The path to new friends

A force for good

The internet can be both a force for good or bad . On the bad side we have the addiction caused by social media. Associated there is the conflict voiced between individuals born from polarized opposing views. Negativity and anger I see often on sites like Twitter. For good we have the ability it provides to make connections with others that not so long ago would have been so difficult or unlikely to achieve. I have experienced the latter over the past few months.

  For a while now I’ve wanted to make a trip to Italy to explore the region where my Grandad was posted towards the end of the last world war. Despite some research I could not really pinpoint a specific location cross referenced with a definitive moment in time with any certainty. As I’ve already written Grandad was a signalman serving with 7th Armoured Brigade. During Spring 1945 this unit was positioned on the Senio river front around the town of Faenza. My planned trip was to visit this town , the river and the general location. 

My intention was to make the journey by motorcycle with friends to meet my wife and daughter who were travelling by air. Other events curtailed the bike trip and I had to make a rather late additional booking to join my family on a flight out of Stansted.

   As the date for our trip approached I had everything arranged. The basic nuts and bolts you could say. However I still had only a general sense of where I was going to go, visit and see once in Italy in relation to Grandad . This is where ‘connections’ and the positive side of the internet becomes part of the story.

Now I know I’m not exactly getting that many page hits with this blog but I am receiving more and more comments. Unfortunately most of these comments for some reason unknown to me appear mainly centred on the benefits of cannabis based  remedies of one sort or the other. Then I hit the comment jackpot , a real online ‘golden nugget’. A chap called Marco contacted me from Italy. We had a shared interest . Having written one book on a specific battle near Faenza during the offensive of April ‘45 he was already working on his second and wanted to hear more about the stories my Grandfather had told me. It really did appear that Fortuna was acting favourably towards me as it was only a matter of weeks before my trip planned for the beginning of May was due and I realised when he said he lived close to the river Senio that we could meet.

         After more correspondence we made tentative plans for meeting up. I also purchased Marco’s book – La Guerra sul Senio ( the war on the Senio) , a dual language edition. If you have interest in military history and specifically the last offensive of the Second World War in Italy I highly recommend this book.

  In our correspondence Marco provided me with much information. Moreover he gave me a probable location, date and time for an event I’ve mentioned already on my blog. This was the bombing incident Grandad spoke of and which I suspected was actually a friendly fire event. On the morning of 9th April B17’s of the US 15th air force dropped their ordinance East of the river Senio by mistake causing casualties among the allied forces which included elements of 7th Armoured Brigade.

An extract from the war diary of 7th Armoured Brigade ( supplied by Marco) sums it us thus :

‘During the afternoon one flight of heavy bombers dropped their loads on the East side of the Senio causing over 150 casualties ( mostly in 2nd Carpathian Brigade ) many of whom were key personnel for the assault that evening’. Marco told me that this bombing centred around the hamlet of Cassanigo close to the Senio opposite Felisio, very close to where he worked.

 Within a matter of days in the weeks leading up to May I had transitioned from a very loose sense of where I needed to be to follow my Grandfather’s footsteps to a specific location for a key moment and event of his war experience. Even better, I had someone waiting in Italy who wanted to help me fulfil my plan of visiting this spot. Someone with a shared common interest and a passion for history. Someone who wanted to meet and guide me.

 As I said, the internet can be a force of good or bad. For me it has been the most wonderful thing of late and in my next article I will tell of the day I spent visiting what was the front line in April ‘45 between the rivers Senio and Santerno. A visit I spent as a guest.