Castle of the Eagles

by Felton, Mark;

  *

  It had already been a long road for Leeming, at 45 years old one of the oldest Flight Lieutenants in the RAF. Born in Chorlton, Lancashire in 1895, Leeming had demonstrated an early talent for writing, publishing his first article at the age of thirteen. He was later to write many bestselling books, some indulging his fascination with aviation. While at school he witnessed some of the early efforts at powered flight and quickly became hooked. In 1910, aged fifteen, Leeming had built his first glider, and he continued to build and fly gliders throughout the 1920s. Moving on to powered aircraft, Leeming had achieved lasting fame in 1928 when he and Avro’s chief test pilot Bert Hinkler became the first people to land an aircraft on a mountain in Britain. They selected 3,117-foot-high Helvellyn in the Lake District for their stunt, managing to set down and take off again in an Avro 585 biplane. Leeming had founded Northern Air Lines in 1928, and he was instrumental in finding a new airport site for Manchester at Ringway.

  In the early 1930s Leeming had branched out into horticulture, building a stunning garden at Bowden, writing bestselling gardening books and creating the character ‘Claudius the Bee’ for the Manchester Evening News. Walt Disney bought the film rights. With the onset of war in 1939 Leeming had been commissioned into the RAF and appointed as aide-de-camp to Air Marshal Boyd. Though separated by a considerable difference in rank, Leeming at 45 and Boyd at 51 were close in age and united by their fascination with flying, going back to childhood for both men. They were to become close friends and comrades during the coming years of adversity.

  *

  ‘You know,’ declared Air Marshal Boyd to Leeming, Samuels and the other RAF crewmen who were sitting inside a tiny house before a large audience of excited villagers, ‘all this is highly irregular.’14 Boyd, who was seated on the only chair inside the hovel, was referring to the fact that the Sicilian peasants had yet to disarm them. The Air Marshal was a stickler for the rules and regulations, and dealing with civilians, particularly foreign civilians, was wearing what remained of his patience thinner. Each Briton still wore his service revolver on a webbing gun belt around his waist. Boyd, noted Leeming, sat in the centre of the room ‘like some medieval monarch holding Court, we grouped like courtiers around him, the crowd of chattering villagers facing us.’15 Boyd, stern-faced and clearly not impressed by the situation, decided upon a ‘proper’ gesture. It was inconceivable that no one had yet demanded that they surrender. ‘We’d better hand over our revolvers,’ he stated, resolutely making up his mind.

  Boyd slowly rose from his chair and reached into his holster, pulling out his pistol, Leeming and the Wellington’s crew following suit. But if Boyd had expected a formal surrender ceremony he was soon disabused of the notion as a peasant instantly snatched the proffered sidearm from Boyd’s outstretched hand, while other Sicilians crowded forward in a noisy tumult. The British revolver was worth a considerable sum of money to the impoverished locals, who soon descended into a pushing and shoving mob who competed loudly and increasingly violently for ownership.

  Boyd, not content to see his surrender gesture reduced to a farce, acted swiftly to restore order. He suddenly launched himself into the crowd, his squat, broad-shouldered frame bulling through the riotous locals and roaring at the peasant who had taken his pistol: ‘Give it to me!’ Though the Air Marshal was rather diminutive, the peasants reacted to Boyd’s force of personality, drawing back from the red-faced and shouting foreigner in fear. It was a magnificent display of sheer bravado on Boyd’s part, but entirely in keeping with his strong character. ‘Give me that!’ shouted Boyd, snatching the pistol from the peasant who’d originally pinched it. He broke it open and emptied the shells into his other hand before snapping the pistol shut and handing it back. ‘Now you’ll be safe,’ Boyd explained to the confused peasant, enunciating each word in the loud manner many English use when addressing foreigners. ‘Silly devils! You might have shot yourselves!’16

  Shortly afterwards a unit from the Royal Italian Navy arrived from a nearby base and formally took Boyd and his companions prisoner. This time the ‘surrender ceremony’ was a good deal more dignified, and Boyd was satisfied. The Britons were conveyed by car to the Italians’ base where they were given an enormous meal before being taken on to the town of Catania, on Sicily’s east coast.17 Their journey into an uncertain captivity had commenced.

  *

  Darkness had fallen by the time the car carrying Boyd and Leeming arrived at Catania. Their fellow captives were being separately conveyed to another camp.

  ‘Dear me,’ muttered Boyd under his breath as he looked out the car window. ‘The place is lit up like a bally Christmas tree.’ Both RAF officers were struck by the ineffective local blackout, with shops still brightly lit and even streetlamps on in places. Boyd did a fair amount of tut-tutting under his breath as they drove by, making comparisons with the British blackout. Eyebrows were raised further when Boyd and Leeming were summoned to see 49-year-old Major-General Ettore Lodi, the handsome and rather serious officer commanding the 3rd Air Division ‘Centauro’ and the senior Italian on Sicily.18 Lodi was deeply proud of his ‘blackout’, and took pains to point out to Air Marshal Boyd that many of the city’s street lamps were extinguished. Turning to Boyd, through an interpreter he asked for his professional opinion of his efforts. The Air Marshal, ‘one of those honest people who say what they really think’,19 told him.

  A red-faced General Lodi and his ADC personally showed the exhausted RAF officers to their quarters. Each man was given a bedroom, sharing a spartan bathroom. After being left alone for a while, the Britons heard someone moving around outside the door to Boyd’s room. Intrigued, Boyd and Leeming cracked the door slightly and peeked out. Standing in the corridor was a bored-looking Italian soldier armed with a rifle and fixed bayonet. Using sign language, Boyd managed to ascertain that the sentry was to remain on duty outside the door all night. This news seemed to strike Boyd as an affront.

  ‘The poor chap won’t be relieved all night, John,’ said Boyd, his brow deeply furrowed by this further evidence of Italian military inadequacy. ‘It’s just not on, John, not on at all.’

  During his previous commands, Boyd had built up a sterling reputation as an officer that genuinely cared for the welfare of those serving under him. Typically of the man, Boyd now extended this solicitude to his enemy.

  ‘The poor devil can’t stand there all night,’20 he said, still baffled by the incompetence of it all. Suddenly he made up his mind and strode across his room, snatching up one of the warped wooden chairs that they had been issued with and handed it to the sentry, indicating that he should sit. The astonished sentry, his eyes round with amazement, took the chair from Boyd.

  ‘Grazie, grazie,’ said the sentry over and over, making little bowing movements before finally sitting down.

  ‘Not at all, my dear chap,’ said Boyd, grinning, as he closed the door.

  ‘That Lodi devil ought to be relieved of his command, John,’ said Boyd once the door was shut. ‘Can you imagine a British officer treating his chaps in such a fashion?’ Leeming admitted that he couldn’t and sat on his bed while the Air Marshal pottered about the room muttering about ‘incompetence’ and ‘slovenliness’ until he finished hanging up his uniform and retired to bed.

  After a little while they heard a key being gently turned in the door and for the first time their situation sank in – they were prisoners of war. ‘There seemed something grim and final about the turning of the key,’21 wrote Leeming. For a long time he stared into the darkness, unable to sleep and more than a little apprehensive about what the morrow would bring.

  *

  ‘My God! I’m slipping, John!’ the voice from outside the window said in a fierce whisper. It was the dead of night and Air Marshal Boyd was clinging for dear life to a rickety drainpipe that ran outside his bedroom window down to a drain at the foot of the building. Leeming leaned out of the open window and grasped his boss by both arms. ‘I’ll pull you in, sir,’ he gasp
ed, attempting to take the strain. But it was easier said than done. For a few seconds it was touch and go, as Leeming thought that he would have to make a decision between dropping Boyd the twenty feet to the stone courtyard below or risking being dragged out of the window by the weight of the Air Marshal’s dangling frame. But, after much struggling and cursing, Leeming managed to pull Boyd up to the ledge, where the exhausted Air Marshal clambered back inside, the beam of a sentry’s torch settling momentarily upon Boyd’s struggling legs and posterior as they disappeared over the window ledge. Seconds later the bedroom door burst open and several Italian soldiers rushed over to subdue the two struggling RAF officers. This first attempted escape from the Italian HQ at Catania, where Boyd and Leeming were imprisoned for several weeks, had been precipitated by Leeming’s pre-war reading of thrillers featuring dashing cat burglars who shinned like cats up drainpipes to crack safes and steal jewels. ‘What we failed to realise was that at our age climbing down a drainpipe was a precarious and difficult feat,’22 wrote Leeming later with commendable understatement. Only after this false start did Boyd realise that they had gone about the thing the wrong way. ‘Further experience would have suggested the use of sheets,’23 he would comment, without a trace of irony.

  Leeming was constantly amazed by his boss’s ability to soldier on. Boyd’s career had effectively come to an end when his plane had been forced down in Sicily. If he had reached Egypt he could have expected eventually to have taken full command of the RAF in the Middle East, to have been promoted to Air Chief Marshal and in all likelihood to have received a knighthood. As it was, those honours and more besides were to go to the man that Churchill had originally blocked from the post, Arthur Tedder. While Boyd would languish in captivity, Tedder would rise to fame, eventually becoming Deputy Supreme Allied Commander under General Dwight D. Eisenhower.24

  The fortunes of war were further compounded for Boyd when he received a letter from London while a prisoner at Catania, informing him that as he had only held the rank of Air Marshal for seventeen days before capture, and as 21 days were required before confirmation of promotion, he was hereby demoted to Air Vice-Marshal and his pay was concomitantly reduced. But Leeming never heard Boyd utter a single word of complaint. Instead, the tough old dog started plotting his next escape. Considering what he had lost, it is small wonder that Boyd was so determined to get back home and back into some position of influence over the course of the war.

  The drainpipe episode earned Leeming and Boyd a transfer to Rome, with the crew of their shot-down Wellington joining them. The headquarters at Catania was never designed to hold prisoners of war, and Boyd had by now learned that the Italian press had dubbed him ‘Italy’s Prize Prisoner’.25 Clearly, Mussolini intended that his prize should be secured somewhere more appropriate – a location where shinning down drainpipes in the dead of night might be less of an option.

  Boyd and Leeming finally left Catania in a battered military bus provided by General Lodi, who was thrilled to see the back of them, bound for the port of Messina, their suitcases crammed full of enough Italian toilet paper to last them for at least a year: almost as soon as Boyd had arrived at the Catania HQ, he had started stealing the toilet paper. Leeming was initially nonplussed by his boss’s new pastime.

  ‘Damned primitive,’ said Boyd, pointing at their joint bathroom. ‘And this is an HQ, John. Imagine what a prison camp is going to be like. No, we need to prepare for every eventuality and err on the side of caution.’ So caution dictated that the two of them pinch every roll of lavatory paper that the Italians provided. Leeming later wrote that the Italians must have been considerably baffled by this strange behaviour. Each morning when they inspected the prisoners’ toilet they discovered an empty lavatory roll hanging on its spool, and duly replaced the paper. Each morning, an entire fresh roll was gone. British intestinal habits must have quietly amazed and fascinated their captors, Leeming would surmise.

  Whether Boyd and Leeming would need all that pilfered toilet paper now that they had departed from Lodi’s HQ, only time would tell. For now, their ultimate destination remained top secret.

  CHAPTER 2

  ___________________

  A Gift of Goggles

  ‘The Italians were hatefully full of themselves, for they had had a bumper week with a galaxy of generals in the bag…’

  Major-General Adrian Carton de Wiart

  On the evening of 6 April 1941 two cars sped across the Western Desert, headed for Tmimi, Libya. The first, a Lincoln Zephyr, carried the past and present commanders of the Western Desert Force, Lieutenant-Generals Sir Richard O’Connor and Sir Philip Neame, along with another seasoned desert campaigner, Brigadier John Combe, and a driver. Behind them, a Ford Mercury held Neame and O’Connor’s batmen, Neame’s aide-de-camp Lieutenant the Earl of Ranfurly, and a driver.1

  The desert campaign that had been going so well for the Allies at the beginning of the year had suffered an alarming reversal of fortunes since the Italian forces had been joined by Germany’s Afrika Korps. Now, with their headquarters at Marawa in danger of being overrun by the rapidly advancing Germans, Neame, O’Connor, Combe and their aides had taken the decision to evacuate and withdraw to Tmimi.

  Dick O’Connor had arrived in Libya just days before, Sir Archibald Wavell, British commander-in-chief in the Middle East, having decided that he needed to call upon the talents of his finest desert general once again. It was not that Wavell lacked confidence in the present commander of the Western Desert Force, the indomitable and brilliant Neame, it was just that Neame lacked desert experience while O’Connor had virtually written the book on North African campaigning.

  O’Connor had first joined the army in 1909, and had returned from the First World War with a Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, indicating the second award of a decoration that ranked only one place below that of the Victoria Cross. He had gone on to command a brigade along the fiercely dangerous Northwest Frontier of India in 1936 and faced down the Arab Revolt in Jerusalem in 1940. But it was his performance in Africa that had established his reputation. With his short grey hair and neatly trimmed white moustache, ‘General Dick’, as his contemporaries fondly knew him, had taken command of the Western Desert Force with the ominous task of trying to stop the massive Italian invasion of Egypt. With a force much smaller than his opponent, O’Connor had done just that, launching Operation Compass on 9 December 1940. In two days the British had smashed the Italians at Sidi Barrani. O’Connor had then pushed the Italians back into Libya.

  In January 1941, he had reorganised Western Desert Force then struck the Italian fortress of Bardia. It fell after two days of fighting. On 21 January O’Connor’s forces had captured the strategically vital port of Tobruk. In February Beda Fomm had fallen, O’Connor capturing 20,000 Italians for the loss of just nine British and Australians killed and fifteen wounded. In a stunning run of victories over ten weeks, O’Connor’s force had captured 130,000 Italian and Libyan troops and almost 400 tanks.2 But it was O’Connor’s very successes that had changed the course of the war in North Africa in the Axis’ favour. Hitler had been so alarmed by British successes in the desert that he had decided that he must support Benito Mussolini before Italy was completely knocked out of the war. In February 1941, while the British Army shuffled its pack, making O’Connor General Officer Commanding British Troops in Egypt and appointing Neame to Western Desert Force, advance elements of Major-General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had begun to disembark at Tripoli.

  On 31 March 1941 Rommel had struck, launching a surprise counteroffensive that threw the Western Desert Force on to the defensive and saved the Italian Army. Matters had been compounded for the British by Winston Churchill’s insistence on sending men and materiel to Greece to aid the futile struggle there – Wavell simply didn’t have the units with which to stop the combined German–Italian offensive and was soon forced to give ground.

  With O’Connor no longer in command of Western Desert Forc
e, the new man had struggled to manage what was soon shaping up to be a losing battle. Fifty-three-year-old Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Neame was a sapper, commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1908. Serious, of average height, precise and quietly humorous, Neame hailed from the Shepherd Neame brewing dynasty in Kent. A man of immense personal courage, during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in France on 19 December 1914 he had single-handedly held up the German advance for 45 minutes by lobbing grenade after grenade at large numbers of enemy troops while a battalion of the West Yorkshires evacuated their wounded. For this extraordinary feat of arms Neame had been awarded the Victoria Cross. Even more incredibly, he had followed this up a decade later by winning a Gold Medal for shooting at the 1924 Paris Olympics, the only VC to ever have become an Olympic champion.

  During leaves from the army Neame had pursued his other twin passions – exploring and big game hunting. He’d explored ‘all sorts of strange places where the natives were anything but friendly … climbed mountains in the wildest parts of the world, [and] shot all the most especially difficult kinds of big game.’3 In India, Neame had been clawed and almost killed by a Bengal tiger, and still proudly carried the scars.

  Nicknamed ‘Green Ink’ by some of his contemporaries for his rather affectatious use of a green pen on all his correspondence, Neame had commanded a brigade in India between the wars before being appointed Commandant of the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in 1938, charged with turning out new officers for the army.

  When Wavell, in desperation, had offered the newly knighted O’Connor command of Western Desert Force on 3 April 1941 he had refused, explaining that ‘changing horses in midstream would not really help matters.’ At Wavell’s request, though, O’Connor had agreed to ‘advise’ Neame, bringing with him the 46-year-old Brigadier Combe, lately commanding officer of the 11th Hussars, a regiment that had first won widespread public fame during the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. In true cavalry style, Combe had commanded a flying column consisting of out-of-date Rolls-Royce and Morris armoured cars that had cut off the Italian retreat at Mersa el Brega in early 1941.4 A good-looking man of medium height with brown hair and the ubiquitous military moustache, Combe had, like his boss, been awarded the DSO and Bar for his desert exploits and was tipped for higher command.