On September 12, 1943, Hitler launched Operation Eiche (“oak”, in French). The goal: to free Mussolini, imprisoned in Italy since his dismissal on July 25.
Dante’s country, at this moment, is in dire straits. The Anglo-Saxons have just landed in Sicily, the army is in disarray and Mussolini, still adored yesterday, has become “the most hated man in Italy”, in the words of King Victor-Emmanuel III, by stubborn to support Hitler. On July 25, therefore, the king announced to the Duce that the Fascist Grand Council had just voted for a motion of no confidence in him, before imprisoning him with the intention of handing him over to the Allies.
The next day, Hitler fumed. Without Mussolini at its head, Italy is lost to Germany. It was therefore important to release him and restore him to his functions, hence Operation Eiche, launched a few weeks later.
I, who thought I had a fairly good knowledge of the major events linked to the Second World War, am forced to realize that I am missing parts of them. I discovered, in fact, the details of this episode thanks to Operation Eiche (Quebec America, 2023, 168 pages), an energetic children’s novel by the more than prolific Camille Bouchard.
The latter is not at his first steps in terms of historical novel. In his excellent series The century of misfortunes (Boréal, 2018-2020), it chronicled the Mexican Revolution, the colonization of Africa, institutionalized American racism, the atomic bomb and the Indochina War.
The inventiveness of this novelist is dazzling. Give him a subject and he will quickly turn it into an instructive and invigorating novel, which young people and others will devour with great pleasure.
This is the case, once again, with Operation Eiche“an adventure based on extraordinary true events”, narrated from the point of view of Tommaso, a young Italian shepherd plunged into the heart of the story despite himself.
With his friend Niccolò and his dog Achille, the boy is looking for a lost sheep in the mountainous Abruzzo when German gliders appear in the sky. One flies so low that it hits a sheep’s head before crashing. Operation Eiche, of which these children know nothing, is underway.
A few steps away, in fact, is a ski resort transformed into Mussolini’s prison. The place is so impregnable that it is hard to imagine the Germans risking it. Yet here they are falling from the sky!
Bouchard, without ever weighing his teaching pencil, becomes a historian in his own way. He teaches by telling. It vigorously presents the main actors in this incredible episode of the war.
We thus meet Otto Skorzeny, the Waffen-SS brute whom Hitler chose to lead the operation, “a sort of furious bull who enjoyed running into spit fences all his life”. We also meet a Hitler made hysterical by the betrayal of the Italian hierarchs and determined not only to find Mussolini, but to capture King Victor-Emmanuel III and Pope Pius XII to take revenge for such an affront.
We finally meet the fallen Duce, who has lost his splendor from the heyday of fascism. From a low angle and dressed in his military uniform, the leader, in the propaganda photos, looks like a colossus, we are told. However, when the young shepherds finally see him up close, at the window of his special prison, the man is no longer imposing and “does not at all have the expression of a dictator in control of everything”.
The Germans, thanks to the effect of surprise and the confusion of the Italian soldiers, who no longer knew which allies to turn to, succeeded in their mission without a single real shot being fired.
In the disorder that accompanies the events, Bouchard inserts his little shepherds and attributes to them the audacity to approach Mussolini to demand compensation from him for the loss of the sheep killed by the German glider. It is the smile of the novelist, at the heart of a story whose tragic ins and outs we know, moreover.
For more than thirty years, three novelists for young people have provided great reading pleasures to the adult that I am. Every year, on the occasion of the publication of our edition devoted to children’s literature, I have a moving thought for the late Raymond Plante, whose The Complete Grapes (Boréal, 2010) remains a masterpiece of the genre.
Likewise, I consider François Gravel to be a writer of genius since I read his series Savage (Quebec America, 2010), in addition to the rest of his work, one of the most imaginative and delightful in Quebec literature. Camille Bouchard, a master of historical and adventure novels, completes this elite trio.
These three are amazing novelists, for everyone.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game),
essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.