Americans in Italy

The British chronology of the war records under 30 June 1918 the arrival in Italy of the first contingent of United States troops. The date needs explaining. The only American combat unit that fought on the Italian front, the 332nd Infantry Regiment, arrived in Italy only at the end of July. The first organised units of the American army to reach Italy, at the end of June, were instead the sections of the US Army Ambulance Service. American airmen, for their part, had been training in Italy since the autumn of 1917.

The ambulance sections were intended for the Italian army. Thirty sections, 76 officers and 1,641 men in all, set out on 13 June from the training camp at Allentown, Pennsylvania. Each section numbered about 45 men and 20 Ford ambulances and served roughly one division. According to the history of the US Army Medical Department, these units reached Genoa while it was still June, and their arrival was celebrated with a parade with five bands. They were commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel E. E. Persons. They were assigned to Italian divisions, although in August half of them were taken to France, where the American Expeditionary Forces needed more and more ambulances. At the same time the wounded in Italy were also carried by volunteer columns of the American Red Cross. In one of them served the eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who had arrived in Milan at the beginning of June.

The airmen had been in Italy longest. From the autumn of 1917 American pilots trained at Foggia in Apulia, and one of their commanders was Captain Fiorello La Guardia, a New York congressman of Italian descent and later Mayor of New York. In 1918 American pilots flew with Italian bomber squadrons in heavy Capronis, attacking targets behind the Austrian lines. According to American figures, 54 of them served on the Italian front in all.

The infantry came later. The Italian government asked for American divisions to raise the spirits of the army and the population, but the American command in France did not want to disperse its forces, and there was also a shortage of ships to carry troops across the Atlantic. In the end one regiment was sent to Italy, the 332nd Infantry Regiment of the 83rd Division, about four thousand men strong. It sailed from New York on 8 June, reached Liverpool on 15 June, and from there went via Southampton to France. According to the British official history, on 25 July it was sent by rail from France to Italy, and at the end of July it arrived at the small town of Villafranca di Verona.

It was a political demonstration rather than a real reinforcement: a few thousand Americans did not change the balance of forces on a front where more than one and a half million men were fighting. It was meant, however, to show the Italians that the United States, which in December 1917 had also declared war on Austria-Hungary, took the Italian front seriously. The regiment later fought in the last Italian offensive in the autumn of 1918.