Roy Johnston

22nd Battalion 2NZEF 35784

Roy Johnston was a New Zealand soldier. He enlisted in the 1930s in the 4th Reinforcement in Trentham Camp and later entered the NCO training school, where he became a sergeant instructor for the 5th Reinforcement. When the Second World War broke out, he was sent to Sydney and then boarded the Mauritania. His voyage took him through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and he finally arrived in Crete. Johnston participated in the North African campaign and starred in several propaganda films distributed in the United States and the Commonwealth.

Initially, he was deployed on the Turkish border to fight in Syria. He was recalled to Egypt after the fall of Tobruk and a few months later, the enemy surrounded his battalion at Ruweisat Ridge during the first Al Alamein battle and he was captured on 15 July 1942.

The prisoners were loaded onto lorries by the Germans and brought 20 kilometres across the desert, where they were handed over to the Italians, who, using armoured vehicles, took them to the prison camps of Derna, Tobruk, and, finally, Benghazi. After a few weeks, Johnston was transferred to Italy. He landed in Bari and was brought to PG 65, Altamura, before being sent to PG 57, Grupignano, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

The news of the Armistice disrupted the camp’s routine, and Johnston, along with other prisoners, seized the opportunity to climb the outer walls of the camp, as they were certain that, given the situation, the Italian guards would not search for them. After spending two days hidden in a corn field near the camp, Johnston noticed a house nearby and, tired of waiting, decided to approach it and greet its inhabitants at dusk.

I went into the house just at dusk and talked to the grandfather, Nonno. The whole family gathered. I was able to establish a connection thanks to Matteot[t]i, a Christian socialist who was killed by Mussolini and became a symbol for the liberal Italians. The family had a photo of Matteoti, who they revered, hidden inside Casa Busa […] Nonno, his wife Nonna and their family welcomed us. The women gave us some civilian clothes and turnedour wool uniforms into garments for the children because they were short of good clothes. They behaved as though the British had arrived and we were the advance guard of Montgomery. They made a great fuss of us. The Italians are like that.

Johnston spent his first night in Casa Busa sleeping on straw in the stable. The next morning, he noticed the family was busy with the grape harvest. He observed and participated in the local customs regarding harvesting grapes and winemaking:

The next morning, they were making wine and we offered to help tread the grapes. We weren’t even allowed to wash our feet first. “No, no water in our wine,” said Nonno. We were assured that the fermentation process cleaned everything including, we hoped, the excrement of the hens we noticed doing their business above the pressing.

Johnston and his companion, whose name had been italianised into Giacomo (James or Jack), feared their presence could cause problems to the family, as they had agreed to shelter them despite the danger. Therefore, they decided not to sleep in the house, but rather in a small hut, built using vine leaves, which protected them from outsiders’ gazes, especially when German patrols passed by. The matter came up again and again, and each time the nonna, responding to Johnston’s preoccupations about danger, replied that it was her duty to protect them.

Nonna stepped in and said, “You are a mother’s son therefore we want to look after you. No nationality or patriotism comes into it. Furthermore, we have a son in South Africa who is a prisoner of the British; we will look after you and they will look after him.” That was the simple contadini [farmer] logic. So, it was agreed.

During the following months, Johnston helped in the fields, but as winter set in, he was forced to move into the stable and devise a system to hide in the hay and connect his hideout to the house to escape if the Germans were to search Casa Busa. Despite the tension, Johnston was able to observe the farmers’ lives from inside the family. He learned about their habits and traditions, the mezzadria [sharecropping] system and how the harvest was divided among them and the landowners, their food harvested from the fields, and the role of the women who take care of the house. Their relationship grew with mutual exchanges and Johnston’s full trust in them. In turn, he wanted to contribute to their well-being, despite the difficult circumstances.

The women were marvellous. They were the courageous ones; the men could waver. Nonna was wonderful. Her husband was huge and used to hover; she was small but boy oh boy, she ran him. All my ideas about the strength and fighting spirit of women were being reinforced here! The family fed us and shared everything with us, even though they were on limited rations. We would go out and find food for them.

As the war continued and the Allies resumed their offensive, Johnston decided to move from the area to understand how he could reach the Allied troops coming from the south. For this reason, while scouting at night around Casa Busa, he encountered the local Matteotti partisan band. With them, he and Giacomo took part in sabotage actions against the Nazi-Fascists and in the rescue of other Allied personnel.

Our drill was to rescue anybody shot down in one of these big raids. If it was in our sector, we tried to get there before a German patrol. One chap we rescued, Graham, was in the Oxford Air Training Corps. The Germans had picked him off and he had parachuted down. We arrived as he was about to hit the deck. I can understand what we looked like to him, two very dishevelled-looking guys approaching him, and he pulled out his revolver. He received a tirade of New Zealand language about what to do with his gun, to which he retorted, “Who are you?” “We are bloody New Zealanders of course,” we said. “You New Zealanders seem to be everywhere in this bloody war,” he said in his plummy accent.

After 18 months spent running and hiding, Johnston learned that the Nelson Force, an organisation working behind enemy lines to rescue escaped PoWs, had some ships at their disposal in the Adriatic and that, by reaching Ancona, he could board one of them and return home. On 13 April 1945, Johnston finally reached the town and, from there, Florence. Before repatriation, he stopped in Egypt, where he spent some time recuperating. He then went to Sydney and Auckland, where he arrived on the day of Japan’s surrender. He took the train to Taihape, where, at the train station, he was reunited with his parents and his girlfriend Daphne.

Despite the war, the dangers, and the uncertainty, Johnston always kept a special place in his heart for Casa Busa and its family, and he would continue to tell stories and anecdotes of the months he spent with them after his escape:

While the Italians have a very strict morality, the contadini demand pregnancy before marriage, Nonna would say to me, “We always marry in pink. The signore marry in white but they should marry in pink.” Nonna’s daughter-in-law Cesira, whose husband was a prisoner of the British, was the odd-woman out. When we went to church, which we did occasionally to conform, she would find a suit for us to wear. (Italian wives are very good at doing things for their husbands, very like Daphne actually!) “Cesira is the daughter of a priest,” Nonna explained. “You’re kidding,” I replied in Italian. “Oh no,” said Nonna. “The priests are terrible people. You were here the other day when the Franciscan monks came around; they took a tenth of our food reserves. The church is not good at all.” She told me this on Saturday night, as we were all drinking wine and talking. The next morning, I woke to see Nonna going off to church dressed in black and looking like something out of a Van Gogh painting. When she returned, I asked her why she had gone to church after what she had said to me the night before. “Oh Raimondo [Roy],” she said. “Just in case. Just in case.