I received a note recently from Marco Soggetto, who lives in Northern Italy.
Marco is engaged in a difficult historical search, concerning a small group of Allied soldiers who escaped from Italian camps and tried to reach the Swiss border through Italy’s Aosta Valley, on the Western Alps.
“They climbed the highest mountain chain in the whole of Europe,” he explained, “without being trained or equipped to do so, and as an alpinist I know how difficult this may be.”
One of the prisoners in this group came from Camp 59. He was Charles John P. Bradford, a British rifleman from the Rifle Brigade, 6915262. He was born March 8, 1918 and he died in 1989.
I asked Marco if he would send me detailed information about his research that I could post on the Camp 59 site. This morning he sent me the following note, which tells of his research and also is a request for assistance from anyone who may be able to help him in his quest for information.
If you know anything about any of the soldiers he mentions, please write to me at hilld@iu.edu and I will share the information with Marco.
Dennis Hill
Camp 59 Survivors administrator
Escape through the Alps
Allied soldiers on the run between Piedmont and the Aosta Valley
April 15, 2012
To the kind attention of the public of Camp 59 Survivors website,
Good evening from Biella, a small town in the northwestern part of Italy.
I am writing this short article and request for information on the very kind suggestion of Dennis Hill, webmaster of the nice and impressive website dedicated to deepening the history of Camp 59.
I am a researcher—both for work and in my free time—and I’ve spent my life under the stars of two different and powerful passions: mountaineering and history.
These two great, fascinating interests first captured me in a difficult search between August 2009 and the following Christmas. In a few words, after many years spent on the Western Alps in the beautiful Aosta Valley, I found the wreckage of a legendary plane, which crashed during the Second World War on the Dame di Challand (Ladies of Challand) group at about 2,900 meters above sea level.
Camp 59 Survivors 