by Tom Carver
The Cage gives a good sense of the claustrophobia of prison camp, where privacy was a rare commodity and where every phrase was magnified by the close proximity of existence. “If we wanted to talk privately, it meant crawling away to some less frequented corner and leaning out of a window, and these elaborate arrangements somehow destroyed the whole pleasure of a conversation.”
Dan Billany and David Dowie escaped together from Fontanellato, but never made it home. The last time they were seen was about 70 miles from the Allied lines high in the Apennine mountains. They died, apparently together, in unknown circumstances as winter approached.
One day three years after the war had ended, a package arrived at the small house in Somerset where Dan Billany’s parents lived. It contained the manuscript for The Cage with a note from an Italian farmer called Meletti, saying that Dan and David had stayed with him for a few nights while they were on the run and entrusted him with the manuscript. They asked him to post it to England if they never came back to reclaim it.
*
One evening not long after he’d arrived in the camp, Richard was surprised to come across a childhood friend in the bar. Carol Mather had grown up not far from Richard’s grandparents in Cheshire. Through his friendship with the family, Mather had met Monty and had made enough of an impression to be able to secure a place on Monty’s staff in the desert. It was Carol Mather whom Monty had sent out to bring home his errant general Lumsden. Mather always gave the impression of being on the inside of anything that was happening. In his memoir of wartime experiences that he wrote 50 years later called When the Grass Stops Growing, he portrayed the war as a spirited romp full of midnight raids, nights dressing up as Arabs, and playing poker onboard Navy ships before a commando landing. He briefly belonged to Stirling’s Long Range Desert Patrol, the forerunner of the SAS.
As Mather boasted about his achievements in the desert at Tommy’s Bar, Richard felt rather self-conscious of his capture after less than a month in the front line. The only justifiable activity in a POW camp, Mather said, was to try to escape. He poured scorn on the sports competitions, the Oscar Wilde performances, the lectures on Italian art and archaeology and the earnest attempts to recreate an officers’ mess in an orphanage in northern Italy.
“It’s all madness,” Mather proclaimed as he knocked back his wine from the tin cup. “Madness. They’re just lotus-eaters.”
Richard did not mention his membership of the drama society. He could see why Monty approved of this action man; he was exactly the kind of can-do officer that Monty liked to have around.
“I have an idea for an escape,” said Mather, leaning closer, “but I need your help. I’m convinced that we can dig a tunnel from underneath the front steps of the orphanage. There’s a ventilation grill in the wall of the dining room that leads under the steps where there’s a large space.” Richard was one of the most senior Royal Engineer officers in the camp and Mather needed Richard’s engineering expertise to design the tunnel and to make sure it was strong enough because it would be passing underneath the front yard where vehicles went in and out. Richard said he would be happy to help.
That evening after the final roll call, the two of them inspected the space under the steps and found it was almost big enough to stand in. Richard could see it offered an ideal location to start a tunnel; they could hide tools in there and even store some of the earth that they removed. However, after assessing the site further, he told Mather that the plan was unworkable. “I turned it down as being too difficult owing to the high water level,” he explained in his diary. It’s possible that Richard’s urge to escape had waned. The news from the desert was continuing to improve. Why risk everything on a break-out when he might be free in a few weeks?
Surprised and perhaps a bit annoyed, Mather brushed aside Richard’s objections and went ahead anyway. To avoid the high water table and yet allow enough soil above to make it strong enough to support a vehicle, the tunnel could only be eigheen inches tall. Mather and his team set to work right away. Each night after the evening roll call was over, the guards would lock the doors of the orphanage and withdraw to their positions on the watchtowers. This gave the prisoners all night until the morning roll call at 7am to dig. Inside the crawl space under the steps, Mather and his colleagues rigged up an electric light, running the cable from a socket in the dining room, and built a flue from Red Cross tins with a bellows at one end, which pumped fresh air down to where they were digging.
Some of their equipment they received secretly from MI9, the arm of British Military Intelligence responsible for helping Allied personnel stuck behind enemy lines to get home. The staff of MI9 consisted of a number of eccentrics, including a former magician called Jasper Maskelyne who conjured up devices to assist British POWs to escape: baseball and cricket bats that contained saws and collapsible shovels, forged identity papers, maps inside playing cards and board games full of real money.
To get this equipment into the POW camps, MI9 set up fake charities with innocuous sounding names like the Welsh Provident Society and the Lancashire Penny Fund and sent letters, apparently written by an elderly widow or a country vicar, asking for their “parcels of cheer” to be distributed to British prisoners. According to MI9’s records, they successfully dispatched 9,247 maps, 1,119 hacksaws, 427 sets of dyes and 297 blankets that could be used to make civilian clothes.
Work on the tunnel had been going for about two months when one night a guard patrolling outside spotted the light through a tiny crack in the front steps. The prisoners had just enough time to get out before the guards rushed into the basement, pulled off the grill and found the digging equipment. “The tunnel deserved a better fate,” Richard wrote, “but I’m sorry to say that it was discovered after a progress of only about fifteen feet.” Mather and his accomplices did not admit to the crime so the entire camp was punished by having all walks in the countryside cancelled for a month. The Italians then made the POWs dig a deep ditch between the two fences so that any further tunnels would be exposed.
*
On the morning of Sunday 25th July 1943, as summer reached its height, Richard lay in a deckchair with one of his beloved Trollope novels. He was gazing through the wire at the Italian farm workers in the vineyards, when he suddenly heard shouts coming from inside the building where the early occupants of Tommy’s Bar had been startled by a commotion in the guards’ accommodation outside. Rushing to the windows, they watched off-duty guards stream out of the huts, most of them wearing only shirts and trousers and no jackets. They began dancing in the road, grabbing anyone who happened to be walking by. At first, the prisoners thought the Italians were celebrating the victory of the local football team, but then, to their astonishment, the guards started to rip down posters of Mussolini from the walls of the convent and stamp them underfoot.
Somewhere in the camp Richard knew that a radio was hidden; its exact location was a closely guarded secret but everyone benefited from its presence. It had taken four months to assemble in secret, using stray pieces of metal and wire from the theatrical props department. The only piece they could not make themselves, the radio valve, had been provided by a corrupt guard in exchange for a large amount of chocolate and cash. And when the atmospherics were right, it worked well enough to be able to pick up the BBC Home Service.
An American journalist called Larry Allen, who had been plucked from the sea off Tobruk, would tune in each day and write a daily summary of news which he posted every morning on a noticeboard outside Tommy’s Bar. By carefully weaving information from the BBC into the digest of dry Italian government pronouncements, he was able to avoid alerting the authorities to the radio’s presence. On 25th July, he posted a bulletin which read simply, “Flash. Benito finito!”
The news spread rapidly through the camp: Mussolini had been deposed. Some thought it meant the end of the war and expected the guards to fling open the gates of the camp at once. Rainy immediately opened a book on how long it would take for the Allies
to liberate the camp. The optimists, talking wildly of amphibious landings in Genoa, bet on a week. But others were less sanguine and noticed that, after their celebrations, the guards went back to their positions in the watchtowers. Mussolini may have gone, but Italy had not surrendered. It was still an enemy, albeit a fairly reluctant one.
Among his papers after his death, I found one letter from my father written to his beloved Aunt Bulley from inside the camp at the time. Prisoners’ letters comprised one piece of paper which was folded inside itself without an envelope or glue. This was to allow censors at every stage to read it without difficulty. “Posta di prigioniero di guerra,” it says on the outside, and above that my father wrote, “via Aerea Roma-Lisbona-Londra”, as if helping to guide the flimsy airmail letter across the battlefields of Europe to the house at the end of the gravel drive outside Hindhead where Aunt Bulley tended to her rhododendrons.
It was written on 30th July 1943 – five days after the news of Mussolini’s arrest had broken. “The news seems so good that one wonders whether it is worth writing. In fact I suppose you will only get this if we have been disappointed in our hopes. The paper has been very exciting reading the last few days. Camp life goes on much the same except that walks are temporarily suspended. I told you in my last p.c. that the parcel of books containing the Bible and the book on architecture had arrived back from the censors. I like the latter, it is not the same as any already in our library and has a lot in it without being frightfully technical. They all had their backs torn off them and I have rebound the Bible myself with cloth.
“I also had a parcel last week of drawing things from Winsor & Newton. Please thank whoever sent it. I think it may have been Mrs Reynolds if it wasn’t your good selves. Lastly I had a book from the Bodleian, the only one I have received to date. It has been very hot here recently, not of course comparable to India as I often remind my room companions to their great annoyance; but still hot and there are a good many mosquitoes about. One longs for a bathe, but we are lucky to have good cold baths. Love from Dick.”
*
The coup against Mussolini had been building for some time. So long as the war had been going the Axis way, Mussolini had been safe. But as Monty advanced closer and closer to Italy, the pressure on Il Duce grew. On 10th July, Monty had landed in Sicily and within a week, General Patton had captured Palermo and both he and Monty were heading for the Straits of Messina. It was obvious that an Allied invasion of the Italian mainland was imminent. A cabal of Mussolini’s advisors decided that Il Duce had to be removed for the sake of Italy. On 24th July 1943, at a meeting of Mussolini’s cabinet, they called on the cabinet to remove Mussolini and restore power to the king. The plotters, knowing the risk of opposing Il Duce so openly, had packed hand grenades into their briefcases in case he ordered their arrest. The motion passed, but Mussolini left the room assuming that they were bluffing.
The next morning, however, to Mussolini’s astonishment, King Victor Emmanuel informed him that in the light of the cabinet’s decision, he had invited Marshal Pietro Badoglio to form a new government.
Badoglio was an old First World War general who had led the invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s and had been given the title of the Duke of Addis Ababa by Mussolini as a reward. Mussolini walked out of the king’s palace stunned that they could think of replacing him with such a docile fool. When he got outside he found that his car had disappeared; in its place stood a Red Cross ambulance which he was ordered to get into. He was driven to a police barracks in the centre of Rome. On the orders of the king, carabinieri quickly surrounded the Fascist Party headquarters to prevent a counter-coup. None came. It was a Sunday afternoon and Mussolini was finished.
That evening at Frascati, a few miles outside Rome, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of the German forces in Italy, was having dinner when a messenger brought the news that Mussolini had been removed from power. The much-vaunted German intelligence had not picked up the possibility of a coup. Kesselring was alarmed; the Third Reich had only two and a half divisions on the Italian mainland, with a further four fighting the Allies in Sicily.
Hitler’s first reaction was to send Kesselring to Rome to arrest Badoglio and restore Mussolini; the problem was no one knew where Mussolini was. Instead, General Kesselring suggested feigning support for Badoglio to keep him from going over to the Allies. He called the general and asked how many German divisions he needed to protect Italy. When Badoglio vacillated, saying it was not his decision, Kesselring interpreted it as carte blanche to bring in as many as he could. Had Badoglio acted decisively, he could have closed the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria and prevented any German reinforcements from entering the country. But the 72-year-old general was incapable of acting swiftly. The old lion of Addis was grieving the loss of a son and his wife and was said to be drinking heavily. For 21 years, Mussolini had made every important decision relating to military matters and the general, like most of the cabinet, had lost the habit of making decisions himself.
Within two weeks of Mussolini’s arrest, the Germans had moved six newly equipped divisions into Italy. At Fontanellato, Richard stood beside the wire with the others and watched in dismay as unit after unit of well-armed German soldiers drove past. “Quite a lot came by our camp and bivouacked in a neighbouring field,” Richard wrote in his diary in early August.
The wishful-thinkers among us wanted to make out that they were on their way north, evacuating the country. But it was obvious that there were fresh troops, very young most of them with new equipment and it seemed to me only natural that they were on their way to La Spezia and Rome and possibly further south where the Germans must be expecting landings. They marched down the road looking very fit and whenever they passed our camp they always struck up one of their militaristic songs. The Italians kept well out of their way.
7.
RICHARD’S DISMAY AT watching the Germans streaming down the roads of Italy was shared by 80,000 other British POWs who were imprisoned in Italian camps that summer. For some time MI9 had been debating within itself what to do in the event that Italy pulled out of the war. It was MI9’s job to help POWs. But what advice should it give to them? Should it urge them to stay in the camps or try to escape?
And once out, should they be told to join the resistance or try to find their way home? In MI9’s short existence it had never encountered the predicament of how to handle thousands of POWs at once.
The head of MI9, Brigadier Norman Crockatt, who had been in charge of the London Stock Exchange before the war, instinctively disliked the prospect of mass breakouts. He believed that it would cause chaos on the battlefield and might precipitate reprisals by parts of the Italian army who did not support the surrender. Furthermore, he considered the malnourished POWs to be of little value as fighting soldiers.
Crockatt and his team concluded that Monty would sweep up Italy in a matter of a few days anyway. Under this scenario, they believed, the best alternative was to tell the POWs to “stay put” and wait in their camps for the Allied forces to arrive.
At Allied forces headquarters in Algiers, MI9’s views were greeted with astonishment; the Italians might surrender but no one believed that the Germans were going to walk away from Italy and allow the Allies to march up to the Alps unopposed. It could be weeks, they argued, before Allied forces reached the camps – and the Germans, who were already in Italy, would almost certainly get there before them. Even MI9’s own officer in the Middle East, Colonel Simonds, realised the madness of the order and tried to argue against it.
But on 7th June 1943, MI9 in London issued Order P/W 87190: “…in the event of an Allied invasion of Italy, officers commanding prison camps will ensure that prisoners-of-war remain within camp. Authority is granted to all officers commanding to take necessary disciplinary action to prevent individual prisoners-of-war attempting to rejoin their own units.”
To get the message to the SBO in the camps, MI9 used an ingenious method. MI9 knew that many of the camp
s had built clandestine radios in order to listen to the BBC. One of the most famous figures on the BBC was the “Radio Padre”, the Rev. Selby Wright, who broadcast a weekly talk every Wednesday evening at 7pm to British forces around the world. Thanks to Wright’s simple unpatronising manner, the Radio Padre was the second most popular show on the BBC after Tommy Handley the comedian.
Selby Wright received 1,000 fan letters a day, but he didn’t like the limelight and was keen to return to being an ordinary military chaplain in the field. In September 1942, he had finally obtained permission to step away from the microphone. But MI9 had other ideas and he was ordered to return, this time with an additional mission.
Over the next six months, MI9 inserted a series of messages using a secret code known as HK into the text of the padre’s talk, being careful not to tamper too much with the meaning. The means of deciphering the HK code had been distributed to the camps on silk handkerchiefs hidden inside cans of food. HK was not particularly complex but it appears that the Germans and Italians never broke it.
The Reverend Wright had no idea what the messages were, only that his talk had been “adjusted”. Each time this happened, he was told to open his talk with the words “Good Evening, Forces” instead of “Hello” or just “Good Evening” – this was the signal for any POWs listening to their radios that there was a message for them hidden between the lines of Christian reassurance.
During June and July 1943 MI9 broadcast the “stay put” order to POW camps all over Italy. MI9’s official history states proudly, “It is a tribute to the efficiency [MI9] had attained that almost every camp’s SBO received the message in time.” Brigadier Crockatt, the head of MI9, “was happy at what was being done”.
