby in her exhausted mother’s arms. “Have you decided on a name for this pretty little girl, Roma?”

                “Her name is Linda, because I read in a book that it means ‘beautiful.’ And her middle name is ‘Lee’ after her Daddy.”

                “How’s Lee doing? Is he still at the Great Lakes Navy Boot Camp?”

                “He’s having an awful time with his stomach, Doc. The food there keeps him sick most of the time.”

“That belly of his has given him fits since he was a little kid. I feel for him, Roma.”

Like every town in the USA, as was the case across nearly all of the civilized nations in those World War II days, Peebles was a place of women and children and their elders, the able-bodied men of fighting age having been drafted into the military, some of them serving actively, some of them home or in hospital seriously maimed, or already dead and buried in family cemeteries or lost on foreign soils, their remains never to be recovered. As it turned out, because of his problem with his stomach, my eighteen-year-old father was given an honorable medical discharge before completing boot camp training. It was a physical condition that plagued him all the 89 years of his life. However, if he had gone on to serve, there is every reason to assume he would have been a “swabby” on a ship or submarine reported to the Pacific Fleet, there to fight in hotspots of the pitiless water- and air-war against the Japanese.

I was nearing seven weeks of age by the time my dad first laid eyes on me. He had missed my birth, but was home in time to celebrate with my mother the joyful event of their first wedding anniversary. Other than concerns about my parent’s brothers, cousins, and friends on active duty, our little family led a peaceful existence through the balance of World War II, dad contributing to the war effort in various factories in Dayton, and Cincinnati, as well as in Columbus, Ohio, where we finally settled permanently, and is my home to this day.

However, my family’s elation over my birth surely would have been tempered had news come via the radio or newspaper of the sinking of the “USS Cisco,” a submarine on which my dad might very well have been a crewman, if not for his bad stomach. Having sailed on August 7, 1943 from Panama for Brisbane, Australia and arriving on September 1^st to assume local patrol duties, she docked at Darwin on September 18^th for two days. While at Darwin, Chief Radioman Howell B. Rice (USN ret.) was taken ill and sent ashore to the Navy hospital. “Cisco” then put out to sea on her first war patrol on September 20^th, the only submarine on duty in her field of operation. She was never seen again. Japanese records relate a grisly tale, one of an oil-leaking US submarine sighted and then sunk by bombs and depth charges by Imperial Japanese Navy carrier-based torpedo bombers and the Japanese riverboat “Karatsu.” The brutal irony is that the riverboat was originally the U.S. Navy gunboat “USS Luzon,” captured from the US by Japanese forces earlier in the war and put to work against its former owners. “Cisco” is thus presumed to have been lost in action on September 28, 1943, which was also the date of my parent’s wedding anniversary. The only survivor among the 77-member crew was Chief Radioman Howell B. Rice, left behind in a hospital bed in Darwin more than a week before that fateful day.

If you would like to donate to Linda's Birthday Fundraiser for Wounded Warrior Project, please click onto this link. Thank you so much.

Fundraiser for Wounded Warrior Project by Linda Lee Greene

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Three-quarters of an hour southwest of Peebles, in Adams County, Ohio, which is the place of my birth, the great Ohio River flows briefly northward and narrows to little more than one thousand feet wide. In times of summer drought a nearly dry footpath, and of winter freezes a solid bridge of ice, this taper in the waterway hosted animal and human traffic trekking shore to shore since antiquity, in pre-colonial times including but not limited to the river’s northern-based Miami and Shawnee Indians slinking across it, looting their southern neighbors, and hightailing it home with their angry victims in close pursuit. Once back on the north side of the river, it was easy to take cover in the great and dense “Imperial Forest,” as dubbed by frontiersmen. Caves, hollows, and thickets of bushes and of grapevines that wove impenetrable screens among the giant trees, some of them sycamores so large in circumference that two horsemen riding side by side could pass through their tunneled trunks, provided strategic hideaways. Over time, as the red faces changed to white, the river was a primary transportation route during the westward expansion of the United States of America, and the magnificent trees shading its waters began to be put to man’s ax to build their residential and commercial enterprises.  

            In the spring of 1804, one year almost to the day following Ohio’s designation as the 17^th state of the Union, at the bend of the river where it meets Red Oak Creek on its northern shore, Colonel James Poage, a Virginian, along with his wife and ten children and their possessions, as well as his twenty slaves, disembarked two enormous flatboats on a wild and pristine thousand-acre plot, land granted to him for his twenty years of service to the government as a surveyor. Poage was attracted to the location not only because of its abundant natural resources, which he foresaw lining his pockets with riches, but also because it was a slave-free region. While a member of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, the practice of enslaving human beings exercised his conscience, and he wanted out of it. Shortly after his arrival at his new home, he freed all of his slaves, dismantled his flatboats, and with the recycled lumber and trees from the forest, built a settlement. Soon a town took root that through a few evolutions finally was named Ripley. The riches never materialized for Poage, but his reputation for his “robust and cheerful piety” and as a welcoming and gracious host to new arrivals and guests in his Ripley, Ohio home grew far and wide.

            Weary black slaves on plantations in America’s Deep South lulled their children to sleep at night with stories of the great river up north with its narrow place that would someday be their pathway to freedom. They called it the “River Jordan” after Jesus’ baptismal waterway in the Bible. “And on the other side of the river, in a place called Ohio, people don’t keep other people as slaves. All people are free, even people with black skins like you and me,” slave mothers told their wide-eyed children. “That river is the line between being a slave and being free.”           

In the years leading to the American Civil War, slaves bolting to freedom on dangerous journeys across the north-south frontier via the Underground Railroad found more escape routes for the largest number of themselves on the Ohio River than anywhere else in the country. According to Ohio State University history professor Wilbur Siebert, Ohio’s Underground Railroad network comprised an estimated 3,000 miles of routes featuring more than twenty points of entry on the Ohio River, and as many as ten exit points by ferry across Lake Erie into Canada. The Ohio River is the generally accepted line to this day in the United States that separates the Midwestern Great Lakes states from the Southern border-states. Remnants of martyrs to the cause of freeing slaves, black and white and all shades in between, pepper the shores of the river. If you silence your mind and put your heart to the task, you might hear their anguished cries above the angry shouts, the snarls of the dogs, the blasts of the guns of their trackers.                                                                                                                                   

Perched atop the high embankment of the narrow bend in the Ohio River, the townspeople of Ripley were major witnesses to and actors in the firestorm of comings and goings of runaway slaves and their pursuers across the river. Among the population at that point were prominent as well as less-known abolitionists drawn to the area by a burning desire to devote themselves to the illegal act of freeing slaves. They set up housekeeping, established secret safe houses, cut backwoods paths, and worked diligently at helping slaves to escape bondage, at risk to their own and their family’s lives. Owing to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that granted slave-owners the right to regain their “property” even within the borders of free-states, slave-hunters, both owners and bounty-hunters, prowled the shores of the river, breached its northern shore, and chased down their human prey in free territory with impunity. It is doubtful that the Underground Railroad would have succeeded as it did absent the presence and support of free people of color fighting against such forces. They were people who had made it to freedom and had deliberately settled along stations of the Underground Railroad in Ohio beginning at the river, and stretching north to Columbus and on to Toledo and Cleveland and other towns around Lake Erie. Their express purpose was aiding runaways seeking safe harbor. During my growing-up years of the 1940s and 1950s in Columbus, I was unaware of the vital role my city, and even my state, played in fighting against one of the most oppressive human rights violations ever to occur. I was proud to learn in my research for this essay that Columbus alone has 22 documented Underground Railroad sites. 

Much is owed in the effort to end slavery in America to the more than 3,200 individuals known to have worked on the Underground Railroad. Many others will remain forever anonymous. But as I submit earlier in my dissertation, listening hearts might hear them.

          

**Author’s Note…I read a fabulous novel on the subject of a fleeing slave recently titled “The Day I Saw the Hummingbird,” by American author Paulette Mahurin. It is available in soft cover and eBook on Amazon.com.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available on Amazon.com.

Image…Ripley, Ohio from the southern shore of the Ohio River…1847 Woodcut