Italian casualties in Sicily

When the invasion of Sicily started, Italian troops in Sicily numbered 252,000 men overall, including in the total, in addition to the men of the Sixth Army, also the service personnel of the Navy and Air Force.

According to the official history published by the Italian Army Historical Branch, the fate of these men was the following:

4,678 men were confirmed dead, with known grave on the island;

32,500 men, wounded, were evacuated to the Italian mainland during the campaign;

62,000 men, unwounded, were evacuated to the Italian mainland at the end of the campaign;

116,681 men (wounded and unwounded) were taken prisoner by the Allies;

36,072 men were reported as “missing”.

The question of the “missing”, whose number is often ignored when relating the casualties of the campaign, is a problematic one. These men were neither confirmed dead, nor taken prisoners; usually this means that they would have been killed but never found, but the Sicilian campaign poses another possibility. A large part of the men were recruited locally, and it is known that a number of them jettisoned their uniforms at some point and returned home. The problem is that, during these 70 and more years, no research has been done do determine how many of the 36,072 men were deserters/disbanded soldiers, and how many were actually killed and not found. A large number of the missing, according to the official history, were actually dead; buried on the battlefield or at imprecise locations. Many soldiers killed in action were buried by the Allies in mass graves that in many cases were never dug up again. It has been estimated that over 3,300 Italians were killed in the battle of Gela, many of them dismembered by naval gunfire; only 600 of them have a known burial, the others were declared missing, buried in mass graves in the nearby area.

A couple of hints about the actual number of Italian soldiers killed in the battle for Sicily come from the other data. One is the number of wounded among the Italian troops, 32,500 (not counting the wounded who were taken prisoner); that would be six to seven times the number of killed. From what it can be seen about combat casualties suffered in most battles fought by the Italian Army in WW2 (El Alamein, Keren, Bardia, Nibeiwa, the whole Greek campaign are just a few examples), the ratio between killed and wounded was usually between 1:1 and 1:3.
The other hint comes from the 1957 ISTAT study on the Italian casualties in World War II (available here). It should be noticed that the numbers of killed/missing provided by this study are often underestimated; for instance, total military dead are here reported as 291,376, whereas more recent studies by the Italian Defense Ministry (updated to 2010) have revised this number up to 319,207 (in both cases, colonial troops are not included).

For the months of July and August 1943, the ISTAT study lists 12,426 killed or missing (the ISTAT missing are dead whose bodies were never found) in the Italian armed forces, and during that period the only significant fighting involving Italian forces happened in Sicily.

It seems therefore likely that the actual number of Italian soldiers killed during the battle for Sicily was somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000, but only more accurate studies could prove, or disprove, this estimate.

There is not a ‘dedicated’ war memorial or war cemetery for all Italians killed in Sicily; the 4,678 men with known graves are buried in different cemeteries all over the island. 1,288 of them are buried in the Cristo Re War Memorial, in Messina; over 900 are buried in the memorial inside the Church of S. Nicolò l’Arena, in Catania. Others rest in Gela, Syracuse and other cemeteries.