Latina Province,1944—1950

Abstract

The province of Latina in Italy provides an exceptional case in the history of postwar problems involving refugees, evacuees, and displaced persons. Famous until the 1930s as a largely uninhabited malarial swamp, the province was drained, reclaimed, and settled by Mussolini's regime. This was a massive and complex intervention that had propaganda, public health, and eugenic purposes as the swamps of the Pontine Marshes were transformed into a showcase of the new society the fascists intended to construct. Mussolini's foreign policy objectives, however, were incompatible with the goal of public health, and by 1944 the new province became a battlefield between the Allies and the retreating German army. The result was extreme environmental devastation and the unleashing of a major epidemic of malaria that intensified the sufferings of the recently settled civilian population that found itself homeless, hungry, and seriously ill as the war ended. This article examines the strategies employed by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the returning Italian authorities to deal with this complex emergency. Part of the interest of Latina province in this period is that it became the site for the earliest use of DDT to control a major epidemic of malaria, and an important precedent for the worldwide eradication effort of the World Health Organization. It is useful, therefore, to examine the grounds for the success of the antimalarial effort in Latina, which was in fact multifaceted. In addition, the paper addresses the political purposes that motivated the UNRRA relief effort as the Allies sought to prevent the threat of social unrest and revolution as well as to combat hunger, unemployment, homelessness and disease.