Salvo Fagone Bücher

Dragged forcefully by Japan into the Second World War, the United States of America in 1942 gradually increased its presence also in the Mediterranean basin. Here, until then, the balance of the conflict had always been in the balance between the Axis forces and the British and Commonwealth ones. Technological innovation and the arms race put in the field by the American war industry meant that quickly the fate of the conflict in the Mediterranean area changed radically in favor of the Allied forces. An unprecedented firepower was unleashed first on the cities of southern Italy and, in the course of 1943, on the whole national territory, leading to the fall of the fascist regime, then to the armistice and subsequently to the declaration of war by Italy to Germany itself. In a little less than three years, the Allied military force was able to conquer most of the Italian territory, reaching the capital, Rome, on June 4, 1944.

The island of Malta is renowned for its stoic defiance during the Second World War. Less well known is the significant contribution of its photographic reconnaissance aircraft to the war in the Mediterranean, particularly the surveillance of Sicily up to and beyond the Allied invasion.

In the summer of 1943, while the Axis troops had just withdrawn from North Africa, the Allied forces were about to conquer Europe starting from what Winston Churchill considered the weak link of the Italian-German alliance, Italy, the "soft underbelly of Europe". Through Operation Husky, thousands of young men from different military units, all belonging to the Anglo-American alliance, but of different nationalities, landed in Sicily. Among them was a young Rhodesian photographer, Algernon de Blois Spurr, enlisted in the Southern Rhodesian Air Force, who together with his airborne unit, the 55 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force, flew up the boot, in a journey that ended in Rome in the summer of 1944. His small camera, brought with him during the long journey, immortalized moments of war and daily life, constituting an important testimony of those crucial days, which, preciously preserved in a drawer in South Africa, resurface today, thanks to his son who granted the publication, and to the author, who has combined the shots with a meticulous reconstruction of the war events that accompanied the Squadron, and that come to life in this work, in a journey unpublished and sometimes exciting, that from the Sicilian island crosses the peninsula, to the eternal city.