Part 4 - Captured Again

In January, Allied troops landed in Anzio, south of Rome so we thought we’d head for there. By March we were in the Tivoli area, 30 km from Rome. As we wandered through the hills we were approached by an Italian priest. He took us to a warehouse on the outskirts of Rome and gave us brand new Red Cross issue British army boots.

Walking along a mountain footpath we saw a couple of South Africans we recognised. We called out to them and walked over. Suddenly, two German soldiers appeared, asked for our papers and realising something was wrong, arrested us and marched us away. We were taken to a village and put in the courtyard of a large villa. I looked around and recognised a number of other Brits, German deserters and Italians. We’d all been rounded up because we had no papers. A German Major came out onto the balcony, looked down on us and pointed at me. The guards dragged me upstairs to his office. He shouted at me in German and I answered in my broken Italian. He spun me round and hit me with his gun. I fell to the floor, thinking my time was up. He obviously thought I was a German deserter. That meant death. I shouted that I was an English soldier, though being dressed in civilian clothes that also meant death. I was marched off to a civilian jail, run by the Germans. After a couple of days I was taken to a big house full of other British prisoners. The German Major, who turned out to be Austrian, gave us all new Yugoslav uniforms to replace our civilian clothes (they didn’t have any British ones). We looked like clowns in these rather garish uniforms.

We were driven back to my old prison camp PG54 Fara Sabina and I was reunited with Wilf and Phil, who had already resumed their tunnelling exploits.

Every day hundreds of American bombers flew over our camp, which was marked with a large red cross, as per the Geneva Convention. But one day as we watched, a marker flare was dropped by the leading plane and the following planes dropped their bombs. I sat in a shelter next to a New Zealand lad and when the dust settled he was dead with a bomb crater a few feet away.

April was Hitler’s birthday and the guards got drunk. The morning after, because the British Army were now so close, they decided to march us to a nearby rail head for evacuation. About 200 of us marched out with still drunk German guards lined on either side of us. We reached a village, broke ranks and started to run. The Germans panicked and started shooting. I dashed into a cul-de-sac and on turning back was taken prisoner again. The Germans rounded us up and marched us to a nearby football pitch for the night. The following morning they took us back through the village. The dead still lay in the road. A tank column had driven over the bodies during the night.

A week later we reached the rail head and so began the long journey to Germany. We were put in closed and locked cattle trucks, twenty to each wagon. True to tradition we started to lift the wooden floor boarding and some brave souls dropped down, letting go of the wagon as it rolled along. I never entertained this way of escaping. I was afraid of the cow-catcher on the back of the train. Also there were guards stationed on the rear van looking for prisoners escaping by this route. I later heard that some men did manage to escape in this way. We travelled for days and were repeatedly attacked by Allied aircraft during the journey. We had spy holes through the cattle trucks and could see the Brenner Pass as we travelled through the mountains. ( I have since been through the pass on the auto strada and looked down on the valley I travelled many years before).

We reached Innsbruck and were ordered off the train onto the platform. There we were stripped naked and searched. We were sent to Moosberg, a transit camp near Munich. Then moved on to a huge camp at Muhlberg in Saxony. There were thousands of people, from all over Europe. We were all given medical examinations and if fit, sent on work details (Arbeit kommandos) all over the region. (I still have a tiny x-ray, taken at the time, that I stole from my kommando). My pal Wilf was sent to the coal mines in Poland. I was sent to a camp somewhere between Leipzig and Dresden, on the outskirts of Chemnitz.

Next Time:  Germany