The Italians in Russia: two memories from the other side
December 1942 – September 1943. From the recollections of Soviet tank crewman Sergei Otroshchenkov and the testimony of Ukrainian civilian Yekaterina Ivanovna Mateychuk, two views of the Italian soldiers sent to die three thousand kilometres from home.
In the summer of 1942 Mussolini sent ARMIR — the 8th Italian Army in Russia — to the Eastern Front: 229,000 men deployed along 270 kilometres of front on the river Don. Three army corps, one of them Alpine, with the Tridentina, Julia and Cuneense divisions. An imposing force, poorly equipped, lacking adequate anti-tank weapons, with hobnailed boots unsuited to the snow and the forty degrees below zero of the Russian steppe.
What makes the story of ARMIR extraordinary is not only the way it was overwhelmed by the Soviet offensive of December 1942 and by the frost of the retreat. It is also the way it was seen from the other side: by the Red Army soldiers who met them on the battlefields, and by the Ukrainian civilians who watched them pass through their towns, first as occupiers, then as ghosts in retreat.
Two testimonies preserved in the Russian archive Ya Pomnyu — «I Remember» — give us back that gaze.
They are uncomfortable voices, at times harsh. But they are necessary voices, because true memory never has a single perspective.
Through the eyes of a tank crewman
The valley between two Cossack hills
Sergei Andreyevich Otroshchenkov was born in 1921 in the Smolensk region. He fought from the summer of 1941 until Germany’s surrender in May 1945, escaping nine times from tanks in flames. He commanded a tank battalion from the battle of Korsun until the end of the war, destroying 23 enemy tanks and self-propelled guns. His interview was published by the archive in December 2010, when he was eighty-nine.
Operation Little Saturn was the scaled-down offensive plan adopted by the Soviet command in December 1942 in response to changed conditions on the southern front. The original plan — Operation Saturn — had far more ambitious goals, but the German counter-offensive launched on 12 December from Kotelnikovo to break the encirclement of Stalingrad forced Stalin to revise his priorities. The Soviet defences of the 51st Army, part of General Yeryomenko’s front, were weak and unprepared, and the danger of a German breakthrough was real.
On 13 December Stalin took two crucial decisions: to transfer the powerful 2nd Guards Army from Rokossovsky’s front to Yeryomenko’s — not without friction, since General Vasilevsky had already ordered that transfer on his own initiative without consulting the dictator, sparking a violent clash — and to redefine the goals of the offensive with more limited directives achievable in the short term. So Operation Little Saturn was born, which General Vatutin accepted reluctantly, convinced that the original plan could have brought far more decisive results.
It was Little Saturn, launched on 16 December 1942, that swept away the Don front and struck at the most vulnerable point of the Axis line: the Italian and Romanian positions.
In the winter of 1942-43 Otroshchenkov’s T-34 was advancing with the 170th Tank Brigade into the bend of the middle Don, towards Nizhny Mamon. The tanks were painted with white lime to blend in with the snow. The cold was, as Otroshchenkov recalls, «terrible»: inside the steel it was colder than outside.
«If you found a fur coat, you warmed yourself in it.»
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📍 THE MEMORY December 1942 · Khlebny and Petrovsky, bend of the Don Dawn on the steppe The 170th Tank Brigade had taken up position on two heights near the small Cossack settlements of Khlebny and Petrovsky, about three kilometres apart. Between the two hills lay a low, open valley. Early in the morning, in the snow, the column began to arrive: thousands of men who no longer marched like an army but moved like a crowd, like something that no longer resembled an organised military body. It was the 8th Italian Army, looking for a way out of the encirclement. |
When the Italian columns came level with the two heights, the order was given. The T-34s, painted white with lime to blend into the snow, came down from the hills onto both flanks of the Italian column at the same time.
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«When the Italian vanguard came level with us, the order went down our columns: “Forward! Crush them!”. Then we hit them from both flanks. I had never seen such a massacre before. The Italian army was literally ground into the earth.» Sergei Andreyevich Otroshchenkov · tank crewman, 170th Tank Brigade |
When the Russian tanks came out of the fray, they had changed colour. White with lime in the morning, they were red up to the turret. And on the tracks — whoever cares to imagine it, let them imagine it.
That day entire columns of prisoners were taken.
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📍 the memory Weeks later · Return to the battlefield «We carry off five hundred a day» A few weeks later the brigade returned to the battlefield to record the tanks it had lost. Otroshchenkov remembers the air in those days of thaw: an unbearable stench that made it hard to breathe. The local Cossack women worked without rest to gather the dead. They told the soldiers: «We carry off five hundred a day to bury, and there’s no end in sight». So many had been killed. |
Historians have often made an observation that is worth more than many analyses: around Stalingrad, the Soviet offensives struck first where the Axis line was weakest.
The Red Army command made the ideal move, in this reading, by aiming its main blow precisely at the Italian and Romanian lines.
This is not a judgement on the courage of individual soldiers. It is the recognition of what happens when an army is sent to fight without adequate means, on an impossible front, for reasons that are not its own.
Yekaterina’s testimony
Those caps with bright feathers
Yekaterina Ivanovna Mateychuk was fourteen in October 1941 when, at dawn, she saw foreign soldiers in her town for the first time: Krasnoarmeysk, in today’s Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine. They were almost certainly Bersaglieri.
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👁 the first-hand testimony «Early in the morning of 21 October 1941 there were already Italian troops in the town. And we children ran to look: what beautiful uniforms! Berets with bright feathers, aiguillettes…» «There was nothing bad about them, but the Italians left very quickly, and only when the Germans appeared in the town, and then the Germans began their atrocities, did we feel the difference. I remember well how terrified I was when I saw hanged people for the first time. And it was even worse because the gallows stood near the church. Most of the hanged men were young, and they had signs on their chests saying “communist” …» Yekaterina Ivanovna Mateychuk Ukrainian civilian · Krasnoarmeysk, Donetsk region · Interviewed in 2008 |
It is a short testimony, almost marginal in the long account of Yekaterina — who was deported to a camp, witnessed the hangings and saw the convoys of Jews taken out of town. And yet that image of the «caps with bright feathers» has enormous power.
It is the gaze of a girl who does not yet see enemies: she sees men in uniform, some with an unusual, almost picturesque air.
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📍 the memory 21 October 1941 · Krasnoarmeysk (Donetsk), Ukraine The first day of the Italian occupation The Italians arrived before the Germans and left quickly. They did not commit the atrocities that marked the following months under German occupation. But they were occupiers all the same: the town was theirs, the houses were theirs, the streets were theirs. The children ran to see them out of curiosity — those aiguillettes, those hats with feathers. A military beauty that said nothing of what was about to come. |
Yekaterina’s story allows no easy pity. She lived under the occupation regime for almost two years and saw things that cannot be forgotten.
The German occupation was immediate and systematic. The new masters registered every inhabitant, posted notices on the doors with the number of people of working age, and put teenagers to forced labour: trenches to dig, roads to clear, ground to clean up. Yekaterina tried to escape by hiding with relatives in the countryside, but the Germans arrested her mother and sister as hostages until she gave herself up. She ended up in a camp set up in the town’s secondary school, where she stayed for six months with many other young people. The German guards were cruel — once a sentry deliberately trod on her hands as she climbed out of a trench, leaving her with a damaged nail for life — and the local police proved even worse. Her family could speak to her only through the window.
In the town she saw the first hangings, with «communist» signs hung on the chests of the condemned — the gallows stood near the church, and that image never left her. She saw a large convoy of Jews pass by and believed they were being moved elsewhere: she learned later that they had been killed outside the town. Her cousin managed to hide one of them, Rose, in a barn in the countryside: she survived.
In February 1943 Soviet troops broke into the town for the first time, splitting it in two along the railway. The fighting lasted a few days; on 23 February the Germans retook their positions. The reprisal was brutal: house-to-house round-ups, grenades thrown into the cellars where people were hiding, executions in the streets with Soviet names — Proletarskaya, Kommunarskaya. Men could no longer go out. Yekaterina went back to the camp for another six months.
Final liberation came on 8 September 1943, unexpected even for the Germans. People woke in the early hours to the noise of Katyushas and saw Soviet tanks racing down the street. In the courtyards the Germans fled in panic, half-dressed, some begging for help from the very population they had oppressed shortly before. Yekaterina remembers feeling, in spite of herself, something like pity. «I understood that they too were forced to fight. That they too were people.»
But when she remembers the retreating Italians — she saw them for the second and last time in her town in 1943 — her testimony takes on a further nuance, almost heartbreaking in its simplicity.
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👁 First-hand testimony «Then we saw the retreating Italians. But instead of their beautiful uniforms they were now wearing some sort of red capes, and if before they had gone looking for chickens and eggs, now they asked only for buryak.» Yekaterina Ivanovna Mateychuk Ukrainian civilian · Krasnoarmeysk, Donetsk region · Interviewed in 2008 |
Buryak is beet. It is famine food, the food of those who no longer have a choice. They were not asking for food: they were asking for whatever they could find, whatever was left over.
The same men she had seen passing two years earlier with their feathered caps were now rags begging for a root.
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📍 the memory 1943 · Krasnoarmeysk · GHOSTS in retreat The «red capes» and the buryak When Yekaterina sees them again, the Italians are no longer soldiers. They are broken men, wrapped in whatever they have found along the road — she remembers reddish capes, probably blankets or civilian clothes picked up in abandoned houses. They ask for food, the simplest possible. The shift from «beautiful feathers» to «beet» tells, in two images and without rhetoric, the whole tragedy of ARMIR. |
Reflection
Sent to die: the responsibility of those in command
The two testimonies neither absolve nor condemn the Italian soldiers. They see them as those on the other side saw them: men, often young, thrown into a conflict they were not equipped to sustain, in a faraway country, because of decisions taken by others.
Otroshchenkov’s account, the Russian tank crewman’s, makes it plain: the Italians were the weak point of the Axis line, not for lack of individual courage but because of the nature of their equipment and training. The Soviet command knew it and aimed there.
It was no military secret: it was an Italian fault — the fault of the regime, not of the soldiers sent to war with hobnailed boots in the snow, without camouflage suits, without anti-tank weapons able to stop a T-34, three thousand kilometres from home.
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«The Alpini, the best infantry corps available, were incomprehensibly deployed on flat, open ground. Sending such large contingents to Russia can only be explained by the wish to cut a good figure in front of the Germans.» From the history of ARMIR, 1942–1943 · Italian Wikipedia — Italian campaign in Russia |
Yekaterina, the Ukrainian girl who became a teacher, uses no words of hatred for the Italians. She clearly distinguishes them from the Germans and remembers them with a certain neutrality — almost with a bewildered distance. They came, they occupied, they left. Then they came back in flight, asking for a root.
And there is something deeply human in this: neither the rhetoric of heroes nor that of executioners, but the simple, brutal reality of war. Ordinary people, placed in abnormal situations by decisions that were not theirs.
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📍 lest we forget 26 January 1943 · Nikolayevka, Russian steppe Nikolayevka: the only victory in the rout On 26 January 1943 the Alpini of the Tridentina, led by General Luigi Reverberi, broke through the Soviet defences at Nikolayevka in a desperate attack — the only military success of the whole tragic retreat. About 20,000 men, more than 7,000 of them wounded or frostbitten, managed to get out of the pocket and reach friendly lines on 31 January. The Tridentina was the only Alpine division to remain substantially intact. The others — the Julia and the Cuneense — left thousands of dead on the steppe, many of whom never had a grave. |
Memory
Why remember from this perspective
The National Alpini Association keeps the memory of those who left and did not return, of those who returned but were no longer the same, of those who carried for ever, in body and spirit, the mark of that white steppe. It is a memory of sacrifice and of loyalty to duty, which deserves respect and honour.
But true memory — the kind that serves future generations — cannot only be celebratory. It must also include the uncomfortable questions: why were they sent there? With what equipment? For what political calculations? And it must include the gaze of those who were on the other side.
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Historical notes — ARMIR in numbers
The 8th Italian Army was overwhelmed by Operation Little Saturn on 16 December 1942. The retreat from the Don lasted until 31 January 1943. The Alpine Corps, intact until 15 January, had to face a two-week retreat across the steppe that destroyed the Julia and Cuneense divisions. Only the Tridentina kept its organisational cohesion. The survivors returned to Italy in the spring of 1943. Many of the prisoners died in Soviet camps. The last were repatriated in 1954, nine years after the end of the war. |
Otroshchenkov remembered the Italians ground into the snow the way one remembers a battle won: with cold professional satisfaction.
Yekaterina remembered their feathered caps with the childlike surprise of someone who does not yet understand war, then their red capes with something that resembled — almost in spite of herself — compassion.
Neither of them hated them. They saw them as pawns in a bigger game, decided elsewhere.
The names on the war memorials, the medals in museum cases, the yellowed photographs in the drawers of families in Belluno, in Veneto and all over Italy: all this tells one part of the story. The words of a Russian tank crewman and a Ukrainian girl tell the other part. Together, perhaps, they bring us closer to the truth and the atrocity of war.
Michele Sacchet
Sources: Archive Ya Pomnyu («I Remember», iremember.ru) — memoir of tank crewman Sergei Andreyevich Otroshchenkov, 170th Tank Brigade, published in 2010; testimony of Yekaterina Ivanovna Mateychuk, civilian from Krasnoarmeysk (Donetsk), interviewed in 2008 — Wikipedia — Italian campaign in Russia and Operation Little Saturn · ArcipelagoMilano — The Alpini in the USSR with ARMIR in 1942–43 — Gotica Toscana — The Russian Campaign, 70th anniversary.
Cover photo: Soviet troops with the insignia captured from an Italian regiment. (Getty Images)
Related articles: L’Indovina del Don (in Italian) and «General Winter» in the history of the Alpini.
