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 speci
fic 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
[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.
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