by Tom Carver
Later, when the full disaster of what had been done became clear, MI9 tried to blame the order on Monty, claiming that he “probably gave his directive… in late May or early June when nominally on leave in London”. But the original order has disappeared from the archives – its existence known only from references to it in other communications – so the truth of who actually instigated the notorious “stay put” order may never be known.
In Fontanellato, MI9’s message was duly decoded and passed on to Colonel Hugh de Burgh, the camp’s SBO. At first it did not seem an unreasonable order and even added slightly to the sense of optimism. But as summer wore on, and the POWs watched unit after unit of German soldiers marching down the road towards the front, the mood changed. It became obvious to everyone that, despite Mussolini’s departure, the Germans were going to stand and fight in Italy. For camps like Fontanellato, located in the north of Italy far from the Allies and well inside the area of German control, the “stay put” order seemed like an invitation to become a prisoner of the Germans.
One afternoon in late August, the POWs in the yard were shaken from their torpor by the unaccustomed sound of propellers. A few of them started squinting upwards and then waving and pointing; others joined in and soon hundreds of prisoners were whooping with delight as they watched 40 American Flying Fortress bombers drone slowly through the blue sky, the sunlight glinting off their fuselages. It was the POWs’ first sighting of the Allies in Italy.
Just then there was a whump whump – as an anti-aircraft battery opened up nearby – and the whoops turned to jeers and curses.
“You couldn’t hit a plane if it landed on top of you!” someone yelled at the Italian gunners, positioned on the edge of the field about a quarter of a mile away.
Then to everyone’s astonishment, including the Italian guards’, smoke began to belch from one of the bombers’ tails and three tiny white dots slowly separated themselves from the smoke and began to fall towards earth. The prisoners rushed to the fence to watch. The parachutists floated to the east, disappearing out of sight on the other side of the town. A few seconds later there was a whistling sound and a piece of twisted American bomber fuselage – made somewhere in the plains of Kansas – smashed into a row of vines just beside the anti-aircraft battery, causing the Italian gunners to cry out in alarm.
Guards clambered onto the camp truck and disappeared in a clatter of dust down the road in the direction of the parachutes. Half an hour later, the truck returned. The habitués of Tommy’s Bar leaned out of the window and yelled questions at the dazed crew as they were pushed quickly into the guardroom. To everyone’s frustration they were kept in a separate location from the camp so no one had the chance to talk to them and find out how the war was progressing.
*
On 3rd September 1943, Monty crossed the Straits of Messina from Sicily and landed on the Italian mainland.
“My dear Brookie,” he wrote to the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, “I attacked across the straits of Messina this morning at 0430. At 1030 I stepped ashore myself on the mainland of Europe just north of Reggio. It was a great thrill once more to set foot on the Continent from which we were pushed off three years ago at Dunkirk! The Germans evacuated Reggio before we got into town so we had no opposition there from soldiers, but there is a zoo in the town and our shelling broke open some cages; a puma and a monkey escaped and attacked some men of the HQ 3rd Canadian Brigade. I have enjoyed it all greatly.”
That same day at Fairfield Camp in Sicily, the Italians signed an armistice with the Allied forces; Italy was out of the war but its status remained unclear. No order was given to the Italian soldiers to fight the Germans; King Victor Emmanuel told them only not to resist the Allies. As soon as this was issued, General Badoglio, the king and most of the government fled Rome; within 24 hours, the Italian War Office was empty, leaving junior officers to answer the phone calls from bewildered unit commanders all over Italy asking what they should do. On 11th September, the Italian War Office finally sent out a message from the safety of Brindisi ordering all Italian soldiers to treat the Germans as enemy, but it was too late.
The Germans moved quickly. They swept through central Italy rounding up the confused units; they showed their erstwhile allies as enemies, showing them little mercy. Many were shot on the spot or sent to German POW camps in cattle trains. General Kesselring boasted to Hitler that within four days 700,000 Italian soldiers had been captured along with 56 divisions’ worth of equipment and material. All of Italy from Rome northwards was placed under German martial law and treated as an occupied country. German military currency replaced the lira. Italy may have surrendered but the battle for control of Italy had only just begun.
In the six-week hiatus between the coup against Mussolini and Italy’s final surrender, as British intelligence described German divisions pouring across the Alps into Italy, MI9 had plenty of opportunity to rescind Order P/W 87190 and transmit fresh instructions via the Radio Padre. But it didn’t.
Churchill and the War Cabinet remained unaware of what MI9 had done. In the negotiations that took place that summer with the Italian government, Churchill had insisted that the Italian War Ministry release all British POWs at the earliest opportunity. Article 3 of the armistice that was signed in Sicily that September stated: “All prisoners or internees of the United Nations to be immediately turned over to the Allied commander-in-chief and none of these may now or at any time be evacuated to Germany.”
As soon as the armistice was signed, the Italian War Ministry ordered all camp commandants to release British prisoners under their control, but in the confusion of those final days, some commandants did not receive the order. Others chose to ignore it; after years of holding men in captivity, it hurt their professional pride simply to open the gate and turn their prisoners loose. A few evenmade preparations to defend their camps against the Germans while others decided to hand over the camps intact to the German occupiers.
At PG5, the “Italian Colditz”, as it was known, near Gavi in the Piedmont, the Italian commandant refused to open the gates when the armistice was declared, despite a ferocious argument with the SBO. When the Germans arrived the next day the entire camp was handed over to them. Realising what was happening, some of the prisoners tried to hide inside the camp but were quickly found; 800 men were put on cattle trains and shunted north to Germany.
Further north at PG57 near Trieste, the commandant withdrew his guards, but the SBO, loyal to the “stay put” order, kept the gates closed and ordered the prisoners not to leave. Within 24 hours the camp was surrounded by Germans and the window of opportunity had closed.
When the Italian guards abandoned PG21 in Chieti in the middle of the night, and the SBO Colonel Marshall threatened to court-martial any POW who left the camp, there was a near mutiny among the prisoners. He appointed his own phalanx of guards and ordered them to man the watchtowers. In the end, many of the prisoners could not bring themselves to disobey a high ranking officer and for a week remained docilely where they were – guarded by British guards in an Italian POW camp. When a battalion of German paratroopers arrived they were astonished to discover prisoners still milling around inside the camp compound, with no sign of Italian guards. The entire camp population – about 1,300 soldiers – was shipped by train to the Nazi camps in Poland and Germany.
At Allied headquarters in Algiers, the implications of MI9’s order began to sink in. Colonel Simonds, the lone voice of MI9 who had protested the order, was summoned urgently and told to do whatever he could to rescue as many POWs as possible. He was given the use of several boats and allowed to request air sorties. He hastily assembled a small group to organise escape paths for POWs through German lines.
But for most of the prisoners it was too late.
Out of the 80,000 British POWs in Italy at the time of the armistice, 50,000 – more than half – were immediately captured by the Germans and shipped north. Of those who did escape, only 11,
500 made it all the way home: 5,000 by crossing the Alps into Switzerland and 6,500 by reaching the Allied forces coming up Italy.
The rest were either rounded up or shot by the Germans on the run or just faded into the countryside, settling in the mountain villages of the Apennines and never going home. Some 2,000 were never accounted for.
What happened at Fontanellato was unique.
8.
SOME SIXTY YEARS later, my father and I sit side by side in his little car overlooking the Solent, as a blustery wind sends patinas of seawater and rain sliding down the windscreen. He is now 92. Though increasingly frail, he stubbornly refuses to entertain the idea of moving to a nursing home. I live in America and worry about him a lot. I fly over as often as I can, but mostly it is only for three or four days, just long enough to conquer the jet lag before heading back to my own family.
He is dozing in the driver’s seat with a copy of The Times propped against the steering wheel, folded to the letters to the editor. He’s ticked the letters he’s read with a black and red HB pencil stub that he always carries in his pocket.
As I study the faint outline of the Isle of Wight across the Solent, I try to calculate how many hours he has been alive. He was born in May 1914, three months before the First World War began. ninety-two years is approximately 800,000 hours. His heart has beaten every second of every day since then – nearly three billion times.
A seagull belly-flops onto the car roof causing my father to open his eyes. He studies the drizzle for a couple of seconds then turns and notices me sitting beside him as if for the first time. He blinks, his bright blue eyes like small pools under the craggy outcrops of his eyebrows. “What have you been thinking?” he asks.
“I was trying to calculate how many hours you’ve lived.”
He chuckles, coughs and chuckles again.
“Oh my goodness. Far too many I should think.”
That evening after my father has gone to bed, I sit in his study, amid the piles of his watercolours and old files, and examine the tiny green diary once more, the one that he had pulled out of a box of papers from under his desk ten years earlier. I read a few pages and turn the compass around in my hand, marvelling at the way the safety pin still faithfully swings around to find the north. It strikes me how he had never once brought these precious indicators of his life downstairs to show them off to his friends or to his grandchildren, not even out of a sense of mild interest and amusement. He had less interest in revisiting his own past than I did.
Through the open door, I can hear the rhythms of his breathing. Under a mound of papers from the United Nations Association, I spot a large homemade notebook. The cover is made out of cardboard and blotchy green canvas and the spine has been roughly glued together and reinforced with two brass tacks.
Inside is a mass of dense typing on coarse green paper. The book, along with the mound of UN documents, appear to be slowly gravitating towards the bin, my father no longer able to recall their purpose. I open the first page.
“The spirit of the opera,” it begins, “moves me to commence to try to record in readable English the notes I wrote covering my experiences escaping from a prison camp in Italy during September and October 1943, just a year ago. I say the spirit of the opera because I start writing to the music of Leoncavallo’s famous I Pagliacci even in name alone so very Italian and such a reminder of a lovely country so ill handled by Mussolini and his supporters.”
It is the diary, I realise, of another prisoner. The ornate style suggests a very different character from the plainness of my father’s writings. According to the cover page, his name is Tony MacDonnell, a name I immediately recognise. Colonel Tony MacDonnell was on the list of those who had been in Poppi and then travelled with Richard and the others to Fontanellato. He was known as “The Gloomy Dean” by the other prisoners, after Dean Inge, the Dean of St Pauls who was a figure in the 1930s fêted for his lugubrious outlook on life.
Just a year ago. He must have written his diary no later than 1944. I imagine him sitting by the window in some bachelor’s apartment in Victoria with his gramophone playing his beloved Leoncavallo; the streets still buried in rubble from the Blitz.
“The Gloomy Dean”, Richard Carver’s fellow escape
A photograph of the “Dean” has survived in my father’s papers. It shows him standing on the steps of a large country house, before the war. He has a moustache and is dressed in a tweed jacket, plus fours and a flat cap. A pipe sticks out of the corner of his mouth. He is striking something of a heroic pose, scanning the horizon with a shotgun at the ready, as if poised to bag a pheasant from the terrace of the house at any moment.
In the preface of the journal I come across these words: “Richard Carver was my companion and guide. Without his leadership, I should have been the lost sheep in the wilderness. Richard did all the navigating, producing his homemade compass when we were in doubt, copying maps when we could not obtain them and, most of all, speaking to the Italians, never failing to make himself understood. He was marvellously patient with his silent companion and never showed the slightest sign of resentment when he had night after night to do all the begging.”
The description jolts me. I have stumbled on an account of my father’s experiences told not from his endlessly modest point of view but from the perspective of another man. In it is the unexpected image of my father as a leader.
9.
FOR THE INMATES of Fontanellato, the early evening of 8th September 1943 seemed no different from any other. The weather was hot and sultry, a low haze gathered on the horizon and the POWs sat in deckchairs in the shade of the watchtowers, watching a listless game of football.
On the other side of the wire, workers moved slowly through the vineyards with large wicker baskets slung from their shoulders, picking the first harvest of grapes. Rumours had circulated that morning that Monty was on the verge of landing on the Italian mainland from Sicily, but no one had taken much notice of them.
The six weeks since Mussolini’s arrest had bought valuable time for General Kesselring, the German commander in Italy. He had managed to bring in ten divisions from Austria and Occupied France. His intention was to slow down the expected Allied advance up Italy long enough over the next three months to stop them from reaching Rome before Christmas. Once winter set in, any serious advance with armour would become impossible, giving the Germans a further breathing space to build more substantial defences.
News of the Eighth Army’s successful advance had certainly improved morale in the camp, but Sicily was 600 miles from Fontanellato. The Flying Fortresses were the only evidence of Allied troops they’d seen, whereas almost every day they could hear convoys of German troops passing south-east on the Via Emilia, the main Milan to Bologna road that ran half a mile to the south of the camp. Several units had stayed in the town on their way to the front.
Inside the old orphanage the heat was oppressive; men dozed on their beds, in Tommy’s Bar they leaned out of the windows straining to catch a breeze. Following the fall of Mussolini, the guards had become more lenient, no longer firing back on sight at prisoners in the windows.
At about 7.30pm there was a disturbance down below in the courtyard. Suddenly, just like six weeks earlier, the guards began pouring out of their huts and shouting and dancing around each other.
“What’s going on?” yelled the prisoners. “Cosa succede?”
“Armistizio! Armistizio!” the guards yelled up at the faces above them. A few moments later, Colonnello Vicedomini could be seen pushing his way through the crowd to his office in the orphanage. Prisoners ran out into the corridor and burst out into the exercise field to give the news. Italy had surrendered.
The order was given for all prisoners to assemble immediately in the main hall. Hugh Mainwaring, the man who had been captured with Richard in the desert, jumped onto a table and announced that an armistice had been signed between the Allies and Italy, and that the SBO Colonel de Burgh was in discussions with the Colonnello
about what to do.
“Remain calm and do not celebrate. It is not over yet,” he said.
Into the vacuum poured rumours – the Germans were just outside the camp, there’d been a parachute landing by the Allies near Genoa, a sea landing at Rimini. Some claimed it would only be a matter of days before they were reunited with their regiments; others reminded them of the fighting ability of the German army.
People said that the guards were going to abandon the camp. Suddenly freedom seemed close at hand, but many privately dreaded the chaos and confusion of being “on the run”; instead of going home they were being tipped into a battleground. The camp, with all its curious habits and routines, now felt less of a prison and more like a sanctuary from the furious anarchy outside.
The colonnello was pessimistic – if anything, the future was going to get worse, he told the SBO. His country now had two occupying armies, one from the north and one from the south, heading towards each other. Far from signalling peace, he believed that the armistice was about to trigger a much more vicious war.
As far as he was concerned, Vicedomini was free to deal with his 600 British prisoners of war as he thought fit. The Italian War Office had ceased to exist. His government was in hiding. What he did with these POWs was a matter of his own conscience. The easiest option would have been to do nothing; the nearest German unit was rumoured to be only a few miles away. He could simply order his guards to lock the gates, return to the watch-towers and wait for the Germans to arrive and take over, as many of the other camp commandants did. It took a brave and independent spirit to act otherwise. In the course of the next twelve hours it became clear where Vicedomini’s true loyalties lay: he hated the presence of the Germans on Italian soil and wanted to see them beaten as much as the British did.
