“Except for bread we lack almost everything”
I poke through old folders of unused archival material on my hard drive from time to time. It’s not unlike a treasure hunt; occasionally, you’ll stumble on fresh insights, unexpected perspectives, and new avenues of research.
Today I came across a pretty astonishing set of documents from the British National Archives (WO 204/6761): Excerpted passages from Italian mail culled by a Civil Censorship Group at the Headquarters of the Allied (Control) Commission (ACC)—an Anglo-American organization responsible for enforcing the terms of the Italian Armistice, liaising with Italian politicians, and administering occupied, war-torn territory. This particular set of documents was created in the spring of 1945. Since chronologically my dissertation project ends in autumn 1943 (when the ACC was created), I never ended up using a lot of my material on the Italian campaign. Hence, it remains filed away on my computer for future use.
Each week, as the documents reveal, the ACC in Italy created a series of reports on civilian morale and local attitudes toward Allied policies. They coalesced around a recurring set of themes: The food situation; clothing; housing; income; local politics; relations with the Allies; the military situation, employment opportunities, agriculture, etc. For each category, the censorship board categorized the excerpted each response as “favorable” or “unfavorable” as a gauge on local morale, and tallied up the results in a series of scientific-looking charts.
ACC Public Opinion Report, May 12, 1945. “This report is based upon 50 letters per week being checked on a 6-day weekly basis. The number of censors employed during the week was 150, making a total of 47,600 letters checked for this tally.”
As noted in the above photo, the reports also contain statistics on the amount of letters checked by Allied censors over the final few weeks of the war. This, it seems, was no small job:
384,000 letters censored over the four weeks prior to April 14, 1945.
207,540 letters censored during the week ending April 21, 1945.
215,035 letters censored during the week ending April 28, 1945.
297,077 letters censored during the week ending May 5, 1945.
I’ll have to go through more of the folder down the road. I’ll just end here for now by saying that each page bears the unmistakable imprint of the civilian costs of war and illustrates the difficulties of occupying and rehabilitating war-torn territory. Some of it is incredibly heart-wrenching. See the middle of p. 3 (below), for instance.
Source: “Appreciation and Censorship Report on Italian Civilian and Military Mail for Four Weeks Ending 14th April 1945,” May 4, 1945, WO 204/6761, TNA, p. 2.
Source: Ibid., p. 3.