The World War 2 Radio Podcast · Brick Pickle Media LLC

The Brenner Pass Story

·32 min·2 clips

Tony and Harper wire the trestle so a German troop train will crash onto the road.

1. The World War II Radio Podcast presents Cloak & Dagger's "The Brenner Pass Story," a June 4, 1950 radio drama about OSS sabotage in the Italian Alps. 2. Donald Harper is the American engineer and OSS operative who says he can cross the Brenner Pass mountains, and a colonel weighs his plan against the risk of capture by Italian fascists or German police. 3. The episode asks whether Harper can destroy the Brenner Pass highway and cut off a German retreat route before American troops advance. 4. Harper says he knows the Brenner area because he climbed the rocks around his grandmother's hut as a child and skied near the pass before the war. 5. The colonel agrees to supply TNT, an Italian uniform, forged papers, and names of partisans in the mountains. 6. Harper's first-person account says a snowstorm on the 40-mile journey throws him off course and leaves him without his knapsack, food, or identification. 7. Even after losing the forged OSS papers, he still keeps the TNT intended for the highway near Ampezzo. 8. He enters a tavern near Parola that caters to Nazis and fascists because he has no safe place to stop and needs food to continue. 9. A girl at the tavern taunts him, throws beer in his face, and helps make him stand out to the Germans watching him. 10. Harper follows the trail to his grandmother's house, where an old man named Padre and his grandmother shelter him while he sleeps. 11. Tony, the tavern girl, turns out to be the leader of the local partisan group, and she says she uses German gossip after getting them drunk. 12. Harper and Tony examine a diagram for the demolition, and the plan centers on a railway running over the highway. 13. Tony insists on helping with the explosives and says she wants to be part of the action after Harper is gone from the mountains. 14. They place TNT and a grenade on the trestle, then wait for the German troop train to come through. 15. Harper pulls the wire, and Tony asks for the chance to set off the explosion herself, showing how directly she has entered the operation. 16. After the blast, Harper and Tony face a new danger when Germans arrive at the house and Harper has to flee from an upstairs window. 17. The episode moves like a wartime radio adventure, with first-person narration, scene changes, and long stretches of dialogue spoken as the action unfolds. 18. Its energy comes from coded talk, mountain weather, and the pressure of moving explosives while German soldiers are close by. 19. Listeners who like OSS stories, vintage radio drama, and alpine sabotage will find this useful. 20. Listeners who want modern narration or a slow historical discussion may skip it.

As heard by us

A taut OSS sabotage drama with vintage wartime-radio urgency.

The Brenner Pass Story turns a Cloak & Dagger OSS sabotage mission into lean wartime radio drama. It follows American operatives trying to disrupt the Brenner Pass, the alpine route between Germany and Italy, and keeps the tension tight with clipped exchanges, quick reversals,…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a 1950 OSS sabotage story on vintage radio, with old-radio urgency and the Brenner Pass in play.

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