Some years ago I learned about this book and ordered three copies of it because the Timothy Kenneally mentioned in it (a dedicated chapter) was my Grandad's brother.
My dad is called Timothy, known to everyone as just Tim except to my aunt who always calls him Timmy and my cousins who call him Uncle Timmy.
I wrote to the author of the book and got a very nice email in reply in which he told me that he visited the Kanchanaburi War Cemetary in Thailand as part of his reasearch and he sent me some very nice photos. He also told me that his chapter on the escaped and subsequently captured men was quite graphic and that I might like to warn my aunt before she read it.

When Alex was studying WWII in scuola media he mentioned that his Grandad's Uncle had been captured and killed by the Japanese. His snotty teacher told him to leave the classroom and take his fantastic lies elsewhere so I sent him back to school for the next history lesson armed with the book, a copy of a letter from the War Office to Mrs Kenneally saying her son was dead and a letter of condolences from King George. That soon shut her up the nasty cow.

https://www.amazon.it/Emperors-Irish.../dp/1845887271

It's not complicated. The story of a Britain that 'stood alone' during the Battle of Britain was used by Brexiteers to argue that the UK could again stand alone without the EU. And continues to be used by the political right. Being leftist and pro-EU, I am someone who is quite happy with the idea of 'free movement of people' and the mass legal immigration into the UK from the EU (and people like me out of the UK into the EU!). And therefore I would happily use the evidence of Polish airmen in the RAF during the Battle of Britain to counter the myth that Britain 'stood alone'. I would do this from what I believe to be good motives, but nonetheless I would still be indoctrinating students in my beliefs.

'Blitz Spirit' and 'being all in it together' during WW2 are also myths. These myths were recently invoked during the Covid pandemic, and we saw the reality of that. It wasn't much different during WW2. It always a bit more complicated than the simple story suggests.

So, getting back to Italy, the relationship with WW2 is quite tricky. And helpful to understand modern Italy. A good introduction to the subject if one has never read anything about this before is this article https://theconversation.com/forgotte...ry-books-34891

Lorna, C.2s - Thank you both.

C.2s - with you on this.

And Hungary's relationship is also a bit tricky!

Why was the teacher denying what happened in Thailand in 1945?
Was it normal to get a letter from the King? Some of my uncles were killed in WW1 and I never saw any letters from Buckingham Palace.

Who knows what was in the teacher's head? Maybe she only wanted Italian stories. She was an old witch who just presumed Alex was making things up though she had no reason to doubt him. The Geography teacher ended up being much more interested than the History teacher ever was.
I don't know if a letter from the King was normal. I just know that my Granny gave me some things for safe keeping years and years ago because I'm the eldest and because my cousins don't have much sentimentality for old things. I also have Uncle Timmy's war medals although they were never worn by him. My aunt found out that that she could send off to get them from somwhere and they were sent to her in nice cases with a sticker on the back of them where the name of the medal is printed and Fus. T. Kenneally 4271150. My aunt gave those to me

Here's an extract from the book, Timothy's index card which the author found during his research.
It was a bit chiling to see in writing the cold words "disposed of".

Shocking.

Lorna - I wish I'd been there to see that Italian teacher's reaction when she was shown those historical documents. What an uneducated person she was!

C.2s - in terms of trade and economy, we're definitely better off staying in the European single market. I think it's generally beneficial to have freedom of movement, but I wonder why our previous governments didn't extend this right to those from other English-speaking countries. I found it a bit odd that non-English-speaking, non-Commonwealth populations in Europe were granted this privilege while the Australians or Canadians were discriminated against because of their nationality. I know this argument has been used by some Brexiteers to further their cause, but they seemed to have a point there.

Well I think that you're asking the wrong person to explain this...er .. interpretation of history. You should ask a Brexiteer to explain it.

Basically I think it's not true, but as Lorna's story shows it's risk to say something is not true. I once had a student who interrupted A level History lessons often with odd questions. I didn't mind as a teacher. Better to have some interaction than none at all. But one day we were looking at the wars in Korea and Vietnam and he said "Stalin wanted to attack Scandinavia with giant crabs from Siberia."... now as you can imagine the rest of the class fell about laughing and in my head I was thinking"WTF!" ... but thankfully I managed to say"Er... did he? What makes you say that? Tell you what we'll talk about it next lesson." Having googled it (as all teachers do)it turns out that during Stalin's time a species of giant crab was taken from the area around Vladivostok to the Baltic and as it was an invasive species it did damage the fishing in Sweden and Finland. There's an argument (or a conspiracy theory) that it was a deliberate attack on those countries economies, but it's probably more likely that Russian people just liked the taste of giant crab and didn't consider the impact on the environment.

SO the point is that all good lies have a grain of truth to them.

As I understand it the EU never dictated immigration policy in it's member states. Each member state made (and continues to make) it's own decisions. If you consider for a moment that immigration into the UK from other Commonwealth countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and India AND from countries that are not EU nor Commonwealth such as Brazil or China continued throughout the period of the UK being part of the EU then I believe that the 'story' of discrimination towards Australians or Canadians on the basis of their nationality is a lie... but maybe there's a grain of truth to it? As I said it's not up to me to justify someone else's claims

I think it's appropriate to remind ourselves that the original motivation for the creation of the Common market (& later the EU) was to bring peace to Europe.

https://european-union.europa.eu/pri...on-may-1950_en

The word 'discrimination' may be inaccurate (sorry about that) - systemic injustice? Maybe it was just the absence of a level playing field. That would be an apt description.

The problem with extending FOM to all English speaking nations is that you would have to have included some 300 million Americans - oh, the horror!

Talking about this is designed to exploit our love of the idea of "a level playing field" and try to blame the EU. But it's a red herring.

1. There never were that many Australians or Canadians who wanted to move to the UK (during the period of EU membership) ...there just weren't the same economic and social push factors
2. Those people who wanted this "equality of opportunity" were often a bit racist (perhaps inadvertently)... they were not intending to make it equal for everyone, only for people they (wrongly) consider to be quasi British
3. EVEN IF that was true that the system was unfair it was the decision of the British government not the EU. It wasn't necessary to leave the EU to change UK immigration law in respect to Non EU citizens.

AND the moment the borders were open they would ALL come in their hordes obviously

Yep. Churchill said that we had to create a United States of Europe (though I don't believe that he thought the UK would be in it!)
​​​to maintain peace and it's worked much better than the previous 700 years. (although one could argue that is because of other factors like the cold war, the dominance of the USA and nuclear weapons and international trade and globalisation and improved communication technology and travel and the Eurovision Song Contest!)

I feel sorry for the future History students in 20 or 30 years time who will have to try and discuss in 3000 words or less the extent to which Britain's exit from the was a major cause the war in Ukraine. Even as a proEU person I'm not going to say that anything that has happened or is happening now with international politics or the economy is a direct result of Brexit... that's way too simplistic and as I keep saying History isn't simple... for a start try unpicking the effects of the pandemic on the economies of the various countries involved