Castle of the Eagles

by Felton, Mark;

  *

  It was generally agreed that Captain Pederneschi completely lost his cool following General O’Connor’s attempted escape. Neame wrote that Pederneschi went ‘half mad with excitement’8; doubtless as security officer he was humiliated by O’Connor’s successful vaulting of the castle wall. As well as yelling at O’Connor in an unintelligible stream of English and Italian, language for which General Neame complained to the commandant (the Italian officer, he said, had impugned the gentlemanly values of British officers),9 Pederneschi reserved his greatest wrath for the hapless sentry who had foiled the escape. The security officer ‘became almost hysterical, venting his rage on the poor sentry, calling him vile names and locking him up for the night.’10

  O’Connor was bundled off to the commandant’s office for questioning shortly after being recaptured, before being locked in his bedroom while the wheels of Italian military bureaucracy swung into action.11

  The next day, 25 July, General Chiappe made yet another visit to the Castle, this time with orders from Rome to dispense punishments. The sentry locked up by Captain Pederneschi was released, Chiappe rewarding him with 500 lire for very sensibly not firing on the escaping British general.12 Once more, the whole camp, including Dick O’Connor, was assembled for an official dressing-down.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Chiappe in a loud voice that echoed off the fortress’s walls. ‘There is no use attempting to escape. The castle is too strong; you will not escape from it alive. And even if you do, there is no chance of reaching the Swiss frontier.’13 Chiappe looked directly at O’Connor.

  ‘Generale, your punishment for attempting to escape is 30 days’ solitary confinement, to be served in a different fortress.’ O’Connor said nothing – he had expected nothing less than the regulation prison time for such an escapade.

  ‘Generale Miles, Generale Combe and Generale Stirling, for helping the prisoner to escape you are each sentenced to ten days’ solitary confinement, to be served in your rooms.’14

  *

  General O’Connor was to serve his sentence at Campo 5 at Gavi-Serravalle Scrivia in Piedmont, twenty miles north of the port of Genoa. The distance from Vincigliata was 165 miles. Tantalisingly, the new fortress was only 100 miles from Lake Como and the Swiss frontier. O’Connor was escorted from the castle to Campo 5 by an infantry colonel on Major-General Chiappe’s staff, accompanied by two Carabinieri.15 The strange vagaries of war showed themselves when O’Connor noticed that among the Italian colonel’s medal ribbons was the British Military Cross.16 He had been awarded it during the First World War, when the two countries were allies. The colonel pointed to the several rows of ribbons on O’Connor’s tunic, touching one in particular. It was the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor, awarded to O’Connor by Italy in October 1918 during an offensive on the Piave River. Two old allies were now deadly enemies – in theory at least.

  At Campo 5 General O’Connor was placed in a gloomy cell that would be his home for a month. It was furnished with a small bed, table, chair and two chamber pots. Little light entered through the two small, barred windows. He was permitted two hours of exercise each day on the fortress’s battlements, and his food was sent up from the main camp, where many British prisoners were housed. Forbidden to communicate with anyone, O’Connor overcame this ban by writing messages to the POW cooks on the inside of the mess tin that contained his hot food.17

  *

  While O’Connor languished in a jail cell, security at Vincigliata Castle was tightened further. The number of day sentries was increased and the sentries’ platform that ran around the inside of the battlements was wired in. This was done by placing eleven strands of barbed wire around the platform, effectively creating a wire box for the sentries to patrol inside and making it impossible to climb up on to the platform.

  A single strand of wire was fixed to little metal poles positioned five feet inside the castle’s curtain wall.18 Captain Pederneschi explained its purpose to the prisoners when the work was completed.

  ‘This is the line of death,’ said Pederneschi darkly, pointing with one gloved hand at the wire. ‘No prisoner is allowed to cross it. If you do, you will be shot!’

  The commandant instituted a series of rigorous room and kit searches, but due to the prisoners’ ingenuity at hiding illicit escape gear, nothing of any significance was found.19

  *

  On 3 August a new officer arrived at the castle. Surgeon-Captain Ernest Vaughan of the Indian Medical Service had been captured at Tobruk. General Neame had applied for a British doctor for the camp, and the request had finally been granted. Vaughan proved to be a first-class supporter of escapes as well as a fantastic doctor.20 He was assigned a dispensary within the castle but soon complained that the number of Red Cross sanitary parcels containing medical supplies and drugs was not sufficient.21

  *

  By late August the leaves had started to turn and would soon fall from many of the trees around the castle. The prisoners greeted this sight with consternation. As summer gave way to autumn, the natural cover that was essential for escapers hiking cross-country was disappearing. Such a time marked the end of the effective escape season until spring 1943. But planning, at least, could continue – the question was what means the next escape attempt should take. Everything thus far had been a complete bust.

  *

  General De Wiart had long been urging that the escape effort should be redirected away from the castle’s walls. He had grown increasingly interested in the bricked-up chapel adjoining the large dining room on the keep’s ground floor. Various prisoners had speculated that there must be underground vaults or rooms beneath the castle that could be used for escape. It seemed a perfectly sensible idea considering the great age of the fortress and its many rebuilds down the centuries. One lucky find had been a dusty old Italian book about Vincigliata Castle that was discovered mouldering in the corner of a closed-up room. It was studied carefully, in the hope that more of the castle’s secrets would be revealed.22

  Soon after O’Connor was sent away, De Wiart approached Neame urging him to formulate a plan to get into the chapel and explore. ‘The castello with its crazy planning ought to have been a labyrinth of secret passages,’ wrote De Wiart, ‘leading straight to the top of the highest mountain or into a lovely lady’s boudoir in a neighbouring villa.’23 But the castle’s design had proved extremely frustrating. ‘All the passages led stupidly into one another, like a dog chasing its tail,’24 wrote De Wiart. Many dark words were passed concerning the Englishman’s Castle and the infernal Englishman who had rebuilt it.

  ‘As now attempts have been made over the wall, by day and by night, there only remains under the wall,’25 stated De Wiart. Neame agreed and called a meeting consisting of De Wiart, Boyd, Combe, Miles, Hargest and Stirling, with himself as chairman. Boyd and Miles had already examined the outside walls of the chapel, which was located on the northwest corner of the great keep, and made tentative sketches of its ground plan.26

  ‘I have no idea how on earth we are going to break into the damn place,’ said Air Vice-Marshal Boyd. ‘The bricked-up doorway opens straight into the main courtyard, so we couldn’t open it up without being observed.’

  ‘Then the only way in would be through the wall of the keep,’ said Miles.

  ‘But we’ve no idea how thick the keep wall is,’ said Combe. ‘Judging by the rest of the castle, it’s bound to be bally substantial.’

  ‘I suggest we make a detailed reconnaissance first,’ said Neame, calmly, his engineer’s mind already starting to tick over. ‘We can at least get a look inside through that little grille above the door. We’ll try tomorrow afternoon, when most of the Italians are having their siesta.’27 Regardless of any potential problems, ‘hope rose strongly within us at once,’ wrote Jim Hargest, ‘and almost without discussion we were agreed to give it a try.’28

  The next afternoon, out of sight of the sentries patrolling the high walls, Neame and the ‘Tunnel Committee’ mounted their f
irst detailed exploration of the chapel. Taking a table from one of the rooms, Neame climbed up to the grille that was set about eight feet off the ground. The opaque glass shutter was open and, cupping his hands around his face, he peered through the grille, allowing his eyes to adjust to the gloom inside.

  ‘I can see a small lobby,’ said Neame slowly. ‘Then there’s an archway leading through to the chapel.’29 Neame strained his eyes, his engineering training taking over. ‘Wait … the lobby is outside the keep wall … the archway has been cut through the main keep wall. Interesting.’ Neame jumped down from the table, and the others quickly took it back inside.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the dining room that adjoins the chapel,’ said Neame, striding off with the others following him. In between the chapel wall and the dining room was a narrow service area that was dominated by a service lift and shaft. Neame peered up into the lift shaft. He saw that at the top of the shaft was a dummy archway in the wall, where he estimated the wall was about nine inches thinner than elsewhere. It was not the main keep wall. ‘If we’re going to break into the chapel, then that’s the only place I can think we’d stand any chance of success,’30 said Neame seriously.

  A new meeting of the Tunnel Committee was called for the following day, once Neame had had a chance to think about the engineering overnight.

  ‘When the lift is in the “up” position,’ said Neame, ‘the place where we will make a hole is completely concealed. Even with the lift down the closed doors of the lift shaft hide the area we’re interested in. The light in the shaft is also dim – any way we could make it dimmer?’

  ‘I can paste some paper over the small window in the service lobby,’ said Miles. ‘That should help.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Neame smiling. ‘What I suggest is sinking a shaft and tunnel through the chapel floor if we don’t find any hidden vaults. I think we should commence work on breaking into the chapel at once. I suggest we work in reliefs of two.’31

  Neame placed Boyd in charge of the operation to break into the chapel. More manpower was brought in in the form of Brigadier Todhunter. The teams were Boyd/Miles, Combe/Todhunter and Stirling/Hargest.32 Others, including some of the younger orderlies, would support as and when needed.

  Most importantly, a system of lookouts was necessary to ensure that those breaking into the chapel would not be discovered in the event of a surprise visitation by the Italians. A team of watchers led by General De Wiart, who due to his disabilities could not excavate, was arranged from a bedroom overlooking the white wall that led into the Italian sector of the castle. If any Italians were to enter the POW area through the white wall gate, the excavators could be warned at once.33

  It was decided to fit the excavations in around the camp’s usual routine, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Italians conducted twice-daily inspections and a head count, the prisoners were served meals at set times, and walks in the castle grounds and the local countryside were scheduled in the afternoons, weather permitting. Attendance was voluntary, so the workers on shift would not be missed provided they turned up every so often for an excursion. The excavators could work safely, under the cover of the watchers, twice a day: at 7.30–9.30am and 2.00–4.00pm.

  The wall into the chapel, even though substantially thinner than the keep wall, proved very tough to break through. It was, the men would discover, two feet six inches thick, and was composed of solid masonry. It was essential that those doing the work made as little noise as possible, as the nearest sentries on the battlements were only ten to twenty yards away.

  The prisoners lacked the right tools – all that could be sourced were some improvised short iron crowbars, a carpenter’s chisel and mallet, and a shovel.34 The crowbars were simply iron bars sharpened by Sergeant Baxter using the kitchen range as a furnace. Lord Ranfurly manufactured the shovel out of a piece of sheet iron, fixing a wooden handle to it. An old kitchen knife was also used, Boyd fitting it with a new wooden handle. The spoil was initially removed using garden buckets, but later the teams switched to canvas pails to cut down on noise.35

  It took the team five days to cut a small hole through the wall. The hole was slowly widened until a person could wriggle through into the chapel. Boyd was commissioned to manufacture a three-ply wooden cover for the hole, disguised to look like plaster.36 Lord Ranfurly manufactured a contraption to hold the board in place within the carefully cut square in the original plaster. He used a bottle of water as a weight inside a hollow tube of wood attached to the panel with a cord. ‘To open the door,’ recalled Hargest, ‘one had merely to pull the panel out and lower it down the lift well out of the way, while to replace it one raised it and fitted it in – the bottle did the rest.’37

  Noise was a problem. The two-man teams would stand on top of the lift that was normally used to bring food up to the generals’ dining room from the servants’ kitchen below.38 As they chipped and cut away at the plaster and then the mortar that held the wall together, pieces clattered into the top of the metal lift, making a terrible noise that was greatly magnified by the narrow lift shaft. Any movement by the men atop the lift caused it to sway and crash into the sides of the shaft with a loud boom. A further problem was the constant cloud of plaster dust – it soon fouled up the lift’s electric mechanism. Brigadier Hargest’s gammy hip started playing up, leaving him often unable to work, but Miles and Stirling made particularly excellent progress.39

  *

  Once inside, the men found the chapel to be quite large, with windows set very high in the walls–so high, in fact, that nobody could look in from outside. The room was about twenty feet by twenty feet by fifteen feet,40 with an altar, and the lobby or porch was about seven feet square and lower than the chapel itself by three steps. It was dark and gloomy inside, making it ideal for concealment.41

  The chapel was crammed full of old boxes, dusty furniture and gloomy oil paintings. The room clearly hadn’t been touched for years. They even discovered a case of good champagne and a single bottle of whisky. The alcohol wasn’t touched. If the Italians discovered the excavation the last thing any of the prisoners needed was a further charge of petty theft.

  The camp’s master electrician, Sergeant Bain, was brought in to ‘fix’ the lift – he altered the mechanism so that it could only be lowered by pressing the button at the bottom, located in the servants’ pantry. This was a further attempt at concealment should any nosy sentry peer into the lift shaft. Bain also removed the light at the top of the shaft.42

  *

  The question now was where to begin the tunnel. Neame ruled out the chapel, as it would involve moving the altar. Instead, the obvious place was the lobby. The tunnel would pass beneath the courtyard wall rather than under the main keep wall (as would be necessary if the tunnel were dug from the chapel itself) and Neame suspected that the courtyard wall had shallower foundations. Boyd would remain in charge of the actual excavation, with Neame acting as tunnel designer and engineer. The first task was to survey the land under which the tunnel would pass and decide upon the dimensions of the proposed tunnel.

  After a heated debate with the other members of the Tunnel Committee, Neame settled upon his final plan.

  ‘So, we are agreed,’ said Neame to the group. ‘The initial shaft will be ten feet straight down from the floor of the chapel lobby. Then a tunnel, of four feet by two feet, will open out from the shaft, driving straight across and under the driveway towards the outer wall.’43

  Neame conducted a secret survey, which had to be done very carefully lest the sentries got wind. The distances were checked and rechecked, and Neame’s calculations proved extremely accurate. Measuring the difference in level was far more difficult, ‘as dead ground outside the castle, and the rising shaft in the end was two feet six inches deeper than I anticipated,’ wrote Neame. ‘Seven feet instead of four feet six inches – owing to a raised flower-bed held up by the stone revetment outside the wall.’44 After several rounds of calculation, the tunnel would be dug on a downward slop
e of 1-in-8, ‘so as to be fourteen feet deep on reaching the outer wall.’ Neame’s intention was to connect with the curtain wall’s foundations, leaving two options: either cut through the foundation of the wall, or burrow under it leaving a rising shaft to the outside. ‘It was also essential to touch and identify the base of the outer wall, so as to know where we were, for it was intended to come out immediately outside the wall, for concealment’s sake.’45 This might help the escapers as the only way sentries on the high wall above could see the base of the wall was by leaning out of a battlement – an unlikely proposition unless the escapers made any noise. In total, the tunnel would extend for 35 feet.46

  How all this was worked out was truly remarkable, considering that Neame had no proper instruments. But Sergeant Bain, who Neame noted would have been commissioned if he hadn’t been captured, made a series of survey instruments from protractors for Neame to use, and they also had a prismatic compass to carefully check all bearings.47

  *

  The tunnel broke ground on 18 September 1942. The honour of starting was given to Combe and Hargest. Brigadiers Todhunter and Stirling cleared a space by moving furniture and paintings out of the way. Breaking ground actually proved to be much more difficult than anticipated. The craftsmen that John Temple-Leader had employed to rebuild the castle half a century earlier had known their business. It took Combe and Hargest the entire first work session just to lever up two close-fitting tiles in the chapel porch floor. The noise was excessive, and the watchers that De Wiart had placed above could hear quite clearly the sounds which echoed through the building.

  One watcher was placed in the dining room to watch the two gateways into the prisoners’ part of the castle from the Italian quarters, with another in Brigadier Vaughan’s bedroom on the keep’s first floor to watch the sentries. But the routine was exhausting and inefficient, so De Wiart altered the arrangements. One man in Vaughan’s bedroom would watch the gateways, while another was placed in De Wiart’s bathroom with an excellent view of the sentries on the wall. The shutters in both rooms were carefully arranged so that the watchers could fulfil their duty without being observed from outside. A rotating system saw watchers work shifts of twenty minutes before being relieved, thereby maintaining their edge.48