Dramatic tales of wartime escapes

By MARGIE THOMSON books editor

It's almost exactly 60 years since around 450 New Zealand soldiers escaped from German-Italian prisoner of war camps in Italy during the confusion that followed Italy's surrender to the Allies in September 1943.

Some of those men were recaptured and sent to prison camps in Germany; some were tortured and killed; and some, through extraordinary tenacity, quick-wittedness and luck in the form of the generosity and courage of ordinary Italian families, remained at large, mostly in Northern Italy.

More than half a century later, these successful escapers - who for months at a time lived among rural Italians, speaking their language, dressing as Italian peasants and even taking on Italian names - piqued the interest of Auckland researcher and Italian specialist Susan Jacobs, who has now written a book about their experiences.

It took several years of research, tracking down those veterans still alive, visiting libraries and archives where she found a surprising number of books and unpublished manuscripts, and then also interviewing dozens of the Italians (or their family members) who had sheltered the "wild colonial boys" from the little country 20,000 miles away. While other books have mentioned the PoW experience to a limited extent, Fighting with the Enemy is the first to bring together this shared history of New Zealand and Italy.

"I have a great affinity with Italy," says Jacobs, who is bilingual. "In the nearly nine years that I lived there I saw New Zealand mentioned only twice on television. And I didn't know much about war-time experiences - my generation was the daughters of those men, but I suppose we saw them as war-mongering - it's taken till now for us to be ready to try and understand them."

Being taken prisoner, she shows, was extraordinarily humiliating. "This was very strong in them all. They were prepared to die, prepared to fight, but no one had prepared them for being a prisoner. There were some who curled up and couldn't deal with it ... The conditions in the Italian camps weren't that bad - they had libraries, sports clubs, lectures, and the successful escapers, just about all of them, had decided, while they were still in the camps, that it was important to learn Italian."

Armed with language skills that ranged from fluent to rudimentary, the escapers tried either to make their way down to the south of Italy to where the Allies were struggling slowly northwards, or over the Alps to Switzerland, or into Yugoslavia. In the process, some joined the partisans who were waging their own war against the fascists, both German and Italian, and many were hidden, at terrible risk, by ordinary Italian villagers.

Jacobs has uncovered some amazing stories. Dave Russell, a New Zealand adventurer of tremendous courage, who unfortunately got drunk rather too easily and thus got into some situations that had his Italian hosts very frightened, was involved with the partisans and helped plan the evacuation of other prisoners in hiding. Caught by the Fascists and imprisoned by the Germans, he was tortured and finally executed by firing squad after refusing to betray his companions.

Most poignant of all is the story of Walter Willis and his Italian lover, Maria Pianina, the daughter of the family who was hiding him. Willis was masquerading as a son of the house, Francesco, but in a terrifying incident was arrested by the Germans. Maria insisted on also going to the Via Spalato prison, where they were both interrogated and, although she was tortured so horrifically that she was never able to have children, she continued to insist that "Francesco" was her brother.

During his interrogation by the Gestapo, Willis pretended to be a stuttering halfwit to cover his imperfect Italian. It was only when a German officer pulled down Willis' trousers, revealing that, unlike most Italians, he had been circumcised, the game was truly up. Luckily, however, it was a mere two weeks before the end of the war, and Willis and Maria were released from the prison just before the Allied Eighth Army rolled into town.

They married in 1946 and settled in New Zealand, in Otorohanga, where they lived until Maria's death in 1989, and Willis' five years later.

"What I'm really interested in is the whole Italy-New Zealand link," Jacobs says. "I'd love to do a history of the Italians in New Zealand. For Maria, life must have been hard - from an Italian point of view, Otorohanga must have been very strange."

Willis and Maria never spoke about their experiences, even to each other. Late in his life, Willis wrote about those wartime events in letters to a cousin, and in one he revealed that "Maria and I never talk about what happened to us ... We just cannot."

Jack Lang and Bob Smith were two escapers who had many adventures with the partisans (whom they generally considered terrifyingly badly organised), criss-crossing the border between Italy and Yugoslavia before earning the trust of villagers who showed them a cave hidden in the side of a cliff.

There they lived for several weeks, eventually joined by a third man, an escaped American PoW, Ross Greening. The cave became a cosy home as they made themselves chairs, tables, shelves, a large bed, a clothes rack, and a chimney for their fire, even making their own tobacco. Villagers provided food - and, of course, the wine was plentiful. Eventually, 0they were betrayed (by a 10-year-old boy in return for a packet of cigarettes) and taken to a prison camp in Germany, where they remained until the end of the war, a year later.

Many of the stories recounted in Fighting With the Enemy are the stuff of action movies, except that most of these men, shocked into silence by the sheer quiet of home (it was so different here where there had been no war, and they felt they simply wouldn't be believed, Jacobs says) or by the ethos of the day (this was, remember, before the ascendancy of the talking cures), have never before spoken of their experiences, not outside the RSA, anyway.

They have endured the sneers of younger generations who considered them "war-mongers", Jacobs says, yet these men were for the most part driven by their first-hand experiences to a knowledge of how destructive and wasteful war really is.

Many of these men have passed on - some since Jacobs interviewed them - but the title of one of their unpublished reminiscences, "My Interesting Four Years", seems to sum up both the understated modesty of that generation, and the drama lurking beneath the surface of received history.

* Fighting With The Enemy (Penguin, $34.95) in bookstores now.