A Traveller's Life (13 page)

Telegram – September 1942. War Office. Absolute Priority.

To G. A. Newby, 3 Castelnau Mansions, Barnes SW13. Regret to inform you that your son Lieutenant G. E. Newby is missing. Letter follows.

I was captured on the morning of 12 August 1942, together with five other members of M. (Malta) Detachment of the Special Boat Section, two or three miles off the east coast of Sicily. It was a calm and beautiful morning. As the sun rose it shone on Mount Etna visible in the haze to the north, a truncated cone trailing a delicate plume of smoke. There was none of the vulgar colour effects noted by Evelyn Waugh which had so upset him while on a cruise in these same waters between the wars.

‘Grouse shooting's beginning. Third year I've missed it,' George Duncan, who was in charge of what was called Operation Whynot, pointed out to us as we trod water, very tired now as we had been in it for many hours.

We had been attempting to rejoin the submarine from which we had landed to attack a German airfield, on which large numbers of JU 88s had been assembled to destroy a convoy of fourteen
merchant ships, eleven British and three American. This convoy was being fought through the Mediterranean at fifteen knots from Gibraltar to Malta in order to save the island from what would otherwise be inevitable capitulation.

Having sailed from Malta in
Una
, one of the smaller sorts of British submarine, we made a successful landing on the coast south of Catania on the night of 11 August in line with one of the main runways of the airfield to which JU 88s were coming in to land a couple of hundred feet overhead. The noise was deafening. When we got close in we lowered ourselves into the water from the three canoes and swam them in through the surf. There was no one to welcome us. We were in luck. We had landed midway between two concrete blockhouses, and if there were supposed to be sentries patrolling between them they must have been elsewhere. We carried the boats up the beach, buried them and obliterated our footsteps. The beach with the surf booming on it seemed at that moment the loneliest place in the world. Then we began to cut our way through the wire, praying that there were no mines underfoot and that the airfield when we reached it would not be alive with savage German police dogs, as it had been at Maleme on the north coast of Crete when the SBS had raided it unsuccessfully earlier that summer. For the first time I was in Europe. Twelve hours later what was left of the party was dragged from the sea some miles offshore and we were prisoners.

Of the fourteen merchant ships which took part in Operation Pedestal, five reached Malta, including the tanker
Ohio
, which was enough to save the island from surrender. The remaining nine were all sunk, four of them by JU 88s operating from Sicily on 12 and 13 August.

Having narrowly escaped being shot as saboteurs by a firing squad in the moat of a fort at Catania in Sicily, our little force was dispersed to various prison camps in Italy. Three of us were
sent to Campo Di Concentramento PG21 at Chieti, a few miles inland from the shores of the Adriatic at Pescara.

The camp was already filled to the brim with officers who had been captured during Rommel's big offensive in June 1942, when he took Tobruk and drove the Eighth Army out of Cyrenaica. Before being sent to Italy in ships' holds they had suffered considerable privations and what the three of us now saw, guarded by Italians who were altogether too cock-a-hoop for our liking about the way the war was going, was a ragged band, many of whom we had known in the desert or else as elegant debonair figures on leave, propping up the bar at Shepheards in Cairo or eating
cailles-au-riz
in the Union Club at Alexandria. The first person I met when we arrived was a tough Welsh boy, a notable boxer, whom I had known at Colet Court and St Paul's, now a regular officer in the South Wales Borderers, who later escaped, rejoined his regiment and was subsequently killed in action. His entire uniform consisted of a shirt, the remains of a pair of shorts and a pair of canvas shoes as full of holes as his trousers.

‘Do you know,' he said, in a voice filled with awe, ‘this place is filled with people from Radley' (an English public school on the banks of the Thames near Oxford). ‘It's quite unbelievable but they've formed an Old Radleian Society and they all sit around talking about when they were at school together. There they are. Over there.' And sure enough seated on the ground in one corner of the compound there was a ragged little band of Old Radleians, talking about the past.

Several attempts at escape had already been made from this camp and I joined a small party which began work on a tunnel in a room used for peeling potatoes for the camp kitchens. While part of the party worked away on the potatoes, others worked on the shaft. On one occasion our look-outs failed to warn us that a Count de Salis had entered the camp on a visit of inspection
on behalf of the Red Cross, attended by a phalanx of Italian functionaries which included the Italian Commandant and Capitano Croce, the camp interpreter, a repulsive Blackshirt who eventually came to a sticky and unlamented end. There was no time to replace the lid of the tunnel in the mouth of the shaft before this resplendent band swept into the peeling shed and while the good count asked us questions about our welfare one of the working party was forced to remain seated with his bottom in the hole still dementedly peeling potatoes as if his life depended on it, while the rest of us stood deferentially in an attempt to screen him from view, which the count must have found distinctly odd. This tunnel was subsequently discovered and a large collective fine was imposed on the inmates of the camp for the damage caused, as was the custom both in Italy and Germany. It was lucky that we were on the winning side otherwise we would all probably still be paying off these debts to the Axis.

The most original escape attempt was made by someone who managed to lower himself into the town sewers and paddle along them on an air bed. Unfortunately they were full of inflammable gas and he blew himself up while lighting his pipe and had to be given hospital treatment before serving a sentence in solitary confinement.

PG22 was the most cultivated camp I was ever in. It was more like a university than a prisoner-of-war camp. In it one could read philosophy with a tutor who had got a First in Greats at Oxford (the final examination for Honours in
Literae Humaniores
), study psychology with a resident psychologist, learn how to draft a foreign office despatch from a diplomat who had abandoned the service for the army for the duration of the war, listen to one of six orchestras, one of them a symphony orchestra of twenty players whose distinguished conductor composed his first symphony at Chieti before diving from a moving train in Italy later in the war
in order to avoid being taken to Germany, after which, while free in the Italian countryside, he began collecting folk music. Almost every week there was a new play and some of the actors were almost permanently in drag – memorable was Bill Bowes, the enormous Yorkshire cricketer, in
Of Mice and Men
, brilliantly cast as Lennie, who would also teach one to play cricket; and when the first Americans arrived, taken in North Africa, they introduced us to baseball. Although I didn't realize it until much later, it was at Chieti that I first discovered my métier as a writer, if I can describe it as such, although nearly fifteen years were to pass before I was to realize it fully.

At the beginning of May 1943, after a truly fearful winter in which the camp was swept by infective jaundice, I was transferred with a number of other prisoners to a prison camp in what had been an orphanage on the outskirts of Fontanellato, a village in the Po Valley near Parma where we lived in what seemed to us such unimaginable luxury, sleeping in beds instead of bunks, sitting on chairs and dining off tables with cloths on them. Rumours began to circulate that we were being groomed for repatriation in some great mass exchange of prisoners, rumours that were entirely without foundation, although by this time the German Army had been driven out of North Africa. If Chieti had been a university Fontanellato was like a London club. The food was excellent. We handed in our Red Cross parcels to the mess and the whole lot was properly cooked and served, relieving us of the necessity to grovel on all fours blowing away at makeshift stoves constructed from old tin cans and burning our bunk boards as we had done at Chieti. There was even a bar which served truly awful wine bought on the black market, which flourished.

Extracts from a letter to Lieutenant Anthony Simpson, Royal Artillery.

PG49 20
June 1943

Dear Tony,

… There is an astonishing man here whose tank blew up in the desert – and no wonder – who lights his farts. He does it under cover of darkness, partly from
pudeur
, partly because the effect is more impressive. A long blue flame is emitted. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes. One wonders if, back in ‘Civvy Street', he will be able to open safes with it … There is also a man who has become a millionaire by prison standards – the universal currency being cigarettes. He rescues teeth, watches and cigarette lighters that people let fall while using the Italian-style lavatories over which one crouches astride with one's feet on what look like engine-turned footplates until, without warning, an enormous head of water like the Severn Bore comes surging up from unimaginable depths and fills one's boots. Besides such heroic acts of salvage this man – whose firm he calls ‘Finders' – acts as a broker or entrepreneur, putting people in touch with one another who want to swap, say, a silk scarf from the Burlington Arcade for a Viyella shirt, or a pair of corduroy trousers for a Dunhill pipe …

On 8 September an armistice was announced between the Italians and the Allies, the Germans took over the country and with German troops on the way to take over guard duties until we could be transported to Germany, the following day, we broke out of the place with the connivance of the Italian commandant, who was subsequently himself sent back as a prisoner and he received such rough treatment that he died. I myself left on a mule as I had broken my ankle falling downstairs some days previously. The following day, while hiding in a hay loft, prostrated with hay fever, I met a very determined and personable Slovene girl whose father,
a notable anti-Fascist, was the local schoolmaster. It was she who produced a doctor who had me transported to the maternity ward of the local hospital, where he put my ankle in plaster. While hidden in hospital I was visited by Wanda, who took time off from supplying other prisoners with food and civilian clothing to give me Italian lessons. When the Germans discovered that I was in the hospital it was she who gave me sufficient warning to escape, and after various adventures it was the Italian doctor who drove me down the Via Emilia, the main German line of communication with the battle front, to a place of relative safety in the high Apennines. Both the doctor and Wanda's father were subsequently arrested by the Gestapo but survived the war.

I was recaptured in January 1944 in a lonely hut in the mountains, having been betrayed, together with two other friends from PG49, by the local schoolmistress.

Northern Italy in January 1944 was gelid, frozen solid, without light, heat or hope, the Allies bogged down on the Sangro hundreds of miles to the south, with Monte Cassino yet to be stormed, Mussolini once more at liberty and the Fascists, now known as
Repubblichini
, once more in the ascendant, torturing and committing hideous crimes, aided and abetted by the Gestapo. The
Milizia
, the odious force recruited from the scourings of Italy, who had captured us, took us down icy mountain roads to Parma. By this time none of us was in particularly good shape.

Parma was like a city of the dead. There we were interrogated by a Fascist police chief in a fog-filled palazzo which, although extremely lugubrious, was at least warm. By this time my Italian was sufficiently voluble for me to be able to suggest to him that as his days as police chief were undoubtedly numbered it might be a good idea for him to let us go and thus cultivate a reputation for humanity which we would testify to when the Allies arrived.

‘I quite agree,' he said frankly, ‘about my time being limited. It is undoubtedly limited for all of us who refuse to betray our country to the British and the Americans and the forces of Communism, but I promise you we will continue to have a good
time here until we are finished,' and he consigned us with a wolfish grin to the Cittadella for onward transmission to Germany.

The Cittadella, built in the sixteenth century by the Farnese, was a huge, star-shaped, brick fortress surrounded by a wide deep moat. We were accommodated in the Sala di Punizione which stood just inside the main gate. Balls and chains lying about in a wired-in compound outside it were presumably used for taming recalcitrant prisoners. An upper room, to which we were taken, had been heavily decorated with graffiti by previous occupants of various nationalities, some of whom had been betrayed in somewhat different circumstances from those in which we had been denounced, if what was scribbled and scratched on the walls was to be relied on – ‘Oh, Mima, you beautiful fucking cow,' one English soldier wrote, with a mixture of lust and despair.

However, there was not much time for reading graffiti. The room was already occupied by a number of officers and men of the Greek Army, who had also been on the run. They were as intent as we were on taking what would probably be the last chance to escape any of us was likely to have before we were sent to Germany. They had already made a start, digging a hole through the ceiling, and we spent the rest of the night, much of it on one another's shoulders, trying to break through it on to the roof from which we hoped to be able to clamber down into the moat. Unfortunately the roof had been built to be proof against seventeenth-century siege mortars and in spite of all our efforts when the time came, six o'clock on a freezing morning, to be taken to the railway station, although we had made considerable progress and a terrible mess – we had hidden the debris under some broken-down beds – we still had a long way to go. We left the Cittadella with despair in our hearts.

However, we did not go directly to Germany. Instead we were taken to Mantova, where we were accommodated with numbers of
other re-captured prisoners-of-war in some extremely spooky army transport garages on the edge of one of the freezing, fogbound lakes that surrounded the city. It was staffed by renegade South Africans who were either genuine sergeants or else had assumed the rank. They had invented for themselves a horrible pastiche of their real uniforms to demonstrate their sympathy with their new German masters, British khaki battledress, dyed black.

The temptation to do away with these monsters was very strong and we might have done so if the guards had been Italians, but they were not even Germans. They were Mongols, apostates from the Russian Army, dressed in German uniforms, hideously cruel descendants of Genghis Khan's wild horsemen who, in Italy, had already established a similar reputation to that enjoyed by the Goums, the Moroccans in the Free French Army, so we swallowed our pride but not our anger and contented ourselves with refusing to acknowledge their existence when they tried to give us orders.

Then one morning, at first light, we were hurried through icy streets to the railway station by tough German soldiers with large metal plaques on their chests announcing that they were
feldgendarmen
, military policemen, armed with Schmeisser machine-pistols, while those of the civilian population who were abroad at this hour hastened on their way with eyes averted. Later that day we crossed the Brenner and the Reich swallowed us up.

We were taken to an enormous prison camp, Stalag VIIA, at a place called Moosburg in the marsh lands north of Munich and about twenty-five miles from Dachau which was situated in the same sort of nightmare country. Over the entrance was a crude depiction of prisoners tottering into captivity with the words ‘To Berlin' under it, which at the time seemed a typically heavy Teutonic joke. In it there were some eighteen thousand prisoners and it was said that more than twenty different nationalities were
to be found in the low, grey huts which formed the living accommodation. In fact, Stalag VIIA was a microcosm of the world, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a microcosm of hell. In it I saw the SS at work on Yugoslav peasants, men and women, many of them Muslims from Bosnia, stripping them naked and kicking them around in the snow. Later, when their day's work was done, I heard these same SS singing harmoniously together in their warm quarters, full of
gemutlichkeit
. I saw starving Russians who en masse resembled packs of wolves, each one with a minute sack on his back which contained his meagre possessions and which he never took off for fear of someone stealing them; men with otherwise nothing to lose who, when they laid hands on a guard dog which the Germans had been rash enough to let into their compound, skinned it, cooked it and hung the skin on the wire; men to whom we used to give bread whenever we could, for which they fought savagely among themselves.

It was here, at Moosburg, that I attended a theatrical entertainment in which the equivalent of the stalls were packed with French officers in elegant uniforms and women in evening dress with elaborate hair-dos, who were not women at all but had rubber tits. At Moosburg the French, who were the oldest inhabitants, virtually controlled the inner workings of the camp. It was at Moosburg, too, that I met a band of soldiers, some of them British, who were subject to less stringent control than we were, being members of working parties, who used to go out through the wire at night dressed in black to render themselves less visible, to pleasure German women whose husbands were at the front or already dead, payment being made either in food or cash, or both. It was here, at Moosburg, that I really realized for the first time the extent of the degradation that the Nazis were spreading throughout Europe, and began to hate them for it.

Then one day, when time had ceased to have much meaning,
some of us were dressed in strange Yugoslav uniforms and wooden clogs, herded into a train, and taken on an interminable rattling journey to what had been Czechoslovakia by way of Landshut, Regensburg, Hof, Plauen, Chemnitz, Dresden, Waldenburg, Glatz (now Klodsko in Poland), then by a network of minor lines to Trebovice and eventually to a place in what was then Silesia called by the Germans, who claimed it as part of the Reich, Märisch Trübau, by the Czechs Moravská Trebová.

So bad were the weather conditions in the Bohemian Forest through which we passed in the course of this journey that when we were allowed down on the line in order to relieve ourselves the guards did not even bother to guard us and I remember shedding tears from sheer frustration, standing alone in the blizzard trying to pluck up courage to run away but knowing that with wooden clogs on my feet, a Yugoslav uniform on my back and without food, money or maps, there was no point in doing so. I was safe in the heart of Fortress Europe.

The camp at Moravská Trebová, Oflag VIIIF, was housed in the former Czech Military Academy. Here we had Canadian Red Cross food parcels every week, the best of all parcels apart from those sent by the Scottish Red Cross. Here, the arts flourished and the theatre played to packed houses as it had done at Chieti, whose occupants had been transported en masse to Germany, thanks to their ridiculous senior British officer who had forbidden them to break out of the camp under pain of court-martial.

Dramatizations of prison camp life often give the impression that the aim of prisoners, one and all, was to escape, and that anyone who failed to try was in some ways lacking in moral fibre. This is nonsense. Only relatively few prisoners-of-war had the skills necessary to make a successful escape through enemy territory, and any Escape Committee that was not entirely irresponsible only allowed escape attempts by people who could prove that they
possessed these skills. On the other hand, hundreds of prisoners who knew that they had no chance of making a successful escape, worked away on tunnels which they themselves would never use, dedicating a certain amount of time each day to digging, acting as look-outs and so on in the same way as they would devote a certain amount of time to reading, playing poker or attending lectures on accountancy or book-keeping.

Here also there were numbers of desperate, ruthless men, many of whom had been brought here without having savoured freedom from the almost escape-proof Italian punishment camp, PG5, which was situated in a hilltop castle at Gavi in the mountains between Genoa and Alessandria, and which German parachutists had surrounded on the day of the Italian armistice. Among them were David Stirling, captured in North Africa, and George Duncan who had led our raid in Sicily and had later walked out through the front gate at Chieti disguised as an Italian
soldato
.

Here, at Moravská Trebová, five separate tunnels were being dug simultaneously and hundreds of prisoners were involved in working on the various faces, operating air and water pumps and the underground tramways, which took the spoil from the face to the foot of the shafts from which it was hauled to the surface. The amount of earth extracted from these workings was prodigious and before the snow melted its disposal was a great problem. In fact the only place where it could be secreted was in the attics of an unused barrack block, which eventually collapsed under the weight, leaving us with the largest collective fine that we had so far suffered.

Later, when the snow melted, the earth was disposed of by prisoners who walked round the camp with sacks suspended round their necks beneath their coats, gently leaking it on to the ground as they pursued their endless, apparently aimless, perambulations. Other stooges, as they were known, acted as look-outs for the
working parties and for The Canary, the clandestine radio that had been built in the camp and which defied every effort by the Germans to discover it even when, later that year, it moved with us to another camp.

In order to discover the locations of these tunnels and The Canary, the whereabouts of which was known only to a handful of prisoners, the Germans sent in what were called Ferrets. Gestapo and other lesser persons, disguised as workmen, and on one or two occasions these Ferrets were lured into cellars where keys were turned on them. When Ferrets entered the camp there was often no time to get the men working in the tunnels to the surface before the lids were replaced, and it was an eerie experience lying at the bottom of a shaft listening to the Ferrets as they hammered on the floor above, and often on the lid itself, while searching for it, and to hear their dogs panting and scratching.

Those lids were works of art. Some of them were the work of South African mining engineers – only a very few of the large numbers of South Africans in prisoner-of-war camps changed sides, in spite of all the inducements offered them by the Italians and Germans. To make a lid, a section of tiled floor, or whatever materials it was constructed with, was taken up and set in a block of concrete in such a way that if it was struck with a hammer it would give off the same sound as the surrounding floor. Special tools had to be devised to lift and replace these lids as they were extremely heavy.

As the weeks and months passed, one by one these tunnels were discovered, as they moved out towards and beyond the perimeter wire. In one instance a guard stamping up and down on his beat outside the wire fell through the roof of one and disappeared from view completely, which was highly diverting to those who saw it happen; but with these discoveries our morale fell too. That is, with the exception of the members of the Escape
Committee – there was an escape committee in every prison camp. Although we who toiled away at their behest did not know it, these tunnels were intended to distract the enemy from a grander, more secret design, one far more serious in intent than a simple escape attempt with the purpose of enabling prisoners to rejoin their loved ones and their units.

What the committee planned was a mass escape of saboteurs and other men trained in irregular warfare in which the camp abounded who, when the escape actually took place, would be taken into hiding by the Czech underground movement whom they would then train in their various skills until such time as they could all take the field together against the Germans.

To further this scheme an Engineering Society was formed and the Germans were then asked to give permission for the making of large scale models to which they, rather surprisingly, agreed. One of these models was of a Bailey Bridge – a temporary bridge made of pre-fabricated steel parts that could be rapidly assembled and was widely used for military purposes. This one was built of wood and was of a very large scale indeed.