by Damien Lewis
Soon enough, Dr Sontgerath came to his room with a troubled countenance. The Gestapo had requested that Hughes be handed into their custody in a few days’ time, he explained. Both knew what that would mean: execution. Hughes sank into a depression, fearing that he would be shot out of hand, nobody at home even knowing the truth of what had befallen him, alone and at the hands of the murderous Gestapo.
But as it turned out Sontgerath and Schacht had different ideas. Together, they worked out that the only way to save Hughes’ life would be to somehow engineer the transformation of his status from illegal saboteur to bona fide POW. The one man who possessed the kind of power to orchestrate such a thing was Field Marshal Kesselring himself. Fortunately for Hughes, the Kesselrings and the Schachts were old family friends. That weekend Schacht travelled one hundred miles from Perugia to Kesselring’s headquarters in Florence to plead Hughes’ case in person.
Come Monday morning, the day set for his handover to the Gestapo, Hughes felt an odd sense of calm. He had recorded himself to his fate and felt ‘ready now to face the consequences’. Yet no sinister Gestapo agents appeared. Instead, Dr Sontgerath announced that Schacht had achieved the seemingly impossible: Hughes had been reclassified as a prisoner of war. But there was little time for celebration or delay. The Gestapo were sure to be furious and would be doing everything in their power to get Kesselring’s decision overturned. Hughes had to be transferred to a POW camp as quickly as possible – only then might he be safe from the Nazi death squads.
Sontgerath and Schacht had arranged for Hughes to be sent by a hospital train to a Luftwaffe camp in Germany, to avoid the prisoner-of-war collecting centre at nearby Verona. That way he should escape interception by the Gestapo if they were planning to pounce. He would have to leave right away.
Before departure, Hughes turned to the doctor who had saved not only his sight but his very life. ‘May I now withdraw my parole?’ he ventured.
Dr Sontgerath agreed that he could. His voice thick with emotion, he wished his English friend ‘good luck’.
On 10 March 1944, as the hospital train pulled away with Hughes aboard, he considered the unlikeliness of these extraordinary friendships. While he conceded that ‘many Germans committed the most appalling atrocities’, he understood that some also possessed the capacity for ‘great humanity and decency towards their foes’. Without the help of Dr Sontgerath and Major Schacht – who no doubt risked court-martial or worse for their actions – he would doubtless have been murdered in cold blood, under Hitler’s secret Kommando Order.
On reaching the next transit point, a POW hospital in Florence, Hughes found himself surrounded by Allied servicemen, all of whom, like him, were recovering from their injuries. Freed from his parole, he hungered to find any who might share a desire to escape. Yet as this was a POW hospital, almost everyone there seemed to have suffered serious injury. Hughes feared that none would be capable of making an escape attempt, let alone of surviving the harsh conditions thereafter, as they tried to make their way through Italy towards Allied lines.
But not so long after his arrival, Hughes was approached by a British soldier named Bill Taylor, ‘a small, bright-eyed and sprightly’ private from the Signal Corps. Hailing from Newcastle, Taylor had identified Hughes as having the bearing and attitude of a potential co-conspirator.
‘Don’t you think we ought to try to escape?’ Taylor ventured, in his broad Geordie lilt.
Taylor’s determination to make a bid for freedom shone through, but Hughes couldn’t fail to notice the arm hanging limply in a sling across his body. When he brought up Taylor’s injury, the signaller dismissed it almost nonchalantly. He explained that he had received the wound during his previous escape attempt, when he’d been shot in the arm. Taylor was clearly determined to slip the enemy’s clutches, no matter the cost, and he knew of another man who might join them.
‘There’s an American over there, and he’s game,’ Taylor ventured, gesturing across the ward.
In short order he introduced Hughes to a burly American Airforce sergeant named Jesse Bradburn. Bradburn had been the sole survivor of a B24 Liberator bomber that had been shot down over Italy. He was in the hospital recovering from the twenty-nine separate bullet wounds that he’d suffered during the attack. Though Hughes was concerned for the health of his new associates, what they seemed to lack in physical fitness they seemed to more than make up for in toughness and spirit.
If they wanted to join him, he was happy to have them along. Together they settled upon a plan based upon the limited resources they had to hand: they would tie together all the bedsheets they could commandeer from the ward, constructing a makeshift rope with which to descend from the first-floor window, after which they’d seek to lose themselves amid the throng on the streets of Florence.
But on the day of their proposed breakout, luck was not with them. A platoon of German soldiers arrived, charged to escort the prisoners to Florence station for their onward journey. There, they were loaded into metal-sided carriages, Hughes, Taylor and Bradburn doing their best to stick together. The German guards warned any would-be escapees that ‘machine guns were placed pointing down the train’, and that all tunnels, bridges and stations en route would be closely guarded. Indeed, Hughes had already spotted the fearsome ‘Spandau’ machine guns mounted atop the train carriages.
It proved swelteringly hot inside the carriage, with the windows locked and the sick and injured POWs crammed together like cattle. As the train picked up speed, Hughes felt his mood darken. With every mile north, they were moving further away from the Allied front, which made his hopes of escape seem ever more fanciful. As the temperature in the carriage crept higher, some of the most severely wounded were struggling to breathe. Hughes cried out, begging for the windows to be opened to provide some air. Finally, the guards relented and the windows were unlocked. With that, the three would-be escapees spied an opportunity and they waited for their moment.
At 0200 hours on 11 March, as the train pulled out of Modena station into the Emilia-Romagna countryside, they took their chance and jostled into position. Before they could pick up too much speed, Hughes and Bradburn ‘pushed Taylor through the window feet first’, thrusting him onto the running board, while trying to be careful of his broken arm. Despite his injuries, Taylor – the tough little Geordie – threw himself off the train with barely a backward glance. Next to jump was Bradburn, who hefted his huge frame through the window and disappeared after Taylor.
No machine-gun fire followed the first two jumps, but Hughes had no wish to chance his luck. He crossed to the other side of the carriage and clambered out onto the running board, so avoiding the attention of any guards if they had caught a glimpse of the previous jumpers. With no time to waste and still blind in one eye, he leapt, making his bid for freedom.
Thanks in part to his parachute training, Hughes made a fine landing, his hands and knees taking the brunt of the impact. He guessed the train must have been moving at around thirty miles per hour, but unlike during SAS parachute training he did not roll to take the impact. Instead, he lay motionless on the earth, waiting for the remainder of the carriages to flash past. Every fibre in his body was tense, anticipating the hail of bullets that would come if the German sentries caught sight of him. He stayed there, unmoving, until the sound of the train faded away. Only then did he pick himself up and extract the shards of gravel that had embedded themselves in his palms and knees. Other than that, he was unharmed.
He set off walking back along the single-line train track, searching for Taylor and Bradburn. He found the pair unhurt and exhilarated by their good luck and daring. Together they deliberated over where they might be and which direction to take, for up until this moment they had not considered what to do once they had broken free. Hughes – who had memorised all he could of Italian geography since first being taken captive – reasoned that they had two feasible options: they could head north towar
ds neutral Switzerland, or south for the Allied lines.
During his weeks in hospital, Hughes had seized every opportunity to listen to the wireless in order to piece together a picture of the current state of the war. He knew that the Operation Shingle landings had been successful, yet that still put the Allied lines some three hundred miles away, and on the far side of the Apennine Mountains. Nevertheless, the three escapees decided to head south. As the Apennines ran down the spine of Italy and were said to be a stronghold of the Italian resistance, Hughes figured they might slip through that terrain aided by the partisans, who were ardently anti-Nazi.
Upon his capture the Germans had searched Hughes for escape aids, but they had failed to discover two special buttons. Almost identical in design to all the others, one was made of steel and the other brass. The steel button was magnetised, and the reverse side was marked with tiny luminous orange dots – one dot representing magnetic north and two dots delineating south. Once removed from the uniform, it could be balanced on top of the brass button, which had a tiny spike affixed to its dome for the purpose. Arranged like that, the steel button would rotate until the single compass dot pointed north. These ‘button escape compasses’, as they were called, had been invented by Captain Clayton Hutton in the M19 ‘Escape Factory’, and were designed to be all but undetectable to the enemy.
Using this tiny compass, Hughes got their bearings and the trio of fugitives set off south. But by the time the sky began to lighten there was little sign of the Apennines, as they had hoped. Instead, a flat plain stretched to the far horizon. Hughes began to feel nervous. He knew that the longer they spent in the lowlands, the greater their risk of recapture. But then the rising sun revealed that what they had taken to be a bank of cloud in the distance was in fact the form of the Tuscan Apennines, rearing steeply from the plain.
It was now that they took their first major gamble, approaching an isolated farmhouse, for without any civilian clothes they stood little chance of making good their getaway. As luck would have it, the elderly Italian farmer was no friend of the occupying forces. All three ‘got civilian clothes and were well fed’, Hughes recalled. They spent the remainder of that day resting in one of his outhouses, before setting out once more at dusk, reaching the foothills of the Apennines under cover of darkness.
Spirits stiffened, they began to climb. Ahead lay many days trekking on a southerly bearing, moving across a seemingly endless succession of hills, valleys, rivers and ridges. Shortly, Taylor and Bradburn, whose injuries were worse than Hughes’, started to find the going hard. They argued for a return to the flatter terrain of the Bologna–Rimini plain, which they could see running parallel to the mountains, a busy road threading along its length. Hughes was certain it would be thronging with enemy traffic. He was adamant they should stick to the high ground, in the hope of securing help from the partisans, or other escaped POWs they might encounter.
After Italy’s capitulation, thousands of POWs had broken out of the prison camps. Hughes felt certain that there would be fellow escapees in the mountains, likewise evading the German occupiers and trying to exfiltrate through the lines. But with such a high number of escaped Allied POWs on the loose, the Germans were sure to be taking greater steps to hunt them down. Either way, for now Hughes’ argument – to stick to the high ground – won the day.
Hughes noted the locations they passed through: Medelana, Luminasio, Biserna, River Reno, the ‘valley at Vado . . . ridge of Manzuno . . . slopes of Monte Visano’. At almost every juncture they were met with kindness from the Italian peasants – a stable or cow shed to sleep in and whatever food they could afford to share. Hughes’ escape report told how on 19 March, their eighth day on the trail, the trio ‘spent the evening with the priest at San Valentino’. The churchmen tended to form the backbone of the resistance, and this one was no exception, advising the trio to make for the local ‘Partisan Brigade HQ, for clothes and boots’.
As the the escapees gained altitude, so the early spring weather proved debilitatingly cold. To make matters worse, the weary travellers were engulfed in ‘a heavy snowstorm and we had to make our way through’, Hughes reported. They had now covered around sixty miles, the lion’s share through rugged and difficult terrain. Such a journey would have been daunting for fit and well-fed travellers. For three malnourished POWs, still plagued by their injuries, it constituted a truly Herculean effort. The thick flurries of snow made for almost unbearable conditions, but still they pressed on. Exposed to the icy blasts in their thin civilian clothing, the fugitives were soon chilled to the bone, and at risk of losing fingers or toes to frostbite.
As they kept pushing deeper into the mountains, the drifts grew thicker and more impassable. In each settlement they encountered, the escapees asked where they might find the partisans. The answer they received was always the same: ‘No partisans here. Try the next village.’ Hughes suspected that the villagers were deliberately refusing to divulge any information, fearing that the three strangers who had wandered into their midst were in truth Gestapo spies, seeking intelligence to help root out the mountain militia.
Half-starved, close to exhaustion and plagued by their injuries, the escapees were beginning to lose all hope when they reached a remote mountainside tavern. Refusing to be daunted, Hughes made his way inside, where he made the usual enquiries about the location of the nearest partisans. He was met with the usual blank-faced response. Just then the door swung open and a young man strode in. He held himself differently from most of the locals that Hughes and his compatriots had encountered so far. He had a rugged, sun-weathered countenance and carried an old rifle slung over one shoulder, the ammunition for which crisscrossed his body in leather bandoliers.
He was followed by a group of similarly attired men. The new arrivals noticed the three strangers at once, and gathered around them, eyeing them with a suspicion bordering on hostility. Hughes had learned a little of the Italian language while stationed in Malta, and he spoke a few words to the man he guessed had to be their leader. That figure stared back for a long moment, before barking out a single inquiry: ‘Inglese?’
‘Sì! Yes, Inglese! English!’ Hughes gushed.
He felt a flood of relief, as the mystery gunmen seemed to visibly relax a little. Both groups began talking now, each trying to explain who they were and how they came to be there. As Hughes had desperately hoped, these were members of the elusive Italian resistance. They explained that while they could be of little help – they were heading north, the opposite direction to the escapees’ direction of travel – Hughes and his fellows should make for the nearby settlement of Strabatenza. There they would find a partisan leader who could offer every assistance.
Overcome with relief, and fired by a renewed sense of enthusiasm, the three set out for Strabatenza the following morning. By midday they had located the partisan headquarters, which turned out to be a smattering of sturdy-looking houses clustered around a large, elegant church. On arrival they were introduced to the partisan chief, a man whose nom de guerre was ‘Libero’, meaning ‘Free’ in Italian. After he had double-checked their story, they were welcomed into the fold. Though it appeared unassuming enough, the remote mountain village of Strabatenza turned out to be the nerve centre for the Italian resistance across a vast swathe of the surrounding terrain.
Taylor and Bradburn were taken to the makeshift hospital. The eleven-day march had been terribly punishing on their battle-worn bodies. They had covered some eighty miles as the crow flies, from the point where they’d jumped from the train, but taking into account their circuitous route it was more likely double that distance. As for Hughes, he was immediately put to work, utilising his specialist skills to aid the resistance effort. Libero and his men were expecting a resupply of weaponry and ammunition, orchestrated by the Special Operations Executive, better known as Churchill’s ‘Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare’.
Charged with arming resistance forces across Nazi-o
ccupied Europe, SOE were due to make an arms-drop shortly, and Libero wanted Hughes to identify a suitable drop zone to receive the weapons and ammo. Hughes did as he had been asked, and once the drop zone had been selected, with little explanation Libero led Hughes down the mountainside, until they came to a small hamlet straddling a mountain stream. There, Hughes was introduced to a seemingly frail-looking elderly gentleman – ‘short in stature, thin and wiry’ – seated behind a farmhouse table and sipping a glass of wine.
‘Good morning,’ the mystery figure remarked, in the distinctive clipped tones of a senior British Army officer. ‘Won’t you sit down and join me?’
With ‘a disarming air of friendliness and candour’, the stranger introduced himself as Brigadier Douglas Arnold ‘Pip’ Stirling. Though this man was no direct relation to David Stirling, of SAS fame, Hughes certainly knew his name and reputation. He could barely believe that this pinched and tired-looking figure could be the same Brigadier Stirling who had soldiered with distinction since the outbreak of the war, before finally being captured. In the spring of 1940 Stirling had commanded a light cavalry regiment, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, part of the British Expeditionary Force. Stirling and his men had fought a spirited rearguard action through Belgium, before being evacuated from Dunkirk.
During that time, Pip Stirling had earned a reputation as a brave and indomitable leader who put great trust in his men. At the height of the battle for France, he had remarked, ‘I felt certain that whatever might happen, I had human material that would give a good account of itself under any circumstances.’ In return his men trusted him absolutely, even after experiencing the nightmare of Dunkirk. Somehow, even under those hellish evacuation conditions, with ‘shells and bombs bursting thick and fast’, Pip Stirling’s force had remained ‘a unit with its discipline and morale unimpaired’.
Finally, Brigadier Stirling had been captured in 1941 while commanding the 7th Armoured Division during the defence of the besieged port of Tobruk. Hughes knew only too well the story of that ill-fated defensive effort, for the SAS’s earliest raids had been devised to sabotage enemy airfields in the region, to help relieve pressure on Tobruk. It seemed portentous that these two men had found each other months later, in a mountain stronghold of the Italian resistance, both now fugitives from the enemy.
