WW2: Italian POW’s in South Africa – Italians who stayed in South Africa

[This is from an email I sent to an Italian American I know. Jan]

BTW we had quite a few italians in SA. Sadly, many were captured during WW2. They came as

POWs and built some beautiful bridges in SA.

Then many of them liked it and stayed here.

I have great respect for Italian thinking and creativity.

We bought weapons from Italy among others.

We had a small jet plane here in SA in the air force that we called the "Impala" but it was actually an Italian plane.

We had quite a lot of them.

Sadly, like dummies Rhodesians and South Africans fought on the idiot side in WW2.