“The American airmen had just arrived on a mission to blow up the Allerona bridge at the moment we were passing over their target.”

SIX YEARS AGO, MilitaryHistoryNow.com published an article about some of the deadliest friendly-fire disasters of the Second World War. In the piece, we included details of an accidental American air attack on 1,500 Allied POWs being held in Italy. Recently, the daughter of one prisoner who lived through the incident reached out to us with her father’s remarkable tale of survival.

The events-in-question took place on Jan. 28, 1944 when a German army train loaded with captured GIs, British Tommies and South Africans was crossing a strategically vital railway bridge over the River Paglia near the town of Allerona.

As the locomotive rumbled slowly across the narrow span, a formation of B-26 bombers from the 320th Bomb Group suddenly appeared overhead to knock out the rail line. With bombs raining down on the river gorge, the train’s crew inexplicably leapt from the engine and fled the scene on foot. The soldiers guarding the prisoners immediately followed suit, abandoning the captives in padlocked boxcars to their fate.

Over the next few minutes, more bombs fell with some striking the bridge and the railway cars themselves. Although more than 400 prisoners were killed in the ensuing inferno, others managed to free themselves and make their way to safety.

Among them was Staff Sergeant Richard Morris of the U.S. Army’s 45^th Infantry Division. Captured in fighting near Venafro in December of 1943, the 22-year-old Colorado native was held for weeks at camp PG 54 near Passo Corese before being loaded onto the ill-fated train with his comrades for transport to a new stalag inside Germany. After slipping through a hole blown in the side of a boxcar and evading the guards, Morris leapt into the river and escaped. He survived in the Italian countryside for nearly six months before rejoining the Allies in June.

Morris’ own daughter, a New Jersey-based journalist named Sue Finley, recently discovered MHN’s article describing the Allerona attack and generously provided us with her father’s first-hand account of the events. Here what she sent:

The convoy moved slowly through the station at Orvieto and headed for the Allerona bridge. Out of the window we could see many bomb craters. When the train reached the bridge, it slowed down to a pace one could match by strolling beside it. I could see that many bombs [from previous air raids] had hit their target. The stone arches had been blasted away and the rails, fastened to their ties, lay precariously over the remaining stumps. The bridge’s condition explained the train’s tentative crossing. I dozed off to sleep.

The rain of rocks and shrapnel against the side of the car awakened me. My first thought was that P-51 fighter planes based on Corsica were strafing us. A few seconds later the whirlwind of air which falling bombs produce corrected this first assumption. I lay as prostrate as possible and prayed earnestly and selfishly to the Lord to spare me just one more time. There was no way I could make my brain deny the danger and transfer it elsewhere. This was the second stick of bombs and when they exploded, the entire train, now stopped on the tracks, shuddered and shook wildly. What was keeping the box-cars from falling through the jerry-built bridge and into the river below?

There was a pause between the bombs dropped by the lead planes and those following; I stood up to look out the window. The train was standing still on the tracks, heading towards the north. The German guards were fleeing to the east. They looked comically awkward in their boots, trying to run over the stones that covered the valley bottom. These stones lay under water when the river was in flood stage. A soldier thrust his face in the window beside me and screamed at the fleeing Germans, ‘come back you dirty bastards and let us out of here!’

Even if the guards were proficient enough in English to understand the request, and tolerant enough to overlook the insult to their mothers, it was unlikely that they would return to the target and unlock the box cars under a hail of bombs. The American airmen had just arrived on a mission to blow up the Allerona bridge at the moment we were passing over their target.

The sound of the third bomb cluster’s approach drowned out the fervent prayers of the men in the car. The bridge and train heaved convulsively when the bombs exploded. Larger holes appeared in the side of the car as bomb shrapnel tore through the walls.

During the pause which followed the third stick of bombs John (Tourtillotte) and I began hustling the men out of a large hole produced by bomb shrapnel. John and I looked at each other. Why were we wasting so much time urging reluctant men to make a break for freedom when some of them might well have been content to wait out the war in a German Camp and exist on Red Cross food parcels? We squirmed through a hole the bombs had opened and jumped down onto what remained of the bridge.

We ran frantically along the bridge beside the halted train in the direction of the locomotive up front. Many of the newer British prisoners had no shoes. Some of the old ‘Desert Rats’ had escaped the night before and the Germans had taken away the shoes of all those who remained behind in the car. This was intended to discourage the others from escaping later. Ahead a bottleneck was developing between the locomotive and the side of the bridge. There was not enough space for so many escapees to pass through at the same time. I scrambled through the bridge framework and jumped with no thought as to the space between the bridge and the river bed below.

The landing in an old bomb crater jarred my whole body. The fourth cluster fell. The blast blew away the tops of the cars in that section, leaving only the flat beds. Was our former car in that part of the train? 

There was John on the river bank. ‘This is our chance, Dick, let’s go!’

Some 150 prisoners were streaming towards the hills in the west. Thirty more prisoners were milling about near us. A lone German officer menaced us with a pistol. ‘Komm! Komm!’

‘You heard him guys, we gotta go with him,’ said an American voice. The statement dumbfounded me. Was the voice mocking or serious? The Germans were supposed to be those who submitted meekly to authority. For a moment I looked at the officer. What threat was his little pistol compared to the American bombs? The planes circled above us. They looked like B-26s. The officer must have thought the planes were getting into position for another attack. He dived into a crater.

With the exception of that officer, all the Germans were on the eastern side of the train, separated from us. The freed prisoners, in a group, were flocking west in the opposite direction. John and I headed north, away from the direction which was certain to be searched first.

According to Finley, after linking up with Allied troops, her father rotated back to the States and was awarded an honourable discharge for his harrowing escape. After using the GI Bill to get himself an education, Morris would spend the next 35 years teaching high school French and Spanish.

“I believe that spending six months behind enemy lines where he didn’t speak Italian or German really brought home to him the importance of foreign language,” said Finley. “He refused to ever go back to Italy; I think it was just too difficult for him to relive, and so he didn’t choose to teach Italian, but something different.”

Richard Morris died in 2003. He was 83.