The forgotten Vietnam of the Italians

Even before American Vietnam, the one told by so many books and films, there was French Vietnam. There was, between 1946 and 1954, that huge and almost forgotten slaughterhouse that takes the name of the Indochina War. The colonial army of France and the Vietnamese People's Liberation army led by Ho Chi Minh face each other. 75,000 men fell among the transalpine ranks, 300,000 among the Vietnamese, while 150,000 civilians were killed. These figures are enough to understand how it was a no-holds-barred conflict between a nation in decline, France, determined not to lose its colonies in Asia and not to abdicate its status as a colonial power, and a people ready to every sacrifice in order to obtain independence.

Well, if we read the list of the fallen on the French side in the Memorial dedicated to the Indochina war in Frejus, we realize that there are many German, Hungarian, Spanish and Italian names. The government of Paris and French public opinion did not want to give up colonial prestige, but they had no intention of sending the young shoots of France to shed their blood in the wastelands of Asia. For that there were the mercenaries, there was the Foreign Legion. Thus perhaps seven thousand of our compatriots found themselves fighting in the French expeditionary force in Indochina. About 1330 died, rewarded for their sacrifice by a simple communication to the families from the French Ministry of War, a communication with the caption: “Dead for France. Fallen on the field of honor ". Many others returned home mutilated or forever marked by the experience of a war clearly with no hope of victory for France, but fought nonetheless with desperate violence on both sides.

Luca Fregona's thrilling book Soldati di misfortura is dedicated to the forgotten Vietnam of many young Italians (Athesia, 2021, pp. 272, also e-book).

Fregona takes its cue from the events of three young South Tyroleans - Beniamino Leoni, Emil Stocker, Rodolfo Altadonna - to tell us about the loss of a generation, the one born in the 1920s and raised with the dark myths of fascism and Nazism. As the author writes: "The lives of the three protagonists of the book [...] contain the drama and loneliness of a generation sucked up by the toxic waste of the Second World War, and then spat back with violence and cynicism - like a lump stuck in the throat of to get rid of - in the Tonkin swamps ". They were therefore the young people of a generation that had known totalitarian indoctrination, the devastation of the world war and found itself lost in the post-war period, too many times without prospects. However, many of those young people were able to leave the past behind and move on. Others, many others, had to deal with their own inner demons or simply with the misery that forced them to make desperate choices. Ready to snatch these guys, in the post-war years, there was the Foreign Legion that had unleashed its recruiters in Italian cities, near the borders where many expatriated as illegal immigrants and, once captured by the French gendarmerie, preferred enlistment to prison or repatriation. Recruiters then wandered around the mines ready to sign those desperate people who were fed up with life in the tunnels to dig and breathe dust. Indochina always demanded new tributes of blood and every means was legitimate to fill the ranks of the legionaries, constantly thinned by the hard fighting with the Vietnamese.

The young people who accepted knew very little about the Legion, the brutality of the training and the obsessive discipline. They were attracted by the engagement and the possibility of obtaining French citizenship after five years. They did not know, above all, that hell awaited them and that their ticket was often one-way. Thus, the penniless and desperate of the continent were sent to fight in the jungles and rice fields along with all those who simply wanted to disappear: ex-Nazis, ex-fascists, members of the Wehrmacht. All soldiers of doom.