Where the Hell Have You Been?

by Tom Carver

  “Yes, please.”

  Richard stayed the night with the New Zealanders and Donato managed to locate a friend in the town, who gave him a bed.

  The next morning Richard gave Donato a travel pass allowing him to travel on military transport to Naples. He was effusive in his gratitude, though Richard knew that the flimsy piece of paper written by an American warrant officer was scant repayment for all the risks Donato had taken to protect him.

  They said goodbye standing in the street. Richard did not make close friends easily. In the most unlikely circumstances, he had encountered someone with a gentle, tolerant attitude to life similar to his own. He admired Donato’s compassion and felt happy in his company. They promised to meet up again as soon as the war allowed it, though Richard gave little indication in his diary that he thought it would actually happen. He was more realistic, perhaps, about how much separated them.

  15.

  RICHARD WAS GIVEN a shower, and a shave and a new set of uniform. The British liaison officer offered to drive him the six miles downstream to Monty’s tactical HQ at Paglieta.

  Sitting in the back, upright, clean-shaven and combed, chatting politely to the officer and his driver, Richard realised that his life on the road was over. He had left behind his farmer’s trousers and his zappetta at the American headquarters and his new uniform felt awkward and unfamiliar.

  When Richard had been captured, his stepfather had been a relatively obscure British general, one among many. One year later, Monty had become a familiar name in every household in the Empire. The propaganda film of the North African campaign, Desert Victory, had been played in countless darkened Gaumonts and Odeons. The publicity shot of Monty leaning out of his tank turret, his foxy angular face craning forward with his binoculars round his neck, had become one of the most recognisable images of the war.

  As Richard stepped out of the jeep, he was told that Monty was just finishing a briefing in the mess tent. He waited by the car. A few minutes later, Monty came out. He was dressed in a typically unorthodox outfit of a fleece-lined bomber’s jacket, a jersey, no tie and wearing his trademark black beret with two cap badges.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he said, looking stern for a moment before breaking into a grin.

  Monty must have been warned that Richard was on his way up from the American HQ, for he’d arranged for an official photographer to be present. They shook hands as a group of Monty’s staff surrounded them and applauded.

  “What took you so long?” said Monty, clapping Richard on the shoulder. “Had Carol Mather through here several weeks ago.” The put-down was typical of Monty who found it impossible to cede the limelight gracefully even for a few moments. But when I look at the photographs of them standing together beside Monty’s caravan, the light in Monty’s eyes is obvious and his smile is real. He looks relieved – he is a father who has recovered his son.

  Richard clearly felt his joy. “Monty was obviously delighted to see me,” he wrote in his diary, “and started making jokes about my clothes.”

  He took Richard on a tour of his tactical HQ, showing him off to his aides and camp followers. They walked around Monty’s collection of canaries and lovebirds as the official photographer clicked away and Monty explained how he had reluctantly given up the peacock that had travelled with him all the way up Italy after it had bitten two of his ADCs.

  Richard and Monty, posing for photographs outside Monty’s caravans at tactical HQ, Paglieta, on 4th December 1943

  “Gave it away to a local farmer, who ate it if he had any sense.”

  After dinner, he took Richard through his plan of attack, describing how he was going to “knock Kesselring and the German army for six right out of Italy” as soon as he was able to cross the Sangro. To Richard, Monty seemed to be the same bustling, self-confident, dogmatic, energetic person, except that his traits seemed to have been magnified by his fame – as if in his mind success had somehow justified his mood swings, his staggering tactlessness and equally startling kindnesses.

  He presented Richard with a signed copy of his “Personal Message to the Troops” which he had read out three days earlier to a large gathering of soldiers from every front-line unit.

  “The Allies have conquered about one-third of Italy since we invaded the country on 3rd September,” it read. “But the Germans still hold the approaches to Rome, and that city itself…WE WILL NOW HIT THE GERMANS A COLOSSSSAL CRACK. Good luck to you all. And good hunting as we go forward.”

  Monty had arranged for a bed for Richard to be made up in his map-room caravan and told him how the caravan had been captured after the battle of El Alamein from an Italian general who was now the Minister of War in the Badoglio government and therefore on the Allied side.

  “But if he thinks he’s getting his caravan back, he’s not!” he shouted, chortling away.

  The next night, after retiring to his own caravan, Monty wrote to the Reynoldses, “5th December – Dick Carver has just come in. He is very well, but is thin and wants feeding up I should say. I shall send him home at once… it will be nice for him to be home for Christmas.”

  *

  Richard’s reappearance was a rare moment of happiness for Monty. Underneath the usual bluster he was becoming increasingly anxious and fretful. His army was grounded in the mud. Having pushed the enemy back 1,800 miles from El Alamein, all the way along the North African coast, through Sicily and up the Adriatic coast, he was now stuck.

  But it wasn’t only having his progress halted that chafed at Monty. He was afraid that his star was about to be eclipsed. Among the senior ranks of the British army, it was now an open secret that Roosevelt and the Americans were turning their attention away from Italy and the southern Mediterranean and focusing on an invasion in northern Europe. As all eyes turned north, Monty could tell that the Italian front was becoming less important. His requests for additional troops and tanks were starting to fall on deaf ears.

  In early November, the idea of invading northern Europe had acquired a code name – Operation Overlord – with General Eisenhower as its supreme commander. On 29th November, during their meeting in Tehran, Stalin had surprised Churchill by asking who was going to command the land forces in the operation. Assuming that Russia wanted to be involved, Churchill had started mumbling about how the three powers could decide collectively, to which Stalin replied that he simply wanted to know.

  Monty showing Richard his collection of lovebirds

  Since an American was the supreme commander, it was likely that a British general would get the post of commanding the land forces – an appointment that would be the crowning achievement of any career; a chance to makes amends for the debacle of Dunkirk, to restore British pride and honour and demonstrate Britain’s superiority in the league of European nations.

  By early December, when Richard arrived at Paglieta, Monty knew that his rival, General Harold Alexander, was being favoured for the job by both Eisenhower and Churchill. Alex and Monty were almost exact contemporaries. Though Alex was four years younger, they had been promoted generals within months of each other and had both commanded corps during the retreat from Dunkirk. As the commander-in-chief for the British forces in the Middle East, Alex was Monty’s commanding officer. However, since El Alamein Monty had become much the more famous general of the two.

  Alexander was the antithesis of Monty in both temperament and background, the third son of the 4th Earl of Caledon from County Tyrone in Ireland. He had shown great courage in the First World War as a junior officer, and viewed the military life with an aristocrat’s cool detachment, utterly different from the emotional fury that Monty brought to the task. While Monty was constantly riding his subordinates to change tactics, Alex left his commanders to fight their battles in the way they wanted.

  Monty studied obsessively and pushed and elbowed his way up the ranks; Alex used his charm for advancement. He was close to Churchill and, like the prime minister, had attended Harrow and Sandhurst. Churchill wa
s convinced that Alex’s smooth diplomatic skills would be essential for handling the Americans. The war was quickly becoming a joint operation between the two nations and political tact and judgment were increasingly necessary skills.

  But once again General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, saw things differently. He believed that the most important quality for commanding the vast coalition of land forces in Operation Overlord was going to be the ability to think strategically, and he had little faith in Alexander’s abilities to do that.

  “Alex, charming as he is, fills me with gloom,” Brooke wrote in his diary, “He cannot see big… He will never have either the personality or the vision to command three services.”

  From his caravan on the damp banks of the Sangro, Monty lobbied furiously for the position, scribbling letters to Lord Mountbatten in Asia, the Reynoldses in England, his former field commanders scattered across the battlefield and to anyone else who would listen, trying to shift the decision in his favour. He had no qualms about openly undermining his rival.

  “Alexander is a very great friend of mine and I am very fond of him,” he wrote on one occasion. “But I am under no delusion whatsoever as to his ability to conduct large scale operations in the field.”

  “The higher art of making war is beyond him,” he wrote to another colleague. “We are on a very good wicket now and we have the winning of the war in our pocket – but if we make mistakes, and don’t put the right men in the right place, we shall merely prolong the whole business.”

  In mid-December, the 69-year-old Churchill was struck down with pneumonia and took himself off to Tunis to recuperate. For a few crucial days, Alex was without his most powerful advocate. This may have been the factor that tipped the decision Monty’s way. Brooke succeeded in lining up the War Cabinet behind Monty and made a formal recommendation to the prime minister. Churchill, too exhausted to overrule Brooke, gave in, and on 23rd December 1943, the telegram arrived at Monty’s HQ in Paglieta, ordering him home to command the land forces in Operation Overlord.

  Richard had started for home a fortnight earlier, after enduring three nights in Monty’s cold and leaky caravan. It often took months for the cumbersome bureaucracy of the army to get former POWs back to Britain, but Monty had fast-tracked him, making sure he received VIP treatment along the way. He wrote to the Reynoldses:

  “I have sent Dick Carver off by air and he should have reached England before you get this. We enjoyed having him here and I was glad to be able to satisfy myself that he is alright – physically and mentally. We were photographed together a great deal and an American cinema man took ‘shots’ of us; so we may appear together on the films!!”

  Richard’s first stop was Bari, the same port where he had experienced his first taste of imprisonment in the transit camp, and where now, ironically, he stayed as a guest of General Alexander, oblivious to all the machinations that were going on about Operation Overlord. From there, he was flown on to Algiers where he was put up in “a sumptuous guesthouse” at Allied forces headquarters, then on through Oran and Marrakesh, finally arriving in the UK on Sunday 12th December 1943.

  Of the 80,000 British soldiers that were in Italian prisoner-of-war camps the day the Italian armistice was signed, only one in seven made it all the way home. But Richard was characteristically modest about his achievement. The entire entry for Sunday 12th December 1943 reads:

  Arrived at Prestwick 1000 hours. Home again after 6 years!

  16.

  IT IS SEPTEMBER before I get the chance to visit my father again from America. This time I bring my six-year-old son, Jude.

  My father still lives in the same house on the south coast of England which he and my mother retired to in the 1980s. It sits a hundred yards from the village church behind a straggly hedge that has grown up unbidden and now acts as the primary division of the property. The house was built in the 1920s out of concrete with a layer of white pebbledash to give it a false veneer of gentility. When my parents moved in they did little to renovate it beyond putting up some rather odd floral wallpaper in the dining room which my mother had acquired in a January sale; it was only enough to cover half of one wall and my mother never found another remnant to match it. She bought off-cuts of carpet and linoleum from the local furnishing stores which vied with the rugs brought back by my father from Persia, Kashmir, India and Jordan – the distant outposts of the British Empire where he had once lived.

  After lunch, Jude asks if he can ride a bike along the seafront. In the garage I discover my old Raleigh, still covered in the defiant red that I painted it when I was seven. I was obsessed with pirates at the time and loved the Raleigh’s brass plaque that stood out below the handlebars like the figurehead of a galleon. Summer after summer it has sat forgotten behind the lawn mower.

  A fierce westerly wind chases Jude around the seafront car park while Dad and I sit in his car watching him. The rubber of the rear tyre has almost disintegrated, but Jude doesn’t seem to mind. I wonder about my father and how close he came to being killed in the war. Was it luck or good judgment that had held him back from leaping off that German truck in the desert and trying to escape into the night? I imagine the young German lieutenant raising his pistol. Then the modest crack of the shot, and Richard’s life draining away into the wet sand.

  As I gaze at the seagulls floating on the wind, I try to imagine the lives that never happened of men my father knew: the children they never had, the love affairs and careers that never developed – I wonder if he still feels their absence.

  After he turned 90, my siblings and I prevailed on our father to allow a carer to live with him. For a long time he had bristled at the idea of having a stranger in his home. He insisted that he could still get upstairs on his own, but eventually confessed that he sometimes crawled up on his hands and knees.

  Richard Carver, with his grandson Jude, with the floral wallpaper behind

  Miriam, a gentle Trinidadian woman from east London, is looking after him at the moment. The next morning at breakfast I find that she and my father have arranged to go on a shopping expedition – although it turns out that Miriam herself cannot drive.

  “Don’t worry,” she says cheerfully, “we’ve been going out every day. He’s a good driver.”

  The nearest town is only fifteen minutes away by car but after three hours they have still not returned. I have long since finished lunch when I eventually hear the sound of wheels on the gravel drive. They’d spent an hour and a half driving around the outskirts of Southampton unable to find a way out. I start to tell Miriam how dangerous it is having him drive but she cuts me off.

  “We make a fine pair, don’t we?” she says, rolling the don’t in her Trinidadian accent. “But when you’re old there’s nothing to rush back to, you know.”

  I study my father for signs of concern but he seems perfectly cheerful. In fact, he seems to have enjoyed the experience.

  “By the way,” says Miriam, “when we were in the car trying to find our way out, he told me that he once got lost driving around in the Sahara Desert.”

  She seems to think he was making it up.

  *

  The war did not stop for my father after he returned from Italy that December. Six months later, he was driving a tracked troop carrier off a landing craft into the shallow waters of the Normandy beaches amid the chaos of burnt-out vehicles and hundreds of thousands of troops assembling. During the fighting in northern France, he would have dinner occasionally with Monty at his headquarters, always leaving with armfuls of cigarettes for his troops.

  One morning, as he was driving in his jeep near Caen, a mortar exploded nearby. A shell fragment passed through his right leg just above the ankle, shattering the bones and creating the indentation that used to fascinate me as a child. He was flown back to England on a stretcher. While he was in the convalescent home, he received a letter from Italy.

  Naples, 5th December, 1944

  Dearest Dich

  I am ba
ck in Naples today only and I can’t tell you how pleased I was to find in my Office your letter of 29/8.

  I hope that by now your leg has perfectly recovered and that you are not looking for more fun in stopping other German bullets.

  If and when you will return to Italy, you know very well that here there are two brotherly arms, a heart and a house always open to you and to whoever comes in your name.

  Gessopalena, my village, has been destroyed. The Germans killed my sister, Bambina, who is survived by her five very young daughters. They also wounded my old mother who has now recovered in body, but who is mortally wounded in her heart by the loss of two children in 11 days. All other members of my family are fine, and they remember you with affection and they hope to see you again one day. Here I was offered some money because of the help I gave to prisoners. Naturally, I refused it.

  Your friendship is much more worthy than any money. If sometime you’ll remember me you can write me at the following address: Donato De Gregorio – Via Marco Aurelio Severini n. 33 – Naples.

  I would have taken with pleasure some tasks behind the enemy lines for example at Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza) or in France, if possible for you, please do something to this end and if in carrying on such tasks I shall die, please do remember my family.

  I will live off my work, as always and I leave politics to those that in this moment feel like doing it here.

  Will I see you in Italy?

  God knows! I brotherly shake your hand and I welcome (salute) in you the old and great England, land of strongly felt liberties. I wish to your illustrious step father, Marshal Montgomery, always more glory and good health and to you a rapid climbing of the ladder of military grades and everything that your just heart may wish for the coming Christmas. Dearly