My Entire Life Exists Because Strangers Chose Courage - Tom Carver

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1:17Anthony Scaramucci:So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. One time during this two months, the Germans realized that there was two officers hiding, and they went to the DeGorio family, and they put the grandmother, Maria, against the wall and said, we're going to shoot you unless you tell us. And she didn't tell them. And it's just incredible, you know, that someone would do that for two total strangers that they had no connection with and would share their last bit of food with them. It's just amazing.

1:51Tom Carver:Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is Tom Carver. He's the author of Where the Hell Have You Been? Monte Italy and One Man's Incredible Escape. It's being republished right now in the UK, and it'll be out again in a new edition in the United States in May. Tom, welcome to the show. And of course, some of you may know Tom's wife, Katty Kay, who, you know, I mean, she browbeats me. Tom and I could probably talk about that as well, but my co-host.

2:27Anthony Scaramucci:Deidre and I could talk about that.

2:29Tom Carver:Yes, exactly. The rest is politics US. But anyway, this is an extraordinary story, Tom. But before we get into this story, I want to talk a little bit about your background, if okay, and your relationship with General or Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

2:48Anthony Scaramucci:sure yeah um well let me say quite funny anthony sitting in the chair that caddy normally sits in to chat to you every week and i'm here instead of her um but she really loves doing the podcast

3:01Tom Carver:and she left you good hey carver she left you good lighting by the way you you're very well lit so she must she set my microphone up she must still like you because the lighting is yeah you know she would have made you too bright otherwise but you're looking good yeah yeah we

3:19Anthony Scaramucci:had a kind of rough night because our daughter had some people around and they were there till two in the morning but we survived and we're here yeah well that's the perils anyway but she does love doing it with you and she often comes out of the podcast talking about it and saying how exciting it is to to be with you and to do the podcast every week so it's great she's she's

3:40Tom Carver:Enhance my brand, Carver. That British accent that you guys have, you know, she's taking me up a notch, Carver.

3:46Anthony Scaramucci:I think it's a meet, sure.

3:48Tom Carver:Well, let's get the conversation on your background, which I think is just a fascinating thing, and how you became a BBC foreign correspondent. And then, obviously, I mean, there's a personal side to this story that gravitated you to write this book. Let's start there.

4:06Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah. Yeah, so I, as you say, I was a BBC foreign correspondent for many years, a war reporter, actually, for eight years of doing wars. I was based in Africa. So I covered the Rwandan genocide and covered Somalia, Black Hawk Down, Srebrenica in Bosnia, all those sort of lovely things that now seem a long time ago, but were hugely consequential at the time. and all the time I was doing this and in the field I was kind of conscious of my father having had also an extraordinary life as a as a officer and the fact that his stepfather was Field Marshal Montgomery and Monty died when I was about 15 I think so I have quite clear memories of him i remember being taken to see him by my parents and being kind of completely silenced by the by by him he was a intimidating character and whenever we went over there it seemed like there was like 15 other generals with all their badges and medals and things and i remember one particularly kind of gruesome sunday afternoon and we were they were having tea and Monty told me to pass the chocolates around and I dropped them because I was so nervous and I was kind of scrabbling around all amongst the feet of all these generals trying to pick up these chocolates and he just yelled at me just get out and go into the garden and so I went into the garden and in the garden of his house down in the south of England where he'd retired was his caravan that he had used all through his North Africa campaign right up through Italy all the way through D-Day to Berlin he had traveled in this caravan and I went on being an inquisitive 15 year old you know went into the caravan I didn't really know much about Monty's significance and on the wall of the caravan was this map of the Mediterranean and there were these kind of china graphs i don't know if you know you know those kind of things you use to write on a map anyway i started kind of just doodling on the map which was a bit mischievous um but i was bored and cut forward i don't know 40 years later and that caravan is in the imperial war museum and there was a formal opening of the caravan which had been donated to the imperial war museum and my dad and i were invited and we were lying lining up and there was a lot of other dignitaries ahead wanting to see the caravan and what it was like and i and by then i was a foreign correspondent and i remember this man i think he was a an american general actually coming out of the caravan and looking kind of mystified and saying to his wife wow i don't know monty ever planned the sea invasion of North Africa.

7:10Anthony Scaramucci:That had been my China graph line that I'd kind of, you know, mischievously lined across the map, uh, from, from the Mediterranean into North Africa. Anyway, I didn't tell my dad, I didn't confess to him that that was my line, but, but it was, yeah, it, he was always this presence in my life.

7:30Tom Carver:But your father is a big part of this story as well, though. So tell us a little bit about your dad?

7:35Anthony Scaramucci:So my dad was born two months before the start of the First Old War, which is kind of incredible to think, right? I mean, in May 1914. His father was very young. His father had just graduated from Cambridge and was sent straight into the trenches. And he was killed at Gallipoli, my grandfather. And my father was 18 months old, so never knew his father. His mother then, who was a very vivacious character by all accounts. I never met her, my grandmother, but she was very, had, you know, enjoyed lots of company. And so she was a widow and she, in the 1930s, met this colonel in the ski resort called Bernard Montgomery.

8:23Anthony Scaramucci:And they fell in love. And he was an unknown at that time. He was completely unknown. and very you could see you could see what kind of a character he was he was you know full of energy slightly add quite sharp you know slightly spectrum probably um you know would be quite sharp with people but but you know clearly brilliant and they were kind of an unlikely couple and they fell in love and my dad was about 12 then i guess um no i guess he was a bit more But anyway, my grandmother then was on a beach just before the beginning of the Second World War in England. And she got a bite from an insect.

9:06Anthony Scaramucci:And she died of blood poisoning. It was before antibiotics. It was before she didn't get proper treatment. And Monty was absolutely devastated. and if you look at the photos of him at that time he just looks like a shell of a man i mean he it was the only person i think in the whole world that he ever loved was my grandmother and when she went he just threw himself into his work um and you know it's one of those interesting counter-narrative things you know if betty had lived would he have become the general that he did subsequently because he became obsessive about fighting the Germans. So he was not liked by Churchill because he was so argumentative and quite difficult to handle.

10:02Anthony Scaramucci:And when Rommel was coming along the North African coast in 1942, and it looked really bad for the Allies, Monty ended up as the general there in charge. And it wasn't Churchill's choice. The previous general had been killed in an aircraft crash. And Churchill really had run out of generals, basically. And so he very reluctantly appointed Monty to this. And it was a real hinge moment because Rommel was on the verge of taking Cairo. Had he taken Cairo, he would have had access to all the oil fields in the Middle East. And Monty just realized this was his moment. And he said, I'm going to make this stand at this place called El Alamein in the desert.

10:53Anthony Scaramucci:And he prepared and he prepared and he prepared for it. And then he launched his counterattack. And it broke through Rommel's lines. And my dad was, Monty had asked my dad to be his ADC, his aide-de-college. And so my dad arrived in the desert, 24, again, just down from Cambridge. And Monty, during this advance, it was all chaotic, as you can imagine. You know, it was like hundreds of thousands of troops. It was dark. It was January. It was raining unusually in the desert. and Monty told my dad to get in his staff car and drive forward towards the Germans to find a new place to put the headquarters.

11:43And my dad drove in the night

11:46Anthony Scaramucci:and he just went too far. There were no lights. And he hit the German lines and they arrested them. And the incredible thing, Anthony, is that they didn't realize they had Monty's stepson because he had a different name and they didn't know about Monty's family, I guess. Had they known that, they would have obviously used him as a hostage. They would have sent him to Kolditz or to the concentration camps. Sure. But because they just thought he was just another British officer, they gave him over to the Italians and he was put in a camp in Italy.

12:22Tom Carver:But he escaped. I mean, this is the great part. Yeah. So then... His life story is tied to you and your whole family because if he doesn't make it out of there, it's obviously a different destiny for all of us, right? So he escapes, and this is a brilliant part of the story. It's a 500-mile journey through German-occupied territory. He's in the winter. He doesn't have a GPS, right? I don't think he has an iPhone on him in the escape, right? So tell us about this harrowing little food, risk of betrayal, risk of being captured. Talk us through some of the moments he faced. How do you think he navigated those?

13:03Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, he obviously had nothing and prepared him for it. I should just tell you how he got to escape, because when the Italians surrendered in 1943, you know, the Italian army just put down their weapons, right? And the head of the camp where he was in, in northern Germany, in northern Italy, by Parma, it's called Fontanolato, happened to be a very decent Italian colonel. And the Germans were pouring into Italy over the Alps to try to stem the progress of the Allies coming up through Sicily and so forth. And he said, he got all the camp together. And he said, in two hours, the Germans are going to be here.

13:47Anthony Scaramucci:I'm going to cut the wire and you can escape and he knew that that meant death for him because the Germans would be furious obviously but he cut the wire and 1200 men ran out and they decided rather amazingly that if they just ran the Germans would just drive around and pick them up, it would be easy for them so they decided to hide in a massive drainage ditch almost right next to the camp because they just thought the Germans would never look there. And for 24 hours, they could hear the Germans driving around and around, unable to kind of figure out where all these men had disappeared to. And then eventually the Germans carried on south and they stood up and started going their different ways.

14:36Anthony Scaramucci:And some went to the Alps, some went to the coast. and my dad as you say decided to walk south down the apennines um hoping i guess eventually to meet up with his stepfather monty who was coming up and you talk about navigation i brought with you something which i think you might find interesting this is the compass that he used on his navigation you know so no gps as you say there it is it's a little thing made out of a safety pin and a top of some tin top and put together by sticking plaster. And it still works, still points north. And he used that for 500 miles, kept it in this little box.

15:26Tom Carver:It's a lot of help along the way, though. I mean, it's an interesting story about the Italian civilian community, right? They come to help him. Tell us a little bit about that because obviously they're helping him under risk of execution. They're helping him under fear of imprisonment, concentration camps, et cetera, but they don't care. They make that courageous sacrifice for him. Tell us about that.

15:50Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah. I mean, they really are the hero of the story and I hope they come across as the hero of my book. There was a series of families that looked after him. I mean, he was looked after by monks in monasteries. He was looked after by quite wealthy families, very poor families along the way. But there was one family in particular that just saved his life because he gets, in December 1943, he gets to the Sangro River, which is this river kind of east of Rome. And this is the river that the Germans have decided to put what was known as the Gustav Line, a massive fortification. and they are going to stop the Allies coming up.

16:39Anthony Scaramucci:And so there are hundreds of thousands of Germans there. But he knows that on the other side of the river is Monty. And so if he can just cross this river, he will be safe. And he is hiding in this bush one morning, trying to kind of figure out what he's going to do. And these two kids come down this track and they trip over my father's feet because my father was quite tall. he couldn't get his feet into the bush so they trip over his feet and they have a gun with them and they think initially that he's a German and so they're about to shoot him and he says no, no, no, no we're English, I'm an English officer he was with a one-on-one guy and it turns out that these two guys Alfonso and Antonio di Gregorio were running down from their farmhouse in the hills because the Germans had just taken their family pig.

17:35Anthony Scaramucci:And that, you can imagine how absolutely critical that pig was to that family's survival. No kidding. I mean, you know, this was a family without hardly any food. And these two boys were determined to take on this German patrol and get the pig back. And my father realized that this was absolute madness and that they would all die if they tried to do that. And so he said, please don't do that, please don't do that, and persuaded them. And they lay in the bushes, and they watched the patrol go by with the pig. And they took my father up to the house. And that family then looked after my father for nearly two months, and they would put him in a cave.

18:20Anthony Scaramucci:There was this cave that he hid in with Jim, his other companion, during the day. And then every night, Alfonso or one of the boys would come down and tell them the coast was clear. And they'd bring them up to the farmhouse and they would feed them. They would share, you know, the tiny amount of food that they had with them. It's an incredible story. It's an incredible story. And just, you know, so just to give you an example of how incredibly brave they were. one time during this two months, the Germans realized that there was two officers hiding, and they went to the DeGorio family, and they put the grandmother, Maria, against the wall and said, we're going to shoot you unless you tell us.

19:09Anthony Scaramucci:And she didn't tell them. And it's just incredible, you know, that someone would do that for two total strangers that they had no connection with. and would share their last bit of food with them. It's just amazing.

19:30Tom Carver:Well, listen, I want to take it back to Monty for a second because you discover a lot about Monty's personality in writing the book. He, as you point out, he's a formidable commander. He's sort of an imperious guy, guy but he's also a stepfather in love with his stepson and he's worried about him uh and he has no idea whether he's alive or dead so tell us about uncovering that story and how it potentially changed your understanding of field marshal montgomery yeah so as i said you know at the

20:08Anthony Scaramucci:beginning my childhood memories of him was as a very severe man who really had lost any person he ever loved. And so, you know, and had gone through all this war, he'd gone through the first old war, and then through the second war. And so he was kind of, you know, suffering PTSD. But also had a very kind of inflated ego and kind of sense of himself. And yeah, he wasn't an easy man, and never kind of showed much affection to any of us. But in writing this book, what I discovered was that when I applied to the war museum for some records I came across a whole series of letters that my that Monty had written to the red international red cross asking about my father and where was he and which prisoner of war camp was he in and was he getting rations and make sure that he is you know um tracked and traced and not you know doesn't disappear into of the Gulag.

21:08Anthony Scaramucci:And you think how busy Monty was at that time of fighting in Alamein and then fighting up through Sicily and up through Italy. And then, yeah, and basically all during that year, he was trying to find my dad and making sure that my dad wasn't lost. And I think that shows an incredible tenderness that I don't think my father ever knew. My father's now died, obviously. And And he was not aware of that because the book came out after my father had passed. But I do want to just say one thing about this. Can I just go back a second to this image of my dad living in this cave? Because not only did the De Gregorios look after him, they enlisted the whole community.

22:00Anthony Scaramucci:And there was a system. So when I was researching the book, Caddy and I went back to Italy with our kids, and we found the cave, and we found the family, and we sat with them, and we talked about it, and we discovered that there was a whole system of looking after Jim and my dad. And, for example, there was a woman in the neighboring village of Rocca Scalegna, which is where the German headquarters were, who every time the Germans went out on patrol from that village, she would lower a sheet out of the window as if she was airing it. And someone else in the village next to the Gregorios, which was called Jessupelenia, would see that and would then run up and tell the Gregorios to get my dad and Jim back into the cave.

22:56Anthony Scaramucci:And so that's kind of one side of it. The reason that the Germans knew that they were there is because there was another woman who was sleeping with the German commandant and revealed in the moment of high ecstasy that there was a couple of British soldiers. And that's why they went up to the de Gregorias and threatened to kill the grandmother. so you know you kind of uncover these layers in which these families are kind of either helping or hindering this effort it's it was kind of amazing and we you know i don't know you want to know about this but i mean we stayed in touch with this family and i'm still in touch with them

23:39Tom Carver:yeah that was my follow-up question have your family still been able to keep that connection

23:44Anthony Scaramucci:you know 80 years long 80 years past yeah yeah absolutely because i just think i mean like you say without them my dad wouldn't be alive i wouldn't be alive i mean i owe everything to them um and so yes i mean the the cousin of of this family came to stay with us for easter in washington um antonio who is another cousin who's very we're very particularly close to who lives in geneva we go and see and then also i'm now on the board of this organization for the Monte San Martino Trust, which is a group of all descendants of POWs in Italy, just like me, who owe their lives to Italian families. And the sole purpose of the trust is to raise money for educational fellowships, to bring the children of these families over, to give them a chance to learn English in Britain.

24:46Anthony Scaramucci:And it's incredibly moving. We just had our lunch in london the other day and just the stories that others have you know quite similar and not just