Road to Rome – Shots and memories of a Rhodesian in the RAF

In the summer of 1943, while the Axis troops had just withdrawn from North Africa, the Allied forces were about to conquer Europe starting from what Winston Churchill considered the weak link of the Italian-German alliance, Italy, the “soft underbelly of Europe”. Through Operation Husky, thousands of young men from different military units, all belonging to the Anglo-American alliance, but of different nationalities, landed in Sicily. Among them was a young Rhodesian photographer, Algernon de Blois Spurr, enlisted in the Southern Rhodesian Air Force, who together with his airborne unit, the 55 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force, flew up the boot, in a journey that ended in Rome in the summer of 1944. His small camera, brought with him during the long journey, immortalized moments of war and daily life, constituting an important testimony of those crucial days, which, preciously preserved in a drawer in South Africa, resurface today, thanks to his son who granted the publication, and to the author, who has combined the shots with a meticulous reconstruction of the war events that accompanied the Squadron, and that come to life in this work, in a journey unpublished and sometimes exciting, that from the Sicilian island crosses the peninsula, to the eternal city.

By Salvo Fagone, 100 pages
English text