Sam Derry - The Rome Escape Line

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EUMENES Publishing 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

ROME ESCAPE LINE

The Story of the British Organization in Rome

for Assisting Escaped Prisoners-of-War, 1943-44

by

SAM DERRY

Rome Escape Line was originally published in 1960 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.

* * *

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

Authors Foreword

I wish to acknowledge the great help given to me by Mr. Peter Lord in producing this book; for the very many hours he spent wading through documents, checking records, taking down pages and pages of shorthand notes, and his unfailing patience and enthusiasm in typing the script.

This book has been written unbeknown to Monsignor Hugh OFlaherty, C.B.E.: one of the finest men it has been my privilege ever to meet. Had it not been for this gallant gentleman, there would have been no Rome Escape Organization. I sincerely trust that nothing I have written will cause him any pain or embarrassment.

I should also like to refer to the great debt of gratitude I owe to Lieutenant-Colonel John Furman, M.C. and Lieutenant-Colonel William Simpson, M.C. I fear no words of mine can adequately express my admiration of the wonderful work done by these two courageous officers during those months in enemy-occupied Rome.

S. D.

1960

1. Road to Rome

This is madness, I thought, as the carriage door whipped open, and I plunged from the speeding prisoner-of-war train out into the Italian morning sunshine. I had jumped on the spur of the moment, and I still wince when recalling how the stony track rushed up to hit and bounce me, and then rose to hit me again, fearsomely close to the deafening roar and clanking of the carriage wheels. The air was blasted from my lungs in a sudden, overwhelming flash of multicolored pain.

I first touched the ground in an ungainly crouch, pitched forward, skidded cm all fours, and, after an eternity of seconds, scraped to a spread-eagled halt, flat as a deflated inner tube.

I lay waiting to be shot.

Incredibly, inexplicably, the shots never came. Maybe if the German guards fired at all they did so while I was hurtling through the air and bouncing along the ballast. The north-bound train, with its nailed-in cargo of British prisoners-of-war, raced on towards Germany, the terrifying clatter of the iron wheels faded rapidly into a confused rumble, and then to blessed silence. Still only half aware of reality, but satisfied that I remained in one piece, I could scarcely believe my good fortune. I had broken every rule in the escape-book, and should have broken every bone in my body.

Train-jumping was the gateway to freedom for many British prisoners during the Second World War, but it was a hazardous business from which satisfactory results came rarely if the rules were not carefully observed. I was better placed than most to know them, and if I had stopped to think before jumping I should probably not have chosen the moment when the crowded prison-train was blundering through the Apennine foothills at rather more than thirty miles an hour, but would have waited for it to slacken speed on a gradient; nor would I have jumped in the broad daylight of morning, with the friendly cloak of night still far ahead; nor while the train was in a deep cutting, with steep hanks on either side, and no possibility of a dash for cover.

Moreover, I was inadequately dad for escape, without food, money, documents, maps, or even any dear idea where I was, andfinal follyI had jumped from the wrong side of the trainthat is, the side from which guards, leaning through windows, could the more easily raise their carbines and fire back along the line.

By all the rules, if I avoided breaking my neck, I should have been peppered with bullets, or failing that, the best to expect was that the train would be stopped, and a detachment of unsympathetic guards sent to reclaim me. As it was, I was so grateful for my luck that I could overlook the hammer-blow pains and a violent stabbing sensation in the right leg. For the second time since falling into the German bag in February, the previous year, I was free again. I could hardly refrain from laughing aloud.

After the night in a dim and airless railway compartment, the glare of the summer sun hurt, and I had to screw up my eyes, and shied them with an unsteady hand. I looked back along the track towards Sulmona, northward along the track towards Germany which I had said I would never reach, and along the tops of the embankments. Nowhere was there any sign of life or movement.

Content in spite of the nagging pain in my leg, I dragged myself up the steep bank, and surveyed the Italian landscape, yellow and dusty green under a blue sky. It was farmland, but scrubby, and studded with the stony outcrops of the foothills, and, although I knew little of the Italian rural economy, it was fairly obvious that it would not be densely populated. The combination of few people and a certain amount of cover, in the form of rocks, bushes, and occasional copses, was promising, for while I was grateful to find myself in one piece, I realized that I was in no condition to travel far. With more bruises than I had ever collected on the pre-war rugby field, I felt rather as though I had been charged by a rhinoceros.

Consequently the two miles of Italy over which I crawled in the next hour and a half were the longest I ever knew. The urge to stop and rest was almost irresistible, yet prison-camp caution prevailed, and I was never quite satisfied with the cover that presented itself. It seemed an age before I reached a small but relatively dense wood, which offered not only reasonable cover but also an interesting view of a little group of squat, flaking buildings, forming the center of a peasant smallholding, on the rising pound above. Where there are people there is food; but escape is always largely a waiting game, so I settled as comfortably as possible among the prickly bushes, watched, and waited.

So far as I had a plan at all, it was to head southward and link up with the Allied forces which had already landed in the toe of Italy. I thought I was on the road to reunion with the Allies, with the Gunners, and, perhaps, at length with my wife, Nancy, at home in Nottinghamshire. I supposed I would be posted missing again, and wondered what she would thinkshe, to whom I had so recently written plaintively, What an end of three years fighting, to be captured, especially after my luck...But the road on which I had embarked so impetuously that morning did not take me either towards the front line or towards Nancy; I was on a strange road to Rome.

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