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Selena Daly, "Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Selena Daly about her book titled Immigrant Soldiers Mobilizing Italians Abroad in the First World War. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, this book helps us understand the phenomenon of hundreds of thousands of Italians who lived outside of Italy, who returned to Italy during World War I to be part of the conscripted military service. This is obviously a pretty massive phenomenon, so definitely worth investigating on that basis alone. But as this book helps us understand, there was a lot of diversity within this group of how much people were eager to be part of this, how they even got to Italy, depending on where they were coming from, what their experiences were like in the war, what happened to them afterwards, did they go home? What did home even mean at that point? It's a really interesting investigation, of course, of military service, but also around questions of migration and identity and communication and all sorts of other things, too. So we clearly have a lot to be talking about here. Selena, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you for having me, Miranda. It's lovely to be here.
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Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book. And what sort of approach have you taken in terms of geography and periodization?
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Absolutely. So I'm an associate professor of Italian Studies at University College London and I'm an historian of modern Italy. So my previous research has covered the Italian avant garde movement, futurism, Italian Cities in the 19th century, the First World War in Italy, as we see in this book, and fascism and its legacies. So this book, in a way, arose out of the work that I did for my previous book, which was Italian Futurism and the First World War, which was published by University of Toronto Press in 2016. I rose out of my postdoctoral work. So that book kind of straddled cultural history, literary studies and art history. And I think I realized after finishing that book that I really wanted to write something about the First World War that really from a kind of a strictly historical vantage point, and that's really the perspective of this book. I'm also a migrant myself. I'm Irish, living in the uk. I've had past experience of migration to Italy and to the us, so I've always found narratives of Italian diasporas really fascinating. And I suppose one of the things that I realised was that most major histories of the kind of mass migration, mass transatlantic Italian migration of the 19th century end in 1914. So most historians use the outbreak of the First World War as an end point for considering those kind of 19th century mass migrations, not just of Italians, but of also other European groups, which makes a lot of sense. But it made me wonder, well, what happened to all of those Italians who had traveled abroad prior to the First World War? What happened when the war broke out? And there's actually been a lot of work done by other historians on coerced forms of mobility during the First World War. So prisoners of war, refugees, colonial troop movements. But what I realized as I was kind of thinking about writing this book is that there was far less done on what we might call voluntary migrants. So migrants who found themselves, who had been economic migrants essentially, and found themselves abroad at the beginning of the war. And I was particularly again interested in those who were not enemy aliens, because there's a lot of work has been done on the internment of enemy aliens, but actually those who found themselves in allied or neutral countries. And that was actually the case for most of the Italians, because Italians were generally kind of concentrated in the allied nations of France and Britain and their North African colonies and in north and South America, which were either neutral or allied during the war. So as I was really thinking about the Interaction between migration and the First World War. I came across this phenomenon of the Italian emigrant soldiers. So, as you mentioned already, Miranda, these were 300,000 Italian men who returned to Italy following their conscription orders from the Italian armed forces, and they returned to Italy for their military service. So there's about 100,000 that returned from the U.S. about 50,000 from South America, mainly Argentina and Brazil, about 90,000 from France, and then the rest from kind of North Africa and elsewhere in Europe. And again, what I realized that this was a uniquely Italian phenomenon, that while there are other large diaspora communities around the world, none of them mobilized or were able to mobilize their emigrants in the way that Italy did during the war. So, for example, there were big German populations in north and South America, but the Allied blockade of the North Atlantic prevented German reservists from returning to serve. We then have some examples, for example, of Syrian volunteers in the Allied armies. So they would have been citizens of the Ottoman Empire, subjects of the Ottoman Empire. And they volunteered in Allied armies. They were being in Argentina, Brazil, and the US there's about 10,000 of those. And then we had a few thousand French and British from South America who returned to the Western Front. But these are really, you know, very small communities in really tiny numbers who are returning, if they're able to return at all for the. In the First World War. Whereas in Italy, for the Italian case, we have, you know, 300,000 men. So, you know, it's really a mass mobilization. And I suppose I was just really interested to find out more about, you know, what their motivations were, what their experiences were. And I was really interested in plugging in this book into the global war. You know, the First World War studies talks a lot about the kind of the global nature of the war. We've really moved beyond in the last kind of 20 years, so from the idea of war taking place in trenches in Europe. And we're thinking much more expansive terms. And this book, I think, in this approach, really allowed me to think about the way in which the war was affecting Italians in North America, in South America, in Africa, in Australia, and to kind of think about the Italians in this global context.
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That's a very helpful introduction to the book. Gives us a whole bunch of things to continue discussing through our conversation, but the numbers really jump out as an initial piece of this. So I just want to make sure we really have clarity there when we're talking about these 300,000 Italians that come to Italy to be part of the soldiers. Obviously, not every Italian Abroad is someone who could be mobilized for war service. So the numbers therefore have to be a lot bigger in terms of how many overseas Italians there are at the beginning of the war. Within that, how many, then we're eligible to be called up. If we sort of end up with the 300,000, what are the numbers that get us there?
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Yeah, that's a really good question. And, I mean, some of these numbers are slightly approximate, but I think I can give you a pretty good sense of where we're at. So, in 1911, so just three years before the war breaks out, Italians living abroad constituted one sixth of Italy's population. There were roughly 5 million people, Italian citizens living abroad in 1911, and actually 1913, so just before the outbreak of war, marked the peak of annual emigration from Italy. So 800,000 people left Italy in 1913 alone. But I think what's really important whenever we talk about Italian migration is to remember that up to 50% of all Italian emigrants returned to Italy at least once. So these weren't necessarily all permanent migrations. And that's really important to kind of put those figures into context in terms of how many were eligible for the draft. Obviously, of those 5 million people, some were children, obviously, some were women, some were older. People would have been too young or too old to be mobilised. So the figure of 1.2 million men is often cited as being kind of a good ballpark for how many men were eligible for the draft. And return rates actually differed quite a lot across different territories for various reasons to do with economics, to family structures, the kind of timelines of migration. So in terms of the return, we can say that there's maybe 1 in 12 Italian men and eligible men from Brazil returned, 1 in 8 returned from the US and 1 in 6 from Argentina. So while on the one hand, you know, 300,000 is an absolutely enormous number of men to return, of emigrants to return to Italy, it's also very clear that draft evasion. Draft evasion is also a huge issue, and that it was kind of impossible for me to look at mobilisation without kind of looking at the flip side of that, which was draft evasion. And that's something I kind of look at in the book, and I think we'll probably talk about a little bit later as well. So, you know, I think, you know, the Italian authorities were actually disappointed by the numbers who had returned. But actually, I think it's remarkable. I mean, this is one of the things, the conclusions that I came to in the book, that I think it is actually really remarkable that so many men did actually return to Italy for their service, considering that there were no punitive coercive measures obliging them to do so. And we might come back to that point. I can talk a little bit more about that later if you want. I think also in terms of thinking about the significance of these numbers, it's worth just putting the Italian case into a comparative context. So I've already mentioned that there's no comparative mobilization of emigrants, but I think maybe a useful comparison is to think about some other cohorts within the Allied armies. So in statistical terms, the Italian emigrant soldiers of 300,000 constituted 7.2% of the Italian army's fighting force. And while that percentage might seem actually kind of small, on the one hand, actually it was higher than that of the Australian and New Zealand's troops who fought for the British army and the colonial, mainly African subjects who fought for the French army. And those are two subjects that have received enormous attention, rightly so, in scholarship on the First World War. But the cohort of the emigrant soldiers who are numerically bigger or at least comparable, have never received that kind of attention. So I think that the numbers, the kind of context for those numbers, I think is really important. I think the other point I'd just like to make really kind of early on as we chat, Miranda, if it's okay, but it's just kind of a definitional point. So these men were reservists in the Italian armed forces. So most of them would have done their peacetime military service, those two years of military service that men were obliged to do once they hit 20. And then they became reservists in the Italian army, and they were there for responding to official mobilization orders. They were not volunteers. And sometimes in scholarship, these men are called volunteers, but they're not. And even though sometimes the men felt themselves that they were volunteers by returning, they were kind of bestowing their service on the Italian state because they were choosing in inverted commas to return legally. That wasn't the case. This was a legal obligation of their Italian citizenship. And I think it's just really important to remember that these are conscripts with maybe elements or similarities to kind of volunteerism, but they're actually not, in legal or military terms, they're actually not volunteers.
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Yeah, that's definitely a point worth making. I mean, anyway, we love definitions as historians, but the context of this really does matter, especially with those numbers that the Italian government was sort of, as you said, disappointed to not get more right because of these sorts of things around the legal and military framework of it. But of course, that does raise already for us the prospect that we're not talking about one experience, right, that all of these Italian emigrant soldiers would have had. We're talking really about a range, a diversity. So can you tell us a bit about sort of why decisions would be made to do this, to go back or to not go back when this call comes up? And also sort of how you as a historian can make sense of the diversity? I mean, there's such a range here, the numbers are so massive. How do you approach understanding those stories and telling them to us?
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in terms of the motivations, you're absolutely right. They're not a homogenous group. I mean, no group of 300,000 people could be homogenous. And they are really different according to, and their motivations, their experiences really differ according to the length of time that they'd been abroad. And some of these men had been born and raised in Italy, had never been to Italy before. Others might have been in Italy, might have emigrated a couple of years previously or emigrated multiple times to different places. So that had a huge impact on their motivations and their experiences, their age, you know, their family status, you know, whether they had family members in Italy or, or abroad. Their, their class background, you know, all of these things had an impact on whether they decided to return and, and why they decided to return. So the, you know, patriotism is, is kind of the easy answer, right? You know, why do you return to a war zone? Because you're very nationalistic, you're very patriotic, you love your country. You know, that's the kind of the easy answer, but it really isn't that straightforward. Yes, there were some men who had kind of imbibed kind of patriotic feeling during their youth and their adolescence. And they felt this was an important part of their duty as Italian citizens. And they believed in the idea that Italy had to redeem the Italian speaking territories of Otranto and Trieste, which was kind of the calling card for why Italy was entering the war. So that did resonate with some people, though generally it tended to resonate with the more middle class, which was the same as actually as was the case in Italy. Whereas the more working class people, both in Italy and abroad, didn't really understand what the war was about and why Italy was even entering the war. So rather than it being about patriotism so much, it was about this sense of it was a duty to do their Military service. Their fathers and grandfathers had done their military service, and that was why it was important. And again, I think the whole question of patriotism in the Italian case is also complicated because Italy had only been unified just barely 50 years before the First World War breaks out. So Italy was unified in 1861, and there was still a much closer identification with a hometown or a region, Sicily or Puglia, than there was with the Italian state. So that's also, I think, something that's really worth us being aware of. So, yeah, patriotism is one, you know, one part of the mix, but certainly not all of the story. A big motivation was actually fear. So the consulates abroad, the consulates and the embassy abroad, they couldn't compel men to serve in the army. They couldn't send Italian police officers to New York to round up the draft evaders, but they did. Yeah, the consulates did send their mobilization orders to the men, and some of them felt this pressure, therefore, to oblige. And some evaders were named and shamed in the press. That happened in Brazil and Argentina. And in terms of the fear, the fear was that if they didn't respond to the draft, and that they would be subject to really severe penalties at a later date if they wanted to return to Italy and they could be imprisoned. So this was, you know, a fear. They said, well, you know, I don't want this to happen if. If I don't serve, so actually, I'll go back and. And kind of serve in the army. Another point is that. Excuse me, the. There was a real kind of youthful naivety at play here. And again, most of the men were. Were young, and there was a desire for adventure. And there's. There's a lovely quote from a man called Vincenzo d'. Aquila. He was born in Palermo but raised in New York. And I just wanted to read it to you because I think it kind of sums up some of the innocence, in a way, of the men. And he said they looked upon the voyage as an agreeable cruise or junket, expecting either to spend a few months visiting the art centers in Italy, or at worst, to enjoy the pleasures of camp life in the invigorating summer mountain air amid the fair plateaus and clear streams of the old country. And that's really a sentiment I came across very often, that the men really had no idea of what was awaiting them. They knew they were going to a war zone, but some of them thought, oh, our intervention is going to be so important that the war will be won within a Few weeks. Once Italy's out of the war, we'll be fine. We don't even have to serve. Another man had brought two suitcases on board with him, and one of them had a tuxedo in it. And he asked a journalist on board the ship as he was going to Italy, do you think I'll get any chance to wear my tuxedo over there? Which just is such an absurd question, but I think really reveals the lack of understanding of what was awaiting them. One of the things that my research really showed was that I think the most important factor determining whether a man returned or not was his family situation. So among those who returned, young single men dominated. And most of them who had parents and close family back in Italy were the ones who were returning. This is a big fear. They wouldn't be able to see them again. If they evaded the draft during the war, they wouldn't be able to get back to Italy without being imprisoned and arrested. And that was a real fear, as I said, rather than risk that we'll go back to serve in the army and be able to see our families. And that was really important. In some cases, there was also family pressure. So family members, parents were writing to their sons saying, you must come back because you're bringing shame on the family. All the other boys in the village have been mobilized, and, you know, you can't be seen not to be doing your part. And then the other question was whether, you know, men had families. So if men had wives and children abroad, they had to think about their welfare. So all of the men's passage back was paid for by the Italian government, but dependents weren't paid for. So some charities step up in Argentina, New York and elsewhere to pay the fares, also family members back to Italy. But obviously, some men said, well, I don't particularly want to bring my wife back to a war zone. So the family members stayed abroad. But then there was a danger of, well, what if they become public charges? And then some men were actually prevented from leaving until they could, you know, ensure that their families were going to be provided for. So really, you know, what I saw in my research was that men with, you know, a wife, let's say more than two children, they tended to stay put and not leave. And it was either single men or. Or men with just a wife or maybe just one or two children that would depart. So the family situation had a really big impact. And the other question you asked, Miranda was about the, you know, how I tell these stories and how I get at These stories. So what I really wanted to do in this book was to focus on the voices and the experiences of the men themselves. Because, you know, when others have written about this phenomenon and there's been kind of a few studies, small studies here and there, they tend to focus on the kind of more institutional questions. I really wanted to get to the core of the human experience. So I kind of adopted a global micro history approach. And in the book, I actually follow four men individually from birth to death, essentially. And one travels from the United States, from New York, another travels from Brazil, another travels from Paris, another travels from London. And, you know, they're all roughly the same age, but, you know, they're different class backgrounds, obviously, coming from different parts of the world, coming from different parts of Italy. So I kind of. I follow their stories, and it gives me a thread and an anchor throughout the book. And then I kind of contextualize those, you know, with dozens and dozens of other stories that I found in the archives from, you know, other places and, you know, other experiences to try and give, I suppose, as representative a picture as possible of the men and their experiences.
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C
All right, so that's really helpful to understand the range we're talking about and how, as a historian, you make sense of that. I'm definitely glad we got to mention the micro histories early on in our conversation, but with those particular examples, I mean, already that's highlighting the amount of effort needed to even get these soldiers to the point that the Italian government can deploy them somewhere. I mean, if they're coming from North America, South America, London, like, that's a bunch of different logistical challenges there. So how does it actually work to get, for example, those four young men to Italy?
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Yeah, so the logistical question is huge, and it is really a major logistical challenge, primarily across the Atlantic. So getting a train, mustering men from across the UK for example, getting them on a train, a ferry across to France and through France, all allied territories, is. Is relatively straightforward. Similarly, from North Africa, there are problems with submarines across the Mediterranean. But getting men from British and French colonies like Egypt and Morocco and Tunisia across the Mediterranean into Italy, again, is relatively doable. The big challenge is getting men across the Atlantic. The distances are huge, obviously. In fact, there were small. There were very small numbers of Italians resident in places like Japan, China, Chile, and they were actually exempted from service because the Italian government just put their hands up and said, you know, this is. This is too, too logistically complicated. The numbers are too small. We're not even going to worry about you guys and so really it was about Italians in North America, primarily the us, some in Central America and then South America, particularly Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. They were where the biggest communities were. So departures actually begin really quickly. So five days after Italy enters the war and the first ship departs from Buenos Aires with 700 Italian reservists on board by 5 June. So Italy enters the war at the end of May 1915, and by 5 June, the first departures from the US and North Africa had taken place. So the mobilisation actually starts very, very quickly. But what happens is that there's then reveals to be kind of a severe shortage of steamships. There's just not enough transport available for the numbers of men that are showing up. So what you have is kind of build up bottlenecks at ports as men are awaiting departures. So particularly in the Argentinian case, I found lots of examples of men being forced to pawn their belongings in order to kind of make ends meet, as they were waiting for weeks sometimes to depart. And, you know, they placed classified ads in newspapers in Buenos Aires looking for short term work until their passage on a ship could be confirmed. And what happened in a lot of cases was that men kind of cut their losses and said, look, I've been waiting for weeks, I have no more money left. You know, there's no sight of a ship departure coming. I'm just going to go back to my previous job and go back to where I was before the war. So those men who, if we talk about motivation, they were motivated to leave, but they, the kind of the logistical, practical challenges got in the way and they then became draft evaders. And then the kind of capacity was a big issue. And the other kind of real logistical, practical problem in crossing the Atlantic was that the journey was very dangerous. And the journey took two weeks from North America to Italy and three weeks from South America and the Italian. The ships had to contend with things like Austrian and German spies, saboteurs, stowaways. The threat of submarine attack was constant, particularly in the Mediterranean. And it was a case in September of 1915. So just a few months after Italy entered the war, for a ship that was on its way from New York to Marseille and had 1700 Italian reservists on board. And there was a big explosion as they were in the middle. They were off the coast of Nova Scotia and there's this huge explosion. Parts of the ship are on fire for three days. They make it to the Azores and 18 bombs were discovered in the hold. And again, this was just one of various plots by Austrian and German spies to try and thwart the return of Italian soldiers to Italy. And there were other various plots that I kind of read about in the archives in South America and elsewhere in New York and Boston and things. So the logistical challenges were immense. And even before the men actually arrived in Italy.
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C
Yeah, the scale of that is pretty challenging on a number of levels there. But it's not like it's all necessarily amazing. Once they do get to Italy, what was it like to try and integrate into Italian society? Of course, in wartime? I mean, what was, for example, the popular perception of bringing all these soldiers over? Was it kind of a popular idea?
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Yeah. So, you know, initially it was a really popular response, sorry, really positive response to the mobilization both in the immigrant communities abroad and also in kind of, you know, the. That's the American press or the British press abroad, not just the kind of Italian language diaspora communications. So this was really a huge global news story in the summer and autumn of 1915. It's also worth mentioning that 2/3 of the 300,000 men actually leave and leave for Italy in the summer and autumn of 1915. So that's when the departures are happening. So really it's a huge news story. And there are, you know, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of photographs and reports of departures from train stations and ports all around the world. And this is, you know, in. Yes, in Italian language media abroad, but also it's in French, it's in English, it's in Spanish, it's in Portuguese. This is a really big news story. And when they arrive in Italy, there are welcoming committees generally greeting them on arrival, particularly those first arrivals in the summer of 1915. The men feel very kind of, you know, well regarded. And, you know, there was an appreciation that these men were doing something, you know, particular and unusual in returning and they want that was, you know, recognized. But they very quickly kind of realized that they weren't being given special treatment once they arrived. And you know, I can talk a little bit more about that later and what that meant. But one of the really what happens to them once they arrive is that there's this moment of recognition when they arrive, but then they're kind of sent off back to their hometowns or the hometowns of their fathers to be mustered into whatever regiment or battalion they were assigned to. So actually, once they arrive in Italy, these men disappear and, you know, they're not a visible cohort. And that's also something that's really important to. To mention that There it's not like the Pals battalions in Britain, for example, where a group from a particular area are all kind of mustered together and served together. Or the Senegalese soldiers were all in the same battalions and they served together. The emigrant soldiers just disappear. They just disperse and are treated like any other soldiers in the army. So that actually means that it's quite hard to. They're not really given any attention during the war years. There's not a visible cohort. The press doesn't really talk about them. In fact, Benito Mussolini, who was not the Mussolini we know so well at the time, he was a soldier and an officer in the First World War. He wrote. He's a very successful journalist and a kind of a well known figure in the First World War. But he actually wrote a little bit about these men from America, he called them, and he said, they're the best of our troops at the front. But he was actually a relatively lone voice in kind of singling out the men. And another, maybe slightly unexpected way in which I found the men were being kind of part of the public consciousness was school textbooks. That school textbooks were reprinted during the war to have kind of suitably patriotic content. And it was almost always a story about the uncle who comes over from America and he's very patriotic and he's come back to serve. So there's a kind of a certain awareness of this cohort in Italy, but not in any really meaningful way. And one of the things that actually happens and you know, again in letters and diaries, I've come across this quite a lot. But the soldiers and the immigrants were often kind of not treated and not welcomed with open arms in the way they expected. So the ordinary conscripts often thought they were just mad, saying, you were in New York, why didn't you come back? You didn't have to come back, you'd have avoided this hell. Well, so kind of, what were you doing? And they felt the emigrants were left feeling a little bit foolish and others actually were saying, why did you come over? Because the more fresh manpower we have, the longer the war is just going to go on. So you're just kind of compounding our misery in the war. So the men were sometimes surprised they weren't getting the kind of hero's welcome that they were expecting and that their reception was more kind of tepid than they had hoped for. Hmm.
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C
No, that's very interesting indeed. Before we go further, though, talking about these particular soldiers and their experiences, I want to make sure we don't lose the thread of the draft evasion that we mentioned earlier. Because of course, by the time we get to these soldiers being in Italy, dispersed amongst these different battalions and regiments, what about the ones that were supposed to be with them but weren't? How did people evade the draft? Were there any consequences during the war?
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A
Yeah, so I mean essentially the vein of the draft in almost all cases was quite easy. You know, it just really involved declining to sign up for a departure. And this is particularly the case in the US when it was neutral until 1917 and in neutral South American countries. So it was really quite easy just to kind of, you know, not make oneself known at the consulate, not sign up for a kind of a pre departure medical exam and just continue doing, you know, doing what you were doing before. I did find some really kind of quite fun, elaborate schemes in the archive of people trying to kind of falsify documents and you know, somebody in the embassy who was trying to kind of, you know, create fake documents, etc. But by and large those kinds of schemes weren't really necessary for most, for most reservists. But ultimately, in terms of wartime consequences, the situation for draft evaders really depended hugely on country of residence. So In March of 1916, the French government signed an agreement with Italy to that they would exchange draft evaders and deserters. So in theory that was a reciprocal agreement, but it was actually very, very clear to everybody that this was the primary target of this agreement was to clamp down on Italian draft evaders in front of. Because there were far more Italians in France than there were French in Italy. There were almost no French men living in Italy. There was a huge Italian community in France and essentially having Italian men kind of parading around the streets, draft age men parading around the streets of Paris, working while all of the French men of their age were dying on battlefields was not very good for French morale. And it was also in a way quite humiliating to Italy to have these men just kind of flaunting their draft evader status. So that was the case in France, in Britain in December of 1917. So again, quite late, you know, quite late in the war, again there's an agreement between Britain and Italy that foreigners would be compelled to serve in one or other of the armies. And when the US enters the war in 1917, all men are required, all men of a certain age are required to register with the draft board. But actually non citizens weren't going to be obliged to serve in the U.S. army. So again, one, they had to kind of sign up for the draft board, but could continue to kind of live their lives unimpeded abroad. But actually, there are some really interesting cases of Italian anarchists who were, you know, there's quite a big anarchist community in the US and elsewhere. And they were so opposed to any kind of military service and even signing up and registering for the draft, even if they wouldn't have to serve, that they fled over the US border to Mexico and to avoid kind of signing up for the draft board at all. So, you know, in the allied countries, you know, draft evasion could have certain consequences and they had to kind of regularize their status depending on where they were living in other parts of the world. They could just continue to come to live their lives, you know, do their work. And yes, they were separated often from family members back in Italy, and that was very difficult. And I've read, you know, hundreds of letters of very sad draft evaders missing their mothers, missing their siblings as they're kind of stuck abroad. But apart from those kind of interpersonal dimensions, there weren't necessarily huge consequences for many of those draft evaded during the war itself.
- [34:47]
C
All right, so let's put aside then the draft dodgers. We have a sense then of kind of what they're doing, going about their daily lives. For the soldiers who do decide to make themselves known and get on the ships and get over to Italy, of course, as you've been telling us a bit about so far, they're really not going about their kind of normal pre war lives. So can you tell us a bit more about how they are experiencing all of this, especially the ones that were born in Brazil and had never been to Italy before? I mean, that's a massive change.
- [35:17]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the biggest differences maybe between within this cohort is those who've been born and raised abroad or maybe brought abroad as very young children. So really all of their experience was, you know, outside of Italy and those who'd be more recent emigrants and maybe had emigrated as older adolescents or as young men and therefore had kind of much, kind of closer ties to Italy. So what's really interesting is that many of the men were kind of experiencing Italy as tourists. So some were lucky enough to have some time to do sightseeing before they were sent to the front. So, you know, you have these letters of them going to visit Pompeii and seeing the Coliseum and the Vatican, and they're having a great time. But actually then the others were, you know, arrived back in Italy and they were immediately sent to the front, they didn't even have a chance to see parents or family members. So many of them were extremely aggrieved because they said, well, the whole reason I came back was to see my mother. And then I was just like, you know, shunted off to the front immediately. So that was, you know, again, it was just luck essentially as to how they, how that arrival was managed. The other point is that, you know, they were, as I said before, they were kind of mustered into their kind of home battalions. So there was no particular special treatment given to them in the army. And there were some cases of skills they had learned abroad that could be used in the army, but they were kind of quite isolated cases. You know, some men who'd been raised in France, worked in munitions, had worked in munitions factories, they were put into engineering divisions. For example, I found a great case of a shepherd from central Italy who had learned how to use a telephone while he was working in Minnesota. And therefore, because he had this particularly kind of advanced technological skill, he was then tasked with manning a telephone and doing surveillance on the Adriatic coast, which I thought was quite an interesting kind of example of technological prowess in the First World War. And if men had knowledge of languages that could be put to good use at certain points during the war as well, not necessarily just as interpreters, but as kind of go betweens. But actually, one of the big issues was in fact language for those men who had spent long periods of time abroad. So some of them had just had limited Italian. It was very difficult for them to integrate. And what I really saw is that they often felt more comfortable socializing with others from the US who spent time in the US or others who spend time in Brazil or Argentina, because they had more in common. They felt quite distant, often from the other kind of non immigrant conscripts within the army. Then the other thing that was really obvious and became very obvious in terms of these men's experiences is that very quickly, within months of being at the front, feelings of regret surface. They say, this isn't what I was expecting. I'd done what I did by coming here. I made such a stupid decision. I was foolish, I was naive. And they begin to write letters home to parents asking for forgiveness for making the stupid decision, or writing to friends or brothers or nephews abroad saying, don't make the same mistake I did. You were right to stay abroad, evade the draft, stay away. And most of those letters were actually censored, so they never reached their destinations. So even the most patriotic of the emigrant soldiers really felt their Italian ness and their feelings of loyalty towards Italy being challenged as they kind of encountered the realities of military life and the harshness of the. Of military discipline. And again, the realization that they weren't particularly well regarded, they weren't kind of singled out for praise, and they were just treated as any other. As any other soldier was.
- [38:59]
C
What about those letters, though? Generally, one expects that, especially in this world war, writing letters home was hard for anyone. I mean, censorship is definitely a thing, as you mentioned, but we're also talking about some pretty extreme distances too. And of course, all the dangers that they faced in getting the ships across the Atlantic would surely also apply for the letters home. So could they keep in touch with their families? What did they do if they couldn't? How else did they try and kind of cope with the situation?
- [39:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely, you're right. I mean, letters are a lifeline during the First World War. So actually, almost 4 billion billion letters and postcards were sent to and from the Italian front lines during the war. But you're right, the emigrant soldiers had kind of a whole host of additional problems they had to deal with in trying to correspond. So one was the fact that while soldiers got an allocation of postcards that could be sent for free every week within Italy, there was no provision made for immigrants who had loved ones abroad. So it was very expensive then to keep postgraduate in regular contact. And that was resolved after a certain amount of time with Britain and France, because, again, the distance were more manageable. They were Allied countries. But for north and South America, as you said rightly, the transatlantic transport was a real issue, and it was slow, it was unreliable. There was a German blockade of the South Atlantic from 1917. So there was a real problem in getting post to arrive in delays. And this kind of added to the sense of isolation that many of the immigrants felt because they saw men all around them getting letters and they. They got nothing, though, obviously, you know, there were men who had their close family members in Italy. They were the lucky ones, really, and they could correspond as other soldiers. Cigarettes were also a big morale booster for all of the armies in the war, really. And. But again, those coming from abroad had their kind of preferred brand of cigarettes. And one of the men that I follow, Americo Orlando, who had been born and raised in Brazil and really missed his Brazilian cigarette and asked his mother to get him some. And eventually, after nine months of waiting, he finally got some. And he wrote to his mother, these cigarettes are so good that sometimes I smoke until I burn my lips. And There are cases of Argentinian cigarette brands taking out ads in Italian newspapers saying, you should send our cigarettes to the men at the front because they missed their Argentinian cigarettes. That was another kind of says coping mechanism. Obviously a major coping mechanism for mobilized men was periods of leave. So you know when you've got a break from the front lines. But this was really difficult for a lot of the emigrant soldiers. So if they were lucky to have, you know, parents or close family members in Italy, that was the same as the non immigrants. But if their family was all abroad, they often had no option. They didn't know what to do with their leave. So some did tourism. If they had any money, they could do some tourism around the sights of Italy away from the front lines. Others really had to beg relatives to take them in for a few weeks and say, I have some money to cover my food and board. But it was almost kind of quite a humiliating experience. And others actually just gave up their leave entirely and said, well, I nobody to spend it with. I have no money to go anywhere, so I just won't take my leave. Which I think was really very, which is very sad. And as I mentioned, one of the coping mechanisms for many of these men was to socialize with other immigrants because they were often identified and kind of seen as being different by the non immigrant soldiers. So they felt more at home with other immigrants. And then when British, French and American troops are deployed to Italy after the Caporetto disaster in 1917, and many of the men are actually pleased to get a chance to meet British troops or French troops and they can talk in English or in French to these other soldiers and in some ways they feel like they have more in common with a French soldier than they do with an Italian soldier. So there's really interesting dynamics again of their questions of identity and how Italian they feel or how unitalian they feel as a result of their war service.
- [43:07]
C
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com yeah, that is really interesting to think about the different dynamics and the kind of unique challenges that they might be facing during the war. And of course this sort of special circumstance I suppose doesn't change even once the war is over, because then of course, they have to do the reverse of what we've been talking about, which is somehow get home. So what was the demobilisation process like? Was it different at all to the kind of challenges maybe faced in the demobilization by soldiers who stayed within Italy? In fact, did any of these emigrant soldiers say, actually, I liked it, let's stay in Italy?
- [44:09]
A
Yeah. So in terms of the numbers, what we can say is that the government at the end of the war paid for passage back to pre war places of residence for 151,000 men. So there are 300,000 who departed and then 151,000 have their passage paid. So we have to also remember that probably about, you know, 43,000 of the emigrant soldiers probably died in the war, according to kind of casualty rights in the army. And Definitely more than 150,000 returned to their pre war places of residence. They paid for their own travel or they traveled illegally. So we can say that maybe two thirds of those who survived the war departed from Italy as soon as they were able. Now, that was for a number of reasons. In some cases because they had family members abroad and they wanted to get back to them as quickly as possible. In other cases because they had no work in Italy and they had better work prospects abroad. So they would again maybe plan on a short term migration, re migration abroad for a few years before returning to Italy at some point in the future. So some stay, but some stay also because they are injured or because they don't have a job abroad to return to. So yeah, unfortunately the demobilisation situation in terms of logistics and shipping and transport is really not much better than how it was in 1915. So the demobilisation process is just very chaotic. There's not enough ships to transport all of the men who are trying to return again, particularly across the Atlantic by the end of 1919. So a year after the war has ended, 40,000 had returned to Europe or North Africa, but only 10,000 to the U.S. which again, kind of shows how getting on a train was relatively straightforward, getting on a ship much less. So I think maybe probably the biggest difference between what happened in 1950 and what happens in 1919 is that there's far more kind of agitation in protest and men are far angrier at the delays they're facing. And you have again, buildups of ports of Genoa and Naples. The situation was really desperate. There wasn't enough accommodation. If men had family members in tow, they were forced to pay for their accommodation out of their own pocket. The allowances that they were given by the army as they were awaiting departure wasn't enough to live on in big cities like Naples. So many of these men were discharged from the army, had no family in Italy, no contact, and were using the small amount of money that had been given at the end of the war to pay for accommodation as they were waiting to be able to depart. So the veterans very quickly are getting disgruntled and this becomes quite a major political issue in 1919. It's talked a lot about in the government, in parliament, it's talked a lot about in the press. And in fact, it's at this moment in 1919 that we see the most attention being given to, to the emigrant soldiers in kind of the public consciousness. And there's kind of a recognition, kind of a belated recognition that their service was out of the ordinary. And there was an acknowledgement that the government needed to do something to show that their service was appreciated. So the government kind of steps in and says, oh, they're going to give them a larger clothing bundle. So all men got a clothing bundle when they left the army. And this would be a larger clothing bundle then awarded to non immigrant soldiers. If they hadn't been able to use their periods of leave during the war. They would get a one off payment to kind of compensate them for that. And they would get a certificate of kind of recognition. But in fact, this certificate of recognition was only given to men who had returned from across the Atlantic saying they battled submarines and long distances and they were deserving of the special recognition. And they ignored the personal and physical sacrifices that men had made who came from North Africa and Europe. And that was actually that certificate was the first time there was ever any distinction made between the emigrant soldiers by country of departure. But ultimately the men weren't particularly interested in a piece of paper. What they wanted was be able to get back to their families abroad or that there was sufficient employment initially they didn't need to depart in the first place if they wanted to stay. But those things weren't really pretty forthcoming.
- [48:37]
C
Yeah, I can imagine that's a very frustrating experience indeed. So this does however, pass for at least most of them. They get home. But it's not like that's inevitably a smooth process of reintegration. So what was that like for the immigrant soldiers kind of getting off the boat in Boston or in Brazil, wherever it might be? Are there any sort of remaining ties with the Italian government? I mean, you mentioned a piece of paper. Do they get, get anything more helpful at any point and what's sort of the reception like back at home?
- [49:08]
A
Yeah, so they do get pensions. They are entitled to an Italian pension for their service in the army. And that's actually one of the things that slows things up a lot before they can leave Italy. So some of them are saying, look, I got the money to leave, I don't want to, I'll just pay my own passage on a ship. But then it takes them months to organize their pension paperwork that they need to have in place before they can leave. So the problem was that the pensions abroad very often were delayed or they didn't arrive at all. And even when they were paid, they were very unfavourable. They were paid in the Italian lire, the Italian currency, and there were unfavourable exchange rates. And all of the rates and pension rates were calibrated for the cost of living in Italy, which was much less than the cost of living in places like New York or London. So that was, you know, the pension they got didn't really serve its purpose. And in fact, you know, this was an ongoing issue up until, up until the late 1920s, early 1930s. And I came across situations in the early 1930s of the Italian consul in Algeria still raising the issue of pensions and not arriving and not being managed properly. So this was a very long term issue. Once they got back in terms of their success in reintegration really varied. So those who'd spent longest abroad before the war had kind of dense as those personal professional networks and they probably find it easiest in general to slot back into life abroad. And in fact they were only given permission to return to Italy, sorry to return abroad if they had a job or family members. But there was also discrimination against foreign veterans in various places. So for example, a lot of Italian men were waiters in London and in kind of top restaurants and often unemployed British men. British veterans would see these Italian veterans getting jobs in restaurants, often returning to a pre war place of employment and say, why are they getting jobs and we're unemployed? The sense of this kind of xenophobia was on the rise. And that was really the case, I think through a lot of the world during the First World War and certainly in the US There was increasing anti immigrant sentiment during the war and increasingly anti Italian sentiment, sentiment particularly. But what I think was really interesting, what I found was that the veterans returning to the US and the emigrant veterans were regarded as being different from other Italian immigrants. So the fact that the men were deemed to have Departed semi voluntarily was deemed to be a sign of their good character. They had the makings of good American citizens. And then they were differentiated positively from other first time immigrants from southern Italy who were deemed to be kind of lower quality quality. There's always these associations between, you know, Italians from Sicily as being, you know, mafia and, you know, bandits and dangerous and, and dirty. Whereas the veterans, even if some of them were also coming from Sicily, were deemed to be of better stock. So again, it was kind of an interesting perception question there.
- [52:05]
C
Yeah, the perceptions are definitely very nuanced in this sort of immediate post war era when of course the war's over. But there's still quite a few challenges in many countries at this point. And speaking to the poor economic sit situation of the Italian government as well, I wonder if we can just go back for a moment and check in on those draft dodgers. Did anything happen to them after the war?
- [52:29]
A
Yeah, so it did. So there was a partial amnesty in 1919, but it was quite limited. So men could get an amnesty, men who had evaded the draft, the Italian draft could get an amnesty if they had served in one of the Allied armies. So if they'd done their service with the British or French army or the American army, if they had been employed in war industries, so as you know, munitions factories, etc. So doing war work abroad, or if they'd been enemy aliens, which they'd been interned, they physically weren't able to return. But actually that left a lot of people outside the terms of that amnesty. And the main problem was that if draft evaders, wartime draft evaders, wanted to return to Italy, they were liable for arrest, they could be imprisoned and they could also then be enlisted into the Italian army and forced to do their period of service. So what you see is that when men return to Italy in the 1920s, for example, so drafted ladies return to Italy in the 1920s and are arrested. A lot of them have excuses like, oh, there weren't no steamships. I tried to come back, but there weren't enough steamships or I couldn't travel back because my wife was sick or my children were sick and those excuses just weren't accepted. And they would be imprisoned for a certain period of time. If they stayed abroad, really there were no consequences for them as long as they were outside of Italy. They didn't depth in Italy. There were no consequences for the draft evaders. But the situation of wartime draft evaders becomes particularly acute and comes to the fore much more of Mussolini comes to power in 1922. So he is very keen to cultivate good relations with the United States. What we see is much more in the 1920s, men wanting to travel to Italy for family reasons, for business reasons, and getting arrested and being conscripted into the army if they do so. So Mussolini, this is particularly kind of a point of tension between the US because some of these men are also US Citizens. And Mussolini then tries to kind of develop a plan to manage this. There's a new law passed in 1928 that actually allows draft evaders to travel to Italy without consequences for short periods of time. Now, in that law, wartime draft evaders, who are obviously the most problematic category, were not formally excluded from this dispensation. So essentially, and I've seen this in the archival documents, it's very, very clear the stated policy is to turn a blind eye and say if wartime draft evaders return to Italy and they spend less than six months in Italy, nothing will happen to them, and essentially they'll be kind of allowed to stay and kind of get on with their business. And that was the policy. That was the policy that was in place during the 1930s, but it takes really quite a long time. It's more than a decade until this is really ironed out. So for draft evaders who maybe wanted to see family members back in Italy, but didn't particularly want to be imprisoned, they were kind of in this limbo for quite a long time.
- [55:30]
C
Yeah, the length that this all takes to get resolved, going back to what you were saying about the pensions too, that's, that's definitely worth highlighting that this doesn't all end in 1918 or 1919. And in fact, Mussolini appears one other time in the book as well. So perhaps that's where we can conclude our discussion on it. What was his interest not just in draft dodgers, but in immigrant soldiers more broadly? What was he sort of trying at least to use them for?
- [55:56]
A
Yeah, so Mussolini was really interested in Italian immigrants in general, not just the emigrant soldiers. He really wanted to kind of bring Italian emigrants back into the, into the Italian fold. There was this fear that a lot of Italian immigrants had been kind of assimilated into these foreign countries and they were no longer, you know, proud Italians. And Mussolini said that Italians should remain Italian until the seventh generation. So he really wanted to kind of, you know, develop a feeling of pride of being Italian among immigrants as well. So he set up lots of branches of the Fascist Party outside of Italy. And the Fascists kind of took over a lot of pre existing organizations, like social organizations, that organized summer camps for immigrant children to come to Italy to experience some of the old countries. There's a real sense of trying to involve immigrants in the kind of fascist dream. But actually what was in terms of the emigrant veterans particularly is that they weren't particularly politically. Politically active. So fascism abroad was never particularly successful. It didn't really ever penetrate hugely into immigrant communities, but when it did, it had most residents with those who had emigrated for the first time after the end of the First World War. And those were the men who were kind of spearheading fascist organizations abroad. And by and large, you know, fascist veterans, sorry, emigrant veterans. So the men, my men, like my 300,000 men, were not particularly dominant in these fascist organizations. By and large, they were quite disillusioned with Italy after their experience in the war and had no particular desire to be politically active. Mussolini did try and raise the profile of the emigrant soldiers in various ways during his regime. And one of the most obvious ways that he did that was in 1932. There was a huge exhibition, a landmark exhibition. It's called the exhibition the fascist revolution, marking 10 years since fascism had come to power. It was in Rome and there's kind of a broad history of the fascist movement beginning in 1914. So really thinking about the First World War as being the kind of the crucible of fascism. And that exhibition did highlight the contribution of emigrants owners during the Great War as being kind of exceptional and worthy of recognition. So that was significant in that, that was the kind of recognition that they didn't guess during the war itself or even really in the kind of immediate post war periods the Mussolini was keen to kind of speak about them. But by and large, the emigrant soldiers and emigrant veterans themselves weren't particularly interested in the fascist cause.
- [58:34]
C
That's really, really interesting and definitely extends when we should be looking at these immigrant soldiers well beyond the end of the war itself. So thank you for taking us right from the beginning of this all the way until the end, leaving me with just a final question of what you might be working on now that this project is complete. The book is out. I don't know if you have any current or upcoming projects, whether or not they're related to this that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [59:00]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So this book took me nine years to write between Changing Job three Times and emigrating and Covid and all these other things. So I am a real glutton for punishment and immediately have embarked on another research project. So in fact I paused the writing of this book in order to write a proposal for my next book, which is what I'm currently now writing, which is a global history of Italian emigration from Marco Polo to today. This is a trade book. It's under contract with Viking Penguin in the us, with Hodder and Stoughton in the uk, and with Mondadori in Italy. So this is, in a way, kind of following. It's a continuation, in some ways, of emigrant soldiers, but with a much larger scope. So I'm kind of, again, taking a global approach, and I'm also using a kind of a global microhistory approach, again, kind of thinking very much about the voice and perspective of the migrants themselves and putting that at the center of my narrative. And what I'm trying to do is take this global approach and focus not just on the kind of canonical years of Italian mass migration, the late 1930s, 20th centuries, to the Americas, but think about how Italians moved around the world much earlier than that, so from Middle Ages and afterwards, and also really thinking about how they moved to Europe, to Asia, to Africa, to Australia. As I was trying to present alternative and parallel trajectories of Italian immigrants, kind of going beyond the kind of familiar stories of Italians in the US and those kind of stereotypical stories of. Of the Italian, you know, ice cream seller or the Mafioso in the us. So that's kind of really what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do at the moment.
- [60:44]
C
Well, that's an intriguing and ambitious project, so best of luck with it.
- [60:48]
A
Thank you very much.
- [60:50]
C
While you are pursuing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Immigrant Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Selena, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [61:05]
A
It's been a pleasure. Miranda, thank you.