“Shivers running up and down my spine”

I have been very fortunate to have been provided with access to a book written by Keith Killby entitled “In Combat, Unarmed” and I was immediately gripped when I read the Foreword, written by Sir Nicholas Young, Chairman of the Monte San Martino Trust, in which he explained how he had been introduced to Keith Killby at a fairly informal gathering of men who had all been POW’s in Italy in World War II.

As he explained, most of them had all been in the camp (PG49) at Fontanellato where both my own father, and Nick’s, had been a POW, except Keith who had been in PG59 at Servigliano, and, on reading this excerpt, I too imagined myself in the same room “keeping very quiet, ears pinned back listening, shivers running up and down my spine.”

And how familiar the following words were to my ears when Nick Young went on to write….

“My father, at that time 12 years dead, had also been in Fontanellato; these men had known him, talked with him, escaped into the Italian countryside with him. He had never seen them again, had told hardly a soul indeed about his adventures.”

Copyright © Monte San Martino Trust, 2013
Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Published by Monte San Martino Trust
Registered Charity No. 1113897
msmtrust.org.uk

How I wish I had been in that same room and, I’m sure like Nick, how I wish that my father had been amongst this small group of men that we could have all shared in their joint stories of life in those camps, maybe how they had all been captured and all their adventures after being released from prison at the time of the Italian Armistice. As well as all the mishaps of their journeys through Italy and, in my father’s case, his recapture and imprisonment in Stalag VIIA, Moosburg in Southern Bavaria, Germany.

So now my task is to find these missing pieces of the jigsaw and piece them all together hopefully so that, one day, I will be able to tell my Dad’s story of his participation in World War II.