The wicked Albion

19/03/21

In the previous piece, a month ago, we were left with the question: why were the Italian prisoners in the hands of the British not released after September 8, 1943, the date of the beginning of the "cobelligerence"? Why did the British government refuse to repatriate them even after the end of the conflict? (v.articolo)

We will look for the answers by examining the vicissitudes my father spent (in the photo, seated first on the right) and extending them, by analogy, to the thousands of other prisoners.

He never hid that he had been a fascist… after all then they were all or almost all. Therefore in Zonderwater he kept his oath taken and - declaring himself not a collaborator - he was kept in a special block and in more severe general and food conditions. Even after 8 September, when the debate began among the prisoners on how to behave or with whom to side, he remained firm on his positions. After all, the information that arrived at the camp was distorted by the propaganda of both sides and for most it was difficult to understand why it started in one way and ended in another.

I believe that the turning point came in May 44 when, with a post card for prisoners of war, he received the sad news that my grandfather Salvatore, known "Tziu Bovoreddu", he had died 4 months earlier, on January 20! Discouragement and despair took over, perhaps regret for a last hug never given or for a clarification that never happened.

The idea of ​​moving away from that place, or the illusion of being able to shorten the time of return, became haunting; he asked to confer with the camp manager ... probably they made him sign a form ... the fact is that two months later he found himself on a list of 444 others pows (prisoners of war, ed) destined for Great Britain (following photo).

He set sail from Cape Town on 27 August 1944 with the motor ship SS New Amsterdam (photo). After about 15 days they landed in Glasgow. On 14 September he was registered at the entrance to Loodge Moor Camp # 17 in Sheffield with the qualification of joiner (carpenter). A month later (on 14 October) he was transferred to Mellands Camp # 126 in Manchester's Gorton neighborhood.

That with the British was a "good imprisonment", certainly better than the rude behavior of the Australian soldiers who had stolen his watch and left 5 days without drinking forcing him to sip his urine. Certainly superior to that of the Indian and Egyptian guards in the "cages" of Geneifa, along the Suez canal, who enjoyed throwing cans of meat or packs of cigarettes from the rooftops just for the sake of seeing the Italian prisoners fighting each other. Even better than the treatment suffered in South Africa where, although with the arrival of the new commander Prinsloo the general conditions could be defined very good, there was that grid of block 4 from which for three long years he had never been able to get out.

At Mellands Camp n.126 in Manchester there was no fence, he went to work in a carpentry where they built frames for public buildings bombed by the Germans, on Sundays you could go out within a radius of two miles from the camp, attend some pubs in them "Reserved". The only thing forbidden was to bother local girls; for the crime of fraternizing one could be sentenced to up to two years in prison, even in cases where the woman confessed to having caused the pow or claimed to want to marry him (for example, on 21 September 1944, an Italian prisoner was sentenced to six months just for writing love letters to a sixteen-year-old girl!).

However, the materially good imprisonment in Britain was devastating from the psychological point of view; the British in fact held the Italian prisoners, until the end of the autumn 1945 harvest, with the complicity of the governments of post-fascist Italy (from Badoglio to De Gasperi passing through Bonomi and Parri), who due to the difficulties of reintegration and because of what was considered a "good detention", they never vigorously and immediately claimed them. Therefore, if before the armistice the imprisonment had been bearable, thanks to the conviction that sooner or later the war would end, the period after 8 September 1943 was the longest and most painful.

In my father's vision, while the rude and inhumane behavior of Australians, Egyptians, Indians and South Africans was part of a justified logic of war, the British could not forgive the arbitrary and illegitimate detention, considering that from a certain moment we had become allies. or at least cobelligerants. September 8 therefore constituted a watershed not only from a psychological point of view, but also for the legal position of Italians in captivity..

Before that date the status of prisoners of war was established: since the Italians were enemies in all respects, even the imprisonment was legitimate and accepted. However, that legal status was not changed when Italy passed over to the side of the allies: the Italians in the hands of the Anglo-Americans were also held prisoner following the proclamation of "cooperation" (May 1944), essentially until their repatriation.

The failure to change the status was due to joint Anglo-American decisions for which Italy should have remained a fully defeated country, but also to the consent given by the head of the government, General Badoglio, to "to use Italian prisoners in non-combat services, but connected with the war effort".

     

The house, in the historic center of Orani, four thousand souls in the heart of Barbagia, was on two levels: the house on the upper floor while the ground floor was entirely dedicated to the carpentry where a combined four processes were the master. It was very noisy and for this reason it was usually started in the morning when we were at school so as not to disturb us in the afternoon.

Sometimes, however, the commitments made obliged Him to depart and, in this case, I would interrupt my translations of Greek or Latin and take a break going down to see Him.

In the thirty-four years we have shared on this earth I have never heard him sing; only two or three times did I catch him doing it, on one of these occasions, with the combined function used as a musical base or almost to cover his voice. The song was always the same and he sang only the one that later in the years I learned and discovered to be the last verse: "Colonel I don't want praise / I died for my land / but the end of England / begins in Giarabub!"1

Almost twenty years had passed since his embarkation in Southampton for his definitive return to Sardinia but the resentment towards the perfidious Albion it did not seem to diminish, also involving me in this imaginary clash that left me for some time an unjustified "dislike" for this people. Obviously today, with hindsight, I changed my opinion on this highly civilized and multiethnic nation, home of meritocracy; I am convinced that he too would have changed his mind if he could have known, for example, that a nephew of his studied in Cambridge, lives in London and is also a British citizen!

The fact is that on April 25, 1945, while the Liberation was being celebrated in Italy, about 150.000 Italian soldiers were still scattered in more than two hundred prison camps scattered throughout the entire territory of Great Britain (photo). For them April 25 did not mean freedom but the beginning of a long and unnerving wait. They were repatriated only from December 1945 and the most unfortunate (for example part of those interned in Sin water) had to wait until the beginning of 1947.

"Shortage of transport ships" has always been the official justification of the British authorities. "The Italian government has forgotten us and sold us to the British"was instead the conviction of many veterans. Which bell to listen to?

Meanwhile, why were so many of our compatriots in the heart of the British Empire?

The answer is simple: they had been transferred to the British Isles from various war fronts and other prison camps located in every corner of the world. to make up for the shortage of manpower. In short, thanks to the use of Italian prisoners - considered good workers and above all less dangerous than the Germans - the British authorities had found an effective system both to make up for the gaps left by the British who left for the front, and to guarantee themselves an economic return.

It is sufficient to rattle off some data to understand the importance that i pows they hired for the British economy. At the beginning of 1945, 60.000 were working in the fields employed by the Ministry of Agriculture; 10.000 in mines, large industries, forests and sawmills on behalf of the Ministry of Supplies; about 5.000, including my father, were employed in construction work for the Ministry of Public Works; 30.000 to the Ministry of War (military infrastructure maintenance, deposit custody, etc.); 15.000 carried out road, rail and coal transport works for the Ministry of Transport; 30.000 kept the more than two hundred camps built by the prisoners themselves or created in pre-existing buildings in every corner of the United Kingdom in order to have the manpower close to the jobs.

The British government, therefore, benefited from the work of Italians in two ways: on the one hand, by employing them in tasks related to the war effort but paying them less than what an Englishman would have to pay, and on the other hand, by giving them to private employers to prices higher than the real cost, forfeiting the relative margin. In September 1945 the earnings for the Chancellery of the Exchequer it was calculated at around 8 million pounds a month!

The Italian representative in Great Britain, Count Nicolò Carandini (photo) was also aware of the fact that the imprisonment was completely unmotivated. A prominent figure of the Liberal Party, he had been sent to London in November 1944 to show the British the face of the "new Italy" and reconnect those traditionally cordial bilateral relations that fascism had deteriorated. The achievement of these objectives was made difficult by the still suspicious attitude held by Great Britain towards Italy. Symptomatic is the fact that Count Carandini was never able to present his credentials to King George VI: they made him understand in every way that he represented a nation which, although "co-belligerent", was and should remain a power defeat. For this he was never considered Ambassador but "Italian Representative"; however, starting from February 1, 1945, however, he assumed the protection of prisoners of war, taking over this function from neutral Switzerland.

Count Carandini also had a clear idea of ​​the danger represented by an accelerated repatriation. Although he was perfectly aware of the drama lived by pows and their status, taking into account the internal Italian situation, with appalling unemployment and galloping inflation, the premature return of 150.000 prisoners of war from Great Britain (but the number would have risen to 340.000 by adding the pows scattered throughout the British Empire) could have had dramatic consequences. It was preferable to keep them away until the Italian situation improved; so much so that on his arrival in London Carandini found a message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs inviting him to do everything to prevent this half a million men (total number of prisoners in Anglo-American hands) was returned to us en bloc and in the most fragile and delicate moment of the nascent democracy with dangerous social ferments surfacing everywhere.

My father meanwhile (it was June 16, 1945) was transferred to camp 144 on Ruskin Avenue in London; now in that area is located the The National Archives but a small museum inside and a plaque at the entrance remind us of his past as a prison camp.

Finally in the meeting of Directorate of pows of 26 October it was decided that the repatriation would begin in December, with a continuous rhythm.

The first 2.700 prisoners left Britain aboard the SS Malaya December 17, 1945. At the end of the month the total number of returnees was 7.000.

With the start of the new year (and, coincidentally, with the end of the harvest!), the pace increased considerably: 23.000 were repatriated in January; 19.000 in February; 20.000 in March; 22.000 in April; 34.000 in May; 10.000 in June; 14.000 in July; 8.000 in August.

The gunner Manlio Sulis, pow n. 162782, field 144, was released on February 3, 1946 and the next day sailed from Southhampton to Naples. Just that day at the port to greet the departures was present Mrs. Elena Carandini wife of Italian representative; obviously neither my father nor the other ex prisoners noticed or were interested in the event!

They landed in Naples on 11 February 1946. The ten days spent in the San Martino al Vomero accommodation center to complete the paperwork must have seemed interminable and longer than the entire six years spent away from home; the arrogant ignorance of a young recruit in charge of filling out the news sheet who could not write the name Manlius (today proudly carried by one of my children), crippling it before in Mallet and then in Mallium, it made him go mad by discharging all the repressed tension so much that he required the intervention of a non-commissioned officer to calm him down.

In any case, on 21 February he was released with an extraordinary license with 60-day checks and the obligation at the end of it to report to the Military District to which he belonged in Oristano. On the 21st evening he embarked on the Naples-Cagliari motorboat where he arrived at the dawn of the 22nd.

The arrival in Orani on 23 February 1946 is confirmed by the visa affixed by the major marshal on horseback Giuseppe Deschino, commander of the local Carabinieri station (photo).

Exactly 5 years, 8 months and 22 days had passed during which he had practically circumnavigated the entire African continent, crossed the Atlantic from south to north and crossed the Mediterranean from west to east for a total of about twenty thousand nautical miles (37.000 km!) (following photo).

In August, the repatriation of prisoners from Great Britain could be considered concluded: about 1.500 Italians remained on British soil, hired with an annual contract, who constituted the bridgehead of a subsequent migratory flow that occurred when the British authorities, starting from 1947, they became less restrictive on immigration. Many of the emigrants were just ex pows who returned because they were requested by old employers or to marry English women with whom they had established (clandestine) relationships during their imprisonment.

In summary, from the Italian point of view, the delayed repatriation was due to a set of political and economic factors: the government, it is undeniable, viewed with concern the return of thousands of prisoners to a war-torn country, in which unemployment, already high, it was destined to increase and for this reason it never decisively demanded the freeing en bloc of the approximately 500.000 prisoners in the hands of the Allies. Carandini, of course, focused on the change of status rather than on an energetic request for repatriation, although he was more than anyone aware of how difficult the situation in the camps was and how dangerous it would be to keep pulling the rope.

Great Britain, on its side, had already unilaterally decided to delay the repatriation of prisoners for purely economic reasons; the pows they were absolutely necessary for the British economy, at least until they were replaced by British soldiers after demobilization. But behind the decision to keep thousands of men in prison against international law, there was also the clear will of the British government to unload on those men the resentment for a won but ruinous war that had created mourning and destruction.

Speaking of wars won or lost, allow me an aside: it was the early sixties, very few had a television set and therefore after dinner, especially in late spring and summer, it was customary to sit outside the door and socialize with usual topics. I was a young man and I liked to listen to the speeches of adults without obviously intervening. During a discussion on the mutual military past - which was then a generational clash between my father and a cousin of my mother on the one hand and my maternal grandfather on the other - to the latter, born in 1886, already a fighter in the Italian-Turkish war, then infantryman in the brigade Sassari wounded and decorated in the facts of arms of Bosco Cappuccio (second battle of the Isonzo), the sentence escaped "In any case, we have all won wars!". My father fell silent, abandoned the discussion, withdrew into the house and for a few days sulked with his father-in-law; he had been a simple gunner but he made this war lost "against the British" a personal matter as if it had been his negligence or responsibility on a par with Graziani or Badoglio !!

I conclude by reiterating that Great Britain always considered the work of the pows as a compensation that Italy had to pay for its faults and our country was unable to oppose.

This Italian weakness, which would become evident with the imposition of the burdensome peace treaty, was already evident in the story of the prisoners of war: exploited by a former enemy who had never wanted to be an ally, citizens of a state that was not in the right conditions. to protect them and that he feared, in an exaggerated way, their return, the Italian soldiers detained in the United Kingdom suffered and endured incredible moral suffering, largely forgotten by public opinion and post-war Italian historiography.

Giovanni Sulis (general of ca on leave)

1 Oasis in the Libyan desert, 280 km. south of Tobruk, garrisoned by 1350 Italians and 800 Libyans under the command of the then ten. with the. Salvatore Castagna, the scene of an epic resistance (10 December 1940-21 March 1941) during the “Compass” operation.

Photo: author / web