Fifty years ago, they had nothing -- No way to go home, no guarantee of freedom here But in Maryland they glimpsed the American dream And some found a way to make it their own

Lelio Tomasina had never seen such oranges.

Mammoths!

4 The oranges of America, as big as a baby's head!

It was late 1942, Lelio's first days in this strange land of gigantic bounty called the United States.

His gateway to the New World was not Ellis Island, but the belly of a prisoner-of-war ship.

And he knew very little, almost nothing, of life here when the

Americans herded him and hundreds of his surrendered countrymen into a mess hall at Camp Buckner near Raleigh, N.C.

The prisoners whispered among themselves: "No wonder America is so big, look at the big oranges they have!"

The Italian soldiers were just a few weeks removed from the battlefields of Sicily and North Africa, where they ate what they could find and bugs crawled on their bodies as they tried in vain to hold off British tanks with pistols and rifles.

Compared to such hell, the sight of oranges worthy of Eden left the Italians awe-struck.

"At first we were afraid to touch them," he said. "Geez, they were so beautiful and big!"

When the prisoners bit into the magnificent fruit the smiles on their faces turned sour.

Lelio Tomasina and his comrades had eaten their first grapefruit.

It was a small surprise in a constellation of change that transformed the young soldier and some 50,000 of his surrendered companions once the United States took custody of their fates.

The Italian prisoners were distributed among Army camps across America, and eventually, Lelio would be shipped to Maryland's Fort Meade, where more than 600 POWs were held between 1942 and the end of 1944.

When Italy surrendered in September 1943 -- leaving Germany and Japan to fight alone against the rest of the world -- the armistice required the immediate release of Allied prisoners in Italian hands, but made no provision for Italian prisoners held by the Allies.

Most of the captives signed "cooperation" papers, which transformed them from prisoners to "co-belligerents." By consenting to help the American war effort in non-combat duties, mostly dull kitchen and construction work, the POWs at Fort Meade received liberties they never dreamed possible.

Says Lelio, who held rank in the Italian artillery somewhere between a corporal and sergeant: "We were prisoners in a way, but not exactly prisoners."

Not exactly.

Not the way his father was a prisoner during World War I and traded his watch to German captors for a handful of potato skins.