The diary below is my father, Gerald Churchill’s, account of his journey through German held Italy to rejoin the Allied lines after his Italian captors, in the spirit of their 1943 Armistice with the Allies, had opened the gates of the prison in which he had been held for most of that year. His experience, although far from unique - for there were as many as 50,000 Allied prisoners held by the Italians at this time, many of whom were released in the same way at around the same time - is, nonetheless, a fascinating document and carries the reader vividly back into that turbulent time.