Courageous Italians

Monument to the Italian soldiers massacred by the Germans on Kefalonia.

The Italian army is not remembered as the bravest collection of soldiers in WW2. The attitude of many people towards them is summed up by a ‘joke’ a former member of the SS Das Reich division told me.  “Heard about the new Italian tank?’ he said. ‘It has five gears – four of them reverse.’

But, I thought, as I traveled last week through Kefalonia, the largest of the Greek Ionian Islands, this sense that collectively the Italians lacked bravery is simply not fair to their memory. Not enough people know, for example, what happened on Kefalonia in September 1943. (more…)