The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment. John Parker

kill me. But then I corrected myself: it would have meant the woman would have been killed too for sheltering me. Anyhow, the German officer saluted me, saluted the bed and left.

      The woman who saved my life wanted me to stay there. She said she would hide me until our troops arrived. Her next-door neighbours were not so helpful. They got to know I was there and they made her send me away; they were right, too. If I’d have been caught there the whole row of buildings would more than likely have been blown up and all these people would have been killed.

      Gavin Cadden made his way back to the church and the priest at Bergamo arranged for some clothes to be brought in and eventually for him to be taken to Milan’s main railway station. They got him as far as Lake Como without incident. There he was met by another priest and two young boys and a girl. He was dressed in an old civilian suit which needed some attention because it had become ripped. They took him to a house and the girl patched it up. He stayed the night and the next morning an Italian Resistance man came in and told the priest that they were going to attempt to walk Cadden to the border and get him into Switzerland. Two young girls and two young boys were to go along with him, the girls either side of him, holding each hand as if they were related. They walked boldly up a mountain track to a point where they could see the barrier and border checkpoint. On the other side was Switzerland. Cadden continued his story:

      I said to myself, ‘My God, will I ever make it?’ The nearer I got the worse I got… ‘I’ll likely be shot now.’ And here down the path came an Italian sergente. He stopped. Well, he knew right away what it was – and they pleaded with him to let us go on. He looked at us very sternly and it seemed to be touch and go whether he was going to call the sentries and escort us back to the village. But I pulled up my shirt and I showed my tattoo [of the crucifix] and the Italian Resistance member said, ‘Cattolico.’ The Italian sergeant nodded and gave us a sign to carry on. We walked away, up a dirt track, and it came right to the wires; there were sentry boxes 100 yards away. If you touched the wire rather roughly it set off a bell in the sentry box. The two young boys crawled up and dug a hole under the wire and made enough room for me to get through, and they crawled back again. The two girls had been sent back home in case anything happened at the last minute. They kissed me on the cheek and said something about God. The two boys, they risked their lives again … but it didn’t seem to worry them. All they wanted to do was to help the British. They dug a hole big enough for me to get through without touching the wire, and they said, ‘Right, go now.’ I managed to squeeze through without touching the wire. And I was ready to run away and he called me back, this fellow, the head one. What he wanted to do was to shake my hand, and what I wanted to do was to run like hell out of it as fast as I could. But that’s what he wanted to do, shake my hand. So we shook hands all round and I made for the valley.

      As I did so, the sentries opened up with their guns. I don’t know if they were aiming at me or making me run faster, but they couldn’t do that; I was already running as fast as I could. I ran down into the valley and there was a Swiss soldier. He took me to a nearby farm and the woman there made me coffee while he called his headquarters. Two armed sentries came up and escorted me down into the town. They were very rough about it. I was put in a cell and still I was not right sure I was in Switzerland until someone came from the British consul and asked me where I’d been. He interrogated me just to make sure I wasn’t a plant. Eventually he said, ‘You’ve done well.’ I replied, ‘Now, how can I get back to my regiment?’ He told me I’d need a good rest before I could think of that. Anyway that was me in my heaven, and looking all round and the people all smiling and walking about the street and not worrying about bombers or shooting.

      It was several months before Cadden’s evacuation to England could be arranged. By that time there were a lot of British and American troops coming in and they were all worrying about getting back. He finally made it back to his regiment in early 1944, just before Arnhem. He asked to see his old company commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frost, and to get back among the action. But after debriefing and medical, he was told: ‘You’ve had enough action.’ He was soon taken to hospital and eventually discharged with a full war disability pension, because of wounds to the head and neck and major operations on his ulcerated stomach caused by bad prison-camp food. ‘My gall bladder went missing too, so I came back just a shell of the man and my wife didn’t know me when we finally met up. She just cried.’

      But that was not the end of the story, and to complete Cadden’s account we must jump forward momentarily to the post-war years. He could not get out of his mind the bravery of the German officer who had saved him and his colleagues from the firing squad. Determined to try to make contact with Lieutenant Colonel Koch, he made enquiries, only to discover that Koch himself had been shot by the Gestapo for countermanding the order of a senior officer, so allowing British Paras to escape the firing squad despite the fact that Hitler had personally ordered that raiding parties should be shot. When he found out about this, Cadden laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in London and became the first British soldier, or indeed British man, to lay a wreath there in memory of a German officer. For years afterwards he sent anonymously a wooden poppy cross to the West German government to place on Koch’s grave. Cadden never signed his name, but eventually the Germans identified him as the sender through one of the German soldiers involved in the original incident.

      The German Embassy in London got in touch with Cadden. Koch’s brother and sister visited him and in 1987 he was a guest of honour at a reunion of the German 5th Parachute Regiment, where he met some of the soldiers who had helped save him. Later he went to visit Koch’s grave in Bonn.

      Throughout those years Cadden also worked to establish and maintain contact between German, British and French ex-soldiers and, partly as a result of his efforts, British and German paratroopers initiated an annual meeting of friendship. As he quietly continued these efforts, he learned that he had been selected to receive the Order of Merit, one of Germany’s highest awards, as well as the European Peace Cross for his work since the war in establishing a bond of friendship between the soldiers who had once fought on opposite sides. He refused both honours: ‘I asked them to withdraw my name. I didn’t want any honours. All I wanted was the satisfaction of laying a wreath at the grave of an officer who gave his life for us, and that was a German officer.’