Hello historians,
(repost of an earlier now-deleted post, reformulated the title in the form of a question)
I've got a piece of fiction slowly developing in my head, concerning the slow death of a friendship between two men in postwar Italy in the early 1950s. (Well, in the then Free State of Trieste, to be specific.) As I'm picturing them right now one is older, fortyish to the younger's late-twenties-to-thirtyish.
Thing is, neither of these characters saw combat during the war (which I find significant to their backgrounds and development as characters, considering the society-wide trauma the war inflicted.) My placeholder rationale is that the older one managed to weasel into some clerical paper-pushing job for his military service and the younger one's number just never came up before Italy surrendered. I've been doing research on the setting, the culture of the era, the political issues at play all around them, but one thing I'm stuck finding out is the crux of my question:
How realistic is it that both of them would have managed to avoid active duty, either in general or in the scenario I've imagined as my "placeholder"? I've never been much for specifically military history so I'm sort of blundering around in the dark here. How did conscription work - was it like in the US, waiting for your number to come up in the draft? Would a man in his thirties have been considered too old for active duty? Was it possible to do bureaucratic stuff instead of combat/field stuff upon conscription and if so, under what circumstances?
Location-specific caveat: Trieste WAS part of Italy during the war and only became a separate territory after Italy's surrender, but there may have been some arcane differences in administration I'm not yet aware of. If so, I welcome correction.
This is mostly just a fear-based procrastination method to avoid ACTUALLY writing this novel, but dammit, I want all the details perfectly researched before I consign the unwritten manuscript to the depths of my brain.
How much "entirely"? Give him a "war-priority" job, or make him a very lucky career officer.
If you can read Italian, then you should probably check Virgilio Ilari's Storia del servizio militare in Italia.
As a general word of caution though, the idea of avoiding military service entirely (as in, sitting out the great world conflict and having therefore a different set of personal experiences) is a problematic one - especially if you want them to be living in Trieste from 1940 to the early 1950s.
As for age limitations, the main core of conscription army was formed by the junior classes (1910-18) and senior classes (1901-09) - to which one should add the newly mobilized (1919-23) and, last and luckiest, the first third of 1924, and a few veterans from 1900 and likely some of the late XIX Century called back for the "territorial" army during 1942-43.
The total of the main 23 classes accounted for 9,729,786 men, which translated into 5,100,000 enlisted men at the time of mobilization. Conversely the number of exempt was of 960,000 - also at mobilization. Giving you a broad ratio for people who actively served in the army and those who possibly avoided service entirely (it's reasonable to assume that many of those originally exempt were later called to replace casualties, since the new classes could only cover some).
Most exempted from active service were nonetheless destined to the production efforts (5.2 millions belonging to the industrial mobilization, of which 1.2 were women though, and others may have been unsuitable for active service) - which was the main way to avoid service for someone who fell within the conscription classes, and was not necessarily a permanent insurance.
Paper-pushing jobs certainly existed within the army - but it was not really something that an enlisted man could have much control on. I suppose you can conjure some convenient circumstances to have them avoid combat anyways, since them being non commissioned officers fortuitously (or commissioned officers intentionally - not really the most sympathetic trait) assigned to a coastal fort seems to defy your purpose.
It's nonetheless worth noting that Trieste fell within the German Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland after the armistice of September 8^th 1943 and administered from the Gau of Carinthia. Trieste and the neighboring region was also a strategic node for the transportation of goods and men from and to Italy, the Balkans and the territories under German occupation, as well as an increasingly relevant position in the partisan conflict across the border with Yugoslavia. It was likely the worst place in (former) Italy to conduct a safe existence during 1944-45, and to an extent continued to be so after that.
I am not an expert on the occupation regime, nor on the subsequent years; and I would advise you to ask further information as a separate question. But the events which occurred there, from the Holocaust properly speaking, to the ethnic cleansing of local populaces, to a prolonged civil war, are some of the aspects you may want to research before setting your story there.
As for our present subject, it certainly wasn't the best place to weather the storm. Italian residents previously mobilized would have been under strong pressure to join the German labor forces - or alternatively transferred to Germany or Poland with another 650,000 Italian Military Internees, provided that they had been in some fashion enlisted at the time of the armisitce, otherwise they would have likely been recruited for labor, but under a different denomination.
General estimates of Italians subject to conscription who managed to remain unaccounted for after 1943 exceed 2 millions - so that it was possible to stay out of both the RSI and the German labor forces. Another possibility, also going against your general intention, was joining the partisan squads (again, not the safest position around Trieste) or volunteering for the Social Republic.