Editor’s note: Phinneywood author Bill Thorness has just released a family memoir “All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father’s War.” It recounts the battles of his commando father in World War II, and to research the book Bill went to Italy and walked those battlefields. Somewhat similar research was done by another Phinneywood author, Dominic Smith, whose novel “Return to Valetto” tells of a family in a dying Italian village who are still, many decades after WWII, experiencing the repercussions of that war.
Dominic and Bill will be in conversation about Bill’s new book, and both will be signing their books, in a free event presented by Phinney Books at the Phinney Center, Room 6, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26. Here is a preview of their discussion.
Telling a Soldier Father’s Story
Dominic Smith: Bill, what struck me when I was reading “All Roads Lead to Rome” was how deftly you managed to interweave your search for your father’s story with your own story of growing up in the aftermath of what happened to him during World War II. Where did the idea come from and how did you arrive at that format?
Bill Thorness: Thank you, Dominic. The project began with a sheaf of letters from my dad to my mom that my mother allowed the family to read after her death. It gave me an image of him that I’d never had, as he died when I was a young boy. I knew of his Army service, because he was in a famous commando unit, the First Special Service Force. But he never talked about it, so my family had few personal details. I researched, both on his battlefields in Italy and extensively in Army records of the war. I read widely about his unit, studied our genealogy, and interviewed family and others, including a few old Italian folks, about the war.
I realized there were two stories, his war experience and my odyssey to learn about him and our history, so I juxtaposed those into alternating chapters. In the war chapters, I retell the stories of his battles as I picture him in the fray. In a sense, I had grown up in the shadow of my father’s experience, so the whole project was me trying to get inside his head, learning who he was before the war and how the war changed him.
DS: So, Erick, your dad, grew up on a farm near a small town in North Dakota and just as he was graduating high school and moving into adulthood, the Dust Bowl hit and the country was facing the Great Depression. So how did this farm kid, the son of Norwegian immigrants, end up joining the US Special Forces and being sent halfway around the world as a commando to fight in Italy?
BT: That is some fascinating history. He was drafted and sent to basic training in the San Francisco Bay area. I imagine he would have gone on to fight in the Pacific like my uncles did. But the Army combed through all their bases on the West Coast, looking for men for a special unit that they planned to send over to fight as commandos in Norway. He could ski and he could speak Norwegian, and they were looking for rugged outdoors-type men, and as a farmer I guess he fit that description.
So he entered the special forces, first of its kind in the Army, and trained as a paratrooper and mountain fighter. But the plan never came together, because they decided it would probably be a suicide mission, so he ended up fighting in Italy. He went ashore at Naples and fought in the campaigns to push the Germans north out of Italy, including the liberation of Rome. He was injured on the final push into Rome, the last day of the campaign in fact, so I decided to finish the trip on his behalf and walk his battlefields into Rome.
Relating Italian History
BT: Dominic, I loved your most recent novel, “Return to Valetto,” in which you wrote about an Anglo-Italian family whose history has been deeply impacted by the unraveling of events at the end of WWII. The patriarch of the family fled in the spring of 1943 to go support the resistance against the Germans and the Fascists and his family never saw him again. How did you gain insight into the tough life the Italians led in the war to create such a moving portrayal?
DS: Thanks, Bill! To really understand that time I read a lot of journals, letters, and memoirs, even before I made a research trip to Italy. One book in particular, “War in Val d’Orcia” by Iris Origo, written by the matriarch of an Anglo-Italian family that takes in displaced children from the north of Italy, gave me a tangible sense of those hardships. The last few years of the war were especially complicated. You had the Allies bombing cities in the north and eventually invading over land from the south, and you had the Germans and the Italian Fascists, but also the partisans, who were mostly peasants and workers who were on the side of the Allies and wanted a fresh start in Italy. Some of these partisans were living out in the woods or hiding up in the mountains and I wanted to capture some of their struggles in my book.
Visiting the Villages
DS: So, we both worked on books that required on-the-ground and archival research about Italy during WWII. In my case, the fictional town of Valetto is down to its last ten full-time residents, and so I visited about a dozen abandoned and nearly abandoned towns all over Italy, from Lazio all the way up to the Alps. I wanted to get a better understanding of why so much of Italy is deserted…with about 2,500 towns empty or on the verge of becoming abandoned. In your case, you visited some towns that were ravaged by the war.
Even though so much of small-town Italy is empty, it seems to me Italians still hold their ancestral villages very close to their hearts, and that they never really turn away from their history. That’s why you can see three different architectural periods on the same block in Rome: Etruscan, ancient Roman, even Fascist…Did you find that the people you encountered were still acknowledging their families or towns’ involvement in WWII? And how did you try to get a deeper understanding of the Italian culture, history, and landscape that were part of your father’s story?
BT: I found that most of the older Italians I met remembered the war vividly, and they still carry gratitude for the Americans coming to fight on their soil. And by association, I sensed their respect for me probing into that past.
My wife Susie and I, as we walked the landscape of the battlefields, stayed in agriturismos and B&Bs in small towns, and everywhere we went, I talked to people about my project. (Susie has long suffered my habit of talking to and interviewing people everywhere we go anyway, but this was for a purpose!)
I found ways to interview older folks through local interpreters and told a few of their heart-wrenching stories in my book. It was fascinating to see the war from their perspectives and memories.
I saw one town that had been so badly destroyed by shelling that the locals just gave up and built a new village nearby. In another larger town, an ancient temple beneath the town was unearthed by all the Allied bombing. The locals there had never known of its existence, but they left the ruins exposed so you can indeed see all those centuries of life.
History is especially fascinating when you get up close and personal with it. It’s a great reason to travel, and to talk to people, trying to understand their lives wherever you go. That approach certainly served me well in my book research.
