THE GREATEST ESCAPER
It’s one of the war’s great untold stories. How a British corporal escaped almost certain death in Dunkirk, Singapore and Burma using breathtaking ingenuity and courage
THE mob of local fishermen grabbed the fugitive British soldier as he tried to escape across the river, tied a rope around him and dragged him along like an animal on a lead. Bravely, he made a break for it, running for his life, until he tripped on a crack in the baked mud and fell. That’s when the curved knives came out, stabbing and slashing at him. Corporal Roy Pagani, London-born but now 5,000 miles away from home and on the run in Japanese- occupied Burma, felt an agonising pain in his side and heard what sounded like a snarling dog.
‘I put a hand to my side and it came away holding a huge clot of blood. The snarling continued but then I realised it was not a dog, it was me. That awful sound was air bubbling through the hole in my side every time I breathed.’ He was surely finished as the mob closed in over him. ‘I was barely conscious, just alive enough to know that this was the end. I was going to die, alone without identity in this distant land among hostile people.
‘I had made a promise to my wife and small son to return home but that would not now be kept. They would never even know what had become of me.’
Yet, by some miracle, Pagani did survive. Because he always did.
He was one of World War II’s greatest survivors, though it is only now — 72 years after that war ended with victory over the Japanese in August 1945 — that his remarkable story is told in full in a new book, Lost Warriors.
Drawing extensively on Pagani’s own typewritten account of his adventures, author Philip Davies tells how this unprepossessing squaddie pulled off a series of extraordinary escapes from the war’s hottest hotspots.
And then he slipped back into obscurity when it was all over, with scant recognition of his personal achievements, though they were unequalled by any another British soldier throughout the war.
A boy from a broken home, Pagani joined the Army on his 18th birthday in 1933. He met a 16-yearold girl called Pip in 1939 and married her after courting for six months, just before he was posted to France with the British Expeditionary Force.
When Hitler’s armies sliced through France the following spring, he deliberately avoided the crowded and bombed evacuation beaches at Dunkirk, trekked north along the coast into Belgium, stole a boat and sailed it single-handed to England. It took him four days before he washed up on a shingle beach in Suffolk. That was his first great escape. The next was nearly two years later when he arrived in Singapore on the day the Japanese attacked.
ABomB plummeted down the funnel of his troop ship and, as she sank, he missed death by inches by jumping onto a destroyer that came alongside. He joined the defence of the island, only for the British garrison to ignominiously surrender a week later.
But not Pagani. As at Dunkirk, he set off on his own, racing through the burning city where corpses littered the streets and down to the docks.
There, he commandeered a 20ft sampan. Ignoring its cargo of fish manure, he took on board four other men and headed into the China Sea, aiming for Sumatra.
They island-hopped for a week, making good progress, until a ferocious tropical cyclone nearly sank them. He thought, not for the first or the last time, that he was a goner. But the storm abated, and the sampan staggered into shore in Sumatra, an exhausted Pagani thanking his lucky stars at surviving yet another brush with death.
He waited there to be ferried to British- held Ceylon but the Japanese arrived, the sun glinting cruelly on their bayonets. There was nowhere to run this time.
The prisoners were embarked on a tramp steamer for Burma, hundreds of them battened down in the tiny hold and fed on rancid vegetable soup. Dysentery was rife. So was death.
WHATfollowed was a nightmare train journey until they reached a remote jungle camp and were put to work on what would soon be known as the Death Railway.
For each of its 258 miles linking Burma to Thailand, 393 slave labourers would die from malnutrition, disease and brutality. The Allied death-toll was nearly 13,000.
New prisoners were harangued by the Japanese commandant: ‘ You are the remnants of a decadent white race and fragments of a rabble army. This railway will go through, even if your bodies are to be used as sleepers.’
There was no escape, they were warned. The jungle around them was impenetrable. And any man caught trying would be tortured and then beheaded.
Pagani took no notice. Ever since his capture he had been plotting his escape as he worked on the line, day after back-breaking day, knee-deep in mud, plagued by insects and leeches, and sleeping in a damp bamboo hut.
Short and stocky and of similar build to the locals, he was confident that, by adopting their mannerisms and gait, he could blend in. He resolved to leave behind all his possessions and clothing and wear only a loincloth and an Indian turban. He practised walking barefoot to harden his feet.
Ahead lay a gruelling trek of at least 600 miles to reach British lines in India. He spoke no native language. His chances of success were minimal and the risks enormous, but he had to try.
one morning in November 1942, he simply left the camp.
on the way to work, he had whispered to those around him: ‘So long. I’m off,’ and just melted away into the jungle. For the third time, he was a fugitive on the run.
His disguise was very quickly tested. Walking boldly through a village, he saw a group of Japanese soldiers marching directly towards him, abreast in a line.
Though overwhelmed with fear, he had sufficient self- control to avert his gaze and then casually squat down in a drainage ditch to urinate, just like a local. The soldiers strutted past.
The boy from Fulham had melted into the scenery. Perhaps he had a chance after all.
From then on, he hid during the day and walked 16 miles barefoot every night. Locals were kind, offering him shelter and food. Particularly friendly were the Karens, a separatist hill people who were sworn enemies both of the Burmese and the Japanese.
For many months he joined a band of Karen guerrillas hiding in the high jungle and harassing the enemy. He helped to organise them under the command of a mysterious and semi-mystical Briton, an army major who had stayed on after the Allied forces fled Burma.
It was good to be getting back at the Japanese, but his compulsion to return home got the better of him, and he continued his journey.
He said goodbye, moved down from the hills and out onto Burma’s vast central plain, a lone figure plodding along, conspicuous and vulnerable. Here, however, the local people were hostile, and more than once he had to flee from villagers who wanted to turn him over to the Japanese.
And so it was that, after several narrow escapes, he ran into that howling mob on the banks of the Irrawaddy river and found himself bleeding profusely and certain he was about to die.
He didn’t. He came to in a Japanese patrol boat taking him to hospital, where he was operated on without anaesthetic. For four hours, a so- called doctor rooted around inside his wounded body. The pain was excruciating.
Pagani was left in agony to recover or die, and remembered that night as the worst of his life, trying to suffocate himself by cramming a blood- stained towel into his mouth. only the thought of the promise he had made to his wife made him stop.
‘Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to bear the pain and live out that long, lonely night.’
For six weeks he recovered his strength. Then, to his horror, the
Kempeitai, Japan’s equivalent of the Gestapo, came for him. What if they discovered his secret?
Not wanting to be identified as the British escaper from the Death Railway labour camp, which would mean instant death, Pagani had concocted a cover story. He told
his captors he was a U.S. bomber pilot shot down during an air raid — Lieutenant Terry Ashton Melvyn (the Christian names of his son, which, he reasoned, he was unlikely to forget).
If he could convince them he was an American, then it might just save his life.
He stuck to his story throughout his gut-wrenching ordeal in the
Kempeitai jail, a hellish hole dubbed the ‘Rangoon Ritz’ where as many as 20 naked prisoners were forced to squat side by side motionless in a single tiny cell, forbidden to lie down or talk.
Human waste flowed across the floor. Lice and mosquitoes gorged on their emaciated bodies. Guards routinely handed out savage beatings. Men were hung upside down from a beam and whipped.
Interrogations took place in a series of torture chambers. In the first, Pagani was chained and caned. In the second, a pistol was put to his head and the blade of a sword slashed down on his neck before stopping just in time. But the third was the worst — a washhouse with a drain in one corner.
Here, he was forced onto his back with his hands shackled and his head beneath a dripping tap. Every few seconds, a drop of water hit him between the eyes until he thought his brain would explode.
At other times, they drove slivers of bamboo under his finger and toe nails, up his nose or into his genitals and set them alight.
He wrote later: ‘How I survived these tortures I do not know. There were times when I could stand it no longer, and I wanted to die.’ Once again, the thought of his wife and baby son kept him going.
For six weeks he suffered unimaginable sadism. Then, for reasons he never understood, the Kempeitai let him go. He was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Rangoon Central jail and put in solitary confinement for four months.
There, he was beaten and interrogated daily, but it was nothing compared with the torture at the hands of the Kempeitai.
Eventually, he was allowed out into the main camp, though conditions there were just as harsh.
Half of the PoWs died from malnutrition, abuse and diseases such as beriberi, malaria, jungle sores, diphtheria and cholera. Dysentery was endemic. Allied bombs were also a hazard, and the prison was hit more than once.
But for most, the greatest threat was losing the will to live. They just faded away and died. Pagani, though, was having none of this.
For the next two years, his irrepressible spirit and attempts to outwit his jailers made a big impression on other inmates, helping them to keep going.
He stole food from under the noses of the Japanese and gave it to the sick. He was the man in the know, a channel of news about what was going on in the camp.
Finally, in April 1945, liberation loomed. The Japanese were increasingly nervous as Rangoon came under siege by General Slim’s approaching British 14th Army. Guards were burning documents and getting ready to go. There was a possibility of them butchering the inmates first.
Instead, 400 of the fittest prisoners, including Pagani, were marched out of the gates to an uncertain fate. Barefoot, they struggled along roads strewn with broken glass, harassed by guards who dispatched exhausted stragglers with a bullet in the head.
It became a terrible battle simply to survive. Pagani bided his time, waiting for his chance to run.
Then, one blissful morning, they were free. After a night stop, they woke to find the Japanese had scarpered like ‘bats out of hell’.
Pagani was euphoric. He was a free man. Soon, lorries from the British 14th Army arrived. It was time to go home. He had made it.
As soon as he could, he sent an airmail letter to his wife, who had not heard a single word from him in three long years, and did not know if he was alive or dead.
She wrote back immediately, ecstatic at his survival, and telling him that he now had a three-yearold daughter, born nine months after his embarkation leave.
Just days later, he flew home. He was debriefed by MI9, the Directorate of British Intelligence overseeing all matters relating to PoWs, who concluded his incredible wartime story was true.
Shortly after, he received a Military Medal through the post with no citation. There was no official presentation. It was as if already he was a forgotten man.
Adjusting to family life proved difficult. Although his back was scarred horribly from the wounds inflicted on the banks of the Irrawaddy, the psychological scars went much deeper. He could not abide being in bare feet or hearing a dripping tap.
That stubbornness and independence of mind that had kept him going through thick and thin in wartime now backfired. He proved an austere father, who never showed his feelings or gave outward displays of affection.
HERE-EnLISTED in the Army, retired in 1959 and, in civilian life, set himself up in a taxi-cab business in Clacton-on-Sea, which later expanded into garages.
Pagani died in 2003, aged 87, his wartime achievements unnoticed. He had escaped from Dunkirk, Singapore and the Burma railway, the only European to do so.
His record, says author Philip Davies, was unequalled by any other soldier during the course of the war.
‘Pagani deserves to be remembered as one of the most courageous and intrepid British escapees of World War II,’ he adds.
‘His stoicism and self-belief in the face of unspeakable suffering bear testament to the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds.
‘He simply never gave up. He was a man of unimpeachable courage, who stands in the front rank of Britain’s war heroes.’