European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

It was difficult for us to get moving during the night.

“Let’s stay here, we’ll carry out our resistance tomorrow”.

We also had a mortar,

but before we could do anything we had to blow up the Secchiello Bridge.

I went down on one side to be safe and then made it under the bridge.

The Germans were already on the Secchiello bridge.

It was also quite a hard bridge to blow up.

I took advantage of the confusion, went under the bridge and set the mines.

The bridge was made of iron, but there was a rock, quiet high.

I lit the fuse and jumped off. It was a question of seconds.

However the Germans heard some noise when I lit the fuse.They shot some rockets.

I had jumped right away and hid behind the rock.

My comrades already knew that they would have to shoot when the Germans fired to give me a chance to draw back.

There was really a significant gunfight between us and them.

I slowly drew away, unhurt.

The following morning the Germans tried to reach Costabona twice,

but we pushed them back.

There were oak-trees, and we stood there with our machine guns, forcing them to retreat.

They had machine guns, armoured cars.

We had blown up the bridge so they couldn’t get through with armoured vehicles.