European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

ordered the local commanding officer, Ramis, to mine the power plant:

not the whole plant, only the roof, so that it would fall on the machinery and preserve them.

Ramis refused and told them:

“Listen, there are 500 partisans over here”.

There was also an English officer, and we were really armed then.

We had everything: a whole load of ammunition, machine guns, mortars…

If we had to mine a power plant at that point…

We fought back fiercely, even at night.

They had made it to less than one km from the road to the Predale power plant,

but they didn’t manage to proceed any further, not one step further.

The local people helped us out a lot there.

Workers built the trenches while the women cooked.

That was really a perfect battle,

and one morning the Germans were forced to retreat.

In order to retreat the Germans had to cross a slope: it was easy to shoot them with the machine gun.

So they devised a plan: using smoke-bombs, they created a smoke-screen in the whole area to try and get through.

We kept firing the machine guns, in spite of the smoke-screen.

But the Germans would always carry away their casualties.

That was the last real battle in our area.

After that there were only small attacks, to trucks and so on, but that was the last big battle.