To War with the Black Watch [Paperback]

The British Army has always had a percentage of foreign troops even after the recruitment of trained mercenaries was stopped. Italy with its poor reputation of changing sides in 1915 and 1943, of major defeats and withdrawals obtained the butt of scorn from both its friends and foes. After the armistice in September 1943 willing Italians were first employed in mine clearing with the Pioneer Corps; in mid 1944 certain Divisions of the Italian Army in the South were retrained, and re-equipped by the Allies into six Groups (Gruppi di Combattimento), and fought bravely in the line as co-belligerents until the country was liberated in May 1945.

This book, translated for the first time into English, is a collection of 16 stories, pencilled by Gian Gaspare Napolitano, a journalist in civilian life, when serving as Intelligence Officer, IO, during most of 1944 with the 6th Black Watch on the Adriatic front of the Gothic Line. As they were not intended as reports but thoughts, impressions, and feelings of battle from the front the tales were presented as part fact and part fiction, but together with the accompanying historical contribution by the military historian Trevor Royle, author of a recent unit history of the Black Watch The Black Watch: A Concise History, readers can more easily identify the personal illustrations behind the official history.

Among Napolitano's more interesting descriptions centre on the army hierarchy beginning with the different officers: the regular with an aristocratic origin Lord Dix, the fatherly middle class professional reservist; next, the regular NCOs, including the regimental sergeant major, the RSM, which all officers try to avoid, and the call ups who looked down on all local civilians as objects beneath them. There was more respect for "Jerry" or "Ted" at the outset than for the IO, portrayed as Lt Gian or "John" Pinto, since the Italians or "eyeties" were distrusted as "bandits" or "mummy's boys" but slowly "John" and the "eyeties" came to be considered almost normal as themselves, complete with balls and grit, with the officers in the mess beginning to open up, helped by drams of whisky, and recounting their life stories of home.

Across the historical and cultural differences in moments when life and death were close as a hair's breath, he looked down with a mixture of awe, deference and irony for his Italian readers at the innocence, the ignorance and snobbery, even arrogance of his new few allies with his own sense of humour, and sense of the ridiculous (note: what is said about the bidet, about whisky which the Scots claimed to know a lot and of wine which they don't), and codified the world victors in his own simplified stereotype. In his mind he is saying that despite mutual goodwill living together in the heat, the smoke, the fear and the stench of the battle national differences can not be easily eradicated or crossed over in peacetime. The Fascists, for him, may have lost us the War, but in "sunny" Italy we, the Italians, have not lost our way, while the occupiers or "liberators" have been bogged down in the winter mud and the minefield of paper bureaucracy - something which today may be familiar to veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is, what is more, one issue that is still contemporary and topical: the difference between being British and not English or Scottish (something which Italians still do not comprehend as they continue to call the Brits as "inglesi", i.e. the English), and though residing geographically within Europe, feeling and behaving themselves more or less as a single European population with a common heritage. His quick witted comments resemble the Anglophile Italian journalist, Beppe Severgnini Inglesi: The British, Neighbours of Europe. Italians reading the stories today would wonder how the Allies could fight and win a battle and still be permanently fuelled with so much whisky: Severgnini would hit back in kind stating the obvious that his bubbling Italians live on their nerves, brought on by constant daily flow of black espressos.

However, as Severgnini, this author was not loved by all Italians; maybe as always he was admired more by outsiders: the Fascists found him too indulgent towards the Antifascists and reproached him for serving with the enemy; the Antifascists in turn deplored his warm friendships towards Fascists; for those on the right he sounded too irreverent to middle-class values, for the intellectual middle class snobs of the left with personal axes to grind they suspected his attachment to past traditional aristocratic military virtues, and his passion for the wicked imperialist Kipling. I suspect all Italians wanted to have him in their own camp, and the fact that he would not bend and was too honest made him too much of a danger.

Napolitano's pieces put him in the same genre as war correspondents and short story tellers during the Second World War as Britain's Eric Linklater Private Angelo (Canongate Classics)and Italy's Dino Buzzati. More notable is that his stories first were printed in the paper in December 1945 close to his more well-known contemporary, Alberto Moravia which may be a good comparison for talents.

The collection of short contributions, well translated by Ian Campbell Ross, will be of pleasure to those interested in military history, those with a love for Italy, and in particular in contemporary Italian literature. The remaining veterans of the War in Italy and their families will recognise the dangers the "D Day Dodgers" experienced. At the price, Napolitano's tales are a bargain. Worthy, funny, and most recommended.