About this book, author Joe McGinniss (Blind Faith, Fatal Vision, The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro) writes:"Monte Sole" is really more than a book. It is some sort of testament, some sort of act of witness, it is something holy, and that's not a word I use much any more. You gave voice to the voiceless, and something very close to the restoration of life to the dead. I did not know a man could do that with words. But you did. Books are fine, good books are worthy of celebration, great books worthy of veneration, but what you have done here...it is art that bursts beyond the confines of the covers.
FROM THE DUST JACKET:
"Mr. Olsen's brilliant re-creation of the massacre of innocents by the SS in an Italian hill village stands as one of the finest, most heartfelt, and morally forceful works to come out of World War II."
-- Gerald Green , author of The Last Angry ManJack Olsen's "true story of the massacre of Monte Sole" is an overwhelming account of an outrage that has remained buried among the forgotten atrocities of World War II: the coldblooded murder by German soldiers of more than 1,800 Italian civilians, men, women, and children in the fall of 1944.
Monte Sole (ironically Mountain of the Sun) had the bad luck to lie on the main route of withdrawal of the retreating German armies -- a route vitally important to Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Under the fierce command of Il Lupo (The Wolf), the partisans of the Stella Rossa, headquartered in the hills of Monte Sole, harassed the Germans by attacking convoys, derailing trains, even capturing the top-secret plans of the German Gothic Line. As the Allied advance stormed up Italy to the very shadow of Monte Sole, Axis frustration reached its peak. With full authorization of Kesselring, and with an infusion of dread SS reinforcements, the Germans deliberately set out to neutralize Monte Sole.
This massacre constitutes the core of Jack Olsen's monumental book, which brilliantly recounts in spare, almost dispassionate prose the life and death of Monte Sole. His portraits of the people who lived in the isolated mountain area are superb, the result of painstaking research and long interviews with the men and women who miraculously survived or who remember what took place during the unspeakable butchery of the next three days. Eighteen hundred men, women, and children -- most of them having nothing to do with the partisans -- were annihilated on Monte Sole. Others who did not die then were later blown up by mines sown by the Germans determined that Kesselring's order be carried out to the letter. The result -- which Kesselring later was to dismiss as "a war operation" -- was among the blackest pages in the history of man's inhumanity to man.
"This is a book about the effects of war," says Olsen of his work -- one of the most eloquent statements on the subject since John Hersey's Hiroshima. "There are no heroes and no villains. So long as there are wars, there will be massacres like Monte Sole."