An Extraordinary Italian Imprisonment: The Brutal Truth of Campo 21, 1942–3

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Introduction

Imagine: you are imprisoned in a room containing 39 other men. You sleep on one of a pair of wooden bunk beds, with nowhere to put any personal possessions except on a small shelf by your bunk, or in a cardboard box underneath it. You have no privacy. Apart from the three men who occupy the bunks beside, and above or below yours, there is a gap of only 20–24in. between your bunk block and the next one on each side, where four more men are trying to sleep. For warmth at night, you have only two sheets, two thin woollen blankets, and what clothing you wear. It is early January, and there is snow on the mountains that tower over your prison compound. You have no warm winter clothes, only shorts and one shirt which are nearly worn out, so during the daytime you wear your blankets in place of a coat. Your shoes or boots have long worn through and your feet are cut, but there are no proper bandages. There is no heater in your room and after dark falls, at about 1630hrs, the electric light is so dim that you can’t see to read or write. You have had no hot water to wash in for months and the stench from the lavatories, which do not flush, is appalling. Your diet is monotonous and the food barely adequate.

You have been in this prison for nearly six months. The guards all speak a foreign language and the interpreter is unwilling to translate any of your requests or complaints accurately to the prison governor. There have been no visitors or phone calls from home; any letters that you write never seem to reach your loved ones. Rarely does a letter from them reach you. Your loved ones themselves are threatened by an enemy against whom you can no longer defend them. Your home is far away across the sea and even if you could manage to escape from your prison, you would be in a hostile land, surrounded by enemies. If you were seen trying to escape, you might lawfully be shot dead. You are in your early twenties, and you are facing a sentence of unknown duration. Life is passing you by.

You are in Campo Prigioneri di Guerra Number 21, at Chieti, Italy. It is January 1943.

This book is intended as a tribute to the many thousands of men, some young, some not so young, who were imprisoned by the enemy during the Second World War. These men had committed no crime, but had been captured while fighting in defence of their country. Today, our society in the United Kingdom marks its disapproval of crime with fixed-term prison sentences of which a prisoner will serve half or less, or, if the crime is extremely serious, with indeterminate life sentences. Prisoners will be well fed, provided with adequate warmth, bedding and clothing, will be allowed family visits, and family contact by post and telephone, and will have access to such luxuries as television.

The lot of a prisoner of war was very different. The sentence was of indeterminate length, since no one knew how long the war would last (or, in the early years, who would win it). Conditions in the camps were often very harsh, with inadequate food, bedding and clothing. In Campo 21, whose story this book tells, shortage of water was an acute problem. No visits from family or friends were allowed, and post was either very much delayed or non-existent. Illness, both physical and mental, was often inadequately treated – usually because there were few medicines or medical instruments available. The only crime the prisoners had committed was that of being captured, or worse, of obeying an order to surrender.

Campo 21 was a large camp, containing at various times up to 1,600 prisoners of various nationalities. It was designated for officers, but also held over 200 other ranks who performed the necessary more menial tasks within the camp. A complete cross-section of society was there, all of them entirely at the mercy of their guards. For those who read this book, most of whom, I would guess, have never been arrested and remanded in custody, the story may be diffcult to fully understand. Arrest or capture means the immediate imposition of a total lack of liberty. You no longer have any right to choose where you go or what to do with your life. You must do exactly what you are told at all times. For some of the new arrivals in Campo 21, imprisonment came as a total shock. The starkest of contrasts was for shot down airmen. A few nights before they might have been celebrating in the hotspots of Alexandria, Cairo, or even London’s West End, only to find themselves, abruptly, prisoners in the squalid conditions of Campo 21, with the most depressing of future prospects. For pilots and aircrew, who enjoyed the vast freedom of the open sky, imprisonment in a walled camp was purgatory. So, too, for those whose lives before the war had been lived in wide-open spaces such as the Australian outback, many parts of the United States of America, or the moorlands of Britain.

After the retreat to, and evacuation of Dunkirk in May/June 1940, thousands of British troops were taken prisoner. For the vast majority of them, imprisonment would last for five years, the equivalent of a ten-year prison term in modern Britain. I remember well as a young barrister in the 1970s, appearing for the defence before His Honour Judge the Lord Dunboyne at the Inner London Crown Court, knowing that he had been captured at Dunkirk, and had served five years as a prisoner of war. In fact, having himself experienced the pain of incarceration for so long, Lord Dunboyne was far from being an unduly harsh judge.

My own father, Major Gordon Lett DSO, was one of the 35,000 Allied troops captured at the surrender of Tobruk in June 1942. He was 31 years of age when he reached Campo 21 at Chieti, in August 1942. He had been an Acting Lieutenant Colonel when captured at the fall of Tobruk, and had been a regular soldier before the war. In a sense, the danger of being taken as a prisoner of war was part of his full-time profession. However, since progress in his career depended upon rising in rank, time behind the wire was lost career time, and he would now be overtaken by many of his juniors in the hurly-burly of war. Many other prisoners were appreciably younger, and were soldiers for the duration of the war only. They came from all walks of life, some voluntarily, some because they were conscripted. Most had left families behind them, and the vast majority wished only to return to their peacetime professions once the war was won. Some were little more than schoolboys, who in happier times might have been carefree university students, or travelling around the world for a year before taking their degrees. Others were mature married men, who had left wives and children at home. These were the men who had to face life behind the walls and wire of Campo 21.

Much has been written about the German prisoner-of-war camps, such as Colditz and Stalag Luft III, from which the Wooden Horse and Great Escapes took place, about the horrors of the German concentration camps, and about the inhumanity of the Japanese towards their prisoners. Relatively little has been published about the Italian camps, which operated from June 1940, when Mussolini took Italy into the war on Germany’s side to form the Axis alliance, until the Italian Armistice in September 1943, by which time it is estimated that over 80,000 Allied prisoners of war were held in Italian camps. Although nominally run along similar lines to German ones, the Italian camps were in many ways different, and, after Rommel’s victories in North Africa and the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, they became very overcrowded. Various other factors adversely affected conditions in the Italian camps, and the Italian administrators in any event lacked Teutonic efficiency. Campo 21 was one of the biggest, and one of the worst: after the war, a number of its Italian personnel were considered for prosecution for war crimes.

This book traces the life of Campo 21 from the time that it was opened on 3 August 1942, until it closed following the fall of Sicily to the Allies and the resulting Italian armistice in September 1943. It follows the lives (and deaths) of many who endured imprisonment at Chieti. It is a story of capture, suffering, and – for some – escape. It is also a story of courage, inventiveness and durability, and of how to make the most of whatever circumstances a man might find himself in.

For the reader, I should add this: the account of what happened in Campo 21 may initially and inevitably create the impression that the Italians during the Second World War were a cruel and unattractive people. Of the Fascists this is absolutely true, particularly when it seemed that, thanks to their German allies, they might win the war. However, as virtually every escaped prisoner of war discovered, the ordinary Italians were of a totally different character, particularly the peasant farmers, the contadini. The courage and self-sacrifice of many of those who helped the escapers was quite extraordinary, based on a simple humanity and respect for their fellow man. The success of most of those who escaped through to Allied territory was thanks to the food, shelter and guidance provided to them by the Italians that they met, despite the rewards that were offered for the handing over or betrayal of Allied prisoners, and the threatened penalties for helping them. An escaped prisoner of war who was recaptured would simply be returned to the camp. An Italian who had helped him, or was suspected of helping him, would usually be shot, and his home often burned to the ground. This was well known to the Italian people and yet still they helped. Thus, those reading this book are entitled to judge the Fascists harshly, but not the ordinary Italian people. To drive the point home, I should add that my father, Gordon Lett, dedicated his second book to the Italian Military Police, the carabinieri.

Brian Lett

Somerset 2014

Month 1

August 1942

THE BEGINNING

In early 1942, the Second World War was being fought between two power blocks. One comprised the Axis powers, essentially Germany and Italy, together with Japan, after she had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The other was known as the Allies – the British, Canadians, Australians, Indians, and New Zealanders, together with the smaller British Empire nations, South Africans, the free forces of the various countries that the Axis powers had occupied, and, since Pearl Harbor, the United States of America. Until the arrival of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa, there were a relatively modest number of Allied servicemen in Italian prisoner-of-war camps. The Italian campaign against the Allies had been generally unsuccessful, and most of the prisoners taken during it were Italians captured by the Allies. However, once the Germans gave their support to bolster the weakening Italian position in North Africa, that position changed. Rommel and his Afrika Korps won a series of victories that resulted in the taking of Allied prisoners. Since nominally the Italians remained in charge of the North African campaign, prisoners taken by them or by their German allies were an Italian responsibility. The surrender of Tobruk in June 1942 resulted in an enormous increase in the number of prisoners for whom the Italians had to find accommodation. An estimated 35,000 Allied personnel were taken at Tobruk, and the Germans were only too happy to leave the task of housing them in suitable camps to the Italians. The Italians knew perfectly well what their duties were, since so many of their own men were prisoners of the Allies. However, their immediate logistical problem was an enormous one – many thousands of prisoners but nowhere to put them.

The rights of prisoners of war had first been recognized by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which had held effect during the First World War. On 27 July 1929, the Geneva Convention was signed by 47 countries – members of the League of Nations and a number of others – creating a bill of rights in international law for prisoners of war. The Convention was later ratifed by most of the signatories, including Great Britain, Germany, Italy and the United States. Japan signed but never ratifed the Convention. Russia was viewed at the time as something of an international pariah, and neither signed nor ratifed it. Any nation embarking upon a war would expect to take enemy prisoners, but also to have a number of its own servicemen captured by the enemy – most countries were therefore keen to ensure fair treatment for their own nationals at the cost of committing to fair treatment for the enemy prisoners that it took. The Swiss, traditionally neutral, were to umpire a prisoner’s rights.

The central provisions of the Geneva Convention can be summarized as follows:

Prisoners were to be treated humanely.

No constraint was to be applied to those who refused to give any information beyond their name and rank, or service number.

Prisoners were to be allowed to keep all their clothes, including metal helmet and gas mask if carried, and any personal papers. They must surrender arms, military equipment and service papers. If insuffciently clad, they were to be clothed by the holding power.

Prisoners were to be kept in fxed camps, away from the battle area, which were to be dry, clean and warm, and no less sanitary than the holding power’s normal barracks.

The prisoners had the right to correspond with their families, and to practise any religion that they chose. Inward post could include food, clothes and books.

Rations were to be no worse than those of the depot troops of the holding power.

Each camp was to include a hospital.

Officer prisoners were to salute their equals and seniors in their captor’s forces.

Pay as appropriate to rank was to be provided by the holding power. Officers would not be required to work, warrant and non-commissioned officers were to work only in a supervisory role.

No prisoner could be put to warlike, unhealthy or dangerous work, or made to work excessively long hours.

Prisoners were subject to the civil laws of the holding power, and might be punished judicially according to those laws, but might not receive corporal punishment, excessive penalties, or be place in noisome cells.

For escape or attempted escape, the maximum disciplinary penalty that a prisoner might receive was 30 days’ solitary confinement. Of course, if he committed an offence of assault or theft as a part of his escape, then he would be liable to judicial penalties in addition to any disciplinary penalty.

Warring nations might communicate with each other through the International Red Cross, and an appointed Protecting Power (in Europe usually Switzerland) would ensure, by means of inspections of the prisoner of war camps, that any nation was complying with the Geneva Convention.

Prisoners also remained subject to their own country’s military discipline. Within the prison camps a Senior Officer, usually British (SBO), would be appointed to be in overall command of the prisoners and responsible to the camp Commandant for their conduct. It would be his job to maintain discipline within the camp and to ensure that military law was obeyed by his men. Of course, the extremely diffcult circumstances in some of the camps rendered this a diffcult task and a wise SBO would exercise considerable discretion according to the situation his men were in. The SBO would appoint a camp Adjutant, and each hut or prison building would have its own hierarchy, each reporting up the chain of command to the SBO, and passing on his orders to the men.

However, in North Africa in late June 1942, the practicalities of the situation meant that the Geneva Convention was at least temporarily unenforceable. Captain Charles ‘Bonzo’Burdon-Taylor, a 23-year-old from the Durham Light Infantry, was captured by the Germans when his position was overrun. He did not remain in their hands for long, since all Allied prisoners were to be handed over to the Italians. Burdon-Taylor described being brought across the desert towards what looked to him, from a distance, to be a brown sea, but which turned out when he got closer to be thousands upon thousands of Allied prisoners in khaki battledress. He recalled that when he was finally despatched by the Germans to walk into Italian hands, friends of his from the Durham Light Infantry spotted him and called out, ‘Good God, they’ve got Bonzo!’

There was no interrogation by the Italians of their prisoners, it was simply a question of finding somewhere they could be caged up, until it was possible to ship them over to the Italian mainland. Although triumphalist and jubilant, the Italians were totally unprepared and the prisoners were transported to a number of vastly over-crowded compounds, where water was in very short supply, and sanitation at its most basic. The prisoners came from a wide cross-section of different countries and races representing all corners of the British Empire and South Africa. There was also the odd American, but the United States were as yet playing no signifcant part in the North African and Middle East campaign. It had been a South African, Major General Klopper, who had been the senior officer in command of Tobruk at the time of its fall, and who had given the order to surrender, taking many by surprise. Tobruk had been unsuccessfully besieged for many months in the previous year, when defended by mainly Australian troops. Some were already grumbling that the South African support for the Allied cause was half-hearted, and that the Boers amongst them really sided with the Axis powers. However, for those who had been in action in the desperate defence of Tobruk, the overriding feeling was one of exhaustion. They suffered the deprivations of the temporary North African camps in a daze and hoped that they would eventually reach mainland Italy safely.

The Italians were experiencing enough diffculty supplying their own forces. They were just not capable of supplying their prisoners properly, or in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Major Gordon Lett, who was to become a long-term prisoner at Campo 21, described the lack of water, vital for survival in the heat of the desert: ‘Most of the troops were desperately thirsty, and it was a horrible thing to see soldiers actually crying for water, and, when they could, crawling round the water point licking the tops of the containers for any spare drops that had collected there during flling. The water was brought from a point in the harbour, which under [Italian] sketchy organization only managed to make two trips per day, which was barely suffcient for a single issue.’

Lance Bombardier Frank Osborne, 72 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, an economics graduate of London University and another future inmate of Campo 21, was captured at the Knightsbridge Box at the end of May 1942, and as a prisoner in North Africa was soon swamped by the infux of prisoners from Tobruk. By the time he was passed by the Germans into Italian hands, his physical condition and that of his companions was dangerously low. Osborne described the moment when a large water carrier arrived, carrying hundreds of gallons of liquid by then regarded as more precious than diamonds: ‘Multitudes of thirst frenzied beings clawed and bit, kicked and snatched for a vantage point. Friends became mortal foes and croaked vile deprecation on their enemies. The vehicle possessed numerous drain cocks – they were peak points of panic. The circular caps atop the tanker were also besieged. Steel helmets were shorn of their rubber padding and used as drinking bowls. Lying in wait under the chassis, with cool cunning, were the helpless unfortunates who trapped the inevitable spillings of the human maelstrom above. Gloating on the outskirts, with shining and clicking cameras, were our Axis tormentors. Propagandists had a feld day, though such revelations would be unhesitatingly discredited today.’

All the Allied prisoners had to be transported to Italy either by air or sea, and the danger of being shot down or sunk on the journey was a real one. Ships were sunk and many lives lost. Once in Italy, most of those destined for imprisonment in Campo 21 were first held for a few weeks at a Transit Camp at Bari and then taken by train north to Chieti. Conditions at Bari were far from good, but it was the first chance that some of the prisoners had to begin to recover from the trauma of capture. For most it was a very sudden and dramatic change of status. Captain J. E. Kenwyn Walters, Royal Tank Regiment, commented: ‘As far as I was concerned this must have been the lowest point of my life. Until then [capture], I had been an officer in the British Army with all the backing that that gave. Now, I stood up with practically nothing and was dependent on the enemy for everything – including my life.’

Lieutenant John Speares, Royal Signals, recorded: ‘I was completely dazed, in a state of shock, incapable of thinking very much for a long time … one had to exist, that was the primary objective. At Bari, when we first saw a Red Cross parcel, there was immense excitement – it was the first demonstration that our side cared and could help. The sight of a Rowntree’s cocoa tin was the first thing that woke me up from the state of shock and isolation that I was in.’ However, Speares was one of ten men who had to share a single Red Cross parcel – it contained amongst other things a packet of raisins, which they counted out amongst them raisin by raisin, to ensure that everybody got their fair share.

For prisoners of war arriving at PG 21 Chieti, the first impressions of the camp were excellent, particularly after the horrors of life as a prisoner in North Africa. Although not built as a prisoner-of-war camp, Chieti was relatively well designed. It comprised a series of brand new buildings encircled by a high wall, and had apparently originally been intended for use as a barracks for Italian soldiers, and later as a prison concentration camp for anti-Fascists. However, the food of Allied prisoners of war pouring into Italy following the surrender of Tobruk meant that plans for the almost finished camp at Chieti had to be changed. Prisoners, when they arrived at Chieti in the early days, would be held outside in the compound whilst their Italian guards sorted them out. Each was thoroughly searched again, having to strip partially or fully naked in front of the assembled Italian guards for the purpose. Many covertly buried their treasured possessions in the earth of the enclosure where they were first held, in the hope of being able to retrieve them later – only to see the entire holding area dug over by the Italians after they had been allocated to their barracks, and all those precious possessions found and confscated, never to be seen again.

Gordon Lett, who reached Chieti at the end of August, was one of many new arrivals upon whom the camp initially made a favourable impression: ‘At first sight, the camp appeared to conform with civilised convention, and doubtless our neutral visitors thought so too. It consisted of a walled enclosure, approximately 700 yards by 300 yards in area, in which were six barrack blocks, a single storey high, and an impressive looking cookhouse at the end of a broad asphalt roadway. The buildings were new, and their appointments modern. There were neat metal door handles, glazed white tiles in the washrooms and lavatories, many shining taps, innumerable water cisterns, newly planted trees, and – at first – expanses of grass and vestiges of a garden. A high water tower … dominated the south-west corner.’

The wall that surrounded the camp was 4 metres (about 13ft) in height and went a further 2 metres underground. Estimates of the precise size of the camp vary – Captain Trippi, the Swiss Inspector who visited in October 1942, gave its measurement as 197,000 square feet (the equivalent of about 150 × 150yd), considerably smaller than Lett’s estimate. The walls of the camp still stand today and the author’s estimate is that the total area within them measures about 300 × 400yd, but only part of this was for use by the prisoners. The Italian guards and administration had their own quarters. There were eight main buildings – the guardhouse on either side of the main gate, the cookhouse at the opposite end of the camp, and six U-shaped bungalow blocks, three on each side of the central path that ran from the main gate to the cookhouse. Four bungalow blocks were to accommodate the prisoners, one was for the Italian garrison (the first on the right), and one was for the Italian administration and the camp hospital (the first on the left). Each bungalow block comprised two separate L-shaped bungalows, joined by an arched and open doorway at the front of the building that led through to a rear courtyard. Standing at the main gate and facing into the camp, the buildings on the left were known as Settore (Sector) One, and those on the right as Settore Two. All the bungalow blocks except that occupied by the Italian garrison were given letters: A–C in Settore One, D and E in Settore Two. The officers barrack wings of the blocks were given individual numbers 1–5. There were two wings used for dining halls. The other ranks had their own wing of Block B. The northern aspect of the compound looked towards the town of Chieti, standing on its hill, with the cathedral prominent. Looking southwest, there was a magnifcent view of the Gran Sasso range of mountains.

From a large entrance gate, an asphalt roadway led down the middle of the camp, between the solidly built bungalow blocks, towards the cookhouse. On either side of the road there were some small trees, and a grassed area that would not long survive use by thousands of prisoners’ feet. The cookhouse at the end of the roadway was a long low building, which eventually was also to house the camp theatre. In the first block on the left beyond the entrance gates were not only the camp hospital and the administration offces, but also the ‘cooler’ – the punishment cells for prisoners who misbehaved. The ‘legs’ of the U-shaped barrack bungalows each comprised two large dormitory rooms, and two large washrooms. The crosspiece forming the front of each bungalow contained smaller rooms and one of the bungalows contained a shower room, with 60 showers. The other ranks had their own cookhouse, between the hospital and their wing. The barrack bungalows and the cookhouses were divided by barbed wire from the remainder of the camp, which was used by the Italian garrison. Relatively new, the camp was potentially an excellent facility.

Campo 21 first opened its gates on 3 August 1942, in full summer. The camp was close to the village and railway station of Chieti Scalo, just outside the town of Chieti in the Abruzzo, about 12 miles from the east coast of Italy and the Adriatic Sea at Pescara. Chieti is about halfway down the boot of Italy, and very approximately level with Rome on the west coast. As mentioned, the view from the camp was an enticing one of felds, mountains and the attractive hilltop town of Chieti, as well as the mountain range of the Gran Sasso. The camp was under the control of the Italian IX Armoured Corps. Lieutenant Colonel Mario Barela, the first commandant of the camp, indicated at the first inspection by the Swiss Protecting Power, that its capacity was 1,800 men. This was a wild exaggeration. The camp had in fact originally been designed to hold 350 men. Italian records state that at the time when its intended use was changed to that of prisoner-of-war camp it was to hold a maximum of 1,000 men, but by 1 September 1942 it already contained 1,489. At the time of the first inspection by the Protecting Power on 7 October 1942, the total had risen to 1,603. The prisoners slept in dormitories of 40 bunks, or in the smaller rooms at varying rates of occupancy. The beds were what the Italians call castelli – wooden two-bed bunk units (officers were meant to be given individual beds). In some of the dormitories, two-bunk units were placed side by side, creating a ‘castle’ of four bunks, with each such castle a mere 20–24 inches from the next. In reality, the camp was grossly overcrowded. It was probably ft to hold 600–750 long-term prisoners at most. The main problem, however, was that the smart modern complex was extremely short of running water, rendering its showers and lavatories virtually useless.

The modern façade and fttings, which initially fooled the arriving prisoners, also had an effect on the first Swiss inspector to visit the camp. Gordon Lett describes the inspector, one Captain L. Trippi as, ‘an elderly gentleman of Swiss nationality, who spoke good English and insisted on speaking in English all the time, but was slightly deaf.’ Captain Trippi was clearly impressed by the superfcial gloss of the camp, reporting back that the installations in all the bungalows were quite up to date, and in some instances luxurious. He described the shower room as ‘most excellent’. Trippi’s report will be dealt with more fully later.

As far as the prisoners were concerned, however, it was not long before they realized that the appearance of luxury and modernity was merely a mirage, something that all desert soldiers understood. Lieutenant Ronald C. W. Hill, Royal Artillery, who arrived in Campo 21 on 5 August, recorded in his diary that on his first day he sat at tables equipped with tablecloths and serviettes, and that he enjoyed his food much more under such decent conditions. Lieutenant George Hervey-Murray’s reaction was much the same. But the tablecloths and serviettes never appeared again, and as the camp flled up the food became worse and worse.

Major Lett described the realities of the camp:

The unfortunate inhabitants of PG21 soon discovered that the glazed tiles were mere camouflage for the most primitive of sanitary systems, that the water cisterns had never worked since the day that they were installed, and that the impressive water tower produced the very minimum of water. The rooms which had been built to house twenty men in each had, in many cases to hold forty officer prisoners. The beds were of wood, and built in double bunks, one above the other – as used in the barrack rooms of the garrison soldiery – and the mattresses consisted of old sacking stuffed with dry grass which in the words of one senior officer: ‘would not be fit to feed cattle upon’, and which was never renewed. The cookhouse, too, proved but a whited sepulchre, for apart from the large cauldrons with which it was furnished for cooking the eternal Italian macaroni stew, or pasta, there were no other utensils available, not even ladles for serving out their contents – hence the food tins which were eventually obtained from Red Cross parcels had, perforce, to serve a double purpose as saucepans, or drinking vessels, for individual officers. Everything else connected with this luxurious establishment – as certain optimists at home believed it to be – was of the same standard.

With 1,600 prisoners eventually crammed into six wings of the bungalows, facilities out of doors became of great importance. Paths ran off the central asphalt road to the bungalows. There was space outside suffcient for some games, but the trees, paths and road got in the way, and there was a trip wire and ‘forbidden zone’ in front of the surrounding walls, together with signs in English warning the prisoners not to cross the wire and approach the wall. These read: ‘FORBIDDEN ZONE. PASSAGE AND DEMURRAGE NO ALLOWED. DANGER’ at the wire, and: ‘WARNING It is forbidden to approach the wall. The sentries have orders to fre without warning’, on the walls themselves. Similarly, across the asphalt road that led through the centre of the camp, near to the gate out of the prisoners’ compound, there was a white line painted, beyond which the prisoners were not allowed to go. Here also was the notice: PASSAGE AND DEMURRAGE NO ALLOWED. The poor quality of English refected the modest ability of the senior interpreter and security officer in the camp, Captain Mario Croce. The word ‘demurrage’ was researched by the prisoners, and found to be a technical term relating to the length of time that a railway goods wagon was left idle. The sign was therefore taken by the prisoners to mean: ‘no crossing of the line or hanging about allowed’. Nobody ever told Croce how poor his English was.

Captain Dominick ‘Toby’ Graham, Royal Artillery, arrived in Chieti on 4 August, as one of a batch of about 500 junior officers. The shortage of water was acute in the summer heat, and at that stage (with the camp nowhere near as full as it would be later), the water to the taps was turned on only twice a day for one hour. The lavatories did not fush. In the courtyard of his bungalow, number 5, Graham describes a