The Death of the Julia Division: Memoirs of an Officer

"The Death of the Julia Division" is the devastating story of the destruction of the Italian Julia Division (an elite group of army alpine soldiers, once 10,000 strong) in the war against Greece in 1940. It has only been told in a piecemeal fashion, from personal recollections of those few survivors who much later narrated their experiences.

Usually these stories are about the first phase of the campaign, which was a war of action and winning; while the second phase, substantially a war of defense and holding position that ended in defeat and death, is ignored or barely touched on. However, in his book "The Death of the Julia Division," the retired Italian Army General, Giacomo Fatuzzo (now deceased), fills in the gaps in his moving true story about this division – the division that was to have been the key to success in Italy's Greek campaign.

In his book, which is based on his actual war diary, General Fatuzzo (then a Major in the Julia Division) provides an emotional, first-hand, day-by-day description of the difficulties encountered, the suffering endured, and the battles fought by the alpine troops of the Julia Division. On the one hand, these pages are compelling because they present a quick and concise narrative of actual experiences and feelings, not a cold accounting of strategies and troop movements.

On the other hand, they are riveting because they tell a timeless story – the agony of a man who doesn't believe the war he is fighting is justified but fights as hard as he can; of an officer who knows that his superiors are making poor decisions from a remote location but still must follow the resulting orders; of a soldier who does his best in impossible circumstances and who suffers tremendously, as do all of those involved in the campaign.

December 29, 1940. The last diary entry but not the end of the story and the book. Fatuzzo, while on the front line, was seriously wounded on December 30 and evacuated in painful stages from the battlefield back to Italy. Thus, he lived while most who served with and around him in the Julia Division stayed and died, something he could never forget. In the last part of the book, Fatuzzo reconstructs his agonizing and bloody memories of those last few horrific days of defeat.

And damning are the pages where he describes, without hesitation, the mistakes made and the deficiency of means for the campaign. In short, he lays out clearly the endemic problems that plagued the Italian army, and even provides proof that the virtual encirclement and annihilation of the Julia Division in the Pindus Mountains could have been avoided. All those needless deaths weighed heavily on Fatuzzo, and he used this book to provide a powerful statement on the courage and the strength of these mountain soldiers called Alpini.

How different is this from stories of soldiers in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan? Are their thoughts and actions and suffering so very different from Fatuzzo's? Ultimately, his book is an anguishing trip by a survivor into the ugly realities of war – any war.