Sunday, January 21, 2007

Italian War Camp in WWII by American recalled by Lost Diary

The ANNOTICO Report

 

American soldier Dennis Sweeney was captured by Italian Forces near Tunis in North Africa in WWII, and then transferred to Servigliano, a town on the eastern coast of central Italy.

Sweeney joined about 2,200 Allied soldiers in Camp 59, which housed British, American, French and Polish prisoners of war. In anecdotes written by other prisoners of the camp, guards often told soldiers, "For you, the war is over," when they arrived. Following the Geneva Convention's rules, the Italians paid the prisoners twice monthly  the same salary as soldiers, with a deduction for housing costs.

They were given new clothes upon arrival  British uniforms, he wrote.

Each day they ate a dinner of bread, cheese and tea at 11 a.m., and supper at 4:30 p.m., often small amounts of pasta. The guards issued them cigarettes, and on holidays a prisoner-led orchestra performed and prisoners boxed.

Easter Sunday The orchestra entertained us boys with music. Also we witnessed 12 boxing bouts. Mother's Day was the same program.

May-17-43 209 American prisoners arrived in our camp. I thought we looked bad when we arrived in this camp, but they looked worse than we did. I was hoping to see some of my buddies, and to my surprise, I found one.

May-29-43 I received my first letter. It was the first letter I received in 7 months and believe me I was the happiest boy in camp. I must have read that letter 10 times that day.

May-31-43 I took my weekly bath. My friend threw water on me by the bucket full.

June-14-43 Was my birthday. I was 28 years of age and it seemed to me like another day in a P.O.W. camp.

On Sundays, Sweeney, a devout Catholic, took communion from an Italian priest. Days seemed to pass slowly. He wrote his mother a letter on July 3, and the hot Italian summer took its toll on him in the camp, leaving him to search for ways to cool off.

One day in July, Sweeney relished the opportunity to leave the prison walls for a half hour to cart gravel into camp from a mile away.

He spent much of his time writing poems and philosophizing about the war:

Sweeney's diary ends on Sept. 8, 1943, the day the Italian forces surrendered to the Allies. A few days after the Italian surrender, he said, the Italian commandant opened the gates and announced, "You're on your own," to the prisoners.

His group of 13 fled to the Sibylline Mountains, where they hid for 11 days while listening to the radio to chart German troop movements before they surrendered, unarmed, to German soldiers. Sweeney and the others were then loaded onto boxcars, destined for German prison camps.

In East Prussia and a camp in Schrotz, Germany, Sweeney worked the fields with villagers, and he ate well, feasting on cabbage and potato soup. He was then moved to a different prison camp, where Americans cut down trees for roadblocks used by the German army.

"Sometimes, after work, they would make us take off our clothes and put them in a bushel basket and take it away," Sweeney told an Allentown newspaper in 1981. "So we wouldn't have any clothes on our backs if we did escape."

 

Forgotten wartime journal turns up in East Texas
Reveals life in a World War II POW camp

By Kyle Peveto

The Daily Sentinel
Nacogdoches,TX,USA
Saturday, January 20, 2007

It fits snugly in your hand  a small notebook of graph paper, tattered and yellowed by more than six decades in a soldier's pack and a veteran's drawer.

While in an Italian prison camp during World War II, an Allentown, Pa. man wrote in this diary about his scant meals, his job cleaning toilets and his longing for home. He wrote poems about his family and essays about war's absurdity.

More than 63 years after he lost the diary, Dennis Sweeney, 91, reconnected with those wartime thoughts and feelings when he received a package from Nacogdoches.

When Italy surrendered to the Allied Forces in World War II on Sept. 8, 1943, confusion struck the Camp 59 prisoner of war outpost near Servigliano. Through a hole in the stone wall, thousands of captured troops  Americans, Britons, Polish  ran for the Swiss border, a six-month trip for some, while others hid in the Sibylline Mountains of central Italy.

In the confusion, Sweeney apparently handed his diary to a Texas man, Carl Valentine, and asked him to get it to his family in Pennsylvania. After escaping and returning to his troop, Valentine apparently forgot about the diary and kept it until his death six decades later.

The diary languished in a drawer until last month, when Valentine's nephew, Jim Norman, a Nacogdoches dentist, decided he needed to find its rightful owner. After such a long time, he thought Sweeney had probably died, but he hoped to place the diary with Sweeney's family. Clueless about how to find the rightful owner, Norman kept the diary in a drawer until he accompanied his father, an armed forces veteran, to a Houston veterans' cemetery.

"It was kind of an epiphany," Norman said. "There were half a dozen services going on there, from World War II veterans to some from Iraq. I decided I needed to do something about this (the diary).

"My uncle Carl was gone, and I thought he was, too. But I thought I would try to get it to his family."

Norman contacted Nacogdoches County's veterans services officer Dan Singletary, who made copies of the graph-paper diary. On the second page, Sweeney had neatly printed his name and Army serial number, which made tracking Sweeney simple.

Singletary, through the Veterans Services Administration, learned Sweeney was alive at 91 and still living in Allentown. Other than having his legs amputated from the knees down in 1999, Sweeney is in good health and has a great memory. Norman mailed the diary in late December, and Sweeney waited anxiously to see it again.

Since 1985, Sweeney has lived with his lifelong friend Jean Owens, who is a retired school teacher Sweeney grew up with in Allentown. After losing his legs to poor circulation, he stays in a hospital bed in Owens' parlor.

When the diary arrived, he told his caregiver that he could hardly believe he wrote it. The words seemed foreign. But his entries provide a glimpse into a short period of his life when he had time to ponder his predicament, and the war so many were thrust into.

Inducted into the Army Feb. 3, 1942, at Camp Meade, Md., Sweeney attended basic training at Camp Wheeler, Ga. Attached to the first division infantry, he sailed overseas in August. The morning of Dec. 23, 1942, the forces of Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox, captured Sweeney and several from his division at a battle near Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, and a north African port city across the Mediterranean Sea from Sicily.

Sweeney and other Americans marched 15 miles in the mud into Tunis, where they spent Christmas under the guard of German soldiers. He wrote in his diary that the Germans treated them well, sharing their rations of bread, jam and "good German sauerkraut."

Allied forces bombed Tunis for three nights, and Sweeney's platoon marched during the bombing to a nearby port, where they embarked for Palermo, a short trip across the sea. After 20 days in Palermo, Sweeney's platoon traveled to the mainland of Italy and boarded a train to Servigliano, a town on the eastern coast of central Italy.

Sweeney joined about 2,200 Allied soldiers in Camp 59, which housed British, American, French and Polish prisoners of war. In anecdotes written by other prisoners of the camp, guards often told soldiers, "For you, the war is over," when they arrived. Following the Geneva Convention's rules, the Italians paid the prisoners twice monthly  the same salary as soldiers, with a deduction for housing costs.

They were given new clothes upon arrival  British uniforms, he wrote.

Each day they ate a dinner of bread, cheese and tea at 11 a.m., and supper at 4:30 p.m., often small amounts of pasta. The guards issued them cigarettes, and on holidays a prisoner-led orchestra performed and prisoners boxed.

Easter Sunday The orchestra entertained us boys with music. Also we witnessed 12 boxing bouts. Mother's Day was the same program.

May-17-43 209 American prisoners arrived in our camp. I thought we looked bad when we arrived in this camp, but they looked worse than we did. I was hoping to see some of my buddies, and to my surprise, I found one.

May-29-43 I received my first letter. It was the first letter I received in 7 months and believe me I was the happiest boy in camp. I must have read that letter 10 times that day.

May-31-43 I took my weekly bath. My friend threw water on me by the bucket full.

June-14-43 Was my birthday. I was 28 years of age and it seemed to me like another day in a P.O.W. camp.

On Sundays, Sweeney, a devout Catholic, took communion from an Italian priest. Days seemed to pass slowly. He wrote his mother a letter on July 3, and the hot Italian summer took its toll on him in the camp, leaving him to search for ways to cool off.

One day in July, Sweeney relished the opportunity to leave the prison walls for a half hour to cart gravel into camp from a mile away.

He spent much of his time writing poems and philosophizing about the war:

Any fool can make war. And that is the reason why wise men arm themselves.

War does not determine who is right  only who is left.

Poems he wrote focused on childhood, and they were often addressed to his mother. His poem "An Irish Doughboy's Dream" begins:

Oh mother, do not worry,

For your boy who's far away

He thinks of you quite often.

In fact, every day.

But Sweeney would not see his mother again.

"I was glad to get home and see my mother," Sweeney said about his homecoming at the war's end. "But they didn't tell me she had passed away before  about a year after I was captured, but they didn't want to tell me."

Sweeney's diary ends on Sept. 8, 1943, the day the Italian forces surrendered to the Allies. According to a history of the Servigliano camp, about 3,000 prisoners escaped through a hole in the wall during the confusion following the surrender. Sweeney cannot remember the circumstances under which he relinquished the diary, but he does remember escaping the Italian camp.

A few days after the Italian surrender, he said, the Italian commandant opened the gates and announced, "You're on your own," to the prisoners. His group of 13 fled to the Sibylline Mountains, where they hid for 11 days while listening to the radio to chart German troop movements before they surrendered, unarmed, to German soldiers. Sweeney and the others were then loaded onto boxcars, destined for German prison camps.

In East Prussia and a camp in Schrotz, Germany, Sweeney worked the fields with villagers, and he ate well, feasting on cabbage and potato soup. He was then moved to a different prison camp, where Americans cut down trees for roadblocks used by the German army.

"Sometimes, after work, they would make us take off our clothes and put them in a bushel basket and take it away," Sweeney told an Allentown newspaper in 1981. "So we wouldn't have any clothes on our backs if we did escape."

They never tried to escape, he said, because they had no place to go. Time passed, he said, and the Germans began to lose their grip on Europe.

"All of a sudden the camp was quiet," he said. "The Russian and the Polish (troops) were coming fast. The Germans wanted to get out, too. We had to walk out through the snow to find the Americans."

Sweeney and the other Americans eventually found Allied troops near the Hildesheim airport, a city in northern central Germany. From there, he flew to Camp Lucky Strike, one of nine hospital camps named for cigarette brands, located near Le Harve, France.

At Lucky Strike, Sweeney changed clothes for the first time since he was given new British clothes a year and a half before at Servigliano.

He left France June 2, 1944, on a Navy ship. Sweeney said he rarely saw the ocean or the sky from the crowded ship  he spent a great deal of time gambling below deck.

The ship docked in New Jersey June 14, 1944, Sweeney's 29th birthday. In 1981, he told the story of his homecoming to an Allentown newspaper. In a phone call to his family from the port, he said, "Don't tell Mom  I want to surprise her."

After a long pause, his relatives broke the news: "Dennis, listen, we have to tell you something."

Coming back to civilian life, Sweeney took a job as an orderly at a Lehigh County-owned nursing home in Allentown for a year. He later began his career as a plumber at Bethlehem Steel, one of the world's largest steel producers based in Bethlehem, Penn., across the Lehigh River from Allentown.

Sweeney worked there for 25 years before taking his pension at 62. He never married and has no children, but he and Owens pass the days talking and telling jokes  What has four eyes but can't see? Mississippi.

After he learned of the diary's existence in late December, Sweeney talked about the lost journal constantly. Waiting for the package to arrive, he constantly awaited the diary and asked his caretaker, Marie Schleder, if it was coming soon.

"It's hard for him to think back so far and think he actually wrote it," Schleder said.

It arrived from Nacogdoches at Christmas time, 2006.

 

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