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...

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 :-)

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?