New book on death of Archibald Reece Campbell, PoW and partisan

For Italian speakers, the above might be of interest. Raoul Paciaroni is a formidable amateur historian who usually writes about the Middles Ages but has written a couple of books about incidents in his home town of San Severino Marche in the period between the Italian Armistice and his town's liberation in July 44. Having read his book "Una Lunga Scia di Sangue", I looked for any documents on the particular individual named above.
Campbell was a South African PoW who on escape joined up with local partisans and was killed in an incident on 12th June 1944. It was a War Crime and therefore investigated immediately post-war. Those investigations are held at Kew.
Although the book is in Italian, its Appendices include the main documents from the file which are in English.

 

Unfortunately a large number of war crimes were committed in the Marche region, of which this is just one.
According to the research I have carried out using the Discovery facility of the National Archives website and cwgc.org, twenty three known victims are buried in Ancona War Cemetery and and five in Coriano Ridge, along with several unknowns.

I have all the files listed and will post them shortly,

Vitellino

 

Ancona
I have listed at least one file for known or named victims ( often there are two or three) plus four unknowns killed alongside Dvr. Didcock and Pte. Gordon.
I have surmised that the 24th in the list is airman W.O.I. Barker, but would need to send for the file for proof. If this is the case, two other victims would be Sergeant J. Groves and Sgt. R.P. Evans.

There are quite a lot of files for victims whose identity can only be established by reading the contents, if then.

Coriano Ridge
There are files for four POWs buried here who were killed in Marche.

(N.B. - ignore the lines - they don't mean anything)

 

Thanks Vitellino.
The story of my search for Sidney Seymour Smith's story is told here: Signalman Sidney Seymour Smith, PoW Italy, died March 1944
And of course this is only a partial list, since it refers only to UK nationals. American airman Robert Newton, together with his companion Martin Madjewski, shot near Santa Vittoria di Mantenano, are the subject of this book: The story of Robert Newton, PoW in Italy, published today!

 

Here's the War Crimes file in the National Archives. I didn't put in in the above list as I was only looking for British/Commonwealth victims when I made the list out:

WO 310/198 Santa Vittoria, Italy: killing of two American airmen

Vitellino

 

Reice Campbell was a South African, and as a result of the book mentioned above, the South African Military History Society took up the story and tracked down Reice's descendants. Here is a link to the recorded Zoom talk by Alan Mantle:
http://rapidttp.co.za/milhist/zoomvideo/campbellitalypt1.mp4
It's worth a watch with a glass of whatever takes your fancy .

 

An excellent presentation.