Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini’s Colditz

By Mark Felton

'Keeps up the suspense to the end.' The Times Literary Supplement

'An extraordinary, and largely forgotten wartime story -- brought back to life in this Boys' Own account.' The Daily Mail

High in the Tuscan hills above Florence, an elaborate medieval castle, converted to a POW camp on Mussolini’s personal orders, holds one of the most illustrious groups of prisoners in the history of warfare.

The dozen or so British and Commonwealth senior officers includes three knights of the realm and two VCs. The youngest of them is 48, the oldest 63. One is missing a hand and an eye. Another suffers with a gammy hip. Against insuperable odds, these extraordinary middle-aged POWs plan a series of daring escape attempts, culminating in a complex tunnel deep beneath the castle.

One rainswept night in March 1943, six men will burst from the earth beyond the castle’s curtain wall and slip away. By assorted means, the three Brits, two New Zealanders and a half-Belgian aristocrat will attempt to make it to neutral Switzerland, over 200 miles away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785781193

Mark Felton

Mark Felton has written over a dozen books on prisoners of war, Japanese war crimes and Nazi war criminals, and writes regularly for magazines such as Military History Monthly and World War II including China Station: The British Military in the Middle Kingdom, 1839-1997. After almost a decade teaching in Shanghai he has returned to Colechester, England where he lives with his wife and son.

Reviews for Castle of the Eagles

[janerawoof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the most famous POW escapes is one everyone knows of--Colditz. This is one much lesser-known: in Mussolini's Italy, the escape from Castle Vincingliata, a bleak, forbidding medieval castle in Tuscany, which housed British military, both high-ranking and low. In fact, at first sight, one of the soldiers compared it to "Dracula's Castle." The book, nonfiction and unbelievable, but reading like a novel, tells of each of the POWs' backgrounds, how they came to be captured, then of several abortive escape attempts, ending in the final successful one: tunneling under the walls from the chapel--an operation taking months. The escapees also fashioned fake ID papers, copies of maps, obtained civilian clothing, and even dummies to put in bed to fool the Italians during nightly bed checks. After the harrowing escape during a night of wind and rain, the men split up into groups and the narration follows each group. There is a series of plates, extensive notes, bibliography and what happened to everyone, both British and Italian, after the war. I only regret there was no map giving locations and the journeys of each group. It was hard to visualize.Highly recommended.