WW2 Era Letter Written by Italian POW in the USA.

[Heartfeltzero]

This letter was written by a Sebastiano Zumbo. He was captured at some point during the war and brought over to the USA. During the war, there were around 51,000 Italian POW’s in the US. When the Badoglio government declared war on Germany on October 13, 1943, Americans began to see the Italian POWs as potential allies. Beginning in February of 1944, the United States Army Service Corps offered the Italian POWs in the United States the opportunity to join what came to be known as Italian Service Units. The men who volunteered were given jobs, monetary compensation, and some freedom of movement. Prisoners signed forms of allegiance to the new Badoglio government in Italy and were “screened” for Fascist tendencies in order to join the Italian Service Unit program.

Of the 51,000 Italian POWS being held in the United States at the time, over 45,000 joined the Service Units and were sent to places with a shortage of labor manpower across the United States. The remaining 5,000 who did not volunteer or who were deemed to be pro-Fascist were moved to isolated camps in Texas and Arizona.

The letter reads:

“ 15th May 1945.

My dear Rosina, I have received your letter and I am happy you and the children are in good health. I assure you I am also well as of now. My dear wife, you talk about women, when I have never seen any women in the 2 years I've spent as a prisoner. You will understand what I'm saying, be careful what you do. You have suffered and know what it means to betray a man who has suffered like us war prisoners. We pray to God that he helps us like he has helped us until this moment. My dear wife, I am very well now. I put on so much weight that you won't even recognize me anymore. Enough, I don't have anything else to say. I send my dearest hugs and kisses to you and our dear children. Send my regards to my sister-in-law Carmela. You’re Sebastiano.”

An interesting tidbit about letters like these, I own a couple of these USA POW letters, all written by different people at different times at different locations, and one thing that they all have in common is a blueish chemical splatter on the letters. If you look closely you can see the blueish color on the letter. That would actually be applied by the Censor to expose any hidden messages that may have been written by the German Prisoner with invisible ink.