From Tobruk to the Brenner Pass
The 'cage' in Tobruk in which we prisoners of war were confined consisted of an enormous barbed-wire-surrounded enclosure. We were herded inside and left to our own devices. There were hundreds of us – thousands, in fact, since an estimated 30,000 British and Commonwealth Troops had been ordered to surrender by General Klopper, the South African general in command of the garrison.
On the way to the cage we had been passed by a German staff car in which standing upright with a satisfied smile on his face, was General Irwin Rommel. He had reason to be self-satisfied. The capture of Tobruk had resulted in his promotion to the rank of Field Marshal. In my seven undistinguished years in the army, he was the only actual general, either Allied or Axis, that I ever saw!
It was hot. It was dusty. We were all thoroughly miserable. A water tanker came into the compound to allow us to fill our water bottles. At some time or other another vehicle brought food – but most of us didn't feel like eating. There was no shelter from the sun. I laid down on the sand and dozed, then woke, then dozed again.
Nothing happened. Then more nothing happened. I filled my water bottle and when the food lorry came round again I took an offered tin. It was about a half-pound size tin of 'Carne Bovina'. We imagined that that was Italian for corned beef but, of course, it means 'beef meat'. It was horrible but we tried to eat it.
I just don't know how long I spent in that 'cage' in Tobruk; two days? Perhaps three? Lorries were being filled with groups of prisoners and driven away. The process could have taken months. It was obvious to me that my chances of survival depended upon my getting out of this situation, preferably to mainland Europe, just as soon as possible.
South Africans were being taken first – well someone had to be first. I decided to become an honorary South African. The only difference between British and South African tropical uniform was an orange ribbon worn on the shoulders of South African troops. Discarded bits of uniform lay around here and there. Jim Palmer and I, who had decided to stick together, rummaged around until we found a couple of orange ribbons. We should, of course, have worn one on each shoulder but we thought – rightly as it happened – that one would be plenty to satisfy a German or Italian soldier who wouldn't really care who piled on board his vehicle.
We got onto the next lorry load. The South Africans in the lorry with us were Afrikaans speakers but they were friendly and welcoming enough. We were so crammed in that we had no alternative but to stand upright, swaying in all directions as the lorry bounced over the uneven surface of the desert road. We drove past the familiar Gazala Bay where, about a month earlier, our last idyllic swimming party had been rudely interrupted by the German offensive.
We finally halted for the night at Tmimi, about twenty miles beyond Gazala. Here we slept on the ground and in the open on salt flats, a few hundred yards from the sea. We were guarded by Italians. There was no barbed wire and it would probably have been easy to escape – but where to? We were really too exhausted and dispirited even to think about it.
The next day we drove on to Derna, the first more-or-less undamaged 'town' that we had seen for months. Here we stayed for several days, behind wire, in what had been a Muslim cemetery. I was at my lowest ebb. I remember being thoroughly depressed and without hope. I was weak, exhausted and suffering from griping stomach pains and diarrhoea! It was the only time in my life in which I seriously considered ending it. Fortunately I was too weak and too dispirited to do anything about it. Jim Palmer saw me through, nagging at me to keep on trying to eat what little we were given and drink when I could. When the time came for us to move on, he practically pushed me onto the lorry.
The next journey was the last we were to make in North Africa. Our destination was Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica or Eastern Libya. This time we were in an articulated vehicle and I remember that, shortly after we drove away, we made a sharp turn and a hand of one of the South African prisoners was momentarily trapped between the two parts. He spent the rest of the journey in agony and I think that his distress helped me to forget my own miseries.
We drove inland through countryside totally different from anything that we had previously seen in Egypt or Libya. There was vegetation and palm trees. We passed villas and small settlements that had obviously been – and perhaps still were – the homes of Italian colonists.
At last we reached Benghazi. Our destination was another 'cage', similar to that at Tobruk except that here there were some tents for shelter and we learned that groups of prisoners were being shipped from there to Italy. The South African with the damaged hand was whisked away in a Red Cross vehicle and we were left to settle in. It was better than Tobruk, Tmimi or Derna and there was some semblance of organisation and order there.
An English speaking Italian priest visited the camp. He was asking for the names and home addresses of Catholic prisoners. Their names would be broadcast from the Vatican Radio Station so that their families and friends would know they were alive but prisoners. At that time I would have described myself as an 'Anglo-Catholic' (a 'High Church' Anglican). Throughout the war, including the whole time that I was a prisoner, I wore a small crucifix hung round my neck with my identity discs. Well over sixty years later I still have it! This made many folk imagine that I was an RC.
It was enough for the priest. My name and address were duly broadcast from the Vatican. My mother in Ipswich, who had heard only that I was 'missing' and had feared the worst, was told of my fate by a local Roman Catholic who listened regularly to the Vatican broadcasts. She was much relieved. The broadcast also gave an address to which she could send me letters. This got her into trouble with the British authorities: 'That's just what the enemy want to know – how many people listen to their broadcasts!' Goodness, what a dreadful breach of security!
I don't remember how long we stayed in Benghazi but I have it fixed in my mind that we were eventually herded into the SS Ravello of Napoli on either the 20th or 21st of July. That means that I stayed in North Africa for only a month after my capture. I subsequently learnt that my determination to get away from Tobruk and to get to mainland Europe in the shortest possible time had been wise.
While I was in Italy I learned that there had been a diphtheria outbreak in the Benghazi prison camp shortly after we had departed. Among its victims had been Lance Bombardier Alfie Bloomfield from Wickham Market who, like Jim and I, had been a member of the team of 'B' Troop's No. 4 Gun. He had been a likeable young man, just a year older than I was, and I was very sorry to hear of his death.
Much, much later – just a year or so ago (from 2008) – I learned that another batch of prisoners from the 67th Medium Regiment had been driven on from Benghazi to Tripoli. They had set sail from there for Italy in the SS Scillin in November 1942 (some four months after us) and had been torpedoed by a British submarine during the voyage.
Fifty members of my regiment had died – by far our largest single batch of fatal casualties. I knew many of them personally. They were all young men in their early to middle twenties from Ipswich, or nearby Suffolk towns and villages. All had been volunteers in the Territorial Army and, like me, had been called up for full-time service at the beginning of September 1939. Among them was Sergeant Meadows, brother of Gunner Gordon Meadows, a member of 'B' Troop. He had been the Regiment's 'Pay Sergeant' and had been one of those captured, and subsequently liberated, at Hellfire Pass.
Our voyage was uneventful. We landed at Tarranto, were put on a train for Brindisi where we spent just a day or two at a transit camp. Then we entrained for Altamura which I remember as a stony, desolate and poverty-stricken spot not far from Bari. It was Campo Concentramento (Prigioneri di Guerra) No. 53 – a tented camp in which we first began to experience the pangs of real hunger and where we first became louse infested, two conditions that were to be with us until we departed from Italy to Germany over a year later.
A few years ago, while reading Photography at Westminster University, my younger grandson Nick retraced my footsteps as a POW in Europe sixty years earlier. He created a video tape of his experiences that helped him achieve his honours degree (See 'Return to Zittau'). He began his researches in Tarranto and at Altamura and found the latter to be just as bleak and unwelcoming as I had in 1942.
We weren't sorry when, after about a fortnight, we were marched out of Altamura and again clambered into cattle trucks on a train. This time our journey took us northwards along Italy's east coast and then inland across the flat Plain of Lombardy, the Valley of the River Po. The train halted near the town of Carpi, not far from Modena, and we marched the mile or two from the station to the prison camp that was destined to be our home.
Campo PG 73 at Fossili near Carpi was everybody's idea of a prison camp, enclosed behind high double barbed wire fences with guard towers at each corner. Inside we could see barrack room style huts being built. However until these were completed and ready for occupation we were destined to live in a tented area within the prison compound. Here we were issued with two blankets and straw-filled palliasses to sleep on. There were also 'ablution huts' with rudimentary washing and toilet facilities. We settled in.
Life in PG 73 was low-grade misery. Eventually we moved into the barrack room huts. Here we had bunk beds, one of us sleeping in the upper bunk, the other in the lower. We were louse-infested. We were hungry. We were bored out of our minds. The huts were jerry built, unbearably hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter when an icy wind blew down from the snow-capped peaks of the Alps that we could just see in the distance. We would walk round and round the compound for exercise. The ground was baked hard through the summer months and either a sea of mud, or frozen solid, during the winter.
We had to parade outside and be counted daily. Our guards weren't exactly the cream of Italian intellectuals and they would frequently make mistakes and have to start again from the beginning. They counted out loud. To this day I can count in Italian as quickly and easily as in English – 'Uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque, se, sette, otto' and so on. The process could go on for half the morning.
We drew our rations daily from the camp cookhouse – roughly a pint of a thin rice or macaroni soup, flavoured with tomato purée and sometimes with little bits of unidentifiable meat in it, plus a tiny maize-bread loaf, not much bigger than a 'roll', that had to be shared between two prisoners.
We were supposed to get a Red Cross parcel every week, sent from depots in the UK or Canada to supplement our meagre rations. When they arrived they were life-savers, but their delivery in Italy was painfully irregular. We wouldn't receive one for two or three weeks and would be told, 'They're at the station but they (the camp authorities) can't get the transport to get them here'. Eventually they would arrive – each containing tea or coffee, a tin of some kind of meat, a tin of milk powder, jam or honey, butter or margarine. They were wonderful – I can almost see one opened in front of me as, some 65 years later, I type these words!
However, the Italian camp authorities wouldn't just let us have them. Every parcel had to be opened and inspected and every tin of meat punctured to make sure that it wasn't saved up for an escape attempt. Italian guards opened up the parcels and passed them along to an officer armed with a kind of hammer with a spike on it instead of the usual head. As the parcel was put in front of him he would hit each tin with the spike to puncture it. Only after this process had been completed were we allowed to have them.
We used to watch this process with hatred in our hearts! I remember once watching a particularly foppish officer, with heavily pomaded hair and carefully tended moustache, obviously proud of his immaculate uniform, disdainfully puncturing each tin and thoroughly enjoying doing it. One parcel approaching him contained a tin with bulging ends. It was 'blown'. The meat inside had decomposed creating gases that were distending the ends of the tin. Would it be spotted? I wondered. It wasn't. The officer struck with his hammer and, to the delight of the audience, a squirt of abominably smelling liquid shot all over his face, hair and beautiful uniform!
It was a satisfying spectacle but it didn't fill our stomachs. We became bonier by the week. On one occasion we had an opportunity to have our photo taken in groups of two and were given copies to send home to parents or wives. Jim and I had ours taken and sent them to our homes. My mother told me later that she took one look at it and tore it up – she couldn't bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow, clad in ill-fitting Italian army uniform, that I had become.
The regime had unfortunate physical and psychological consequences. Young men unwillingly deprived of feminine company for month after month, dream and daydream of women and girls – their girl-friends, their wives, the star of the last cinema film they saw before leaving England. This is universally true. A line of the German wartime ballad 'Lili Marlene' goes 'noch in Traum ich küsse dein verliebte Mund' (still in my dreams I kiss your beloved mouth).
Starvation sordidly turns those dreams of romance and passion into ones of gluttony! Jim once confided in me that he had had a wonderful dream in which he had hired a beach hut in Felixstowe for the day and had sat there, looking at the sea and consuming tin after tin of evaporated milk. My own, not dissimilar dreams tended rather to focus on crusty white bread rolls, thickly spread butter and strong cheddar cheese.
Our louse infestation grew worse. Do lice prefer undernourished bodies and thin anaemic blood? We would strip off our shirts and run the burning end of a lighted cigarette along the seams, popping the louse eggs concealed in them. Yes, we were rarely completely without cigarettes – our principal solace! Some came from the Red Cross, but the Italian authorities would also from time to time, distribute their cheap-and-nasty-but-better-than-nothing 'Nazionali' cigarettes to us.
From time to time a 'delousing machine' would be brought into the camp. This consisted of a chamber into which we put our clothes while a connected boiler was supposed to fill the chamber with hot steam to destroy the lice and their eggs. We would strip, put every stitch that we wore into the machine, and then stand around naked – either getting burnt by the fierce sun or shivering in the freezing wind (it was always one or the other) – for about three quarters of an hour. Then the machine would be opened and our clothes, probably still damp, recovered. We would try to find our own clothing and put it on.
Most of us tried this only once, or twice at the most. Far from destroying the eggs, the machine seemed to incubate them!
Yet another effect of cold and semi-starvation was to stimulate our kidneys! We would find ourselves having to get up, huddle into our greatcoats and stagger out to the latrines, over and over again during those cold winter nights. Once I remember emptying my bladder while standing next to another prisoner. 'This is my fifteenth time tonight', he confided. I had given up counting, but I think it was about my tenth!
Prisoners died in the camp of general weakness, lethargy and starvation related disease. I particularly remember James McGregor, a Scotsman who by some quirk of fortune had found himself in our East Anglian Regiment. I had got to know him pretty well both before and after capture. He didn't have anything obviously the matter with him. He just lay down on his bunk, gave up eating altogether and faded away. I visited him on several occasions and then, one day, I learned that he had died in the night.
Deaths were announced by a notice stuck on the camp notice board, giving the prisoner's name and regiment and a comment from the Camp Commandant: 'Great honour to the soldier who has given his life for his country. Signed Guiseppe Ferrari, Colonel of Cavalry'. Not, I would have thought, a great source of consolation to his nearest and dearest!
I am sorry to have gone on for quite so long about the miseries of POW life at that time – but it wouldn't have been a complete picture without it. Life wasn't nothing but misery. We did get the Red Cross parcels sometimes. We were able to write home and get letters from home. Some received 'Dear John' letters from girl friends or, occasionally, wives who had 'found someone else' usually 'some smooth b……… in a reserved occupation' or even 'one of those overpaid b………. Yanks!'
A fellow prisoner, Toni Vezza, was of Italian origin. He would get letters from his old Grandma, born in Italy but for many years a resident of Glasgow, telling him how lucky he was to be spending the war 'in Sunny Italy'!
My letters were always very loving and very welcome. I heard regularly from my mother, my girl-friend Heather Gilbert and various relatives and friends. Throughout her life Heather was a prolific letter writer and I was the principal beneficiary of this trait at that time. I always looked forward to her letters telling me about her family, about how she had managed to visit my mother even though Ipswich was in a 'restricted zone', and about her new job in the office of Unwin Bros., printers, in central London.
Heather was not perhaps the most discreet of letter writers. This was during the London Blitz and, so I learned later, she would tell me all about the bombs that had fallen around her office, about the often-disrupted rail service between Ilford and Liverpool Street and later, about the buzz-bombs and the V-2 rockets. All of this was blacked out by the British censor. I became used to getting letters with long blacked-out sections. Once – I can't remember if it was while I was in Italy or Germany – I received quite a long letter that began, 'My dear Ernest', and ended 'lots and lots of love from Heather' but in which everything that came between that salutation and farewell had been blacked out!
There was never any question of her writing a 'Dear John' letter and when, it must have been in 1944, she sent me a studio photo of herself I was very pleased to note that she was wearing the miniature Royal Artillery Badge brooch that I had given her before I kissed her goodbye. This said clearly to all and sundry 'my boy-friend is a gunner – hands off!'
The war rumbled on. We learned of its progress in various ways though few of our sources were totally reliable. We were bitterly disappointed at the failure of the Dieppe raid, not long after we were captured. We were pleased to hear about the continuing defence of Stalingrad and of great tank battles on the Russian steppe. Then the allies invaded Sicily and progressed to the Italian mainland.
Rumours abounded. We were all to be transferred to Switzerland as the Italians could no longer cope with us. The Italians were about to surrender to the allies, the Germans would withdraw to Austria and we would all be freed. If the Italians surrendered the Germans would immediately take over the camp and we would be transferred to Germany.
It was the last of these prophecies that was fulfilled. One morning three or four German tanks appeared on the road beside the camp. Our Italian guards disappeared and were replaced by Germans. For about a week things carried on much as before and then out of the blue came the order, 'Get your belongings together – you're moving out'. Under guard we marched again along the dusty road to the railway sidings and were ushered onto more cattle trucks. The train moved slowly away – heading north-east towards the Brenner Pass, Austria and Germany.
Grandson Nick had a big surprise when, retracing my travels in Europe between 1942 and 1945 he visited the site of the former Campo PG73. Part of the camp was still standing, complete with living huts, guard towers and barbed wire – and was being visited by groups of young Italians.
After our departure it seems that the camp was taken over by the Nazi Waffen SS and used as a transit camp for Jews and political dissidents destined for Auschwitz and other Concentration Camps. Now it was preserved by the Italian Government and used as an educational facility in which young Italians could see at first hand some of the grimmer realities of World War II.
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