Italian Soldiers Research Articles

Controlling Sex in Captivity: Pows and Sexual Desire in the United States during the Second World War

Controlling Sex in Captivity examines the sexual activities of Axis powers prisoners of war (Pows) during World War II and the efforts of the U.S. military to control them. Among an increasing number of works on the military and sex, this book is unique and important in three ways. First, because of its subject: unlike most other works that deal with victorious U.S. servicemen in conquered countries such as Germany and Japan, this book is about the sexual activities of defeated servicemen in the conqueror country of the United States. Second, the author explores homosexual activities as well as heterosexual. Third, the author makes full use of German and English primary and secondary sources. The bilingual sources enrich the book's content and perspective, illustrating the desirability of multilingual sources in today's increasing international and transnational historical research. The book starts by describing Americans' favorable reactions to receiving “good looking” Germans who “conformed to the widely publicized wartime ideal of Anglo-Saxon masculinity” and “docile” unthreatening Italians, which overcame hostile feelings there might be toward enemy soldiers (p. 38). Indeed, fraternization between American women and Axis Pows in camp towns was ubiquitous and impossible to control. The author points to race and the presence of immigrant communities as factors that facilitated fraternization of Americans with Pows. Both German and Italian soldiers were white, and many Americans shared common ancestry with them. There were few Japanese Pows, but fraternization did not occur because they were not white. Enemy German and Italian Pows were often treated better by local white citizens than were African American servicemen who were fighting for their country. The author maintains that this racism was keenly felt by African Americans and played a role in the subsequent rise of the civil rights movement.

Deaths and survivors in war: The Italian soldiers in WWI

Objective: The aim of this paper is to study the selection effects of mortality among soldiers in WWI.

Incidence of malignant tumours (1996-2012) in young Italian soldiers sent on mission abroad. Preliminary analysis of the data of the Parliamentary Enquiring Commission on depleted uranium and vaccines (CUC)

since 2000s, epidemiological studies conducted by the Italian Ministry of Defence on Italian soldiers sent on a mission abroad showed excess mortality and/or incidence for Hodgkin lymphomas and also a significant reduction of all tumours and of all diseases. this analysis aim to evaluate tumour incidence and overall mortality among Italian soldiers sent on a mission abroad (period 1996-2012; 3,663 cases). This investigation is preliminary to a more complete retrospective study on the cohort of soldiers affected by tumour (No. 6,104 cases) diagnosed in the period 1973-2017 and registered by the Epidemiological Defence Observatory (OED). cohort data were acquired by the Uranium Commission of the Chamber of Deputies (CUC, 2016-2018). For statistical and epidemiological reasons, mainly dictated by the number, completeness, and quality of information concerning patients (or deceased) and the study population. The survey was temporarily limited to male military aged between 20 and 59 during the period 1996-2012 (No. 3,663; 60% of the total). Military from the four Italian defence forces - Air force, Carabinieri, Army, and Navy - were, respectively, divided into two groups: those involved in at least one mission abroad ("missionaries"; No. 874; 24%) and all the others ("non-missionaries"; No. 2,789; 76%). Using the method of indirect rate standardization, the age-standardized incidence ratio comparing missionaries and non-missionaries (SIRm) and comparing missionaries and the general population considered as an external reference (SIR) were calculated, with respective 90% confidence intervals (95%CI). Similarly, the overall mortality risk among missionaries was investigated. considering the population of the non-missionaries, the analysis of tumour incidence (TM) by military forces identified excesses in the missionaries of the Air Force (SIRm: 126.7; 90% CI 107.9-147.9), Carabinieri (SIRm: 152.8; 90%CI 134.0-173.7), and the Army (SIRm: 116.2; 90%CI 108.1-125.6). Taking into account missionaries, there was an excess of risk for specific neoplasia: for hemolymphopoietic system in Carabinieri (SIRm: 150.1; 90%CI 106.0 - 207.1) and in the Army (SIRm: 109.0; 90%CI 93.9-125.9); for Hodgkin lymphoma in Air force (SIRm: 187.7; 90%CI 88.1-352.5), Carabinieri (SIRm: 187.3; 90%CI 87.9-351.8), and the Army (SIRm; 104.5; 90%CI 81.2-132.6); for leukaemia in the Army (SIRm: 142.4; 90%CI 107.5-185.4). Significant risk excesses were also observed in missionaries for stomach, testis, kidney, bladder, and thyroid tumours. On the other hand, for missionaries in the Navy, a statistically significant risk reduction for all tumours emerged (SIRm: 61.1; IC90% 51.0-72.6). Missionaries showed a higher mortality for all causes. this preliminary study confirms the need for an in-depth survey on the health status of Italian soldiers. In particular, the risk for diseases, even non-neoplastic and after 2012, should be investigated in the military over the age of 60, who has a greater risk of incidence and mortality, not only for tumour. All potential disease determinants, both environmental and personal, should also be studied.

Religion, race, and the nation inLa Tradotta del Fronte Giulio, 1942–1943

This paper examines intersections and divergences between Catholic universalism and Fascist ethno-nationalism in the pages ofLa Tradotta del Fronte Giulio, a satirical weekly newspaper for Italian military personnel in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Military propagandists appealed to grassroots Catholicism to motivate demoralised Italian soldiers in the last year of war against the communist-led Yugoslav partisan movement. Their use of Catholic themes revealed overlapping values but also apparent incongruities between Christianity, Fascism, and Italian military culture that had been evident throughout theventennio. While Catholic anti-communism blended relatively seamlessly with nationalist-Fascist anti-Slavism to depict the partisan enemy as a dehumanised Other, the use of conventional piety and Christian humanitarianism in the army’s propaganda contradicted Fascist and military concepts of the ideal Italian ‘new man’. In the process, military propagandists sowed the seeds for thebrava gentemyth that dominated postwar memory and national identity in Italy.

Antifascism in Uniform: About 3000 Letters of Italian Soldiers and for Italian Soldiers Censored by Their Command for Lack of Optimism

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From Home to Port: Italian Soldiers' Perspectives on the Opening Stage of the Ethiopian Campaign

In this article I analyzed the journey of Italy’s soldiers from home to the port of embarkation. Far from a united and uniform fighting force, I showed that Italian soldiers originally conceived of their enlistment in strikingly divergent terms. At the outset of the campaign some were clearly reluctant, suspicious recruits. Others, meanwhile, were broadly enthusiastic about the adventure and adversity that lay ahead. But all–to some degree or another–had yet to take firm personal ownership of the campaign they had been called to serve. Nonetheless, over the course of these soldiers’ journeys south, their first engagements with the country and countrymen that existed beyond the domains of their provincial homes ultimately yielded a crucial measure of national solidarity by the time of their embarkation for the Ethiopian front.

Breaking the frame: frame disputes of war and peace

Frames guide the way in which organizations and individuals interpret their surrounding contexts and shape avenues for thought, action, and behavior. This paper tests the individual-level effects of experiencing ‘frame disputes’: the state of holding individual-level frames that are at odds with dominant organizational frames. We hypothesize that on the individual level a frame dispute will be associated with negative effects on outcomes important for an organization’s functioning. The hypothesis is tested using a survey of a battalion of Italian soldiers. Our results demonstrate that, on average, soldiers who experienced frame disputes in that they perceived their mission differently from the dominant organizational frame displayed significantly lower levels of perceived cohesion, performance, and legitimacy. Frame disputes are likely to be widespread phenomena among organizations and social movements, and understanding their effects has theoretical, empirical, and policy relevance beyond the military case under study.

Military Cultures and Force Employment in Peace Operations

ABSTRACTAlthough hundreds of thousands of soldiers from different national contingents are deployed every year in multinational peace operations, no previous study has examined differences in peacekeeping practices along national lines. This paper first documents systematically differences in the way national contingents behave during peace operations in their respective area of operation. In a second step, it argues that these differences in behavior are largely consistent with the most important traits of each army's military culture. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2014 in Lebanon and Afghanistan, the paper shows how, within each mission, Italian soldiers prioritized humanitarian activities, while the French engaged in more patrolling activities, despite being both contingents deployed under similar conditions. These variations in behavior are consistent with the way French and Italian soldiers perceive the mission and context in which they deployed. And both the differences in behavior and perception are in line with the respective armies' military cultures. This paper contributes to the debate on the role of ideational factors in international politics and in particular to the ongoing discussion on strategic and military cultures.

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano: desacralisation of a fascist relic

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano, raised to remember Italian soldiers who fell in the First World War and to celebrate the victory over the Austro-Hungarian army, was contested from the moment of its installation in 1928. The German-speaking inhabitants of Bolzano were offended by its expression of Italian patriotism and the monument continued to symbolise the antagonism between the Italian- and the German-speaking population in the period following the end of Second World War. The monument’s explicit fascist propaganda attracted strong polemical reactions and some political groups even asked for it to be demolished. A recently-opened permanent exhibition in the crypt of the monument explores the twentieth-century dictatorships of Italy and their impact on Bolzano. Its historicisation offers a new interpretation of the monument – not one based on a schism between the populations of Bolzano, but rather one proposing reconciliation. This historicisation happens through the contextualisation of the monument, an efficient tool for the ‘desacrilisation’ of politically charged buildings; by exposing the detested ideology that they represent, they are stripped of their original ‘sacred’ character. This process also shows that it is possible for controversial, politically significant structures to become legitimate parts of a country’s modern heritage.

Les pertes de l’armée italienne pendant la Première Guerre mondiale

Le nombre le plus souvent avancé pour estimer les pertes de l’armée italienne durant la Première Guerre mondiale est celui de la commission des réparations de guerre de 1921 qui comptabilise 650 000 décès. Cet article a pour objectifs de critiquer cette estimation, d’en proposer une nouvelle, et de fournir des informations sur la structure par âge et l’âge au décès des soldats italiens tombés durant la guerre. Le tableau d’honneur des soldats morts au combat ( Albo d’oro ) est utilisé dans cette étude, avec d’une part les tableaux récapitulatifs publiés à la fin de chaque volume, et d’autre part un échantillon de 11 000 décès militaires (représentant environ 2,1 % du total) extrait de cette source. Nous concluons que l’estimation de 650 000 décès militaires formulée immédiatement après la fin de la guerre est trop élevée, et le chiffre de 560 000 décès semble plus proche de la réalité. Les données de l’ Albo d’oro montrent que le taux de mortalité a culminé durant la dernière année du conflit, et non en 1917 comme cela avait été affirmé. Il semble enfin que les décès dus à des maladies, plus fréquents dans les rangs de l’armée italienne que dans ceux des autres superpuissances, aient eu un impact bien plus important qu’on ne le supposait auparavant.

Back for good: melodrama and the returning soldier in post-war Italian cinema

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy’s experience of the Second World War and the Resistance. However, this article argues that viewing this period of Italian cinema solely through the lens of neorealism has obscured the importance of the affective charge of melodrama in constituting an alternative ethics of representation in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Italy, one that worked via an appeal to the emotions. It posits that the traumas of Fascism, war, occupation, and Resistance were worked through by Italian cinema after the war in a range of genres and modes, principally melodrama.By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier orreduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by thereduceto familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.

First World War and Mental Health: a retrospective comparative study of veterans admitted to a psychiatric hospital between 1915 and 1918.

The association between mental illness and war has been repeatedly investigated. Higher levels of depressive symptoms and an increased suicidal risk have been found in veterans. In this study we investigated the mental health conditions among Italian soldiers during the “Great War”, who were hospitalized in a mental health hospital in Italy. The study sample consists of 498 soldiers who were admitted during the World War I between 1915 and 1918, and 498 civilian patients admitted in two different periods (1898-1914, 1919- 1932). Psychiatric diagnoses have been recorded retrospectively by a detailed examination of clinical records. Socio-demographic informations, diagnosis at first admission, number of admissions, and deployment in war zones were collected. A logistic regression analysis was performed, the diagnosis of depression was considered as dependent variable while clinical and demographic variables as independent predictors. Soldiers deployed in war zones were more likely to have a diagnosis of depression compared to those not serving on the frontline. The logistic regression analysis showed that the diagnosis of depression is predicted by being a soldier and being deployed in a war area. Our data confirm that soldiers engaged in war are at higher risk of developing depression compared to non-deployed soldiers.

Mowgli dans les Dolomites. Représentations paysagère et ethnographique du front italien par Rudyard Kipling en 1917

The British writer Rudyard Kipling left an extremely striking testimony of his visit to the Italian-Austrian front in May 1917. In the form of five articles of propaganda, published in English and American newspapers, the famous writer described the conditions of life and battle of Italian soldiers waging a ‘vertical’ war in the mountains. Indeed the writer-reporter, immersed in this strange mountainous landscape far away from his Indian homeland, combines the power of realistic writing, elements of natural history and zoological metaphors to describe the different protagonists in this war (the visual land scape), its smells (olfactory landscape) and its sounds (soundscape). Kipling also took the opportunity to build a history of representations of a fictitious Italianity.

Mare Nostrum: the visual politics of a military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean Sea

Since the early 1990s, the ‘migration crisis’ has been high on Europe’s agenda and a main cause of concern for European citizens. In recent years, numerous activists and scholars have denounced how the militarisation of migration and border controls has been explicitly bound with notions of humanitarianism. As such, the current focus on both the securitarian and humanitarian sides of the phenomenon supports a more complex logic of threat and benevolence that allows for a security-humanitarian response. Assuming the launch of Mare Nostrum – the military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean targeted at both rescuing migrants and arresting smugglers – as a transformative moment in the communication strategies of Italy, this article examines the narratives produced by the Italian Navy during the operation, and how these invite us to witness them. Pivoting on the interrelated notions of ‘war imaginary’ and ‘emergency imaginary’, this article investigates how photographs and videos produced by Italian soldiers have contributed to represent the Mediterranean as a ‘humanitarian battlefield’. Thus, exploring the visual politics of Mare Nostrum within the broader framework of the new mediated warfare, it indicates how the bio-political imperative of managing lives is visually expressed through an aesthetic of trauma, where ‘war’ (on migrants) is represented both as an intimate experience of sorrow and as a public act of peacemaking.

Mussolini's army in the French Riviera: Italy's occupation of France

In contrast to its brutal seizure of the Balkans, the Italian Army's 1940-1943 relatively mild occupation of the French Riviera and nearby alpine regions bred the myth of the Italian brava gente , or good fellow, an agreeable occupier who abstained from the savage wartime behaviors so common across Europe. Employing a multi-tiered approach, Emanuele Sica examines the simultaneously conflicting and symbiotic relationship between the French population and Italian soldiers. At the grassroots level, Sica asserts that the cultural proximity between the soldiers and the local population, one-quarter of which was Italian, smoothed the sharp angles of miscommunication and cultural faux-pas at a time of great uncertainty. At the same time, it encouraged a laxness in discipline that manifested as fraternization and black marketeering. Sica's examination of political tensions highlights how French prefects and mayors fought to keep the tatters of sovereignty in the face of military occupation. In addition, he reveals the tense relationship between Fascist civilian authorities eager to fulfil imperial dreams of annexation and army leaders desperate to prevent any action that might provoke French insurrection. Finally, he completes the tableau with detailed accounts of how food shortages and French Resistance attacks brought sterner Italian methods, why the Fascists' attempted Italianization of the French border city of Menton failed, and the ways the occupation zone became an unlikely haven for Jews.

L’émergence des constructions clivées, pseudo-clivées et liées en français by Magali Rouquier

Reviews 289 the book’s mission to rethink the history of French, appears to be creating different or larger frameworks for contextualizing the development of the French language. Lodge leads off with a discussion—and subsequent dismantling—of language myths that seem to dominate previous approaches. Buridant argues for studying the history of French within a larger group of all Romance languages, against which the unique linguistic innovations of French (for example, the two-pronged negation system or indefinite on) become more apparent. In two later chapters that may have been better situated earlier in the book, Lusignan guides the reader through some key works on the history of French leading up to the current historical sociolinguistic approach, and Cohen discusses the validity and consequences of the different systems that were used in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century France to classify its languages. Interspersed with these contributions are a few chapters that examine specific instances of variation. Two chapters discuss variation within the Anglo-Norman dialect spoken in England during the Middle Ages: Trotter considers whether an orthographic alternation (-aun- /-an-) in fourteenth-century legal documents points to regional variation within the language. Kristol argues that some of the seemingly erroneous phonetic transcriptions given in the early fifteenth-century Anglo-Norman pedagogical text Femina provide valuable insight into variations in pronunciation. In a later chapter, Ernst similarly analyzes the so-called mistakes found in personal correspondence among less educated groups—namely, nineteenth-century French and Italian soldiers or emigrants. The final chapter of the volume considers an increasing homogenization in French pronunciation across the Hexagon, in contrast with the clearly delineated accents of England’s major cities. The volume also includes two other chapters that do not seem to fit into these two main categories. A very short piece by Iliescu traces the development and grammaticalization of the definite article from Late Latin. A chapter by Bauer discusses the evolving diglossic relationship between French and Italian in the bilingual Aosta Valley. Overall, although it does not necessarily present a coherent picture of what it means to rethink the history of the French language, the book does include some thought-provoking insights and observations. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis A. Kate Miller Rouquier, Magali. L’émergence des constructions clivées, pseudo-clivées et liées en français. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3032-9. Pp. 205. 29 a. Copious examples and careful examinations of text structure and pragmatic properties characterize this tightly-focused monograph on three word order constructions in Old and Middle French. Specifically, the author seeks to trace the emergence and diachronic development of the c’est-cleft (C’est Pierre qui s’en occupe), the pseudocleft (Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est la diachronie), and what the author labels, for lack of an established term, a construction liée (C’est une belle fleur que la rose). These structures are interesting because they differ both syntactically and discourse-pragmatically from “canonical” subject-verb main declarative clauses. The opening chapter overviews earlier work on these constructions, combining description with theoretical critiques. The author also issues the standard but crucial caveat that, when analyzing historical data, native speaker intuitions are by definition no longer available. This difficulty in large part underlies the second chapter, where the author provides diagnostics for teasing apart true clefts from numerous sequences that superficially resemble clefts but cannot be properly analyzed as such. Although this chapter highlights the difficulties encountered in historical data, it testifies to the author’s rigor in selecting (and excluding) data for analysis and leaves the reader confident in the data collection methods. Chapter 3, devoted to the c’est-cleft, revisits debates on the nature of the subject pronoun ce and presents a carefully organized series of instantiations of the c’est-cleft in Old and Middle French. Although each subtype of cleft (for example, temporal adverbial clefts, prepositional clefts, causal clefts) is clearly illustrated with one or more examples, low overall token counts preclude anything beyond an elementary diachrony of the emergence of clefts in Old and Middle French. Chapter 4 reveals that pseudo-clefts, as instantiated in modern French, emerged only in the middle...

Nuto Revelli, Mussolini’s Death March: Eyewitness Accounts of Italian Soldiers on the Eastern Front

Nuto Revelli, <i>Mussolini’s Death March: Eyewitness Accounts of Italian Soldiers on the Eastern Front</i>

Biological monitoring of Italian soldiers deployed in Iraq. Results of the SIGNUM project.

Leukemia/lymphoma cases reported in 2001 among United Nation soldiers or peacekeepers deployed to the Balkans aroused alert on the exposure to depleted uranium. Recent epidemiological studies carried out in different European countries among peacekeepers who served in the Balkans failed to demonstrate a higher than expected risk of all cancers but, mostly due to their limitations in size and follow up time, leave open the debate on health risk of depleted uranium. The aim of SIGNUM (Study of the Genotoxic Impact in Military Units) was to identify potential genotoxic risk associated with the exposure to depleted uranium or other pollutants in the Italian Army military personnel deployed in Iraq. Blood and urine samples were collected before and after the deployment from 981 Italian soldiers operating in Iraq in 2004-2005. As, Cd, Mo, Ni, Pb, U, V, W, and Zr were determined in urine and serum. DNA-adducts, 8-hydroxy-2'-deoxyguanine and micronuclei frequency were evaluated in blood lymphocytes. Three different genetic polymorphisms, GSTM1, XRCC1, OGG1 were analyzed. Significant T0-T1 reduction in the total concentration of uranium, increases for Cd, Mo, Ni, Zr, and decreases for As, Pb, W, and V in urine and plasma were observed. Increases in oxidative alterations and in micronuclei frequency, included in the range of values of non-occupationally exposed populations, were observed at the end of the period of employment. Our results did not detect any toxicologically relevant variation of DNA-damage biomarkers related to the deployment in the operational theater.

La grande guerra di Mario Monicelli. La cinematografia italiana di fronte al primo conflitto mondiale (1959)

Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra is the most well known (and probably most beloved) Italian film on World War One. Released in 1959, and awarded with the Best Film prize at the Venice Film Festival (along with Roberto Rossellini’s Il generale Della Rovere), La grande guerra has greatly contributed in changing the traditional Italian canon of the war epic, both in the movies and in other cultural domains, a canon that dated back to the fascist era. Relying on a vast corpus of war memoirs, and on a huge international film tradition, the director and his screenwriters created the first realistic representation of the experience of the Italian soldiers in the trenches. Monicelli’s choice of mixing tragedy and comedy, in order to tell the story of two yellow heroes, was object of debate, not just among film critics, but more generally in the public sphere. In the context of the Italian economic boom of the sixties, with its deep cultural and political transformations, this debate marked a watershed in the collective memory of the wars fought by the Italians during the first part of the Twentieth century.

The memory and historiography of the First World War in Italy

La memoria y la historiografía de la Primera Guerra Mundial en Italia se puede dividir en cuatro amplios periodos. Durante el periodo inmediato a la posguerra (1918-1922) el debate se concentró primordialmente en aspectos tales como la derrota italiana en Caporetto en 1917, los costes de la guerra humanos y materiales y el tratado de paz. En las décadas subsiguientes (1922-1960) el fascismo se presentó como el heredero de la guerra, convirtiéndose en un elemento fundamental de la identidad nacionalista así como parte de los ritos del régimen. Esta interpretación nacionalista y fascista del conflicto sobrevivió en muchos aspectos hasta los comienzos de los años 1960. Las visiones de la guerra se revisaron subsecuentemente a lo largo de los siguientes veinte años (1960-1980). Las nuevas tendencias culturales de estas décadas generaron una historia del conflicto desde abajo, abarcando las experiencias de los soldados italianos, vistos en muchos casos como víctimas de la maquinaria militar. La historiografía se centró en su oposición a la guerra, incluyendo casos de indisciplina y crisis nerviosas. En tiempos más actuales (1980-2014) estas tendencias continúan y emergen nuevos estudios, pero aún están bastante desatendidos múltiples aspectos de la guerra, incluyendo el frente interno y el contexto internacional (los enemigos de Italia inclusive). Además, aunque hay un vivo interés público en la Primera Guerra Mundial en la Italia noreste, que fue el escenario de operaciones, el periodo 1915-1918 posiblemente forma parte de un pasado remoto para la mayor parte de los italianos.