Gordon Lee
Trooper 7899817 44th Battalion Royal Tank Regiment
Gordon Lee was captured in Libya by the Axis forces on 5 June 1942 and, after a short stop in the Benghazi prison camp, was transferred to PG 53, Sforzacosta in the Macerata province. In the camp, he befriended three fellow prisoners, Ernest Johnson, Philip Millard, and Jim Farnsworth, who would join him during his escape.
After the Armistice, Lee understood things were moving rapidly, especially after the Italian guards vanished and the British Senior Officer told the prisoners that, in case of escape, they would be court-martialled upon their return to the United Kingdom. As they realised the danger of ending up in German hands, the four PoWs executed their escape plan with success, avoiding the control of the camp’s newly formed British Military Police. Their objective was to get away from the area before nightfall and then head south to join the advancing Allied armies. Thus, they began to wander in the Marche countryside, doing their best to survive. They stole grapes from the vineyards and soon met with the locals. The two most pressing issues were food and shelter:
As evening approached, we decided to find somewhere to sleep and came across a small, isolated farmhouse. How would the people receive us? It was our first, and certainly not last, experience of being beggars asking for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. We were to repeat this over and over and usually the response was a good one. This first time they were sympathetic, and they showed us into the barn and gave us bread and cheese.
The first positive interactions with the inhabitants allowed Lee and his companions to learn about the living conditions of the local farmer families, who showed sympathy for their condition and anti-fascist sentiments, if not hatred for Mussolini. A few farmers had lived in the United States, making communication easier, even though they spoke an often incorrect and rough form of English.
Their journey continued through Tolentino, Pinella, Sarnano, and Amandola as they tried to follow the main road and reach the Apennines. During each stop, the group enjoyed the hospitality of the locals and their traditional foods, above all the polenta, and was integrated into the farming work.
So, days followed with special memories. Like the evening spent with the villagers of Pianella working as a community to strip maize cobs of their leaf covering. It was an annual event where everyone worked together and finished with a heap of maize cobs and another pile of empty bottles! Some of maize was eventually milled into flour and used for making a dish of polenta about which more later.
After four weeks on the march, Philip Millard fell and gravely injured his leg, forcing Lee’s group to make another stop. The small village of Trisungo was the place they chose. Little did they know, they would remain there for the following nine months.
This [village] turned out to be Trisungo, where we were to remain for the next nine months, and our stalwart friend was Eber Petrucci. With his wife and family, he would organize food supplies, safe housing and generally take care of us. We didn’t realise then just how indebted to him we should become.
The Petrucci family consisted of Eber, his wife, Giuseppina, and their children: Isidoro, Francesca, and Gilda. They lived in a modest house, much like the other families in the village. Despite their destitution and poverty, they all contributed to helping Gordon and his companions, bringing them food on a rotating basis and sheltering them in the huts they used to store their farming equipment.
For most of our stay we lived in small stone huts up on the hillsides some way out of Trisungo, where tools and equipment for farming and forestry purposes were kept. This saved the bother of taking it to and from the village. These places were very primitive indeed but we kept warm with fires […] food consisted mainly of bread, homemade flat strip pasta, potatoes, slices of some cured ham, cheese made from goats and sheep and polenta made from maize flour.
However, the danger of Nazi-fascist raids was always present and, therefore, Lee was sometimes invited to stay hidden, because in the village some informants worked for the enemy to find escaped PoWs. Despite German patrols occasionally approaching the village, Lee and his companions had a relatively quiet time in Trisungo, adjusting to the locals’ way of life and assisting with seasonal agricultural work.
Autumn saw us helping harvest the wheat crop. It was laid down on a stone courtyard surface and beaten with the old-fashioned flail which was a very tiring job. The grain was then swept and placed in sacks which were then hung over a donkey’s back and taken down to the miller in the next village. Eventually it came back as flour.
Winter passed without any relevant issues, and Lee spent it mostly inside crumbling houses as copious snowfall affected the province. Despite the dire weather conditions, Lee never fell ill, something he believed was due to the copious amount of wine he drank with the Petrucci:
Throughout the winter’s bad weather, we lived in the village, in people’s attics but mainly in a hay loft belonging to the Petrucci’s. We survived the weather and the somewhat hard and primitive living conditions without suffering from a cold or chill and we believed that this was due to being fortified by the wine we drank! Better than cough medicine.
Once the cold season began to end, Lee learned that the Germans were also withdrawing and observed, from a hill, their trucks lined on the main road. Meanwhile, he discovered, thanks to a radio, that the enemy, during its withdrawal, had raided villages, burned houses, stolen cattle and food and, in particular, blown up bridges to slow the Allied advance in the province. As German vehicles became a rare sight, Lee decided to leave Trisungo and try to rejoin the Allied armies advancing from the south.
The flow of troops eventually came to a stop, the last of them blowing up bridges to make Allied progress more difficult and we judged it time to leave Trisungo, to contact the approaching forces and to make our way home. It was a sad parting from all those friends who had taken care of us for all those months at great risk to themselves. It had been a great experience and we had lived a very basic life with none of the luxuries or normalities we had been used at home.
Lee eventually rejoined a unit of Royal Engineers in Rieti and, with them, went to Rome, where he boarded a train that, after crossing half of Italy, brought him to Bari. Here, he spent some time waiting for repatriation. However, in the meantime, he went back to Trisungo to bring a few gifts to the Petrucci as a token of gratitude.
I decided therefore to return to Trisungo and to take Eber a gift of clothes and boots as a thank you for his kindness. I would go alone for the others did not want to know and I realized they must have been keener to get home than I apparently was, which may be difficult to understand.
After his brief leave accorded by the authorities, Lee was shipped to Algiers and then, finally, to the United Kingdom. He arrived in Glasgow and took a train to Manchester, where he was able to contact his family by telephone to tell them he was back. He would never meet his escape companions again, but in 1982, he would return to Trisungo with his wife Marie, only to learn that the Petrucci had moved out of the village. Nonetheless, during that trip, he was able to meet again a few people who had helped him during his escape, sharing a glass of wine with them.
Camps related to this story
Sources
Gordon Lee’s Diary, Norfolk Record Office Archive, The Archive Centre, Norwich NRO, MC 2148/1, 925X6