The Australian War Memorial holds the document AWM 54, Written
records [1939-1945], 780/1/6, Report on the Directorate of
Prisoners of War and internees at Army Headquarters, Melbourne,
1939-1951.
Volume 1, part 2 is about Enemy prisoners of war, and pages 101 to 106
list all the arrivals in Australia of Italian POWs. On page 106, you
will find a summary table of which I reproduce here below the part about
Italian POWs:
This figure of 18,432 is what everybody quotes, including
the most authoritative authors, like Gianfranco Cresciani in "Captivity
in Australia: The case of the Italian prisoners of war, 1940-1947". Studi Emigrazione / Etudes Migrations, 26(94),
1989, 195–220, on page 204, and Desmond O’Connor in "From Tobruk to
Clare : the experiences of the Italian prisoner of war Luigi Bortolotti
1941-1946". Fulgor, 1, 2003, 69–85.
, on page 69. Also Alan Fitzgerald, in his widely quoted book, The Italian farming soldiers: prisoners of war in Australia, 1941-1947, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, on page 191, reports the magic figure of 18,432.
The problem with that figure is that if you read the text of the
original document, rather than just looking at the total, you will see
that only 256 seamen were first interned and then held as POWs, not 268
as reported in the summary table. As a result, it is reasonable to
conclude that the Italian POWs were in fact 18,420.
My study of the list of 44,513 POWs and internees of all
nationalities made available by the Australian National Archives as
series MP1103-1 seems to confirm the lower number. I eliminated as
carefully as possible all entries of non-Italian POWs and all entries of
Italian internees and ended up with 18,415 names.
For a while I had in the list exactly 18,420 names!
This series MP1103-1 includes the Service and Casualty Forms of
all POWs and internees. The military authorities filled in those forms
when the POWs arrived in Australia. If it turned out that there are
indeed 18,420 forms for Italian POWs, the universally accepted figure of
18,432 might have to be reconsidered. In any case, it can no longer be
accepted at face value!
In case you are wondering, I'm still working on the PhD. But the focus
of the PhD has somewhat shifted from telling the stories of POWs to how
to tell those stories. I'll try to write more often. The huge void before this article is shameful...
Italian POWs in Australia
2013-11-14
2013-03-05
Why the Italian POWs were not freed at once
As soon as Italy signed the armistice, the Australians asked for more Italian POWs to put them to work. They transferred from India as many as they could.
I just discovered that in October/November 1943, the Americans told the British that, as Italy was a cobelligerent, the Italian soldiers captured while Italy was allied with Germany should no longer be considered POWs.
According to the Americans, the Italian POWs should have been organised into military units of the Italian armed forces to be placed under American or British command.
The Fascists among the POWs would be considered part of the armed forces of the newly formed Italian Social Republic, which was allied with Germany. Despite being held by the Allies, they would be considered prisoners of the Royal Italian government, which was fighting the Germans and the “Repubblichini” beside the Allies.
In this way, the Americans hoped to increase the number of Italian troops fighting against the Germans. I think it would have been the right thing to do and we have to give credit to the Americans for proposing it.
But the British (the Australians had no voice in this issue, as they were just seen as one of the states under British hegemony) were concerned that it would be difficult to maintain discipline of Italian troops placed under Allies’ control. They pointed out that, once the Italians were freed, it would not be possible to change their status back to that of POWs. As a result, they insisted that the Italians should remain POWs.
In the end, the British managed to convince the Americans.
That’s why the Australian government was able to use Italian POWs as a cheap labour force for the following three years.
I can’t help it but speculate that the British found the Italians more useful as farmers than as soldiers and acted accordingly, without much consideration with what would have been morally right. I might be wrong...
I just discovered that in October/November 1943, the Americans told the British that, as Italy was a cobelligerent, the Italian soldiers captured while Italy was allied with Germany should no longer be considered POWs.
According to the Americans, the Italian POWs should have been organised into military units of the Italian armed forces to be placed under American or British command.
The Fascists among the POWs would be considered part of the armed forces of the newly formed Italian Social Republic, which was allied with Germany. Despite being held by the Allies, they would be considered prisoners of the Royal Italian government, which was fighting the Germans and the “Repubblichini” beside the Allies.
In this way, the Americans hoped to increase the number of Italian troops fighting against the Germans. I think it would have been the right thing to do and we have to give credit to the Americans for proposing it.
But the British (the Australians had no voice in this issue, as they were just seen as one of the states under British hegemony) were concerned that it would be difficult to maintain discipline of Italian troops placed under Allies’ control. They pointed out that, once the Italians were freed, it would not be possible to change their status back to that of POWs. As a result, they insisted that the Italians should remain POWs.
In the end, the British managed to convince the Americans.
That’s why the Australian government was able to use Italian POWs as a cheap labour force for the following three years.
I can’t help it but speculate that the British found the Italians more useful as farmers than as soldiers and acted accordingly, without much consideration with what would have been morally right. I might be wrong...
2013-02-22
Most returning POWs came from the South
I started adding to the 554 records of
Italian POWs who returned to Australia some of the information
contained in their Service and Casualty Form (the green forms of
which you see an example in italianpow.info/2013/02/passengers-arrivals.html).
In particular, I’m adding the
military rank (e.g. Cpl for Corporal), the date of capture (e.g.,
1941-4-11), when they were captured (e.g., Amba Alagi), the place of
birth (e.g., Palermo), the profession (e.g., Engineer driver
tractor), the marital status at the time of capture (e.g., single),
the service (e.g., Army), the ship boarded for repatriation (e.g.
Otranto), the date of repatriation (e.g., 1947-01-10), and a flag to
indicate whether they were “parked” in India before being sent to
Australia.
So far, I have processed 116 records,
and discovered that three of them were of internees. This is easily
explained: with 18,550 records of POWs extracted from MP1103/1 and
only 18,420 POWs counted in AWM54 780/1/6, I expect my list of POWs
to contain at least 130 internees. Three of them must have travelled
to Italy and I discovered them when they returned back to Australia.
After processing about 21% of the 554
records, I couldn’t resist the temptation to start making some
statistics.
The first thing I did was counting how
many of the 113 processed records referred to singles. It turns out
that 63.7% were singles and 36.3% were married. These figures
obviously can change once all 554 records will have been processed,
but they already give a good indication of the final result.
Somehow, it doesn’t surprise that
singles were more adventurous.
Next, I checked where they came from.
For two of them, the place of birth was not clearly legible, but the
remaining 111 provided an interesting result. First of all, here are
the counts for all Italian regions (listed from North to South):
Piemonte
|
1
|
Valle
d'Aosta
|
|
Lombardia
|
3
|
Trentino-Alto
Adige
|
|
Veneto
|
5
|
Friuli-Venezia
Giulia
|
|
Liguria
|
|
Emilia-Romagna
|
3
|
Toscana
|
3
|
Umbria
|
|
Marche
|
1
|
Lazio
|
2
|
Abruzzo
|
2
|
Molise
|
4
|
Campania
|
23
|
Puglia
|
9
|
Basilicata
|
3
|
Calabria
|
24
|
Sicilia
|
28
|
Sardegna
|
|
Total
|
111
|
Here is a map of the regions downloaded
from www.mapsofworld.com/italy/regions.html to help you
visualise them.
Clearly, many more of the returnees
were from southern regions. Without counting the two people from
Lazio, which is the region used as a demarcation between North and
South, 14.7% came from the North, and 85.3% from the South. A ratio
of almost six Southerners for each Northerner.
Again, I will repeat the calculation
once I will have processed all 554, but I see no reason for expecting
much change.
The figures become even more dramatic
when taking into account the fact that the population of Northern
Italy was larger than that of the South. Using the results of the
1951 Italian national census (the closest date to the return of the
POWs to Australia) as a correcting factor, I calculated that the POWs
from the South were close to nine times more likely to return to
Australia as migrants.
I see this as a clear indication of the
fact that life in the South of Italy was much more difficult than in
the North. The South had always been (and, to a certain extent,
still is) less developed than the North. Therefore, it is no
surprise that more Southerners were prepared to leave their country
to seek fortune Down Under.
To confirm this conclusion, I will need
to check the ratio of Northerners vs. Southerners among all 18,420
POWs. If it turned out to be heavily biased in favour of the
Southerners, that could be a reason for the unbalance in the numbers
of those who returned.
To avoid having to obtain the place of
birth from 18,420 Service and Casualty Forms, I will select a number
of them at random and only check those. I will estimate the
statistical error of the resulting ratio, but I am confident that a
comparatively small sample (perhaps 1%?) will be sufficient to check
whether the Northerners/Southerners ratio of the POWs roughly
reflected the ratio of the whole Italian population.
After all, the significant result is
that many more Southerners returned, not the precise ratio with which
they did so.
2013-02-19
Number of Returning POWs
I finally managed to compare the list
of 18,420 Italian POWs with the list of 203,813 people who arrived in
Australia via Fremantle (WA) or transited there on their way to one
of the Eastern ports.
I found 554 entries with matching
family and given names.
I had actually expected a higher number
of matches. Desmond O’Connor,
professor of Italian at Flinders University (Adelaide), in his
article From Tobruk to Clare: the experiences of the Italian
prisoner of war Luigi Bortolotti 1941-1946, which you can read online or download in PDF format,
estimates that 9.4% of Italian POWs held in South Australia returned
to Australia as migrants.
If we assume that the same percentage
applies to POWs held in all states, we arrive to a figure of about
1,700 returnees (9.4% * 18,420 = 1,731). Further, if we assume, as
it seems reasonable to do, that many independent factors influenced the
decision to return to Australia, we can apply the
Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to estimate the degree
of approximation of the mean.
The CLT, for those who are not familiar
with it, states that the mean of a sufficiently large number of
independent random variables is normally distributed. In practical
terms, it means that if we repeatedly measure something that depends
on many independent factors and make a histogram of the values we
measure, the plot will approximate the familiar bell shape of a
normal distribution (thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the following image).
With a normal distribution, we can
roughly estimate its standard deviation (indicated with the Greek
letter σ in the figure) by taking the square root of its mean. In
practical terms, it means that with a mean of 1,731, the standard
deviation of the number of returning POWs nationwide is 42. This in
turn tells us that, according to O’Connor’s estimate, the actual
total number of Italian POWs returning to Australia has a probability
of 68% to be between 1,689 and 1,773. And the probability of the
actual number being less than 1,605 (3σ below the mean) is less than
1%.
My figure of 554 is so low as to be
incompatible with O’Connor’s estimate. Now I have to figure out whether one of us is completely off the mark and why...
2013-02-14
Passengers Arrivals
The National Archives of Australia
(NAA) have made available online the list of passengers arriving by
ship in Fremantle and other WA ports between 1921 and 1949, or
arriving at Perth airport between 1944 and 1949.
The lists, consisting of 879,900 names,
is part of the data included in the series K269. Unfortunately, the
NAA ran out of funding before digitising the whole series. That’s
why the list stops in January 1950.
This list is interesting for my project
because, besides the passengers disembarking in Western Australia, it
also lists the passengers who transited through Fremantle to reach
other Australian ports. Among them, will be most of the former
Italian POWs who returned to Australia. Excluded will only be those
who arrived on a later ship or on a ship that didn’t transit in
Fremantle. I expect them to be a minority, but, for the time being,
I have no way of knowing it with any certainty.
Each record consists of the following
fields:
family_name
|
GARGANO
|
given_name
|
Pietro
|
alternative_family_name
|
NULL
|
alternative_given_name
|
NULL
|
ship
|
Napoli
|
port-of-embarkation
|
Naples
|
port-of-disembarkation
|
Sydney
|
date-of-arrival
|
18/01/49
|
barcode_no
|
9244767
|
The NAA was very helpful and sent me a
dump of the database starting from the date 1947-01-01. As a result,
I now have a text file with 203,813 records, in which the fields are
tab separated. The latest version of Excel can load up to one
million rows, which means that I will be able to filter out some records. I still have to do that.
The record above shows the return of
Pietro Gargano, whose Service and Casualty Form is this:
I happen to know that they are indeed
the same person, but normally a matching name wouldn’t necessarily
identify a returning POW. I’ll have to use further
cross-references to obtain reliable matches.
Notice that the name of the ship is
“Napoli”, which is the Italian name of the city of Naples where
Pietro’s return journey began. This is no mistake. Here is the
only photograph of the ship I have been able to find:
It is included in the beautiful book
Australian Migrant Ships 1946–1977, by Peter Plowman,
Rosenberg Publishing Sydney, 2006. Notice the star on the
smokestack, characteristic of the Achille Lauro fleet of merchant
ships. The following information also comes from the same book.
Built in 1940 by Harland & Wolff
Ltd, Belfast with the name Araybank; tonnage 8,082 gross; length 451
ft (137.5m); width 57 ft (17.3m); service speed 14 knots; propulsion
Diesel/single screw.
Severely damaged in Suda Bay, Crete, on
3 May 1941, it was towed by the Germans to Trieste, seized by the
British in 1945, and sold to Achille Lauro, who renamed it Napoli.
In 1946, it was rebuilt in Genoa as an emigrant ship capable of
carrying 656 passengers, 176 in cabins and 480 in dormitories. The
rebuilding was completed in August 1948.
A journey between Genoa or Naples and
Australia took approximately one and a half months. The trip with
Pietro on board probably was its second one, and it made a total of
fifteen round trips to Australia before being transferred to South
American routes in 1951.
To return to the list of 200
kPassengers, to be able to find matches of POW names listed in
MP1103/1, I’ll have to load it into a database, so that I can
quickly make the necessary 18,420 searches (well, the computer will
:-)
2013-02-10
Bloody dagoes!
Here is a nice (so to speak) newspaper
article of May 1944 about how some Australians viewed the Italians
working in Queensland. Clearly, if the chief editor allowed himself
to refer to the Italians as dagoes, it means that there was within
the readership enough support for such an attitude.
These were the times of the White
Australia Policy, and Italians, like all Southern Europeans, were
considered marginal.
To read the article comfortably, view the image by right-clicking on it and selecting Open Link in New Tab.
Why the POWs must work
I found an article in the National
Archives of Australia that I would like to share. I clipped some
parts of it. If you want to read it in full, go to
the Archives search page,
set the Series number field to A373, set Item control
symbol to 6221, and click on Search. When the item page comes
up, click on view digital copy, go to page 160, and select
Enlarge.
That the peace terms with Italy had not
been settled seems a poor excuse for keeping thousands of Italian men
in Australia almost one and a half years after signing an armistice.
It was a convenient sense of morality that allowed the Australians to
keep the Italian to do forced labour.
After this article was written, it took
another year before the Italian POWs began being repatriated and
almost two years before repatriation was completed.
Can you imagine the outcry if the roles
had been reversed and British subjects had been kept to work the land
in Italy for enough money to buy soap and some cigarettes?
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