| Mussolini's Death March - eyewitness accounts of Italian soldiers on the Eastern Front (2013) |
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| Notes/Review |
| The Wikipedia page for the Battle of Nikolayevka is a terse description of Soviet operation Little Saturn, designed to force the river Don and encircle the Italian 8th Army. In the sidebar of the Wikipedia page there is a map of the Italian retreat. Beneath the map it says "Result: Axis breakout". The last paragraph of the section titled "The breakout" tells us that the Italians suffered heavy losses in the breakout: the Cuneense division had been destroyed; one tenth of the Division Julia survived and one third of the Division Tridentina survived. These Italian forces were deployed just to the north of Stalingrad. The Battle of Stalingrad is well known. I knew nothing of the Italian presence until reading this book, and I've read quite a bit about the Eastern Front. The Cuneense division was made up of soldiers from the area around the town of Cuneo, in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. Nuto Revelli served in the division and interviewed some of the survivors of the battle. For the most part, these are not stories of combat, but of flight, capture, the camps, and repatriation. This book was originally published in 1966. In 2013 an English translation was published. This isn't a scholarly description of the events. But it's not exactly an oral history, either. Revelli has homogenized the tales of his subjects, rendering all their stories in the same way. The language is immediate: told in the first person, present tense, typically in short sentences. The majority of these men were uneducated, leaving school in the third, fourth, or fifth grade. They're farmers, bakers, and masons. Their stories always start out with their service experience prior to Russia. Typically, these men served on the Western Front (a short skirmish with France in 1940; essentially fighting their neighbors) followed by a stint in Greece and Yugoslavia. Then the trip to Russia, their capture and imprisonment, and repatriation. The stories are tough to read: starvation, thirst, sickness, frostbite, fear, deprivation. Each man's story is his own, not interspersed with the others. But occasionally we learn that this man encountered that man; these three all saw this specific event. The stories interlock and through repetition we get a tapestry of truth and misery. The book is broken into two parts. The first part were soldiers who were captured. The second part is shorter, what happened to soldiers who managed to escape the pocket. The final of these stories I found exhausting. The Afterword is the author's own story, written later. |