was very frightened, more frightened than I had ever been. What upset me more than anything, quite irrationally, was the thought that if we drowned – which seemed more than probable – none of our people would ever know what had happened to us and why.
I had just succeeded in getting my boots off when I saw George swimming away into the darkness, and I knew immediately that he was doing so because he felt that he could not keep afloat much longer and did not want to be a burden to the rest of us. He was not a strong swimmer and he had no spare flesh on him to combat the cold.
I was the only one who saw this and I went after him and persuaded him to come back, after a fantastic conversation in the sea of which I shall never forget the gist but have completely forgotten the actual words which passed between us; all I can remember was that he was very calm and determined, just as Captain Oates must have been, walking out of that tent in the Antarctic; but eventually he swam back with me and Desmond insisted on getting out of his canoe and giving George his place, which was difficult to do but undoubtedly saved George’s life.
Now we tried to swim shorewards to where we thought the mouth of the Simetto River ought to be. If we could only reach the right bank before dawn we might be able to lie up among the trees until nightfall and then make the rendezvous for the second night with the submarine, by Capo Campolato, six miles to the south. But although by first light the wind died away, we never reached the mouth of the river or the rendezvous. It was a pity because, at great risk, Pat brought Una back three nights running to wait for us although he and his crew having seen the explosions on the airfield and heard the shooting, were more or less convinced that we were captured or dead.
Of the fourteen merchant ships which took part in Operation Pedestal, five reached Malta, including the tanker Ohio, which was enough to save it. The remaining nine were all sunk, at least four of them by J.U.88s operating from Sicily on August the twelfth and thirteenth. Operation Whynot is not one on which I look back with either pride or pleasure. The fishermen took us in to Catania where we were surrounded by a hastily assembled escort, and marched, presumably for the edification of the inhabitants, bootless and in the few clothes which remained to us – some of us were without trousers – up past palaces and convents, some of them like those on Malta and equally golden in the sunshine, to a more modern building in the centre of the city. Here we were subjected to a long, inexpert interrogation by unpleasant men in civilian clothes. We were still very sure of ourselves and Desmond made the kind of rude remarks about the Duce, whose photograph glowered down at us from the wall, which only Guards officers are really capable of making, and to such an extent that we were in danger of being badly beaten up, as we certainly would have been if we had been Italian prisoners insulting a portrait of Churchill.
The Italians were angry enough without being taunted. We had penetrated their coast defences and the Germans, whose aircraft had been in some danger, had already pointed this out to them. That we had failed completely to do what we had set out to do did nothing to appease them. It was now that we made a rather feeble attempt to escape from the window of a lavatory to which the guards had, rather stupidly, taken us en masse. What we would have all done in the middle of Catania with hardly any clothes on, none of us had stopped to think; we were too bemused.
We were given nothing to eat or drink, and all that morning we sat shivering in our damp underwear and shirts in a northfacing room; and George, who had not recovered from his immersion, became ill. Finally an Italian colonel arrived and cursed our hosts for keeping us in such a condition and we were issued with cotton trousers and shirts and cotton socks and canvas boots made from old rucksacks, which were very comfortable, and we were also given food. Later in the afternoon we were put in a lorry and taken to a fort with a moat round it in which the conducting officer told us, we were to be shot at dawn the following morning as saboteurs because we had not been wearing any sort of recognisable uniform when we were captured. Looking out of the window into the dry moat in which the firing party was going to operate, I remembered the innumerable books about first war spies that I had read at school which invariably ended with ghastly descriptions of their executions. Mostly they were cowardly spies whose legs gave way under them, so that they had to be carried, shrieking, to the place of execution and tied to stakes to prevent them sinking to the ground, and although I hoped that I wouldn’t be like this, I wondered if I would be.
By this time George was very ill. He had a high temperature and lay on one of the grubby cots, semi-delirious. We hammered on the door and shouted to the sentries to bring a doctor, but of course none came.
Finally, sometime in the middle of the night (our watches had been taken away from us so we no longer knew what time it was), a young priest arrived, escorted by two soldiers, as we imagined to prepare us for the ordeal ahead; but, instead, he dismissed the sentries and knelt down by the side of George’s bed and prayed for him.
The priest spoke a little English and before he left he told us that the Germans were even more angry about the Italians’ decision to execute us without consulting them first, than they had been about the attack on the airfield, and that they had given orders that we were on no account to be shot but sent to Rome at once for further interrogation. Perhaps they never meant to shoot us but, all the same, we thought ourselves lucky.
The next day George was better, although still very weak, and later that day we left for Rome by train with a heavy escort of infantry under the command of an elderly maggiore who had with him an insufferably conceited and bloodthirsty sotto-tenente who had obviously been recently commissioned.
By now we were all very depressed but Desmond, who had a positively royal eye for the minutiae of military dress, had the pleasure of pointing out to the sotto-tenente that he had his spurs on the wrong feet.
‘He is quite right,’ said the maggiore who was not enjoying his escort duty and appeared to dislike the sotto-tenente as much as we did. ‘Go, instantly and change them. You are a disgrace to your regiment.’
At Rome station while being marched down the platform to the exit, we were able to pick up some of the ruinous and extensive baggage belonging to some very pretty peasant girls who had travelled up from the south on the same train. Happy to be given this assistance, for there were no porters even if they had known how to hire one, they trotted up the platform beside us between the escorting lines of soldiers who had been given orders only to shoot or bayonet us if we tried to escape, with the residue of their possessions balanced on their noddles, while the sotto-tenente screeched at us to put their bags down and the maggiore, not wishing to make an exhibition of himself, disembarked from the carriage in a leisurely fashion. These were the last girls any of us spoke to for a long time.
In the city we were housed in barracks occupied by the Cavalleria di Genova, a regiment in Italy of similar status at that time to one or other of the regiments of the Household Cavalry in Britain. They still had their horses and the few officers and men who were about looked like ardent royalists. They certainly all knew about which was the right boot for the right spur, which was more than I did and, although they were not allowed to speak to us, their demeanour was friendly. They sent us magazines and newspapers and the food, which was provided by the officers’ mess and brought to us by a white-jacketed mess waiter who had the air of a family retainer, was of an excellence to which none of us were accustomed in our own regiments, although there was not much of it.
After the first day we were all separated from one another and we began a period of unarduous solitary confinement in the course of which we contrived to communicate with one another by way of the mess waiter who carried our innocuous written messages from one room to another among the dishes. At intervals we were all interrogated, but never really expertly, by people from military intelligence. As we had been taught never to answer any questions whatsoever, however fatuous they might seem, we learned more from our interrogators than they did from us. It was interesting to find out how much they knew about our organisation. About some parts of it they knew more than I imagined they
