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After about a couple of days there, we were taken to Capua, which is about 20 miles, in a truck. When we got to Capua, we noticed all these men grasping the barbed wire all around the perimeter of the camp and they were obviously captured in the desert. They had shorts, the same clothes that they were caught in — ragged, dirty, unshaven - they were the men from the 8th Army; Australians, New Zealanders, some Indians. Personally, I’d wondered what life was going to be like. I thought perhaps you’d be allowed to read books every day, of course no such thing! We were given a piece of cloth and a… it looked like a pea-shooter, and the men divided into groups of 8 I think. And with the pea-shooters if you put them together, telescopic, and, used the blankets together, you could form a tent and 8 men could sleep in it. The next morning when we got the idea and we’d got our heads down, once again absolutely starving…

Sue: Still nothing to eat?

Ron: No. When we got talking to some of the older members of the establishment, the camp, no food? And they said, at 11.00 o’clock you’ll get your roll and then about 5.00 o’clock, you’ll get your bowl of soup. When the bread arrived, in a blanket, we were given one roll each. It was nice bread, but it was like an English roll. And that was the morning ration. The old lags there said, well, you’ll learn to save a piece. Well the rolls disappeared and then, somewhere about 6.00 o’clock, we had to queue up, we had a billy can, or some container, an old clim tin they called them, and you were ladled out a container of soup. The trick was, which we learned later, was to not try and get in the front of the queue because the top of the containers that were ladled out were like hot water. All the goodness, the bits of cheese, the bits of meat, the fennels were in the bottom. And we kept saying ‘Stir! Keep stirring’. But that’s one of the things you learn, as a prisoner you got to know what to do. The next morning, the same again, the bread, the soup. And you did learn to save a piece of bread to eat with your soup and so on.

Red Cross parcels were non-existent at that time, but then they began to come in. You had to share them, one between two, and every tin had been punched open by their bayonets of the Italians because they thought anyone escaping would start storing food. So every tin you always had to eat there and then because it would go bad.

Then there was a big rumour that there was going to be an escape. Meanwhile we’d met Charlie Coward, he’d done a concert, an impromptu concert, in the evening and we’d got to know all about him.
Sue: This was still in Capua?
Ron: Yes, Capua. PG 66. Incidentally, they had football matches there. The old lags had organised football matches and they looked at our clothing, we had red patches all over — if we had Italian clothes we had red patches sewn in great big diamonds and squares. They said ‘we’ll have those’ to make football shirts. And we were very lousy in those days we used to count them — if you could down to about 30 a day, if you could pick off 30 from your shirt, you’d done well. You just had to do it every day. People used to say, if you put your shirt on the sand, you could see it moving.

And it was so boring, Italy, you didn’t do anything, you just waited for your soup and your roll to come round. In the daytime there was nothing; there were no books, no papers, nothing to do. You just walked around the camp, unless it was too hot and then you kept in the shade.

Sue: How long did you spend there?

Ron: I must have been in Capua about 3 or 4 months, I think. Then I was transferred to another Italian camp. That was in cattle trucks. I remember standing on the station, on the road outside the station, and we were pelted with rotten eggs and stones by the Italian women and the guards did nothing to stop them. We got to another camp on the Adriatic — in a place, I think it was called Masarata and we were always told that the rations, doesn’t matter where you were, your soup and your bread were exactly the same everywhere. When we got to Masarata, we realised you got twice as much soup, if you wanted it, and probably the bread was the same, and you had Red Cross parcels. There it was more comfortable. We weren’t there very long.

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Sue Craig on behalf of Ron Redman and has been added to the site with his permission. Ron fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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