Reeducating Italians: The War Department and the Public Debates about Race and Backwardness Surrounding the Employment of Italian Prisoners of War in the United States during WWII

Once Italy became a co-belligerent party in 1943, the Western powers began reworking the country's image and status. Across the United States, some 32,000 Italian prisoners of war were transformed into almost-allies. However, the presence of a group of some 20,000 who continued to refuse any form of collaboration with the Allied Powers raised an important question: Who are they? As a result, by 1945 a variety of new labels circulated on both local and national levels through via the press which separated the "good" and "bad" Italians by calling them "ex-POWs," "Italian Service Personnel," "ISUs" and "Fascists," "Fascist Criminals" or simply "Nons." The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the formation of Italian co-belligerent units was considered by the War Department as a method for re-educating Italians according to American values, while not treating them as equals. The War Department was not the only agency involved in this project, since newspapers as well as Congress actively participated in these debates aimed at defining how and whether Italians were able to overcome the influences of Fascism and their socio-economic 'backwardness.' My analysis will explore this triangular interplay, with a special focus on how Italians' perceived racial identity was negotiated and became a necessary condition in order for Italians to be put in the position to learn the "American way of life." Investigating this process will also help explain how, at the same time, the "Fascist camps" became a repository of otherness for those considered non-eligible, which spilled over to Italy and into the neo-Fascist milieu during the immediate post-war period.