Angelico Carta

Who is Angelico Carta?

Angelico Carta was an Italian military officer. During the Axis occupation of Crete in World War II, he held the rank of Division General and served as the commander of infantry division "Siena". The Siena division had confronted the 5th Cretan Division with heavy loses in the Greco-Italian War and was assigned to the occupation of the eastern provinces of Sitia and Lasithi after the fall of Crete. The division counted around 20,000 men and was headquartered in Neapolis.

Carta was a royalist rather than a fascist and in contrast to the commanders of the German garrison in the western part of Crete, he generally behaved with restraint to the local population. After the 1943 Italian armistice, Carta and a few members of his staff were smuggled to Egypt by SOE major Patrick Leigh Fermor where they gave in to the British, whilst the Siena division was disarmed and surrendered to the Germans