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250 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Forces NEAR Genoa in Italy." One might suppose that Pound
had been a major military objective. The item noted that "Pound
left America at the age of twenty-two and returned in 1939 after
an absence of thirty-one years. In 1942 he tried to get back to
the United States but was left to continue unwillingly his thirtythree
year exile."
Thus the New York Times corroborates the fact that Pound
had been left in Italy against his will, and in violation of his rights
as an American citizen. This was important evidence in his favor,
and it explained why the government was not anxious to bring the
case to trial.
Six terrible months began for Pound. Few men could have survived
his ordeal, and younger, hardened soldiers, kept in the
same environment, suffered nervous breakdowns or tried to commit
suicide. Although he was nearly sixty years old, Pound was
sent to a brutal concentration camp then operating in Europe,
the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa,
Italy.
After the war, there were a number of Congressional investigations
of these "D.T.C." units, as they were called. The commander
of the one at Litchfield, England, was punished. A D.T.C. in
Africa was run by a master sergeant who had been a professional
torturer for the Communist Party during the Spanish Civil War.
The one at Pisa, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned, was the most
notorious of these camps.
Government officials have never advanced any explanation as to
why Pound was kept for six months in the Pisa D.T.C. As Pound
points out, in a letter to me dated June 24, 1959, "D.T.C. Pisa
solely for american soldiers guilty of anything from mild inebriety,
AWOL, to murder, high-jacking, or sending home $15,000 in one
week, origin of same unaccounted for."
There was no looting by American forces in Italy. At any rate,
the D.T.C.s were operated to punish members of the U.S. Armed
Forces, and Ezra Pound did not fit into this category. The only
possible explanation for placing him in the Pisa camp was the fact
that in addition to the rapists, hijackers and murderers imprisoned
there, a number of "political unreliables" also were serving indefinite
terms. These were American soldiers who had been re-