Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Italian American in WWII Makes Escape from Germans Because he Speaks Italian
The ANNOTICO Report
Pasquale D'Amato, at 90, recounts an amusing story of a horrible experience being captured in Italy by the Germans as an American GI.
How to "speak" Italian helped Amato in a ruse to ESCAPE the POW camp, but advice from an Italian civilian as to how to "walk" Italian KEPT him out. :)
D'Amato Makes Great Escape
Bristol Press - Bristol, CT, USA
By Jennifer Abel
January 22, 2007
Editor's note: It's been nearly 62 years since the end of World War II. Living veterans of the war are few and far between. Veterans who served time in a German prisoner of war camp are even harder to find, and those who successfully escaped from POW camps harder still. This story of such an escape is one of a series of articles on World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War veterans from Bristol, Plymouth and Burlington.
BRISTOL - Pasquale D'Amato, will celebrate his 90th birthday on Jan. 25. On his 27th birthday, in 1944, he was in Italy with other members of the Army's Third Ranger Battalion.
Five days later, Pfc.
D'Amato was captured by the Germans.
"We were supposed
to march in and take Cisternia, but after about eight hours of heavy fighting
we were hopelessly outnumbered," D'Amato recalled.
The Americans
surrendered. D'Amato and his fellow prisoners spent two days imprisoned in an
old building on the outskirts of town. However, heavy Allied bombing raids made
it too dangerous to stay there, so the Germans moved their captives to the town
of Albano, where they spent another four days in a ramshackle building before
being trucked to Rome for a propaganda parade.
"They had cameras
to film us, the 'first Americans to march through Rome,'" D'Amato
recalled. "Some Italian peasants cried when they saw us.
D'Amato's first prison camp was about 15 miles north of Rome. He spent a short time there before being moved to another camp near the city of Florence.
"My buddy Jim
Adamson and I - he died about three years ago - we studied how things were so
we could escape." Their original plan was to escape at night, until they
learned that anyone leaving their barrack at night was shot on sight.
D'Amato soon observed that Italian civilians from the surrounding countryside
did work in the camp. Furthermore, the Italians did not have to show passes to
the German guards.
"I was pretty
fluent in Italian," D'Amato said. However, there was no way he and Adamson
could have passed for Italian civilians in their American Army uniforms, and
they could hardly go shopping for new clothes.
"There were some
South African prisoners who'd been in camp a lot longer than any of us,"
D'Amato recalled. "They wanted to trade their clothes for our uniforms.
Their clothes were full of lice." D'Amato and Adamson made the
"lousy" trade. They shaved their faces with the only razor blade in
camp, property of their company commander.
There were 14 barracks
in their prison camp. The two men stealthily made their way from barrack to
barrack when the German guards turned their backs. At last, they reached Hut
13, in front of which lay an old piece of tile pipe.
The two men grabbed the
pipe and tried to look like workmen. D'Amato did the talking for the two of
them; he instructed Adamson to simply nod and say "si, si" to
whatever was said.
They had to walk 150
yards to the camp entrance. Near the gate they ran into an unexpected obstacle:
a work crew of five Italian teenagers overseen by a German guard. The Italians,
recognizing an escape attempt in progress, dropped their shovels and gawked,
but they said nothing and their German overseer didn't notice.
"At the gate, I
told the guard in Italian that we had to deliver this pipe to a storage shed
nearby," D'Amato said. The guard opened the gate and the two prisoners
walked out with a desperately nonchalant air. They laid the pipe next to a
broken-down German truck, grabbed some lumber off a nearby pile, and began to
carry it across an open field, never looking back.
"It was three hours before the next roll call. I knew the Nazis wouldn't
miss us until then."
Around the time that
roll call took place, Adamson and D'Amato were walking by a main road. Two civilian
men working in a nearby field hailed them, and one of them said, "I'll bet
you escaped from the prison camp!" The Italian recognized them because of
how they walked; he gave the escapees the valuable advice that they were
walking too fast. Italians wouldn't walk that fast, he advised, so slow down
and take it easy if you want to stay out of German hands.
The two headed for the
hills at a more leisurely pace and began walking south, hoping to eventually
reach the Allied lines. It took them five months to do so.
Meanwhile, back in the
States, D'Amato's wife, Clara, had no idea what had happened to her husband.
"The Germans never told the Red Cross they captured Pat," she said.
On March 11, 1944, she received a telegram: the Secretary of War regretted to
inform her that her husband had been missing in action since Jan. 30. It would
be another three hellish months before she learned her husband was alive and
safe.
By the time Clara
received that first telegram, her husband and Adamson were living in a cave
with five South African soldiers. The weather was too poor to travel. Sometimes
civilians would bring them food; other times they would steal what they could
from nearby farms.
"One name I'll
never forget," D'Amato said. "Emilia Fiorenti. She'd bring us food
when she could, Her friend told her, 'if you get caught the Germans will shoot
you!' But she said 'I'm an old woman. I'm not worried.'"
"After the war I wrote her a letter," Clara said. "I wanted to
thank her, and send her some chocolate - she said she loved chocolate. But the
letter was sent back, marked person unknown. We never found out what happened
to her."
D'Amato learned, much later, that two of his South African cavemates were later captured by the Germans and shot. "Being in civilian clothes, we could have been shot as spies," he said.
By the end of May,
D'Amato and Adamson were in a town called Allumiere. That's where they heard
that Rome was in American hands. "That seemed too good to be true,"
he said.
The townspeople soon learned they had two Americans in their midst, "and the ovation we received was something I'll always remember."
They saw two officers
and a private - in American uniforms - riding by in a jeep, and were so happy
they cried, from joy and relief. They identified themselves and were brought to
Civitavecchia for interrogation and debriefing. "They burned our
civilian clothes to kill the lice," he said. "Otherwise I would have
kept them as a souvenir."
American policy was that
soldiers who had been captured by the enemy and managed to escape were sent
home rather than back to the front. D'Amato returned in June of 1944.
"I never used to
talk about this," he said, "but a couple of years ago I started
talking and it seems I can't stop. It must be because I'm getting old."
http://www.bristolpress.com/site/news.cfm?newsid
=17736353&BRD=1643&PAG=461&dept_id=10486&rfi=6
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