His slingshot killed 23 Nazis in silence: the story of the partisan who turned a game into a weapon

Winter of 1944, Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, occupied territory. Every morning, Second Lieutenant Klaus Ricter demanded the same report, a headcount of the men on guard duty before the shift change. It was a simple, almost mechanical procedure. The soldiers emerged from their barracks, still wrapped in the dawn chill, wrote down names and checked the surveillance posts around the small German garrison set up near the mountain road.

And every morning something didn’t add up, a sentry was missing. They found her for the first time next to the stone bridge over the stream. Lying in the fine snow, her rifle still leaning against the shoulder of the road. No shots fired, no alarm signal. The whistle still hung around her neck, only her cracked helmet and dark blood frozen on the ice.

At first they said it was an accident, a fall, perhaps a blow against the rock during the night. Then it happened again. Three days later, another soldier was found dead at the crossroads leading to the village. The same scene. No struggle, no sound heard by nearby patrols. The footprints in the snow simply stopped in front of the body.

No enemy, no sign of escape. The local command suspected a partisan sniper, but the distances were too short, 15, maybe 20 meters. A rifle would have woken half the garrison. A knife, then. But how could anyone approach a sentry posted in an open field, illuminated by the moon and surrounded by snow? After the fourth death, the soldiers began to whisper during the night. Something was moving in the woods.

Someone was watching. The guards stood still, fingers stiff on the trigger, listening to the wind coming down from the mountains. Every rustle sounded like a footstep, every shadow among the chestnut trees seemed alive. Yet nothing was ever heard. No shots, no screams, only the silence of the Apennines.

When German counterintelligence arrived from Bologna to investigate, they found five sentries dead in less than two weeks, all eliminated in the same manner. It was then that someone uttered for the first time a word no officer wanted to hear. It’s not an attack, it’s a hunt. To understand what was really happening in those Italian mountains, they needed to know the man who had transformed a simple childhood object into a weapon of war.

His name was Matteo Rinaldi, and before the war, no one in his village would have ever imagined seeing him with a gun in his hand. In San Benedetto in Alpe, a handful of stone houses clinging to the mountainside, everyone knew him as the blacksmith’s son. His father, Ernesto, had a soot-blackened shop near the fountain, where he shoed mules, repaired hinges, straightened blades, and fixed locks with seemingly endless patience.

His mother, Lucia, taught the village children to read and do arithmetic in the small municipal school and always said that Matteo had two rare gifts: a steady hand and kind eyes. As a child, he spent more time outdoors than indoors. In the summer, he climbed the slopes with the shepherds.

In the winter, he helped his father in the shop, keeping the fire burning and passing him tools. He was a quiet boy, not shy, but one of those who observed before speaking. He watched how he worked the iron when it turned red, how it changed its sound under the hammer, how one badly struck blow could ruin an entire day. Ernesto told him that strength is worth nothing without precision, and Matteo remembered this for the rest of his life.

He learned early to shoot from afar in the woods with the other boys. He used an ash wood slingshot that his father had shaped for him when he was seven. At first, everything was missing: pine cones, cans, apples hanging from the branches. Then he began to measure, to understand the weight of smooth rocks, the tension of the rubber, the exact moment to let go.

At 12, he could swing a bottle from 20 paces away. At 15, he hit a nut leaning against a wall and knocked it off without chipping the stone underneath. The village kids laughed and challenged him. He barely smiled; he simply threw and hit it. When he grew up, he didn’t become a soldier, but a craftsman. He went to Forlì to learn the mechanic’s trade in a small workshop that repaired bicycles and agricultural machinery.

He loved working with gears, bearings, and parts that needed cleaning and reassembling until they were perfect. He had strong hands and fine fingers, a rare combination. And the workshop owner said that Matteo could feel metal like a doctor feels a pulse. He didn’t talk about the future, but the future was right there.

A shop of his own, perhaps a marriage, a house with a vegetable garden, a hard but simple life, like the one his father and grandfather had had. Then the war came, and with it came the Germans in the valleys, the roadblocks, the trucks, the shouting, the roundups. Matteo returned to the village with his hands still stained with oil and found the mountains changed.

The men lowered their voices when they spoke in the square. The women closed their windows at sunset. At night, from the higher slopes they could see distant flashes and hear sharp blows carried by the wind. One thing about him in those months was more striking than anything else. He continued to observe, to measure, to remember. He had neither the temperament of a braggart nor that of a martyr.

He was someone who noticed where the patrols stopped, how often they changed shifts, which paths remained in shadow even at full moon. He still seemed like the boy with the slingshot and the shop, only with a harder face and a more oppressive silence. Anyone who met him then would hardly forget him.

Tall, lean, his clear eyes always fixed on something others hadn’t yet seen, as if inside his head he was already building an answer to a question no one had had the courage to ask. >> The end of his former life didn’t come in a single day, but in a series of increasingly harder blows, like hammer blows delivered to the same spot, until the iron gives way.

At first, there were orders posted in the square, stamps, prohibitions, men in uniform demanding shelter, food, obedience. Then came the names read aloud in front of the town hall, the suspicions, the whispered denunciations, the first arrests. San Benedetto in Alpe was not a place accustomed to fear.

Fear was quickly learned there. The Germans had positioned themselves along the mountain road because supplies and messengers passed through there. Every bend became a checkpoint, every bridge a lookout. It took very little to be stopped: an extra loaf of bread in the backpack, a response spoken in the wrong tone, a look that seemed defiant.

Matteo continued to help his father in the shop and do small repair jobs in the nearby villages, but by now every outing was a risk. They returned home before dark, spoke in hushed tones, and stopped asking questions. The first real blow came in the fall. A German truck hit a mine not far from the pass, and that same evening the soldiers entered the village like a flood.

They were looking for the culprits, but they had no names. When you don’t have names, you just grab whoever comes along. They took four men from the square, including Giulio, Matteo’s cousin, who had never held anything but a hoe in his hand. His mother ran after the trucks screaming, tripped on the gravel, and broke her knees. None of the four returned.

After that, the town began to fall apart from within. Some wanted to give in, some said they had to resist, some remained silent so as not to betray anyone, and some remained silent because they were already afraid of everyone. Matteo became even more withdrawn. He worked late in the shop with his father, without a radio, without light, behind the covered window.

Ernesto hammered away at the iron and every now and then stopped to listen to the sounds outside, as if night might enter at any moment. He did indeed enter one November morning. It was still dark when he heard rifle butts banging on the door. Not a knock, a strike. Three sharp raps, then a voice in German, then another in Italian, too rapid and servile.

Matteo was already standing when he saw me pass by the windows. His mother grabbed his arm, but he slowly freed himself, without speaking. Ernesto opened the door, standing straight, still in his shirt, and found himself faced with six soldiers and a fascist militiaman from the capital he knew by sight. They said that tools for the rebels had been repaired in the shop.

They said pieces of metal were missing from the requisitioned warehouses. They said many things, all decided before entering. They searched everywhere, knocked drawers over, took pliers, files, horseshoes, even Ernesto’s large hammer. They found what they were looking for: a bag of long nails and a roll of steel wire, common material in any workshop, but that morning it was enough to turn a blacksmith into an accomplice.

When they tried to take him away, Ernesto resisted only for a moment, the instant needed to make his son understand a simple and terrible thing: don’t do anything stupid. A soldier hit him in the stomach with the butt of his rifle, another on the back of the head. He fell to his knees, but didn’t scream. Lucia, however, screamed, and how she screamed her husband’s name, then her son’s, then words indiscriminately.

Matteo took a step forward and felt a cold cane thrust into his chest. The fascist soldier told him to stay still with a half-smile that Matteo never forgot. They took Ernesto away on a truck along with two other men they’d picked up along the way. Lucia remained in the doorway with her shawl open, as if she’d forgotten she was cold.

Matteo didn’t see her cry right away; he saw her right an overturned chair, pick up an apron from the floor, and calmly close the broken door. That was what hurt him the most, that ordinary gesture in a house that was no longer a home. For a week they searched for news. Matteo went down to the valley command, spoke with a priest, a pharmacist, a man who knew someone who knew a German interpreter.

Each time he returned with nothing. Finally, he learned the truth from a carter who had seen the bodies along a ditch after the sharp bend towards Comano. “Reprisal,” he said, and lowered his eyes. He didn’t add anything else. Matteo went alone; he recognized his father by his hands even before his face. The hands were dirty with dirt and still had an old burn near the thumb, inflicted years earlier in the shop.

He stood there for a long time without speaking, his knees in the frozen mud. When he returned home, his face was older, and in his eyes was something that hadn’t been there before. Not just pain, but a kind of cold precision, as if everything inside him had come together around a single thought.

Two nights later, someone knocked softly on the back window. They weren’t soldiers, but men from the mountain with muddy boots and blankets over their shoulders. One of them knew Giulio, the missing cousin. He said a few words, looking at Matteo and not at his mother. He said that up there, they needed capable hands, kind eyes, people who knew how to keep quiet.

He said they were expecting a response before dawn. Lucia didn’t try to hold him back; she made him a piece of bread, put a rosary that had belonged to her grandfather in his pocket, and adjusted his collar as she had done when he was a child. Alone at the door, as he was about to step out into the darkness, she placed her hand on his face and told him not to lose himself.

Matteo nodded, but made no promises. He walked up into the woods without looking back. Behind him, the village remained silent, its windows closed and its bell tower black against the sky. Ahead, among the chestnut trees, men who had already stopped living as they had before awaited him. From that night on, Matteo Rinaldi was no longer the son of the blacksmith from San Benedetto in Alpe.

He became part of the mountain, and the mountain in those years forgave no one. The first days in the mountains seemed unreal to him. Not because of the cold, which he knew so well, nor because of the hunger he had already seen creeping into the homes of the village, but because of the way the people around him seemed suspended between two worlds. During the day, they hid among chestnut groves, abandoned barns, and old, half-collapsed farmhouses, silently, as if the mountain had swallowed them up.

At night, they descended along the paths, crossed the valleys, disappeared towards the roads guarded by the Germans, and returned at dawn with wet shoes, gaunt faces, sometimes with food and ammunition, sometimes with nothing, sometimes one man short. The group Matteo joined called itself the Falcon Brigade, even though at the beginning it was small: there were just over 30 of them, perhaps 35 when everyone was present.

But counting them was difficult because the numbers changed from week to week. They included draft dodgers, disbanded former soldiers, farmers who had escaped roundups, two students from Bologna who spoke too softly to sound like soldiers, a railway worker with a scar on his chin, a former carabiniere whose name no one ever called.

Each man carried a story he didn’t immediately tell. In the mountains, questions were asked late, after one had already demonstrated his ability to remain silent. The weapons were few and all different. There were old Italian rifles from the previous war, two short muskets, a few hand grenades recovered who knows where, a German submachine gun taken in an ambush and kept like a treasure with its magazines counted one by one.

Some still had work shoes, others boots that were too big, others pieces of uniform thrown together haphazardly. No one looked like a soldier from a distance, yet you only had to look into their eyes to understand that they had become one, not through training, but out of necessity. The commander was called Aldo Ferretti, but everyone called him the maestro.

Before the war, he taught literature at a school in Faenza, and something of that profession remained in him: the measured tone, the habit of observing faces while speaking, the way he explained things without raising his voice. He was over 40, sported a short beard, always too long for neatness, and walked with a slight drag in his left leg, the result of a wound he’d sustained months earlier during a raid.

He wasn’t the strongest or the fastest, but when he made a decision, no one argued—not because he’d instilled fear, but because he was one of those who took the weight of decisions to the very end, even when they ended badly. It was he who took Matteo aside the second evening near a small fire shielded with stones and blankets.

He asked him a few questions, as all those who had already seen too many people lie did. Where he was from, what his job was, if he knew how to shoot, if he was afraid of the dark. Matteo answered without adding anything. When he mentioned that he had been a mechanic and that as a boy he spent his days in the woods, the teacher barely nodded.

When he said he knew how to sit still and observe, she nodded a second time and looked briefly at his hands, as if trying to gauge the kind of man he was by the way he held his fingers intertwined. She immediately assigned him to the scouts. It was the most thankless and important task. It brought no glory, no booty, often not even the certainty of returning, but everything else depended on them.

They were the ones who got down before the others, counting the sentries, studying the roads, figuring out if a bridge was mined, if a barracks had reinforcements, if a courier could get through or would fall into a trap. If they made a small mistake, someone died. If they did their job well, no one noticed, because good reconnaissance was only evident when the operation was going smoothly.

Leading them was Nedo Vannini, a woodcutter from the Apennines with broad shoulders and a light step, a combination that seemed almost impossible to Matteo. His hands were damaged by the cold and the axe, and he spoke little, even compared to the others. Matteo learned more from him in a week than in months of fear in the village. He learned never to walk on the ridge if there was a moon, to stop before leaving a covered path, to recognize by the silence of the dogs if there were strangers in a house, to read the snow not just for footprints, but for absences, for the places where no one was.

It had been days, and those in which the surface had been barely touched and then swept as best they could. The main camp wasn’t a real camp; it was a network of makeshift shelters, changed frequently to avoid being found. One night they slept in an abandoned charcoal shed, another in a barn high above a ravine, another in a shepherd’s house with a half-caverned roof and the wind blowing through the rafters.

The food came from the peasants who risked being shot to bring a loaf of bread, a little flour, dried chestnuts. Ardo wrapped in a rag. Every bite tasted of both fear and trust. The teacher often repeated this to the newcomers. The bread they ate wasn’t just food; it was a promise made by the people of the villages.