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'This is a picture of 'Italian Prisoners of War' on Peddocks Island, in Boston Harbor. Some in this image were allowed to visit with local Italians living in Somerville. Image from 1945 or 1946, Digital Commonwealth.
October is Italian Heritage Month*
World War II is almost exclusively a litany of horrors and tragedies. But there were a few exceptions, one of which was the story of the prisoners of war (POWs) from the Italian armed forces who ended up in the United States and at the war’s end, a number of whom were held in the Boston area.
How these individuals ended up here, is part of a long and complex chain of events.
Italy’s modern history began, in part, as a result of European wars in the mid-19th century that ended up certifying the long gestation of a modern nation from the various city-states, “Papal States” belonging to the Catholic church, and foreign-dominated regions scattered across the peninsula. But it was always a fragile union with a fractured economy and only mild hints of democracy.
In an effort partially motivated by a desire to gain additional regions that nationalists thought should be part of Italy, the nation joined World War I on the side of the Allies, fighting the Austro-Hungarian empire.
While Italy ended on the winning side, the war had produced many casualties, much destruction, and further economic dislocation, which paved the way for the rise of Benito Mussolini and his nationalist version of socialism.
He, in turn, embarked on expansionist wars, first in Ethiopia, in 1935, and then, after joining Germany in its war with France and Britain, sending his army across North Africa to attack Egypt, then controlled by Britain.
The see-saw battles that raged back and forth across the region ultimately led to the defeat of Italian and German forces in the region by British and American armies and, after the latter’s invasion of Sicily, to a coup d’état against Mussolini and a peace agreement with the successor government of Marshall Badoglio and – the ultimate twist – Italy becoming a de facto member of the Allied coalition!
While these great events transpired, individual Italian soldiers, captured by the Allies and rarely enthusiastic for Mussolini’s wars in the first place, in some cases were transported to the US where, particularly after the deposition of Mussolini, they were given opportunities to remain captives in name but nearly free, in fact, working a range of jobs such as loading ships and even earning a token pay for their trouble. Organized into ‘service units,’ they were given American uniforms with special insignia and badges. According to the Italian American review, vol 9, no. 2, there were about 2400 POWs in Greater Boston, mostly at Camp McKay, Ft. Andrews, and Camp Myles Standish.
Those in the Boston area discovered the area to be largely friendly, full of opportunities, and well-staffed with Italian immigrants who had come to the US decades earlier, as well as their children and grandchildren.
The combination was attractive and, unsurprisingly, when, at the end of the war, service unit members were given the option of staying in the US and becoming citizens, many did. Whether any ended up in Franklin is not known, but the cohort of former soldiers became the vanguard of a new flow of immigrants from the Italian peninsula that would increase in the late 1950s and then in the 1960s with removal of restrictive immigration quotas.
* Italian Heritage Month was established by President George H.W. Bush in 1989.
