The Way Home
Ballaquane Hospital closed down in October 1944. Its modest buildings reopened within a few weeks with an intake of approximately sixty Finns from Mooragh. With the closure of the Peel Hospital, Giovanni Moneta was transferred back to Douglas as an orderly attached to the Falcon Cliff Hospital for internees.
There he was taken ill and had his appendix removed in Noble’s Hospital. The surgeon was the Scot whose practice was on the front at Douglas and who had been the first of the Manx doctors to become attached to an internment camp when it all started back in 1940. The operation was subsequently significant to Maneta, for the successful appendectomy, although a routine matter in itself, was only the first favour he was to receive from the Scots doctor.
Meanwhile in their native land the Italians had gone through the very remarkable convolution of giving in to the Allies and shortly afterwards joining up with them in the war against Hitler.
This did not result in the immediate release of the remaining Italian internees on the Isle of Man, but the great steam-roller was crunching slowly across Europe, and although the end of the war was not yet in sight, victory was assured. It was therefore possible to offer war work to suitable internees who might not otherwise be offered it.
Moneta’s chance came soon after he had been moved to Falcon Cliff and recovered from his operation. Men were wanted for war work in Liverpool at a factory manufacturing parachutes. He had no particular wish to leave the Isle of Man and still less to leave the occasional company of Margaret Cannell, but an opportunity to work in what was very nearly normality could not be missed.
So he went. This was a different life again. He was not yet free of all restrictions; he slept at the factory and ate in the canteen with the rest of the civilian workers, many of whom were women. He wore normal issue British battle dress, with a white circular patch on the back which alone revealed his status. Once, and only once, during his time in Liverpool did he see Margaret Cannell, although occasionally they had exchanged letters. It was her only visit to the mainland for the rest of the war.
He was free to roam about Liverpool in any way he wanted, and nobody gave him a second look. Life had reabsorbed him in the anonymity of the pavements.
Release came to Moneta in an unexpected way. After he had been working in Liverpool for only a few months, he had an industrial accident which left him with severe damage to a knee. By the time he recovered, the war was collapsing round the Nazi army; Europe was in a chaotic state. The thread for the parachutes was no longer needed at such desperate speed. The momentum of the munition factories was already starting to run down.
Moneta was advised that he needed a cartilage operation and that standing around heavy machinery was not for him in his condition. By now the war in Europe was over. He would be repatriated with the first of the Italian POWs to be sent back.
Weeks later he landed at Taranto, in the heel of Italy. There he stayed for a fortnight, until he received travel permits which took him home to distant Elba. He was luckier than some. But he had not finished with the Isle of Man. Far from it.
Later that year he invited Margaret Cannell to come to Italy and meet his parents. Months later the ex-internee and the nursing sister were married in Elba and spent their honeymoon in the hillside house of Giovanni’s old shipmate Lanzardo Mattio, who had been with him at Metropole. Margaret Moneta’s health was poor; she needed a more northern climate. Her husband applied to return and work in the Isle of Man. It was 1947, and a difficult time to seek permission. Then Moneta remembered the Scots doctor who had operated on him. He made the request; the papers were signed. He was free to return from one island to the other. It was the second favour he had received from the same doctor.
They came back to the Isle of Man and settled down in Douglas, where they had two children and now have six grandchildren.
All the internees who had put their names down for repatriation early in the war did not necessarily have to wait for the passing years, but almost all of them certainly did. Only a few went back to their homeland comparatively quickly. Disappointments were many and often bitter. The individual case had to be considered and compared with other applications. Exchanges had to be agreed: international arrangements had to be made and progressed through neutrals. It was a case that, where a substantial number wished to be called, only a relative few could be chosen.
The first repatriation had taken place back in the beginning of October 1941, when forty-three German women who had been interned in Port Erin since June of the previous year left the island to go down to Newhaven on the Sussex coast. There they joined two hospital ships which were to take badly wounded German prisoners of war back home under an exchange scheme. The routine for such an operation had to be organized by Sweden, and the journey to be routed through Gothenburg.
Those women were fortunate. It took three years all but a month for there to be another substantial repatriation, although steady efforts were made to secure one. There were always a great many obstacles; the approach to the enemy by the neutral power was a delicate business. In the camps rumour would lead to hope, then to mounting excitement and finally to disillusion and depression as it was reluctantly realized that one more camp dream had gone. Repatriation was not just the boat home for which the Nazi internee lived. The Italians who lived in London and Glasgow and even the non-Nazi Germans hoped fervently that those registered for repatriation would be lucky. For, in some mysterious way, a repatriation for the hard-liners meant that conditions were easing generally, and so they, the people left behind, would most likely be released back to the mainland and home the more quickly. Such was the impetuous logic of internment, and from time to time excitement went up and down like the temperature graph of a sick man. Bitter would be the disappointment. This particularly applied to the women’s camp in Port Erin.
The next outgoing party after October 1941 was a small one, consisting of twenty-seven Japanese, who left Palace and Metropole Camps in Douglas for a northern port on the mainland. There they linked up with others of their countrymen, including diplomats, who were being repatriated under an agreement for the exchange of civilians. The Palace contingent was led by one Kano, who had been the manager in London of the Specie Bank of Yokohama and was known to camp guards, surely erroneously, as Viscount Kano. His men had attracted much quiet approval in Douglas. They were exceptionally lucky; having arrived in the Isle of Man in mid-December 1941, they were on their way home by a secret route early in the following July.
The largest single repatriation did not take place until 1 September 1944. Rather more than six hundred aliens—women, married couples and children—had opted to pull out from Port Erin, and at last, after so many setbacks, the turn of most of them had come. Their departure reduced the internee population of the small resort to fewer than four hundred. More than a hundred internees were also repatriated from the men’s camps in the same party, bringing the total of detainees and internees remaining on the Isle of Man, men and women, to fewer than two thousand.
The Mona’s Herald described the final scenes with a patriotic flourish. In the early hours of Friday morning, it wrote a little breathlessly, a special steamer glided out of the darkness of Douglas carrying six hundred aliens from Port Erin on the first stage of their journey to the darker life of their doomed German homeland. It was an accurate enough prophecy, although there was much fighting ahead across western Europe,
The internees from the men’s camps had already boarded the Manx steamer. The contingent from the south arrived later by special train. It included 470 women and 25 children, some of whom had been born in the camp. They were taken to the quayside in relays by a small fleet of six buses.
Elaborate precautions, we are assured, were taken for the departure, and a large force of auxiliary police patrolled Douglas railway station. All busloads were escorted by London policewomen stationed at the Port Erin camp. Police guarded the entrance gates, and about a hundred sightseers lined the railings on Station Hill to watch the women as they were driven off.
The repatriates looked just like a crowd of healthy holiday-makers, with the difference that they were not singing or joking; so said the Mona’s Herald. Many carried Manx travelling-rugs as souvenirs of their four years on the island. It was not reported, but their luggage had been dumped at Port Erin’s small railway station the previous day and carefully checked by the detachment of policewomen. These constables were experienced searchers who went through the work as a matter of routine, sometimes under rushed and difficult conditions. This time their task was heavy, but at least they had time for it. The Manx travelling-rugs reported by the local Press were only the outward and visible sign of the steady collecting that had been going on; the internees were proposing to return to Germany with tins of food, bought item by item from their modest earnings, with knitwear and with a substantial stock of sanitary towels. These last they had saved carefully from any surplus to requirements in their personal monthly issue, which was free and decidedly liberal as almost all of them had been on camp welfare. Allied intelligence was insisting that there was an acute shortage of such items in Germany, and luggage so liberally stocked would make good propaganda. The women themselves were willing collaborators on this one point: the small detachment of policewomen who had to buy theirs in the ordinary way took a jaundiced view as they checked the luggage and started to confiscate these items. Word quickly came down from the camp authority; the women were perfectly in order in taking as many as they could pack and were not to be discouraged. It made good sense to let them take them back to Germany. So take them back they did, sometimes even as the stuffing for soft toys.
The last of the women were aboard the Rushen Castle by ten o’clock on the Thursday night. They mostly walked briskly up the gangplanks, excited and happy; one was heavily pregnant. It did not look as if they were sorry to be leaving. They sailed soon after midnight and, after a very rough crossing, reached Liverpool at breakfast time on the Friday morning. The Drottningholm, which housed an entirely different problem that was a police matter, had not been allowed to berth but was anchored in midstream. The internees were taken across to it by tender, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the repatriates it was some hours before the ship could set off. The party then sailed for Gothenburg, where they were exchanged for returning British prisoners of war and internees.
M. E. Mundy, special correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, talked with the repatriates when they reached Sweden, about to start on the last leg of their journey home. Baron Kettleholdt, a former German camp leader, would not be quoted for publication. Herd Hanwerck, another leader, was very frank. When asked about their treatment, he replied: ‘Food and billets were quite satisfactory, especially during the last two years in the married camp. Before that in the military camps conditions were not so comfortable, but have since improved.
‘We have no complaints and all of us are grateful for many considerations and the fair treatment we received from Commander Cuthbert, the British chief of the Isle of Man camps.’
C. R. M. Cuthbert was, of course, commandant of the women’s and married camps at Port Erin. He was not in charge of the men’s camps and never had been.