More than 600,000 members of the Italian Armed Forces were taken prisoner during World War II, and about 51,000 of these Italians were brought to the United States as POWs, including 140 Italian POWs who were held captive at the Logan County Fairgrounds in 1943, mainly to help harvest that year’s sugar beet crop.


Campy recalls his time here:

They asked if prisoners wanted to go out and work sugar beets. I guess it was pretty much mandatory because they have to make you work. This is the law. We had all the rules—the Geneva Conventions—outside the barracks. We could read our own rules and the privilege put down by the Geneva Conventions for prisoners all over the world, so we knew what we could do and what we couldn’t do. Some of the boys said, “Oh yeah, we’d like to go out and work sugar beets.” You know, get out of the camp, maybe get to see the girls. I was tired and didn’t want to go. They needed janitors, so I told them I would be a janitor. They let me stay. I did janitor work—cleaned the barracks, swept and cleaned the bathroom—soaped all the sinks and stools and stuff.

There was an Italian lieutenant, the English teacher. He asked if anybody wanted to have this class of English. He said, for your own benefit, since you are going to be in this country, maybe it would help you to talk with authorities and soldiers. So I went. He started with the basic, you know, how to read. He gave us the alphabet. Every night we had a class, people came from the field; they could do it, too. It was pretty nice. We learned how to write and read English and we talked to the soldiers that came around. Then they moved us to Sidney, Nebraska.
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It was a tide-changing year for Italy in 1943, when the Allies invaded Italy, and Italy dismissed and arrested Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. The new government, headed by Pietro Badoglio, signed an armistice with the Allies, and on October 3rd, Italy declared war on its former Axis ally—thus becoming one of America’s partners, raising the question of what should be done with the Italian POWs on American soil. Italian Service Units were created to perform non-combat tasks, supporting agriculture, hospitals, army depots, seaports, and army training centers. About 3,000 Italian prisoners did not volunteer for these units, perhaps because they were concerned about family members living in German-occupied areas. Others were deemed pro-Fascist, and were held in POW camps; however, 80% or more of Italian prisoners joined the “Italian Service Units.” The men were given jobs, monetary compensation and some freedom of movement. By the end of the war, Italian Service Units had contributed millions of hours to Allied war effort.

Campy describes his work with an Italian Service Unit:

When I got to Sidney, Italy had surrendered and then they allowed the prisoners to be free on their own word. You couldn’t go anywhere—you couldn’t escape—but you could walk around. You could go to the PX, buy beer, buy cigarettes; whatever you wanted to do. We had pretty much freedom. We started working, they gave us 80 cents a day. They had a little movie house there, and a church. It was the same building, but they converted from movie to church. It cost 15-20 cents for the movie. Beer cost a nickel, cigarettes were 15 cents. Clothing and things like that were all furnished. We had plenty of food.

Over there, they put me in the railroad, putting sand under the tracks. I got pneumonia, and they put me in the hospital. The doctor told them not to put me back out there because I wouldn’t make it. I told them I had been a mechanic in Italy. I started working in building where they fixed electric forklifts. Instead of using a regular combustion motor, they used electric batteries because of the danger. They stored ammunition there, and they needed the forklifts to lift these boxes of ammunition.

It was in Sidney, that Campy met Edith Rocker who was driving one of those little lifts, and the two became friends. Campy worked in Sidney for about two years, but in 1945, with the war ended, Italian Service Units were decommissioned, and their members returned back to Italy. In 1945, Italian Service Units were decommissioned, and their members returned to Italy.
Campy proposed to Miss Rocker, and she travelled with him to Genoa, Italy, to marry. The Catholic Church in Italy said that Campy and Rocker would have to marry “in the back room, back of the altar,” because she was Protestant and he was Catholic. The two decided to go to the courthouse to get married instead. Later, when Edith was going to have a child, the couple decided she better get back to the United States, because, by law, if the baby was born in Italy, the child couldn’t be an American citizen until she was 18 years old. Edith went on ahead of Campy. Campy got his papers in order and landed in Sterling in the nick of time. The next day, Edith was in the hospital, delivering their first daughter, Lena.

Campy proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen in December 1950. He opened his own gas station in Sterling, which got him started selling used cars and opening a salvage yard. In his later years, he prepared generators and alternators for an auto parts shop. He and his wife Edith had four children—Lena, Mary Ann, Jenny, and Mario—before kidney disease caused her death. At the age of 41, Campy remarried—his second wife, Joanne, who had been widowed by her husband’s heart attack. Although Campy had no desire to live in Italy again, he made frequent visits to see his family, and as his children grew up, he traveled with each one to show them his native country. “He was very happy to be a U.S. citizen,” Joanne Campanella said.