After Mussolini's ouster in July 1943, Italy's new government held him prisoner at a remote ski hotel atop the Gran Sasso massif. German commando Otto Skorzeny led a daring glider-borne raid that freed Mussolini without a shot fired, allowing Hitler to install him as the puppet leader of the Italian Social Republic in the north.
Mussolini had been arrested by King Victor Emmanuel III's government and shuttled between secret locations to prevent both escape and Allied rescue attempts. By September he sat under guard at the Campo Imperatore Hotel, accessible only by a funicular railway, on the assumption the location was unreachable.
Skorzeny's plan involved crash-landing gliders directly on the rocky slope beside the hotel. Roughly 90 German paratroopers and SS commandos overwhelmed the Italian guards, who offered no resistance. Mussolini was flown out aboard a tiny Storch aircraft piloted off a treacherously short runway, an image that became wartime legend.
The rescue extended the war in Italy by nearly two years, as Mussolini's puppet Salò Republic gave Germany a pretext to continue fighting doggedly up the peninsula, prolonging brutal combat and partisan warfare that claimed tens of thousands more lives.