Last weekend German SS troops stormed the windswept slopes of central Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain, and liberated Benito Mussolini from his partisan captors, or rather a group of Italian military history enthusiasts did.

Just as the Germans recorded Operation Oak in 1943 for propaganda purposes in one of the most documented events of the second world war, so Italian military historians meticulously re-enacted the dictator’s dramatic rescue from Campo Imperatore on the 65th anniversary of the audacious mission.