World War II Italian Prisoners of War In Chambersburg by Flavio G. Conti & Alan R. Perry

Author:Flavio G. Conti & Alan R. Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: unknown
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Cpl. Aldo Lorenzi from Mozzecane (Verona), second from the left; Cpl. Giovanni Barbè from Gravellona Lomellina (Pavia), third; Pvt. Luigi Brescianini from Barbata (Bergamo), fourth; and an unidentified prisoner pose on the steps near the amphitheater, most likely in summer 1945. The photograph’s background, near the area where the chapel and bell tower were also built, shows either a warehouse or POW barracks. (Courtesy of Keti Melotto.)

Four

POWS,

ITALIAN AMERICANS,

AND WOMEN

Approximately five million Italian Americans lived in the United States in 1940, and this demographic meant that many Letterkenny ISU members had relatives and friends that could come to visit them from as far away as New York City and Boston. Saturday evenings and Sundays were the two days of the week when most visits took place. These guests brought food of every type, but it was their simple presence that greatly helped to raise morale. For their part, the POWs often repaid these family visits by traveling to cities both near and far.

The prisoners tended to conglomerate according to their regional, provincial, and even township provenience. In this way, they could share news from home that might very well involve extended family of the other POWs they associated with as ISU members. Norman Kogan, a future political scientist who had a stellar career at the University of Connecticut, served as a US Army sergeant at Letterkenny, and one Sunday he accompanied six cooperators to a club in Philadelphia. There, he realized that all of the Italian American civilians originally hailed from Piedmont, just as did the prisoners he chaperoned. Often, by finding a common identity through geographical grouping, the POWs could communicate with each other in their local dialects instead of standard Italian, a powerful way of helping to reinforce emotional ties to their home and loved ones.

Several young women, either of Italian extraction or not, usually accompanied by parents, came to parties organized on the depot. These occasions, as one can readily understand, helped to foster many romances with the POWs, and after the war, several women traveled to Italy to marry their sweethearts. Beyond this experience, there are four known cases in which unmarried American women gave birth to a son or daughter from a liaison with an ISU soldier. Such is the case with Betty Gilbert and the POW Elio De Angelis.

After the war, many POWs kept in touch with Italian Americans they had met at Letterkenny and on a few occasions even hosted them in their homes in Italy.

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