How accurate are your children's school textbooks? Writing in The Daily Telegraph recently, journalist Byron Rogers reported his shock at reading, in his daughter's history textbook (Modern World History by Tony McAleavy, Cambridge University Press), that the Italians taken prisoner at the battle of Adowa in 1896 had been castrated by their Abyssinian captors. Knowing a little bit about Adowa, but nothing of the mass castration of the Italians there (and there were 1,600 prisoners in all), Mr. Rogers set about checking this myth-making statement. After checking in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ringing the Italian military attache and the Ethiopian Embassy, and speaking to Cambridge University Press, Mr Rogers finally got in touch with the author himself. His original source turned out to be Richard Overy's The Road to War. When contacted, Richard Overy confessed, 'I was always a bit worried about that one, but the chapter was actually written by my co-author'. Turning to an expert on Italian military history, Professor John Gooch of Leeds University, for enlightenment, Mr Rogers asked him if he had heard of this gruesome episode. It transpired that there had been about thirty castrations in the thick of the battle, but in fact, 'the prisoners were treated so well that there were even stories in the Italian papers suggesting that the Abyssinians may have provided them with women during their captivity'. Mr Rogers' daughter, unperturbed by all this controversy, refuses point blank to drop history as it is the most exotic world of gossip and hearsay anyone could ever hope for. The whole episode is a lesson not to believe all that we read - unless it is published by Greenhill, of course. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 85 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com