In September this year, my wife Kate and I travelled around the glorious island of Sicily primarily to enjoy the sights and the sounds, the sunshine and the sea. But if we could make it at all possible it was also to walk in the footsteps of my father who was held in Sicily between his capture in north Africa and being moved on to PoW camps in mainland Italy.
My father, Stanley Thomas Dunn (6/11/1919 – 22/2/2003), said very little during his post-war life about his wartime experiences, and since his passing my sister Vanda and husband Peter, my brother Graham, and I have tried to piece together the brief conversations that we had with him about his time as a PoW and his escape, in order to gain a fuller picture.
What we do know is that Trooper Dunn 7908395, 5th Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment, was captured at El Machili in north Africa on 8 April 1941. He was transported to Sicily, and at an unknown date was sent on to the Italian mainland, to PoW camps Servigliano (PG 59), then Fontanellato (PG 49), and finally Sforzesca (PG 146/18), from where he escaped on 8/9/1943.
It remains somewhat of a mystery why my father would have been sent from Servigliano, which was an “other ranks” camp, to Fontanellato, which was an officers’ camp, before being sent on to Sforzesca, but I would like to think that being a born opportunist he saw a possible means to improve his lot, and simply made it happen.
Brave Italian helpers
His escape was from Sforzesca, and with the courageous help of the brave Italian people of northern Italy, he made his way to Switzerland (arriving on 1/11/1943) and found sanctuary at Camp d’Eoades, in Arosa. We understand that rather than waiting to be repatriated by the British government from Switzerland he worked his passage home on a merchant ship from a port in the south of France, but we’re frustratingly short of detail about that.
Readers of Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Apennines may recall that Eric served in the Black Watch and Special Boat Section and was captured in 1942. He escaped from Fontanellato after the Italian Armistice and was befriended by a Slovenian woman, Wanda Skof, whom he married after the war. After my father’s escape he too was helped by Wanda and her wonderful family, and my sister Vanda was named after her but with her name spelt the English way.
My father maintained the strong connections he had made with families in Vigevano at the time of his escape from the Sforzesca camp throughout his later life, and my parents honeymooned there. Over later years my father hosted many young Italians at his flat in Camberwell while they were studying in London. We can be absolutely sure that none of those students would have returned home to Italy without having acquired a surprisingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the finest pubs to be found across our capital city as Dad escorted them by car, bus, tube and on foot to experience the very “Best of British” hospitality.
But let me return to the part of our holiday which grew ever more significant as our departure date from the UK approached – that of locating the actual place (…or places ?) in Sicily where my father had been held between the time he left north Africa and his arrival on the Italian mainland. Naively, I had assumed that this would be a simple matter of doing a little online research; finding a few WW2 history-focused Sicilian-based contacts; and perhaps visiting a specialist museum or two as we travelled around the island. We had a hire car at our disposal, so nowhere would be out of our reach, and constrained only by the timing of our hotel bookings our timetable was very much our own. What could possibly be much of a challenge about that? In reality – quite a lot.
The collective wisdom of our good friends at MSMT offered me sound advice, contacts and websites where research might best be pursued, but the further I immersed myself the difficulties inherent in finding the specific locations of the two holding PoW camps (both identified as PG 98) emerged.
Fading folk memory
A number of people I contacted in Sicily and elsewhere who I had presumed would be able to point to a known spot on a map, or find a volume of record that would have an identifiable location, could not actually offer me much help. Not being an Italian speaker was a far greater obstacle than I had anticipated, and I was reliant on reaching someone familiar with Sicily’s wartime history with whom I could freely communicate.
What I understood was being gently pointed out to me as I pursued separate strands of research was that the “folk memory” of precisely where the two camps were located in 1942/3 had simply been allowed to fade, and that the precise locations had not been formally documented. I was led to understand that there were Sicilians who were not at all proud of the way the camps had been established and managed, and the part that their countrymen had played in their operation. Essentially, the camps were not created to be permanent fixtures on the landscape, and as their use came to an end they would have been demolished and their usable structural components recycled. When the two camps ceased to exist, no markers were erected to identify their wartime presence or purpose.
Because we don’t know the date that my father arrived in Sicily, or when he was transported to the mainland, we cannot be sure which of the two camps he spent time in, or whether he had experience of them both. Hence our decision to visit both areas; it was to be our way of paying our respects to all of the Allied PoWs who had passed through them.
The brilliant Allies in Italy website offers a fine insight into the brief existence of the two Sicilian camp sites, each housing around 1,000 PoWs. In summary :
Castelvetrano (Borgo di Buturro): the first PG 98 site
In December 1941, after the capture of many British soldiers in Africa, the Italian Chief of Staff suddenly found itself in need of a quarantine camp near an airport, and not too far away from Libya, to ease the transport of PoWs. The Command of the Sicilian Territorial Defence chose a site in the Buturro district, part of the Castelvetrano municipality, not far from the local airport.
The camp was built in just a few weeks, but was soon found to be unsuitable as a PoW camp as malaria became endemic and there was no source of drinking water. Living conditions were abysmal; there were no sanitary facilities, and the entire camp flooded when it rained.
The PoWs were often very unwell, but Red Cross and Protecting Power inspectors were refused admittance. At the beginning of 1942, a dysentery epidemic broke out, and as it threatened to spread to the nearby town the PoW office decided the camp had to be moved. When the Chief of Staff learned that the area for the camp had been chosen without consulting the Health Directorate and military engineers, he took action against the Territorial Defence of Palermo. The commander was also punished for the slow and ineffective way in which he had directed the camp, which, besides its poorly chosen location, lacked infirmary services, fences and lighting.
In September 1942, the Castelvetrano camp was transferred to Traversa, near San Giuseppe Jato in the Palermo province, roughly 50 km from the Castelvetrano airport. The new camp retained the same identifying number and command as PG 98.
When we visited Castelvetrano I had just read the part of the very detailed memoir of G. Norman Davidson, In the Prison of his Days, wherein he describes (page 166) his sudden transfer from the Castelvetrano camp to the Italian mainland, and that journey commencing with him and around a hundred other men being marched from the camp to Castelvetrano Station on 31 January 1942.
He states that the march took the men around five hours, “in icy cold rain’”. Given that they had been constantly underfed and had lacked good nutrition; were inadequately booted; were in many cases unwell or injured; and would probably not have undertaken the march with any great enthusiasm – my estimate was that the camp’s location would have been at most 15 km away from the railway station.
Kate and I visited Castelvetrano railway station and followed that with a visit to the Castelvetrano Museo Civico to meet its delightful staff. They were anxious to help us succeed in our quest but could not find any formal record that identified the precise location of the camp, or any details of its establishment. Our photos of the broad valley in Borgo di Buturro do show a large open area that could very well have contained the camp’s location, and lies 15 km from the town, so we left feeling cautiously confident that our objective of finding the site may well have been achieved.
Traversa – San Giuseppe Jato: the second PG 98 site
This was chosen to replace the Castelvetrano camp as it was more in line with the required basic hygienic necessities. It was supplied with drinking water and electrical power and lighting, and recycling some materials brought from the Castelvetrano site it opened in September 1942. Mainly being a tent camp, it was divided into two sectors, with one used for decontamination, and the other for quarantine. The operation of the two camps overlapped for just a few weeks.
Red Cross and Protecting Power inspectors were again refused admission, and some PoWs complained that at their arrival personal property searches were “exceedingly scrupulous”, and watches and rings were often “requisitioned”. PoWs were punished for breaches of discipline by incarceration in “security chambers”, and after the war the camp’s commander was accused of “maltreatment” and put on trial, but found innocent.
In July 1943, after the Allied landings in Sicily, San Giuseppe Jato, PG 98, was closed.
We visited San Giuseppe Jato and explored the delightful area of Traversa. Today it appears as an attractive and prosperous rural area, with a mixture of family homes and farmhouses within blocks of cultivated farmland, and is now divided into three distinct areas. And once again, we felt at least a modest degree of certainty that we had found the most likely site for the camp.
A peaceful legacy
Now back in Lincolnshire, Kate and I look back on our trip to Sicily with warmth and affection. Everywhere we went we seemed to become joyfully caught up in events unfolding around us – wedding parties, church bells ringing noon, massed street drummers and suchlike, and it was a pleasure to sit in shaded sunshine with a chilled glass of white and just let it all wash over us.
I feel that we did walk in the footsteps of my Dad. He found himself in Sicily in vastly different circumstances to us, and the more I have learned of the experiences that he and his mates from so many Allied nations were faced with and endured, the more my respect for them all has grown.
When I found that identifying exactly where the two PoW camps were was not the simple task I had assumed it would be, I was somewhat miffed. Of course, the sites should be identified and clearly signed! But now we are home again I can better reflect on the reality that Sicily has over the centuries been controlled by Carthaginians; Greeks; Romans; Vandals; Ostrogoths; Byzantines; Arabs; Normans; the Hohenstaufen; Angevins; the Aragonese; Hapsburgs and Bourbons. There is simply far too much history baked into the island’s fabric for every part of its story to be highlighted. And thankfully, the parts that we came to see because of my father’s journey through such an awful war are once again places where families can happily live in freedom and farm in peace. There can be no better memorial and legacy than that.
The memories of our forebears that surround us personally are safely held in trust by great organisations such as MSMT, where they can be openly shared and become the catalyst for action to produce a better world. Many thanks to all the good people at MSMT from Kate and I for kindly assisting in our quest, and to all the wonderful Italian people who did so much, so long ago, to help those of our families who live in our memories.