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.
