1945 magazine articles Florence Italy, late WWII, color photos

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1945 magazine articles Florence Italy, late WWII, color photos:
$6.57

Selling are 2 magazine article from 1945: Florence

Title: Return to Florence

Author: 1st Lt. Benjamin C. McCartney, USAAF

This article is about the author’s revisit to Florence Italy. He had ‘visited’ it earlier on bombing missions. This time was on foot shortly after the enemy left, though fighting still going on in the area. The article was from March of 1945; the visit was in the summer/fall of 1944.

A paragraph on the last page says Lt. McCartney was killed in action in September 1944.

Quoting the first page “I was sitting on the cement ledge that runs along the north side of the Arno River in Florence watching some Italian civilians loading the smashed bodies of three of their fellows into a boat moored twenty feet below me. As the three had been trying to cross the broken and twisted rubble of the blown-up bridge, one of them had lifted a wire and set off a German mine.

The day before, I had seen five civilians killed climbing over the rubble at the south end of the ancient and famous Ponte Vecchio, where the Germans had blown up the houses to block the bridge and had then planted mines in the rubble.

All over the city there were mines and booby traps. The British sappers were clearing these up; yet little groups of careless civilians were being blown up almost hourly.

In the hills south of the city a battery of British guns thundered and expostulated at some target in the other hills, far north of the city, where the Germans were. It was almost midday, and the city lay inert under the heat as if poleaxed.

Somewhere in the park, a quarter of a mile away, a machine gun rattled briefly and then was quiet. Just beyond me, across the little open square where the jeeps and British cars were parked, the officers and men of the Allied Military Government and the Intelligence Control Unit were coming and going through a hotel doorway.

With them were occasional Italian members of the armed Partisans, wearing bright-colored armbands and feathers in their caps, and sometimes bright-colored scarfs. They were fighting the Germans and the Fascists in the outskirts of the city and often in the city itself. The night before, a Fascist soldier had been killed by the Partisans only 200 yards from the hotel.

Seeing my companion, Capt. Leonard S. Ackerman, coming out of the hotel doorway, I got up to walk over to him. We had been flying together for a year and had come up to Florence to see the bomb damage in the marshaling yards of the city and to inspect what had been one of the greatest examples of precision bombing in the war.

\"It\'s hot this time of day,\" I told him.

\"It certainly is. I\'d hate to have to run around the streets much if it\'s hot like this.\"

\"What did they say inside?\"

\"The same story: there are still snipers in the Campo di Marte yards. The Germans even have machine guns in all the yards. I guess I\'ll have to wait.\"

We walked over to the cement ledge again and looked down on the three dead civilians in the boat.

\"Poor guys,\" Captain Ackerman said.

\"What a lousy kind of war that is.\"

\"A civilian was talking to me about the bombing,\" I told him. \"My friend said it was really a beautiful job. He didn\'t know how we kept within the target aria at Campo di Marte where the yards are so narrow. I guess they don\'t feel too bad.\"

\"I wish we could get in to see it. I\'d like to look it over for myself.\"

\"Maybe tomorrow. Maybe our gang will clean them out today or tonight.\"

We were leaning over the ledge now, looking at the sluggish Arno filled with flotsam from the demolitions upstream. Below us, to the west, inching across the water break from one side of the river to another, was a long, patient line of civilians carrying net bags filled…”

7” x 10”; 23 pages, 18 B&W photos.

Title: Northern Italy: Scenic Battleground

Photos by: assorted

No text, just photo captions.

7” x 10”; 16 pages, 18 color photos of people and places in the Northern Italy. Some appear to be pre-war, some are later by McCartney. 2 aerial-bombing photos too.

These are pages from an actual 1945 magazine. No reprints or copies.

45C1

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