Over several years, Malcolm Gaskill travelled around Italy, retracing the footsteps of his great-uncle Ralph, a prisoner of war. Here, he reveals how he pieced together a story of quiet courage – and what he learned along the way
A few years ago, my mother had a dream about her uncle Ralph, long gone but lingering in her consciousness. He had pulled her gently by the arm, as if encouraging her to join him beyond the veil or in that most exotic of foreign countries: the past. Her account of this strange dream triggered in me a curiosity about Ralph that sent me on a journey across time and territory.
No one still alive had known him well, and those now gone who had known him hadn’t warmed to him. He died in 1980, in his sixties, after three decades in Africa as a colonial prison governor, leaving a wife but no children to continue his memory. I never met him, although I remember as a boy hearing my grandmother’s stories about him: how he’d been a prisoner of war in Italy and had escaped and lived in a farmhouse. There were few details. I did recall being told that he’d cut his way out of a train carriage using a knife and fork, but later I saw Frank Sinatra do something similar in Von Ryan’s Express. So I put that part of the yarn down to embellishment or the accidental and often inevitable corruption of memory.
The only other significant part of the story was that Ralph had kept a diary, which my mother’s cousin had in her attic in Doncaster. It turned out to be a contemporaneous memoir written in hiding, probably in 1944, and concerned his time in a POW camp in Puglia and his escape and recapture eight days later.
Inside Camp 65
The site of the camp – Camp 65, between the towns of Gravina and Altamura – has survived, with some original buildings. Arriving there in late summer 2021, it was like stepping into some netherworld where time slips and the imagination runs wild. You don’t need to believe in ghosts to sense it is a haunted place. The president of the Camp 65 Association, Domenico Bolognese, a crusader to preserve the memory of the camp, became first my guide, and then my friend.
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In pursuit of the enigmatic Ralph and his escaping partner, Charlie West, Dom and I visited archives and libraries, took flights the length of Italy, and drove hundreds of miles. We buttonholed pensioners, hiked across deserted countryside, picnicked on mountains and climbed over walls, often trespassing to follow the scent. And so, as the story of Ralph and Charlie became clearer, our own story of likeminded companionship emerged alongside it. The past looped in and out of the present, and sometimes the membrane between the two felt thin.
From reading diaries and memoirs in the Imperial War Museum, I discovered that although Ralph’s account of incarceration in Camp 65 was accurate, its omissions made it suspicious. As a warrant officer and a camp policeman, Ralph enjoyed a privileged position. All senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were hated by the rank and file, but he gave no indication of this. Not for the last time, Ralph’s mysteriousness shaded into secrecy, even deceit.
Ralph hardly mentioned food, whereas most prisoners were obsessed with it. Camp 65 was the largest in Italy and was deluged with prisoners in the first half of 1942 as Axis armies scored victory after victory in North Africa. Ralph had been captured in Libya by Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps on 1 June; Charlie, an RAF pilot, had been shot down there flying the nascent SAS on their very first mission in 1941. Rations were meagre in Camp 65, and the supply of Red Cross parcels erratic. Towards the winter of 1942, the majority of prisoners were slowly starving and sickness was rife. Ralph and Charlie, however, not only kept up their strength but were able to buy parts to construct a wireless set, and, through a network of contacts, assemble an escape kit and hoard food.
The great escape
The escape was planned for the moonless night of 3 March 1943. After some hazardous experimentation, Charlie had worked out how to dim the lights throughout the entire camp. After showing a fellow warrant officer the ropes, he and Ralph packed their canvas overalls – a prized garment – with food and matches, compasses and maps, and after decoys had been set in motion climbed over the wire under the noses of the Italian sentries in their observation towers.
Travelling in darkness and hiding in drainage culverts and outhouses during the day, they made good progress, but it was not good enough. Charlie’s plan was to walk a hundred miles to the port of Brindisi, where they would steal a German transport plane and fly it to Switzerland. No one had ever tried this before, he reasoned, so they’d be mad not to have a go. The fates were against them. It rained almost constantly, Charlie had an attack of malaria, and it was more difficult than anticipated to avoid inhabited areas. Ever more exhausted and demoralized, they found themselves in a town where they were challenged by an Italian sentry and only narrowly evaded arrest. The end came at a farm near the town of Noci, where they were apprehended by a part-time policeman and taken for questioning by the local carabinieri. Before long, they were back in Camp 65.
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As the threat of Allied invasion mounted in early summer 1943, the Italian authorities moved British and Commonwealth prisoners to camps farther north. Ralph and Charlie were sent to Camp 52 near Genoa, where they got their radio working and were able to listen to the BBC news. Like most POWs in Italy, Ralph supposed that the Fascist surrender was imminent after which he would be going home. I knew this because in his only surviving letter to his wife, Florence, he hinted that she should prepare his clothes because he’d soon be needing them.
But Hitler had other ideas. When the Armistice of Cassibile was signed by Italy and the Allies in September 1943, the Germans swarmed into the camps, where many POWs had, on the instructions of their own high command, stayed put in anticipation of the arrival of Allied troops. Instead, the men were put on trains heading for the border with the Reich where they would be put to work to support the Nazi war effort.
A second getaway
Ralph and Charlie were having none of that. At dawn, their train halted at a small station north of Verona, whereupon the two friends escaped from their sealed goods wagon. With Charlie once again beset by malaria, they hid in undergrowth until the engine pulled away. This is where Ralph’s memoir ends. For a while it seemed that he’d never committed another word to paper, but I struck gold wading through files at the National Archives in Kew. At the end of the war, ex-prisoners, especially escapers and evaders, were debriefed by military intelligence. In the spring of 1945, Ralph was handed a form by an MI9 officer, on which, in small block capitals unlike the curvilinear script of his memoir, he gave an account of what happened next.
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Ralph and Charlie had freed themselves from the train in just the same way my grandmother had said: making a hole in the floor with table cutlery. After that, they took refuge in a vineyard worker’s hut down the valley, at Ceraino, and stayed for five weeks, fed and clothed by local people, until enemy activity drove them into the mountains above the Val d’Adige. Using a photograph Ralph and Charlie had taken when they went back in 1958, Dom and I located the hut, virtually unaltered since the war. It was a spine-tingling moment when we entered, wondering whether the shelves on either side of the door had been for the fugitives’ personal items – shaving kit, a candle, a photo from home.
Courageous civilians
The next year, Dom and I explored the rugged highlands, following the route taken by Ralph and Charlie. Our discoveries were astonishing. Not only was the house where they sheltered still there, outside the town of Molina, but an old man appeared, Fioravante Bacilieri, who had, as a boy, brought food to a pair of Englishmen hiding in the barn. His father had been a partisan and was shot dead in front of Fioravante’s eyes. Fioravante himself had been hit in the leg by a bullet and, biting back tears, he showed us the scar. Evading the Germans and the post-armistice fascists was no Boys’ Own adventure; it was deadly dangerous, and the civilians who helped POWs on the run were magnificently brave.
It was there, at Molina, that Ralph and Charlie parted company in the autumn of 1943. Ralph headed south hoping to meet the advancing Allies; Charlie went north, at first to find a way home through the Alps, then joining a brutal, battle-hardened partisan band. I describe the next remarkable phase of Ralph’s story in my book, The Glass Mountain, but suffice to say that, like 5,500 other ex-POWs, he forged a relationship with some contadini – the humble, sharecropping peasantry – which transformed his outlook and sense of himself. While the war lasted, he never made it to British lines or to neutral Switzerland. Instead, he settled into rural life in a hamlet called Paitone in Brescia on the shores of Lake Garda, dressing like a contadino and working, eating and generally fitting in like one. He even learned to speak not just Italian, but the local dialect, and so was reborn as ‘Rodolfo’.
Life after war
Dom and I knew all this not only from the MI9 debrief but two other sources. First, after the war the British set up an organization called the Allied Screening Commission to compensate Italian civilians for sacrifices made in harbouring escaped POWs. The extraordinary files survive in the US National Archives in Maryland. The form submitted by the Maccarinelli family even enclosed a photograph of Ralph in support of their claim. The other sources were the Maccarinelli descendants, who still live in the same area and own the house where Ralph first arrived, in a terrible state, at Christmas 1943. We also met the Maccarinellis’ cousins, the Garlettis. Piero Garletti, now in his nineties, remembered Rodolfo well, this fascinating traveller from afar.
It came to light that Ralph had met with US parachutists from the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, and had done some work for the resistance, which required him to have a forged safe conduct pass – this document turned up among Ralph’s papers in Doncaster. It seems he was useful as a Morse operator, having learned this skill after he left school at fourteen to work for the London North Eastern Railway. But Ralph didn’t do nearly as much work with American agents and Italian resisters as he pretended later. In 1946 he had an Italian friend write a testimonial declaring that he’d been a fearless partisan leader for his eighteen months living as a farmhand in Italy. I reckon a lot of people, not least his wife Flo, wondered what he’d been doing all that time.
The more I found out about Ralph, the more I grew aware of everything that would remain mysterious. He was complicated man, and until I started digging, I’d never have guessed how much I would have to read between the lines to appreciate the nuances, deceptions and contradictions of the soldier whose face stared blankly from old photographs. He was an ordinary working-class Yorkshireman, intelligent and ambitious though not well educated, propelled by war into a blizzard of excitement and danger. There he learned about the fine line between life and death, and the enduring power of courage and friendship, and it changed him. And in learning about all these things for myself, I found it changed me too.
Malcolm Gaskill was a professor in the history department of the University of East Anglia from 2011 until 2020, when he retired from teaching. His latest book is The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy (Penguin, 2026)