Where to start?

How do you find out about Italian POWs in Australia? The obvious thing to do is to type it into Google and see what comes up. This is a good starting point, but for a PhD (and, in general, for any research that you want to have accepted within the academic world) you need to independently verify everything you find on the Internet.

This is because the Internet is full of rubbish, and you cannot depend on what you find there. The best thing, obviously, is to rely original sources of information, while the second best is to refer to reliable secondary sources, like well documented and referenced books and articles written by respected researchers.

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) has an extensive collection of documents, pictures, and physical items. I found there the Report on the Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees at Army Headquarters, Melbourne, 1939-1951, which listed when and how many Italian POWs were transferred to Australia:

Date of Arrival	Officers	Other Ranks	Where From
28 May 1941	6	2,000	Middle East
15 Aug 1941	405	412	Middle East
23 Aug 1941	2	15	Middle East
13 Oct 1941	110	879	Middle East
15 Oct 1941	25	923	Middle East
15 Dec 1941	13	167	Middle East
26 Feb 1942	38	218	Merchant seamen
04 Oct 1943	2	1,012	India
01 Nov 1943	1	506	India
16 Nov 1943	1	506	India
29 Dec 1943	1	506	India
16 Jan 1944	1	506	India
05 Feb 1944	2	1,012	India
22 Feb 1944	4	2,024	India
26 Apr 1944	8	4,048	India
29 Dec 1944	-	991	India
12 Feb 1945	-	2,076	India
Totals:	619	17,801
Grand total:		18,420

Notice that all prisoners transferred from India arrived in Australia when peace between Italy and the allies had already been declared (8 September 1943). Australia didn’t mind to get cheap labourers instead of re-uniting them with their families. After all, Italy had lost the war, hadn’t it? What did it matter that Italian troops were fighting side by side with Australians against the Germans?

Anyhow, although it was great to find the numbers, where could I find information on the individual POWs?

The answer was: at the National Archives of Australia (NAA), which provides an online list of all POWs kept in Australia. The list, available as the series MP1103/1, provides surname, name, date of birth, and nationality of 44,513 POWs, of which, hopefully, 18,420 are Italian.

Extracting the data of the Italian POWs from the list is not trivial, because all the information is stored in strings of text like the following one:

To select all and only the Italians, you cannot rely solely on the word “Italian” or the code “PWI” being present, but selecting all records that include either word seems the best feasible solution. There are in fact some Italians classified as Japanese, Javanese, or German.

The format was standardised, but sometimes a comma was entered were a semicolon was supposed to go; some other times, the string “Date of birth” was replaced by “DOB”. In other cases, the date of birth was missing, or only year or month/year was entered.

By using the parsing and sorting capabilities of a spreadsheet program and removing entries in blocks, you can reduce the list to about 23,000 entries.

You are then faced by the problem that the list also includes Italian Internees. That is, Italians who resided in Australia when Italy declared war on the allies.

Theoretically, all POWs are identified by a code beginning with the three letters PWI (Prisoner of War – Italy; which explains the URL of this blog), but this was not done systematically. To compound the problem, some internees where reclassified as POWs, which means that the same person is now registered twice. Additionally, some internees where simply classified as POW.

The NAA did an incredible job, because, besides typing in some data for each POW, they also scanned the original prisoner cards, called “Service and Casualty” forms, and made them available online. Here is an example of such a form (to see the details, view the image on its own):

Francesco Della Pietra, a 23-years old farmer from Apulia, was captured in Ethiopia on 11 December 1940. He arrived in Sydney on 4 October 1943, with the first shipment of Italian POWs from India. Perhaps, when he boarded a ship after almost three years of imprisonment, knowing that Italy was no longer at war with the allies, he thought he was being repatriated.

But that was not the case. Three more years of imprisonment awaited him. He arrived in the POW camp near Cowra, NSW, on 9 November 1943. Then, on 17 January 1944, he was sent to work in Launceston, Tasmania (PWCC stands for Prisoners of War Control Centre). After being moved around a couple of times, on 10 January 1947, he finally boarded the Steamship Otranto (shown below) that took him back to Italy. By coincidence, the ship was named after an Italian port that is less than 120km away from the town where he was born.

Don’t you get goose pimple reading about these people? I do, but perhaps it is just the cold air that the air conditioner is blowing onto my back. :-)

Anyhow, I have managed to reduce the number of entries to 18,550, tantalising close to the 18,420 listed in the document I obtained from the War Memorial.

Next, I’ll have to find out how many of those POWs came back to Australia...