by Tom Carver
The French commandos did not offer any explanation as to why they were there. But Light explained that the French commandos had been provided to help guide the prisoners to the assembly area and to protect them in case they were attacked.
“I have identified an assembly area near Silvi Marina,” said Light. “For two nights running a motor torpedo boat will come into one of the bays. They will flash a code with a torch. Once the POWs have responded with the right message, the boat will drop anchor and the party will wade out to it.”
Gordon decided to send groups of twenty prisoners at a time down to the assembly point. Sitting in the kitchen smoking the English cigarettes, with the French commandos cleaning their weapons silently in the corner, the plan looked good. “We were all delighted at the idea,” Richard commented, “and thought it sounded as if it would be a really good show this time.”
It was agreed that the Dean should be on the first boat out; he would go at once to the coast with Badger Light and the French, while Richard and Gordon went round the farms briefing the other POWs. It was Saturday 30th October 1943. The Dean handed over his watch and beloved pipe to Richard. They had travelled well over 400 miles in each other’s company, sharing beds at night and helping each other through each day. They shook hands and congratulated each other on getting this far. The Dean promised to send a note to Monty telling him that Richard was alive as soon as he reached Allied lines.
“I’ll be home by morning!” he declared.
The first 12 prisoners were brought to the farmhouse. The schoolmaster generously cooked them a special meal of spaghetti followed by roast chicken, relieved no doubt to see them leave. At 2pm they set off. The French commandos, brushing aside concerns about Germans, marched the group straight down the road in full daylight. Several of the prisoners were still dressed in British uniforms.
“The contrast between the care and caution which Richard and I always observed to this free and easy crowd was remarkable,” wrote the Dean.
He proposed that they split into two groups to reduce the chances of being killed in the event of an attack. This was agreed but within half an hour the groups had remerged since the one at the back, anxious not to lose the way, kept running into the one at the front. When they halted outside a farm to have a smoke, a German tank came round the corner and they ducked inside a barn.
An Italian ran out into the road and warned them that there were Germans everywhere up ahead and told them to return to the hills but the French continued, full of sang froid.
A short distance further on, another Italian came alongside them on a bicycle and asked if they were heading to Silvi. They pretended never to have heard of the place. The Italian shrugged.
“Oh, I thought you might like to know that a British boat has just landed there,” he said in broken English. The French continued to feign ignorance but the Dean found this exchange “a little disconcerting”. They were still twenty miles from the coast – how could their plan be so widely known?
Their first attempt to be rescued ended in disaster when the motor launch was destroyed by German machine-gun fire as it arrived at the rendezvous. They then tried, unsuccessfully, to commandeer a fishing boat that they came across on the beach. Eventually, two nights later, they found a fisherman who was willing to take them in his boat. He seemed an unlikely saviour, but he was all they had.
When darkness came, the fisherman led them down a small track between some cottages. The Dean, deciding he had used up all his luck, knelt down on the pebbly beach and prayed for success. A cold wind whipped the waves; they could see the boat some 30 yards out, bouncing in the rough surf. They waded out and found that it was already full of Italians. The boat was only big enough to carry about 25 passengers and they were more than 40 in total.
“What are you doing? This is our boat – we paid for it,” yelled the French commandos over the noise of the sea. “So did they,” said the fisherman, indicating the Italians huddled in the stern. He shrugged and smiled. There was nothing they could do; no one was going to get out. So the Dean climbed aboard and prayed once more.
In his journal, he describes a nerve-wracking voyage. As they set off, the boat’s engine whined and battled against the pounding surf. A couple of times it was pushed broadside to the incoming waves. The captain yelled at everyone to shift to the windward side to prevent the vessel from capsizing. For about half an hour it was unclear which would win, then slowly the noise of the surging tide began to sink into the background, the waves grew calmer and the coastline started to diminish. They had two hours of darkness left to get out of sight of land.
The Dean kept his eyes fixed on the morning star, watching it rise gracefully to take its place in the arc of the sky. He didn’t want to look back. A stiff southerly wind whipped up and the captain raised the sails. Soon the east began breaking with light; the Dean looked at the mountain of the Gran Sasso shining in its new coat of snow and wondered where Richard was. At one point, a group of bombers flew low overhead in tight formation. Everyone watched them drawing the anti-aircraft fire, and then there followed the explosions of their bombs, which sounded like someone pounding a table in a faraway room.
They sailed past Pescara, Ortona and the mouth of the Sangro River, all names that would become famous for their casualties in the battles that were to come in the weeks ahead. At 6pm, as the light was fading, the fisherman steered into the tiny walled harbour of Termoli.
“Very skilfully the skipper swung the boat round so that it came alongside another similar craft tied up to the steps. We scrambled out over the other craft, up the steps onto the damaged quay, free men once again.”
And so ends the Dean’s diary. It was Sunday 7th November 1943. The Gloomy Dean had walked back into freedom two months to the day after leaving Fontanellato.
13.
THAT SAME DAY in the hills of Carpineto 40 miles inland, Richard waited anxiously. He had heard the news from the coast: that the Germans had shot up the motorboat in the bay and raided the staging area. Assuming that the Dean had been captured, he decided to abandon the sea route. The notion had been tantalising but the risk was obviously too great. He turned his back to the coast and set his mind on trying to walk through the German lines before winter froze everything in place.
It was one year since Richard had been captured in the desert. Having come this far, his overriding priority was not to get recaptured. His motto was slowly but safely – yet he could not go too slowly if he was to cross the mountains before the heavy snows arrived.
Richard had already covered well over 400 miles on foot. His boots were in a bad state of repair and his two pairs of socks were disintegrating. He had been given a vest several months ago and he now wore it continuously with his battledress jacket to keep out the cold. He estimated that Monty and the Eighth Army were only about 60 miles to the south. In fact, unknown to him, Monty’s tactical HQ – the same collection of caravans and command vehicles that Richard had disappeared from a year earlier in El Alamein – was closer than that, sitting on the far bank of the Sangro River just 30 miles away.
Since the armistice two months earlier, Monty had conquered nearly half of Italy with little opposition. The Germans had no intention of trying to defend the sparsely populated villages of the south. It was Rome that mattered to them, and preventing the Allies from breaking out to the north. The Eighth Army had breached the first of the German lines – the Volturno and the Barbara – but was now grinding to a halt on the Sangro. The Americans in the west were faring no better. After struggling to break out of their beachhead at Salerno, they had gained only 200 miles and were stuck 50 miles south of Rome on the Via Casilina.
Richard asked around among the POWs shivering in the barns and pigsties of neighbouring farms to see if anyone was willing to accompany him.
“Sure,” said a South African infantry officer without cracking a smile, “I want to be back in Cape Town by Christmas.”
The officer introduced himself as Jim Gill.
In the ice-bound barn Richard was astonished to see that he was wearing shorts. They were made of dark-blue hessian-type material and looked so badly cut they could have been homemade. If he had been wearing the baggy army shorts that Eighth Army soldiers wore in the desert it would have been more understandable, but these shorts seemed utterly out of place. No contadini would ever be seen in shorts in the middle of winter in the mountains. Richard eyed them with concern.
“Always wear shorts,” Jim said tersely. “I can’t walk in trousers, hate the damn things.” Jim Gill had grown up on a remote farm outside Paarl in the eastern Cape. He was stocky, probably no more than five foot eight, with sandy hair, blue eyes and a firm farmer’s handshake. He didn’t say much, as if he believed that words were a resource that needed careful husbanding, like water or grain. Richard sensed immediately that he shared less in common with him than he had with the donnish old Dean, but he was younger and fitter than the Dean, which was an important advantage for getting over the mountains. And besides, they didn’t expect they would have to be travelling companions for very long.
The next morning, the 8th November, Richard and Jim slipped out of the farmhouse where they were staying into the freezing pre-dawn darkness. By noon they reached the dam on the Pescara River which Richard had reconnoitred two weeks before. The gatekeeper at the dam told them that many POWs had crossed this way in recent weeks; at one stage, he said, he had even kept a visitors’ book though he’d thrown it away after the Germans started arriving in force. On the other side, they climbed steeply out of the valley to the lower slopes of the Majella mountains, a formidable limestone massif in the Apennines whose peaks reached over 8.500 feet and whose deep valleys had forbidding names like Vallone di Femmina Morta. The whole area was thinly inhabited and pockmarked with caves.
That winter of 1943 was particularly brutal in Italy. The snows started earlier than usual and by the first week of November, there were already several feet of snow in the passes of the Majella. In the bottom of the valleys a biting sleet set in and lasted for several weeks. In villages where food was never abundant in the best of times, there were already widespread shortages.
The women and children and elderly who made up the bulk of the population in the region had been unable to do anything to stop the German soldiers who stole the family’s supplies or demanded to be fed at the family dining table. The Italian Fascists had been little better; eager to show their German colleagues that they weren’t soft on their own countrymen and dismissive of the rough peasants, they had taken whatever the Germans had failed to find.
The villagers had done their best to hide food in outhouses, attics and under floorboards; even burying bags of dried pasta and rice in the fields. But animals were harder to disguise and if they spotted a pig or sheep, the Germans would often herd them into the back of their trucks. The villagers were used to surrendering the occasional animal as tithe to the Church, but unlike the Church, the Germans offered nothing in return except the threat of violence.
The families encouraged their shepherds to stay as long as they could in the high summer pastures in order to keep their flocks out of German hands. The only shelters up there were primitive huts, made out of birch branches and turf and designed for an occasional summer’s night when inclement weather prevented the shepherds from sleeping outside among the leopards’ bane and anemones. Some of them were made of stones, built on an ancient Greek tholos design, which involved laying flat stones one on top of the other until they met in the middle. For two days Richard and Jim climbed steadily away from the coast, stopping at farmhouses to collect as much bread as they could carry.
I carried only the barest essentials in the old string bag. I also carried a zappetta [a mattock] to give an air of verisimilitude – Jim carried a hatchet and bread wrapped up in a large and very dirty handkerchief. Also he seemed to be able to bestow unlimited quantities of dried figs etc in his pockets!
Drawing of a tholos, from Richard’s diary
Above Acquafredda, they stumbled across eight POWs sheltering in a cave. They had a fire at the back of the cave but it did little to dispel the cold wind. There wasn’t any room for Jim and Richard so one of the prisoners led them down the hill to a tholos. On the way it started to sleet and they were soaking by the time they arrived.
Tuesday November 9th 1943. It had snowed in the night and was still snowing in the morning. In spite of that however, we decided to cross the pass… my boots by this time were in a pretty bad way; the soles were very thin in spite of patches and the uppers cracked and in holes. But they were still boots whereas poor Jim only had thin shoes.
We plodded on, making fresh tracks in the virgin snow. It was about a foot deep on the top of the pass. There was a road down the far side and we took that as the slopes were well wooded and other routes difficult to find in the snow. About two miles from the top we came upon fresh wheel tracks and concluded that a Boche truck must have taken the wrong turning, come up so far and then turned round.
Above the village of Preturo, Richard and Jim found six more prisoners sheltering beside some cows in a hut. They were now no more than eighteen miles from Monty’s headquarters: a twenty-minute drive in peace-time. One of the POWs described how he had attempted to cross the Sangro River but had come across large numbers of Germans preparing defensive positions on the high ground overlooking the river. Unable to find a way round, he had turned back. In fact, they had run up against the Gustav Line, the toughest and most well dug in of all of Kesselring’s defensive systems.
Richard and Jim moved off, hoping that somehow they might be able to skirt between the ridgeline of the mountains and the edge of the German positions on the Sangro River.
November 10th. More rain and snow. Difficult going along the mountainside as we had to cross a number of deep ravines. When we were opposite Guardiagrele, we heard a “battle” of machine gun fire and mortars in the valley below… a local told us that some prisoners had escaped from Guardiagrele and been shot while escaping. At about 1600 hours while seated on a rock above Pennapiedimonte discussing our onward route, we saw a strange figure coming up the mountain towards us.
It was a German officer. They fled rapidly back, nearly stumbling into a chain gang of Italian soldiers digging trenches on the hill which they realised the German officer was coming up to inspect. They either had to go around the position, which meant a difficult climb up into the cloud and snow of the peak, or pull back to a tholos that they had passed. They decided to retreat.
That night in the hut, they shared the final tin of bully beef that Richard had carried in his knapsack all the way from Fontanellato and burrowed together under some brushwood to try to keep warm. The next morning they stuck to the tracks made by hunters and the charcoal gatherer as much as possible, but before long they found themselves approaching a main road. They could hear the sound of horses and carts but couldn’t see who was driving.
“Let’s push on,” said Jim impatiently. “They’re bound to be Italians.”
Emerging from the hedgerow, they were nearly run over by a German ammunition wagon being pulled by five horses. The German soldiers slowed down and studied the two odd-looking Italian peasants as they passed a yard or so away. Richard and Jim could hear them talking; Richard was sure they were debating whether to detain them. He braced himself for the order but none came and the ammunition wagon continued to roll on down the hill. They had been saved by the Germans’ inability to distinguish the fake from the real Italian peasant even when one of them was dressed in shorts.
About a mile further on, they were given a bowl of hot pasta, which they ate hiding in a cowshed, as they listened to the curses of a German gun troop outside trying to manoeuvre their guns through the mud on the track a few yards away. They were surrounded by German units, and battling exhaustion. Richard had been walking for two months; one foolish mistake would undo all the time they had spent on the run. Every choice mattered now: “Everything gone but the will to hold on. Seldom had
food tasted so good.”
At the junction of the Lajo and Aventino rivers they encountered more gun emplacements and it wasn’t until midnight that they finally found a place where they could wade across. They rewarded themselves with an hour’s rest in a small hut on the other side. When they emerged, the moon had come out and in front of the hut a carpet of yellow apples glittered in the moonlight under an old tree. They jammed as many as they could into their pockets and, their spirits lifted, went on their way.
*
Around 3am they spotted an army signal cable running down the path and followed it for a while as it was the only route through the woods. Suddenly they heard someone humming ahead in the darkness. They froze. The humming stopped and through the silence came the muffled thuds of German 88mm artillery probing for the British defences on the far side of the valley.
Hardly breathing, they listened to the guns and to the silence. Then, as clearly as if they all were sitting in the same room, they heard a field telephone ring and a German soldier suddenly stand up, no more than fifteen yards ahead of them. He stamped his boots and began talking into the phone. As far as they could tell, he was on his own, probably a sentry. Carefully lifting their feet so as not to crackle the undergrowth, Jim and Richard moved off the track back uphill into the trees.
They collapsed into a thicket of brambles, their nerves grating with tiredness and desperation. They dozed intermittently but the fear of being caught stopped them from falling asleep properly. The guns in the valley had stopped; soon it would be dawn. Unfortunately, having walked off the map that Badger Light had brought, they had little idea of their exact location.