In May 1945, Captain Ramsay Park was finishing his seventeenth month at Avellino. The town remained what it had been for the duration of the war, the sleepy location of the Canadian army’s reinforcement base and 2 Echelon Canadian Military Headquarters. Avellino was an ancient place that, thanks to its mountains and pine trees, reminded the Canadians of home. It lay in a small valley that stretched along the foot of the Apennines, and it was the largest producer of pine nuts in Italy. In fact, its name was said to mean “nut” in some forgotten language. Avellino had a quaint town square, a number of churches and a few prominent families. Atop the valley’s highest peak sat the monastery of Montevergine, which had a reputation for curing human maladies. The church was filled with crutches and other supports that grateful patients had left there following their healing; the bones of many saints were on display in caskets in the monastery’s small chapel. The most prized item was a very small piece of wood that was said to be from the cross on which Christ was crucified. The monastery also had a wine bar, which Canadian officers frequented. The entire Avellino area was famous for the production of robust wines, such as the white Fiano di Avellino and the red Taurasi.
Life for officers stationed there was a steady flow of bureaucracy. On May 7, the Canadian headquarters in Rome was closed and its staff sent to Avellino for a stopover before their eventual return to England and then Canada. Now that the war was over, censorship by unit commanders was discontinued, although letters would still be censored by the commandant at the base. Orders were issued each day. These covered everything from the most banal matters to the most crucial. In May 1945, for example, the army declared sunstroke to be a self-inflicted wound; soldiers were warned to take precautions as Avellino was malarious; they were warned not to eat Italian ice cream as it was suspected that it caused diarrhea. The bishop of Avellino held a mass for the Allied soldiers who had lost their lives fighting in Italy and for the civilians who had died as a result of enemy action.1
The war had first arrived at Avellino by air. On September 20, 1943, a Sunday afternoon, American war planes dropped bombs. They targeted Avellino’s farmers’ market, which was located on a small square at the crest of a hill near the town’s centre. On that morning, Avellino had thirty thousand inhabitants; after the bombing, three thousand were dead, most of them women and children. Benito Scopa, who was five years old on that day, was shopping with his mother at the market for the family’s lunch. When the bombs struck, the explosions brought down a giant awning. The baldacchino collapsed, covering Benito and his mother; for the rest of his life he would credit his survival to it. At first, as panic ensued, people wanted to believe that the bombing had been an accident. But this hope was extinguished once the American fighters began strafing the crowd. “They flew low and fired right at the women and the children,” recalled Benito. In a matter of minutes, ten per cent of Avellino’s population was gone. The bodies carpeted the ground, piled two and three feet high in many places. Those who survived carry souvenirs of that afternoon. Benito still cannot stand being in a crowd and faints at the sight of the smallest amount of blood.2
Three weeks later, a fifteen-year-old girl was playing in the forest near the outskirts of Avellino. She and her family were living in a makeshift tent in the woods, having fled the town. As she was playing, she noticed a figure emerge, “as if appearing from thin air.” He was crouched close to the ground and he was wearing a round helmet and a green uniform she did not recognize. He beckoned to her and asked her in Italian, “Dove sono i Tedeschi?”—where are the Germans? She told him the Germans had gone. The soldier gave her some presents and told her not to worry; “Siamo Americani. Siamo amici”—we are your friends. An hour later, the girl returned to her family and told them the Americans had arrived. You’re crazy, her father told her, they can’t have. “Look,” she said, “look, look what they gave to me.” Then she lowered the lip of her skirt, which she had used as an impromptu basket; nestled in the folds were dozens of candies and chocolate bars.3
The Canadian army entered Avellino after the Americans liberated the town, on November 22, 1943. In Avellino e l’irpinia nella tragedia del 1943–44, local historian Vincenzo Cannaviello describes the effect the Canadians had on the small city. They chose Avellino because it was ideally situated between four strategic cities. To the west lay Naples and Rome; to the east lay Bari and Ortona. From Avellino the Canadians could supply all four destinations. Immediately after taking control of Avellino, the army commandeered every inhabitable house, school and villa and gave the civilians forty-eight hours to vacate the premises. A nunnery became the Canadian Military Hospital. Left without homes, people went crazy, wrote Cannaviello, “wild like plants in the desert.” They lived in the woods and earned money by begging at the side of the road, saying, “We are human, we are not animals.”4 To make the city easier for English-speakers to navigate, the Canadians renamed major streets. Via Fratelli Del Gaudio became Fraser Avenue. Via Mancini became Saskatchewan Road. Corso Littorio became Queen Street. The clerks at headquarters began publishing a weekly newsletter entitled Echelon Etchings. The Canadians opened an officers’ mess and christened it Maple Leaf Gardens.
The tone of Cannaviello’s book is bitter. While he admits that the Canadians were handsome, “tutti belli,” and their tobacco gave the air an exciting aroma, he criticizes their treatment of the citizens of Avellino. Canadians were less respectable and less dignified than the Italians. They were also “troppa devota a Bacco,” badly devoted to alcohol.5 Soldiers were often seen weaving about in public, and the military police were routinely called in to pick them up. One drunken sergeant en route back to camp from Salerno froze to death after passing out by the road; Captain Norman S. Bergman had presided over the court of inquiry.
Italians stayed on their guard, particularly after dark, since a soldier “carrying a gun could kill as many as he wanted.”6 Canadians loved to fight. One word, Cannaviello maintains, and they would put up their fists. In 1943, four Canadian soldiers beat a farmer named Mario Grado to death. The Canadians’ taste for pugilism can be attributed in part to their experience at the front. “When the soldiers returned from fighting they changed completely,” remembered Teresa Preziuso, who was sixteen years old when the Canadians arrived in Avellino. “They were joyless. Their eyes were dull. They drank and they fought with each other. They even changed in how they looked. We had a couple of Canadians who would sometimes eat supper with my family. They went away to fight at Cassino. When they came back they knocked at the door. My mother couldn’t recognize them. They had changed that much. I remember them saying, ‘Mother, don’t you recognize me?’ ”7
Cannaviello accuses the Canadians of being a corrupting influence on the town’s female population. They “put a new fantasy in the minds of women.”8 At night teenaged girls could be seen walking with Canadians. Parties were held at the Canadian officers’ mess to which only the young, pretty women of Avellino were invited. A soiree held on February 12, 1944, Cannaviello writes, was more like an orgy than a social gathering. On another occasion, Cannaviello describes seeing a girl dressing as she left a truck filled with twelve soldiers. Other older citizens of Avellino confirm his assertions. Avellino historian Andrea Massaro says that in the black market section of Avellino, working-class women had sex with soldiers in exchange for food. At the town’s fountain, down by the river where the women did the washing, they would stop their duties and casually provide gratification.9 One Avellino woman recalls how three soldiers came to her asking where they could find ficky, fick (the Italian slang for a woman’s genitals). The woman, who was then only twelve years old, thought the men were asking for figs, fici, and told them to go down the street to a nearby shop. When they arrived at the establishment, the Canadians thought they had hit the jackpot: the shop’s owner had three beautiful young daughters. He was not impressed, however, with their intentions, and he ran them out with a broom.10 When not driven by financial need, many young women were watched closely by their families. A writer for Echelon Etchings lamented that his Italian sweetheart had a father who “kept the shot-gun behind the door and the wedding bells under the bed.”11
Still, not all Canadians were bad, Cannaviello admits. When they weren’t drinking they were very affectionate. They would embrace you and joke. They gave gifts. Here, he echoes British officer Norman Lewis’s description of Canadian soldiers: “They give candy to every child in sight, shove all male Italians off the pavement and make an instant sexual advance to every woman of child-bearing age they encounter.”12 Many Canadians adopted local families and gave them supplies and food. In Avellino, if you walked down the street at dusk, you would see Italian women wearing dresses made from Canadian uniforms and their children running about in outfits sewn together from Canadian blankets. Serious love affairs developed. One elderly Avellino resident remembers a young French Canadian soldier who fell in love with her and sent dozens of love letters. She never saw him again: he was killed fighting north of Florence.13 A number of Canadian soldiers married local women, although the archbishop of Avellino refused to grant them marriage licences.
Avellino was also home to Number 2 Canadian Field Punishment Camp, which by May 1945 was the last Canadian military prison in Italy. There were 143 soldiers there under sentence, states its war diary, with 4 in hospital and another 178 in the “concentration camp.” All these men required transport back to Canada, even those the army deemed “incorrigible.” Prisoners the army thought were good soldiers who had fallen on the wrong side of military order would be released and transported back to Canada as free men. The incorrigible would be transported as prisoners and confined in military prison once they returned to Canada. Even now that the war in Italy was officially over, crimes were still being committed. In May, 11 Canadian soldiers were sentenced to terms over six months, and another 18 were given sentences under six months. One soldier was convicted of manslaughter. On May 17, after reviewing the service records of those in prison, the army released 178 of the 325 men in prison. They were sent to Naples, where they boarded a ship and sailed for England. On May 25, another 104 were released and sent off. Meanwhile, arrangements were made for the eventual apprehension of the hundreds of Canadian deserters who remained at large in Italy. The Canadian authorities decreed that deserters who were arrested after the Canadian army had left Italy would be sent to the British for processing. The British would transport the offenders to England, where the Canadian army would take over.14
By May, the tale of the Lane Gang had been reported to the army at large. The British army newspaper, The Crusader, recounted the exploits in a two-page tabloid-style article. While in hospital, Canadian private Stanley Scislowski read the story and was so fascinated by it that he kept a copy for decades after the war until, he said, it “finally crumbled to the point where I couldn’t read it anymore.” Scislowski went on to write a memoir of his time in Italy, Not All of Us Were Brave. In an effort to preserve the tale, he wrote a brief description of the Crusader article and passed it on to me. There was no mention of Scarface or Gunner Ceccacci or any other member of the real Lane Gang. Instead the article focused on two Canadian soldiers.
Both were deserters from their infantry battalions. One was from the 1st Division and one from the 5th Armoured Division. In Rome, they got mixed up with as tough a gang of multinational cut-throats and criminals as ever walked the face of this earth. It was likely the two joined up with what was known by the Criminal Investigation Division of the American Military Police as the Lane Gang, a notorious heterogeneous mixture of deserters from practically every Allied formation in Italy. There were quite a few racial types involved in it, as well as German deserters and Italian criminal elements. They did everything you could name in the black book of crime. They hijacked lone vehicles driving along the highways. They murdered. They were into dope dealing and prostitution. And they were involved also in a big way in counterfeiting. They ruled underworld Rome with an iron hand and they even had the armies nervous, what with their seizures of supply-laden trucks on the roads and highways, killing the crews if they gave any opposition. They grew outrageously rich from revenues accrued through the sale of the stolen goods.
Eventually the Criminal Investigation Division got wind of a meeting or party going on by the criminals in a building tucked away in a backwater section of the city and raided it. As the hoods took off in a running gunfight with the MPs, one of the Canadians was seriously wounded. Rather than leave him behind alive for interrogation, his buddy from the 1st Division cold-bloodedly shot and killed him. Within minutes, the killer was apprehended and after a long period spent in a prison compound, was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to death by a firing-squad.15
This version of events became the official story, and it is the same story that Colin McDougall uses in Execution. McDougall has Fraser, the character with Harold Pringle’s fierceness and outlaw behaviour, desert and escape to Rome, where he joins up with a black market gang, “the worst kind of scum and cut-throats.”16 While on leave, Jonesy, the character with Harold Pringle’s more innocent traits, meets Fraser, who after a night of drinking brings Jonesy back to the gang’s hideout. Jonesy overstays his leave, and one morning the US Military Police close in: “There was a lot of gun play, several of the gang were killed, a few escaped, and two were taken prisoner—Jonesy and a G.I. deserter. A U.S. Policeman was killed. Frazer, Jones and a couple of others tried to break out through the back. Someone had shoved a Colt .45 in Jonesy’s hand, he came running out trying to cock it and two rounds actually went off. Not that he hit anyone, it was one of the others who killed the M.P.”17
This fraudulent tale of the Lane Gang allowed the Allied public relations machine to change Harold Pringle into a hardened master criminal. Instead of turkey thefts, drunken fights and a long drive into the countryside, Lucky’s murder became a cool homicide. Obviously, the military police knew that the Sailor Gang was a separate entity and that the Lane Gang was the larger, more organized operation. After all, it was the SIB who investigated and arrested both groups. All that did not matter. The creation by the military press of a large, sophisticated organization allowed the Allies to attribute unsolved crimes to the legendary Lane Gang. That was the story’s most attractive feature. As far as the Allies and the Italian civilian authorities were concerned, it was a happy ending. The surviving members of the “Lane Gang” were to be shot. Justice would be served.
The Canadian officers in Avellino did not know much about the Lane Gang, but they knew a Canadian was being held in a British prison near Rome and they knew there was a good chance that there would be a firing squad. In May, Captain Ramsay Park, who was recovering from a bout of malaria, paid little attention to such matters. He was busy organizing the polling for the federal election that was to take place in June.
Park was billeted in the villa of the principessa di Marzo, of the aristocratic Marzo family, the most respected in Avellino. The Marzos owned vineyards, and their villa was set in the heart of the town on a few acres of well-groomed gardens. Tall trees and rose bushes sat by sculpted pools of water and Renaissance statues. The Canadians occupied the villa’s lower floors, while the principessa, who was in her late forties, lived on the top floor with her daughter. The principessa was a beautiful woman, with straight black hair and an elegant face that delicately combined strength and grace. Her husband was missing; the principessa believed that he had been killed sometime during 1943. Her daughter, Alina, was in her early twenties and was, remembers Park, also very beautiful, possessing a luminous unadorned glow. Alina taught him and some of the other officers Italian, but though he would have liked the opportunity, Park was never able to strike up a romance. “Her mother kept her under close watch,” he said. “I guess she didn’t want her having some Canadian’s baby.”18
Also billeted at the Villa di Marzo was Lieutenant Michael Cloney, who had been married shortly before going overseas and had a young son he had never seen waiting for him in Canada. The war had been lonely for Cloney but relatively uneventful. In early April 1944, he had defended Captain Norman S. Bergman. Bergman, who had unsuccessfully defended Harold Pringle, had been accused of stealing his regiment’s petty cash, a sum of almost one thousand dollars. Cloney worked hard on the case and noticed that Bergman, who faced imprisonment, was not very concerned. One night when Cloney was working late, Bergman happened by his tent on his way to the officers’ mess; he had laughed, telling him, “Don’t worry, Cloney, it’ll be all right,” as if some kind of fix were in. Bergman’s prediction proved prophetic. On April 21, the legal proceedings for that week were reported. There had been twenty-five courts martial and only one acquittal: Captain Norman S. Bergman.
Michael Cloney, left, and H. Ramsay Park in England following Pringle’s execution, 1945.
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Shortly after the case, Cloney was given a plum assignment: turning a nurses’ leave centre on the Amalfi Coast into a retreat for Canadian officers on leave. It became a popular spot and won the nickname Cloney’s Cloisters. Along with this duty, Cloney made frequent trips to and from Avellino. He would visit with his casual acquaintance Captain Park, whom he found mild-mannered: “Park had a very characteristic laugh. It was a kind of chortle that bubbled up in the middle of sentences. He would be describing something very serious and this laugh would break out.”19
An average day in Avellino consisted of military administration, followed by recreation. Liquor and cigarettes were available at the Canadians officers’ mess, which was located off the main town square. Men dined at the Ristorante Rossetta, and both officers and enlisted men often ate with Italian families. “If you could provide meat, you were welcome anywhere,” recalled Park. Companionship was also available, and some Canadian officers had regular girlfriends. The district area provost marshall, H. R Law, fell in love and was engaged to an Italian. In May, the pair married in a service at the Villa di Marzo. Park, Cloney and the other officers were there. The festivities were presided over by the officer in charge, Brigadier J. C. Stewart. Park was more solitary than most. He did not have a steady girlfriend, or at least “nothing you would describe as a girlfriend.”20
Along with permanent staff, there were also Canadian officers who were being routed home through Avellino. While most of the Canadians had been sent up to Holland and France in February 1945, a few were still left in Italy. Among those sent to Avellino in May 1945 was Captain Thomas Jamieson. After taking part in the January 1945 Po Valley offensive, Jamieson had been kept at Canadian Headquarters in Rome and then sent briefly to Greece, where he and the British contingent had put down a rebellion led by the Greek Communist partisans. The partisans had been allied with the British during the war and had proven more effective at fighting the Germans than the right-wing royalists. But the partisans were Communists, and now that the war was being won, they had to be stopped. So Jamieson found himself fighting the same army he had been supplying a year earlier. The British intervention was not enough to neutralize the Communists. It was not until the Civil War of 1946, with massive amounts of American support, that the royalists were able to defeat them.
Jamieson was familiar with the circumstances surrounding Harold Pringle’s arrest. In November 1944, he had been stationed at Canadian Headquarters in Rome and had learned about the Sailor Gang, about the multiple shooting, about the international character of the gang; he knew that Harold Pringle had been found guilty and sentenced to die. Jamieson was a good shot, and thanks to this skill and his knowledge of Pringle’s case, he was assigned the task of canvassing Avellino for prospective marksmen. He was told to casually make his way through the base and bring soldiers up to the camp’s firing range. There, he had the men shoot target practice and made note of how each fared. Jamieson brought cooks and drivers, men who had not fired a rifle since basic training, and tried to teach them how to shoot straight. If these men failed, there were the soldiers of Avellino’s Special Employment Company, but they were not a preferred choice. The Special Employment Company was composed of shell-shocked soldiers whom the army deemed unfit for front-line duty. These men were kept behind the lines doing menial labour. Many had been labelled by army psychiatrists as unfit “for duties within sound of gun-fire.” Half a dozen men from the Special Employment Companies had been reported drowned in the Liri River following the Cassino fight. It was not lost on Jamieson that the Liri was a slow-moving river not more than five feet deep. A firing squad of such men was unlikely to be very effective.
As the first sunny, warm weeks of May passed, Jamieson became nervous. He heard word from his friends at British Headquarters in Rome that the Canadian upper echelons in London, England, were ready, in the event that Ottawa disallowed Pringle’s petition, to choose an officer to lead the firing squad. You did not have to be clairvoyant to see the way matters might turn. Jamieson was already picking the men, and the odds were that he would be asked to lead the final assignment. The idea terrified him. Jamieson had seen action and he knew what it meant to fire a weapon with the intent to kill. He even knew what it meant to watch someone be executed. While in hospital with a head wound, Jamieson had been in a bed near a wounded German who kept screaming out in pain. The screams were continuous and eventually they annoyed a nearby British officer, who instructed the orderlies to take the German out. They did. He never came back. Lining up ten feet before a Canadian and shooting him in cold blood was unimaginable. It was around this time that Tom Jamieson began suffering from insomnia.
IN MID-MAY, PETTY OFFICER BILL CROFT was in his third month at the Royal Navy Provost Centre in Santa Lucia, a suburb of Naples. Croft lived in a small, bare cell, according to Babington and Gardner, where he spent his time reading thrillers and doing crossword puzzles. Croft kept his sense of humour and spent many hours chatting with his jailers, who played cards with him and talked with him about the war. Maria was now living in Naples; she and her baby visited Croft twice a week. Bill and Maria remained passionately in love. Shortly after his trial, Croft asked the navy for permission to marry his Italian sweetheart. “The prison chaplain objected,” wrote Babington and Gardner. “But the Royal Navy captain in charge took a more sympathetic view.”21 Maria and Bill were married in the officers’ quarters. A local priest stood in for the army chaplain.
Bill Croft held out hope that he would be spared, and he spoke with Maria about the life they would lead once he was free again. Now that the war was over it would not be necessary to live outside the law and they could settle in Naples. He could find work as a sailor. Yet it is likely that somewhere in his heart, Croft, a sharp and cynical man, must have known that his chances were slim. On May 15, the commandant of the prison sent a message to the Admiralty stating that “the circumstances of his custody is having an adverse effect on the men’s morale.”22 The Royal Navy acted quickly. On May 22, it sent its confirmation of Bill Croft’s death sentence. The prison commandant promulgated the sentence. Bill Croft had one last request.
That afternoon two corporals visited Maria at her apartment. They informed her, wrote Babington and Gardner, that there had been a change in orders. From now on, she would be allowed to visit Bill each day. In fact, they were on their way back to the prison and wanted to know if she cared to join them. Maria gathered up her baby daughter, and the corporals drove her to the prison in their jeep. Bill Croft was “the same as ever when she saw him,” wrote Babington and Gardner.23 He and Maria spent half an hour together. He played with his daughter and chatted with Maria in Italian. They laughed, and Croft was delighted to see how happy Maria was at the prospect of seeing him each day. When their meeting was done, Bill Croft told Maria he would see her the next day. Nothing he said or did, Babington and Gardner wrote, gave her any hint that he was about to die.
Croft was brought to Number 55 British Military Prison, which was located on the island of Nisida, a small volcanic outcropping in Naples’ harbour. The island had first been discovered by Greek navigators in 700 BC and had since been home to strange occurrences. “The island,” Oreste Schiano di Zenise told me, “has a somewhat sinister aura to it.”24 The Romans used Nisida as an aristocratic playground. The Roman consul Luculus had built a lavish palace there, and it was in this palace that Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators are said to have plotted Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. After the murder, Brutus and his wife Portia fled to Nisida. There, unable to endure the shame of her husband’s crime, Portia killed herself by swallowing burning coals.
Under Constantine the Great, Nisida was granted to a religious order. Luculus’ palace was destroyed and a small castle erected from its ruins. A prominent family, the Carafa, built a warning tower that allowed them to alert islanders to the approach of the Moorish pirates who regularly attacked the Italian coastline. Throughout the Middle Ages, Nisida was owned by private families. In the seventeenth century, it was returned to the Neapolitan Crown. During this time, two monks and a woman ran a counterfeiting operation on Nisida, minting their own false coins. Those who happened upon their secret operation did not live to speak of it. The trio was eventually discovered. In 1632, during Holy Week, all three were hanged.
The Neapolitan government began construction of a plague hospital on Nisida, but it was never completed, and in the late seventeenth century the hospital was converted into a holding pen for “undesirables” who arrived by ship. It was also around this time that Nisida became known for its asparagus and grapes. It once again became a place for rest and relaxation; on the gates of Nisida were written, in Latin, the words “Seaman, snub the boat and furl the sail. Here is the aim of your work. Happily calm your soul.” During the Second World War, the Italians, the Germans and finally the Allies all occupied Nisida. The British adapted the old hospital and turned it into a military prison.
It was in this prison that Bill Croft spent his last night playing cards and conversing with his jailers. According to Babington and Gardner, on May 23, just before dawn, Croft was taken from his cell and marched to a quarry near the prison yard. A warm day was beginning, and the heat began to burn through the few trees and shrubs that dotted the barren plot of land. Three posts were fixed to the ground, each six or seven feet high. Bill Croft was tied to the middle post. He asked not to be blindfolded, but the request was not granted. A small white disc was pinned to his heart. Two American officers and a military doctor were on hand.
The firing squad consisted of twelve Royal Marines commanded by a non-commissioned officer who had been given special training for his unsavoury task. The men were provided with one bullet each; in keeping with tradition, one of the rounds was a blank. The firing squad was given the order to fire, and the “noise of a ragged volley filled the air.”25 Croft was cut down from the stake and examined by the doctor.
The Sailor was still alive and fully conscious.
The doctor turned to Captain Barnes, the officer in charge of the firing squad, whose responsibility it was, in the event of a botched execution, to deliver the coup de grâce. Reluctantly, the doctor pointed to Croft’s heart. Numb, Barnes knelt, aimed his pistol and fired. There was a moment of stillness. Bill Croft’s chest heaved; somehow, he was still alive. To Captain Barnes he whispered, “Bad shot.” The doctor pointed to Croft’s temple. Again, Barnes aimed his pistol. That shot did the job. Bill Croft was dead, like Lucky, of multiple gunshots, the last two to the chest and head.
The Royal Navy was embarrassed by the bungled execution. A naval legal officer sent a letter to headquarters. “It has been suggested to the Admiralty,” he wrote, “that the use of a firing party might perhaps be discontinued in favour of execution by a clamped and fixed Bren gun firing a limited number of shots in automatic mode, or of execution by a revolver at close range.… I think it is desirable to investigate this question with a view to avoiding a recurrence of the unfortunate incident at Naples.”26
When Maria learned that Bill Croft was dead, she was, wrote Babington and Gardner, “reduced to hysterics.”27 Years later, after rebuilding her life, Maria moved to England, to Bill Croft’s home town of Grimsby. She remarried and raised her daughter, refusing to discuss her lost love or the exploits of the Sailor Gang.
On the day of Bill Croft’s execution, Harold was unaware that his friend had been killed. He was still serving time in the prison near Rome and receiving his calls from Father Farrell. While waiting for a visit, he wrote home to his parents. After his usual inquiries regarding everyone’s health, Harold mentioned his case:
Say Mother Dear I still havent heard more yet about my trial. But I dont think it will be much longer now. And I sure hope that you are not worrying about it please dont for me. What is Dear Dad working at now. I sure hope he is in good health. And how are all my Sweet Brothers + Sisters. I sure hope they are in the very best of health. And has there been any more of the Boys home yet. If so give them all my best regards. I was to Holy Communion again Sunday and always three or four times aweek. So that isnt to bad is it? I think Father Farrell will be in to-night I havent seen him since Sunday at mass But I guess they keep him on the go most of the time. I think he looks after about three places altogether now.
Well my Darling Mother I guess I will ring off for to night. But I will write again real soon don’t forget to give everyone my best regards. Say Mother has Father Kinlin been up to see you if so please dont worry. To My Darling Mother + Dad + b + s. With all the best of luck in the world God Bless you all.28
HAROLD PRINGLE MIGHT HAVE been better served keeping any spare luck for himself. Now that both Charlie Honess and Bill Croft had been executed, the chances of the Canadian authorities reversing his sentence were growing slim. In early May, the Canadian Judge Advocate General in London had been busy investigating Harold’s petition. The JAG determined that there was no American hospital in the vicinity when Lucky had been transported on November 1. But they did not investigate temporary hospitals. If they had, they would have learned that there had been a casualty dressing station in Ceprano, a town down the highway from where the Sailor Gang had stopped on November 1. They would have learned that it was at this hospital, shortly after the Hitler Line, that Harold Pringle said he had been treated for minor wounds.
On May 17, the Canadians had received a cable from the Royal Navy: “Findings and sentence on Croft confirmed by Admiralty. Navy expects to execute Croft on 21 May 45.” The cable was passed on directly to Montague, with a note, “Sir I thought you might be interested to see this,” tacked on by Brigadier Beverley Matthews. The news must have excited Montague. He sent a cable telling the British to “ensure that I am advised immediately [when the] execution has taken place.” On May 23, at 9:15 a.m., one hour and fifteen minutes after Croft was killed, Montague had received a cable from the Canadian commander at Avellino, Brigadier J. C. Stewart: “Execution took place at 08:00 hrs today.”29
Meanwhile, the Canadian Provost Corps planned on transporting Harold to England from Italy. Brigadier Stewart reported that Harold was being held in Rome, would be sent to Avellino and then would be “moved under arrangements Candex” on one of the embarkation drafts that were being sent to the United Kingdom: “Propose dispatching C-5292 Pte. Pringle Harold Joseph to UK on MKF 45 29 May. Pringle is awaiting promulgation of sentence on murder charge. Captain HF Law DAPM proceeding MKF 45 in charge of Suspect.”30
So at the end of May, Harold was brought down south. He was placed in No. 2 Detention and Field Punishment Camp in Portici, a small town at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Father Farrell was encouraged by the move. After all, if the army intended to kill Harold, why would it go to the trouble of moving him and then transporting him to England? Surely they would have shot him in Rome. And there were other, more superstitious reasons to be optimistic. When Vesuvius had erupted in 1944, the lava and dust had rolled down the side opposite Portici. The town had been spared.
Major General Montague and the rest of the JAG were not following Father Farrell’s logic. Now that Croft had been executed, it made no sense to move Pringle to England. Executing Harold Pringle immediately, however, might be risky. A federal election was being held on June 20, and the execution of a Canadian private months after the war was over, whether on British or Italian soil, would not help a prime minister who was already vilified by men who served overseas. “All the officers at Avellino always assumed the government held off executing Pringle until after the election,” Michael Cloney recalled. “They did not want the bad publicity.”31
Meanwhile, the Judge Advocate General in Ottawa, which was reviewing Pringle’s case, was concerned by what it perceived to be flaws in the proceedings. It sent a cable asking why a medical officer had been allowed to be president of a general court martial panel; only combatant officers were eligible to serve. Also, was not this officer a co-worker of one of the witnesses for the defence? Wouldn’t his personal connections cause prejudice? This was not an issue, replied Montague. By strict legal definition, all officers in the Canadian army were considered combatant officers, except for those granted honorary commissions.
On May 28, Montague sent a cable to Brigadier Stewart in Avellino. Along with it was enclosed a three-page set of instructions. “You are directed to retain Pringle in Italy until final decision on confirmation is made,” the cable read. “Captain Law DAPM will also be retained. See instructions for carrying out judicial executions.”32