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This is my Granddad’s story, told in his own words to a journalist at the Southern Daily Echo. The article appeared in the paper on Thursday January 6 1944. My grandfather died when I was just 6 months old in 1965 but he has always and will always be a family hero.

Private Paul Lombardi was taken prisoner while serving in North Africa with The Hampshire Regiment. He was a native of Malta but had settled in Eastleigh and worked for Pirelli—General Cables before and after the war. He joined the army in June 1940. Here he describes his escape from a train with a South African Sergeant. These are his words as quoted in the Echo article of 1944.

“You can easily imagine that life in a prisoner of war camp makes a chap do desperate things and hunger is the chief thing that drives us to attempt escape. We jumped the train after we had travelled about five kilos, the place where we took the chance being very dense wood. We hid in the trees for 12 days and begged food from a farmer who was very kind to us. We walked through the woods for two days and then we came to the mountain. After walking for a week we got picked up by an Italian Fascist officer who was not a nice fellow at all and who in turn did not like the look of us. As I speak a little Italian and am dark I should not have been noticed so easily, but my South African pal was fair skinned which rather gave the game away. After we had pleaded with the Fascist he sent us on another route over the mountains out of his patrol area, and we were thankful to be able to continue our journey. We had to walk by day and rest at night because it was impossible to go climbing mountains in the dark. We came across what appeared to be a peaceful plain but when we were halfway across we found about a hundred German tanks occupying it. We made ourselves scarce as quickly as possible. We were then about half way on our journey and the nearer we approached the line the more Jerries we saw, so more care had to be taken. At one time they opened up on us and if we had run we should have been shot so we pretended to pick something up from the ground. That experience gave us a very nasty feeling up and down the spine. Later that same day we had another narrow squeak when we were given the tip by friendly Italian soldiers that the Germans were in the vicinity. Further on we had one or two other nasty jolts and were unpleasantly close to German machine gun posts when they received attention from our artillery and Air Force.�

Here the quote ends the article describes my Grandfathers work mates giving him a monetary gift and 200 cigarettes. My grandfather immediately raffled the cigarettes and raised £8 2s 6d for the Red Cross prisoner of war fund who he spoke very highly of.
Family legend says that when he arrived at the front line and met up with the British troops he was just skin and bone. He may also have been mentioned in dispatches. I understand he returned to his regiment after a period of recovery. I believe many prisoners were transported to Italy when they were caught in North African. The train from which he escaped may have been taking them on to Germany?
Does anyone know the story ? Or know who the South African was? Were do I go to find any reference to him in dispatches?

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