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Memories of an Italian Naval Signalman Part Four — From POW Camp at Geneiffa, Egypt to a POW Camp at Poona, India

Part four of an oral history interview with Mr. Artemio Ettore Torselli conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“In that place in Egypt, one morning, there usually was a British soldier at the gate and the Sergeants usually came in had got a tent or an office in the camp. Well just to be practical when we were in that camp there in Egypt one of our Petty Officers, he was from a submarine that was captured, he was bald, completely bald and to protect what he reckoned himself, from the strong sunshine he used to put some sort of oil on to it. There was a Sergeant, he used to come in to check the roll call in the morning. One day he said - oh, there was another Petty Officer, submarine Petty Officer that spoke English, he acted as interpreter - so one morning this Scottish Sergeant, about six foot tall, twenty years in the Army something like that, he said to the Petty Officer, ‘tell that so and so to put something to cover his head because he is dazzling with the sunshine with his completely bald head!’ At a different time this Sergeant, he asked our Petty Officer, he said, ‘What’s the matter with your men?’ he said, ‘why?’ ‘because you know they are all grinning and laughing’ and our Petty Officer said, ‘What do you expect?’ As it was tradition, this Sergeant he had got whiskers, ‘What do you expect with your whiskers, they look like handlebars on the old bike!’ He said, ‘Oh, alright.’ Nothing to worry about, we made the best of it shall we say.

Then one morning somehow, somebody had dumped big cases of uniform, shoes, tropical, by the gate and they said, ‘Right! Help yourself, get yourself dressed.’ ‘Ooh, what are they for?’ ‘get yourself dressed.’ They said, ‘Right, line up at the gate ready to go out.’ ‘Ooh, Lord’, we said, ‘wonder where we are going?’ We went to a station, not really, there was a train there on the rail, ‘Right on board’ and we went south. Naturally I’ve got an idea where we were going. We went to Suez, there we were put on board of a troopship and it just happened that morning that we got some papers and it was splashed on the first page of the paper, ‘A thousand German bombers had been over London during the night causing havoc.’ While we thought these chaps, what they are feeling, I was thinking of that. It was quite nasty. When we left the camp, I don’t know how, we got all the supply, food and everything first thing in the morning so somebody said, well they asked the Sergeant, the British Officer, ‘Where are we going?’ ‘I don’t know!’ So he said, how about taking the food and things like that just in case so we did, everybody took something and we took it with us. When we got to Suez we were going on board this ship, so we carried it on board and we gave it to the crews on board and we said, ‘You know if you cook it!’ ‘ooh, yes’. All the Merchant ships of the British Empire, shall we say from Suez they used to change the crews - only the British Officers on board, but they used to change the crews while they got the English crews or they used to have Chinese or Indian, well on board it was Indian cooks. So they cooked it for lunch time of course, we got pasta, Italian. They cooked it with milk and sugar! When we got it, ‘Ooh, Lord! They ruined it, it was something good.’ I don’t think there were any Italian people that used milk and sugar to cook.

Anyway we were in a hold on board a troopship and I don’t know what next, through the wall, if you touched the partition like that, it scorched your hand, it was bloomin’ hot down there and when we got boiling tea, if you drunk a bit it came out of your pores in sweat. Oh, it was horrible. Anyway so we said, our Officers they were on the top deck in cabins and we were in the hold, so we told the British Officer, please tell the cook to cook it not with milk and sugar but something tasty. Next day we get it! Laughter! I reckoned they tipped a cargo of pepper in the bloomin’ thing like that, to eat it - if you had a spoonful you had to drink a bit to swallow it. So we said, ‘Ooh, no more. Let us have something, it doesn’t matter what as long as we don’t have to suffer like that.’ And they, how can I say, well the British Officers they used to do travelling between India and Suez. We were all men. We behave humanly like men, and one morning, the Officers they were on the top deck in cabins, but they used to let us help on top deck to walk about to give some air because down there it just was …! One time we’d drinking water and it didn’t work. At the top of the staircase there was a sentry with a rifle and bayonet so we told him, ‘Alright’. They send down a Chinese member of crew but the when they sent him down his legs were trembling, he was frightened to death. He looked pretty afraid and then we had him down several times because the perishing tap stopped running and we used to say, ‘Oh, there’s the old boy, the old gent is coming down again, smile!’ We used to have a bit of fun like that.

One morning, one of our Petty Officers from the submarine, the interpreter, they said we’ll put a bit of white stuff around you on your shoulder so that you’ll be sort of free to come on board for any need of interpreting. Well one morning he goes up the stairway, on top of the stairway there must have been a new sailor on duty there, when he gets there this sailor gets the rifle and fixes the bayonet in front of him, he had a shock this Officer because he was reckoned to be free more or less. He told him, he said, ‘I am interpreter.’ This sailor, he didn’t want to know anything. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘call for an Officer.’ A British Officer came down and two or three Italian Officers, they came down to sort it out, they explained like that and the British sailor said, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t got any orders.’ Well, they all had a laugh and the British Officer said, ‘Forget it, let him through’ and the Italian Petty Officer said, ‘You silly sod, give me your bayonet and then we’ll see, I’ll get your gizzard out!’ Well, the way it went although they were laughing!

Well the temperature was killing. We actually hoped that some how a submarine based at Massaua, would fire a torpedo at that ship but actually we were grateful that it didn’t. Of course we realised when we got to India that quite a few of our submarines were sunk already and some of the crews were prisoners in India. So we said, ‘Oh, that’s why we didn’t get torpedoed because the poor devils were already Prisoners of War!’

We landed at Bombay. We came ashore and we were put in a big hut with a corrugated iron sheet roof. All of a sudden there was a hell of a racket on the roof, we wondered what was going on, well somebody looked out of the window and he saw there was some policeman with umbrella. He said, ‘Here, boys! Have you ever a policeman with the umbrella?’ It was a very sharp shower, it was what they call rainy time and there was this clatter on the roof like that. Of course then we got used to it and we were put on the train I think it was only a few hours journey, we got to, what the name? It was called Poona, which was then the Head Quarters of the British Army in India. It was a military post there and there were a couple of camps there and they were building others as well you see. There was a cinema place and some of us were allowed to go and see the picture because there were British men and they had got their families there. We went to the picture with the families, the children and we could buy monkey nuts - it wasn’t too bad. In this camp there was actually two camps, a real good camp and then another small one where our Officers where. Before we got there some English chap said, ‘When you get there you will see there is already an Italian General there’. We said, ‘You are nuts’ and when we got there, there was an Italian General right there! He was nabbed in Libya by a British patrol and there were quite a few of our Navy Officers as I said already in residence, they had been captured. I can’t remember exactly, perhaps there were less than 100 Officers, quite a few had been captured in Libya, in the desert, like that. They had got a small camp, there was a gate open to go in both camps and in the main camp I think we could have been, what 450, something like that. Well, they had got - the Officers had got civilian cooks, waiters and everything like that. Well, what happened, the British Command in India, they’d got some of the best cooks and waiters from the biggest Indian hotels, well I remember one day talking, he said, we get meals better than a Five Star Italian hotel in Rome. They’d got drinks, Italian drinks, English drinks, anything like that. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘can’t go wrong.’ We were, well it has never been know exactly, but we were over four hundred rescued and we made the whole camp, right there. We organised about four football teams. We used to play in the field you know, we had the football pitch right there.

One morning the British Sergeant at the roll call, he counted us and then he was puzzled by the look of him, he checked again and then our chap interpreter said, ‘What’s up Sarg?’ ‘Well’ he said, ‘four men gone!’ ‘Oh, how?’ ‘I don’t know. They’ve gone!’ Eventually they found out that they had slipped under the barbed wire in a place in a shadow and ‘Right, they’ve gone, they’ve gone!’

Well, one morning there was an Italian Major a submarine commander, he was in charge there, because in every camp there was an Italian senior officer or Petty Officer if there was no officer, in charge. Well this Capitane, Italian rank, Lieutenant Colonel, at the roll call a couple of chaps were a bit late, they weren’t there ready and lined up, so when they came he said, ‘I’m not surprised your ship has been sunk with a crew like this!’ Well, that was the worst thing that anybody could hear! So as soon as we were counted and free I was walking to the next place, the next camp that was open, to see my Commander, First Officer, the one that got hold of my shirt. But two were running and they got to him before me so they stopped him, ‘Sir!’ ‘what’s the matter, boys?’ ‘Captain so and so said that with a crew like that we had on our ship it couldn’t do anything else but be sunk!’ Oooh, that got his temperature up, he said, ‘Alright boys I’ll see to that.’ A little while after he had got him on attention and what he said I wouldn’t dream about, I bet that chap, that Lieutenant Colonel was sorry he joined the Navy. He was a Neopolitan chap this other Commander and he couldn’t half say it blindingly clear, anyway so we … well, not too bad.

I learn a bit of English as I was charge of a small shop in the camp. There was an Indian tradesman came in every day, put little things, cigarettes, drinks, things like that and I used to give orders like that. But from there, when we changed camp I ended up, it wasn’t a little shop, it was a bigger shop. Because their Officers by International regulations were allowed so much of their wages, of their salary to be accounted when they returned over, so they had got quite a good shop, goods like that they used to buy clothes. I was in the kitchen for a good spell. In 1942 we ended up under the veranda outside the cook house, we had a pile of white turnips. Could have been 10 — 20 tons of them because we didn’t know how to do them, cooking them. But we got to a stage we didn’t know what to do with them. And from the Head Office that used to supply all the food like that we used to get four mutton carcasses for 600 men and as far as vegetable our contractors at Head Quarters they said they just can’t get anything else.

In the shop, that was quite a bit of a story, they used to order anything, shall we say shoes or tennis racquet or anything like that which the officers were allowed to buy. But between somebody we used to get barley and we used to ferment it in the distilling plant. That was all between friends until they found that somebody by mistake had put on the order form 144, a gross of cotton reel and they asked about it, ‘what the hell do they want all those for?’ So, from the Head Quarters or somewhere they said, ‘Steady now in what you order or what we supply because somebody will smell … In 1942 at Christmas a chap, distilled 100% proof drink and when somebody was walking by ‘Here, boy you want a drop of real good stuff?’ ‘yes!’ ‘Here you are a drop of that, 100%.’ And they would just drop on the floor perhaps they didn’t manage to get on the bed! “

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