My Father's Role in the Fall of Fascism: The True Story behind the 2017 Bestseller 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky'

My dad, the protagonist of author Mark Sullivan’s 2017 Amazon bestseller, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, was born in 1926. The voice and image of “Il Duce” (as Italians were obliged to call Mussolini) were ubiquitous in Italy at the time. Mussolini would ultimately drag the country into the Second World War on the side of Germany’s Adolf Hitler. My father is now 92 and lives an hour north of Milan, and his name is Pino Lella. His last two years as a teenager are inseparable from the war and the fall of Fascism.