Found my fathers working pass for a Italian pow to go and build the Du Toits Kloof pass. Were there passes given to the pow's in other camps ??
I'm no expert but don't see why not: * "In 1943 Italy overthrew Mussolini, and became a co-belligerent with the Allies. This did not mean any change in status for Italian POWs however, since due to the labour shortages in the UK and the USA they were retained as POWs there." (Wikipedia) * One hard-won Italian PoW-built road I know of here in Blighty is that linking Kinlochleven to South Ballachulish * And I suspect paroling prisoners outside camp for such work would have been somewhat less risky in South Africa ... ... If you've never read 'No Picnic on Mount Kenya' then perhaps you should as this bit from near the end of Chapter 1 probably rings true for your father's situation: It was not very difficult to escape from a PoW camp in East Africa, far easier probably than from any camp in Europe. On the other hand in Europe an escaped prisoner was not unduly conspicuous among the indigenous white-skinned population, road and rail facilities were far better and the distances to cover in order to get, for instance, from any point in Italy to the nearest neutral country, Switzerland, were far smaller. In East Africa the situation was reversed. It was extremely difficult to travel anywhere in a huge country where the European population before the war numbered less than twenty thousand, and where a white man walking along with a rucksack was as easily recognisable as an escaped prisoner as though he were labelled 'Escaped PoW'. The authorities knew this as well as we did. The camps in East Africa were guarded by African troops. This was both a handicap and an advantage to the prisoners. Black sentries do not behave as white ones would; they have quite different reactions and a quite different sense of responsibility. Sad accidents such as happened in PoW camps in East Africa would have been avoided by European sentries, who would have made life inside the fences less dangerous and escape far more difficult than it was. The African sentries were often easy to bribe with a few hundred cigarettes, a bottle of camp-made brandy or a handful of coins. I know of instances when they even helped escaping prisoners to raise the wires in order to allow them to pass through without getting entangled in the barbs. With European sentries the plan we adopted of marching out of the camp gate at midday would never have worked. Cheers, Steve
My father told us of things they made in the camp and the sentries sold it for them. Thats how they got money to buy things they needed.
