Forbes, Colin The Palermo Ambush

"Colin Forbes" was a pseudonym employed by the British thriller author Raymond Harold Sawkins; this novel was published in the U.S. under the title The Palermo Affair. Author Forbes takes the documented World War 2 collaboration of Sicilian mafia with the Allies during the July-Aug. 1943 invasion of that island and spins an interesting, if none-too-believable, tale of a guerilla attack upon the last train ferry sailing between Sicily and the mainland. His small guerilla team is comprised of an Italian-speaking British Army officer (he's in command) and an American counterpart, as well as a local mafia bigwig and a non-mafia Italian partisan. Most of the novel's action takes place as the four men make a mad dash across the inhospitable mountains of central Sicily to Messina, homeport of the huge train ferry CARIDDI. There, with the aid of dockworkers controlled by our mafia "hero" (actually, Forbes paints the man in decidedly non-heroic, barbaric terms), the men make their way secretly aboard the ship and, on a return run back from the mainland with a passenger load of several thousand German Panzer troops and a fully-load ammunition train, successfully blow up the vessel. As noted, Allied forces really did work with the Sicilian mafia during World War 2, so there is some solid basis for Forbes' tale. However, in real life the massive train ferry CARIDDI - built in 1931 as one of the largest train ferries in the world - was actually scuttled by German troops on Aug. 16, 1943, the day before hostilities ceased on the island. Indeed, the vessel had brought over 100,000 German troops from Sicily to mainland Italy during their retreat from the Allies, and modern day historians see that successful action as actually being a defeat for the Allies. Though patently false, Forbes' fictive sinking of the CARIDDI has a satisfying taste for those rooting for the Allies versus the Nazi war machine and is certainly an appropriate ending for his thriller.