In July 1943, with the Allies in Sicily and bombs falling on Rome, Benito Mussolini was voted out by his own Grand Council of Fascism, dismissed by the king, and driven away in an ambulance. This episode follows his downfall from unquestioned dictator to depressed prisoner shuffled between island hideouts, and finally to a mountaintop ski hotel on the Gran Sasso, a building shaped like the letter D as part of a resort meant to spell out his own title from the air.

We dismantle the propaganda legend of the September 1943 glider raid, Operation Oak. SS officer Herbert Kappler tracked Mussolini using intercepted family letters and counterfeit British pounds from Operation Bernhard. Major Harald Mors and General Kurt Student planned the assault, but Otto Skorzeny inserted himself, disrupted the glider formation, and forced his way onto an overloaded Storch aircraft that dropped off a cliff on takeoff. The man they retrieved was a broken figure who begged his own guards not to fire, and who became a hostage running a Nazi puppet state until his execution by partisans in April 1945.

• How a bureaucratic no-confidence vote, not a revolution, ended twenty years of fascist rule
• Why the Badoglio government kept moving Mussolini while secretly negotiating an armistice with the Allies
• The Italian general forced onto the gliders as a human shield to guarantee a bloodless capture
• How Skorzeny’s hunger for glory nearly killed the pilot, himself and the dictator he was sent to rescue
• What the Italian Social Republic reveals about Mussolini’s final eighteen months as Hitler’s captive