by Tom Carver
That evening, he informed Colonel de Burgh that he had ordered his guards to prepare demolition explosives and dig trenches to defend the camp against a German attack. He then offered to let de Burgh send one POW out of the camp to reconnoitre a suitable place to hide the prisoners in case the Germans arrived within the next few hours.
“I will provide my interpreter, Capitano Camino, to help him to communicate with the local population,” he added.
De Burgh was grateful but sceptical; why would the locals suddenly help to keep the location of 600 escapees hidden? The few prisoners who had managed to escape had all been recaptured, for the Italians were very good at distinguishing the fake from the genuine. Someone was bound to inform the Germans.
Nonetheless he told Hugh Mainwaring to go – it seemed fitting that someone who had been captured carrying out a reconnaissance should carry out another reconnaissance to orchestrate an escape. As the light started to fade, the two of them, Mainwaring and ‘Cap’ Camino, set off down the road past the convent on a pair of requisitioned bicycles.
De Burgh then approached Richard. As the most senior Royal Engineer officer in the camp, Richard was nominally “in charge” of the twelve other Engineer officers. So far they had done nothing together except form a football team, but de Burgh was clearly determined to organise the camp on military lines, perhaps in preparation for a return to battle.
“At first light you are to post your platoon of engineers at the gates. If the Italian guards vanish in the night, then you and your men are to take their place. You are to prevent any prisoner from leaving the camp by the main gate – by force if necessary. We must not allow a breakdown in order.”
Other platoons were tasked with doing the same all along the wire. It was an invidious position to be in and one that Richard had never imagined might happen; to be taking over the guarding of a camp full of his colleagues inside enemy territory. It looked as if de Burgh was intending to implement the “stay put” order. The next day, Thursday 9th, he started his diary thus:
Truly a memorable day! Having got up at 0600 we found we were not needed as guards as the Italian sentries were still on duty. The others went back to bed but I stayed up and studied my bible in the growing light, wondering what the day would bring forth.
He could see several of the guards standing in newly dug slit trenches and an adjacent pigsty wearing glum expressions. They had no interest in fighting, especially not in a new war against the Germans. Then after breakfast came an order to prepare to move out at short notice. Everyone was told to take only one day’s worth of rations.
As we only expected to be out a few hours, such was the unreality of the situation, we didn’t take so much care in selecting articles to take with us as we might have done.
Richard’s small band of engineers was tagged onto a company commanded by the Gloomy Dean – the man whose diary I was to find in my father’s study. The Dean, however, like many other prisoners, seemed remarkably unaware of the precariousness of that day. In his diary he records going as usual to the bar for a pre-lunch aperitif: “The bar, as might be expected under the circumstances, was very well attended; spare tickets were difficult to obtain. It was when walking upstairs to return my glass to my room before going down to lunch that I met a lot of the other ranks all with their haversacks, running down; almost simultaneously the bugler sounded the alarm.”
Two guards sent by Vicedomini to find the exact location of the Germans had returned, saying that they’d seen a German convoy heading towards Fontanellato. Colonel de Burgh ordered everyone to line up by their companies on the exercise field. Richard rushed upstairs to try to recover the stash of Red Cross chocolate that he had been hiding for just such an eventuality, but he was pushed back by the crowds heading the other way.
“The Germans are moving fast,” de Burgh announced as men poured out of the building into the field. “They apparently know that the orphanage at Fontanellato contains a large number of British officer prisoners.”
Three Gs were blown by the camp bugler and Vicedomini ordered his guards to cut the barbed wire at the back of the exercise field. Company commanders reported their charges present and de Burgh announced the order of march; the Dean’s company, with Richard’s troop, was told to go last. As the Italians stood to one side in an impromptu guard of honour, the prisoners of PG49 marched out three at a time, saluting to the SBO as they passed as if they were on a parade ground.
It took some time for 600 men to pass through the small gap in the wire. At the back, Richard and his engineers waited anxiously for their turn. The moment seemed increasingly unreal. Any moment they expected to hear hoarse shouts of “Alt!” and the running of feet behind them in the orphanage, but nothing came. The Germans had stopped eight miles away to organise the evacuation of four labour camps – had they headed straight for the camp, they would have arrived with the escape still in progress.
As he inched towards the gap, Richard glanced back one last time at the playing field that had been his world; it was completely empty except for the four white geese. He remembered them as goslings scuttling in and out of men’s feet during the daily roll call and squawking for the safety of the stream during rugby games. Fattened by the guards all summer on a diet of lettuce and corn, the birds now huddled nervously together in the middle of the football pitch, watching everyone leave. It was just after midday.
10.
TO WALK THROUGH the wire was like stepping through a looking-glass. It was a hot day; small puffs of cloud clotted the blue sky. After months of trying to escape with tunnels, in the end the men of PG49 had simply walked out. Suddenly they were in the world of farmers and peasant girls, of ox-drawn carts swaying under hillocks of hay and motor cars rattling past to market. The prospect of being killed by the Germans or the Italian Fascists felt significantly greater than any danger they had faced as POWs. After months of captivity, most POWs had grown used to the routine and relative safety of prison life. To each other they had talked continuously about being home by Christmas and getting the chance to rejoin the fight against the Jerries, but in fact many were suffering from what was known in the German camps as gefangenitis, a torpor bordering on depression which came from being shut up for so long. In their walks in the countryside as POWs, the locals had been ordered to look the other way when they passed, but now, to the prisoners’ relief, they were surrounded by smiling townspeople.
As they walked, the long line of soldiers kicked up a large dust cloud; the front of the line was too far ahead for Richard to see. He got out his homemade compass; he could tell that they were being led north-west away from the town and out among the farms and fields. Farmers in their wide-brimmed straw hats stopped the harvesting to watch, and a few even cheered. Richard felt vulnerable not having any weapons – any moment he expected to see a line of grey German trucks on the horizon – ten well-armed soldiers would be sufficient to arrest everyone.
They had been walking for about twenty minutes when there was a sudden noise of an aircraft. A German Junker flashed low overhead. There was panic as hundreds of men attempted to lie down on the road at once. It took a long time – most prisoners were out of condition and Leon the Belgian cook, a rotund character whose girth seemed undiminished by captivity, fainted. A car appeared and out of it got a farmer with buckets of water which were passed down the line. The cook was bundled into the car and taken away.
A bit further along they stopped in the shade of a line of poplars. Richard could see a man in a pinstripe suit conferring with Cap in the shadows, while all around prisoners sat smoking and listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the birds and the wind rustling the poplar leaves. No one spoke. De Burgh walked along the line explaining the plan; we’re heading for a large wood nearby, he said, where we’re to stay until the Germans have moved on.
“Nowhere is going to be big enough to hide us all,” said one prisoner. “Someone is bound to betray us.”
A couple of workers stood in the field on the o
ther side of the road staring. They must have been a curious sight, these British men, a mixture of uniforms and old clothes, all still carrying the red flashes on their backs that signified prisoner of war.
“Look at those Italians – any of them could tell the Germans where we are.” Some of the officers began demanding that the group be broken up and for everyone to be allowed to go their own way. But de Burgh and Cap – the British and the Italian officer – were in agreement: if we break into smaller groups we stand very little chance.
“We must hide until the hunt has died down; the Germans will never think of looking for us so close to the camp,” said de Burgh. Richard knew it was an extraordinary gamble to try to hide everyone in one place but he also felt that this was probably the least worst option. He asked his friend Hugh Mainwaring if he’d found a good location when he went on the reconnaissance. “We have. It’s well hidden from the air, but I can’t tell until we get there whether we’re all going to fit.”
They moved off again. After another half an hour, Cap and Mainwaring led the straggling line of 600 harried men off the road and down a track through an old vineyard. Between the vines, Richard could see the ground had been tilled. At the end of the field lay a small wood. Someone said the place was called Rovacchia. Richard estimated that they had walked no more than two miles from the camp. As he came out of the sunlight and adjusted his eyes to the gloom, he saw a steep bank below him covered in undergrowth leading down to a dry, rocky riverbed. Hundreds of prisoners were already lying in the riverbed and all the way up either side, squashed together, clutching their few possessions and panting in the heat.
“There’s no space left; the wood is full!” said a voice.
The Dean was ordered to take his company of 100 men, including Richard’s troop, back out to the field and hide among the vines. Richard’s engineers grumbled. They felt very exposed; they were clearly visible from the sky. It was still several hours until darkness.
Richard lay with his face pressed down among the vine stalks and wondered what to advise the engineers under his command to do if the Germans arrived:
It was no good all bolting like rabbits or some would undoubtedly get shot, the only hope was to lie still, or possibly if they were rounding up people at the far end of the field to try and move off quietly along the vine row in the opposite direction.
A bottle of water was passed down, then came word that the Germans had reached the camp. Furious at finding it empty, the soldiers had begun looting the Red Cross supplies. One rumour claimed that they were getting drunk on the vermouth left behind in Tommy’s Bar.
*
As the last prisoners had disappeared through the gap in the wire, Vicedomini had released his guards from their posts in the pigsty and the slit trenches and they had run to the guardroom, ripped off their uniforms and put on their civilian clothes; they had no interest in confronting the Germans, and Vicedomini wasn’t going to force them to fight over an empty camp whose only inmates were four white geese.
After they too had left, the colonnello returned to his office to put his papers in order. He was no longer answerable to any legal authority but he could not break the orderly habits of a professional soldier. He sat down at his desk and waited. He had carried out his duty and hoped that the idea of Italy would live on in its people even if the state no longer existed.
A little after 3pm the Germans pulled up in front of the orphanage in a cloud of dust and truck fumes. There were about 200 of them; they marched up the front steps and into the entrance hall. They scoured the rooms, noticing the signs of sudden departure: the beds unmade, many with the blankets missing, old tin cans and rations that no one wanted lying around. When they reached the exercise area and found the gap in the wire, they turned on Vicedomini, screaming at him and kicking him. They told him he had betrayed the cause of Fascism and National Socialism and had insulted the name of the Führer.
A couple of the officers wanted to drag him to the exercise yard and execute him at once. But a small crowd had gathered under the plane trees on the boulevard to watch what was going on. The Germans knew that they were not welcome as the new arrivals in Italy; a public execution might turn the local population into resistance. So they placed Vicedomini under arrest and dragged him down the steps of the camp.
Handcuffed and dishevelled, he was pushed into the back of a truck. It was the last time that the people of Fontanellato saw him. Vicedomini spent the rest of the war in a German labour camp. He managed to hold on until the Allied liberation. Well into his sixties and his health broken by the hard labour, he died shortly after returning to Italy, having lived just long enough to see a new Italian state emerge.
The German commander gave the order to get back into the trucks and start searching. It had only been a few hours; the prisoners could not have got very far. The patrols moved off in different directions, confident of soon seeing clumps of obvious-looking prisoners walking through the fields. It wasn’t long before the rumble of the trucks reached Rovacchia.
Richard pressed his face harder into the soil. The sounds came closer. Several times the trucks and motorbikes passed right by the wood where hundreds of prisoners crouched in the shadows. The Germans must have wondered how so many could have vanished so completely.
As dusk fell, swarms of mosquitoes and midges began lifting off the bushes in the riverbed, awakened by the cooling air. The sound of muffled curses and people trying to swat them away could be heard by Richard and the others lying in the fields. Had the Germans stopped for a moment on the road and cut their engines, they would have heard them too.
Darkness finally came around 8pm. Somehow they had done it: 600 men had slipped out of a prisoner-of-war camp and hidden themselves right under the noses of the Germans. Or at least they had got through the first day, though there was still the possibility of betrayal. By now the entire village must have known where they were.
As if to confirm their fears, groups of Italians began to appear at the edge of the wood. Then someone noticed Cap among them. The interpreter had gone out and sought food and water from neighbouring farms and he returned with several farmers laden with buckets of water, bread, grapes and hard, dry chunks of parmesan. The Italians placed the food in the middle of the wood. Some of the prisoners held back at first, still struggling to grasp the idea that the battle lines had changed. They found it hard to trust Cap, who had spent a year relaying the orders and punishments of the commandant and the guards. But gradually his transparently good nature won them over and to everyone’s astonishment he revealed that he had an English wife and had even run a business in London before the war.
That night everyone had a different plan – to go north to the Swiss border, to strike out for the coast to greet the hoped-for Allied landings, to hide in the farms nearby and wait for the Allies to get here, to head south on the long hike down the Apennines. Each idea could be argued with equal authority; the truth was that no one had a clue what was going on. The camp radio appeared to have vanished, left behind in the rush. They were more out of touch outside the camp than they had been inside it.
Already the evenings in the bar playing baccarat, the history classes, the amateur dramatics and the soccer tournaments seemed a distant memory. They faced a rough, uncertain future as the hunted. Hardly any of the prisoners could speak more than a few words of Italian. They were hiding in occupied territory and could be shot at any time as enemy combatants. Their chances of survival seemed slim – it would have been farcical if it wasn’t so dangerous. Richard told his troop to ration themselves to a quarter of a tin of bully beef and two biscuits a day.
At about 9pm the first group left, fortified by the food; and then more went, pushing past the others and eager to get going. There was finally enough space in the wood for the Dean’s company with my father’s troop to be allowed off the fields and under cover. Many of them slept on the sloping ground, exhausted by the day; others sat chatting, smoking and swatting the mosquitoes, adjusting thems
elves to the unaccustomed sounds of the night. They could hear the steady hum of German military traffic heading south on the Via Emilia. The occasional drone of transport planes filtered into the wood. Were they Allied or German?
The next morning Cap reappeared with several hundred loaves that the local baker had made overnight for the prisoners. With him came a farmer who had milked his entire herd to provide milk for them. He had civilian clothing too. Arguments quickly broke out as prisoners struggled to get rid of their battledress with the tell-tale red strip as fast as possible. Many were convinced that a single item of Italian peasants’ clothes would make them invisible. Bad decisions were made. Thick, warm battledress jackets were exchanged in haste for a camisole or a thin shirt. Others swapped their army boots for badly made shoes.
The Italians found it hard not to laugh at the sight of these pale, earnest British officers squeezing themselves into ill-fitting contadino trousers. One officer, Douglas Flowerdew, decided the safest way of avoiding attention was to dress as a woman. The farmers’ wives fitted him out with a blue stockinette dress, a blue kerchief padded with maize hair on his head and high heels. Everyone laughed at the sight, but he managed to get all the way back to England where he became a vicar in Sussex after the war.
Another group of locals arrived with Red Cross parcels from the camp. The temptation to have taken this food home must have been considerable, but instead they handed them to the POWs. They said there was little sign today of the Germans at the camp. Buoyed by this news, the prisoners became more confident. They began to walk around more freely; a few of the prisoners lucky enough to have secured a flagon of wine even held a picnic among the vines.