Italian war prisoners whose attempt to escape Nanyuki camp ended in failure
The story of the Kamiti prison break and how they ended up in the plains of Mwingi is the stuff movies are made of. The escapees may have as well read Felice Benuzzi’s book No Picnic on Mount Kenya: A Daring Escape, A Perilous Climb, which is a story of war time capture and escape – interestingly their bid, too, was to head to Somalia.
“The idea of escaping is a vital factor in the mind of every prisoner,” writes Benuzzi, a law school graduate from Rome who had been captured as a prisoner of war (PoW) in World War II and taken to Nanyuki’s Camp 354 in 1941.
“Then one evening, stepping from his hut within the barbed wire-enclosed compound, he looked up to see a break in the clouds and the rising mass of Mount Kenya, its sharp summit silhouetted like a great snaggletooth,” Rick Ridgeway tells us in the introduction of that book, which is a story that challenges the very concepts of mountaineering and paints a picture of human determination.
Like the Kamiti prisoners escape, “Benuzzi and his comrades knew, even at the outset of their escapade, that permanent freedom is impossible. They are plotting what essentially will be only an interlude: When it is over they will have no choice but to return to the drudgery of their daily round”.
For a man who wanted to be a lawyer, but was thrown into a war by Benito Musolini, Benuzzi’s story is quite captivating.
Strange-looking thorn trees
The PoWs had been transported from Nairobi to Nyanyuki in a “cattle-truck coach”.
“On our left there was a wood of strange-looking thorn trees with smooth green stems (they could be acacia trees), on the right was a vast plain where in the midday haze the corrugated-iron roofs of hundreds and hundreds of barrack huts shimmered. Between the guard-towers one could divine the barbed wire fence.”
“The very sight of this encampment tumbled one’s heart into one’s boots. We stared as though mesmerised, but nobody dared utter aloud the question each put to himself: ``Yes, inside there; but for how long?”
Benuzzi knew that he could not escape alone and his idea – like that of the Kamiti Three – was to either reach a neutral country “or of living under a false name in occupied Somalia as many have done”.
Plotting a prison break, as we learn from Benuzzi, was not easy. “First, I wrote to my family asking them to send me my boots and my woollen clothing which had not been sold – vest, jerseys, and so on. I stopped smoking.”
The idea of scaling Mount Kenya and escaping to the other side was rather baffling, even by today’s standards.
Unlike the Kamiti Three who were close to each other before they were sentenced, Benuzzi faced the problem of getting the best person to sell his escape idea. “I reckoned that a party of three would be the best, which meant that I had to find two men willing to take the risk. Of these, one need not necessarily be a mountaineer because the actual climb could be attempted by two, while the non-mountaineer could stay at the base camp. His main job would be to assist at keeping watch in the forest on our way up.”
Benuzzi tells us how he approached a prisoner – whom he knew was a former mountain climber: “Have you ever thought about escaping and trying to climb (Mt Kenya)?”
Most of the prisoners in Nanyuki were by then under-nourished and could not reach Mt Kenya. “If they would feed us beef steak, we might consider it,” Benuzzi was told by the man he first approached. As he pressed the mountaineer further, he was told no. “It would be sheer madness to think of it seriously.”
Band of askaris
He would later say: “I realised then that I would find companions only among ‘mad men’ like myself.”
Finally, he got one ‘mad man’ as he enquired from other prisoners whether there were any mountaineers among them – without, of course, revealing his intentions. The man was called Umberto.
“He was an utterly reliable fellow and more than anything he regretted that with his lame leg he would never again be able to climb mountains.”
He then opened his heart to a third man, Mario: “A fairly good football player who had earned a high reward for a gallant exploit with a small band of askaris.” Mario was willing to be the man at the base camp.
The prisoners were usually allowed to make a mile walk up to the Equator signboard in Nanyuki. There was a dump site there and both Mario and Benuzzini started looking for iron and aluminium scrap metals to make two ice axes and a cold chisel. It was an exercise in futility – despite taking some scrap metal into the camp, they could not make the required tools.
Then an opportunity came out of the blues – and this could also be a lesson to wardens.
We are told that the Kamiti Three took advantage of some maintenance works; the Benuzzi group also took advantage of a group of artisans who had arrived at the camp.
“The minor works of maintenance in the PoW camps in Kenya were at this time carried out by Indian artisans, bare-footed chaps with dignified beards, whom I watched with particular interest. I soon discovered that during the lunch interval they left their tools in a store, the door of which was sometimes left open. It was an easy matter to enter the store one day, to collect two hammers and a chisel and to conceal them in my shirt and to saunter off nonchalantly... it was the first theft I had so far committed.”
All along, both Benuzzi and Mario made sure they were never seen together and “only met only by night”.
To a prisoner, information can arrive from unexpected quarters. Benuzzi came from The Akikuyu, a book by Italian priest Father F. Cagnolo’s.
It had a route map providing direction through the forest to Chogoria. The Kamiti Three were reportedly relying on Google Maps.
“I thought it would be worth trying to follow the river Nanyuki upstream towards its source. The route might be long but by adopting this plan we should at least avoid the main headache of escapees in Africa – the necessity of finding water,” Benuzzi notes.
Then, the third man was found. It was his barrack mate Giuan, a doctor. He was enthusiastic about the potential of conquering Mt Kenya as they escaped.
Then they started accumulating their food rations and looking for a chance to leave.
“Once a month a party consisting of those in need of dental treatment was sent over to Camp 359 Burguret... I happened to be suffering from a bad tooth and as I wanted to have this attended to before escaping, I applied to be allowed to accompany the next party,” Benuzzi states in the book.
Burguret was closer to the forest and he questioned the prisoners from that camp about the mountain routes. “The stories I heard made me shiver... prisoners of war are notorious for distorting most plain facts and for inventing fairy tales.” There were stories of buffalo and rhino attacks. Then the day came.
“It was not very difficult to escape from a PoW camp in East Africa, far easier probably than from any camp in Europe. (But in East Africa) it was difficult to travel anywhere in a huge country... where a white man walking along with a rucksack was as easily recognizable as an escaped prisoner.”
Easy to bribe
The Kikuyus used to call these escapees “Mbono”, and they would trade their wares with them. “The African sentries were often easy to bribe with a few hundred cigarettes, a bottle of camp-made brandy or a handful of coins,” Benuzzi recalled. “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.”
The camp had a gate and the keys were kept by a British Compound Officer. But normally, he would pass the key to a prisoner to open the gate. The escapees made imprints that were then used to make copies.
“One day the British Compound Officer was busy elsewhere and had left the keys on his table. I entered the office and made several good imprints on pieces of tar... a mechanic cut a key for us from the patterns of those imprints.”
“When the time came to test the key I felt considerable emotion. It was a calm Sunday afternoon and there was neither British staff nor prisoners in sight. I leaned nonchalantly against the gate, manoeuvring the key with my right hand which was hidden by my elbow. I watched the sentry closely, ready to throw myself down in order to avoid the bullet if he showed any sign of becoming suspicious and opening fire...”
Their key did not work. But after four other modifications that took months it worked. “And it worked again when I locked the gate.
Sunday January 14, 1941 was D-day. Umberto mimicking the compound officer carried the keys and confidently walked towards the gate. If the sentry had seen the actual compound officer walk through the gates, he would have realised that this was a choreographed escape. Luckily, the officer had not left for lunch.
Umberto, dressed in shorts and a khaki shirt like an officer, ordered the two prisoners to follow him. The prisoners, in uniform, followed. He opened the gate. It worked. He then closed the gate.
“We disappeared into the vegetable gardens. It had been so easy that we could hardly believe it…”
The trek towards Mt Kenya forest began. “Amid the scrub in the black darkness our progress was a nightmare. The cold. The tortuous terrain. Rain. Fever.”
And then there was the search for the missing prisoners. The escape to Mogadishu had come a cropper. They returned to the camp, dejected, beaten, weathered. BY DAILY NATION
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