The Italian hill town of Ameglia rests prettily upon bedrock at the very tip of Liguria. The historic center and its frazioni are a popular destination for Italian and foreign visitors, who come for the renowned beach at Punta Corvo, the riverside walk at Bocca di Magra, or the village of Montemarcello, one of the borghi piu belli d'Italia. If not for three memorial plaques, no visitor would suspect that Ameglia's gentle nobility was defiled by a terrible war crime. Within the borders of this innocent town, fifteen American soldiers were executed by the German Army on March 26, 1944, in contravention of the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention. They were ignobly and brutally killed and buried in a mass grave. Today they are remembered not just by their families nor by those three markers, however. Their deaths led to a judgement which was used as a precedent at the Nuremberg war crime trials and which is now part of the bedrock of modern international law: an illegal military order by a superior is not a defense to a war crime.
On the cloudy and moonless night of March 22, 1944, two PT boats from the American OSS base on Corsica appproached the rocky Ligurian coast near Framura, a tiny town 6 miles north of Monterosso in Cinque Terre. This began the Operation codenamed Ginny II. Working silently, the boats' crews launched three rubber boats holding a commando team of 15 American soldiers in field uniform, their weapons and equipment, including 650 pounds of dynamite. As the team paddled toward shore, they struggled to ascertain their position relative to their objective: a small promontory south and east of Framura Station where two railroad tunnels on the critical Genoa-La Spezia line joined in a vaulted arcade with openings toward the sea. They knew their starting position from the radar carried on one of the PT boats, and they planned on using radio contact for further direction. In a disastrous turn of events, radio transmissions were unreliable that night and German torpedo boats appeared, forcing the American PT boats to leave. The final approach was visual on the darkest of nights with unknowable ocean currents.
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