In the Rome-Berlin axis, Mussolini had always been the weaker partner. He had put so much effort into the Ethiopian and Spanish wars that his army was in no state to fight an equal in 1939. He only entered the European war in June 1940 when it looked as if Germany had already won it. His air force’s sole intervention in the Battle of Britain led to a ludicrous though minor defeat. His navy fared ignominiously at Taranto and Matapan. His army did well, momentarily, in Somaliland, but by the end of 1941 had lost that and the empire of Ethiopia as well. Stiffened by the Afrika Korps, it held out in Libya till the end of 1942, but failed to hold Tunisia the following spring; and operation ‘Husky’, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, proved that his system was rotten. He was quietly arrested on 25 July, and within seven weeks his country had changed sides.
The Allies’ attack on Italy had long been foreseen by their chiefs of staff, though as the campaign in Tunisia drew to its close in the late spring of 1943 the Germans remained in doubt about the next Anglo-American objective. Their doubts were kept alive by a series of deft deceptions, one of them long famous: they were led, in the teeth of the evidence, to believe that operations impended against Sardinia and the Peloponnese. The combined chiefs of staff never in fact hesitated; they settled on Sicily, followed by the Italian mainland.
Montgomery was to be the British force commander, and attended closely to the details. Among them, he laid down a doctrine for Allied prisoners of war. He always liked neatness and order, and abhorred the slovenly; he was not much attached to irregular operations of any kind. He therefore insisted that 170directions were to be sent to Allied prisoners on Italian soil that they were to stay in their camps until the advancing armies overran them. He expected the campaign to be brief, a matter of weeks. A moment’s hindsight reminds us all that the dogged and prolonged Italian campaign was not like that in the least: nearly twenty months of close combat ensued, more similar to the trench warfare of 1914–18 than any other part of the century’s second world war, and only in the last week or two did the battle open up. Montgomery had intended something altogether different.
He probably gave his directive on this point – the document has not survived, or at all events has not surfaced in late May or early June 1943, when nominally on leave in London, resting after the rigours of the Tunisian campaign. There may well have been, on a matter then so secret, no document, but an order transmitted by word of mouth. At any rate Crockatt received and transmitted the direction that, in the event of an invasion of mainland Italy, prisoners of war were to stay put, to await release; not to attempt to break out of camp, or to assist the Anglo-American air forces in their attacks on the enemy’s communications. It is a tribute to the efficiency his organisation had attained that almost every camp’s SBO received the message in time. The Americans, through Holt and Washington’s correspondence section, were happy to conform.
Crockatt was still enough of a practical fighting man to take in the military worth of groups fresh out of a prisoner of war camp: it was bound to be low. Individually many of them might be capable of some single astonishing, even heroic feat; and collectively, in tunnelling squads, some of them had acquired a strong sense of team unity. But in his judgement they were bound to lack that disciplined cohesion, born of months of training together and years of regimental tradition, by which a sound infantry unit imposes its will in battle. Besides, however willing, about half of them, airmen or gunners or tank crew or men from service units, had had little or no infantry training, 171and only the sappers among them knew the first thing about demolitions; and they were unarmed. Montgomery did not relish the idea of having his future supply lines hampered by unauthorised bridge demolitions, and Crockatt did not relish the idea of sending Clarke and Simonds to badger the air and Q (G-4) staffs at Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) about arms supply. So he was happy at what was being done. He decided to send orders to the German as well as the Italian camps to discourage mass break-outs, for he feared that these would only lead to mass reprisals. The odious excesses of Himmler’s concentration camp guards in the Third Reich were by now becoming known to a limited circle, to which Crockatt belonged; two years later of course they had become a world sensation, of a horror matched only by the first uses of nuclear weapons in anger, and by the much later revelation that concentration camps were rife in the Soviet Union as well. Crockatt had the foresight to envisage that if his prisoners overreached themselves, they might all find themselves packed into cattle trucks and sent off to extermination, Geneva Convention or no. The Italians’ record was much milder, but he had an uneasy feeling that they too might, if pressed too hard, display the ferocity of a cornered rat.
He told Washington in mid-June that his current policy in Europe had three main lines: to deprecate mass break-outs, both for fear of reprisals and because ex-prisoners would be such inefficient troops; to order prisoners to stay put at the end of the war; and to encourage escapers to carry information in their heads. The Americans concurred.
The end result in Italy was less happy than Crockatt or anyone else had foreseen, for reasons over which neither MI 9 nor MIS-X had any control at all. It can be put brutally briefly: well over half the prisoners, who stayed put as ordered, were quietly scooped up by the Germans and taken by train into Germany. Only the more rebellious and more enterprising ones got out, and by no means all of these got clean away. The most 172probable reason for this seems to have been a catastrophic staff muddle, at a level so senior that no one has quite cared to clear it up.
According to Simonds’ vivid recollection, he was hurriedly summoned to AFHQ in Algiers early in September 1943, and urged by several senior officers to exert himself to the utmost to rescue Allied prisoners of war in Italy. Instructions to this effect had come, he understood, from the Prime Minister himself. The Italian surrender, be it remembered, was announced on the September 8, Montgomery’s army had disembarked near Reggio on the September 3, and operation ‘Avalanche’, the Salerno landing, began on the September 9. Every facility was to be placed at Simonds’ disposal; except that he was not to endanger any naval craft, and could only request aircraft sortie by sortie, taking his turn with other bodies – such as SOE, OSS, or SAS – which might need aircraft also. He got to Taranto hard on the heels of the British 1st Airborne Division, and assembled a few teams of uniformed helpers; he intended to send them forward, in front of the advancing Allied armies, to find escaped prisoners and guide them back within the Allied lines.
A few surviving files indicate the sort of troubles with which he and his colleagues had to wrestle. Few British officers had fluent Italian, so it was necessary to recruit local helpers immediately, and guides and interpreters. Almost all the Italians who proffered themselves blenched at the very thought of parachuting, let alone the act; and as so often happens, some of the loudest talkers were the least anxious to run into actual danger.1 Field escape section number three was set up by an operation instruction from Simonds to Captain F. P. Falvey on 7 September with the vague aim to ‘organise where necessary the rescue of all escapers and evaders in your territory as is possible under existing conditions’. Falvey had some money and an Italian-speaking sergeant called Pittarelli, but he had neither wireless nor transport. He begged a lift to Taranto with the ships that carried the airborne division, and liberated eight prisoners there on the 10 September, the day after he arrived; on 11 September he was reduced to touring the city in a horse and buggy. ‘The city is full of former rabid fascists’, he reported; and ‘I believe that it is generally felt by the Italians that the war is over for them.’
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174Captain Christopher Soames, subsequently a son-in-law of Churchill, a commissioner of the European community in Brussels, and a recent recruit to the House of Lords, commanded field escape section number two, with the Eighth Army. He was to ‘utilise all known available means to produce a network of helpers behind the enemy lines and make local plans for the early rescue of ground troops and air crews at large within enemy territory’. Simonds’ assistant, Major J. V. Fillingham, who gave this order to Soames, believed at the moment the Italian surrender became public that ‘Steps have been taken by Italian authorities to release Allied prisoners immediately’. All that happened was that the guards at prisoner of war camps were withdrawn; they marched off to the nearest barracks, leaving the gates open.
In every camp, the SBO called a parade and announced the order to stand fast. Crockatt’s name was not used; it was certainly unknown to most of them. The order came with the full and distant authority of ‘the War Office’ or ‘the Air Ministry’. Simonds himself had been telling Fillingham, a few days before, that ‘NO ATTEMPTS MUST BE MADE TO INDUCE OR PROVOKE MASS BREAKOUTS’, and nothing outrageous happened. A few British camp commanders, particularly quick-witted and well informed, foresaw the possibility that the Germans would come to collect them, and encouraged those who wanted to do so to take to the hills; most, having received an order, stuck to it.
As far back as the early spring of 1941, during some staff discussions about interrogating German prisoners in the event 175of an invasion of England, Crockatt had noted in a minute the ‘DUTY OF AN OFFICER TO ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY AND ACT ON HIS OWN INITIATIVE’. This was the doctrine to which everyone paid lip-service; only the best put it into practice. To disobey a War Office or Air Ministry order was always a serious offence, but sometimes it had to be done. The army’s official Field Service Regulations indeed laid down that an order ought to be disobeyed, if ‘some fact which could not be known to the officer who issued the order’ made disobedience necessary, to comply with the known intentions of the superior who had given it. The handbook went on to say, with a foretaste of Catch-22, that ‘If a subordinate neglects to depart from the letter of his orders when such departure … is clearly demanded, he will be held responsible for any failure that may ensue.’
Yet was this the case foreseen, in which unexpected developments would justify men on the spot in doing what they had been told not to do? Most camps had hidden wirelesses, but neither the BBC nor the Italian broadcasting services were privy to the German high command’s intention, and the fog of war lay densely over Italy. Churchill, ordering Alexander to do all that he could to rescue prisoners, forgot to let Crockatt know that he had done so. Even had he sent word to Crockatt, the latter would hardly have had any means at his disposal for passing instructions on to all the many camps quickly enough. MI 9’s secret broadcasting system suffered from an unfortunate defect, apart from all the security troubles that attended on reception at the camp end: transmission was often too fast for out-of-practice operators to take it in.
Several people were found to complain, then and later, of the chance that was missed. Larry Allen for example, an Associated Press correspondent captured from HMS Sikh off Tobruk on 14 September 1942 and treated as a prisoner of war – he was offered an immediate exchange in return for naval information, to which he simply replied ‘Don’t be silly’ – protested when eventually he got back into United States hands that Colonel 176Marshall, the British senior officer in the huge camp PG 21 at Chieti, had been too strict; and that the War Office’s orders had been too inflexible.
The stand-fast order had reached the other ranks’ camps as well as the officers’. In Italy, as in Germany, MI 9’s codes had been spread round a select few with no trouble. A number of air force warrant and non-commissioned officers were code users; and in big camps for army other ranks, codes could be carried in and quickly taught by medical officers or chaplains.
Most prisoners of war were simply caught napping by the Italian armistice and change of sides. Those who had not devoted much, if any, thought to escape had neither food nor clothes available with which to sustain themselves on a walk towards the Allied lines, which turned out to be stuck hundreds of miles away. Many prisoners absconded for a few hours, for the pleasure of walking where they wanted for a change instead of being pinned to the track round the inside of the camp’s perimeter wire; and then came back, because they had neither bed to sleep in nor money to live on, (Though most non-Soviet prisoners of war were paid, holding powers took care to pay them in special currencies that were worthless outside their camps.)
Some, afflicted by the disease that in Germany was called gefangenitis – much like that legionaries’ cafard which readers of P. C. Wren will remember, a state of depression bordering on accidie – were distressed at their guards’ disappearance, and found life unguarded uncomfortable. Others found it only too comfortable, particularly if they had secured some money by selling some possession unlooted by their original captors, or if they had tumbled upon some complaisant girl-friend. One of Simonds’ most enterprising escape organisers, Jock McKee, pushed forward as far as Sulmona, and found there an inchoate mass of more than a thousand ex-prisoners of war: not by any means anxious to leave the district, which they knew, for whatever perils this forceful young captain was determined they 177should rejoin. Twenty-three people accompanied him when he left. The Germans scooped up most of the rest, though not all.
Some hundreds were left at large, drifting south-eastwards along the Apennine foothills, in effect begging food from the peasantry; lending a hand with the wine harvest, or any other odd job about the farm, by way of payment, or on the remoter slopes helping to keep an eye on the sheep. As late as 7 November Soames was reporting that his constant trouble had been to keep parties of escapers on the move. They had an exasperating tendency to linger wherever they found a beautiful valley or a beautiful girl; and were crassly ungrateful to their guides, whose dangerous work they took for granted.
Others were more resolute, and found helpers of their own if they did not come across N section’s. There was a marked and sudden contrast between the Italy of midsummer 1943, when those officious busybodies who pullulate in every dictatorship were inciting mobs to outrage against parachuted aircrew, and the Italy of early autumn, after Mussolini’s fall and Badoglio’s surrender, when newly arrived aircrew and newly self-liberated escapers alike found four peasants out of every five at least ready to advise, and often ready to aid.
Altogether, Simonds reckoned in retrospect, about 900 prisoners came through to southern Italy before the end of the year. Soames at the time put the figure at about 2,000. Several exciting books have resulted from some of their adventures, such as Tony Davies’s When the Moon Rises about his march down the spine of Italy with Michael Gilbert the novelist and Toby Graham the future ski champion and professor of history. And many prisoners – certainly several hundred, perhaps over a thousand – decided that they had had enough of military inactivity, and would plunge at once into whatever work of active fighting they could find locally.
For in Italy the concept cherished in MI R before the war got under way, of escapers as innumerable small but sharp thorns in the enemy’s side, had some splendid developments. The OVRA 178had kept the Italians as firmly bottled up as the KGB oppresses the peoples of the USSR today, but the fall of Mussolini and the armistice provided hope, that essential food for resisters; and against the republic of Salo people were ready to run risks and carry arms to an extent that had been unthinkable under the Fascist monarchy.
Many escapers made touch with nascent partisan bands – ‘patriot forces’, as they were called by British and American staff, a shade patronisingly – and much enhanced their military worth through their own experience and skill. There were several cases of privates and one of an ordinary seaman who were elected to command battalions, and two Australians in Piedmont each commanded a brigade two thousand strong.
MI 9’s actual staff in 1943 can claim no credit for any of this, nor can MIS-X. From the previous summer onwards a frequent question at the secret lectures for airmen on escape and evasion had been, ‘Can’t we go and join the resistance, and wait until the ground battle catches up with us?’ The standard reply was No. Aircrew had been expensively trained, and were needed back urgently to get on with the air war. Their plain duty was to return to their own lines, if they could, instead of embarking on an entirely different kind of combat. Much the same applied to sailors. Soldiers were not quite on the same footing as the others, unless they belonged to technical corps and were trained in the use of material unavailable to resistance – surveyors, tank drivers, electrical engineers: their place also was clearly back with their own corps. For infantry and commanders there might well be a role in resistance, but they were not encouraged to look for it. The language difficulty was real, though not insuperable. A less tangible, but more important obstacle was lack of training in how to behave as an underground worker.2 179This hardly mattered in the closing stage of a campaign, when two or three weeks’ all-out effort would see the enemy’s backs – the stage that most people quite wrongly thought the war had reached in Italy in mid-September 1943; but it counted for a great deal in town and country alike till that closing stage arrived. Uniformed men were seldom good at adapting briskly to the exigencies of clandestine warfare in plain clothes.
If they did try to do so a legal point arose, which escape lecturers felt bound to make. As one of them put it bluntly, ‘Never carry arms in civilian clothes. If caught you stand an excellent chance of being shot.’
For this particular set of tasks in Italy, N section of A Force came under the G-3 (operations) branch of AFHQ, and not as usual under G-2 (intelligence). Simonds minuted to Dudley Clarke on 9 September that ‘We should never have got such support under G-2,’ and added at once that the backing G-3 gave to N section was due to the high regard the operations staff had already developed for A Force, the parent body. He spent two months in the heel of Italy, in charge of a force called Simcol of which the aim was to recover as many former prisoners of war as possible. It slowly dawned on everyone that the high hopes with which the force was founded had been dashed. The advance that was to have swept up the peninsula like a knife through butter had got stuck. For technical reasons, not much use was made of sea power to outflank the Germans’ fixed defensive line; there were not enough landing craft, and staffs were unused to the finicky, intricate details involved in setting up a large landing. Simonds had much wider responsibilities than Italy on his mind, and had to go back to Cairo to look after them.
Before he left, he glanced round his mess table late in October 1943 and saw that he had lunching with him another regular soldier, a steeplechase jockey, a Harvard and an Oxford don, an American ex-sergeant of the Foreign Legion, a French Communist who had fought in Spain and an Englishman who 180had fought against him, a Cambridge undergraduate, a Polish embassy counsellor on half pay, a tea taster, a stockbroker, a police detective, three Italians – a prince, a priest and an intelligence officer – a Cockney, a South African lieutenant-colonel, an American from the Bowery, a merchant marine skipper and a Fleet Street fashion artist. It was a pity that so little could be found for such a galaxy of talent to do.
Out of the wreck of many hopes there emerged one shining example of the British genius for making the best of a bad job: the Rome escape organisation.
This was run, à l’improviste, by Major S. I. Derry, a territorial gunner battery commander who had been captured in the desert in January 1942, escaped at once and was recaptured by the same formation – the IO recognised and named him – next July. He had unexpectedly been made head of the escape committee at Chieti, when all the other members had been betrayed by an informer and packed off to another camp. The whole Chieti camp was moved by the Germans to Sulmona, and thence unceremoniously bundled into trains for Germany. The guards ‘all seemed to fire at once when one of the group made a bolt for it at Sulmona station. Captain Jock Short covered only twenty yards in his suicide bid for freedom, before he crumpled and fell, riddled with bullets. He would not have been more efficiently shot if he had stood before a firing-squad.’
Derry’s resolve to escape was strengthened, not weakened, by Short’s death; after a sleepless night, he jumped off the back of the train next morning, while it was going fast. In doing so he permanently injured his leg, but he survived; and found that he was within twenty miles of Rome. He made friends, in pidgin Italian, with local peasants, who fed him, and introduced him to a dozen British escapers who were hanging about in some near-by caves. Their numbers swiftly grew to fifty; they all looked to Derry, the only officer, for a lead. With a village priest’s help, he smuggled a message in to the British legation 181in the Vatican, and got in reply successively a little money, and a request to come to Rome. He entered the city hidden in a pile of cabbages going to market, was conducted by tram to the Tiber, and handed over in St Peter’s Square to Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest who had little reason to love the British but still less to love the Nazis.
O’Flaherty took him to a safe house – ironically, to the German College: it was extra-territorial papal territory, and the nuns who lived there were Christians, not Nazis. He borrowed one of O’Flaherty’s soutanes – luckily they were much of a height, about six feet three each – and thus disguised he entered the Vatican City proper by a side door. There he met the British minister, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, a descendant of the great Duke of Marlborough and of that Earl of Danby who had taken a leading part in inviting William of Orange to invade England in 1688.
Osborne had already been inundated with requests for help from ex-prisoners whose Italian guards had vanished and who had seized the opportunity to make themselves scarce before the Germans closed in. He invited Derry to take over the business of organising housing and feeding these people, and any more who turned up; Derry accepted. He had had no clandestine training whatever, but he had plenty of energy and common sense, and a mass of willing helpers. His own admirable The Rome Escape Line explains vividly what he did, which can only be summarised here.
A few British officers who had got into the Vatican before Rome’s military authorities closed the frontier, and had been interned there, provided him with some office help. An international group of volunteers, mostly British, but including Irish, Dutch, Poles, Frenchmen, Greeks and Yugoslavs as well, several of them in orders, acted as couriers. Hundreds of Italian families put themselves at risk. The Germans appreciated that several thousand prisoners of war had slipped through their fingers, and introduced their usual remedy: the death penalty 182for those found harbouring them. As is so often the case in occupied countries, some people came forward to denounce their neighbours; treachery was an ever-pressing danger, and so was the probability that the Germans would try to feed people into Derry’s system and break it up from within.
Pressures soon got so intense that he had to give up working from the German College, and retired within the legation’s apartments inside the Vatican, where his presence was inadmissible. So he lived as ghost-like an existence as Best’s or Harvey’s in Colditz, though not for quite so long. By a stroke of good fortune, John Furman and Bill Simpson, gunner subalterns whom he had known well and liked much in Chieti, turned up in Rome in early December, in the company of a Cypriot private of Czech origins called Joe Pollak who spoke perfect Italian. Derry had suspected Pollak of being the traitor who shopped the Chieti escape committee and greeted him coolly; but was soon persuaded of his mistake. The three became his principal helpers; all were arrested at different times, and all got away again. Derry himself was carefully enough hidden never to fall into German hands; as English was his only effective language this was as well.
Their main object was to keep escapers from congregating in Rome. To do this they had to have numerous addresses of farms and other safe houses in the surrounding countryside, to which they could guide them, and money for fares, and subsistence money for the escapers’ hosts, and masses of black market food, which had to be found, paid for and safely transported. Money, security and communications were their three nightmares.
One officer much Derry’s senior was brought into Rome: Major-General M. D. Gambier-Parry, one of the armoured commanders in the desert war. Derry naturally offered to hand over control to him, but the major-general preferred to stay strictly out of sight and to leave the struggle in the hands of those who already knew the ropes.
As for money, Sir d’Arcy Osborne sent to London (via Lisbon, with the help of his Portugese colleague) a telegram 183so piteous that even the Treasury, even the trading-with-the-enemy department maintained by the Foreign Office jointly with the Board of Trade, relented enough to let him purchase lire for his ‘crying and urgent demands’; even though these lire had to reach him in devious ways.
Less tortuously, but not less dangerously, some lucky officers in Rome were able to find anti-Fascist aristocrats who would cash cheques on London banks for them, and trust to time, honour and the course of the war for repayment. Derry himself engaged in a few transactions on the grey, if not the black market in currency which he felt to be dubious at the time and was not astonished when the British field cashiers he met after Rome’s liberation on 4 June 1944 flatly refused him £154 in sterling to honour a debt of 100,000 lire. By then he knew his way so thoroughly round the economic by-ways of Rome that he was able to raise the sum and clear the debt through the jet-black market himself, within the five days from liberation he had promised.
The oddest feature of these transactions was that Osborne could produce neither receipts nor accounts for public money that he expended. He was so obviously straight, and the needs of the men he looked after were so obviously pressing, that all the usual rules were waived; though in late September 1944 the southern department of the Foreign Office reminded his chancery that some sort of receipt might as well be submitted while memories were still fresh. In retrospect, there are some entertaining passages on file about the propriety of changing official sterling on an enemy black market – ‘You should not present appearance of exploiting difficulties of lenders you have in view, but at the same time we are not entitled to help them out at the expense of public funds.’ One thousand pounds of the money Osborne had secured he had paid for by a cheque to his butler’s mother for a Catholic mission in the Fulham Road. In his annual report for 1944 he praised the ‘invaluable work’ of Derry and all the helpers, and certified that he had ‘strictly restricted expenditure and relief to 184the charitable purpose of saving lives, to the exclusion of any military objective.’
He paid just tribute also to ‘the generosity and kindness displayed at great personal risk, and on occasion at the cost of death, by great numbers of Italian peasants,’ which was ‘above all praise.’ Any readers who do not know Derry’s The Rome Escape Line are urged to consult it for a splendid picture of how ordinary people behave under extraordinary pressures.
Derry himself, who had been interrogated before and recognised the signs, was sharply taken aback when at his second meeting with Osborne he found himself being subtly cross-questioned about where he had played on the rugger field, and what place his father took in Newark society at his Nottinghamshire Inline; his father in fact was an alderman, and he eventually held that thousand-year-old office himself. He soon took in that it was sensible of Osborne to make sure that he was who he said he was before trusting him, and that there must have been a rapid exchange of telegrams between Rome, London and Newark. What he did not discover till long afterwards – it was no direct business of his, and he had early picked up the secret activists’ rule, Do not ask a question to which you do not need to know the answer – was that in mid-September 1943 Osborne’s direct wireless link with London stopped: presumably because the minister had had his ciphers burned, in the anticipation that the Germans were about to hike the legation over. This drastic step did now and again look likely; and O’Flaherty, who cared nothing for the rules of security, was lucky that they never raided the German College.
One final difficulty beset Derry’s path. Osborne’s communications, such as they were, ran north-westward to London, not southeastward towards Eisenhower and Alexander, the successive Allied commanders-in-chief, still less towards Simonds in Taranto or Cairo. Co-ordination between what Derry was able to arrange or avert in Rome, and what Simonds in N section wanted him to do or to arrange elsewhere in Italy, was therefore 185likely to be a cumbrous, tricky and time-consuming business. N section sent in an agent, an Italian called Peter Tumiati, to make touch with whoever was to be found in Rome. He made straight for O’Flaherty, who arranged a meeting with Derry in Bernini’s colonnade in St Peter’s Square. ‘My difficulty’, said Derry, ‘was that one can scarcely ask an MI 9 man for his credentials. The monsignor, in whatever way my questions were phrased, simply said, “Why, me boy, I know him well,” and changed the subject.’ Derry sent back to Bari by Tumiati’s hand a list – already running in November 1943 to nearly 2,000 names – of ‘all the ex-prisoners known to be at large’. John May, Osborne’s butler, microfilmed the list and hid it in a roll of bread.
Through another Italian working in the British interest, a former parachutist major called Umberto Losena whom Derry described as ‘one of my most valuable contacts’, Derry was able to arrange for three successful evacuations of escapers from Adriatic beaches, shepherded by the ubiquitous ‘Popski’s’ Private Army. It was unfortunate, yet in the circumstances unavoidable, that so many schemes on which high hopes had been based should founder on troubles of communication and control.
Derry’s impromptu and quasi-official organisation amply proved its worth, and he may be left to summarise its achievements in his own words. ‘By the time of the liberation, the Rome Organization had on its books the names of 3,925 escapers and evaders, of whom 1,695 were British, 896 South African, 429 Russian, 425 Greek, 185 American, and the rest from no fewer than twenty different countries. Fewer than 200 were billeted actually in Rome, but of the thousands in the “country branch” most, by far, were in the rural areas immediately surrounding the city, scattered in groups varying in size from three to more than a hundred.’
The care taken of the Russians produced the unusual courtesy of a letter of thanks from the Russian embassy in London to the Foreign Office. Not much courtesy was eventually extended to those of this party who did not wish to return to the USSR.