Castle of the Eagles Read online

  *

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ said General Neame in a low voice. ‘We take over the aircraft and fly it to our own lines.’29 General O’Connor nodded vigorously, his whole demeanour since capture one of dogged determination to escape. General Gambier-Parry and Brigadiers Combe, Todhunter and Vaughan listened carefully to the plan during the short exercise time that the Germans permitted their prisoners each day at Derna. The group of senior British officers strolled around a dusty parade square in the dirty old barracks complex, puffing on pipes and cigarettes as they went over Neame’s plan.

  ‘Phil’s right. It’s obvious that the Jerries are going to shift us to Germany, and soon,’ said O’Connor to the brigadiers. ‘We’ve worked out a plan to hijack the plane that takes us to Berlin.’ The fear was that the generals, because of their high ranks and command responsibilities privy to a vast amount of top-secret information, might be handed over to the Gestapo once pressure had been put on the Italian authorities under whose nominal authority they remained for the time being. At the very least, they could expect detailed and long interrogations by German military intelligence. The intelligence windfall for the Germans could potentially change the course of the war for Hitler.

  The plan was outlined. It did seem remarkably straightforward, if somewhat reckless. The generals believed that they would be sent north to Germany in stages, accompanied by their ADCs and batmen. O’Connor had managed to fool the Germans into assigning a captive RAF pilot as his aide-de-camp since the disappearance of his actual ADC Captain Dent in the desert. O’Connor still had a fully loaded service revolver hidden on his person, and Brigadier Combe a primed hand grenade. The Germans, perhaps intimidated by the exalted ranks of their new prisoners, and concerned that every military courtesy be extended to them, had been loath to search Neame’s party too thoroughly. The Germans also underestimated the resolve of the British generals to attempt to escape – such behaviour was considered virtually unthinkable by both the Germans and the Italians. Neame had, in the meantime, managed to find and hide a small hammer. The rest of the senior officers and their batmen would have their fists.

  Neame’s plan was brutally simple. Once airborne, and at a given signal, the POWs would spring into action and overpower the German guards inside the aircraft’s cabin, and then O’Connor’s RAF ADC would replace the German pilot in the cockpit. The aircraft would then be flown to Allied lines in Egypt.30 Everyone was keyed up for the operation, Lord Ranfurly writing that it was ‘exciting waiting’.31

  *

  The Italians’ bag of prisoners was not yet quite full. To it would be added one of the most extraordinary and larger-than-life characters in the history of warfare. And, like Air Vice-Marshal Boyd and Flight Lieutenant Leeming, this particular prisoner was to arrive quite unexpectedly from the sky, at the same time as General Neame and his friends were plotting to escape North Africa by air.

  ‘We’re going to have to ditch, sir, prepare for a landing on water!’ was the last thing that Major-General Adrian Carton de Wiart heard from the cockpit of the Wellington bomber that was supposed to be taking him to Yugoslavia. De Wiart had been furiously attempting to struggle into a parachute harness, a stream of expletives flowing from beneath his salt-and-pepper moustache, when the call came through his headphones. He was relieved, as he didn’t think that he could have squeezed his very tall frame through the small escape hatch set into the bomber’s belly to parachute clear. De Wiart used his only hand to grip his seat tightly.

  The 62-year-old warhorse had just been personally appointed by Churchill to head the British Military Mission in Yugoslavia. His journey there was by air via Malta. De Wiart’s plane had been headed for Egypt, thereafter to turn north for Yugoslavia, when the emergency had struck. Both engines had inexplicably died, and De Wiart would later suspect sabotage as the cause. Running through his mind as his plane started to go down were the words of Air Marshal Sir Jack Baldwin when they had met on an airfield at Newmarket, Suffolk, two days before: ‘Don’t worry, old chap. I’ve sent 94 Wellingtons to the Middle East and only one failed to arrive.’32

  De Wiart had thought that his war was over long before he stepped aboard the Wellington in Suffolk, and the Yugoslavia mission had appeared to be his final service for King and Country before he was pensioned off. As the Wellington began its death dive towards the ocean below, De Wiart found that he was not scared. But this was probably because the word ‘scared’ was not in his vocabulary. He had already faced death over a dozen times in a military career that stretched back to the Boer War, and the general consensus of opinion was that the only thing that could kill Carton de Wiart was Carton de Wiart.

  Tall, lean, balding and covered in scar tissue, De Wiart was half British, half Belgian, hailing from an aristocratic Brussels legal family. Rumoured to have been the illegitimate son of King Leopold II, De Wiart’s brushes with death had begun in 1899 when he had disappeared from his studies at Oxford to enlist as a trooper in the British Army. He took a bullet in the stomach in South Africa, and after sufficient convalescence in England and the mollification of his Belgian lawyer father, who was angry with him for having abandoned his studies, De Wiart gained a commission in the cavalry. By 1901 he was back fighting the Boers. In 1907 he became a British citizen, and spent his leaves at shooting parties in various aristocratic castles around Europe, marrying an Austro-Hungarian noble, Countess Friederike von Babenhausen, daughter of Prince Karl Ludwig of Babenhausen, in 1908.

  When the First World War broke out De Wiart showed his mettle at the Battle of Shimber Berris while commanding a unit of the famed Somaliland Camel Corps. De Wiart was shot twice in the face, losing his left eye and part of an ear, and in the process winning a DSO. Sent to London for recuperation, De Wiart checked himself into a nursing home on Park Lane. He would return to the same home after each fresh injury, ‘becoming such a frequent occurrence that they kept his own pyjamas ready for his next visit’.33 Henceforth sporting a black eye patch (a glass eye provided to him by doctors was thrown out of a taxi window when it proved uncomfortable), De Wiart was sent to France where he was a battalion and then a brigade commander.

  During the course of his service on the Western Front, De Wiart was wounded an astonishing seven further times. The list of his wounds is staggering: shot through the skull and ankle on the Somme, through the hip at Passchendaele, the leg at Cambrai, and the ear at Arras. He lost his left hand to shellfire in 1915. In fact, his hand was so mangled that De Wiart actually bit off some of his pulped fingers after a surgeon failed to help him. The entire hand was later amputated above the wrist. It is perhaps unsurprising that this bullet magnet eventually won a Victoria Cross in 1916 at the age of 36. During an attack, three of the brigade’s battalion commanders were killed, so De Wiart, as the last lieutenant-colonel still on his feet, took command and constantly exposed himself to German fire as he organised, cajoled and encouraged the brigade forward, armed only with a walking stick. The brigade won the day, capturing the ground assigned to it.

  At the conclusion of the First World War, De Wiart, missing an eye, parts of both ears, a lung and his left hand summed up his experiences succinctly: ‘Frankly, I had enjoyed the war …’34 But now, trapped in a diving Wellington bomber in April 1941, Carton de Wiart had not yet made up his mind whether he was going to enjoy his second world war.

  De Wiart had only a hazy recollection of the Wellington hitting the water. When he regained consciousness he was being pushed through a hatch into the freezing cold sea, which instantly revived him. De Wiart and the RAF crew took refuge on the plane’s wings, nursing their injuries. It was dark and the aircraft’s rubber dinghy was punctured and useless. They were about a mile and a half off the North African coast. One crewman had a broken arm, the pilot a busted leg. But there was a cold northerly wind blowing rapidly inshore, and they soon found themselves about half a mile from the coast. Then, with a groan and several sharp cracks, the Wellington’s fuselage suddenly broke in two and started to
sink. De Wiart helped the injured pilot to swim towards the shore. The little group made it but landed straight into the hands of Italian native police.

  ‘Lower that rifle immediately!’ boomed De Wiart in Arabic, picked up as a child in Cairo where his father had practised law for a while. The native policeman obliged, a little startled by the forbidding presence of the tall British officer, hatless, shoeless and brandishing his only remaining possession, a bamboo cane inside which De Wiart had had the forethought to secrete a roll of banknotes. De Wiart, looking like a shipwrecked pirate with his eye patch and empty sleeve, questioned his captor.

  ‘Where are the British forces?’ he demanded, continuing in forceful Arabic.

  ‘They go,’ replied the policeman, ‘they left here yesterday.’

  De Wiart confounded their bad luck. If the Wellington had managed to stay airborne for a few more minutes De Wiart and the crew could well have come ashore in friendly territory.

  Soon after, a local Italian priest arrived and led the British party to a small café, where he provided them with food and drink before arranging to take them to hospital. During their ride on a truck to the hospital, De Wiart tried to persuade his captors to take them to the British lines, but they were unmoved. They knew that the Italians would shortly arrive to reoccupy the town and they were determined to ingratiate themselves by handing over their impressively high-ranking prisoner.

  As a doctor patched them up they heard the unmistakable sound of an aircraft out to sea. Looking outside, De Wiart and his party could see a British aircraft circling in the early morning light, evidently searching for them.

  ‘Sabotage, sir. I have no doubts,’ said the young pilot, his broken leg now set in plaster, to De Wiart as they watched the newly arrived British plane making its pointless sweeps over the sea. ‘It’s very unlikely that a Wellington would fail on one engine, let alone two, such a short way out from Malta.’ De Wiart agreed. After a while the British search plane disappeared from view. ‘We cursed that punctured rubber dinghy,’ De Wiart wrote; ‘our hearts sank low as the drone of the plane faded into the distance.’35

  De Wiart resolved to escape, and quietly spoke to the RAF crewmen. They’d wait till darkness and then, once the native police had relaxed, slip off and try to make their own way down the coast to safety. But it was not to be. Two hours after arriving at the hospital the calm was interrupted by the sound of a field car pulling up outside the entrance. In strode two Italian staff officers, their polished jackboots ringing on the hospital’s tiled floor. After questioning De Wiart, they announced that he was to accompany them to Bardia. Handed a pair of sand shoes, De Wiart bid farewell to his RAF crew, who, the Italians assured him, would be treated as prisoners of war and sent to a camp. He was later to discover that the pilot was shot, though for what reason remains a mystery.

  The Italians officers drove De Wiart to Bardia where the mayor provided him and his escort with an excellent lunch. The party then drove on to the city of Benghazi, where De Wiart was ushered into a small hotel room and left under guard for the night.36

  The night in that small, stuffy hotel room was one of the longest of De Wiart’s life. ‘Often in my life I had thought that I might be killed,’ he wrote, ‘and though death has no attraction for me, I regard it more or less phlegmatically. People who enjoy life seldom have much fear of death, and having taken the precaution to squeeze the lemon do not grudge throwing the rind away. But never, even in the innermost recesses of my mind, had I contemplated being taken a prisoner. I regarded it as the calamity that befell other people but never myself.’37 It was a situation that Generals O’Connor, Neame and Gambier-Parry also had to come to terms with, along with the brigadiers and colonels who were captured with them. Each reacted in different ways.

  ‘Though I never think of the Italians as great warriors,’ wrote De Wiart of that time, ‘they did seem to be having all the luck.’38

  *

  Neame’s very daring plan was spoiled two days later when a Luftwaffe staff officer arrived to inform him and O’Connor that they were indeed flying to Berlin, but that they were not to be accompanied by any of their other staff or military servants. Still armed with the revolver and the hammer, O’Connor and Neame settled themselves on to a wooden bench seat that ran the length of the Junkers Ju 52’s cabin, but any notions of attempting a hijacking were quickly dispelled. German soldiers armed with MP40 machine pistols took post at either end of the plane and watched the generals like hawks during the flight across the Mediterranean, which was made at a wave-skimming height of just 50 feet to avoid British fighters.

  Just before Neame had boarded the Ju 52 at Derna airfield, he had spoken to an Italian officer and asked him to lodge a protest with his own headquarters. The British officers had been captured in an Italian theatre, and should by rights be handed over permanently to the Italian Army and kept in Italy, not taken to Germany.

  When the plane landed at Messina in Sicily to refuel, Neame’s protest seemed to have worked, for a heated argument developed between the Luftwaffe officer who was escorting them and some senior Italian officers, until Neame and his cohorts were bundled off the plane and handed over to the Italians.39 It was a quiet victory for Neame, who had saved the senior officers from lengthy Gestapo interrogations once inside the Reich, and Italian military pride had been restored as Mussolini now possessed a host of British generals with which to underline before his people the prowess of Italian arms in the desert.

  CHAPTER 3

  ___________________

  Mazawattee’s Mad House

  ‘You know, these people don’t know why they are at war with us.’

  Air Vice-Marshal Owen Tudor Boyd Sulmona, 1941

  Flight Lieutenant John Leeming lay flat on the roof of the large house. He was dressed in his RAF uniform, its dark blue colour perfect night-time camouflage. His face had been blackened with soot from his room wood burner. He had been watching the garden for a couple of hours and cramp was starting to set in to his arms and legs. It was very quiet, just the occasional puff of wind stirring the trees and shrubs down below. Every so often one of the Italian guards would light a cigarette, the glow of a lighter or match providing a pinprick of bright light for a few seconds. The surrounding mountains and hills were difficult to make out, just tall gloomy backdrops to the little drama being played out at the villa.

  Leeming strained his eyes to check various parts of the garden, looking for patches of shadow that could be used to conceal a body. Snatches of conversations between the guards drifted up to Leeming’s hiding place. There were a lot of guards, their steel helmets reflecting the weak moonlight as they stood or paced around the perimeter of the house. Too many guards, thought Leeming.

  His nocturnal observations at an end, Leeming carefully slid away from the edge of the roof back towards a trapdoor that led into the loft. Suddenly, his shoe caught on a loosened tile. It lifted and, before Leeming could catch it, banged back down with a loud crack. Leeming’s heart rate increased and he pressed himself into the roof, closing his eyes. He lay absolutely still, barely daring to breathe, trying to make himself as small as possible. Down below a guard snapped on a handheld torch, running its bright beam along the edge of the roof. Leeming squeezed his eyes even tighter shut and gripped the tiles around him. Any second now there would be a shout and then the sound of a rifle being cocked. Time seemed to slow down. But then the light suddenly shut off. There was no shout, no metallic click. Leeming listened as the sentry resumed his methodical patrol, his boots crunching loudly on a gravel path. Leeming waited for three minutes until his heart rate slowed before resuming his crawl back to the trapdoor and safety.

  *

  A few weeks earlier Leeming and Air Vice-Marshal Owen Boyd had sat inside a freezing cold railway carriage as it was slowly hauled higher into the mountainous Abruzzi region towards its destination: the small town of Sulmona, about 100 miles east of Rome. It was snowing outside the windows, thick drifts lining the railway tra
cks and causing several delays to their journey.

  After disembarking from the train at Sulmona station, the two Britons had been hustled into a waiting car and driven two miles to their new home, the Villa Orsini. Along the way they passed walls adorned with a recurrent Fascist exhortation to the population: ‘Credere! Abbidire! Combattere!’ (‘Believe! Obey! Fight!’). As the car passed through the three-storey villa’s large gates, Boyd and Leeming saw Italian soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders, bundled up in steel helmets, greatcoats and mittens stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. The place looked well guarded.

  The house itself was impressive. Before the grand entrance was a large marble fish pond surrounded by ornamental railings, its surface icy and frozen. The villa was a square building of buff-coloured stucco, its hillside garden scattered with classical statues1 that were now half buried in snow. Stepping inside the house through a pair of elaborately carved wooden doors, Boyd and Leeming took in their new surroundings. The entrance hall floor was marble and before them stood a grand staircase. On first impressions, it appeared as though the prisoners had fallen on their feet, but closer inspection soon revealed that the Villa Orsini was badly designed and rather dilapidated.2

  No one seemed to have had the forethought to actually inform the commandant that Boyd and Leeming were coming, so the villa was in a considerable state of disarray, with harassed Italian soldiers darting about, supplies piled in various rooms, and the commandant, a squat, rotund and permanently perspiring colonel, shouting orders in an excited voice above the din. Fortunately, out of this chaos emerged one man who seemed to know what he was doing, and who, ironically, was to become a friend to all of the British prisoners that were held in the villa over the next few months. Lieutenant Baron Agosto Ricciardi was a tall and elegant dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, from Naples.3 He spoke excellent English, having had a British governess as a child, and he immediately put Boyd and Leeming at their ease. The contrast between the calm and collected Ricciardi and the excitable and loud commandant was stark. Ricciardi made sure that the two prisoners were served a hot meal after their long journey from Rome. They would soon take to calling this affable young Italian officer ‘Gussie’.4