Matteo Pretelli (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’)

World War I and World War II were two pivotal moments for the acceleration of Italian American into American society. During the Great War, Italians in the US supported their adopted country in the conflict against the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires by raising funds and purchasing war bonds to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. While thousands of Italian immigrants left the US to join the Italian army, around 300,000 were drafted into the American Expeditionary Force, of which circa 100,000 were deployed along the French-German war front.

In the aftermath of the conflict, Italian Americans moved towards integration into the American proletariat and improved their economic status during the Roaring Twenties. Yet, in the 1930s, they suffered dramatic effects of the economic Depression, resulting in strong support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese aviation attacked the US naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The day after, Roosevelt asked the US Congress to declare war on the Japanese empire. During the conflict’s years, circa 850,000 Italian Americans joined the American armed forces and fought all over the world, allegedly becoming the largest ethnic group employed in the multiethnic US military.

Italian Americans enlisted in the US armed forces were mainly second-generation immigrants born during the 1920s, and thus American citizens bound culturally to their parents’ home country. They were native English speakers and deeply influenced by a rampant American consumerist culture, although their ethnic background—as evident from the Italian food and dialects in their homes—was a considerable part of their identities. Nevertheless, Italy was an unknown country to the majority of them since they had never visited it and had learned about it only through memories and tales passed down to them by their families. Additionally, a small number of Jewish exiles who had emigrated from Italy after the adoption of the Italian Anti-Semitic Laws, as well as anti-Fascists fleeing political persecution, also joined the Allied forces as a way of fighting back against Benito Mussolini’s agenda.

Before the war began, many Italian Americans had held a positive attitude towards the Italian dictator, since they perceived Il Duce as a sort of ‘redeemer’ of Italianità (Italian character). Appreciated by a large part of the Western elite as a ‘man of order’ and anti-communist, for many first-generation immigrants (born in Italy and later emigrated overseas) Mussolini was the symbol (albeit not ideologically) of an allegedly reborn Italian pride, especially in those countries—such as the Anglophone ones—where widespread anti-Italian bias cast them as unreliable, violent, pre-modern and, as such, unable to assimilate into a democratic society. Yet, following Mussolini’s declaration of war against the US on December 11, 1941, this mostly nostalgic appreciation for the Fascist leader became damaging to many Italian communities. Restrictions were imposed on circa 700,000 Italian citizens living in the US, now Italy’s enemy. Draconian policies reduced the personal liberties of such so-called “enemy aliens,” limited their mobility, or imposed forced removal from the country. In some cases, those considered a threat to national security were relocated to internment camps.

Against this backdrop, fighting with the Allied forces was a fundamental way for people of Italian descent to show their loyalty to the adopted countries. Some had their fathers interned as fifth columnists, thus they fought on the battlefields to redeem their families’ honorability. Those who had arrived from Italy could also hope to achieve citizenship in their host country through military service. For others, such as Jewish exiles, who had fled overseas, fighting and winning together with the Allies meant defeating anti-Semitism. Yet, for the majority of Italian American servicemen, warfare was a turning point toward being fully accepted by American society. Many Italian Americans left their ethnic enclaves for the first time to discover their country and the rest of the world, interacting with peers of different backgrounds. As for soldiers of other nationalities, many only fought because they had been conscripted, aiming merely to survive and return home. Others departed with curiosity and a juvenile spirit of adventure or instead were moved by a patriotism devoted to the country that had accommodated their families and defended democratic liberties worldwide. A case in point was Salvatore ‘Don’ Gentile, a hero of the U.S. Air Force who obtained national fame thanks to his missions over German cities. Gentile believed his service was a way to ‘give back’ to the United States, a country that had given so much to his family in terms of financial wealth and well-being. On one hand, Italian American patriotism functioned to dismantle the bias that from the 19^th century depicted Italians as bad soldiers; on the other hand, it was intended to show that Italian Americans were 100 percent American and could claim the right to full citizenship. The case of Marine Sergeant John ‘Manila’ Basilone is remarkable. A young Italian American from Raritan, New Jersey, he achieved national recognition for his heroism in the Pacific to the point that he was awarded a Medal of Honor, and the Navy Cross after he was killed in action on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. Eventually, Italian Americans fought earnestly, lived through dramatic circumstances, discovered tragic new realities such as concentration camps, and died, at Pearl Harbor, in the Pacific islands, and across the European front.

However, war did not only happen on the battlefields. On the domestic fronts too, the Italian communities worked to support the Allied effort through rationing raw materials, donating blood, manufacturing clothes for military purposes, and, above all, purchasing war bonds to support the armed forces. War, therefore, was not only soldiers’ business, but also that of women and children. While some joined the women’s military corps in charge of logistics, women also played a pivotal role in running their households and supporting morale, as well as participating in the activities mentioned above. War was a matter of patriotism for them too, especially in the United States.

In the early post-war years, many Italian American veterans could mobilize upwardly into the middle-class, by leaving their ethnic enclaves and moving to suburban neighborhoods, thanks to the benefits provided by the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill.

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