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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
Malcolm Gaskill
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- [00:46]
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- [01:01]
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- [01:36]
Eleanor Evans
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. How close can we truly get to the experiences of Second World War POWs? Historian Malcolm Gaskill sets out to tackle this question in his new book, the Glass Mountain, which explores the forgotten wartime experiences of his great Uncle Ralph, a Coldstream Guard turned prisoner of war in Italy. From daring escape attempts to unexpected alliances with Italian villagers, Malcolm tells his relative's story in tandem with his own mission to stitch together the events as faithfully as possible. It's a name which, as Malcolm reflects in conversation with Eleanor Evans, comes with its own set of challenges.
- [02:16]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Today, we welcome Malcolm Gaskell back to the podcast. Malcolm, you joined us last time to talk about 17th century witch hunts, and today's episode is a bit of a shift, isn't it?
- [02:27]
Malcolm Gaskill
It is, yeah. I've swerved off in a in a very different direction geographically and also across time too, so I'll try and explain.
- [02:35]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Well, I'm so glad you have, because it's a. It's a wonderful shift. It's a story of historical fragments of family love and law, and a real labour of love and skill on your part, too. And I hoped we could start by hearing from you on what brought you to your great uncle's story.
- [02:50]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, it all started with my mum, who's in her 90s now, still with us and still going strong, and she had a dream about her Uncle Ralph. Now, I didn't really know too much about Ralph, but he had been a soldier during the Second World War and a prisoner of war in Italy. And I remembered from childhood that he had escaped. And this strange dream my mum had had sort of got me thinking about Ralph. And although ultimately, I think took me by surprise how long I spent on trying to work out what had happened to him, it sort of got under my skin and I just bec. Increasingly curious and got deeper and deeper into the story. And the thing about Ralph is he was mysterious and we didn't really know that much about him. So that really this was. Although this is very different in subject from books that I've written before about 17th century witches and so on, in some ways it was the same kind of historical curiosity that drove me to find out more and to reveal more of this rather intriguing story.
- [03:55]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
It's a fascinating feat of you stitching together the evidence and this is woven entirely through your account as well. We have this sort of almost dual narrative of Ralph's story and your own story as you trace him. I wanted to ask about the diaries and how you come to these and what it sort of begins to give a picture of Ralph's story.
- [04:13]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, this conversation with my mum led me to my mum's cousin in Doncaster, and she had this. What was remembered as a diary, but was in fact a contemporary memoir that Ralph had written in hiding in northern Italy towards the end of the war, about his time in a prisoner of war camp in the south of Italy, from where he escaped and subsequently recaptured. But this really was the core certainly of the early part of the story. So I went up to Doncaster and got hold of this account and that. That really got the ball rolling and that then led me to the camp in southern Italy and it led me to my friend Domenico Bolognese, who is the president of the Camp 65 Association. So as you that so much of this book is about weaving together a contemporary story of discovery, mostly with Don Bolognese, and following in the tracks of Ralph and his friend Charlie west. Because he had an escaping partner, as escapists so often did, and they were thick as thieves and did absolutely everything together. So those two stories kind of ran in parallel and crossed over at certain points as the past, sort of membrane on the past, was pierced by us as we. As the story revealed itself.
- [05:28]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Indeed. I think that the sort of fragility of that screen between the two friendships was really fascinating as I was reading. And I must say, your friendship with Dom in particular was very lovely to read about. So I'm glad we'll hear more about that as we talk, but I wonder if we can jet back in Ralph's story to situate our listeners a bit in the timeline. So he, through various, obviously, events at the start of the Second World War, he finds himself in Northern Africa. So can we go into his experiences there?
- [05:55]
Malcolm Gaskill
Right, so he was a regular soldier before. Before the war, he joined the Coldstream Guards. It was a very elite British regiment. But then at the start of the war, he is transferred to the Military Police, because obviously, with the start of the war, they need to expand the military peace dramatically, which had been very small in the interwar era anyway. So he finds himself shipped off to the Middle east and they're heading inexorably towards Libya, where obviously, this is the locus of the war at this point, where the Italians and the Germans are fighting the British and Commonwealth forces. So that's what he gets sucked into. And in June 1942, Rommel's forces overtake what's called the Gazala Line, which is a big defensive line south of Tobruk, and he's taken prisoner, and like so many thousands of others, he's shipped off from North Africa to a camp in Italy, because Libya is an Italian colony. So even though they're captured by the Germans, the Germans have to hand over the prisoners to their Italian allies.
- [06:54]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
I don't want to intentionally jet over this experience too much because obviously it's a very significant part of his wartime experience. But I think it's fair to say that a lot of your account then focuses on his life and his friendships in the camps. So I wonder if there's anything else you'd like to say on the North Africa part of his story before we move on.
- [07:14]
Malcolm Gaskill
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the interesting thing about Ralph's memoir is there's things he talks about in great detail, particularly the scape and the things he doesn't really talk about at all, and they were the things that really needed to be reconstructed. So he doesn't actually say in his memoir he doesn't say anything about being a North Africa, but there are some notes that are written on the back of photographs and so on. So one of the things about Ralph and about all the men who were taken prisoners, that they experienced this as a really intense humiliation. So there's a lot that runs through the book about masculinity and about male friendship and about ideas of honor and integrity and so on, and the things that we can still identify with, but they are still of the previous generation. They are still, I think, think felt by men and by soldiers in particular, much more intensely. So that when men are taken prisoner on the Gazala Line, they are, first of all, astonished. They can't actually believe it's happened to them. But secondly, they feel a great sense of shame. And this shame actually reverberates through the rest of the war. And even when they come home in 1945, because they feel that they haven't quite done their bit. And there's something, especially about the soldiers that end up in Italy, both those who are prisoners of war and those who go to fight in Italy, that they were in a kind of a sideshow and that the British public don't quite recognize the contribution that they made.
- [08:40]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Yes, I think that disconnect is really interesting. Not just the sort of sacrifice of what these men are giving up or experiencing in terms of that sense of shame and unable to participate or feeling out of things, but the reality of the conditions as well. I think what Ralph and his comrades go through is really stark and not understood at home.
- [08:59]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, yeah, I mean, the conditions, obviously, you know, on the front line in the desert are fairly grim, but they are very quickly plunged into really terrible conditions. First of all, up in the camps, in some transit camps up in Derna and Benghazi, where the conditions are beyond primitive and many of the men have dysentery. They're crawling with lice, they're hungry, intensely thirsty. And they are conditions which actually, when they get into the camps in Italy, they do gradually improve, largely thanks to the Red Cross and the delivery of parcels, which really prevents them starving at one point towards the end of 1942. But they really are. Nothing could have possibly prepared them for this. So one of the things is the ship that takes them over from North Africa to Brindisi in the heel of Italy. The conditions on the ship are absolutely inhumane. The men are really just thrown into the hold. And again, many of these men are extremely sick, especially with dysentery, as I said, and absolutely terrified as well, because The Allies or the British are torpedoing and bombing Italian ships, and often they know that there are prisoners of war down there. But, you know, this is. These are very hard decisions to be made. So it's incredibly brutal. So this is a particularly terrifying, as well as appallingly uncomfortable journey over to Italy.
- [10:22]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So we've had this wartime experience in North Africa. He's shipped to Italy, he arrives at Camp 65, and his life begins as a sort of prisoner of war in situ, I suppose. Can you tell us a little bit about Ralph's status? There's really quite a clear hierarchy in these camps. Where does he fit in? And can you take us closer to this strata?
- [10:42]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, again, one of the things about Ralph, because he is a slightly enigmatic man and doesn't completely reveal everything, one of the things that sort of struck me quite late on actually reading lots of other accounts and lots of other. Other letters and diaries, mostly in the Imperial War Museum, about. From prisoners who were in Camp 65, I realized he didn't actually say that much about food. And so many other men were absolutely obsessed with food. Some of the men in the diary team was all. Literally all they wrote about. So this really, like many other parts of the story, started to ring some little alarm bell that maybe there was something that Ralph was concealing. And so Ralph is a warrant officer. In fact, he actually. His promotion comes through from Sergeant while he is in the camp extraordinarily, and that the warrant officers in the camp are the elite, because the commissioned officers and the other ranks are separated into different camps. So there are no officers in the camp except for Padre and a medical officer. And even they come along a little bit later. So the warrant officers have the. Although they are not commissioned officers themselves, they have the role, they have the authority, they have the status, and with that, the privileges of officers as well. And it turns out that the warrant officers were actually resented and detested by the rank and file of the men in the camp precisely because they were seen as having these privileges. They got better food, they had better living accommodation. And also they were seen as slightly in cahoots with the Italian authorities. And there was something slightly dubious about the fact that, you know, that they weren't resisting in a way that some men would want them to have done. And Ralph is also military policeman, so he becomes head in his sector in the camp of the police. That gives him even more authority. Ralph is a man who definitely likes status, and so this gives him everything that he wants. But, of course, we never knew anything about this, and he never writes about this, but that it is very clear from other sources that this is the kind of life that he lived in the camp.
- [12:44]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
I think we're getting a real sense from you here of how painstaking it is to go behind Ralph's words and using other men's testimonies, trying to stitch together the full picture of this existence. And before we go into sort of, I guess, the next stage of talking about escape and so on, can we hear more from you on you following in his footsteps to Italy and how that was for you?
- [13:05]
Malcolm Gaskill
So having found Dom Bolognese, the president of the Camp 65 Association, I was desperate to get out there and, you know, I was writing another book, the book we talked about last time I was on the pod, the rune of all witches, that I was still kind of finishing this. So I, you know, I couldn't really start writing another book. And then of course, the pandemic came along, along, and I couldn't get out there. So it didn't really go out there until 2021 and met Dom, of course, and we immediately hit it off. But most importantly, got to see Camp 65 because the site is still there and many of the buildings are still there. And this is an extremely ghostly and haunting place. And I think this is another for listeners. You might be confused about why I'm writing about the Second World War having been written about 17th century Massachusetts. Any of the listeners who read that book will know that the epilogue is really about me going out to Springfield, Massachusetts, and rather channeling these ghosts of the people that I was writing about and getting a feel for the land. Well, what happens at Camp 65 is exactly the same. This place is absolutely teeming with ghosts. Now, I don't mean that, you know, very literally. I don't believe in an actual restless spirits of the dead, but this sense of what historians do with their imaginations, you know, part of it is grubbing about in archives, in fact, most of it is, but the rest of it is actually walking around. One historian once called it the archive of the boots, where you just have to walk and feel and imagine. And Camp 65 is extraordinary for that modern Springfield. You have to see through all the high rise buildings to try and imagine what it was like there in 1635. But not Camp 65, because that site is there and you can go into the buildings and you can really feel that place where those men were in the mid-1940s and looking at the same
- [14:56]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
valley or the same tree as they would have Done and maybe wrote about in their own diaries or captured in pictures.
- [15:01]
Malcolm Gaskill
Yeah, exactly. Same. And there is this actual tree on the horizon that men wrote about that's still there. I mean, again, because you're dealing with 80 years, not, you know, 350 years. So much is still there. And of course, the other part of that is that there are people who are still alive who remember the camp. You know, not to jump the gun in the story, but even some people who remembered Ralph, which was really probably the most extraordinary discovery of the whole journey.
- [15:26]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
They are extraordinary. I can attest to that, having read it. And, you know, it's sort of. There are moments where you sort of get goosebumps at the permeability of this picture, of seeing things through the same. Through the same eyes. It's remarkable.
- [15:38]
Malcolm Gaskill
That's what I hoped for.
- [15:40]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Yeah. Well, it really comes across, and you've mentioned the theme already of sort of a friendship. You've mentioned your own journey with Dom as you go on the road in pursuit of Ralph. We haven't yet been fully brought in. Charlie West. So let's turn to Ralph and Charlie's story in Camp 65. What happens there?
- [15:57]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, Charlie west, he is another warrant officer. He's essentially a sergeant pilot in the Royal Air Force and another regular from before the war. And he really is the most remarkable character in his own right. He is very much the leader, I think, of the two of them, Ralph follows. He's a sort of a rebellious, incredibly tough man, absolutely restless in his curiosity and in his determination to escape. And, in fact, he ended up in Camp 65 because he took the nascent SAS in on their very first mission at the end of 1941. And of those six SAS planes that went in on the very, very first mission, one of the planes was shot down. And Charlie west was flying that plane. And he is very badly injured, but he is well treated by the Germans in hospital, and he does make a remarkable recovery. And that's how he ends up in Camp 65. And they. They are very contrasting characters, a bit like me and Dom in some ways, but they are also very fortuitously complementary, and they do see eye to eye. And they also, again, a little bit like Dom and I, we discovered there is this almost telepathic thing going on where they know what the other one is thinking and therefore they know what to do. And there's an awful lot of fun in going on a road trip when you can, you know, anticipate someone else's movements and their thoughts. And that was Another way in which I think that our journey of discovery, our road trip mirrored theirs.
- [17:33]
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- [19:00]
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- [19:29]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So good, so good, so good.
- [19:32]
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- [19:42]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
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- [19:43]
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- [19:45]
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- [19:59]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So Charlie too then has this sort of illustrious road to the camp. Once they're there, they want to escape. They're in this relatively privileged position within the camp, obviously acknowledging that there's still immense hardship there. How is that perceived more broadly in the camp? How can they go about it realistically?
- [20:16]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, one of the things is that we have a kind of myth about prisoner war camps, particularly because of Colditz and other, you know, films and books like the Great Escape and the Wooden Horse and so on. We've got this idea that everyone is always constantly trying to escape. That is far from the truth. A very, very small minority actually want to escape. And they are often resented by the other men because they feel that that just causes inconvenience for them because the Italians or the Germans are constantly having to, you know, turn the camp upside down to look for them and have, you know, roll calls and so on, and also inflict punishments for men escaping. So that there is this hostility towards escapers in many quarters and goes against that myth that we have. But for those who actually do want to escape, if you've got connections and you can get hold of escape equipment and you can get hold of food and compasses and maps and you can, you know, tw all sorts of arms and call in all sorts of favors, then that puts you in the very best position to get out and ultimately to stay out as well, which is the greater part of the challenge of escaping. It's making it home, which is relatively few men do compared to those who actually escape.
- [21:29]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
I think that for Ralph and Charlie, it's sort of underpinned by this friendship. They're very much in it together, aren't they? Can you take us into their first attempt and how that goes?
- [21:42]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, one of the things they've been building radio, which is another kind of separate story, and it does ultimately come to fruition. But they are always into and onto something. They're always doing something. And this is really, again, driven by Charlie. But escape is always on their minds. But it's very hard in the winter, in the winter of 1942, they're thinking about it. But hungry men find it difficult to escape. It's quite difficult even for them to accumulate enough food. So they wait till the spring. They're in the March, early March 1943. And Charlie, extraordinarily, has discovered a way of dimming the lights throughout the camp by cutting through one of the main electricity cables. And he guesses correctly that this won't arouse suspicion because the electricity supply, often there are often outages. And the electricity supply is not great to the camp, so the lights are always dimming. But he discovers that he can control it. So that's what they do on this night of 3rd March 1943. They get a little team of the warrant officers just like them, the men who will be sympathetic, the men who are on this side, the men who have often helped supply them. And they cut through, they dim the lights, they crawl out and they cut through the wire, or rather they cut through, but it's a bit, it's actually quite difficult in the end they climb over, but they do get clean away and what they are trying to do. And again, this is one of Charlie's madcap ideas which he says, you know, we've got to try it because no one's ever tried it before. That's the reason often not to do things, but not for Charlie West. And the plan is that they are going to try and get back to Brindisi, where the ship originally came in from North Africa, steal a German transport plane and fly it to Switzerland. Because the big problem in the south of Italy is that you're 600 miles from your nearest land border, which is Switzerland, so you can't really walk it. And Charlie says, well, the only thing we can really do is fly. So that's what they set off to do. Of course, like all great, best laid plans of mice and men, it doesn't quite go to plan, particularly because Charlie has malaria. But they live cheek by jowl as they do for many, many months subsequently. And there's a special kind of friendship in that. It's not obviously matey. In his memoir, Ralph never refers to Charlie by his first name. He's a stiff stuffed shirt, you know, and it's not that kind of touchy feely friendship. It's not a bromance, you know, that we might think of, it might be today. It's reserved, but it is solid and they absolutely depend upon each other with their lives. And I think that's a very, very special thing.
- [24:24]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
It's a very powerful thing that comes through in your book. To divert from their story just briefly, I think you mention about their reserve, or particularly your great uncle's reserve, is that that gave him a very interesting post war reputation or at least coloured others perceptions of him. And I think one thing that really comes through strongly in your book is that while you can read the story with admiration, their recklessness and bravery and so on, the post war reality that some people met, you can't control how people are Going to perceive you.
- [24:56]
Malcolm Gaskill
I suppose this is what biographers have to. To do, because this is a. This is a sort of biography. It's just not of somebody who is well known. And it harder in some ways because the sources are that much more fragmented. But one of the questions running through the research of this and the writing of it is kind of, what is a life? And how might we write about it? How do we present ourselves to the world? How do others perceive us? We all have many facets. We all behave differently in different contexts. And, you know, actually, when you look at Ralph, it's no different from that. So he did have this perception because it's very important to remember that he didn't have children. And so that, you know, if you have children in a. In a family story, you get this kind of legacy. And, you know, there's a certain way of remembering somebody through the next generation. Ralph, it's like this. It cuts off. And people didn't like him very much. I think Charlie west was an enormously attractive, likable character. And he has family that remember him well. And he was just. I think he's actually a really lovely. Although incredibly tough, as is revealed in the book, especially later in the war, where he had to make some terrible decisions. But Ralph is just rather, perhaps a bit pretentious, a bit selfish, a bit standoffish, emotionally quite cold. And the people that really remember him well are my mother and my mother's cousin, who I said, I got the memoir off in the first place. My mother didn't like him very much, and my mother's cousin really didn't like him. So there are Italians who. Well, at least one who remembers him extremely fondly. But that was another way that I think he'd reinvented himself in Italy. And somehow in himself, he found something where he could be perhaps relaxed. I don't know. A nice guy. Came across differently. But when he came home, I think he was very fretful and anxious and dissatisfied and probably felt certain kind of thwarted ambition and the rest of it. And I think that that made him sort of perhaps dislikable. But then, you know, I never wrote this book intending anybody to particularly like him. As you say, he's complicated, and we all are in our own way. And he presented different facets to the world at different times. And that's to me why, although he is an everyman in many respects, he's also this rather complex, multifaceted individual, just like anybody else.
- [27:19]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Yes, a real testament to all the different parts of life. Lived. And I am jumping us around in the story. Apologies, I know we've got a lot of ground to cover. If we return to Ralph and Charlie, they are outside of Camp 65. They've managed to get over the wire, and as you say, they're living cheek by jowl. Charlie has again fallen ill. What does this mean for them over the forthcoming days? And if we can weave in how you were on their trail as well as you were discovering this part of the story?
- [27:48]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, it really means that they don't keep to schedule and they are just running out of time. And running out of time really means running out of energy. It means running out of food. And is probably as well that they never made it to Brindisi, because I think that they would have been immediately shot the second that they'd got into that German air base. But they are. They are massively slowed down. Of course, they can only really travel by night. They hide out in the day in drainage culverts under fields and in also in farmers outhouses. And it rains constantly. They are slowed down. They're absolutely caked in margins. They're soaked through. And I think that their spirit is not broken. But, you know, they do lose some morale on that journey. And they also start out pretty gung ho and they write these rules for themselves. You know, never go near farm buildings, only travel at night, never go on roads and so on. They break all these rules. Gradually everything goes out the window. So they start having encounters with people that they can't trust and that they, you know, they don't know what's going to happen now, whether the Caribbean area are going to come and arrest them and they're going to be woken up with a point of a bayonet or whatever. So all this starts to go wrong and they really just fall behind. I think they even start to feel that almost inevitably their luck will completely run out and that they will be apprehended.
- [29:07]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Just to pick up on one moment I really enjoyed in your book, there's a moment with some broccoli. I wonder if we could bring that over the.
- [29:13]
Malcolm Gaskill
Oh, yeah. Well, this is an extraordinary. Again, I didn't really answer the other part of your question. It's about me tracking those. So Dom and I do get in the car and we do go along the trail as much as we can, and we go along a road that's pretty much parallel to where they would have gone overland. But that in the end, their track across country and our track on the road did converge, and they converge At a town called Joya del Colli, which is where Sylvester Stallone is from, his family. Sylvester Stallone, the Salone family are all the honorary citizens of Gioia. Anyway, that's by the by. But at Gioia they are in a town. Now this is disastrous to be in a town because they just find they can't avoid it. They haven't got the energy to skirt round it, so they end up there. So they have to cross a railway bridge, they end up in the town and this is where they very, very nearly get caught for the first time. But that they are very hungry and that they discover. Walking along the railway siding, Ralph discovers that he's in the middle of a vegetable patch. Because during the war the Italians are turning over all the land to cultivation to feed the war effort. Ralph picks up this broccoli and starts eating this broccoli out of the ground immediately and picks loads, then Charlie picks some and they're carrying it in their battle dress jackets and so on. And they subsequently, you know, they eat this broccoli and cook it and so on. But when we went there, Dom and I, we were trying to work out where they'd come in, so. And suddenly realized there's the broccoli field full of broccoli, just as if we've just slipped through a kind of a wormhole in time. And exactly where they were looking at the, you know, the genetic descendants of the broccoli that they ate, you know, 80 years earlier, which is again just the most spine tingling moment just to really feel that you've slightly slipped back or that the two parallel worlds have actually bumped into each other.
- [31:03]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Another remarkable echo for sure. So we'll get back to their story. It does run out. They get returned to the camp. What sort of treatment awaits them? And what does this mean for potential escapes in the future?
- [31:15]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, there's a little bit of comedy comes in there. I think that the other warrant officers are absolutely delighted. They sit around, tell the stories. You don't know what the other prison ordinary prisoners felt, but I know from other sources that they were very much down on escapes. They didn't lift morale. It just made them feel that they'd caused inconvenience and was actually quite a selfish thing. So it's not quite what we'd expect. The Italian authorities, I mean, you find this in all camps there tends to be a division between the carabinieri who are like paramilitary policemen, who are extremely brutal and highly competent, and the army camp authorities who are generally fairly lenient. But sadly can't really control the carabinieri, so you've got these dual authorities. So the carabinieri, quite rough on them, but not as rough as they are on some other escapers, again, I think, because of their authority that they have. But amongst the army, amongst the commandant and the normal soldiers, there's a sort of. A. Sort of an amused kind of weariness, I think, about escapers, and they bring them back. So actually, really there's a little bit of solitary confinement, but they are let go and they just get back to their usual, you know, the mischief that they were up to before they escaped and constantly thinking about more escapes. But also they get on with the building of this radio, which they don't get working in Camp 65, but they do get working a bit later on in the story.
- [32:36]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Well, let's move on, then. Obviously, there's a big moment coming in terms of what happens in Italy. That means that these prisoners are moved. It's a big change for them. Can you take us into this next part?
- [32:47]
Malcolm Gaskill
So prisoners in southern camps, including Camp 65 Gravina, are gradually being moved northwards in Italy because the Allied invasion has begun in Sicily and then into the mainland. And so the war is really pushing the prisoners out of the south. So the Camp 65 prisoners, they're moved all over the place, but a lot of them are moved up to a camp at a place called Piano Karelia, which is near a seaside resort called Chiavari on the Ligurian coast, bit along from Genoa. That's where we are roughly. Any, if you know your Italian geography, we're basically in Genoa and this is a much nicer camp, really. But then, because thanks to the Red Cross, the conditions are generally better in most camps in early 1943 compared to 1942. So they moved up there. But there is this sense that the end of the war is coming and that Mussolini is deposed in July 1943, and that really makes them think the war's about to end and that really the armistice is coming and men are in high spirits and they think they're all going home. And in fact, Ralph writes home to his life. The only letter that survives from Ralph to his wife Flo, back in Doncaster, which basically says, you know, hints. He says, you know, Flo, you better get my clothes ready, because I think I'll be needing them soon. And it's incredibly poignant because he's not going to see her for another two years, nearly two years. And that was, of course, the story of many men at that time. So that the Italians do surrender and the arms to sign in September 43. But the Germans arrived. The Germans have flooded into through northern Italy, and they quickly take over the camp, as they did in so many other camps in northern Italy. The Germans are incredibly short of manpower. They certainly don't want these soldiers marauding out the camps. So they start the process of putting them onto cattle trucks and shipping them up through the Brenner Pass into the Reich. And that's what happens to Ralph. Ralph and Charlie, still together all this time again, thick as thieves. And they end up in the same cattle truck heading north in that sort of late summer, early autumn of 1943.
- [34:54]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Now, I do want to obviously leave some of the story for people to discover in the book. And what comes next really is remarkable. But I want to ask about you quote that it's called a strange alliance of POWs in Italy after the armistice. There is a strange alliance then between local people, local Italians, and then escaped prisoners. And Ralph and Charlie really do experience this, this strange alliance, don't they? What can you tell us about this?
- [35:18]
Malcolm Gaskill
Hopefully, one of the sort of dramatic impetuses in the book is about reversals. You know, men are thrust into war, they have this experience, everything changes for them. They kind of grow up and they suddenly become incredibly worldly wise, often in a. In a very tragic way. But one of the great reversals for so many escaped prisoners of war, those who actually walked out of the camp camp at the armistice, because I should just say there's 80,000 prisoners, Allied, British and Commonwealth prisoners in Italy at the time of the armistice. And 50,000 of those just walk out. And even though they're told to stay put, they just leave. And it sometimes is referred to as the greatest escape playing on the Great escape, because there's 50,000 men now, many of those are recaptured, but 18,000 of them never are. And what so many of those 18,000 discoveries is this fantastic reversal, which is that they hated the Italians, had hated them even more than the Germans. And in fact, the Germans hated the Italians. They hated the fact they were having to pick up the pieces of Mussolini's vainglorious imperial ventures into North Africa and so on. There was this Anglo Saxon respect between the Germans and the British that the British and the Italians didn't feel. However. However, what these 18,000 men who were never recaptured discovered is that the Italian civilians were the most incredibly brave and generous and selfless and loving people that they'd ever encountered in their lives. So this immense reversal in their opinions of the Italian People because of the sacrifices that these ordinary Italians made to shelter at huge, huge risk to themselves and their families and their property to shelter these British prisoner war, often right to the end of the war. And, of course, this was Ralph's experience, too.
- [37:09]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
You already alluded to the life that he's able to sort of live there while essentially still in hiding in a form of captivity almost. He's a very different person. He sees out the war, he's able to return home again. We might leave those elements for listeners to discover in the book and these relationships that he forges. But I think, think just as we begin to sort of wrap up this conversation, you've already alluded to it already, the sense of this story, this life, then boiled down through filters of family law to become, oh, yes, Uncle Ralph, he was a prisoner of war in Italy. He escaped from a train. These two sentences potentially representing this vast story. I just wonder if you can give us a sense of your journey, your whole journey, in putting together together this life for this book.
- [37:58]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, it's. It's hard to sum up, but let's just say it pretty much took over my life for about seven years. So on and off. I mean, not absolutely continuously, but certainly in the last three or four years. I was constantly going to Italy, constantly digging up stories in archives, and was totally immersed in this man's life. Now, as a child, I can remember my grandmother told me just what you just said, that he's a prisoner war, that he'd been sick and their family had looked after him. Well, I would never have guessed at the age of seven that I would end up in that house and that the same family would still be living there and that they would welcome me with exactly the same enthusiasm that once they welcomed Ralph. I mean, that's a truly almost miraculous thing, but that's all I knew. But of course, by the end, I knew so much more, I think, than actually his. Ralph's own wife knew. I think I know him better than actually anybody. Doesn't seem arrogant, but I hope he doesn't, because I think he was reserved. And I got behind all that through the archives and through meeting other people. And so I see all his facets. There is something else crucial to add in here, though, and I'm sure this is true of everyone who's ever written a biography, is that the more you know, the more you become aware, very acutely aware, of all the things that you can't know and that you don't know and you never know, because you become very Conscious of somebody's private life. Now, some of this was revealed, including by letters written by Ralph in Italian to his friends in Italy, which I found in an archive in America. I mean, it's just extraordinary. I could never have imagined it. So you do see this affectionate side of him. You do see this incredibly tender side to him. But then he clammed up again when he came home, as far as I can see, and that maybe there was no lasting effect. And that makes it even more surprising. Who knows? Maybe he just sort of, like so many men, he wanted to put the war behind him. And that although Charlie went out to his friends in Italy every year after the war, right up until the time he died in the 1980s, and he had really, really close friendships, I don't think Ralph ever did. And Ralph actually went off to Africa with floating. They left England too cold. There wasn't enough status for them, you know. And I think this is one of the things in my own family why neither of them remembered particularly fondly, because they were felt to be slightly pretentious in class terms and wanted to be someone, and that's how they lived out the rest of their lives.
- [40:31]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So in a story that contains multitudes, I feel like we sort of have to skip inevitably over vast swathes of Ralph's story here. We've hopefully given a flavour of his story that's contained in those pages today. And I wanted to sort of end on the sense of it being called the Glass Mountain. And, Malcolm, can you expand on that idea as how you came to that as a title for your book?
- [40:52]
Malcolm Gaskill
Well, I suppose it's something all historians find. You're sort of looking backwards through this lens, which is clouded, and you're trying to see as clearly as possible, but you know that. That the past is on the other side of it and actually is an illusion, doesn't exist anymore. So The German writer W.G. sebald wrote about this, and he described it as a glass mountain, this huge bulking thing that we look through, which is transparent, but actually not that transparent. And so Seabout said, our concern with history is a concern with preformed images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere. And when memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain. That's what Ciebau said. And so that's where I lifted my title from that quote. But I thought it perfectly summed up many what it's like to be a historian at all about writing about anything, but especially given this is about memory. And that was something that Seabo was talking about, specifically personal memory, that it felt particularly appropriate for trying to tell Ralph's story. It's interesting you're saying about, you know, you apologize for sort of skipping about, but. But originally, I tried to structure it many, many different ways. The structure of the book was the hardest thing, especially weaving the modern narrative in with the wartime one. In the end, I just kept the wartime one as straight and chronological as possible. But there's a really good book by a guy called Roger Lewis, which is a biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And he quotes the French theorist Roland Barthes talking about the French historian Jules Michelet. And he says that when he wrote about the history of France, he didn't try to write a narrative. He wrote what he called an organized network of obsessions, which was this sort of map of things. Right? And actually, that's what lives are like. When we remember our own lives, we don't think episodically. When you remember something from your past, you don't start at your birth and work force. We get flashes and impressions. And especially when you discover things about somebody, you don't discover it in chronological order. You discover it all over the place. And so, although I didn't end up writing this organized network of sessions, I think that idea of biography not being able to capture everything, but also being this sort of patchwork of things that suddenly sort of appear here. I'm mixing my metaphors now, but, you know, these kind of flashes of things here and there and lots of darkness in between. And that's kind of how it felt to research it. And I think actually it's also an accurate representation of what. What Ralph's life and any life is, is really like in remembering it. It's a mess.
- [43:27]
Eleanor Evans
That was Malcolm Gaskell speaking to Eleanor Evans. Malcolm is the author of the Glass Mountain Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy. You can listen to the other conversation that Malcolm mentioned in this episode on a 17th century witch trial on the History Extra feed. Just search for a forgotten witch hunt. And in New England.
- [43:59]
Malcolm Gaskill
Hello, America. It's your new favorite podcast here.
- [44:02]
McDonald's Announcer / James from No Such Thing as a Fish
Yes, It's James and Andy 24 of the British podcast no Such Thing as a Fish.
- [44:08]
Malcolm Gaskill
That's right. We do facts. We do weird facts, fun facts, facts you've never heard before. James, give us a fact.
- [44:13]
McDonald's Announcer / James from No Such Thing as a Fish
Did you know you may be able to cure chronically blocked noses with a snot transplant?
- [44:19]
Malcolm Gaskill
Lovely, lovely fact.
- [44:22]
McDonald's Announcer / James from No Such Thing as a Fish
If you want to hear us, go to wherever you get your podcasts and search for no such thing as a fish.
- [44:27]
Malcolm Gaskill
That's right. We'll see you there.