For Love and Country: The Italian Resistance (review)

This mistitled book depicts the Roman-area Italian Resistance, September 1943-June 1944. An introduction covers Italian events from 1938 until Mussolini's overthrow. A conclusion decribes the war's conclusion and the fates of some characters previously mentioned. Both sections are largely irrelevant. What worth For Love and Country does offer derives from interviews conducted with Resistance survivors.

This reviewer has never encountered a work worse in form or content. If editorial shortcomings were crimes, the editor—if there was one—would deserve hanging. Minimal work could have corrected multitudinous grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary errors. Some sections have no commas, rendering sentences unintelligible. In others commas are consistently misplaced. Possessives are frequently used as plurals. Typos mar most pages. Reading even a few pages induces mental agony.

Factual mistakes (despite good multilanguage sources) and logical lapses abound. On p. 13, Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg causes the Anschluss by inviting "German troops into the country to suppress disorders." No citations appear for this and other absurdities. On p. 63, Marshal Pietro Badoglio is criticized for aborting the 82nd Airborne Division landing in Rome, missing "the chance . . . to have left the war and fought with the Allies." The Rome Gestapo headquarters is described on p. 154 as "a temporary prison. It was a place where few returned." A Resistance member appears on p. 164 as: "the tall and stocky Communist leader." The Allied invasion of January 1944 is thus characterized on p. 180: "Anzio had become a second Verdun consuming men at the rate of 2,000 a month." Has the author no knowledge of casualties during that terrible 1916 battle? "The war in Italy continued after the liberation of Rome for eleven months. An Allied victory could have been achieved before then" (p. 256). How? The author shuns explanation. "The Italian people not only hated the Nazis but also the Fascist blackshirts, the fascist police, militia, and Black Brigades" (p. 261). Were not those 570,000 men and their civilian supporters also Italians? On p. 268 the book states "Never to return to Italy were the thousands of men Mussolini sent into battle from Ethiopia to Russia [sic].The thousands of Italian prisoners of war who were captured by the Germans and sent to concentration camps, and the Italians who deported [sic] to Germany didn't return, either." Does this mean none of those three million Italian soldiers and workers survived? In fact, Italian military and civilian dead from June 1940 to April 1945 numbered about 480,000.

This inky morass obscures tales of heroism and horror. The members of the Roman resistance fought ruthless enemies. Many paid with terrible torture and cruel death. Despite poor use of their testimony, their moving stories occasionally leap from the page. These Resistance fighters deserve the recognition granted their better-known counterparts in Northern Italy. But they are unlikely to acquire it from this disaster of a book.