Malcolm Gaskill
Isabella Insolvibile has written a fine study of Allied prisoners of war in Italy. Originally published in Italian in 2024, it will interest not only historians specialising in wartime captivity but anyone concerned with the history of Italy during the Second World War. Beyond her specific focus, Isabella’s bigger subject is the conduct of the Italian state between 1940 and 1943. Upon this, she shines a bright spotlight, laying bare a reality that many people in Italy, where history and memory are contested, would prefer to ignore.
This is a brave book, first, because it tackles myths (when myths are precious, guarded closely); and secondly because it breaks silences (when people are often silent for a reason). All Isabella’s wide-ranging research points to a single truth: that the Fascist authorities were culpable in failing to care for their prisoners to the same standard that Italian PoWs were cared for in Britain, as demanded by the Geneva Convention. As such, she tackles head on one of the most entrenched myths and most deafening silences of the Second World War. Along the way, she also exposes not only the forgotten story of captivity at the hands of an enemy but the fact of captivity itself, which she calls “a paradigm for interpreting the twentieth-century world at war”.
She also shows that our perspectives on history are skewed by emotion. Captives, Isabella points out, don’t like to remember owing to the military shame of capture and the pain of what they subsequently endured; and their captors are similarly evasive because of how they treated those captives. The latter, she argues, was devastatingly true of Italy and its PoWs, mostly taken prisoner in the triumphant Italo-German campaigns in North Africa, 1941–2.
There’s much here to enlighten the descendants of both sides. Postwar Britain and Italy took different paths of remembering because their social and political conditions – and popular needs – were different. But Britain, too, distorted its own story of captivity through an obsession with exciting escape stories, which appealed to readers and cinema-goers partly because they palliated the ignominy of defeat and incarceration and soothed the agony of British economic and imperial decline after 1945.
Escapes were actually comparatively rare: as Isabella notes, there were only ten successful “home runs’”prior to Italy’s capitulation. The typical reality for PoWs, one less commonly explored, was suffering: hunger and illness, monotony and depression. It’s obvious why Italians might overlook this, but the Allied nations overlooked it too, precisely because it was painful to remember. “Captivity transformed actively waged war into passively endured war”, writes Isabella, the worst part of which, according to Odell Myers, a PoW in Camp 21 Chieti, was “accepting powerlessness”. And what was hard for men to come to terms with in captivity was also hard to confront after the war.
British memory is also skewed by a disproportionate focus on German camps: Colditz is a household name; Gavi, its Italian equivalent, is not. Over-emphasis on the northern European theatre of war as opposed to the southern one was resented even by soldiers who fought in Italy – the so-called “D-Day Dodgers”, a slur they sardonically owned – so how much more by the men who sat out the war in Italy as de facto noncombatants. They weren’t even eligible for the Italy Star campaign medal, unless they could prove they had fought with Italian partisans after breaking free in the autumn of 1943.
Finally, most memoirs and films described the experiences of commissioned officers, a minority of the 70,000 Allied prisoners in Italy. With the exception of Camp 78 Sulmona, which held men of all ranks, officers also had their own camps, where they were treated better than ordinary PoWs. This came from what Isabella calls the “strongly classist view of the Italian armed forces” and an accordingly punctilious respect for rank. Although Camp 49 Fontanellato looms large in literature and memory, it was meant for just five hundred officers, boasted all mod cons – prisoners knew it, jokingly, as “The Ritz” – and was not fully operational until the spring of 1943, by which time conditions even in previously grim camps had improved markedly.
Overcrowding
One of those grim camps, the one I know best from my own research, was Camp 65 Altamura-Gravina, situated in Puglia and the largest of its kind. It first opened its gates in the spring of 1942, and was quickly overcrowded. Although designed to hold 12,000 prisoners, the camp was unfinished, meaning that the 8,000 PoWs there by December far exceeded capacity. In January 1943, there were 9,000. From the autumn 1942 into a bitter winter, men had been slowly starving to death, a catastrophe prevented only by the arrival of more Red Cross parcels – an intervention which helped out Italians increasingly struggling with resource and supply issues as much as it helped save the lives of their malnourished prisoners.
It was a similar, baleful story in many other camps. Previously I’d tended to treat this situation as a blame-free effect of a country in dire economic straits as it started to lose the war. On this point, however, Isabella is clear: the misery inflicted on Allied captives was a sustained, systemic act of culpable neglect. Only nations with the wherewithal to care for prisoners should go to war, she insists. Anything else is a violation of international law.
My great-uncle Ralph Corps, a prisoner in Camp 65, attempted an escape in March 1943, accompanied by a redoubtable RAF pilot named Charlie West. Their plan was to walk a hundred miles to the port of Brindisi, where they had entered Italy, steal a German transport plane and fly it to Switzerland. After scaling the wire, they lasted eight days before being caught, worn down by hunger, exposure, exhaustion and, in Charlie’s case, malaria. But such escapes were rare. Most prisoners were either too weak or despondent or simply concerned to sit tight and not stir things up, especially if resisting incurred punishment. As Isabella argues, prisoners may have seen escaping as a duty or at least a right, but camp authorities were ambivalent about this, and often treated escapes as crimes.
War crimes
The real crimes, this book contends, were the war crimes committed by Italians. These comprised not only individual acts of brutality and cruelty, even sadism, but a comprehensive failure to treat prisoners humanely – feeding, clothing and housing them, affording adequate sanitary and medical provisions, and not casually endangering their lives. For historians to shift their attention from the waging of war to the more static experience of captivity, an Italian historiographical trend since the 1980s, is not enough. Instead, Isabella argues, we need to leave the well-ploughed field of Italians as captives for the new territory of the Italians as captors. And there they are found wanting.
All this supports the book’s key myth-busting idea, namely that the image of the “good Italian”, formed after the Armistice of September 1943, covered up an uncomfortable truth about the somewhat less good Italian in the preceding three years of the war. Conversely, examining Italian war crimes, and broadening their definition to include passive mistreatment, undermines the cherished public memory of a nation of brava gente that emerged in the postwar world and assuaged troubled Italian consciences.
My own book, The Glass Mountain, includes both bad and good Italians, but also explores how the attitudes of fleeing PoWs were changed by the loving hospitality they received at great risk and great material cost to their civilian hosts. The story of the “strange alliance” between the contadini and the Allied servicemen they sheltered was brought to prominence by the historian Roger Absalom in 1991. At the same time, it’s not widely known among British people and certainly wasn’t when I was growing up, in the long shadow of the war, in the 1970s. What I remember instead were sniggering jokes about Italian incompetence and cowardice, trickling down from the war years into the prejudices of the next generation. This humour was of a piece with the mockery of the Irish for supposedly being thick: both these lampoons were legacies of British war, colonialism and racism.
So although the myth of the good Italian may hold sway in Italy, I’m not sure it had the same impact in the UK – despite the fact that Italy and its people have been loved by holidaymakers before and especially after the war. More importantly, the brava gente myth is not completely false because over 20,000 Allied servicemen were shown staggering degrees of kindness by ordinary Italians. The 85,000 files generated by the Allied Screening Commission, held today by the US National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland, testify to the scale of their courage and sacrifice.
Each ex-prisoner on the run had his own epiphany, in his own way. In common with all veterans of the Western Desert, Uncle Ralph detested Italians – until he met some that loved him and he loved them back. He lacked the literary talent of Eric Newby or John Verney, but the emotions he felt in Italy were every bit as authentic and powerful. He, like so many other haters of “wops” and “eyeties”, was transformed by living peaceably in a brave sharecropper’s farmhouse in Brescia, a few miles from Lake Garda.
The essence of Ralph’s story is rooted in the collective story Isabella recounts in her superb book. The intoxicating detachment from reality that men felt lodging with contadini had begun in the camps – less happily in most cases, but still a suspension of normal life and an unsettling slowing of time. Furthermore, the euphoria of liberty and amity with a simple, strong and fiercely loyal people, not to mention the pleasures of simple food and routines in bucolic settings, were all the more joyous for standing in such stark contrast to life as a prisoner of war. This remains true even if, taken as a whole, these Italians’ humble philanthropy became what Isabella calls ‘a form of collective redemption’ for a postwar nation coming to terms with its past.
Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of East Anglia, and the author of The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy (Penguin, Allen Lane, £10.99).