Visiting Italian POWs

"That was the best part of my life. We were treated like kings there, but what I didn’t do for them [POWs]. What I treasure most is a big plaque they gave me with the words:
'We will never forget what you did for us.'" – Guy Sardella

Italian POWs during World War II were given special privileges over the Japanese and Germans, like receiving visitors at Camp Meade (now Fort Meade) from Baltimore's Italian community on Sunday afternoons. Below is a chapter on this topic from "Baltimore's Little Italy: History and Heritage of The Neighborhood."

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   During World War II (1941–45), the U.S. Army had captured and shipped to the states almost 500,000 Italian, German and Japanese prisoners of war and housed them in 650 camps across the forty-eight states.

   Camp Meade (now Fort Meade) in Maryland, located between D.C. and Baltimore, was both a training center and headquarters for the Enemy Prisoner of War Information Bureau; it first hosted POWs in September
1943—1,632 Italians and 58 Germans—and kept records on all POWs throughout the United States.

   The POWs worked locally, building stone bridges on post and laboring on area farms. Because Italy had surrendered to the Allies, the Italian POWs were given privileges and treated better than the Germans, such as being allowed to shop in the post exchange and being allowed to leave the compound with visitors.

   “We were treated better than we were as soldiers in the Italian army,” said Lelio Tomasina in a 1993 Baltimore Sun story, “as if we were family.” He arrived on a ship at age twenty-two, bent down and kissed the American
ground. “It was so unbelievably magnificent. I was sure the Americans were just being nice before they shot everybody.”

   As a boy, Johnny Manna remembered visiting the Italian soldiers with his family. Some were from the same villages in Italy as the Baltimoreans. It made quite an impression on the then eight-year-old: “First thing I’d see
when we were close to the compound,” he said, “was the American soldiers in guard towers with automatic weapons, barbed wire fences and the big red ‘PW’ lettering stamped on the backs of the POW fatigues.”

   His family—parents Mary and Pasqual “Patsy” Manna, grandmother Consiglia Tana, aunt Jean Tana and uncle Luigi and aunt Aninna Molino—had prepared picnic food for the soldiers. They cooked meals the prisoners were accustomed to eating at home: veal cutlets, roasted chicken and peppers, macaroni, potatoes, salads, greens, cakes and homemade wine.

   “We visited on Sundays,” said Johnny. “My family knew some of the prisoners.” He recalled some of the other Little Italy families who visited Camp Meade: Altieri, D’Adamo, Ippolito, Fabi, LaCanale, Lamberti,
Muratore, Montefarante, Suriani and Campanoli.

   It was not just Little Italy residents who interacted with the POWs; so, too, did others in Baltimore’s Italian community. The late Olga and John Bianchi
entertained small groups of Italian POWs in their home on Baltimore Avenue in Dundalk. “They appreciated being invited into our homes,” said Mike Pirisino, brother of John Bianchi.

   After learning of the POWs’ privileges, WCBM radioman Guy Sardella, a native of Little Italy, prompted folks on air to visit them. Soon after, lines of cars containing hundreds of people motored weekly to Camp Meade, laden with picnic food, cheerfulness and the prisoners’ native language.

   Sardella became a liaison. He organized a musical band among the prisoners, introduced them to local Italians, arranged for Catholic Masses at the outdoor chapel, organized a soccer team and took Baltimore mayor Thomas D’Alesandro to the barracks to deliver a speech in Italian. “He fielded angry letters from local men who complained that their wives were spending every Sunday afternoon socializing with POWs,” wrote Rafael Alvarez in a 1993 Baltimore Sun story.

   Little Italy resident Rosalia Scalia remembered Tomasina “talking about how he came here as a prisoner of war; how he thought he had died and went to heaven because he had never seen so many eggs, grapefruits and oranges in one pile at the camp.”

   Tomasina, similar to about thirty other POWs, married a girl from Little Italy--Sue Gentile—and became an American citizen. As did Bruno Brotto from Padua, who married Gabriella Fabi in 1946; her father, Jimmy Fabi,
owned a barbershop on Eden and Gough Streets. POW Rolando Giacomelli from Prato, in the Florence region, married resident Anna Giro six months after they had met at a dance hosted by the Italian community for the
soldiers. They moved into a house on Gough Street, two doors down from her parents, Rosa Meo from Riposto, Sicily, and Nicola Giro from Vasto.

   Francis Tarasco, born in 1912 in Vicocanavese, Italy, married American-born Elsa Impaciatore. He said in his 1979 BNHP interview that he came to the United States on the Queen Mary as a prisoner after being captured
in 1944. He had joined the army in Italy because “it was compulsory for all men to serve under Mussolini. At first, men in the U.S. Army spoke to us in Italian to persuade us that the American way was best. They made
propaganda and told us the news was bad, that Italy was ‘coming apart.’”

   By day, he worked at Camp Meade, keeping inventory in the army’s store. At night, he worked at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington, D.C., “to do nonstrategic work on mail that U.S. soldiers sent,”
he said. “The Italian community in Baltimore entertained and visited us, and asked for news of relatives.”

   It was a memorable time, yet all Camp Meade prisoners were gone by the fall of 1944. Laid to rest in its cemetery, marked with simple white headstones, are thirty-three German POWs and two Italians: Agostine
Maffeis and Pasquino Savigini.

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