1943 BISCARI MASSACRE

While dealing with a very strong defense of Gela in southern Sicily -please read the January issue on "Battle of Gela & Livorno Division counterattack"- some of the Allies troops committed massacres of Italian military and civilians.

May be because enraged by the many US casualties, some US soldiers committed murders of some defenseless civilians and many surrendered soldiers....and later justified themselves accusing general Patton to have given orders to "kill all of them".....

All this cruelty -according to senator Augello in his famous book "Uccidete gli Italiani"- was originated by the hateful declarations of general Patton to his US Division, just before the Allies landing on Sicily: "Pay no attention to the raised hands (of the Italians who surrendered). Aim your gun between the third and fourth rib, then shoot. Fuck, no prisoners! Gone is the time to play, now it is time to kill! I want a division of killers because the killers are immortal!"

Here it is a resume of four articles dealing with these massacres:

1) The BISCARI MASSACRE & other shameful murders of Italians during the 1943 Sicily invasion, by Gianluca Di Feo

What happened in Sicily between July 12 and 14, 1943 is one of the blackest pages in US military history. A page on which US historians have been discussing for many years, while in Italy this event is almost unknown. In North American universities there are courses in 2004 devoted to these massacres, such as the one held in Montreal «From the Biscari massacre to Guantanamo». And these weeks US military law experts evaluate the responsibility of the "Abu Ghraib warders" on the basis of the military courts that judged the «killers of Italians». Because – according to the trial proceedings – the US soldiers defended themselves by saying to have obeyed Patton’s orders. «We had been told – they stated – that the General (Patton) wanted no prisoners».

The Italians murdered at Biscari were almost all infantry of Lombardy (mostly from Brescia) or Veneto (mostly from Vicenza); with them fifty airmen who came mostly from Sicily, some from Lazio and Umbria. Senator Andrea Augello has also discovered the fate of Carl Ludwig "Lu(t)z" Long, German Olympic long-jumper, notable for winning Silver in the Olympic Games of 1936 who went down in history for the handshake with winner US black Jesse Owens: "There is clear evidence that Lutz Long was killed on July 14 and buried at Biscari". In the above famous photo Lutz Long is behind the winner Jessie Owens, in the 1936 Olympic ceremony

THE FACTS-No one knows the exact number of Axis servicemen killed after surrendering. The most important episodes are five, with at least two hundred victims. Two of them, occurred at Biscari airfield near Ragusa, are known in every detail. In Fall ’43, the US Court Marshal held, in the utmost security, two trials: Sgt. Horace T. West gunned down 37 Italians, Capt. John C. Compton’s firing squad at least 36. The trial records state: «All prisoners were disarmed and collaborative». Two more slaughters were described by an eyewitness, British journalist Alexander Clifford, in talks and letters now disclosed to the public. They took place at Comiso airfield, that would become famous half a century later for NATO missiles. At the time it was a Luftwaffe base, contested in a bloody battle. Clifford reported that sixty Italians, captured in the first lines, were unloaded from a truck and machinegunned. A few minutes later, the same scene was repeated with a bunch of Germans: fifty of them were killed. When a Colonel, called in by the reporter, stopped the killing, only three were still breathing.Clifford reported everything to Patton, who promised him that the culprits would be punished. But there was no trial and the journalist refused until his death to testify against the General. Finally, the last atrocity in the Narbone-Grilli soap factory at Canicatti against civilians that were pillaging it. According to the statements compiled in those confused days of 1943, US MPs, after ordering to halt and firing warning shots, opened up on the crowd killing six people. But the records discovered in 2002 by Prof. Joseph Salemi of New York University – whose father was an eyewitness of the facts – relate the testimony of some soldiers who were there. «Just as we came in, the Colonel yelled to shoot at the crowd that had entered the plant. We did not move: it was a chilling order. Then he reached for his pistol and fired 21 shots, reloading three times. Many civilians died: I saw a boy with his stomach torn open by bullets».

THE ORDER – But the trial records pertinent to «the Biscari facts» give to understand that the victims may be many more. All crimes were work of the 45th «Thunderbirds» division, units originated in the Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona National Guard. Their members are described as cowboys, some with Native American origins. But they participated courageously in some of the hardest battles of WWII. Their baptism of fire took place in Sicily: they were to get hold of the three airfield nearest to the coast, strategical for the move of Allied air units. Instead, the desperate resistance of two Italian divisions and few German units held them off for four days. Many G.I.s lost their nerve. And everybody was convinced that Gen. Patton had ordered not to take any prisoner. Dozens of enlisted men, NCOs and officers testified: «We’d been told that Patton did not want to get them alive. Aboard the ships sailing towards Sicily, we heard Gen. Patton’s speech over the loudspeakers: [...]If your company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and when you get within two hundred yards of him he wishes to surrender – oh no! That bastard will die! You will kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick him. Stick him in the liver. We will get the name of killers and killers are immortal. When word reaches him that he is being faced by a killer battalion he will fight less. We must build up that name as killers.

THE HORROR – First to discover and report the atrocities was the Division chaplain, Col. William E. King. Some distraught G.I.s summoned him and showed him the heap of bodies riddled by Sgt. West: «It’s crazy – they said – they’re killing all prisoners. We’re at war to fight this brutality, not to do this filth. We’re ashamed on what’s going on». King rushed to the Regiment HQ. But while on the road leading to the airport he saw a stone fence, probably a sheepfold, full of Italian POWs. So goes the chaplain’s statement: «As I neared, the Corporal on guard greeted me: “Father, have you come to bury them?”. “What are you saying?” I replied. The Corporal said: “They’re there, I’m here with my Thompson, you’re there. And we were told not to take no prisoners». At that point, Col. King got on a rock, called all the present G.I.s and improvised a sermon to convince them to spare those men: «You cannot kill them, prisoners are a precious intelligence source. And their comrades might retaliate on our fellow soldiers that they have seized. Don’t do it!». Capt. Robert Dean’s tale is almost as poignant: «I was stopped by two unarmed stretcher bearers. They said: “We’ve got two wounded Italians, send for somebody to finish them off”. I yelled them to tend those soldiers, otherwise I’d make them pay for it».

THE SENTENCE – It was the will of Col. King himself to originate the two trials on the Biscari atrocities. King reported everything to the Army inspector (something like a District Attorney or Italian “Pubblico Ministero”) that reported to Omar Bradley. The trial against Sgt. West started in September. Charge: «wilful murder, for killing deliberately and in full awareness 37 POWs, with unbecoming behavior». The Italian infantrymen – a little less than fifty – had been captured after a long fight in a cave near the Biscari airfield. The CO handed them over to the Sergeant with an order presumed «vague» by judges: to take them away from the landing strip, where the fighting was still ongoing. Nine witnesses reconstructed the slaughter. West lined up the Italians, after a few kilometers of marching took five or six of them from the rest of the group. Then he got hold of a submachine gun and took the others away from the road. There he killed them, chasing the ones running for their lives while he reloaded: one of the bodies was found 50 meters away.Before the court, Sgt. West defended himself by appealing to battle fatigue: «I was on the frontline for four days, with no sleep». He declared to have witnessed the execution of two G.I.s captured by th Germans, which made him «uncontrolledly furious». His defending counsel spoke about «temporary mental infermity». In the end, West said to the judges: «We had been ordered to take prisoners only in extreme cases». But his defence did not convince the Court, that sentenced him to life emprisonment. The sentence, however, was never served. In fact, the US Governement were terrified by the possible repercussions of the atrocities. They feared the image loss on the Italians, with who an armistice had just been signed – and the risk of retaliations on Allied POW in Germany. They decided not to jail West in a US penitentiary but to keep him under arrest at a base in North Africa. Then his sister started writing to the Ministry and urging the County Congressman to intervene. The Army High Command feared that the affair might end up on newspapers. On February 1, 1944, the War Ministry head of Public Relations pressed the Caserta Allied HQ for an «act of mercy» for Sgt. West: «We cannot – says the letter published by Stanley Hirshsohn in 2002 – allow that this story be made public: it would give help and support to the enemy. It wouldn’t be understood by civilians, that are too far away from the violence of the fightings». Thus, after six months only, West was released and sent back to the frontline. According to some sources, he was killed at the end of August 1944 in Brittany. According to others, he ended the war unscathed.

THE ACQUITTAL – Instead, on October 23, 1943, Capt. John C. Compton didn’t try to find any excuse before the military court: he just said to have obeyed orders. During the trial was reconstructed the battle for Biscari, fought all night through. There was a hidden emplacement on a hillside that kept firing on the strip. It was a ferocious fray, with machinegun and mortar shots, without any front line. Compton’s outfit had had twelve KIA within a few hours. At some point, a G.I. saw an Italian in uniform and another in civilian clothing coming out of a shelter: they were waving a white flag. The G.I. came closer and about forty men in the trench raise their hands. Five wore civilian jackets and blouses over their military pants and boots. The soldier handed them over to the Sergeant but the Captain came over. Compton wasted no time and decided to kill them. Many of his men volunteered: 24 of them shot hundreds of rounds in the bunch of the Italians. The exact number of the casualties is uncertain but the enquiry ended with the indictment of the sole officer for 36 murders, freeing his subordinates. And Compton declared in courtroom that the order was to kill the enemies that kept resisting at close range. Furthermore he specified that those Italians were “snipers”, hence they had to be shot: a defensive line that was reportedly suggested him by Patton himself. «I got them killed because this was Patton’s order – the Captain concluded – Right or wrong, the order of a three-star-General with combat experience is enough to me. And I carried it out to the letter». All eyewitnesses – among them several Colonels – confirmed Patton’s statements, that terrible «Kill them if they surrender only when you’re close».Others also referred that Patton had said: «The more men we take, the more food we need. We’d better do without it». Compton was acquitted. The responsible for the enquiry William R. Cook was tempted to appeal. «That acquittal was so far from the American sense of justice – he wrote – that such order had to appear clearly illegal». But in the meantime Cook had been killed in action. By a twist of fate, he was reportedly hit by a sniper while he was approaching some Germans who were waving a white flag.Compton’s acquittal, however, became a legal case that began circulating among the personnel of US military courts after the end of the war. A precedent deemed “confidential” also to prevent it from influencing the Nazi war crimes trials. Then, in 1973, a trace was found in Patton’s diaries published by Martin Blumenson and in 1983 the first complete description in Gen. Bradley’s autobiography.Today, some American historians – absolutely beyond suspicion of revisionism – believe that, on the basis of the Compton sentence, the SS shot for murdering US POWs were to be acquitted. And while studies on the «Biscari massacre» and its repercussions have been published in the United States during the past twenty-five years – the first in 1988 by James J. Weingartner, the latest in 2002 by Hirschson – the facts were substantially ignored in Italy. Twenty years ago, in the volume written by American historian Carlo d’Este on Operation Husky, translated by Mondadori, the matter was consigned in the beginning of a paragraph. Then, lately, two hard-to-find works of Sicilian historians and one page in the well-documented volume by Alfio Caruso. However no initiative was ever taken to remember those nameless soldiers. While even Biscari does not exist any longer: today the town is named Acate.

Gianluca Di Feo (Corriere Della Sera, June 23, 2004)

2) Allied war crimes of the Campaign of Sicily, by Gianfranco Ciriacono

About a month ago (on 23 and 24 June) the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published an article by the journalist Gianluca Di Feo about some American war crimes made during the Campaign of Sicily: - two massacres of POWs (36 and 37 men) in the airport of Biscari by men of the 180th Regimental Combat Team, 45th Division. - two massacres of POWs in the airport of Comiso: about 50 Italians and about 60 Germans were killed by men of the 45th Div. - 6 civilians killed while they were plundering the Saponeria Narbone-Garilli at Canicattì. The article provides new interesting info.

The massacres of Comiso were witnessed and denounced by the British journalist Alexander Clifford; Patton granted that the guilty soldiers would be put on trial, but no enquiry was ever done.

The civilians killed in Canicattì were among a crowd plundering a factory, but while this action of the American MPs could look as a harsh but legitimate way to stop them, it seems instead that it was done by a colonel with the intent of murdering people: in 2002 prof. Joseph Salemi (University of New York), whose father had been a witness, has found the original verbals of the inquiry that followed the massacre, included this testimony (I'm re-translating from Italian): "As soon as we arrived, the colonel shouted to shoot at the crowd that had entered the factory. We stood firm, it was an apalling order. So he [the colonel] took the pistol and shot 21 bullets, changing the cartridge clip 3 times. Many civilians died: I saw a child with the stomach opened by the bullets." Canicattì, unlike Comiso and Biscari, was not under the control of the 45th Div., but, AFAIK (the article doesn't tell it) of the 3rd.

The massacres of Biscari are more known, but not very known is the involvement of Gen. Patton.They were denounced by the chaplain of the 45th Div., col. William King, to Gen. Omar Bradley. He soon urged the opening of an enquiry, and told Patton of the crimes. Patton wrote in his diary: "Bradley, a man too correct and very nervous, has come to me to tell me that the captain [John C. Compton] has taken seriously my order of kill those [enemies] who kept on shooting when we are at less than 200 yards. The captain has killed almost 50 prisoners, at cold blood and grouping them, an even greater error. I replied that probably the news were exaggerated. Nevertheless I told him to tell to the captain to declare that those men were snipers or that they had tried to escape, because there is the danger that everything will go on the newspapers and civilians will become furious. Whatever happened, they are dead and there is nothing more to do."Since Patton did nothing to arrest them, Bradley spoke again with Patton on 9 Aug. and then, since he did nothing again, personally ordered the arrest. In those same days Patton was removed from the command in Sicily.

This time two trials were opened.

Sgt. Horace T. West, who had killed 37 POWs at Biscari, told that he did it because of battle stress and because he was ordered to take prisoners only in extreem situations. The judges found him guilty and sentenced him to life prison. But he was released because of the intervent of his sister (in fact Capt. Compton was not imprisoned, read below) after only 6 months and, according to some sources, died in Brittany in Aug. 1944, but other sources state that he survived the war. The chief of the public relations office of the Ministry of War wrote this letter (published by Stanley Hirshson in 2002) to the Allied command of Caserta on 1 Feb. 1944: "We cannot let that this story will be publicized: it would give help and support to the enemy. It wouldn't be understood by the citizens who are so far from the violence of the fightings.".

Capt. Compton instead followed Patton's advice: he simply told that he had followed the orders of killing snipers. He, along with 24 volunteer soldiers, had killed 36 Italian POWs in Biscari. The soldiers were not even put on trial. He told: "I killed them because this was the order of Patton. Right or wrong, the order of a 3-stars general with battle experience is enough for me. And I followed it to the letter.". All the witnesses, includes some colonels, confirmed the order. Already in June 1943 Patton had been informed by the magistrate of his army that he should have changed the texts of his proclaims. The order of Patton quoted during Capt. Compton's trial was: "When we land against the enemy, don't forget to hit him and hit him hard. When we meet the enemy we will kill him. We will show him no mercy. He has killed thousands of your comrades and he must die. If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and when you get within two hundred yards of him he wishes to surrender- oh no! That bastard will die! You will kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick him. Stick him in the liver. We will get the name of killers and killers are immortal. When word reaches him that he is being faced by a killer battalion he will fight less. We must build up that name as killers."The prosecutor, Maj. William R. Cook, wanted to make an appeal, but he was KIA soon after.

The Corriere published also the testimony of Giuseppe Ciriacono, son of one of the men killed in Biscari and then member of the Carabinieri (Italian military police) and eyewitness of the massacre (he was 13). He told that 6 civilians were among the killed (and this might explain why Compton told that five of the men he had killed were wearing civilian jackets), moreover one of the killed was a boy just older than Ciriacono.

Le stragi dimenticate - Gianfranco Ciriacono

3) An excerpt on 45th Division murder of POWs from "The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944", by Rick Atkinson

“…By early Wednesday morning, the airfield was at last in American hands. Bodies lay like bloody throw rugs on a runway gouged by more than two hundred bomb craters. The charred cruciforms of ruined airplanes smoldered near the hangars; enemy snipers had hidden in the cockpits, taking potshots until a platoon of Sherman tanks exterminated them, fuselage by fuselage. Flames crackled in the grain fields east and west of the airfield. Through the billowing smoke U.S. soldiers could be seen like wraiths in olive drab, dragging wounded comrades to safe ground or snatching first-aid kits and ammunition from abandoned packs. Sniper fire still winked from the shadows along the packed-dirt Biscari road. Companies A and C of the 180th’s 1st Battalion had landed five days earlier with nearly 200 men each and now counted 150 between them... ‘We had the killing spirit,’ one sergeant later observed. Another rifleman wrote his father that the summer dust ‘tasted like powdered blood,’ then added ‘Now I know why soldiers get old quick.’ By midmorning on Wednesday, the 1st Battalion had pushed through the smoke and dancing flames, flushing German and Italian laggards from caves along the thready Ficuzza River. Soon Company A had rounded up forty-six prisoners, among them three Germans. Frightened and exhausted, the captives sat naked but for their trousers on a parched slope above the Ficuzza, all shirts and shoes having been confiscated to discourage escape. A major separated nine prisoners for interrogation – the youngsters were considered most likely to talk – then turned both them and the other captives over to Sergeant Horace T. West with a small security detachment for removal to the rear. West proved a poor choice. Born in Barron Fork, Oklahoma, he had joined the army in 1929, then switched to the National Guard, training on weekends and working as a cook in his antebellum civilian life. Now thirty-three, he had two young children, earned$101 a month and had gained a reputation, one superior said, as the ‘most through non-com I ever saw in the Army.’ But the past few days had badly frayed Sergeant West. ‘It was something sitting on me,’ he later said, ‘just to kill and destroy and watch them bleed to death.’ In two shuffling columns, the prisoners marched four hundred yards down the road toward a stand of olive trees above the creek. West halted his charges – with being told, they executed a ragged left face – and separated out the smaller group designated for interrogation. Turning to the company first sergeant, Haskell Brown, he asked to borrow his Thompson submachine gun to ‘shoot the sons of bitches.’ Brown handed him the weapon with an extra clip. ‘Turn around if you don’t want to see,’ West advised, and opened fire. They fell, writhing and jerking in the dust, then lurched to their knees, begging, only to be shot down again. Cries filled the morning – ‘No!No!’ – amid the roar of the gun and the acrid smell of codite. Three prisoners broke for the trees; two of them escaped. West stopped to reload, then walked among the men in their pooling blood and fired a single round into the hearts of those still moving. When he was done, he handed the weapon back to Brown. “This is orders,” he said, then rousted the nine chosen for interrogation to their feet, wide-eyed and trembling, and marched them to find the division G-2. Thirty-seven dead men lay beside the road, and their shadows shrank beneath the climbing sun as though something were being drawn up and out of them. Five hours later, it happened again. As Sergeant West herded his surviving charges to the rear, German tanks and half-tracks counterattacked, recaptured the Biscari airfield, and drove the 180th across a ravine south of the runway. The brawling would continue throughout Wednesday afternoon until the enemy was again routed, this time for good. During the fight, Company C of the 1st Battalion swept down a deep gulch, taking a dozen casualties from machine gun fire before white flags waved from an expansive bunker carved into the slope. At one p.m., three dozen Italians emerged, hands up, five of them wearing civilian clothes. Ammunition boxes, filthy bedding, and suitcases lay strewn about the bunker. In command of Company C was Captain John Travers Compton. Now twenty-five, he had joined the Oklahoma National Guard in 1934. Compton was married, had one child, earned $230 a month – minus a $6.60 deduction for government insurance – and had consistently rated ‘excellent’ or ‘superior’ on performance evaluations. Standing on the hillside, bleary with fatigue, he ordered an lieutenant to assemble a firing squad and ‘have these snipers shot.’ The squad soon formed – several men volunteered – and Compton barked the commands even as the Italians pleaded for his mercy: ‘Ready, aim, Fire.’ Tommy-gun and Browning Automatic Rifle fire swept down the gulch, and another thirty-six men fell dead. The next day at 10:30 a.m., Lieutenant Colonel William E. King drove his jeep up the Biscari road toward the now secure airfield. It was said that King had been temporarily blinded during World War I, and the ordeal had propelled him into the ministry as a Baptist preacher. He now served God and country as the 45th Division chaplain, admired for his generosity and the brevity of his sermons. A dark mound near and olive grove caught his eye, and he stopped the jeep, mouth agape, to investigate. ‘Most were lying face down, a few face up,’ King later recalled. ‘Everybody face up has one bullet hole just to the left of the spine in the region of the heart.’ A majority also had head wounds; singed hair and powder burns implied the fatal shots had come at close range. A few soldiers loitering nearby joined the chaplain, protesting that ‘they has come into the war to fight against that sort of thing,’ King said. ‘They felt ashamed of their countrymen.’ The chaplain hurried back to the division command post to report the fell vision. Omar Bradley had already got wind of the massacre, and he drove to Gela to tell Patton that fifty to seventy prisoners had been murdered ‘in cold blood and also in ranks.’ Patton recorded his reaction in his diary: ‘I told Bradley that it was probably an exaggeration, but in any case to tell the officer to certify that the dead men were snipers or had attempted to escape or something, as it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad. Anyhow, they are dead, so nothing can be done about it.’ Two war correspondents who had seen the bodies also appeared at Patton’s headquarters to protest these and other prisoner killings. Patton pledged to halt the atrocities, and the reporters apparently never printed a word. To George Marshall on July 18, Patton wrote that enemy troops had booby-trapped their dead and ‘have resorted to sniping behind the lines’; such ‘nefarious actions’ had caused ‘the death of quite a few additional Italians, but in my opinion these killings have been thoroughly justified.’ Bradley disagreed and, Patton told his diary, ‘feels that we should try the two men responsible for the shooting of the prisoners.’ An investigation by the 45th Division inspector general found ‘no provocation on the part of the part of the prisoners…They had been slaughtered.’ Patton relented: ‘Try the bastards.” Captain Compton contracted malaria soon after the Biscari killings, and not until he had recuperated in late October would he be secretly court-martialed. The defense argued that Patton’s pep talk in Oran had been tatamount to ‘an order to annihilate these snipers.’ ‘I ordered them shot because I thought it came directly under the general’s instructions,’ Compton testified. ‘I took him at his word.’ The military prosecutor asked not a single question on cross-examination. Compton was acquitted and returned to the 45th Division. Killers are Immortal, Patton had declared, but that too was wrong. Compton would be killed in action in Italy on November 8, 1943. A fellow officer in the 45th provided his epitaph: ‘Good riddance.’ Sergeant West’s case proved more convoluted. Like Compton, he was examined by psychiatrists and declared sane. He, too, claimed that Patton’s rhetoric had incited him to mayhem, while conceding that he ‘may have used bad judgment.’ His conduct, he told the courts-martial, ‘is something beyond my conception of human decency. Or something.’ The tribunal concurred and ruled that he had ‘with malice aforethought, willfully, deliberately, feloniously, unlawfully and with premeditation, killed 37 prisoners of war, one of whose names are known, each of them a human being.’ West was sentenced to life in a New York penitentiary. Yet he never left the Mediterranean during the war, nor was he dishonorably discharged, and he continued to draw his $101 a month, plus various family allowances. Colonel Cookson, the 180th regimental commander, later said ‘The whole tendency in the thing was to keep it as quiet as possible.’ A few weeks after West’s conviction, Eisenhower revied the case. If West were sent to a federal prison in the United States, the Biscari story would likely become public; if he were kept confined in North Africa, perhaps the enemy would remain ignorant of the massacre. Eisenhower ‘feared reprisal to Allied prisoners and decided to give the man a chance,’ Harry Butcher wrote in his diary. [West] will be kept in military confinement…for a period sufficient to determine whether he may be returned to duty.’ That period amounted to a bit more than a year. West’s family and a sympathetic congressman began pestering the War Department for news of ‘the most thorough non-com’ in the U.S. Army. On November 23, 1944, he was granted clemency on the grounds of temporary insanity and restored to active duty, though shorn of his sergeant’s stripes. Classified top-secret, the records of the courts martial would remain locked in the Secretary of the Army’s safe for years after the war lest they ‘arouse a segment of our citizens who are so distant from combat that they do not understand the savagery that is war.’ Those who knew of the killings tried to parse them in their own fashion. Brigadier General Raymond S. McLain, the 45th Division artillery commander, concluded that in Sicily ‘evil spirits seemed to come out and challenge us.’ Patton wrote Beatrice, ‘Some fair-haired boys are trying to say I killed too many prisoners. The more I killed, the fewer men I lost, but the don’t think of that.’ And a staff officer in the 45th wrote, ‘It was not easy to determine what forces turned normal men into thoughtless killers. But a world war is something different from our druthers.’ Nobody Really Knows What He Is Doing, Bill Mauldin had written of his first week in combat with the 180th Infantry. Yet other primal lessons also could be gleaned, from Licata to Augusta. For war was not just a military campaign but also a parable. There were lessons of camaraderie and duty and inscrutable fate. There were lessons of honor and courage, of compassion and sacrifice. And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again in the coming weeks as they fought across Sicily, and in the coming months as they fought their was back toward a world at peace; that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained.”

Rick Atkinson

4)Testimony from the son of a victim, by Joseph Salemi

I am the source of the information concerning this incident, which I learned about from my father, Salvatore J. Salemi. I first gave this documented information to Prof. Stanley Hirshson, who used it in his recent biography of Patton. Since then the information has been picked up and publicized by various researchers in Italy. I would like to give a very brief precis of what occurred for the benefit of those in this website forum who may be confused about the incident. The massacre in question took place at 6 PM, on July 14, 1943, in the town of Canicatti, Sicily. The specific location was the Soap Factory and Warehouse of Narbone-Garilli, on Via Carlo Alberto, in the parish of Redentore. A large crowd of civilians had gathered at this partially bombed factory-warehouse to steal liquid soap, which was stored in a large open pit. Most had been dispersed by American MPs, but a number of them were held as prisoners. These civilians were unarmed and unresisting; a number of them were women and children. An American Lieutenant-Colonel arrived on the scene. He was a Civil Affairs officer in AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory), but attached to the Third Infantry Division. He was accompanied by several other American officers and G-2 interpreters, including my father. My father at that time was a corporal, serving in the Third Division as an interrogator of Italian POWs, and as a general translator for G-2. When the Lieutenant-Colonel arrived, he ordered the MPs who were holding the captured looters to shoot them all. This order was refused by the commanding officer of the MP detachment, and also by all of the individual MPs present. The Lieutenant-Colonel then directed the same order to the other American personnel who had accompanied him to the scene of the looting. They too refused. At that point the enraged Lieutenant-Colonel drew his service pistol and fired point-blank into the group of captured, unarmed, and unresisting looters. He emptied one magazine, and reloaded, emptied that one, and reloaded again, and emptied that magazine as well. He fired over twenty rounds, killing at least seven or eight people and severely wounding many others. One of the victims was an eleven-year-old schoolgirl whose stomach was blown out. Since the publication of Prof. Hirshson's book, I have been able (with the help of an Italian researcher in Sicily) to learn the identities of most of the victims of the Canicatti shooting. The incident is now quite well documented. I have also decided that it is now time to reveal the identity of the AMGOT officer who was responsible for this atrocity. He was Lieutenant-Colonel George Herbert McCaffrey, the SCAO (Senior Civil Affairs Officer) for Agrigento Province. Colonel McCaffrey was 53 years old at the time, and a veteran of the First World War who served in the 78th Division. He also served briefly during the Korean Conflict.

Dr. Joseph S. Salemi (New York University)

BATTLE OF GELA (JULY 1943) & LIVORNO DIVISION COUNTERATTACK

The "Battle of Gela" happened for nearly 4 days from July 10, 1943 when the Allies landed in southeastern Sicily just in front of the small city of Gela. Soon after the landing the Italian Division "Livorno" started a counterattack that was nearly successful in throwing back the invaders in the Gela beach. A group of Italian tanks entered a few hours after the landings inside Gela and were stopped at a few hundred meters from the city's beach.

The beaches around Gela were defended by the Italian XVIII Coastal Brigade, the town itself was defended by the Italian 429th Coastal Battalion while the Italian 4th Mountain Infantry Division Livorno, an elite battalion composed by high quality troops with sufficient transports to move all of its infantry units simultaneously, was positioned near Niscemi and supported by the Italian "Mobile Group E" at Ponte Olivo with 38 Fiat 3000 (and some Renault R 35) tanks to respond when invasion points became known. They were considered by the Germans and most Italians to be far superior to the other divisions, as they had originally been intended for the assault on Malta in June, 1942.

They were joined on the afternoon of the first day by the German Fallschirm-Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring with 46 Panzerkampfwagen III and 32 Panzerkampfwagen IV tanks from Caltagirone, reinforced with a regiment of the 15th Panzergrenadiers with the 215th Panzer Battalion attached with 17 Tiger I tanks.

The Livorno Division fought bravery trough all the duration of the conflict. These soldiers carried out a substantial counterattack on 10-11 July, 1943, and threatened to “throw the invaders back into the sea”, being stopped just few hundred meters from the beaches. On 10 July Livorno infantry supported by the 155th Bersaglieri Motorcycle Company and a column of tanks poured onto Highways 115 and 117 and nearly took back the city of Gela, but guns from the destroyer Shubrick and the light cruiser Boise destroyed several Fiat 3000 tanks (a L.5/30 variant) and Re. R 35 light tanks. Also, Allied forces has attacked a division right flank from Licata in the direction of Ravanusa and Riesi, tying up much of Italian troops. The Amphibious Battle of Gela was reported by an American newspaper: “Supported by no less than forty-five tanks, a considerable force of infantry of the Livorno Division attacked the American troops around Gela. The American division beat them back with severe casualties. This was the heaviest response to the Allied advance.”

The Livorno regrouped and made a further attempt to take Gela back one day later and the 3rd Battalion, 34 Livorno Regiment, is recorded by its Commanding Officer as having made a valiant effort in the Gela Beachhead. But on 15 July, 1943, the Allied armoured units had attacked from west between Valguarnera Caropepe and Raddusa, threatening to encircle the Livorno division. Raddusa was lost by Italians on July 18, 1943 after heavy fighting, and the Livorno division has taken a stand at Simeto river down to the river mouth south of Catania. On July 22, 1943 the Livorno division was subject to heavy coastal bombardment by British ships between Leonforte and the Simeto river mouth, but managed to hold positions. Failures of other Axis units in Sicily then forced a Livorno division to retreat north.

The initial Battle on July 10 (according to the US Army official documents)

At Casa del Priolo, halfway between Piano Lupo and Niscemi, where less than 100 men of the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry, had, under Lt. Col. Arthur Gorham, reduced a strongpoint and set up a blocking position, an American soldier saw a column of Italian tanks and infantry heading his way. Alerted, the paratroopers allowed the point of the column, three small vehicles, to enter their lines before opening fire, killing or capturing the occupants. The sound of firing halted the main body. After thirty minutes of hesitation, about two infantry companies shook themselves out into an extended formation and began moving toward the Americans, who waited until the Italians were 200 yards away. Then they opened a withering fire not only of rifles but of the numerous machine guns they had captured when they had taken the strongpoint. Their first fusillade pinned down the enemy troops except for a few in the rear who managed to get back to the main column.

Several minutes later, the Italians moved a mobile artillery piece into firing position on a hill just out of range of any weapon the paratroopers possessed. As the gun opened fire, a previously dispatched paratrooper patrol returned and reported to Colonel Gorham that there appeared to be no strong enemy force at the battalion's original objective. This was the road junction on Piano Lupo, where only a few Italians armed with machine guns held a dug-in position surrounded by barbed wire. Unable to counter the artillery fire, Gorham decided to make for Piano Lupo. The move would have several advantages: it would put him on his objective and closer to the 16th RCT, which he was supposed to contact; it would probably facilitate contact with other paratroopers. Even though naval gunfire began to come in on the Italian column, Gorham had no way of controlling or directing the fire. Leaving one squad to cover the withdrawal, he started the paratroopers south, staying well east of the Niscemi-Piano Lupo road to escape the effects of the naval fire. It was then close to 0930.10

The naval gunfire had come in response to a call from observers with the 16th RCT's leading battalions, which were moving toward Piano Lupo. Because the RCT's direct support artillery unit, the 7th Field Artillery Battalion, was not yet in firing position, the destroyer Jeffers answered the call with nineteen salvos from her 5-inch guns.11 A few of the Italian tanks were hit, but the majority were unscathed. No Italian infantry ventured past the Piano Lupo road junction, for they preferred to take cover from the relatively flat trajectory naval fire in previously prepared defensive positions. Masked on the south by high ground that caused most of the naval fire to overshoot the junction, the Italian infantrymen reached and occupied their positions just a few minutes ahead of Gorham's paratroopers.

The Italian tanks that passed through the fire, about twenty, continued past the road junction and turned on Highway 115 toward Gela. They proceeded downhill only a short way. The two forward battalions of the 16th RCT, though armed only with standard infantry weapons, knocked out two of the tanks, thoroughly disrupted the Italian thrust, and halted the column. Without infantry support, its artillery under heavy counterbattery fire from American warships, the Italian tankers broke off the fight and retired north into the foothills bordering the Gela plain on the east.

Photo of one of the Italian tanks destroyed inside Gela. The 16th RCT reported twenty tanks in this attack. (1st Inf Div G-3 Jnl, entry 17, 10 Jul 43.) The exact number of tanks in this group is not known. One report indicates Mobile Group E had nearly fifty tanks when it started its movement on 10 July (Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, p. 103). Another report (MS #R-125 (Bauer)) indicates that the Italian unit had one company (twelve to fourteen) of Renault 35 tanks; possibly sixteen 3-ton tanks; and possibly some Fiat "3,000" tanks. The Renault tanks, captured from the French in 1940, weighed two tons and were armed with 37-mm. guns. From reports contained in other American sources, the number of Italian tanks appears to have been between thirty and forty total in both Italian groups.

The threat dispersed, the 16th RCT resumed its movement to the Piano Lupo road junction. But Gorham's paratroopers, approaching from the opposite direction, arrived first. After reducing one Italian strongpoint, the paratroopers made contact with scouts from the 16th RCT at 1100.15 The 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry (Lt. Col. Charles L. Denholm), then cleaned out several remaining Italian positions around the road junction, a task facilitated by a captured map, while the 2d Battalion (Lt. Col. Joseph Crawford) and the paratroopers moved across the road and occupied high ground to the northwest.

Meanwhile the heterogeneous Ranger-engineer force in Gela had observed a column of thirteen Italian tanks escorted by infantry moving south along Highway 117 toward the city--the right arm of Mobile Group E's two-pronged attack. Another column, the Livorno Division's battalion of infantry, could also be seen moving toward Gela along the Butera road. While the destroyer Shubrick started firing at the tank-infantry column on Highway 117, the Ranger-manned Italian 77-mm. guns opened up on the Livorno battalion.

The first Shubrick salvos halted the Italians in some confusion. But the tankers recovered a measure of composure; they resumed their movement, though fewer now, for several tanks were burning in the fields along the highway. Without further loss, nine or ten tanks dashed down the highway and into the city. But the same thing happened here that had happened on the Niscemi-Piano Lupo road--Italian infantrymen did not follow the tanks. And so, in the city, the Rangers and the engineers began a deadly game of hide and seek with the Italian tanks, dodging in and out of buildings, throwing hand grenades and firing rocket launchers. Colonel Darby jumped in a jeep, dashed down to the beach, commandeered a 37-mm. antitank gun, returned with it to the city and knocked out a tank. Another burned as Rangers and engineers teamed up, first to stop it and then to destroy it. After twenty minutes of this kind of fighting, the Italians started back out of the city hotly pursued by American fire. The Italian crews suffered heavily. Almost every survivor carried with him some kind of wound.

As for the Livorno Division's battalion--in almost formal, parade ground formation, the Italian infantrymen advanced against the western side of Gela. The two Ranger companies firing their captured Italian artillery pieces took heavy toll among the closely bunched enemy soldiers. Rifles, machine guns, and mortars joined in as the range closed. Not an enemy soldier reached the inner city, only the outskirts. Leaving behind numerous dead and wounded, the remnants of the Italian battalion stopped their advance.

Meanwhile the Rangers repelled an attack by a battalion of Italian infantry (an element of the 4th Livorno Division) advancing from the direction of Butera. The enemy soldiers were approaching across open ground in an unusual close-order formation, fully exposed to the American gunners. It was a baffling move by the Italians, who seemed to have a death wish. Every weapon at the Americans’ disposal-captured field guns, the 83rd’s mortars and offshore naval gunnery-rained devastation upon the hapless Italians. As a result, not one enemy soldier reached Gela.

The Italian thrust against Gela stopped, the 26th Combat Team moved from the Gela-Farello landing ground into Gela and made contact with Darby's force by noon. Two battalions swept past the city on the east, cut Highway 117, and took high ground two miles to the north. With the city firmly in American hands, Colonel Bowen, the 26th RCT commander, began to think of seizing the terrain overlooking Ponte Olivo airfield from the west. Yet he was not anxious to start until he had adequate field artillery and armor support. As of noon, Bowen had neither. Nor was the situation along the Piano Lupo-Niscemi axis clear. South of Niscemi, the right column of Conrath's two-pronged counterattack, the tank-heavy force, closed into its assembly area. The infantry-heavy force closed in the Biscari area. With all in readiness at 1400, five hours late, Conrath sent his Hermann Goering Division into its attack.

The second attack coordinated with the Germans on July 11 (according to the US Army official documents)

Conrath, the "Hermann Goerin Division" commander, who had received a call from the XVI Corps commander, went to the corps headquarters at Piazza Armerina. He learned for the first time of his attachment to the corps and together with Generale di Divisione Domenico Chirieleison, the Livorno Division commander, also in attendance, he received word of Guzzoni's plan for a co-ordinated attack against Gela. According to the plan, the attack, starting at 0600, would have the German division converging on Gela from the northeast in three columns, the Italian division converging on Gela from the northwest, also in three columns.

Northwest of Gela, General Chirieleison commander of the ''Livorno Division" ordered one column to strike at Gela from the north, a second to advance astride the Gela-Butera road and strike Gela from the northwest, the third, while guarding the division right flank against American forces near Licata, to move southeast from Butera Station to Gela. The remnants of the Italian "Mobile Group E" were to support the first column.

General Conrath at 0615, 11 July, sent the three task forces of the Hermann Goering Division forward. (Map V) At the same time, one Italian task force, the one nearest Highway 117, jumped off, but on its own initiative, apparently after seeing the German tank battalion start south from Ponte Olivo airfield. To help support the converging attacks on Gela, German and Italian aircraft struck the beaches and the naval vessels lying offshore. The 3d Battalion, 26th Infantry, which had been advancing up the east side of Highway 117, bore the brunt of the German attack. Company K was driven to the south and west toward Gela, but the remainder of the battalion held firm. The Italian column passed the 26th Infantry, bumped into Company K, which was trying to get back to Gela, and headed directly for the city. Colonel Darby's force in Gela laid down heavy fire on the approaching enemy. The 33d Field Artillery Battalion began pounding away at both columns. The two batteries from the 5th Field Artillery Battalion joined in. The 26th Infantry's Cannon Company and the 4.2-inch mortars in Gela also opened fire. The combination of fires stopped the Italians.

The bulk of the Livorno Division had by this time joined the Hermann Goering Division attack. General Conrath's two tank battalions were once again united, and though he still contended with the 16th Infantry on Piano Lupo, he decided to send the bulk of his armored force across the Gela plain to the beaches. General Chirieleison, the Livorno Division commander, was also pushing for a concentrated attack that would surge over the American positions. He had already lost one hour waiting for contact with the German unit. He did have one column engaging the Americans in Gela. Now he sent a second from Butera toward the city.

With most of the Rangers and engineers heavily engaged against the Italian thrust down Highway 117, only two Ranger companies on the west side of Gela stood in the way of Chirieleison's second column. "You will fight with the troops and supporting weapons you have at this time," Colonel Darby told them. "The units in the eastern sector are all engaged in stopping a tank attack." When the Italian column came within range, the two Ranger companies opened fire with their captured Italian artillery pieces, and with their supporting platoon of 4.2-inch mortars. The Italian movement slowed. General Patton appeared at the Ranger command post in this sector, a two-story building, and watched the Italian attack. As he turned to leave, he called out to Captain Lyle, who commanded the Rangers there, "Kill every one of the goddam bastards."

Lyle called on the cruiser Savannah to help, and before long almost 500 devastating rounds of 6-inch shells struck the Italian column. Through the dust and smoke, Italians could be seen staggering as if dazed. Casualties were heavy. The attack stalled. Moving out to finish the task, the Ranger companies captured almost 400 enemy troops. "There were human bodies hanging from the trees," Lyle noted, "and some blown to bits." As it turned out, a large proportion of the officers and more than 50 percent of the Italian soldiers were killed or wounded.

East of Gela, as General Conrath sent the major part of both his tank battalions toward the beaches, the Gela plain became a raging inferno of exploding shells, smoke, and fire. The lead tanks reached the highway west of Santa Spina, two thousand yards from the water. As they raked supply dumps and landing craft with fire, the division headquarters reported victory: "pressure by the Hermann Goering Division & Livorno Division [has] forced the enemy to re-embark temporarily." At Sixth Army headquarters, General Guzzoni was elated. After discussion with General von Senger, he instructed XVI Corps to put the revised plan into action: wheel the German division that afternoon to the east toward Vittoria.

General Faldella, the Sixth Army chief of staff, reported (Lo sbarco, page 148) an intercepted Seventh Army radio message that ordered the U.S. 1st Division to prepare for re-embarkation. Faldella repeated this to Mrs. Magna Bauer in Rome during an interview in January 1959, asking repeatedly whether the original message appeared in the official records (that "strangely" disappeared after WWII)

At 11.00 the Americans retreated inside Gela and Italian troops reached the railway station, while the German tanks reached the beaches south of Gela. The Americans were desperate and started to fear their beachhead lost. Exactly at that hour the headquarters of the VI Italian Army obtained an encrypted message from general Patton ordering to get ready for possible return to ships. But suddenly tanks and troops commanded by colonel Galvin from the south hit the Germans and forced them to stop the winning offensive. The German tanks were hard hit by the navy guns and started to retreat in the early afternoon with heavy losses.

But the German tanks never reached the 1st Division beaches. Nor was there any hint of American re-embarkation. The 32d Field Artillery Battalion, coming ashore in Dukws moved directly into firing positions along the edge of the sand dunes and opened direct fire on the mass of German armor to its front. The 16th Infantry Cannon Company, having just been ferried across the Acate River, rushed up to the dune line, took positions, and opened fire. Four of the ten medium tanks of Colonel White's CCB finally got off the soft beach, and, under White's direction, opened fire from the eastern edge of the plain. The 18th Infantry and the 41st Armored Infantry near the Gela-Farello landing ground prepared to add their fires. Engineer shore parties stopped unloading and established a firing line along the dunes. Naval gunfire, for a change, was silent--the opposing forces were too close together for the naval guns to be used.

Under the fearful pounding, the German attack came to a halt. Milling around in confusion, the lead tanks were unable to cross the coastal highway. The German tanks pulled back, slowly at first and then increasing their speed as naval guns opened fire and chased them. Sixteen German tanks lay burning on the Gela plain.

North of Gela, artillery and naval fire, small arms, machine gun, and mortar fires reduced the Livorno column to company size, and these troops were barely holding on to positions they had quickly dug. The third Italian column, in about battalion size, starting to move from Butera Station to Gela, ran into a combat patrol which had been dispatched by the 3d Division to make contact with the Gela force. The company-size patrol inflicted heavy casualties on the Italians, who pulled back to their original position. The battering received during this attack on Gela finished the Livorno Division as an effective combat unit.

ROMANS IN UZBEKISTAN?

Many researchers have written about Roman penetration into what is now Azerbaijan and even possible direct contacts between Rome and the Chinese Imperial court. But an academic from Israel (professor Yulia Ustinova) recently has made a claim that Romans – it is argued legionaries – visited western Uzbekistan (the caves at Kara-Kamar) close to Afghanistan in the early centuries AD.

Indeed Yulia Ustinova, of the Ben Gurion university in Israel, wrote the book ‘New Latin and Greek Rock–Inscriptions from Uzbekistan’ about this astonishing possibility.

Obviously, it should be stated that this would be an extraordinary occurrence. But it is not an impossible suggestion. Armenia was briefly a Roman province in the second century AD and a Roman ‘protectorate’ for much, much longer. And a Roman military detachment went just a little further and left an inscription on the western banks of the Caspian Sea near Baku.

Roman legionaries did an inscription in eastern Azerbaijan (60 kms from Baku), which reads: "IMP DOMITIANO CAESARE AVG GERMANICO LVCIVS IVLIVS MAXIMVS LEGIONIS XII FVL, Under imperator Domitian, Caesar, Augustus Germanicus, Lucius Julius Maximus, Legio XII Fulminata", but these Kara-Kamar inscription are located nearly 1500 kms more to the east and so it is the furthest eastern place a Roman soldier went.


The Roman inscription in Baku:

In the late 1980s some "Mediterranean graffiti" were discovered in a complex of caves at Kara-Kamar in Uzbekistan near the border with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, to the west of Termez. These kinds of graffiti were 3 inscriptions: 2 in Latin and one in Greek:

1) ROD/ PAN …/ I M

2) PAN/ G REX/ AP. LG

3) RIPOS ETHE(KE)

The three inscriptions studied in detail by Ustinova are extremely abbreviated, mainly the first two in Latin. This is natural in Roman inscriptions and even more so in graffiti. But it also means to some critics that a few scratches, possibly from another alphabet or epoch could easily be misread into Latin or Greek, especially given that there are other graffiti in Russian, Uzbek and Arabic that complicate the readings.

So the letters ‘I M‘ at the end of the first inscription are taken by the academic editor to be an abbreviation for ‘Invictus Mithras’, ‘Unconquered Mithras’. The editor goes on to suggest that the complex may have been used by Roman soldiers as a Mithraeum.

AP LG is meanwhile interpreted as ‘AP(ollinaris) L(e)G(io)’ ‘the Apollonian Legion XV’. The XV was based in Cappadocia in the east of the Empire, so this would make sense. But again the ‘abbreviation’ (if that is what it is) could be read in other ways and the missing number is a bit strange, according to critics.

The evidence that gives some context to these finds can be read in "The Historia Augusta" (written during the late centuries of the Roman empire), which claims that the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD) received ambassadors from the Bactarian kings, almost certainly the Kushan Emperor offering friendship, and that the Kushan Empire would have controlled Kara-Kamar. Military contact could have come on the back of such a visit or another now forgotten embassy. Alternatively the Roman soldiers could have been prisoners.

The authors of the Kara-Kamar Latin inscriptions -according to Ustinova- regarded the cave complex suitable for the Mithraic worship. These inscriptions were incised by soldiers of the "XIV Apollinaris Legio" in the second-third centuries AD, and the cave complex itself served perhaps as a "Mithraeum" (a temple to worship the Mithraic cult).


The inscriptions inside the Kara-Kamar cave are located not far away from Alexandria on Oxus, an important city of the pre-Roman Bactrian kingdom:

The publication of this fascinating possibility came from Yulia Ustinova: her authority means that these inscriptions must be taken seriously.

Yulia Ustinova wrote later, supporting her findings from critics: ‘In fact, I still think the inscriptions were left there by Roman soldiers, probably captives: there were no other inscriptions in Latin or Greek characters in the cave, and while those in Latin consist of abbreviations that – theoretically – can be interpreted otherwise, the Greek one is unequivocal. Now, who and when could leave a Greek inscription in Uzbekistan? I still consider the suggestion put forward in the Hephaistos article plausible.’

However I want to remember that emperor Trajan in 116 AD conquered all Mesopotamia and obtained the submission of the king of Persia, Parthamaspates, who so was the Roman client king of the Parthian Empire (he was the son of the Parthian emperor Osroes I).

Indeed Parthamaspates, after spending much of his life in Roman exile, accompanied the Roman Emperor Trajan on the campaign to conquer Parthia. Trajan originally planned to annex Parthia as part of the Roman Empire, but ultimately decided instead to place Parthamaspates on his father's throne as a Roman client, doing so in 116 AD after defeating the Parthians at a battle near Ctesiphon. But just one year later, following Roman withdrawal from the area, the Parthians easily defeated Parthamaspates and reclaimed the Parthian throne in 117 AD.

We know that Romans always helped the kings of their "puppet states" (historically called "Client-States"), sending some legionaries inside the territories of these Client States: obviously I wonder if someone of these legionaries went to the northern limits of the Parthian kingdom for some reasons we cannot know...may be these legionaries reached the Kara-Kamar caves located between the Parthian territories and the post-Bactrian kingdom!

A "LITTLE ITALY" IN BOSNIA: STIVOR

In the northwest of Serbian Bosnia there it is a small community of nearly 400 persons, whose ancestors came from the Italian Trentino 130 years ago: the village is called "Stivor".

The Italian emigrants from the Trentino valley of "Valsugana" (devastated by floodings) in 1882 settled all around Bosnia and Herzegovina: around Tuzla, Konjic, Banja Luka and Prnjavor. Nearby the town of Prnjavor they created a settlement called "Štivor'. Its founders travelled for months on foot and brought with them their customs, language and beliefs that have remained almost the same so far. The Italians in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina mostly returned to their fatherland before the outbreak of World War I. But the population of Stivor was much more attached to this new land and only at recent times they have started emigrating to Italy in huge amounts. However as late as 1921 the number of the Italians living in the area was 292.

After the end of World War II farming remained the predominant economic activity in the area, but some Italians of Stivor moved to Italy and Europe. When Tito’s Yugoslavia ended in 1991 and the war in Bosnia broke out, Stivor had 700 inhabitants but most of the Stivorians escaped abroad and many of them reached the Trentino region, their ancestral home. Since then around 530 Stivorians have re-settled in Trentino, and on March 9, 1997 the ”Circolo Trentini di Stivor” (or “Stivorian-Trentinis’ Club”) was founded in Roncegno near Trento.

Today there is a local "Trentino Association" that keeps in touch with their home country. The aims of this Bosnian Association are the preservation of Trentino culture and tradition in Stivor (a very small city where 92% of the inhabitants are descendants of the first Italian settlers). On the actual cemetery can be found typical italian names from the Valsugana in Trentino: Andreatta, Agostini, Dalsasso, Postal, Moretti, Bocher, Osti, Fusinato, Montibeller, Dalprà, Paternoster, Valandro. The population of Stivor still uses a special Trentino dialect from the region of Valsugana, which is slowly dying out in Italy.

It is noteworthy to pinpoint that the creation of Stivor in 1882 is similar to the founding of "Carani", the first "Italian" locality created in eastern Europe -near Romanian Timisoara in 1734- by emigrants from the Trentino more than one century earlier.( href="http://prinbanat.ro/en/the-castle-of-count-mercy-from-carani/ )

Following is an article dedicated to this small Italian community in the Balkans:

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"Bosnia, the ethnic group you don’t expect".............written by Alessandro Giulio Midlarz

Hidden among the woods of the Republic of Srpska and overlooked by geographical maps, "Stivor" is a two-kilometre stretch of road where a com- munity of Trentino nationals has survived for the past 125 years. Two world wars, Tito’s regime and the fierce ethnic war waged in recent times have not changed their identity. A bilingual sign welcomes the visitor. A bar, a food shop and about a hundred small houses line a ribbon of asphalt…

A Catholic outpost in Ottoman territory

Almost all the inhabitants of Stivor are Italian, the grandchildren and great- grandchildren of a small group – about five hundred in all – of Trentino natives who left the Valsugana valley, then a part of Austria, in 1882 after it had been devastated by a flood on the Brenta river and poverty.

Drawn by a massive manpower recruitment campaign, they should have all ended up in Brazil; instead, they entrusted their money and hopes to a middleman who abandoned them at the port of Trieste with neither tickets nor prospects – just after Austria-Hungary had signed the Treaty of Berlin allowing it to administer a still-Turkish Bosnia and started “selecting” settlers to create a Catholic outpost on the ridge between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Ottoman territory. The only formality involved was a request on stamped paper.

It was time to leave for the Balkans: a month and a half’s walk pulling creaking carts piled high with equipment and seeds along rutted mule tracks until they came to a stop in a sea of green nothingness. They cut down trees, tilled the land and built shacks. Thus Stivor came into existence.

There were other peasants – Polish, Czech, Ukrainian – not far away, their story also one of forced emigration. The Trentino natives have never moved since; however, instead of being absorbed by the trend towards standardization of usages and customs, they have maintained their ties with their country of origin. As recently as World War II, Stivor was a sealed-off community; weddings and baptisms were private affairs and not even subsequent intermarriages with Bosnian Serbs in the area have managed to affect their identity, so much so that nearly all the inhabitants are now partially related to each other.

Photo (done in the late 1920s) of a group of the first Valsugana settlers in Stivor of Bosnia

There are a handful of surnames, always the same ones: Agostini, Andreata, Moreti, Montibeler, Postaj, Dalsaso, Bocher, Paternoster. Some have dropped the double letters from their names or incorporated hitherto unknown consonants to adapt to the local phonetic structure: a visit to the small cemetery makes it possible to date the stages of this concession to integration. The first immigrant tomb, however, is located just outside the village with no surrounding wall; it lies in the shade of three century-old linden trees, crystallized in an almost unreal silence, wrapped in eternal peace since 1883.

Close ties with Italy

Giuseppe Moreti, a cordial 50-year-old man with a cool gaze, is the community’s spokesman and the president of the local branch of the Trentini nel mondo association of Trentino nationals abroad. “There are two hundred of us”, he specifies immediately. “In 1998 the Italian government recognised our right to also have Italian citizenship and our passports were sent to us, but Italian has always been the mother tongue here anyway, even at school. Unfortunately there are few young people today, because when the war broke out in 1992, many of our youngsters ran away to Italy to look for work. The village remained without electricity or telephones for two years. Those who stayed on had to make the best of it”. As he speaks, he glances at the fields that start outside his window.

There is not a single cottage, house or shed in Stivor without at least one hectare of cultivated land: vegetable gardens, vineyards and orchards. Each family also has a cistern to collect rainwater for household use and draws drinking water from wells.

The Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy has dipped into regional funds to solve Stivor’s water supply problem. In collaboration with local administrations, it has already built two huge tanks and three big wells and invested 500,000 euros in the construction of an aqueduct which is expected to be functional in five years’ time. “Some have come back”, Giuseppe continues as a boy on the road waves heartily to him in greeting. “Others commute to and from Valsugana, where they are employed as specialised workers in large construction companies. A worker earns 400 convertible marks a month here, or about 200 euros, so it is understandable that many of them prefer to remain in Trentino. So some people come to visit their families every weekend while others only come here for the holidays”.

All year round, mainly in summer, cars keep coming and going between northern Bosnia and places like Strigno, Borgo and Roncegno in Trentino. Whole wedding processions often leave from Trentino, complete with traditional bands bringing up the parade, to come and get married in the little village church and celebrate with a wedding lunch of polenta and luganega sausages in the club hall. It’s not just a question of roots: a reception for two hundred people, i.e. the entire village, only costs about 2,000 euros.

Those who have left and those who wish to return

Financial considerations aside, the call of the land and relatives is undying even for those who have crossed over to another world.

Stefano Montibeler, a sturdy 67-year-old, greets everyone he meets with the good cheer and enthusiasm of the village’s most unexpected guest. This is the eighth time in the past forty years that he is back visiting his native land. The embroidered kangaroo logo on his polo shirt and his caricatural accent reveal his story of a political refugee outside the bounds of Europe. Having fled Tito’s regime in 1965, just married and with “nary a dinar in my pockets”, he stopped off in Trieste and on the outskirts of Latina, where he and his wife decided to get on the first ship to Australia, an alternative to America for fortune seekers of the time. A month’s journey at sea, passing through the Suez Canal; the difficult process of adaptation, the apprenticeships at thousands of different jobs: a story shared by millions of Italian emigrants between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and today’s Third World emigrants, who have simply reversed the direction of the migratory flow. Montibeler now lives in Canberra, where he is a building contractor: a successful one, not least because “the Australians have never really been all that keen on back-breaking work”.

He has only heard about the war in other people’s stories, unlike Ivan Osti, 36, who has a passion for Belgrade’s Red Star football club and exhibits a rare courteousness. Osti experienced the war from up close. He tells of the foolhardiness and determination of his frequent trips from Bosnia to Italy in the three-year period from 1992 to 1995: “Stivor was spared, because they knew we were Italian, but in Derventa, a village only fifteen kilometres away as the crow flies, the bombers razed everything to the ground. They would pass close overhead, flying so low that our caps would fly off our heads”. He had to pay the municipality a tax of 150 German marks a month to be able to leave Stivor, money that was meant to finance war logistics but “ended up making a couple of people richer”. Every trip was an odyssey. In the beginning he would travel via Slovenia and Croatia but the gun battles and army roadblocks became increasingly frequent and dangerous, as he risked being killed because of a misunderstanding. The alternative was to skirt the Balkans via Austria and Hungary, entering Bosnia through Serbia.

Today, Ivan hopes that someone will finally decide to invest in this land and that young Stivorians can come back, drawn by new jobs. Some have even started thinking of hunting-related tourism, advertising empty houses on the Internet and renting them to Italian hunters in search of virgin and, above all – a rarity for Bosnia – mine-free woodland.

A minority that goes against the tide

While waiting for Stivorians to rebuild the future, it is up to the elderly to maintain the link with their ancestors and carry the religion forward in harmony with their Orthodox and Muslim neighbours. Their homes are shrines to piety and tradition, with religious icons, faded photographs, embroidered lace and the inevitable bottle of slivovitza, homemade plum brandy. Listening to Giuseppe’s loquacious 80- year-old mother Elena, 83-year-old Antonia or 91-year-old Arcangelo takes you on a journey into time, for their throats emit a dialect that has remained unchanged since the 19th century, a small treasure for ethnolinguists.

In the jigsaw puzzle of ethnic groups in Bosnia today, the Italians are the smallest of the minorities and it is hard to even find a trace of them on the official maps. They are certainly not represented in the last census, which dates back to 1991: 44% Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak), 31% Serb, 17% Croat, 6% Yugoslav (people nostalgic for the Federal Socialist Republic and mixed marriages).

Since then there have only been estimates. The ethnic cleansing and the war refugees have shuffled the cards. Going by the figures in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, there does not seem to have been a radical change: 48% Bosnian Muslim, 37.1% Serb, 14.3% Croat and a tiny but heterogeneous 0.6% “Other” which also includes the Stivor Italians.

Reviewing the data from a geographical standpoint, however, the country has changed its description: BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network), the regional journalistic organisation, estimates that in the Republic of Srpska, where the majority of the population was formerly Bosnian Muslim, over 90% of the current population comprises people of Serb origin. It is here, far from political games and racial hatred, that the tale of Stivor’s Trentino natives continues to be told.

The small Bosnian cemetery marks the stages of the Trentino nationals’ integration. The first immigrant tomb, however, is located just outside the village, in the shade of three century-old linden trees. In the jigsaw puzzle of ethnic groups in Bosnia today, the Italians are the smal- lest of the minorities and it is up to the elderly to maintain the link with their ancestors and carry the religion forward in harmony with their Orthodox and Muslim neighbours. Young people who witnessed the war from up close, hope that someone will decide to invest in this land.

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For further information please go to ( http://stivor.altervista.org/ct-menu-item-15/ct-menu-item-17 )

ROMANS IN AZANIA/RAPHTA (ACTUAL TANZANIA)

There are many studies about the Romans in eastern Africa (Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania coast). Some are done by Felix Chami, professor at the Dar es Salaam university (read http://www.academia.edu/15058889/Metropolis_of_Rhapta_and_Azania -----&-----http://nabataea.net/juani.html ).

This academic professor is detailing with his researches the Roman presence in the Tanzania coast, a region used to be called in classical centuries with the name "Azania" and that had as the main port a city called "Raphta". Of course we must pinpoint that Romans had a huge commerce for centuries with Raphta, that was the southernmost locality which was possible to reach from their Red sea port of Adulis using the Monsoon winds.

And we must remember that Ptolemy the Geographer, a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt, writing in his Geography in the second century AD, described the interior of Africa beyond Ethiopia quite accurately: "toward the west are the Mountains of the Moon from which the lakes of the Nile receive snow water." This description shows a knowledge due mainly to the commerce done by Roman merchants in the eastern Africa coast

During Caesar times, the port of Rhapta (located near Dar es Salaam in Tanzania) emerged as the principal commercial center on the east African coast. With increasing trade, groups of professional merchants and entrepreneurs emerged at Rhapta, and coins came into general use on the east African coast. Merchants of Rhapta imported iron goods such as spears, axes, and knives from southern Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean region controlled by Rome in exchange for ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoise shell, and slaves obtained from interior regions.

Indeed Ptolemy goes on to itemize a long list of towns and ports all down the eastern seaboard of Africa. Some scholars believe that his knowledge of the coast extended as far south as Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique. Ptolemy included details of the latitude of each place he mentions. The most intriguing of these is a port called Rhapta which is also mentioned in a book written by an unknown Greek author called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The Periplus is probably the most comprehensive documents we have of the ancient world of the Indian Ocean.

According to the most thorough translation by Lionel Casson: "Two runs beyond this island comes the very last port of trade on the coast of Azania, called Rhapta, where there are great quantities of ivory and tortoise shell."

The following is a map from Wikipedia showing the possible location of Raphta in the eastern Africa coast:

A ‘run’ is about 100 nautical miles. The mysterious island is very likely Zanzibar which means that Rhapta would have lain at the mouth of the Rufiji River in Tanzania. This is supported by finds by the archaeologist Felix Chami of the University of Dar Es Salaam in which he uncovered Greco-Roman pottery and Syrian glass. Even more recent discoveries based on his reading of Ptolemy have led to his unearthing shards of pottery and human bones on Juani island off the coast at Rufiji which point to extensive East African trade in the ancient world. It is possible that the island the Periplus talks of is the larger Mafia island off the Rufiji delta which would then add further evidence to the Romans and Greeks being familiar with the coast as far south as Mozambique.

Even old Chinese documents point to the likelihood that the Greeks and Romans were familiar with the east and southern Africa. The fragmentary remains of text and footnotes of the "Weilüe" -an account of the Wei dynasty by historian Yu Huan written in the third century- refers to the ‘kingdom of Da Qin’ (which was Rome) and the territory of ‘Zesan’ which scholars believe is likely to be a corruption of ‘Azania’, the Roman and Greek name for the East African coast.

The Periplus (written around 50 AD) explicitly states that Azania was subject to Charibaêl, the king of both the Sabaeans and Homerites in the southwest corner of Arabia (including Aden). The kingdom is known to have been a Roman ally at this period. Charibaêl is stated in the Periplus to be “a friend of the (Roman) emperors, thanks to continuous embassies and gifts” and, therefore, Azania could fairly be described as a vassal or dependency of Rome (Client-State), just as Zesan is described in the Weilue. Indeed in the Chinese Weilue (written around 230 AD) there it is written:

Section 15 – The Kingdom of Zesan (Azania). The king of Zesan (Azania) is subject to Da Qin (Rome). His seat of government is in the middle of the sea. To the north you reach Lüfen (Leukê Komê). It can take half a year to cross the water, but with fast winds it takes a month. (Zesan) is in close communication with Angu city (Gerrha) in Anxi (Parthia). You can (also) travel (from Zesan) southwest to the capital of Da Qin (Rome), but the number of "li" is not known.

Furthermore we have to remember that the emperor Augustus planned an expedition around Africa with roman ships starting from the Red Sea, but it was never done.

Coins survive for centuries and are reliable indicators of extensive trade, but they can be carried for thousands of miles in a leather pouch or even someone’s pocket so they are uncertain indicators of any Greek or Roman presence in southern Africa. Nonetheless, Victorian archaeologists searching the ruins of the civilization of Great Zimbabwe found a coin from the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 138 - 161) in an old shaft near Mutare at a depth of nearly 25 metres which indicates an age of some antiquity. Curiously, too, a Roman coin from the reign of Emperor Trajan (AD 98 -117) was found on the Congo River about a century ago. Furthermore, J. Innes Miller points out that Roman coins have been found on Pemba island, just north of Rhapta, and Germans of Tanganika found two Roman coins in Kilwa Kisiwani on an island next to the Mozambique border (read http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00672706609511349?journalCode=raza20 ).

Indeed on the central Mozambique coast, Dundo and Chibuene have produced glass beads from the Mediterranean sea and Middle Eastern pottery of mid/late first-millennium age. An Omani green glazed ware fragment at Chibuene suggests that contacts reach back to the early fifth century (read http://www.researchgate.net/publication/265050510_Glass_finds_from_Chibuene_a_6th_to_17th_century_AD_port_in_southern_Mozambique ): these contacts from Chibuene (located south of the Zambesi river delta) probably reached the highlands of what is now Zimbabwe. This suggest that probably agriculture was favored by roman commerce in the region of Africa that a few centuries later saw the rise of the famous ancient "Zimbabwe kingdom".

In the fifth century the Roman commerce with Azania & Raphta seems to disappear, probably because of the barbarian invasions in Europe.

Recently have been discovered what look like some ruins of Rafta on the coast of Tanzania: read http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/africas-atlantis-lost-roman-city-rhapta-discovered-off-tanzanias-mafia-island-believes-1564843

The following is one of the researches about the Romans in Raphta:

The Graeco-Romans and Paanchea/Azania: sailing in the Erythraean Sea (by Dr. Felix CHAMI)

Introduction

This paper is another attempt to elucidate how the Graeco-Romans had extended trade links to the coast of East Africa and probably to the interior of East Africa. This undertaking is probably the first of its kind to collate a variety of archaeological evidence recently recovered from the coast and islands of Tanzania with existing Graeco-Roman documents. Previous efforts have relied mostly on historical data and few objects such as coins found in non-archaeological contexts.

The focus of this paper is on how the Red Sea was used to facilitate contact between communities of the Mediterranean Sea and those of the Red Sea and East Africa or Paanchea/Azania. However, some evidence, published elsewhere (see for example Chami 2002a, 2002b), may also be used to show that similar contacts existed between East Africa, the Middle East and south-east Asia. The present work comprises the new archaeological finds from the Tanzanian coast of 2000-2002. Also the work utilizes, with much more confidence, data from early Graeco-Roman documents hitherto referred to as fairy stories.

It is important to define what is termed in this work as the Graeco-Roman period. The standard meaning obtained from the Random House College Dictionary is that of a period having both Greek and Roman characteristics. Such characteristics occurred in the period when the Romans took over the empire of the Greeks in the second part of the last century BC and hence they fused together both Greek and Roman influences: this process continued until about the end of the 3rd century AD. The use of the concept "Graeco-Roman" in this work extends further back to cover the period following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC until the end of the 3rd century AD.

With this definition, the Graeco-Roman period thus can be divided into two phases. The first phase is the one in which East Africa is linked to the economy of the Mediterranean world via the Red Sea. The emerging historical and archaeological data portray the existence of contact between the regions of the Mediterranean/Red Sea and East Africa beginning from about the early 3rd century BC. This is the period when the Greeks had taken over the control of the eastern Mediterranean and Ptolemaic rule had been installed in Egypt, Greek sailors sailed in the Red Sea and had probably reached East Africa. The second phase of Graeco-Roman economic links with East Africans during the Roman rule of the Mediterranean Sea beginning with the reign of Caesar Augustus, from about 27 BC. Due to the eminent power of the Arabs in the Red Sea and in the northern Indian Ocean in the last century BC, the late Ptolemaic rule and the early Roman rule may have linked with East Africa along the Nile via Meroe (for conspectus see Chami 1999a). It was in the time of Caesar Augustus, more so after the BC/AD changeover, that Graeco-Roman sailors and traders were opened to the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea. Arab power was crushed and Aden, the town controlling the trade from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, was destroyed by the Romans (see Begley and de Puma eds 1991; Cinimo 1994).

Romans in the African coast of the Indian Ocean

The extension of the Roman economic influence to the Indian Ocean reaching the Far East and East Africa probably created an unprecedented world economic order not so well documented before. The new era is known to have lasted three centuries until the Roman control of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean passed to the Aksumites and Sasanians respectively (see Whitehouse and Williamson 1973).

The earliest Graeco-Roman document discussing East Africa, then called "Paanchea", is that of Iambulus, a work preserved in Diodorus (see Oldfather 1961). This document offers in detail a forced travel of Iambulus from somewhere on the Horn of Africa/Red Sea to islands of East Africa, at the equator, in about the 3rd century BC. Recent scholars, and indeed the ancient scholars, doubted the authenticity of Iambulus report rating it as fantasy (see Cary and Warmington 1963, 241).

Key aspects of Paanchea in Iambulus report are: the existence of seven islands populated by people practicing similar culture, literacy and a communal but quasi-Neolithic mode of production. The people of the islands were religious believing in the sun and stars. Another aspect of Iambulus report is the ancient sailing. His trip was done within six months from the Red Sea and when he left the islands, after seven years of stay, it took him a similar time to reach the north-west coast of India. The report suggests that the three regions of the Red Sea, East Africa and India were in contact.

Another person known to have visited Paanchea at the time of Iambulus is Euhemerus, yet his report was also doubted. Another contemporary, Eudoxus, is said to have reached the coast of East Africa after being forced by monsoon winds when sailing to the Red Sea from a mission in India. It was this accidental voyage that led him realise that one could circumnavigate Africa and that people of the Atlantic Ocean based at Gades in the modern coast of Spain had reached the coast of East Africa from the south.

It has been noted that Roman scholars were skeptical of their Greek predecessors knowledge of East Africa, referring to it as fantasy. What should be noted here is that the Greeks found Egyptians having the knowledge of Paanchea (Cary and Warmington 1963, 240) and must have learnt from them how to reach East Africa. It would seem that Egyptians had kept the secrets of East Africa for several millennia as "Paanchea" carries similar phonetic sounds like "Pnt", which although recent scholars have read it as "Punt", could actually have read "Pwanchi". The territory was later identified in the Roman period as Zangion or "AZANIA" with the focus being much more on the Ocean or "za" as opposed to the coastal land or "Apwanchi". The same territory was identified in the Islamic period as Zanchi meaning "land of Za" (see Chami 2002b). The people of the East African coast still refer to their coastal strip as "Pwani", which preserves the phonetic sounds in "Punt" and "Paanchi".

Although Punt has been located, unconvincingly, on the African coast of the Red Sea (see Kitchen 1993) new evidence points further south, as the Greeks who reported to have reached Paanchea, also given the location at the Red Sea area, sailed for several months from the Red Sea in the general direction of East Africa. Paanchea was reported to have had large settlements, the largest of which was called Panara. Whether the capital was located on the island or on the coast or the interior is not mentioned.

However, Strabo who also compiled data from his predecessors, i.e. Hipparchus (2nd century BC) and Eratosthenes (3rd century BC), described the climate and some cultures of the deep interior of East Africa (see Jones 1960). These included well populated wet highlands, and there were people in some parts of the interior who ate locusts, as indeed is done today by the people of the Great Lake region; according to Pliny some inhabitants smeared themselves with ochre (see Rackham 1961, 479), an aspect well attested today ethnographically and archaeologically for the Rift Valley people.

Another important aspect of the Red Sea-East Africa relationship is the trade in spices, particularly cinnamon and cassia, reported at this time to have been reaching the Mediterranean and the Red Sea worlds from East Africa. Indeed Iambulus mission was in search of spices. Paanchea was reported to have traded spices with Arabia, another reason suggesting that the country was East Africa rather than the Red Sea coast of Africa. Strabo speculated the origin of the cinnamon and cassia to have been near the Nile Sudd. However, Pliny corrected him suggesting that it was the East African Acave dwellers@, who had been related to the people of the Red Sea, who brought the spices from a place far in the Ocean, pointing to south-east Asia (Rackham 1961, 63). As it will be shown later the Late Stone Age/Neolithic people on the islands of Tanzania lived in caves.

The second phase of Graeco-Roman literature is that of the early centuries AD comprising the celebrated Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Ptolemy's Geographia. This historiography has been thoroughly discussed by other scholars (see translations by Schoff 1912; Huntingford 1980; Casson 1989; and discussion by Datoo 1970; Kirwan 1986; Horton 1990; Chami1999a, 1999b). Only a few points need to be mentioned here. The Periplus, written in about AD 40-70, describes Azania as extending from a place south of Somalia to the general coast of Tanzania. An island, called Menuthias, probably to be identified as Zanzibar, is mentioned and an emporium called Rhapta is also described and probably located near the Rufiji River. The trade route connecting parts of the Red Sea to Azania and India is described and it is also reported that the Arabs of the Red Sea coast had controlled trade at Rhapta arguing that Azania was under their suzerainty.

Ptolemy's Geographia, written in the 2nd century AD, adds very little to the Periplus apart from offering latitudes and longitudes to the settlements provided. The Geographia suggests the growth of more settlements and the development of Rhapta as a metropolis. The coast of Mozambique and the offshore islands were then known because it is here where Ptolemy places his Menuthias.

Probably one of the most significant contributions made by Ptolemy's Geographia is the inclusion of data about the deep interior. One of the regular Roman visitors to Azania, called Diogenes, visited Lake Nyanza (Victoria), and knew about the Ruwenzori range of mountains (The Mountains of the Moon), the Uganda Nile and a mountain with three peaks probably Kilimanjaro (for conspectus see Huntingford 1980; Chami 1999a). Imports to East Africa included iron objects, wine and grain whereas exports included ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoise shells, and coconut oil/nautilus shells.

It was noted earlier that Graeco-Roman documents, actually of all periods, were of little use up to 1995 because the archaeology of East Africa had not recovered any evidence to corroborate the history. Whereas the Greek reports were not believed, Periplus and Ptolemy's reports were strongly approved because they were strongly supported by archaeological evidence, particularly from India and Sri Lanka. Moreover, Roman history corroborated sailing of the Roman traders in the Indian Ocean reaching as far as South Asia (see Begley and de Puma eds 1991; Cinimo 1994).

The main thrust of this paper is to provide archaeological evidence spanning the period of GraecoBRoman era showing that there were settlements on the coast of East Africa linked by trade to the Red Sea and beyond. The earliest material evidence reported suggesting the existence of such settlements and trade link is that of Chittick (1966) who summarized the report of the finds of various coins of rulers of the Ptolemaic Egypt, Roman Empire and other rulers of the Middle East from the last centuries BC. As none of these were not found in archaeological contexts, the data is unreliable. The next material evidence for trade link between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean was that provided by Chittick (1980; Smith and Wright 1988) from Ras Hafun. Here finds of Roman pottery in archaeological context dating between the 1st century BC and 3rd century AD were recovered. The problem with this site find, however, was that it was not directly pointing to East Africa and the same site could have been serving trade to India.

The third material evidence linking the Mediterranean world with Azania, incontrovertible for the first time, was the report by this author, of "ROMAN BEADS" from the Rufiji Delta region dating back to the early centuries AD (Chami 1999b). The most important of those beads collected is a segmented gold/silver glass bead made on Rhodes between 100 BC and 300 AD. If the beads reached the coast of East Africa before the 1st century AD, it is probable that they could have come through the Nile Valley route via Meroe where similar beads are found (Welsby 1996). If they reached Azania after the BC/AD changeover, it is likely that they followed the Red Sea route as the Indian Ocean was not yet opened to the Roman traders, and such beads have yet to be recovered in the Red Sea or Southern Arabia.

The fourth piece of evidence, also incontrovertible, consists of archaeological finds of both Roman and Indian material deposited in a limestone cave in Zanzibar, and also reported by this author (see Chami and Wafula 1999, Chami 2001). The artefacts include "ROMAN RED WARE POTTERY" similar to those reported by Smith and Wright (1988) from Ras Hafun (this and other finds have been illustrated in Chami 2002a). In association were green and blue glazed and non-glazed Persian wares and Indian beads (including a carnelian bead). A C14 sample from associated charcoal gives a date in the last century BC. Since then, discoveries of many trade goods have been recovered from the island of Mafia off the Rufiji delta (I illustrate this finds here with colour pictures for the first time since they were discovered in 2001-2002). The preliminary report of the archaeological work yielding these finds is found elsewhere (Chami 2000) and a more detailed report is under preparation (Chami, Sinclair, Nordstrom and Knutson forthcoming).

The limestone shelter preserving these materials is found in the small island of Mafia called Juani. The cultural layer, a Late Stone Age/Neolithic with the materials, is now dated by C14 to the last part of the 1st millennium BC. Imported goods include both Graeco-Roman and Indian ceramics. The potsherds of Mediterranean origin are of great interest because they can also provide a relative date. Four potsherds are of marl clay from the Lower Nile region (Nordstrom, pers. comm.). Such pottery was known to have been traded by Egyptians to the Nubian Kingdom of Napata in about the 7th BC (Kendal 1997, 162). It is likely that this kind of pottery could have reached the islands of East Africa via the Red Sea in the time of Iambulus.

Another important find is that of red painted ware identified by Sunil Gupta (pers. comm.) to be of Indian origin and dating from the early centuries AD. However, since the C14 dates for this ware are earlier (falling in the last centuries BC) and since this pottery is associated with Neolithic material rather than the Early Iron Age material found in the upper sequence of the cave occupation, the red painted ware must have reached the coast of East Africa before at least the BC/AD changeover. Vessels of red painted ware are also known to have been used in the Red Sea area in the late centuries BC and early centuries AD (Curtis/Sinclair-personal comm.). Another class of pottery found in the island of Mafia dating to the same early period is black ware also identified by Gupta to have belonged to the Early Iron Age of India. More than 25 potsherds recovered from the island of Mafia have been identified as of Indian origin.

Another category of find linking the Red Sea and East Africa is that of beads now identified as Graeco-Roman. These include one Aeye@ bead and one mosaic bead described elsewhere by Dubin (1987, 60-61) as Hellenistic and Roman period dating from between 300 BC to AD 400 (for illustration see Chami 2002a). Dr St J. Simpson (pers. comm.) who saw the picture of the beads suggested that the Aeye@ bead Acould be pre-Islamic and there is evidence for both Roman and Partho-Sasanian from the Horn of Africa (e.g. Aksum and Ras Hafun).

Prior to 1990 only historical documents existed to show that the Red Sea region had provided a vital economic link between East Africa and the Mediterranean communities. The communities of the Red Sea regions involved in this link included Nabataeans, Zoskales and Homerites/Sabaeans (see Casson 1989, 44). Although early (Greek) documents were known by modern scholars, no one seriously believed them and they were therefore not discussed in the historiography of Eastern Africa. Places such as Punt and Paanchea, mentioned in the early literature, were therefore placed in the Red Sea region (see Kitchen 1993; Phillips 1997).

Although the literature of the Roman period was believed by most scholars, the tendency was to situate Azania and Rhapta more to the north of the eastern Africa coast. This was either due to racial biases in the thinking that it was only Hamites/Cushites who could have found trading towns (see Allen 1983; Horton 1990; Ehret 1998) or it reflected a lack of archaeological data. As suggested in Chittick's publications, the problem was how to substantiate the documents in the absence of archaeological records. In his effort to find Rhapta, Ptolemy's metropolis of Azania, Chittick (1982, 5Cool) had this to say before his death in the early 1980s: It remains possible that all traces of Rhapta have been washed away or buried.

The summary of the archaeological finds presented above, gathered since 1990, by this author and his colleagues now incontrovertibly prove that the Greco-Roman documents preserved only a scanty, patchy picture of what happened in Panchea or Azania, now East Africa. I have already attempted to redraw the ancient cultural and economic system that embraced the Middle East, the Nile, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean territories in the ancient time (Chami 1999a, 1999b, Chami 2002a, 2002b). The archaeological data provided above adds to what I have reported before and hence strengthens my interpretation of the historical records.

In view of what I have discussed elsewhere, only a few things need to be reiterated in this work. Firstly, East Africa had a thriving population with trade centres from the last centuries BC or even earlier. The people of the Late Stone Age who also domesticated animals like chicken, dogs and cats, first entered into contacts with other cultures of the west, north and east. It is likely that those Late Stone Age people of the coast of East Africa occupied caves as living houses or just for sanctuary. They used pottery and used small quartz pebbles to make their microlithic tools and blades. Apart from domesticates, they also hunted wild animals and fished. The culture of these people and its comparative analysis have been provided elsewhere (Chami 2001; Chami and Kwekason 2003).

It would seem that these are the people identified by Pliny as cave dwellers known to have passed spices from south-east Asia to the Red Sea. Both Pliny and Iambulus have shown that the people of East Africa had cultural and trade relationship with the people of the Red Sea. Iambulus suggested that the people of the Red Sea coast sent him to the islands of East Africa as sacrifice to the people described as fair and good. The Periplus reported the claim by the people of the Red Sea, who were found trading and staying in Rhapta, that Azania was traditionally under their suzerainty. Chittick (1980) showed that the people of Ras Hafun, whose site was found to have trade goods of the last centuries BC, had also used stone tools like those of East Africa (also see Chami and Wafula 1999).

It would however seem that by the time of the Periplus and Ptolemy, in the early centuries AD, the people of the coast of East Africa would have started melting iron. If this was the case, as testified today archaeologically (see Chami 1999b & c), then the people of the Periplus time in East Africa were already producing iron objects. The question is therefore why the main imports of the Azania were iron tools? Various explanations including that of exchanging bloom for fine and finished tools from the Red Sea or the Mediterranean regions has been suggested (Chami1999a; Mapunda 2002).

We now know, from the archaeology reported above, that the Periplus does not provide the entire list of what was imported and exported. Iron bloom could be one of the major items of trade as the Roman empire required much iron to be used in ship-building and weaponry. In fact the Romans stimulated the production of iron all over the empire and the periphery (Tylecote 1976) and the increased production of iron in Azania, as seen today in the archaeology of East Africa could have been stimulated by such demand.

Another thinking could be that the local production of iron did not satiate the local demand for iron tools required by the new agricultural communities of Azania then opened to the world market by the growth of Rhapta and other large settlements of the time. Importation of iron tools was then necessary to cater for the higher demand in the markets of Azania.

Another controversy is whether coconut oil was exported from Azania to the Red Sea markets and beyond as recognized in the early translations of the Periplus (Schoff 1912). Casson (1980, 1989) has argued that it was not coconut oil implied in the Periplus but nautilus shells. The current archaeological finds, however, would suggest that south-east Asian domesticates such as chicken and banana had already reached the coast of East Africa from the last millennium BC, which indicate that coconut could also have been domesticated in East Africa at the same time (see Chami 2001).

Another controversy, which can now be examined in view of the new archaeological finds, is whether it was East Africa which provided cinnamon and cassia to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean regions as suggested by Strabo and Pliny. Miller (1969) did suggest that it was the people of East Africa or Austranesians who got the spices from south-east Asia and trafficked them to the Red Sea and the Nile Valley routes to the Mediterranean region. On the other hand, Casson (1984) has argued that it was the people of the Somali coast, who received the Austranesian spices and passed them to the interior and to the Red Sea.

The find on the Tanzanian coast, on one hand, of remains of trade goods and domesticates of South Asia/Indian and, on the other hand, of the Red Sea/Mediterranean regions, dating back to the last millennium BC, would suggest that East Africa rather than Somalia or both would have played a major role in transferring the spices. In fact most of these trade items are found in caves. This fact corroborates Pliny's correction of Strabo that it was the cave dwellers of East Africa who brought spices from far in the ocean and passed them to the Red Sea.

The actual location of the Azanian capital of Rhapta remains ambiguous. However, archaeological indicators reported above suggest that it was located on the coast of Tanzania, in the region of Rufiji River and Mafia Island. It is in this region where the concentration of the Paanchea/Azanian period settlements has been discovered. Also according to the Periplus, if the island of Menuthias was Zanzibar, the peninsula after it would have been Dar-es-Salaam and a further sail past this peninsula would land one in the Rufiji region (see Datoo 1970; Kirwan 1986; Casson 1989).

Ptolemy puts Rhapta at latitude 81, which is the exact location of the Rufiji Delta and Mafia Island. The metropolis was about one degree to the interior near a large river and a bay with the same name. While the river should be regarded as the modern Rufiji River, the bay should definitely be the calm waters between the island of Mafia and the Rufiji area. The southern part of the bay is protected from the deep sea by numerous deltaic small islets separated from Mafia Island by shallow and narrow channels. The north is opened to the sea and any sailor entering the waters from the north would feel like entering in a bay. Even today the residents identify this waters as a bay referring it as a "female sea" as opposed to the more violent open sea on the other side of the island of Mafia.

The doyen of East African coastal archaeology, Neville Chittick was quite convinced that Rhapta was in the area of the Rufiji River. As noted earlier, his suggestion that the metropolis remains are now buried in the ocean, near the mouth of the river, where he surveyed, may not be acceptable in view of the information provided by Ptolemy. Since the location was put one degree away from the ocean, it would seem that the settlement was about 40 km or further to the interior. In this region larger ancient settlements, some with trade remains from the Mediterranean world, have been recovered (Chami 1999b). Future research in this general region may widen the knowledge now we possess about Rhapta and Azania.

The last point for discussion is the possible interior trade link between the coast of East Africa and the Nile valley. It was noted earlier that Strabo did suggest that cinnamon and cassia reached the Mediterranean region via the Sudd of Nile, south of Meroe. Pliny suggested that the origin was from the coast of East Africa. Miller (1969) has argued that there was an interior route from the coast of East Africa to the Nile Valley. This idea has been seconded by this author (Chami 1999a) who argued that the route may have gone through central Tanzania to the Great Lakes region.

The point, which has to be made here, is that when the Mediterranean states failed to reach the south-east Asian products through the Red Sea, due to the growing powers of Arabs or Persians, other routes were always explored. The most recent experience is that of the 16th century European (Mediterranean states) who had to circumnavigate Africa from the Atlantic Ocean via the Cape to get spices from south-east Asia, in order to avoid the Muslim blockade of the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Also to avoid Sasanians who dominated the northern Indian Ocean waters in the 4th- 6th centuries AD, according to Cosmas Indicopleustus (see Freeman-Grenville 1975), Aksumites used an interior route to trade with East Africa.

It is likely that before the rise of the Roman power in the Indian Ocean an interior route via Meroe had been used to reach the Indian Ocean and obtain goods from south-east Asia. This is probably the report found in Strabo. Also the story of Eudoxus that people of the Western Mediterranean Sea, at Gades in southern Spain, had circumnavigated Africa from the Atlantic Ocean, via the Cape, is another example. This could have occurred during the time of Persian power over the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

A sliver of evidence concerning a pre-Roman route to East Africa via Meroe is that Emperor Nero in the 1st century AD was sending expeditions to the source of Nile. One reason for it was to find out if the trade route operating there was still functioning. The mission came up with a report suggesting that the route had shifted to the Red Sea (Welsby 1996). The implication of this report is that goods figuring in this route must have originated from the coast of East Africa, because they could easily be re-routed through the Red Sea. Additional circumstantial evidence is provided by Diogenes' journey from the coast of East Africa/Rhapta to the source of Nile (Huntingford 1980). Diogenes must have been following a trade route to the deep interior. Whereas his mission could have been exploratory reminiscent of the recent historical explorers, another objective could also have been to spy whether the trade route continued to the Nile Valley. In view of the new archaeological data from the coast of Tanzania one can now start reassessing the shift of trade routes from time immemorial in relation to various power politics of the ancient times. It is when Sub-Saharan Africa is placed in the context of the Ancient Classical history with more positive involvement that a better picture of these trade routes will be made clear.

Conclusion

This work has attempted to put East Africa or Paanchea/Azania in the context of the Graeco-Roman world via the Red Sea. This has been done using the most recent archaeological finds from the Tanzanian coast. The data has been collated with Graeco-Roman reports in order to offer a clearer reconstruction of the relations between the two regions.

It has been shown that the coast of East Africa had Late Stone Age/Neolithic communities established probably from about 3000 BC. These communities, apart from hunting wild animals and fishing, did domesticate animals such as chicken, dogs and cats. It is likely that plants such as coconut and banana were also domesticated. It is at this time of Neolithic that these East African communities entered in trade relations with the north reaching the Mediterranean regions and with the east reaching as far as south-east Asia. The Indian Ocean islands, for example Zanzibar, were then occupied by such Neolithic people. These are people reported by Iambulus and other Greek writers having a capital called "Panara".

The new era came with the adoption of iron technology in the early centuries AD or slightly before. The communities of East Africa grew in size and now began trading with the Romans and people of Arabia. People were more cultivating and more settled. These are people trading with the Romans via the Red Sea, with their capital identified by the Periplus and by Ptolemy as Rhapta. The culture and the economy of these people spread quickly to the deep interior and as far south as southern Africa. The core of these communities may have been in the Rufiji-Mafia region where many sites of that time period are found some with remains of trade goods from the Mediterranean region.

It has been noted that in different time period of the East African history, trade routes changed depending with power politics of that time period. There were times the northerners reached East Africa through the interior routes and another time through the Ocean via the Red Sea. As trade routes are difficult to show archaeologically, this may take longer to demonstrate.

LINKED

Romans in equatorial west Africa (https://researchomnia.blogspot.com/2022/11/romans-in-equatorial-coast-of-western.html)

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