It was an incredible thing to see firsthand: the battered bodies of the deposed Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and his lover, Clara Petacci, dumped like so much rubbish in a public square in Milan in the waning days of World War II. The New York Times correspondent Milton Bracker was there on that day, April 29, 1945 — nine days before VE day, the end of the war in Europe — to take the measure of the moment.
“Benito Mussolini came back last night to the city where his fascism was born,” Bracker wrote in a front-page article in the next day’s paper. “He came back on the floor of a closed moving van, his dead body flung on the bodies of his mistress and 12 men shot with him.”
Bracker’s account, written in the first person with an unusual undercurrent of moral indignation, reflected the gravity of the event, the sense that history had swerved suddenly in a new direction. It told how, his support crumbling away, Mussolini had driven north in an attempt to escape to Switzerland. Before he got there, Bracker wrote, he was caught, “like the fleeing Marie Antoinette.”
The story was packed with details. Mussolini’s speedy trial and summary execution by a firing squad along with a group of his followers in Giulino di Mezzegra, in northern Italy. How their bodies were heaped in a van and deposited in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, of symbolic importance “because recently 15 patriots were executed there.”
The bodies were then savagely attacked by angry partisans. Bracker said he and other American reporters had been “thrust into the circle of death” by onlookers eager to show them what had happened.
An unknown photographer shows the reporter at the scene in his military uniform, notebook in hand, interviewing a soldier while the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress lay sprawled at their feet. Bracker saw two young men viciously kicking the slain dictator’s head, causing a “hideous crunch that wholly disfigured the once-proud face,” he wrote.
“It was naturally one of the grimmest moments of our lives, but it will at least serve to give absolutely authentic eyewitness accounts,” he added.
It is one thing to read about such an event in a newspaper; it’s another thing to see a picture of it. Bracker’s story was accompanied by a four-column, front-page photograph depicting the chaotic scene: the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci atop the pile of corpses — Mussolini is easily identifiable by his bald head — as a crowd of armed onlookers pushes and jostles alongside them.
The following day, May 1, the paper printed two additional photographs. One showed the corpses of Mussolini, Petacci and others dangling by their ankles from a pole at an abandoned service station, where they had been strung up by the mob; another showed Lieut. Gen. Achille Starace, an ally of Mussolini, in the final moments before his own execution by a firing squad.
The publication of these photographs was a coup for The Times. Transmitting photos around the world in the age of the internet is such a smooth undertaking that it’s easy to forget how difficult it once was. In the early days of news photography, the only method to get a photo from one place to another was to physically transport the film — an exercise in delayed gratification if, say, it involved a journey by boat across the Atlantic.
A breakthrough came in the 1920s with the development of practical radiophoto technology, a technique by which photographs were scanned and their tones converted into electrical pulses. The pulses were then sent wirelessly to New York, in the case of The Times, where they were transformed back into photographic images for publication.
Along with several other major news organizations, including The Chicago Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor, The Times in 1929 set up a company called Press Wireless that bypassed commercial telegraph monopolies. The company built its own shortwave radio transmission and receiving stations, allowing its members to transmit articles and images far more efficiently.
But transmission was still subject to logistical challenges, particularly during war. At the time of Mussolini’s death, the Press Wireless transmitting office nearest to Milan was in Geneva, some 155 miles away as the crow flies. So in order to get the photographs — which were taken by an Italian photographer whose name remains stubbornly lost to time — to New York, someone first had to get them to Geneva.
Bracker was busy writing his article, the first draft of history. But the mysterious photographer knew Daniel T. Brigham, a Times correspondent based in Bern, Switzerland, and offered to personally transport the photos to Ponte Chiasso, on the Italian-Swiss border, and put them on a train bound for Bern.
Even that was no easy task in a country ravaged by war. The photographer had to hitchhike to the border, navigating “highways blocked with bewildered countrymen and kept in ferment by roving partisan bands,” Meyer Berger, a former Times correspondent, wrote in his book about The Times’s first century, “The Story of The New York Times 1851-1951.” But the photographer got there and put the package on the train.
“Oh, boy, have I got something special!” Brigham exclaimed when he called The Times late that night to say that he had collected the package in Bern. He asked the Press Wireless office, normally closed on Sunday, to prepare to receive his transmission. Meanwhile, he got ready to go to Geneva.
After scrounging up gas for the trip, and obtaining permission from a military censor to use the photos, Brigham set off alone on a dangerous Alpine drive in the middle of the night. “He headed into a mountain blizzard, careening and skidding over black precipices on the dark and narrow alpine roads,” Berger wrote. At one point, one of his tires blew out, and Brigham had to change it in the storm.
At 11:30 p.m. New York time — 5:30 a.m. in Geneva — the images began to emerge from the Press Wireless’s receiver at The Times. They arrived too late for the first edition. But after some changes to the paper’s layout by the night managing editor, Raymond H. McCaw, the first photo, of Mussolini lying in the pile of corpses, was placed on the front page for the second edition.
It was rare to print such a graphic image in the paper, especially on the front page. But the photographs were irrefutable proof that Mussolini was dead. And they were a crucial visual complement to the story of what happened, told in Bracker’s accompanying article and analyzed in a Times editorial that same day.
“The wretched end of Benito Mussolini marks a fitting end to a wretched life,” the editorial said. “The man who once boasted that he was going to restore the glories of ancient Rome is now a corpse in a public square in Milan, with a howling mob cursing and kicking and spitting on his remains.”
After putting the paper to bed, McCaw typed out a memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, with the time at the top, 1:15 a.m.
“Mr. Sulzberger: I think you will agree that the Mussolini picture was well worth Page 1,” he wrote. “Personally, I think that next to the Iwo Jima flag-raising this was the second-best picture of the year,” he added, referring to the famous photo, by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press, of six Marines raising the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima two months earlier.
Sulzberger’s Western Union message to Brigham in Bern later that day was presumably no less heartfelt, despite being written in the weird unpunctuated syntax peculiar to telegrams. “Congratulations securing Mussolini picture which unique,” he wrote.
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