Castle of the Eagles

by Felton, Mark;

  The supplies saw immediate service when the prisoners hosted a party the following evening to mark General De Wiart’s birthday. Baxter managed to make a cake using some of their precious Red Cross chocolate, to which he then added the letters ‘C de W’ in spaghetti on top. The special dinner consisted of Red Cross tinned chicken and sausages.

  The ten other ranks prisoners that Colonel Mazawattee had brought up to the villa from Campo 78 took care of the housekeeping and cooking duties for the generals. This allowed the senior officers to take up a series of useful ‘hobbies’, some of them revealing hidden talents that could prove useful in escape attempts.

  Air Vice-Marshal Boyd and Colonel Younghusband proved to be excellent carpenters, building hutches and pens for the rabbits that Brigadier Todhunter kept in an attempt to supplement the prisoners’ supply of fresh meat, and for Brigadier Combe’s chickens – which were intended to provide both meat and eggs.14 The commandant allowed the prisoners to convert a small garage into a woodworking shop, and further permitted them to purchase a bench and tools. They were occasionally assisted by two tame guards, one who had been a cabinetmaker in Civvy Street and the other a French polisher.

  General Neame, VC winner, Olympic champion, explorer and big game hunter, took up the needle and thread and started stitching attractive tapestries, manufacturing chair backs and seats. (His other ‘hobby’ was annoying the Italians, and he excelled at both pursuits.)

  Todhunter proved incapable of breeding any rabbits, which was quite a feat considering their reproductive reputation. ‘The feller would make a fortune in Australia,’ quipped Boyd one evening in the mess. ‘Why, the Australian Government would pay Todhunter anything he liked to ask.’15

  Combe fussed over his sixteen laying hens with the devotion of a mother over her children. But, like Todhunter and his rabbits, producing eggs for the table proved difficult. Combe’s hens were either ‘not laying’ or were ‘eating their own eggs’.16 The hens further annoyed Sergeant Baxter by covering the steps to the kitchen in excrement.

  Some of the other prisoners took up gardening, trying to create order out of the tangled, weed-strewn mess that they had inherited, or took to laying out allotments to grow fresh vegetables for the table. Such physical labours, as well as being pleasant diversions from the routine of imprisonment, were also important in keeping the middle-aged generals fit and ready for whatever escaping opportunities were to present themselves. ‘The first shock of capture had passed,’ recalled Leeming, ‘the excitement of settling down had died away; life had become monotonous. Day after day the same trivialities, the same people, the same voices, the same mannerisms. In our little community, cut off from the outside world, little bursts of irritability, of impatience, began to happen.’17

  Keeping fit was taken very seriously, and not just by De Wiart, who owing to his injuries was unable to perform manual labour, but by everyone. ‘Before lunch I walked round the garden 24 times as fast as I could, which I reckon to be about four miles,’ wrote Todhunter one day, adding that his normal routine was more like eighteen times round in the morning, followed by ‘a walk in the afternoon with one of the officers of the guard’.18

  Brigadier Todhunter, like all of the prisoners except De Wiart, suddenly began learning Italian. Dick O’Connor took the studying very seriously, and was soon quite fluent. Its aid to escape was obvious. De Wiart, however, could not be persuaded. One day one of the Italian officers made the mistake of asking De Wiart if he wanted to take ‘this golden opportunity’ to learn the local tongue.

  ‘I don’t want to learn your bloody language!’19 roared back De Wiart. Instead, ‘Long John Silver’ had taken to sunbathing on the terrace or studying the little lizards that inhabited the garden.

  Brigadier Todhunter was one of several, including General O’Connor, who persevered with the language. ‘To combat boredom I am learning Italian with marked lack of success,’20 he wrote home. Todhunter also collected Italian newspapers and periodicals and painstakingly translated the news stories into English, producing a bulletin for the other prisoners.21 He also began writing to family, friends and organisations asking for books, collecting them together into a small library as another aid in the continual fight against boredom. But the books they received seemed almost like a cruel joke to Todhunter and the others. ‘We had a parcel of books from the Red Cross for which we are duly grateful but they are a pretty odd selection, collected I should think from various British Institutions in Rome which are now closed down,’ wrote Todhunter. ‘In this parcel there was Vol. 1 of a monumental work on Applied Sociology, Vol. 2 of The Flora and Fauna of Sardinia, a book of 1885 on the tombs of the Popes and a book of rather gloomy illustrations of Dartmoor taken in 1901. Beside these A Bachelor Girl in Burma and The Work of the Church in the Malay Peninsula from 1900 to 1905 by the Bishop of Labuan and signed by the author gave us quite a thrill!’22

  The one prisoner who was unable to work or even to enjoy Todhunter’s expanding collection of eclectic volumes was General De Wiart. ‘His one arm prevents him doing much like carpentering or gardening and his one eye prevents him doing very much reading or writing,’ noted Todhunter. But his spirit was irrepressible: ‘He really is the most gallant old sportsman though.’23

  Mostly the prisoners thought about moving – moving away from the villa to a new camp, closer to Switzerland and with fresh escape opportunities. The months dragged by, but still nothing happened. ‘There is still no definite news of our move,’ wrote home Todhunter in despair in June 1941, ‘though we hear that it will take place shortly.’24 Mazawattee’s repeated assurances on this subject sounded increasingly hollow as the prisoners sweated out the humid Abruzzo summer, when temperatures hit 100°F in the shade.25 General Neame was, however, surprised when his old batman, Gunner Pickford from the Royal Horse Artillery, was located and sent up to the villa by the Italians.

  Not every officer was happy with his batman. Mazawattee had drafted many of the officers’ orderlies into the role at short notice and without any training. ‘I have got a young sapper who was caught at Sollum last September,’ wrote Todhunter. ‘He is very willing but I suspect a better sapper than valet.’26 But all of the generals were very happy with the new cook sent in to assist Sergeant Baxter. ‘He is a pretty odd looking soldier but he was a cook at Claridge’s before the war so he can be excused a lot.’27

  Non-Fascist news from the outside world filtered into the villa by surreptitious means. The United States was not yet in the war, so the US Embassy in Rome continued to act as the ‘Protecting Power’, sending diplomats and a military attaché to the villa on occasion to check on the prisoners’ welfare. The Italian government was paranoid about such contacts. Strict instructions were issued to Colonel Mazawattee that the Americans were to be treated correctly and courteously, but that they were not to be left alone with any of the prisoners lest they exchanged information about the progress of the war, or any other vital intelligence. Ricciardi detailed Warrant Officer Maresciallo and Sergeant Conti to closely shadow the visiting dignitaries and watch for any improprieties. But despite such precautions, the prisoners were usually able to get one of the diplomats alone for a few minutes through some ruse or other, during which the American would quickly fill them in on the latest news.28

  One surprising visitor was a jolly and ebullient Irish priest who delighted in telling the prisoners rather risqué stories. Forty-three-year-old Hugh O’Flaherty, dressed in the scarlet and black cassock of a Roman Catholic monsignor, toured POW camps in Italy acting on behalf of the Pope. One of his tasks was to try to discover the fates of those who had been declared missing in action. If O’Flaherty discovered any of these soldiers alive in the camps he tried to reassure their families through Radio Vatican. With his thick brown hair, round spectacles and permanent half grin, O’Flaherty was very popular, and as a fellow native English speaker, the prisoners at the Villa Orsini took to him strongly.

  General O’Connor had decided that it was imperative
that they establish contact with the War Office in London, and had racked his brains as to how communication could be established. O’Connor, who had rapidly shown himself to be completely dedicated to the idea of escape, wanted the British government to smuggle maps, passports and other useful equipment into the villa to aid future escapes from their new camp. He also wanted the British to put the prisoners in contact with one of their agents in Italy. To this end, O’Connor wrote a letter to the War Office. When O’Flaherty visited, O’Connor managed to ask him whether he would pass the letter to the American defence attaché in Rome, Colonel Norman Fiske. O’Flaherty took the letter and hid it inside his cassock. In fact, O’Flaherty was part of a network involved in concealing people from Mussolini’s authorities; he would become known to history as ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican’. Pope Pius XII was aware that O’Flaherty was helping prisoners, and disagreed with his activities from the point of view of preserving Vatican neutrality, though he did not censure him as he accepted that he was doing God’s work.

  That Colonel Fiske accepted the letter from O’Flaherty and passed it to London via the diplomatic bag was also a violation of President Roosevelt’s avowed isolationism from the war in Europe. The United States was officially neutral, but it appeared that there were already some who believed in the ‘special relationship’ with Great Britain.

  When Fiske himself visited the Villa Orsini to check on the prisoners, O’Connor took the opportunity of smuggling out a long report on the Western Desert campaign to London. It was done via the toilet.

  When Fiske shook hands with O’Connor, the General said in a quiet tone: ‘Very good of you to come to see us. Look under the lavatory seat.’29

  Fiske didn’t bat an eyelid, but carried on chatting to O’Connor and the other officers as if he had heard nothing unusual. The Italian guards took no notice. After a while Fiske asked to use the toilet and was duly escorted to a latrine by one of the Italians. Locking himself inside, the American found a small packet of papers exactly where O’Connor had said, lodged under the lavatory seat.

  Letters passed in this way ended up with MI9, the department of British Military Intelligence that dealt with prisoners of war, which was headed by the colourful Norman Crockatt in London. Crockatt was able to receive good information on what was happening at the Villa Orsini until the United States entered the war following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in early December 1941.

  Importantly, the smuggled letter would lead to the setting up of a coded letter-writing operation between London and the generals in Italy. There was a code called HK, developed by Lieutenant-Colonel L. Winterbottom of MI9 in conjunction with a Foreign Office specialist named Hooker, that would allow the generals to communicate with MI9 through their regular mail, sent to the Metropole Hotel on Northumberland Avenue, London. Devised to enable servicemen to maintain contact with London from their camps if captured (RAF aircrew and commandos were among those trained in its use),30 HK was fairly simple to use ‘and in skilled hands unusually hard to detect. All the user had to do was to indicate by the fashion in which he wrote the date that the letter contained the message, show by his opening words which part of the code he was using, and then write an apparently normal chatty letter, from which an inner meaning could be unravelled with the code’s help.’31

  The establishment of the letter-writing operation was unwittingly assisted by Colonel Mazawattee when he allowed a young British officer to visit the villa one day from the local POW camp. These visits, though infrequent, were made by several other junior officers after General Neame petitioned the commandant, claiming that the generals needed some conversational stimulation and a change of faces once in a while.

  The first visitor, an army commando taken prisoner during a raid on Sicily, succeeded in teaching O’Connor and some of the others the ‘Winterbottom Code’ during his few hours at the villa, and thereafter the prisoners were able to communicate with British Military Intelligence by letter. The Italians were never to discover this secret link with the outside world.

  O’Connor also received a letter directly from the War Office in reply to his requests for assistance, smuggled in to him at great personal risk once again by Colonel Fiske.32

  *

  As July gave way to August, and still with no confirmation of the move, morale in the Villa Orsini was falling steadily. General O’Connor sprained his ankle and was hobbling about for a couple of weeks in a bad temper, while Brigadier Todhunter had a bad run of health. He spent ten days in bed with lumbago and possible mild food poisoning. The temperature was still over 90 degrees in the shade.33 Nothing was happening – the prisoners simply existed. All escape activity had been postponed till the great move, the heat and food was playing on everyone’s patience and forbearance, and the monotony was broken only by the daily excursions to hike and picnic under guard. Some of the prisoners coped better than others. General De Wiart was like a caged tiger, while Gambier-Parry could be impulsive, ‘flashing out, and saying exactly what he thought, yet sorry for his outbursts almost as soon as he had spoken.’34 With so many strong personalities trapped inside a relatively small house, disagreements and arguments arose frequently during that hot summer, but nothing that was said in the heat of the moment was taken to heart by anyone. It was really just a collective case of mild cabin fever. ‘One of the worst things about this type of life is having nothing definite to look forward to,’ wrote Todhunter. ‘After all, the ordinary criminal in the jug knows that if he behaves himself he will get out on a certain day but here it is a case of this year, next year etc.’35 The only relief occurred in mid-August, when the temperature started to drop, which was considered a blessing by all of the prisoners. ‘The weather is getting cooler and the flies are getting less,’ wrote Todhunter. ‘We have had some very good rain this week … the nights are cooler and I have gone back to a thin blanket instead of only a sheet.’36

  The monotony of prison life was broken on 21 August by a joint birthday party held for Generals Gambier-Parry and O’Connor. ‘Our cooks made a cake using as far as I can make out macaroni ground in a coffee grinder,’ wrote Todhunter, ‘and not only iced it (without any icing sugar) but put a fine Major Generals badge on it. In the evening we had a birthday dinner … fishcakes, tinned peaches, cheese and coffee.’37

  By early September snow was visible on the surrounding hills, while the villa was lashed with rain. The thought in everyone’s mind was the same: when do we move? It was rapidly becoming the only topic of conversation.

  CHAPTER 5

  ___________________

  Advance Party

  ‘The idea of a journey was a real thrill. For although we had made the best of it, life at Sulmona had been terribly boring. Most of us had accepted the unalterable, and refused to admit even in our own minds how really sick and tired we were of our existence at the Villa Orsini.’

  Flight Lieutenant John Leeming

  ‘Chaps, the day has finally come,’ announced an excited General Neame as he entered the prisoners’ sitting room on 19 September 1941. ‘I’ve just spoken to Mazawattee. He’s confirmed it.’

  ‘They’re finally getting rid of the idiot?’ asked Boyd, looking up from one of Todhunter’s carefully translated news-sheets.

  ‘No, old chap, much better news. The move north, it’s on.’ Neame could barely disguise his excitement.

  ‘Not that old chestnut again,’ moaned Gambier-Parry, looking up irritably from his book.

  ‘We leave in five days,’ announced Neame. The room erupted. Generals and brigadiers jumped from their chairs as if electrocuted. They crowded around Neame, demanding more details.

  ‘Leeming’s going ahead with an advance party to set things up on the 23rd of September,’ said Neame triumphantly. ‘He’s taking Baxter and two of the other NCOs with him. We leave on the 24th.’1

  ‘But where, old boy, where is he going?’ demanded De Wiart, his moustache appearing even more bristly than usual as he towered over the little crowd.


  ‘Well, it seems old Mazawattee wasn’t pulling our legs when he mentioned a palace,’ said Neame. ‘We’re going to a castle, chaps, 200 miles north of here outside Florence.’2

  ‘Florence?’ said G-P, perking up considerably, his artistic interests piqued by the possibility of close proximity to the famous Uffizi Gallery.

  ‘That’s what the commandant said,’ replied Neame. ‘The Castello di Vincigliata. Mazawattee just told me that it is a summer palace standing in a great park. Ricciardi confirmed what the commandant said. He says it’s a lovely old place.’3

  ‘Well, that’s splendid news for us,’ said Dick O’Connor, brightening up considerably. Florence was only 250 miles from the Swiss frontier, and O’Connor’s mind was already considering this fact. Several of the other officers beamed, knowing that the chance for a serious escape attempt had suddenly materialised.

  Neame, suddenly all business, started issuing orders concerning the gathering of kit for the move. He informed Todhunter and Combe that they would be taking their livestock with them as well.

  ‘What about my workshop?’ asked Boyd, referring to his carpentry equipment.

  ‘That too. We’re not leaving behind anything that might aid an escape in the new camp.’