Claude H. McLaughlin (on left)
Seventy years ago my dad was one of more than
two thousand prisoners of war who escaped from Camp 59, an Italian
prison camp on the edge of the Abruzzi mountains in the small town of
Servigliano. My husband, Duncan, and I are about to embark upon a
personal journey to roughly retrace his steps into hiding and out again.
Unfortunately we don't know exactly where he went on the night of Sept 14, 1943
when he set off with the others in defiance of Field Marshall Montgomery's
order for all prisoners to "stay put" in the camps when the Italians
recapitulated and for the most part threw down their arms.
Montgomery's thinking was that it would be easier to liberate the prisoners than to have them wandering over the countryside looking for the British, Canadian and American troops that were supposed to be sweeping northward from the south e.g. Sicily, Palermo and Bari. His order was made in haste as the Allied campaign readily bogged down and the supposed liberation was long in coming. In fact prisoners in camps who followed the order were rounded up by the Germans and sent to Germany for the duration of the war. Fortunately the British medical officer representing prisoners at Camp 59, Captain M. Derek Millar, made the decision to defy the order.
Montgomery's thinking was that it would be easier to liberate the prisoners than to have them wandering over the countryside looking for the British, Canadian and American troops that were supposed to be sweeping northward from the south e.g. Sicily, Palermo and Bari. His order was made in haste as the Allied campaign readily bogged down and the supposed liberation was long in coming. In fact prisoners in camps who followed the order were rounded up by the Germans and sent to Germany for the duration of the war. Fortunately the British medical officer representing prisoners at Camp 59, Captain M. Derek Millar, made the decision to defy the order.
Through the years
my dad spoke of his experiences in general terms but as a child I have only
hazy memories, a few anecdotes which I will share later and no specific
details of his location or any names of those who helped him to survive. I did
ask him to record his experiences for the family shortly before he died.
Sadly he never had the chance because he suffered a massive stroke five days
after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery in Jan. 1995 when as a family we made
the difficult decision to take him off life-support. Immediately after his
surgery when I saw him in the recovery room, I wanted to ask him to tell me
specifically where he had been in hiding because I always entertained the
fantasy that I would somehow find the family or families who sheltered him for
nine long months before June 1944, when with the help of the Italian
partisans, he made it to the Allied airbase in Foggia
to reconnect with Allied troops.
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