"Kill Us Now!" — Italian POWs Stunned When Americans Offered Them Ice Cream in 110°F Desert.

The convoy of trucks rattled across the Arizona desert in the summer of nineteen forty-three, kicking up plumes of dust that hung in the air like ghosts. Inside the canvas-covered beds, hundreds of Italian soldiers sat shoulder to shoulder, their faces gray with exhaustion and fear. The temperature had already climbed past one hundred degrees by mid-morning, and the metal benches beneath them burned through their thin uniforms. They had been captured weeks earlier in Tunisia, marched to the docks at Oran, and loaded onto ships bound for America. Now, deep in the Sonoran Desert, they were approaching what many believed would be their final destination.

Corporal Giuseppe Benedetti pressed his face against the gap in the canvas, watching the landscape blur past. Sand and rock stretched endlessly in every direction, broken only by the occasional twisted mesquite tree or clump of sage. The heat was unlike anything he had known in Sicily. It wasn't the humid warmth of the Mediterranean, but a dry, suffocating weight that seemed to draw every drop of moisture from his skin. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His lips had cracked and bled that morning. Around him, men sat in silence, too exhausted even to complain.

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