Italian POWs in California Got Thanksgiving Dinner and Wept

Italian POWs in California Got Thanksgiving Dinner and Wept

At 9:00 in the morning on November 23rd, 1944, Sergeant Aldo Ferretti stood in line outside the messaul at Camp Beiel, California, holding a tin tray and watching steam rise from somewhere behind the serving counter. He had been a pr1soner of the United States Army for 14 months. He had not been beaten. He had not been starved.

He had not been put in a hole. He had been given a bunk, three meals a day, and a job picking tomatoes in the Sacramento Valley. None of that had prepared him for what he was about to see. The sergeant at the door told him today was different. Ferretti did not speak enough English to ask why. He stepped inside. What Aldo Ferretti could not have known was that in the next 2 hours he and 400 other Italian sold1ers would sit down to the largest meal of their lives in a country that was technically still at w4r with the nation they had fought for

and that several of them would weep openly at the table. Ferretti had been born in 1916 in a small town outside Brussia in northern Italy. His father worked a textile mill. His mother kept a kitchen garden. The family ate pasta three nights a week when times were good, two when they were not.

Farretti grew up understanding that food was not guaranteed, that an empty stomach was a serious and ever present thre4t, and that the men who controlled the food controlled everything. He joined the Reio Eserto, the Royal Italian Army, in 1937 because the pay was regular and because Mussolini’s government made it clear that young men of his generation were expected to serve.

He was trained as an infantry man and deployed to Libya in 1941 as part of the Ariete division a.ssigned to support Raml’s Africa Corps in the desert w4r against British and Commonwealth forces. The men of the Arieti fought well. By the way guys, if you’re enjoying these stories, we have an exclusive collection called the Lost Files.

Untold stories you won’t find anywhere else on YouTube. Link is in the descr.i.ption. That part of the record is not disputed. At Tobuk, at Beer Hachim, and finally at Elmagne, Italian infantry held positions that German commanders later admitted were considered lost. But the desert ground them down. The heat was relentless.

The supply lines were unreliable. Farrett’s unit went 3 days in October of 1942 without fresh water. They ate hard biscuits and canned meat that had swelled from the heat. men developed dysentery and fought through it because there was no alternative. When Montgomery’s 8th Army broke through at Elmagne in November of 1942, large portions of the Italian force were cut off, out of fuel, and out of options.

Feredi surrendered on November 4th, 1942 to a British corporal who looked younger than he did. He raised his hands, set down his rifle, and waited to find out what happened to pr1soners of w4r. What happened was he boarded a ship for the United States. The American military was not prepared for the volume of Italian pr1soners the North African campaign produced.

By early 1943, more than 50,000 Italian sold1ers were being processed through camps in the American South and West. The Geneva Convention governed their treatment. They would be housed, fed according to standards similar to American enlisted sold1ers, allowed to work and held until the end of the w4r. The Americans expected resentment, sabotage, escape attempts.

They got something different. They got pr1soners who could not understand why the guards were polite. Farretti arrived at Camp Beal, north of Sacramento, in September of 1943. Camp Beal sat in the Sacramento Valley on flat agricultural land surrounded by walnut orchards and irrigation ditches. The summer temperature reached 105°.

The camp held approximately 3,000 Italian pr1soners organized into barracks of 60 men each. Farrett’s barracks held men from three different Italian divisions, infantry men and artillery men who had been captured in Tunisia and Libya over the preceding 18 months. The first morning, a mess sergeant walked through the barracks and told them in rough Italian that breakfast was at 6:00, work details formed at 7:00, lunch was in the field at noon, and dinner was at 6:00 in the evening.

Fetti asked what was for breakfast. “Bacon,” the sergeant said. “Eggs when available, cream of wheat, bread, milk, coffee.” Ferretti did not believe him. The next morning, he believed him. The messaul at Camp Beal served 300 men at a time on long wooden tables. Farretti carried his tray to the serving line and watched the cooks ladle out portions of cream of wheat, str.i.ps of crisp bacon, two pieces of white bread, and pour a full mug of coffee.

A separate table held pictures of cold milk. has sat down across from a man from his barracks named Corporal Bruno Mancini, who had been a fisherman in Sicily before the w4r, and who looked at this moment like a man watching a hallucination. They ate in silence. When Mancini finished, he set down his spoon and said quietly in the dialect of Eastern Sicily that this was more food than his family ate in a day back home.

Farretti did not answer because he did not know what to say to that. The work was not pleasant, but it was tolerable. California agriculture in 1944 was desperate for labor. Young American men were overseas. Mexican berero workers fill some of the gap. Italian pr1soners of w4r filled more of it.

Freed’s detail worked in tomato fields 6 days a week, 9 hours a day, picking and loading crates under the supervision of one American guard who spent most of his time reading a newspaper under a shade tree at the field’s edge. The pr1soners were paid 80 cents a day, credited to canteen accounts where they could purchase tobacco, candy, and writing materials.

Farretti sent letters home through the Red Cross mail system. He did not know if they arrived. What troubled the American officers at Camp Beiel was not the pr1soners behavior but the reaction of the civilian population. In the spring of 1944, the Italian government had switched sides, declaring w4r on Germany, and the military had responded by creating a new category, Italian service units.

Prisoners who voluntarily signed a non combat service agreement were transferred to these units and given expanded freedoms in exchange for military labor support roles. Ferretti signed the agreement on May 3rd, 1944. Mancini signed it the following day. The designation changed their status from pr1soners of w4r to something the military bureaucracy stru.ggled to cla.ssify. They were not sold1ers.

They were not civilians. They were former enemies who had agreed to cook, repair trucks, unload freight, and dig ditches in service of the country that had taken them pr1soner. The Americans did not know what to make of this arrangement. Letters arrived at Camp Beiel headquarters. Complaining that Italian sold1ers had been seen attending a dance in Mary’sville the previous Saturday, a city council member from a town 40 mi south wrote to the camp commander to register his objection to enemy sold1ers being transported to a Roman Catholic

church for Sunday dinner with local Italian American families. The local newspaper ran an editorial asking whether this was how a country treated its enemies or whether someone in Washington had lost their mind. The camp commander, Colonel Richard W4rd, read each complaint and filed each one. He had fought in the First World W4r.

He understood what pr1son camps looked like when they were run badly. Camp Beiel was not run badly. His pr1soners showed up to work. They did not sabotage equipment. They did not attempt to escape in numbers that required pursuit. When he walked through the barracks in the evenings, he found men playing cards, writing letters, practicing English from grammar books they had borrowed from the camp library.

One barracks had organized a small orchestra using instruments donated by a church in Sacramento. They played on Friday evenings. W4rd sometimes stood outside and listened for a few minutes before continuing his rounds. He did not tell anyone he did this. Mancini had become the informal leader of their barracks by July of 1944, not because of rank, but because he was the loudest person in any room, and because he had, before the w4r, operated a small boat in waters that required accurate weather prediction and an

ability to read men’s moods. He had also, through a combination of cha.rm and aggress1ve hand gestures, managed to convince the messaul kitchen to allow two Italian pr1soners to a.ssist with dinner preparation twice a week. By August, Thursday and Sunday dinners at Camp Beal featured pasta in beef, ragu, and risoto, respectively.

The American kitchen staff watched the process with professional skepticism that gradually became professional interest. Mancini explaining the kitchen situation to Ferretti one evening was characteristically direct. “These Americans know nothing about food,” he said. “But they want to learn.” This is how you survive a pr1son camp.

You teach them something they want to know. Fetti was less certain about this theory. He had survived the desert by staying quiet and keeping his rifle clean. He was not sure the same approach applied to a kitchen in California. What they could not have known was that November was coming and November would change everything.

The camp administration had held Thanksgiving dinners for Italian pr1soners in previous years, but 1944 was different. The Italian service unit designation had transformed the camp population from pr1soners to something closer to laborers, and the administration had decided to mark the distinction.

Colonel W4rd approved a full traditional Thanksgiving meal for all 2,800 men at Camp Beiel. The memo went to the kitchen staff on November 15th. Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. The quantities required were substantial. The kitchen began sourcing supplies the following week. No one told the pr1soners what was coming.

The Italian men knew November was approaching. They knew the days were shortening. They knew from the American guards conversations and the newspapers. They occasionally saw that the w4r in Europe was moving tow4rd Germany’s borders. That the Italian campaign had ground its way north through Rome and was pushing tow4rd the Po Valley.

Some of the men had heard that Allied forces had pa.ssed through the towns they grew up in. Ferretti had not heard from his family in 6 months. He did not know if his father still worked the same mill. He did not know if his mother’s kitchen garden had survived. He thought about this most evenings, sitting on his bunk with the letterwriting paper he had purchased from the canteen, trying to find words that would pa.ss through a military sensor and still say something true.

Mancini knocked on his bunk frame on the evening of November 22nd and said there were unusual smells coming from the Messaul kitchen. Something roasting, he said. Something big. Farretti said he didn’t know what it was. Mancini said it smelled like a feast. Farrett told him to go to sleep.

At 9 in the morning on November 23rd, the guards announced a work holiday. No field details, no freight a.ssignments. The men would remain in camp. This by itself was unusual enough that Ferretti left his barracks and walked to the Messaul entrance to see what was happening. Other men were gathering around him, 50 and then a hundred standing in the thin winter sun, watching steam rise from the messaul ventilation and smelling something that took a moment to identify because most of them had not smelled it in years. Roasting turkey, sage, and

thyme, and the deep specific smell of a large bird in an oven. Mancini appeared at Ferret’s shoulder and said nothing. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes slightly too wide and said nothing at all, which was for Mancini a complete and unprecedented silence. The mess doors opened at 11:00 in the morning.

The kitchen staff had decorated the long tables with paper representations of autumn leaves, orange and brown and yellow, cut and folded by American enlisted men. the previous evening. At the front of the hall, a handlettered sign in English read, “Thanksgiving 1944.” Below it in rough Italian, someone had written, “Grazy.” Farretti stepped to the serving line.

The tray in his hands was the same tray he used every morning, dented aluminum with the Camp Beal stencil on the underside. The man behind the counter was a mess sergeant named Coleman who had been at the camp for 2 years and who normally served breakfast with the expression of a man performing a minor unpleasant task.

Coleman was not wearing that expression today. He served turkey and asked in the universal language of a man proud of what he has cooked whether Ferretti wanted dark meat or white. Ferretti said dark. Coleman put two pieces on the tray, added a large spoonful of mashed potatoes, ladled gravy over both, placed green beans alongside, added a scoop of cranberry sauce the color of old wine, and said there was pie at the end of the line.

Ferretti carried his tray to the table and sat down. Mancini sat across from him 30 seconds later. The two men looked at their trays. Neither of them spoke. The messaul was filling up. 300 men were seated, then more coming in behind them. The sound was low, not the usual noise of a camp meal, but something quieter, almost careful. Men were eating slowly.

Some were not eating at all yet, just looking at the food. Ferretti watched a man four seats down, a former artillery man from Naples named Rosario, whom he knew slightly, sit motionless over his tray with his hands folded in his lap. Rosario’s eyes were closed. He appeared to be praying or trying to or simply trying to hold himself together with his eyes closed and his hands very still.

Ferretti cut into the turkey. The meat pulled apart cleanly. It was properly cooked, not dry, not tough. The kind of result that required attention and time. The gravy was real gravy, not the powder gravy the mess sometimes produced on ordinary days. Them mashed potatoes had butter in them.

Ferretti knew this because he could taste it. Butter was something you noticed when you had gone without it. He ate one bite, then another. He was trying to eat slowly and finding it difficult because his body, trained by 2 years of inadequate food in the desert, and then 14 months of adequate but not excessive food in a pr1son camp, was responding to what was on the tray with something close to urgency. He made himself slow down.

He looked at the cranberry sauce. He had never seen cranberry sauce before and did not know what it was. He tasted it. It was sweet and slightly tart, and nothing he had ever eaten resembled it. He ate all of it. Mancini had been eating in silence for several minutes. He ate the turkey and the potatoes and the green beans, and then he stopped.

He sat with his fork in his hand and looked at the table and said nothing. Ferretti watched him. After a moment, Mancini set the fork down and put both hands flat on the table. His face had changed. The expression he normally wore. The particular alert readiness of a man who had survived both the Sicilian fishing industry and the North African campaign by paying close attention to everything around him was gone.

What was there instead was something that looked like a man who had just understood something he had been trying not to understand for a long time. Mancini looked up and said in a voice that was careful and low. They are feeding us this way because they believe we are worth feeding this way. That is what this is.

That is what this has always been. Fetti did not answer. He did not trust his voice at that moment. Three tables over, a man began to cry. Not loudly, not dr4matically, just the quiet dissolution of someone who had held something tightly for a long time and could not hold it any longer. The man was a sergeant from Tuscanyany, 31 years old, who had not seen his wife and two daughters in 3 years.

He was not weeping about the food, or not only about the food. He was weeping about the impossibility of the situation. He had fought for a government that had sent him to d1e in a desert. He had been captured by men he was taught were his enemies. Those men had given him bacon and coffee every morning for 14 months, and they had now set in front of him a meal that was larger and more carefully prepared than anything he had eaten in his adult life.

And they had done this on an ordinary Thursday in November. for no reason he could understand except that it was a Thursday in November and that was what Americans did. Colonel W4rd walked through the messaul at 11. He had seen Thanksgiving sat camp Beiel before. He had watched German pr1soners eat their Thanksgiving meals with the particular weariness of men looking for a trick.

He had watched American enlisted men eat theirs with the efficient gratitude of people who had been eating Thanksgiving dinners their whole lives and understood them as a good meal in a year of adequate meals. He had not seen what he was seeing now, which was grown men eating slowly and carefully.

men who’d survived combat and impr1sonment and the de4th of people they knew, eating turkey and gravy with the focused attention of men who understood exactly what they were receiving and why it was not ordinary. He stopped at Ferret’s table and asked in the limited Italian. He had learned from Afrey’s book whether the food was good. Ferretti looked up. He said yes.

He said it was very good. W4rd nodded and moved on. He did not mention to anyone what he had seen on the walkthrough, but that night he wrote a letter to the w4r department that would later be cited in a 1946 report on pr1soner of w4r camp management. He wrote that the Italian service unit men at Camp Beal had responded to the Thanksgiving meal with a degree of genuine emotion he found difficult to characterize.

He wrote that in his a.ssessment, Theille had accomplished something no administrative policy had achieved, which was to make the men understand that the treatment they had received was not a tactic, but a conviction. The pumpkin pie arrived at noon. Ferretti had not left the table. Mancini had not left the table.

Neither of them wanted to move, and they had been in the army long enough to recognize that some moments were worth staying still for. The pie was served in wedges and small plates by American kitchen workers who were by this point watching the room with an expression that was not quite surprise and not quite pride but somewhere between the two.

The mess sergeant Coleman came by with a coffee pot and refilled cups without being asked. He refilled Ferret’s cup and said quietly, “Happy Thanksgiving.” Fetti said, “Thank you.” He said it in English. the first full English sentence he had spoken to an American since arriving at Camp Beal. He ate the pie. Pumpkin pie was not something that existed in the Italian culinary tradition Ferretti had grown up with.

It was sweet and dense and spiced with something he could not identify. Cinnamon and nutmeg and something else. He ate it carefully, the way you eat something that you want to remember clearly. He thought about his mother’s kitchen garden outside Brussia. He thought about the watery soup he had eaten in Libya.

He thought about the British corporal who had taken his surrender and had immediately afterw4rd given him a cigarette and pointed him tow4rd the pr1soner a.ssembly area with something that seemed like decency. He had not understood that decency at the time. He was beginning to. The men did not leave the messaul quickly. Normally Camp Beal meal hours were efficient.

Men coming and going in shifts. The Messaul cycling through its entire population in 90 minutes. On November 23rd, 1944, the last men were still sitting at their table sat 2 in the afternoon. Some were talking. Some were writing in small notebooks. Rosario, the artilleryman from Naples, had regained his composure and was explaining to a younger sold1er in careful and precise terms exactly what cranberry sauce was made from and why it existed.

He did not know either of these things. He was inventing a plausible explanation to give the younger man something to think about other than the 3,000 mi of ocean between Camp Beal and Naples. Mancini wrote a letter that evening. He wrote to his mother in the dialect of eastern Sicily, knowing she might not receive it for months, if she received it at all.

He described the meal in complete detail. He described the turkey and the gravy and the potatoes and the pie. He described the paper autumn leaves on the tables and the handlettered sign and the American sergeant who had asked whether he wanted dark meat or white meat. He described the man from Tuskanyany who had wept.

And he described what he himself had felt, which he wrote as a kind of confusion because I did not know how to feel something this large in a place that was supposed to be difficult. He wrote that he thought the Americans understood something about human dignity that the governments who had sent him to the desert did not understand and that he was not sure what to do with this understanding, but that he intended to carry it carefully.

The letter arrived in Sicily in February of 1945. Mancini’s mother read it to his two sisters at the kitchen table in the evening. She sat it down when she finished and sat quietly for a moment. Then she said that her son had always understood more than he led on. For Fetti, the days after Thanksgiving were different in a way he could not precisely.

Name: The work was the same, the tomato fields and the freight loading and the maintenance details. The food was the same, adequate and reliable, and nothing like what had been served on November 23rd. But something had shifted in how he understood his situation. He had believed for 14 months that his treatment was strategic.

That the Americans were being decent to their pr1soners because it was useful to be seen as decent. Because the w4r might end and they would need Italian cooperation because pr1soner riots were bad for logistics. He had accepted the bacon and the eggs and the Sunday dinners with Italian families and the canteen tobacco as things given to him by people who were calculating what they could afford to give.

He had been grateful but not moved. The Thanksgiving meal had moved him. He was trying to understand why. What he arrived at over the following weeks in conversations with Mancini and in letters he drafted and rarely sent was something like this. The Americans had set a table that had nothing to do with utility. Thanksgiving was a domestic ritual, a family ceremony, a thing Americans did for each other in their own homes.

Extending it to enemy sold1ers in a pr1son camp was not strategic. It was not cost effective. It was not required by the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention required adequate rations. Pumpkin pie was not an adequate ration. Pumpkin pie was something you made for people you believed deserved a feast. The w4r in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945.

Campiel received the news by radio at 6:00 in the morning. Guards walked through the barracks and told the men. There was noise, shouting, some of the American enlisted men firing their rifles into the air over the objections of their officers. In the Italian barracks, the response was quieter.

Men sat on their bunks and looked at the floor. The w4r was over. They would go home eventually when the processing was done, when the ships were available. They would go home to Italy, which had spent the last two years as a b4ttlefield, which had been b0mbed by the same country now running their pr1son camp, which was in a state of physical and political ruin that none of them fully understood from this distance.

Ferretti sat on his bunk and thought about going home. He thought about his father’s mill and his mother’s kitchen garden and the town outside Brussia he had left in 1941. He thought about what he would say when people asked him what the Americans were like. He thought about November 23rd, 1944. He thought about Coleman, the mess sergeant, refilling his coffee cup without being asked and saying, “Happy Thanksgiving.

” The repatriation process took most of 1945 and into 1946. Ferretti was processed out of Camp Beiel in October of 1945. He was given his personal belongings, a medical examination, and a document certifying his pr1soner of w4r status. He was transported by bus to San Francisco, where he boarded a ship for Genoa.

On the bus, he sat next to Mancini, who was going home to Sicily. They were quiet for most of the ride. As the bus crossed the Sacramento Valley, Ferretti looked out the window at the flat agricultural land, the walnut orchards, the irrigation channels, the fields he had worked for more than a year. Mancini said, “I am going to miss the bacon.

” Ferretti said he thought he would too. They arrived in Italy to a country that was exhausted and damaged and trying to understand what it had been and what it would become. The postw4r years were difficult for most Italians. Ferretti returned to Brussia and worked in his father’s mill and eventually took it over when his father retired.

Mancini returned to Sicily and went back to fishing. Both men married and had children and lived the ordinary lives of men who had survived something extraordinary and had filed the experience away in the section of memory reserved for things that are true and important and not often discussed. In 1962, an Italian journalist named Josephe Matsini began researching a history of Italian pr1soners of w4r in America.

He traveled to Brussia and found Farretti through a veterans organization. He sat in Ferdi’s kitchen with a notebook and a recording device and asked Farretti to describe his time in California. Farretti talked for 3 hours. He described the work and the food and the dances in Mary’sville and the Sunday dinners at the Roman Catholic Church.

He described Mancini and the kitchen arrangement and the camp orchestra. At the end of the interview, Mazini asked what single memory from Camp Beiel had stayed with him most clearly over the preceding 17 years. Ferretti thought about it for a moment. Then he described November 23rd, 1944. He described the tray and the turkey and the cranberry sauce he had never seen before.

He described Coleman asking dark meat or white. He described the man from Tuskanyany weeping three tables over. He described Mancini sitting with his hands flat on the table and saying they are feeding us this way because they believe we are worth feeding this way. Mazini put down his pen and looked at Ferretti.

Ferretti said, “I had fought for a government that sent us to the desert without water, and the people who captured us gave us Thanksgiving dinner. I spent many years trying to understand what that meant about governments and what it meant about people. I am still working on it.” Mazini’s book was published in 1965. The chapter on Camp Beal included Farrett’s account full.

The book was not widely read outside Italy. Military historians who have since examined the Camp Beiel records have confirmed the broad outlines of what Ferretti described. The November 23rd, 1944 Messaul records show a turkey based meal served to the full camp population. Sergeant Coleman’s name appears on the kitchen duty roster for that date.

Colonel W4rd’s letter to the W4r Department exists in the National Archives. What the records cannot capture and what Ferretti spent the rest of his life trying to explain to people who had not been there was the specific weight of that meal on men who had come from the desert. The specific impossibility of being treated by your enemy as someone worth a feast.

Aldo Ferretti d1ed in Brussia in 1991. He was 74 years old. His children later told the journalist who wrote about him that he had kept in a drawer in his study a single artifact from his time in California. Not a photograph, not a document, not his discharge papers, a handwritten recipe for pumpkin pie given to him by Sergeant Coleman the morning of November 24th, 1944, the day after Thanksgiving.

Coleman had written it on a piece of Messaul stationary in the careful handwriting of a man not entirely comfortable with writing. Ferretti’s daughter said he never made the pie. She said he kept the recipe because it proved something had happened that he needed proof had happened. She said he took it out and read it sometimes just to remember.

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At 9:00 in the morning on November 23rd, 1944, Sergeant Aldo Ferretti stood in line outside the messaul at Camp Beiel, California, holding a tin tray and watching steam rise from somewhere behind the serving counter. He had been a pr1soner of the United States Army for 14 months. He had not been beaten. He had not been starved.

He had not been put in a hole. He had been given a bunk, three meals a day, and a job picking tomatoes in the Sacramento Valley. None of that had prepared him for what he was about to see. The sergeant at the door told him today was different. Ferretti did not speak enough English to ask why. He stepped inside. What Aldo Ferretti could not have known was that in the next 2 hours he and 400 other Italian sold1ers would sit down to the largest meal of their lives in a country that was technically still at w4r with the nation they had fought for

and that several of them would weep openly at the table. Ferretti had been born in 1916 in a small town outside Brussia in northern Italy. His father worked a textile mill. His mother kept a kitchen garden. The family ate pasta three nights a week when times were good, two when they were not.

Farretti grew up understanding that food was not guaranteed, that an empty stomach was a serious and ever present thre4t, and that the men who controlled the food controlled everything. He joined the Reio Eserto, the Royal Italian Army, in 1937 because the pay was regular and because Mussolini’s government made it clear that young men of his generation were expected to serve.

He was trained as an infantry man and deployed to Libya in 1941 as part of the Ariete division a.ssigned to support Raml’s Africa Corps in the desert w4r against British and Commonwealth forces. The men of the Arieti fought well. By the way guys, if you’re enjoying these stories, we have an exclusive collection called the Lost Files.

Untold stories you won’t find anywhere else on YouTube. Link is in the descr.i.ption. That part of the record is not disputed. At Tobuk, at Beer Hachim, and finally at Elmagne, Italian infantry held positions that German commanders later admitted were considered lost. But the desert ground them down. The heat was relentless.

The supply lines were unreliable. Farrett’s unit went 3 days in October of 1942 without fresh water. They ate hard biscuits and canned meat that had swelled from the heat. men developed dysentery and fought through it because there was no alternative. When Montgomery’s 8th Army broke through at Elmagne in November of 1942, large portions of the Italian force were cut off, out of fuel, and out of options.

Feredi surrendered on November 4th, 1942 to a British corporal who looked younger than he did. He raised his hands, set down his rifle, and waited to find out what happened to pr1soners of w4r. What happened was he boarded a ship for the United States. The American military was not prepared for the volume of Italian pr1soners the North African campaign produced.

By early 1943, more than 50,000 Italian sold1ers were being processed through camps in the American South and West. The Geneva Convention governed their treatment. They would be housed, fed according to standards similar to American enlisted sold1ers, allowed to work and held until the end of the w4r. The Americans expected resentment, sabotage, escape attempts.

They got something different. They got pr1soners who could not understand why the guards were polite. Farretti arrived at Camp Beal, north of Sacramento, in September of 1943. Camp Beal sat in the Sacramento Valley on flat agricultural land surrounded by walnut orchards and irrigation ditches. The summer temperature reached 105°.

The camp held approximately 3,000 Italian pr1soners organized into barracks of 60 men each. Farrett’s barracks held men from three different Italian divisions, infantry men and artillery men who had been captured in Tunisia and Libya over the preceding 18 months. The first morning, a mess sergeant walked through the barracks and told them in rough Italian that breakfast was at 6:00, work details formed at 7:00, lunch was in the field at noon, and dinner was at 6:00 in the evening.

Fetti asked what was for breakfast. “Bacon,” the sergeant said. “Eggs when available, cream of wheat, bread, milk, coffee.” Ferretti did not believe him. The next morning, he believed him. The messaul at Camp Beal served 300 men at a time on long wooden tables. Farretti carried his tray to the serving line and watched the cooks ladle out portions of cream of wheat, str.i.ps of crisp bacon, two pieces of white bread, and pour a full mug of coffee.

A separate table held pictures of cold milk. has sat down across from a man from his barracks named Corporal Bruno Mancini, who had been a fisherman in Sicily before the w4r, and who looked at this moment like a man watching a hallucination. They ate in silence. When Mancini finished, he set down his spoon and said quietly in the dialect of Eastern Sicily that this was more food than his family ate in a day back home.

Farretti did not answer because he did not know what to say to that. The work was not pleasant, but it was tolerable. California agriculture in 1944 was desperate for labor. Young American men were overseas. Mexican berero workers fill some of the gap. Italian pr1soners of w4r filled more of it.

Freed’s detail worked in tomato fields 6 days a week, 9 hours a day, picking and loading crates under the supervision of one American guard who spent most of his time reading a newspaper under a shade tree at the field’s edge. The pr1soners were paid 80 cents a day, credited to canteen accounts where they could purchase tobacco, candy, and writing materials.

Farretti sent letters home through the Red Cross mail system. He did not know if they arrived. What troubled the American officers at Camp Beiel was not the pr1soners behavior but the reaction of the civilian population. In the spring of 1944, the Italian government had switched sides, declaring w4r on Germany, and the military had responded by creating a new category, Italian service units.

Prisoners who voluntarily signed a non combat service agreement were transferred to these units and given expanded freedoms in exchange for military labor support roles. Ferretti signed the agreement on May 3rd, 1944. Mancini signed it the following day. The designation changed their status from pr1soners of w4r to something the military bureaucracy stru.ggled to cla.ssify. They were not sold1ers.

They were not civilians. They were former enemies who had agreed to cook, repair trucks, unload freight, and dig ditches in service of the country that had taken them pr1soner. The Americans did not know what to make of this arrangement. Letters arrived at Camp Beiel headquarters. Complaining that Italian sold1ers had been seen attending a dance in Mary’sville the previous Saturday, a city council member from a town 40 mi south wrote to the camp commander to register his objection to enemy sold1ers being transported to a Roman Catholic

church for Sunday dinner with local Italian American families. The local newspaper ran an editorial asking whether this was how a country treated its enemies or whether someone in Washington had lost their mind. The camp commander, Colonel Richard W4rd, read each complaint and filed each one. He had fought in the First World W4r.

He understood what pr1son camps looked like when they were run badly. Camp Beiel was not run badly. His pr1soners showed up to work. They did not sabotage equipment. They did not attempt to escape in numbers that required pursuit. When he walked through the barracks in the evenings, he found men playing cards, writing letters, practicing English from grammar books they had borrowed from the camp library.

One barracks had organized a small orchestra using instruments donated by a church in Sacramento. They played on Friday evenings. W4rd sometimes stood outside and listened for a few minutes before continuing his rounds. He did not tell anyone he did this. Mancini had become the informal leader of their barracks by July of 1944, not because of rank, but because he was the loudest person in any room, and because he had, before the w4r, operated a small boat in waters that required accurate weather prediction and an

ability to read men’s moods. He had also, through a combination of cha.rm and aggress1ve hand gestures, managed to convince the messaul kitchen to allow two Italian pr1soners to a.ssist with dinner preparation twice a week. By August, Thursday and Sunday dinners at Camp Beal featured pasta in beef, ragu, and risoto, respectively.

The American kitchen staff watched the process with professional skepticism that gradually became professional interest. Mancini explaining the kitchen situation to Ferretti one evening was characteristically direct. “These Americans know nothing about food,” he said. “But they want to learn.” This is how you survive a pr1son camp.

You teach them something they want to know. Fetti was less certain about this theory. He had survived the desert by staying quiet and keeping his rifle clean. He was not sure the same approach applied to a kitchen in California. What they could not have known was that November was coming and November would change everything.

The camp administration had held Thanksgiving dinners for Italian pr1soners in previous years, but 1944 was different. The Italian service unit designation had transformed the camp population from pr1soners to something closer to laborers, and the administration had decided to mark the distinction.

Colonel W4rd approved a full traditional Thanksgiving meal for all 2,800 men at Camp Beiel. The memo went to the kitchen staff on November 15th. Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. The quantities required were substantial. The kitchen began sourcing supplies the following week. No one told the pr1soners what was coming.

The Italian men knew November was approaching. They knew the days were shortening. They knew from the American guards conversations and the newspapers. They occasionally saw that the w4r in Europe was moving tow4rd Germany’s borders. That the Italian campaign had ground its way north through Rome and was pushing tow4rd the Po Valley.

Some of the men had heard that Allied forces had pa.ssed through the towns they grew up in. Ferretti had not heard from his family in 6 months. He did not know if his father still worked the same mill. He did not know if his mother’s kitchen garden had survived. He thought about this most evenings, sitting on his bunk with the letterwriting paper he had purchased from the canteen, trying to find words that would pa.ss through a military sensor and still say something true.

Mancini knocked on his bunk frame on the evening of November 22nd and said there were unusual smells coming from the Messaul kitchen. Something roasting, he said. Something big. Farretti said he didn’t know what it was. Mancini said it smelled like a feast. Farrett told him to go to sleep.

At 9 in the morning on November 23rd, the guards announced a work holiday. No field details, no freight a.ssignments. The men would remain in camp. This by itself was unusual enough that Ferretti left his barracks and walked to the Messaul entrance to see what was happening. Other men were gathering around him, 50 and then a hundred standing in the thin winter sun, watching steam rise from the messaul ventilation and smelling something that took a moment to identify because most of them had not smelled it in years. Roasting turkey, sage, and

thyme, and the deep specific smell of a large bird in an oven. Mancini appeared at Ferret’s shoulder and said nothing. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes slightly too wide and said nothing at all, which was for Mancini a complete and unprecedented silence. The mess doors opened at 11:00 in the morning.

The kitchen staff had decorated the long tables with paper representations of autumn leaves, orange and brown and yellow, cut and folded by American enlisted men. the previous evening. At the front of the hall, a handlettered sign in English read, “Thanksgiving 1944.” Below it in rough Italian, someone had written, “Grazy.” Farretti stepped to the serving line.

The tray in his hands was the same tray he used every morning, dented aluminum with the Camp Beal stencil on the underside. The man behind the counter was a mess sergeant named Coleman who had been at the camp for 2 years and who normally served breakfast with the expression of a man performing a minor unpleasant task.

Coleman was not wearing that expression today. He served turkey and asked in the universal language of a man proud of what he has cooked whether Ferretti wanted dark meat or white. Ferretti said dark. Coleman put two pieces on the tray, added a large spoonful of mashed potatoes, ladled gravy over both, placed green beans alongside, added a scoop of cranberry sauce the color of old wine, and said there was pie at the end of the line.

Ferretti carried his tray to the table and sat down. Mancini sat across from him 30 seconds later. The two men looked at their trays. Neither of them spoke. The messaul was filling up. 300 men were seated, then more coming in behind them. The sound was low, not the usual noise of a camp meal, but something quieter, almost careful. Men were eating slowly.

Some were not eating at all yet, just looking at the food. Ferretti watched a man four seats down, a former artillery man from Naples named Rosario, whom he knew slightly, sit motionless over his tray with his hands folded in his lap. Rosario’s eyes were closed. He appeared to be praying or trying to or simply trying to hold himself together with his eyes closed and his hands very still.

Ferretti cut into the turkey. The meat pulled apart cleanly. It was properly cooked, not dry, not tough. The kind of result that required attention and time. The gravy was real gravy, not the powder gravy the mess sometimes produced on ordinary days. Them mashed potatoes had butter in them.

Ferretti knew this because he could taste it. Butter was something you noticed when you had gone without it. He ate one bite, then another. He was trying to eat slowly and finding it difficult because his body, trained by 2 years of inadequate food in the desert, and then 14 months of adequate but not excessive food in a pr1son camp, was responding to what was on the tray with something close to urgency. He made himself slow down.

He looked at the cranberry sauce. He had never seen cranberry sauce before and did not know what it was. He tasted it. It was sweet and slightly tart, and nothing he had ever eaten resembled it. He ate all of it. Mancini had been eating in silence for several minutes. He ate the turkey and the potatoes and the green beans, and then he stopped.

He sat with his fork in his hand and looked at the table and said nothing. Ferretti watched him. After a moment, Mancini set the fork down and put both hands flat on the table. His face had changed. The expression he normally wore. The particular alert readiness of a man who had survived both the Sicilian fishing industry and the North African campaign by paying close attention to everything around him was gone.

What was there instead was something that looked like a man who had just understood something he had been trying not to understand for a long time. Mancini looked up and said in a voice that was careful and low. They are feeding us this way because they believe we are worth feeding this way. That is what this is.

That is what this has always been. Fetti did not answer. He did not trust his voice at that moment. Three tables over, a man began to cry. Not loudly, not dr4matically, just the quiet dissolution of someone who had held something tightly for a long time and could not hold it any longer. The man was a sergeant from Tuscanyany, 31 years old, who had not seen his wife and two daughters in 3 years.

He was not weeping about the food, or not only about the food. He was weeping about the impossibility of the situation. He had fought for a government that had sent him to d1e in a desert. He had been captured by men he was taught were his enemies. Those men had given him bacon and coffee every morning for 14 months, and they had now set in front of him a meal that was larger and more carefully prepared than anything he had eaten in his adult life.

And they had done this on an ordinary Thursday in November. for no reason he could understand except that it was a Thursday in November and that was what Americans did. Colonel W4rd walked through the messaul at 11. He had seen Thanksgiving sat camp Beiel before. He had watched German pr1soners eat their Thanksgiving meals with the particular weariness of men looking for a trick.

He had watched American enlisted men eat theirs with the efficient gratitude of people who had been eating Thanksgiving dinners their whole lives and understood them as a good meal in a year of adequate meals. He had not seen what he was seeing now, which was grown men eating slowly and carefully.

men who’d survived combat and impr1sonment and the de4th of people they knew, eating turkey and gravy with the focused attention of men who understood exactly what they were receiving and why it was not ordinary. He stopped at Ferret’s table and asked in the limited Italian. He had learned from Afrey’s book whether the food was good. Ferretti looked up. He said yes.

He said it was very good. W4rd nodded and moved on. He did not mention to anyone what he had seen on the walkthrough, but that night he wrote a letter to the w4r department that would later be cited in a 1946 report on pr1soner of w4r camp management. He wrote that the Italian service unit men at Camp Beal had responded to the Thanksgiving meal with a degree of genuine emotion he found difficult to characterize.

He wrote that in his a.ssessment, Theille had accomplished something no administrative policy had achieved, which was to make the men understand that the treatment they had received was not a tactic, but a conviction. The pumpkin pie arrived at noon. Ferretti had not left the table. Mancini had not left the table.

Neither of them wanted to move, and they had been in the army long enough to recognize that some moments were worth staying still for. The pie was served in wedges and small plates by American kitchen workers who were by this point watching the room with an expression that was not quite surprise and not quite pride but somewhere between the two.

The mess sergeant Coleman came by with a coffee pot and refilled cups without being asked. He refilled Ferret’s cup and said quietly, “Happy Thanksgiving.” Fetti said, “Thank you.” He said it in English. the first full English sentence he had spoken to an American since arriving at Camp Beal. He ate the pie. Pumpkin pie was not something that existed in the Italian culinary tradition Ferretti had grown up with.

It was sweet and dense and spiced with something he could not identify. Cinnamon and nutmeg and something else. He ate it carefully, the way you eat something that you want to remember clearly. He thought about his mother’s kitchen garden outside Brussia. He thought about the watery soup he had eaten in Libya.

He thought about the British corporal who had taken his surrender and had immediately afterw4rd given him a cigarette and pointed him tow4rd the pr1soner a.ssembly area with something that seemed like decency. He had not understood that decency at the time. He was beginning to. The men did not leave the messaul quickly. Normally Camp Beal meal hours were efficient.

Men coming and going in shifts. The Messaul cycling through its entire population in 90 minutes. On November 23rd, 1944, the last men were still sitting at their table sat 2 in the afternoon. Some were talking. Some were writing in small notebooks. Rosario, the artilleryman from Naples, had regained his composure and was explaining to a younger sold1er in careful and precise terms exactly what cranberry sauce was made from and why it existed.

He did not know either of these things. He was inventing a plausible explanation to give the younger man something to think about other than the 3,000 mi of ocean between Camp Beal and Naples. Mancini wrote a letter that evening. He wrote to his mother in the dialect of eastern Sicily, knowing she might not receive it for months, if she received it at all.

He described the meal in complete detail. He described the turkey and the gravy and the potatoes and the pie. He described the paper autumn leaves on the tables and the handlettered sign and the American sergeant who had asked whether he wanted dark meat or white meat. He described the man from Tuskanyany who had wept.

And he described what he himself had felt, which he wrote as a kind of confusion because I did not know how to feel something this large in a place that was supposed to be difficult. He wrote that he thought the Americans understood something about human dignity that the governments who had sent him to the desert did not understand and that he was not sure what to do with this understanding, but that he intended to carry it carefully.

The letter arrived in Sicily in February of 1945. Mancini’s mother read it to his two sisters at the kitchen table in the evening. She sat it down when she finished and sat quietly for a moment. Then she said that her son had always understood more than he led on. For Fetti, the days after Thanksgiving were different in a way he could not precisely.

Name: The work was the same, the tomato fields and the freight loading and the maintenance details. The food was the same, adequate and reliable, and nothing like what had been served on November 23rd. But something had shifted in how he understood his situation. He had believed for 14 months that his treatment was strategic.

That the Americans were being decent to their pr1soners because it was useful to be seen as decent. Because the w4r might end and they would need Italian cooperation because pr1soner riots were bad for logistics. He had accepted the bacon and the eggs and the Sunday dinners with Italian families and the canteen tobacco as things given to him by people who were calculating what they could afford to give.

He had been grateful but not moved. The Thanksgiving meal had moved him. He was trying to understand why. What he arrived at over the following weeks in conversations with Mancini and in letters he drafted and rarely sent was something like this. The Americans had set a table that had nothing to do with utility. Thanksgiving was a domestic ritual, a family ceremony, a thing Americans did for each other in their own homes.

Extending it to enemy sold1ers in a pr1son camp was not strategic. It was not cost effective. It was not required by the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention required adequate rations. Pumpkin pie was not an adequate ration. Pumpkin pie was something you made for people you believed deserved a feast. The w4r in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945.

Campiel received the news by radio at 6:00 in the morning. Guards walked through the barracks and told the men. There was noise, shouting, some of the American enlisted men firing their rifles into the air over the objections of their officers. In the Italian barracks, the response was quieter.

Men sat on their bunks and looked at the floor. The w4r was over. They would go home eventually when the processing was done, when the ships were available. They would go home to Italy, which had spent the last two years as a b4ttlefield, which had been b0mbed by the same country now running their pr1son camp, which was in a state of physical and political ruin that none of them fully understood from this distance.

Ferretti sat on his bunk and thought about going home. He thought about his father’s mill and his mother’s kitchen garden and the town outside Brussia he had left in 1941. He thought about what he would say when people asked him what the Americans were like. He thought about November 23rd, 1944. He thought about Coleman, the mess sergeant, refilling his coffee cup without being asked and saying, “Happy Thanksgiving.

” The repatriation process took most of 1945 and into 1946. Ferretti was processed out of Camp Beiel in October of 1945. He was given his personal belongings, a medical examination, and a document certifying his pr1soner of w4r status. He was transported by bus to San Francisco, where he boarded a ship for Genoa.

On the bus, he sat next to Mancini, who was going home to Sicily. They were quiet for most of the ride. As the bus crossed the Sacramento Valley, Ferretti looked out the window at the flat agricultural land, the walnut orchards, the irrigation channels, the fields he had worked for more than a year. Mancini said, “I am going to miss the bacon.

” Ferretti said he thought he would too. They arrived in Italy to a country that was exhausted and damaged and trying to understand what it had been and what it would become. The postw4r years were difficult for most Italians. Ferretti returned to Brussia and worked in his father’s mill and eventually took it over when his father retired.

Mancini returned to Sicily and went back to fishing. Both men married and had children and lived the ordinary lives of men who had survived something extraordinary and had filed the experience away in the section of memory reserved for things that are true and important and not often discussed. In 1962, an Italian journalist named Josephe Matsini began researching a history of Italian pr1soners of w4r in America.

He traveled to Brussia and found Farretti through a veterans organization. He sat in Ferdi’s kitchen with a notebook and a recording device and asked Farretti to describe his time in California. Farretti talked for 3 hours. He described the work and the food and the dances in Mary’sville and the Sunday dinners at the Roman Catholic Church.

He described Mancini and the kitchen arrangement and the camp orchestra. At the end of the interview, Mazini asked what single memory from Camp Beiel had stayed with him most clearly over the preceding 17 years. Ferretti thought about it for a moment. Then he described November 23rd, 1944. He described the tray and the turkey and the cranberry sauce he had never seen before.

He described Coleman asking dark meat or white. He described the man from Tuskanyany weeping three tables over. He described Mancini sitting with his hands flat on the table and saying they are feeding us this way because they believe we are worth feeding this way. Mazini put down his pen and looked at Ferretti.

Ferretti said, “I had fought for a government that sent us to the desert without water, and the people who captured us gave us Thanksgiving dinner. I spent many years trying to understand what that meant about governments and what it meant about people. I am still working on it.” Mazini’s book was published in 1965. The chapter on Camp Beal included Farrett’s account full.

The book was not widely read outside Italy. Military historians who have since examined the Camp Beiel records have confirmed the broad outlines of what Ferretti described. The November 23rd, 1944 Messaul records show a turkey based meal served to the full camp population. Sergeant Coleman’s name appears on the kitchen duty roster for that date.

Colonel W4rd’s letter to the W4r Department exists in the National Archives. What the records cannot capture and what Ferretti spent the rest of his life trying to explain to people who had not been there was the specific weight of that meal on men who had come from the desert. The specific impossibility of being treated by your enemy as someone worth a feast.

Aldo Ferretti d1ed in Brussia in 1991. He was 74 years old. His children later told the journalist who wrote about him that he had kept in a drawer in his study a single artifact from his time in California. Not a photograph, not a document, not his discharge papers, a handwritten recipe for pumpkin pie given to him by Sergeant Coleman the morning of November 24th, 1944, the day after Thanksgiving.

Coleman had written it on a piece of Messaul stationary in the careful handwriting of a man not entirely comfortable with writing. Ferretti’s daughter said he never made the pie. She said he kept the recipe because it proved something had happened that he needed proof had happened. She said he took it out and read it sometimes just to remember.

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