This raises the question: "When will German-Americans also act?"

August 11, 1997

Missoula, Mont.
By JAMES BROOKE

MISSOULA, Mont. -- For decades, Italian immigrant families who lived through World War II in the United States did not want to talk about the curfews, confiscations of fishing boats, forced moves from seacoast towns, police searches of their homes and internments here at Fort Missoula. But researchers are fleshing out this obscure footnote to American history: the treatment of 600,000 Italian citizens in the United States who were classified as "enemy aliens" after World War II began. And that is stirring memories among those who lived through it.

In 1942, when this old frontier Army post served as one of the nation's largest internment camps, the most widely spoken language at the post was not Japanese or English, but Italian. One of the internees was Alfredo Cipolato, a native Venetian who went from a job as a waiter at the Italian Pavilion of the 1939 World's Fair in New York to a barracks bunk in this once-remote town in western Montana.

"One day I come home," said Cipolato, now an American citizen living here, "the FBI are there, and they just put me in jail."

In the recent past, fading family memories have been jogged by a documentary film, "Bella Vista," a book, "An Alien Place," by Carol Bulger Van Valkenburg, and an exhibit that has toured 21 American cities and is expected to go to Washington in September.

According to the latest research, dozens of Italians lost their fishing boats and hundreds more -- largely bakers, restaurant workers and garbage men -- had to give up jobs because of curfews. About 1,600 Italian citizens were interned, all of them here, and about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to move from their houses in California coastal communities to inland homes.

And the 600,000 legal Italian immigrants who had not become U.S. citizens were put under travel restrictions. Dozens of American citizens of Italian origin who had shown sympathy for Mussolini were temporarily banished from California.

"The majority of Italian-Americans still don't know that this happened," said Lawrence DiStasi, director of the traveling exhibit, "Storia Segreta," or Secret History. "There are people who come to our exhibit who suddenly remember that it happened in their families, too.

The Italian immigrants were caught up, to a milder degree, in the hysteria that swept the West Coast after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. While all the interned Italians were citizens of Italy, about two-thirds of the interned Japanese were American citizens. The anti-Japanese measures lasted the length of the war, while the anti-Italian restrictions mostly ended after less than a year.

About 110,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans were interned in a network of camps, including Fort Missoula. In this sweep of people suspected of sympathy with enemies of the United States, 10,905 Germans and German-Americans as well as a few Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians and Romanians were interned.

The U.S. government apologized in 1988 to the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and started paying reparations of $20,000 each to survivors.

"My government has apologized to the Japanese nationals. Where is the apology to me?" asked Art Jacobs, a Brooklyn native who at the age of 12 was interned with his father, a legal resident from Germany, at a camp in Crystal City, Texas. Jacobs, a retired U.S. Air Force major, said that German-American associations were generally silent about the internment for fear of dredging up old emotions linking Germans and Nazis.

Growing interest among the nation's Italian-Americans, now estimated at 15 million, prompted two New York representatives and a senator to introduce bills last month that call for the declassification of documents on the wartime internment and for a government study "detailing injustices suffered by Italian- Americans during World War II and a formal acknowledgment of such injustices by the president."

The chief sponsor of the House bill is Rep. Rick Lazio, a Republican of New York. On the Senate side, the chief sponsor is Alfonse D'Amato, also a Republican of New York.

At the start of the war, Italian-Americans represented this nation's largest group of foreign-born residents. There were five million of them, and all but the 600,000 had become citizens. Curfews and confiscations were imposed on members of this group within hours after Pearl Harbor, even before war was declared on Italy.

With no evidence of Italian sabotage or spying, the measures came to be seen as counterproductive because President Franklin D. Roosevelt was seeking the full support of Italian-Americans for the invasion of Italy. The curfews were lifted in October 1942, on Columbus Day. The invasion of Italy took place in July 1943.

Although fishing was considered a national priority for the war effort, security restrictions required dozens of Italian-American fishermen, about 90 percent of San Francisco's fleet, to surrender their boats to the Coast Guard.

Umberto Benedetti, 74, a Missoula resident who was interned here in May 1941 after the Italian cruise ship that he was working on was impounded in then Panama Canal, said: "The fishermen lost a lot of money. They should get something."

The police swept through Italian-American neighborhoods in many cities, seizing from Italian citizens firearms, radios, cameras and flashlights that could be used as signaling devices. For much of 1942, most of the 600,000 Italians were not allowed to travel five miles from their homes without police permission. That restriction kept a San Francisco man, Giuseppe DiMaggio, from visiting a wharf restaurant owned by his son, Joe, the baseball legend.

About 2,000 Italians were forced to move from Pittsburg, a town on San Francisco Bay. Joe Aiello, a resident of the United States for 56 years but an Italian citizen, left his home in a wheelchair. Another, Placido Abono, 97, was moved out on a stretcher.

Relocation orders or detention orders frequently hit people whose sons were in the U.S. military. In World War II, about 500,000 Italian-Americans served in the Armed Forces.

Rosina Trovato, classified as an enemy alien and living in Monterey, Calif., received a notice to evacuate her home on the same day that she learned that her son and a nephew had gone down with the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Jerre Mangione, a 75-year-old Italian citizen, was released from detention on the day that officials learned that his son had been killed in a bombing run over Italy.

In the hunt for Fascists, Italian language schools and newspapers were closed in northern California.

"There hasn't been any indication that any of these enemy aliens were engaged in any treasonous activities whatsoever," said Rep. Eliot L. Engel, a New York Democrat who is a cosponsor of the legislation to declassify documents.

Of the roughly 2,000 Italians living in the United States who were detained for questioning after Pearl Harbor, only 300 were deemed to be sufficient security risks for confinement in Fort Missoula. About 1,300 sailors and other Italian visitors had been detained before Pearl Harbor.

Once at Missoula, the Italians divided along generational lines. The older men, generally long-term residents of the United States, were bitter about being torn away from their families.

But the younger men, largely sailors from 28 Italian ships impounded in American ports in the spring of 1941, largely saw "Campo Missoula" as a pleasant and safe place to sit out the war, said the two former internees interviewed here.

"Bella Vista," or "Beautiful View," was the nickname given to this post, sitting at a bend on the Bitterroot River, where wildflowers carpet meadows that stretch toward snow-capped mountains. The center- piece was a new recreation hall designed by the architects of Yellowstone Park's Old Faithful Inn.

About 100 internees were entertainers -- largely musicians, singers, dancers and choreographers from the luxury cruise ship that was caught in the Panama Canal.

"We had a regular theater -- a comedy one week, an opera the next," said Alfredo Cipolato, who met his future wife, Ann D'Orazi, while singing in a church choir in Missoula.

While beef, sugar and butter were rationed in Missoula, these staples were plentiful at the camp, Cipolato recalled. Food, not politics, sparked one of the few disturbances among detainees, the "olive oil riot."

Presented with beef fat for frying, an outraged Italian cook smacked the American supplier across the face. A patrol car raced to the scene, but one of the occupants accidentally set off a smoke grenade inside the car. In the excitement, a guard in a watchtower shot himself in the foot.

Next year, the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula plans to open a recently restored wooden barracks here with permanent exhibits about the Japanese and Italian internment here.

Memories are largely benign for the half-dozen former Italian seamen who stayed on in Montana, Idaho and the State of Washington.

"I lost three years of my life," said Cipolato, who at 84 enjoys the company here of his five children and seven grandchildren. "But if they had sent me back to Italy, I might be dead. I could have ended up in the Italian Army."

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