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ITALIAN TITLE: Un partigiano della Osoppo al confine orientale |
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Foreword -
Renato Del Din's family -
Renato's death -
General Badoglio -
Clean up partisan judgments |
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I am writing this article to remember my uncle Renato, brother of my mother Maria Giuseppina, who, as soon as he left the Military Academy of Modena with the rank of second lieutenant, to keep the oath made to the King went into hiding and enlisted himself in the monarchist partisan brigade Osoppo.
You can see him here in the photo, and I talk about even though I never have 
S.Lieutenant Renato Del Din GMMV known him in person, because at the time of his death in combat I was just about two years old and was living in Sicily, in Palermo, with my mother and paternal grandparents, while my father was still prisoner of the Americans in Northern Africa.
My grandfather, retired General officer of the Alpine Infantry, Prospero Del Din, took me to see his grave in the year 1960.
I seem to remember, it is the first grave on the left in the penultimate row from the entrance to the small old cemetery of Tolmezzo, on top of a hill.
My uncle Renato is buried up there.
The entrance to the cemetery was reached via an uphill road which was then not asphalted, made of macadám, that is a compressed crushed stone, and fine gravel creaking under your steps typical of the place at that time.
I haven't been going there for decades, the last time was almost half a century ago.
However, I remember the noise of silence in the wind echo among the surrounding mountains, while my grandfather made the sign of the cross and - after saying 'hi Renato!' - tapped with two fingers on the tombstone where it was half-erased by time these words:
Sottotenente Renato del Din, Medaglia d'oro al valor militare.
(Second Lieutenant Renato del Din, Gold Medal for Military Valor)
Seeing the silent expression of my grandfather who looked at the tombstone with wet eyes, I got a lump in my throat and I could hardly hold back tears.
That was a moment of such emotional intensity that I never again reached under any circumstances, not even when suddenly in the arms of my wife, in 2008, my son Alessandro, the youngest of my children (32 years old) died for an atherosclerosis of the coronaries.
On the same day my grandfather took me with him to meet the nuns of the orphanage named after his son, which he sponsored and to which he contributed, being also councilor of the National Monarchical Party in Udine.
In Tolmezzo there is also the Station of the Alpine infantry entitled 'Renato Del Din'
The young lieutenant Prospero Del Din of the 'Monteberico Alpine battalion' met his future bride Ines at a party, and it was love at first sight. They immediately decided to get engaged. My Grandfather Prospero 
Renato Del Din and Family became the youngest captain of the Italian army. Wounded more times in World War I, was promoted to Captain in the field, and decorated with a silver medal and later got other decorations, bronze medals and war crosses. During a convalescence leave, after a combat wound, my grandfather and my grandmother married, giving birth to a family.
My Grandmother Ines Battilana, daughter of the doctor in charge of Recoaro public health (a town near Vicenza), then gave up the university studies that her father had planned for her, to dedicate her entire life to her husband and family.
She also took care of all of us grandchildren, in particular every year, when my brother and I were 10 up to 14 yo, she used to take us for a month or two to stay in the mountains holidays. My aunt Paola's children were also educated and protected by her.
My grandfather died in 1974 from the after-effects of a nephritis contracted in Ethiopia in 1936, while my grandmother passed away in 1982.
In the photo from the left the 'little' Paola, my aunt, also G.M.M.V., born in 1923, my mother Maria Giuseppina, born 1917, standing next to the grandfather.On the right standing Renato, born in 1922. When he died he was just 22 years old.
I want to tell pleasant mountain episodes that concerns me, grandmother and the grandfather:
Once we walked in the high mountains, in a valley named 'Val Visdende', we met a long column of bundled up Alpine infantrymen climbing in single file to the mount Peralba towards the Austrian border.
I was 11 years old then, I remember.
Grandma: «Linetto»" - she suggested -
«viva gli Alpini!».
And I obediently exclaimed:«viva gli Alpini!» (Long live the Alpine Infantry!).
Then I took this wise answer from a panting big boy: «Eh, bocia, ti andarà anca ti soto la naja!»" that is in Venetian dialect does it mean about: "Hey little one, at last you too will be obliged to be a soldier!"
I remember that even my grandfather Prospero - when he was still on duty - often took me with him among the mountains and and on alpine glaciers too.
When I was a child he used to take me with him on an inspection tour of the troopers camps.
I don't know today, but then the troops were equipped with everything necessary to be autonomous, and they practiced dismantling and reassembling the fields, where they remained for some time before moving and changing places.
After they had moved, swarms of crows arrived and cleaned up the place thoroughly.
My maternal grandparents were the best in the world, but also my paternal ones were no less.
I tell the story as my grandfather Prospero told me once when he took me to Tolmezzo and showed me the places of the event, even if others told me slightly different things.
In 1960 my grandfather took me to the square where my uncle had been injured, and then to the street where he had been finished.
My uncle just appointed second lieutenant was an inexperienced 22 yo young man, very religious and nourished by very noble ideals, and pure - they told me - as today most perhaps cannot even imagine.
He was brave and daring - as the saying goes the pear never falls far from the tree - and coming from the military academy he had a very high concept of honor.
He could not even imagine that his companions could panic in front of enemy fire, take it in fear and flee like hares to save their skin.
Unfortunately, inexperience and ingenuity usually pay dearly.
The grandfather took me to a square to see a building where he told me that there had been a barracks, then he pointed me to a nearby place where the soldiers of the Republic of Salò militias stationed to check the documents of the people who were passing through.
He told me that my uncle Renato had courageously pushed ahead of all the others, convinced that his comrades would follow him, but as soon as the firefight began, his companions had panicked and they ran away like hell.
Even if they could have overpowered the few militians, they did run away and abandoned their leader in front of the enemy fire.
Renato found himself facing the fire alone. Running out of ammunition, despite being shot in the shoulder near the back of the head and losing a lot of blood, he managed to turn the corner and to seek refuge by knocking on a wooden door.
But although there was someone inside who could have let him in and hide him - my grandfather told me who was them and gave me name and surname - no one opened to let him in.
One of the soldiers who arrived, after shooting him, crushed his skull with the butt of his rifle, exclaiming «porco d'un badogliano!». That is "Pig Badoglio's Follower"
G.M.M.V S.Ten. Renato Del Din
My uncle Renato was not what his killer said, but as many others he was only faithful to an oath made to Vittorio Emanuele III, a weak King and unfit for his task.
King Umberto I himself, his father, knew this well, and had planned to put a Savoia Aosta in his place.
But unfortunately a mad anarchist - named Bresci - a mad murderer who came specifically from the USA had killed him first, thus changing the history of Italy and ultimately causing the end of the millennial House of Savoy.
In fact, I believe that King Umberto I, after the excesses of the riots through the whole country, which happened in Italy after the Russian Revolution because of the italian communists, would have declared a state of siege and would have put an end to both communist and opposite violence by the army's force, restoring order, and finally keeping alive the democratic parliamentary regime.
At daybreak while Renato's corpse was about to be taken away by Germans, the women of the village crowded the square opposing the SS soldiers, and by popular acclaim they gave him a funeral, and buried him in the local cemetery in an unnamed grave, because no one knew who he was.
My grandpa Prospero had to recognize him when he came back from captivity on the Himalayan English prison camp.
He told me that he had recognized him by the hair, because his head had been crushed. There was only the skull, his unmistakable blonde hairs and bones among the uniform remains.
My grandmother, on the other hand, was taken from her home and imprisoned in Udine to tell her where her son was.
In jail among thieves and prostitutes, she was about to be sent to a concentration camp in Germany, but just in time she was saved by family friends, who bribed some Germans with silver objects and let her out.
They told me there was also a nice silver cutlery set for 24.
Yesterday - speaking in the years 90 - that place in Tolmezzo was completely different from when I first saw it in the 1950s, but there is an arch and a commemorative plaque.
There was the Alps troops barracks in Tolmezzo and a small square in Udine, up behind the church of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, which have been dedicated to my uncle Renato del Din.
As for General Pietro Badoglio:
In a nutshell we owe the italian civil war to Badoglio, with treacherous massacres committed by the communist partisans and German reprisals; all wanted by communists in order to shed as much blood as possible, and arouse the hatred of the civilian population against Germans and fascists and among the citizens themselves.
We also owe to Pietro Badoglio many of the problems of today, deriving from the presence of communists emerged again after 25 July 1943, due to the collapse of the State, and up today mainly resulting because the heavy infiltration of their faithful in each Italian public institution, lasting more than a half century.
Moreover, due to the inadequate and now obsolete Constitution of the italian republic, corruption and public spending have been enormously multiplied following the establishment of twenty (!) 'Regions' with the multiplication of spending centers and positions of power, and further fall of the already quite scarce national sentiment.
The same national sentiment today has been transformed for many people into contempt for the united Italy, pushes to the use of a thousand different dialects, and also for stupid hatred towards our millenary capital, the eternal Rome, builder of Italy and Europe.
Note:
Everywhere in the world, typical of the communists and 'politically correct' DEM politics - almost always the truth distortion or overturning is unavoidable.
I state that although he is not a left man, the author makes evident his contempt for the fascist regime.
In those borderline territories, due to the bombastic and strongly nationalist rhetoric, strong contrasts arose between people of Italian ethnicity and others.
However, even if the people of those areas are not as individualistic as other inhabitants of our country, they are always attached to their small bell tower; here, moreover, some also believe that they are superior in seriousness and ability and often the compatriots from other regions are not highly esteemed by most.
The book cover
For the author referred to in the title, in the short twenty years between the two wars, the fascist regime did only negative and useless things when not harmful. He suggests that few in Italy tolerated it. In short, he says the Italians were all a bunch of sheeps (!).
Since he talks about the Resistance, he avoids to say that the country had struggled through the economic crisis of '29, which came as usual from the USA, and doesn't even mention the 'unfair sanctions' imposed by the Society of Nations after the Ethiopian war of 1936, forcing the nation into autarchy.
Since the topic is restricted to the north-eastern areas the author does not say that the territories in the world under Italian administration had reached the extension of 5 million square kilometers, nor does it speak of the social achievements of the Regime that reached the 21st century, such as INPS (National Social Security Institute) and the many sports, trade associations, industry and professional corporations that once had the qualification of 'fascist' in their name. And which were exported to all territories administered by Italy.
Including the workers unions that in Italy have inherited and shared the assets and headquarters of the former fascist worker unions.
Let's mention also that first in the whole world the 40-hour work week was prescribed.
Primo Cresta doesn't remember that if today in Italy sport activities are quite organized and able to compete on a world level, it is due precisely to the fact that there was the Fascist Regime that built them with its 'antics'.
As for the 'grotesque' of the Regime, if I had been enough old, I would have participated reluctantly and forced, 'cause I am quite lazy.
They would have bothered me by making me get up too early on Saturday morning, and certain manifest hypocrisies perhaps, indeed without perhaps, would also have bothered me.
However, I don't remember any discomfortable feeling in 1968 when at the swearing-in ceremony in the aeronautical officers academym they played The 'song of the Piave', and after a perfect formal march performance at the sound of the air force anthem, we all togeter shouted 'I swear it!'. Indeed, we were all moved.
We all were already marching perfectly because in the middle schools of our times (1950) there still were gymnastics professors already fascists.
In fact they once taught the typical gymnastics of pre-war demonstrations and above all to march correctly and obey the relative commands.
Evidently, however, the author is unaware that abroad - USA for example- similar 'antics' are widespread and appreciated.
If I'm not mistaken, in USA they tends to be 'fascists' therefore, because commemorations in costume, parades, pseudo-military exercises are frequent, not to mention the 'national guard' made up with organized and well-armed citizens, and their exercises.
And the voting systems and the US government are similarly shaped to those of the ancient imperial Rome. They have a President-emperor and an elected Senate and they behaves as such, even if it is not up to it. Think about it.
In England, associations of all sorts with the relative symbols swarm. We also have Scouts, an institution that comes precisely from England, with its symbols and rituals, its hierarchies and its watchwords. In short, all regime 'antics'.
Of course, if abroad in the schools every morning they raise up the flag and sing their anthem, this is a highly positive thing, while transported to us it would be classified as 'foolish'.
The Fascist Regime tried - in truth a little bit clumsily and with not much success - to give birth into Italians, who have been mocked for centuries because 'we are not people, because we are divided' -these are unused words by our national Hymn- a national sentiment based on the historical memory of the greatness of imperial Rome that created Italy and the whole Europe.
Maybe it was exaggeration, but the fascist idea based on corporatism has spread all over the world.
Unfortunately our nation has lost everything with the wicked unfortunate Mussolini's decision, since the Germans always boldly start wars but always regularly lose them, that was the wicked alliance with the 'enemy of all times' - my grandfather said.
Another defect conventionally and universally widespread among the Italian people is the 'partisan bias', such as the one that the author manifests by highlighting -and sometimes even lying- the ferocity and treachery of fascists, Germans and Cossacks -those allied with the Germans to escape Stalin's ethnic cleansing- while the partisans in his judgement are all human and noble people.
But the author himself changes his mind on the Communist and Slavic partisans who wanted to annex Friuli and Venezia Giulia to Tito's Yugoslavia, and who therefore committed all sorts of abominations, slaughters and atrocities.
Unfortunately, war is war, and there is nothing clean about it. Unleashed the human beast it is difficult to take it back.
And beasts are beasts and there is little to do if they behave according their nature.
Story of the Osoppo partisan brigade from the book: an Osoppo partisan on the eastern border
Osoppo is an Italian village of 2,837 inhabitants in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which is part of the historical region of Gemonese. 
Today the municipality extends over an area of about 22 km² on the left bank of the river named Tagliamento.
The surrounding area is mostly flat, but there are also some hills.
In this story, the author, Primo Cresta -after various preliminary information and chronicles of events that took place after the disastrous event of September 8, 1943- speaks in first person of himself the Osoppo Division or partisan brigade. Here are two significant photos:
The command of the Garibaldi Natisone partisan divisions with two
officers
of the Soviet military mission and officers of the IX corpus
of the communist dictator Tito in the Tarnova's area - winter 1944-45
Foreign military personnel appear in the upper photo, very clearly identifiable. They are a Slav - the taller guy on the first left and Soviet officers, identifiable by their clothing.
This ugly presence of ruthless killers clearly indicates the preferential alliance of the Italian communists with foreigners who wanted to annex Friuli Venezia Giulia to the future Yugoslavia.
Below here another photograph of the Italian monarchist partisans of Osoppo brigade regularly in military uniform.
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The first partisans of Osoppo brigade on the Friuli mountains |
The Osoppo's partisans ha to face a double enemy:
(º)Friuli is a north-eastern Italian region that takes its name by the contraction of the words 'Forum Julii' -that is Julius place- because the Roman general Julius Cesar camped here during the campaign of the conquest of the Gauls in the first century BC, and founded Forum Julii Civitas the actual town named Cividale.
As is well known, similar events occurred throughout the whole Europe where most part of the actual cities were establishes by Ancient Romans: Eburacum (York), Londinium (London), Colonia Agrippina (Köln), Bonna (Bonn), Lugdunum (Lyon), Lutetia Parisiorum (Paris) etc etc etc
The Porzus massacre
On 6 February 1945 a group of Garibaldini was gathered in Spessa di Cividale, one part went to Udine to open the prisons, and the other went to Poiana, a hamlet between the towns of Racchiuso and Faedis.
The following ic carried out in full from the book on page 118:
«At about 10 am on that fateful day, the alarm was given to Porzus, where I was. Usually the Cossacks would arrive at that time, but from a completely different way.
The people of the town who spontaneously provided any useful information made me aware that they were partisans, even if a little strange in their dress.
In fact, shortly after their long line passed a short distance from the town and I, who with a telescope had taken miself out of the town, on an uncovered cliff, clearly distinguished them as they passed me by.
They were dressed in various shapes, some had red kerchiefs, others were deprived of it, and apparently many carried no weapons.
They skirted the small cemetery and continued the climb towards the huts without even catching their breath, and this struck me as a bit strange.
The one who preceded everyone stopped for a moment to look at the town and me with a telescope that he wore around his neck.
I nodded in greeting, but he didn't answer me and pulled away with his men in single file. Certainly it would have been easy for him to take me and begin his task with me.
All he had to do was calling me with a nod and I would have run, but this was obviously not part of his plan as he could have discovered his intentions and raised the alarm, allowing the young people of the country, connoisseurs of the places, and trained in rapid marches to reach in time the command of 'Bolla' (the commander of the Osoppo) to warn.
To me, unfortunately, the parade of the partisans did not arouse suspicion even if for a long time I had not seen many of them all together.
I did not worry, also because some of them had been recognized by some lumberjacks who were on their way as partisans of Garibaldi housed in the area before the roundup at the end of September 1944.
The next night I was awakened by the footsteps of some people passing through the stony and bumpy streets of Porzus, but this often happened because the partisans carried out actions and movements at night and fortunately I remained calm on the corn leaves, which were then my bed.
At dawn, however, I was informed that unknown persons had made a peasant get out of bed to ask him if there were partisans in the village and he was a certain 'Dibeta' old and mutilated in one leg, not seeing in the dark who the interlocutors were, and fearing they were fascists, he replied in the negative.
Luck continued to assist me. But shortly after, at dawn, the almost incredible news of the tragedy arrived: at the Bolla huts, Enea (Gastone Valente) and a woman, a certain Elsa Turchetti, were killed, and all the others had disappeared..»
NDR: Including the chaplain who celebrated mass every morning
The Porzus martyrs were later accused by the communists of being 'fascists'. It seems obvious to me that those people cannot help but lie. They didn't do it yesterday and and their exegetes and heirs don't do it today.
The commander 'Bolla' was called Francesco De Gregori born in Rome on 16.10.1910 He was awarded the Gold Medal in memory.
Let me say that the motivation of that medal arouses a bit of disgust for its hypocrisy: it is written in fact that "he fell victim to the situation created by fascism and fed by the German oppressor"
It was a coward abstraction which means that the murder of so many people was a fatality, not mentioning the Garibaldinian killers, the communist thugs who wanted to annex Friuli to Tito's Yugoslavia!
After the end of the war.
These uppersaid here and similar facts show the dominant position of the Communists in Italy after 1945, such as the treacherous killings and the disappearance of thousands and thousands of innocent civilians accused of being 'fascists' - today we would say 'desaparecidos'.
All that was instead personal vendettas and class hatred killings carried out by Godless people, few or nothing to do with politics.
More, after the war, lynching or murders of many fascist soldiers held in some prisons of the North Italy also happened.
All this and many other crimes and atrocities were part of a large number of heinous crimes committed to preventively eliminate possible opponents of those who wanted to bring our country into the field of the Warsaw Pact to make us become one of the Soviet socialist republics.
Many italian Fascist did succeed to escape and was enlisted in the French or Spanish foreign legions.
Those enlisted in the French legion were in most part killed in the battle of Diem Bien Phu against the Vietnamese of General Ho Chi Min.
So they couldn't escape the Communists anyway!
Returning from the English prison camp in the Himalayas, my Grandfather belonged to the organization then called 'Fratelli d'Italia' (Brothers in Italy) immediately opposing the aims of the Slavs on Friuli and Gorizia, in particular by organizing the resistance against those who wanted to annex Friuli to that wretched mass of peoples 'southern Slavs', who would suffer so much misery under the oppression of the communist regime.
In the photo: Prospero Del Din with his daughter Paola, also decorated G.M.M.V.
«THE OSOPPO IN GORIZIA
Committed as I was in an attempt to introduce the ideals of resistance that inspired the creation of Osoppo brigade to the people of Gorizia, I was at that time organizing ... (omitted) ... a choral and folklore review ... (omitted) ...
The show took place at the Verdi Theater on February 3, '46 in front of an audience packed beyond belief and in the presence of the area president (Prefect) avv. Hugues, the municipal president (Mayor) avv. Giovanni Stecchina, and Major Harari of the A.I.S. (American Allied Information Service)
The same 'Verdi' took part in the event with other politicians and partisans from Udine, as well as the colonel of the Alpine Infantry Prospero Del Din, father of a gold medal of the Resistance, who, being in uniform, caused an explosion of enthusiasm.
It was our response to the APG 'Partisan Week'.»
If we had to thank someone for having been 'liberated', these certainly wouldn't be the partisan formations.
In facts, the communist formations which prevailed throughout Italy, didn't have the aim of fighting Germans or fascists, but where scoped to provoking reprisals of Germans against civilians, and ambushes with their terroristic attacks.
They wanted to arouse hatred of the population and among the population, because their ultimate goal was to bring Italy into the orbit of Moscow.
In fact, the contribution that the partisan formations gave to the Allied victory was not at all decisive, indeed in my opinion - from what I have seen in many documentaries and I have read here and there - it was not even significant as it was instead essential what the Slavic and Greek partisans gave to the British.
Those non communist people, who in Italy gave themselves to scrubland and mountains to escape the Germans or the conscriptions of the Fascist Republic of Salò, were entangled in what they found, as you can guess from reading Cresta's book.
Our 'liberators' then moved along the peninsula razing entire cities to the ground, bombing even cemeteries, art sites, churches and places of worship, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and destroying and leveling everything in their path, even after the 8 September 1943 and the armistice.
The British Allied also committed atrocities worthy of a trial against humanity, sowing explosive pens and dolls throughout Italy, which caused the death or mutilation of thousands of children.
My wife - born Bologna 1941 - told me that her mother always advised her never to pick up anything from the ground, neither sweets, nor pens, nor dolls, and to warn her when she saw one.
The worst aspect of the 'liberators' of that time was the typical US DEMs political idiocy, which after then did cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of victims in Korea and Vietnam, not to mention the grief among the civilian populations of those countries.
THE POWERFUL PATTON M46
Their enormous stupidly was when providing Russians with the economic means to bleed their exhausted forces, and finally - even more idiocy - by stopping to wait for the Red Army to take over half of Germany.
It is true that the mistake of not helping the defeated nations wasn't repeated, and that a great aid plan was promoted - the Marshall Plan.
While in the USSR there was literally hunger, in fact the economic recovery was beginning in the whole West.
In the book it's said that the armored divisions of German and Cossack troops fleeing towards the Brenner were driven by the massive arrival of the American tanks Pattons.
And let's forget about ridiculous films, like that one about Mussolini's arrest in a German truck, amidst mountains full of partisans who gnashed their teeth.
A German 'Tiger' tank on the run. The Mercedes of the Panzers
A Cossack at the wermacht serviceSurely for Germans and Cossacks, fighting against the annoyance and stinging of the Italian partisans was almost a pastime, a little dangerous, but nothing more.
Lately then I saw on TV a documentary that narrated the not very tragic coexistence of Cossacks and Carnielli (the place autoctone people).
My Grandfather Prospero, once, when he was passing through Sappada, (a town there among mountains) showed me a burned house, he told me that an "imbecile" had fired a rifle shot from there on the column of fleeing Cossacks.
The whole country was set on fire, giving way to the 'anti-fascists' to indulge themselves in inflated tales of further propaganda.
For me that shooter was not only a pure 'imbecile' but the usual Communist thug, that is double imbecile anyway.
Panic among the Cossaks following the announcement that they would be returned to the Russians by the British, against promises made to induce their surrender, was indescribable.
In order not to return to the Soviet hell thousands the Cossacks, men, women, children, preferred to commit suicide en masse, mostly by drowning in the river Drava, rather than falling into Russian hands.
However, many managed to flee to various Western European countries and United States, Canada and Australia, as well as to Turkey or South America, often continuing to harbor anti-Soviet dreams of revenge, and passing them on to their descendants.
In 1992, under Putin's patronage, a Cossack reconstitution took place, as a militarist and ultra-nationalist force, ready to engage in any war in Russia.
Just as a joke:
I report here a sentence from the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus that says: 'the Cossacks horses will drink from the fountains of San Pietro'.
I tell the US DEMs, please don't make some of usual foolishnesses of yours, let's make sure the prophecy doesn't become reality!
Lino Bertuzzi Roma September 05/2019Translation by Lino Bertuzzi April 27,2021 with the help of the Google translator, to do it quickly. Please forgive me for the poor and inelegant form of the text. I believe that the best is the enemy of the good.
