Rita Zucca

Zucca was barred from returning to the United States and lived in relative obscurity in Italy until her death in 1998.

Zucca was then tried by an Italian military tribunal on charges of collaboration. On March 29, 1946, she was sentenced to four and half years in prison, but was released after nine months after the Italian government declared a general amnesty for collaborators in 1946.

As the Axis forces finally collapsed, Zucca went by train to her uncle's home in Turin, where she took refuge until her identification and arrest on June 5, 1945.

As the Allied armies advanced north into Rome, Zucca retreated north with the Germans in 1944 and resumed broadcasting from Milan. There, in September 1944, the broadcast crew of Jerry's Front was attached to a German military propaganda unit called the Liberty Station. By then Zucca was pregnant. Her son was born on December 15, 1944. She returned to the microphone 40 days later and continued until her final broadcast on April 25, 1945.

As the Allied invasion of Italy progressed, the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini decided to try to emulate the German radio's Axis Sally broadcasts of Mildred Gillars. In the summer of 1943, the Italian national radio network in Rome hired the 30-year-old Zucca with this aim in mind, in spite of her losing a typing job in 1942 for copying an anti-Fascist pamphlet.

Her broadcasts sometimes used intelligence provided by the German embassy in Rome in an attempt to confuse Allied troops. On July 8, 1943, the night before the invasion of Sicily, Zucca's broadcast told "the wonderful boys of the 504th Parachute Regiment" that "Col. Willis Mitchell's playboys the 61st Troop Carrier Group are going to carry you to certain death. We know where and when you are jumping and you will be wiped out."

She returned to Italy in 1938, working as a typist and renouncing her American citizenship three years later to save her family's property from expropriation by Mussolini's government.

Zucca's father, Louis, owned a very successful restaurant in New York's Midtown district in the 1930s and 1940s, called Zucca's Italian Garden. Located at 116-118-120 West 49th Street, the restaurant had its own promotional postcards which displayed a distinctly refined setting. Zucca spent her teenage years in a convent school in Florence and, as a young woman, had worked in the family business.

Rita Luisa Zucca (Italian pronunciation: [ˈriːta luˈiːza tˈtsukka], 1912–1998) was an American-born Italian radio announcer who broadcast Axis propaganda to Allied troops in Italy and North Africa. She became known as one of the "Axis Sallys", along with Mildred Gillars, who broadcast out of Berlin, Germany.