Beginning on December 8^th 1941, over 600,000 Italian-Americans were branded “enemy aliens” and were firmly under the surveillance of the US intelligence community. Out of that number, tens of thousands were experiencing a very broad range of civil rights violations and massive economic losses, and a few thousand were being held in internment camps along with Americans of German and Japanese descent[1].

With this large ethnic group under restrictions, an even larger group of the Italian-American population was in military uniform and spread across the globe fighting for the United States. This incongruence was not lost on President Roosevelt and his advisors, and the discussion became how to plan the unavoidable task of invading Italy.