A Brief History
On October 19, 1943, a French cargo ship that had been seized by Germany in 1942, was sunk by USAAF North American B-25 Mitchell and RAF Bristol Beaufighter bombers near Crete, taking 2,098 Italian soldiers being held as POWs to a watery grave.
Digging Deeper
The Italians had surrendered to the Allies in September of 1943, and the Germans were faced with considerable numbers of Italian military forces alongside German forces. The Germans decided to give the Italian soldiers the choice of either serving alongside their German comrades just as before the surrender, or to assume the status of Prisoners of War and be sent to forced labor duties in occupied Europe.
Germany used transport ships to deliver Italian prisoners across the Mediterranean, and 12 of those ships were sunk by the Allies, causing about 13,000 Italian prisoners to die, sometimes executed by the German guards while the ships were sinking!
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Center of Military History United States Army. Sicily and the Surrender of Italy: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations. CreateSpace, 2015.
O’Neill, Bill. The World War 2 Trivia Book: Interesting Stories and Random Facts from the Second World War. CreateSpace, 2017.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of Fernglen shortly after launch in 1929, is in the public domain in Norway because images not considered to be “works of art” become public domain 50 years after creation, provided that more than 15 years have passed since the photographer’s death or the photographer is unknown.
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