Riots today in Tobruk and Benghazi, places largely known to me from films and histories and comics of the Second World War. The scale of that conflict is, in some ways, ever-harder for people of my generation to grasp. Not only has there been nothing like it since (mercifully), it’s hard to imagine anything like it happening again. Of course, that’s what people have thought about war before.
Two things popped up in my RSS feed today, telling stories of unknown or little-remembered aspects of the war. First, from Tom Ricks:
During World War II, the [United States] Army intentionally formed a unit chockablock with fascisti and their suspected sympathizers.
[…] This is all discussed in the new issue of Army Lawyer , where Fred “Three Sticks” Borch has a fascinating article about PFC Dale Maple, a brilliant young man who was born in San Diego in 1920 and who graduated from Harvard with honors but then, because he was bad, was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.
Young Maple spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German when that just wasn’t cool, according to a separate article on him that I just read. Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.
And thereby hangs this tale. In February 1944 Private Maple decided it would be a good idea to help some hard-boiled eggs from the Afrika Korps escape to Mexico. Southward he drove them though New Mexico-a lovely drive, I’ve done much of it. Just across the international border, Mexican authorities caught them all and tossed them back. (Is there a derogatory term for people who illegally cross from the U.S. into Mexico, besides “stupid gringos”?) Maple was tried and found guilty and secretly sentenced to death. President Roosevelt clemently commuted his sentence to life, and he was released in 1951. Maple’s claim to notoriety is that he was the first American-born GI ever found to have committed treason.
And then this, from the Telegraph’s obituary of Mario Traverso, an Italian officer who was present for the last successful battlefield cavalry charge:
Traverso was a young lieutenant in the Savoy Cavalry which, in June 1942, was shielding the southern flank of the German summer offensive. The fighting intensified as, approaching the River Don approximately 125 miles north of Stalingrad, the 600 men of the Savoy Cavalry arrived at Isbuschenskij. There, on the evening of August 23, an Italian patrol encountered a Soviet rearguard of 2,000 men supported by mortars and machine-guns.
[…] The following morning, after breakfast, Bettoni gave the order to attack across a plain thick with sunflowers. Officers, wearing red neck ties, slipped on white gloves for the occasion. They wielded captured Cossack swords, which were heavier, and thus more destructive, than Italian sabres.
[…] Traverso was left in charge of the fifth (machine-gun) squadron, which was the first to advance, laying a thick field of fire from the front and centre of the Italian position directly into two lines of the 812th Siberian Infantry Regiment. Around Traverso, the other Italian squadrons formed up at a walk, before breaking into a trot, canter and finally an all-out gallop. As they set off the battle cry went up: “Sabres. To hand. Charge!”
What followed proved to be a textbook mounted attack. The second squadron broke right, before turning sharply to hammer through the Siberians’ left flank, and then wheeling around again to press the advantage from behind, hurling hand grenades into the disintegrating enemy line. Bettoni then ordered the fourth squadron to attack head on, and the battle wore down into brutal hand-to-hand fighting, with many of the Savoy having dismounted.
At this crucial point the third squadron launched a second diagonal attack, similar to that which had opened the battle, and Soviet resolve crumbled. As the smoke cleared, their losses stood at 150, with a further 500 captured. The Savoy Cavalry had lost fewer than 40 men.
“You were magnificent,” a German officer remarked to the Italians afterwards. “We no longer know how to do these things.”
[…] In the summer of 1941 [Traverso’s] regiment, part of the Italian Army’s three mobile divisions, travelled into Moldova by train and then commenced a 1,000-mile advance on horseback through Ukraine while under constant artillery and air attack. Winter set in by late October and, as temperatures plunged to 50 degrees below, both men and horses suffered bitterly.
The next summer’s offensive marked a high point for the Savoy Cavalry, but their heroics on the Don were soon to be forgotten in the general retreat that followed Stalingrad. In January 1943 they trekked 1,200 miles northwards to Gomel, now in Belarus, where those who remained alive entrained for Poland and Austria, not reaching Italy until April. At the time of the Isbuschenskij charge, 290,000 Italians were in Russia. Six months later 90,000 were dead, and a further 60,000 captured.
The Italians in Russia are, I suppose, just one of the war’s many forgotten armies (and like PFC Maple on the wrong side). Their fate, like that of so many others, was not a happy one. But these stories, tiny snapshots in some ways, are further reminders of the war’s vastness and complexity. Sobering stories, too, of a world in ruins, dizzying and horrifying in equal measure.
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