A bomber pilot who was shot down over Libya in 1940 and captured by the Italians, Garry Garrad-Cole played his part in one of the war’s more extraordinary episodes as a member of the “Rome Organisation” which helped hundreds of escaped Allied prisoners of war to remain free under the noses of the Germans in the Eternal City. Garrad-Cole had himself spent three years as a captive of the Italians before, in 1943, escaping from a moving PoW train that was taking him to Germany in the aftermath of the Italian surrender.

Making his way to Rome with a number of other escapers, Garrad-Cole made contact with a secret organisation that had been set up by a Vatican official, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, assisted largely by young priests and clerical students, to help escaped Allied PoWs. With the trickle of escapers becoming a torrent in the wake of the Italian capitulation — and O’Flaherty becoming a virtual prisoner in the Vatican — an escaped army officer, Colonel Sam Derry, took military charge of the organisation. Garrad-Cole became one of a group of billeting officers — known as the “Underground Twelve” — whose job it was to cope with these increasing numbers, helped by a network of friendly Italians.

Between the end of 1943 and the Allied entry into Rome in June 1944, Derry’s organisation found shelter for more than 300 servicemen in private homes and religious seminaries and many hundreds more in villages outside the city, thanks to its friendly Italian contacts. In that time Flight Lieutenant Garrad-Cole, having grown a sinister-looking pencil moustache and taken to sporting a loud bow-tie, had metamorphosed into a recognisable type of spivvy native.

In this guise Mario Monti, as his forged papers proclaimed him to be, was able to blend with the Roman backdrop. Besides working on behalf of those escapers who had reached Rome he spent a good deal of time in the countryside outside the city boundaries where he and other members of “the twelve” helped more than 3,000 former PoWs to find harbourage. After returning to Britain in 1944, Garrad-Cole was awarded the Military Cross.

Eric (universally known as Garry) Garrad-Cole was born in 1917 and educated at Watford Grammar School, which he left in 1935 to become an apprentice engineer with Vauxhall Motors at Luton. While serving his apprenticeship he joined the Territorial Army as a trooper in the City of London Yeomanry, Royal Horse Artillery. With war clouds gathering, he left Vauxhall to join the RAF in 1937 and after flying training was posted in 1938 to No 70 (bomber transport) Squadron in Iraq.

When war broke out he was sent to 211 Squadron, a unit operating Blenheim bombers, in the Western Desert. On July 14, 1940, not long after Italy had entered the war, Garrad-Cole’s Blenheim was hit by enemy groundfire as he returned from attacking enemy troop concentrations at El Gazala, and he crash-landed the aircraft in the Libyan desert.

He and his crew were surrounded by Italians and taken prisoner. They spent some months in a noisome PoW camp 300 miles from the Egyptian frontier, making an unsuccessful attempt to tunnel their way out. Towards the end of the year they and other prisoners were shipped to Italy and taken to a remote camp near Sulmona in the Abruzzi Mountains.

From this camp, in January 1941, Garrad-Cole escaped with another RAF officer and a naval lieutenant, climbing out of their compound while a sentry’s back was turned. They then walked past several Italian soldiers — in uniforms they had stolen from the camp clothing store — and disappeared into the hills. Their bold, if somewhat optimistic, plan was to make for the Italian airbase at Foggia, steal an aircraft and fly to Malta. As it was, they survived the bitter cold and deep snow of an Abruzzi winter and had gained the coastal plain near the mouth of the Sangro River when they were spotted by an Italian patrol, recaptured and returned to Sulmona.

After several more escape attempts, Garrad-Cole and several colleagues were moved to a secure camp at San Romano, near Pisa. Here a further escape attempt was nipped in the bud and Garrad-Cole was moved south again, to Padula in Campania. There escape attempts were frequent and Garrad-Cole was soon on the move again, this time to Vianno, north of Milan. It was at Vianno on September 8, 1943, that he and other prisoners heard of the Italian surrender.

Garrad-Cole and a few companions decided not to wait for the Germans to take over the camp but left while the going was good. After lingering in the north for a few days in the fond hope of an Allied landing in the Gulf of La Spezia, they determined to make their way southwards on foot. It was a strange journey, with frequent encounters with Italian civilians, partisans, PoWs released into the wild like themselves and German troops from whom they were anxious to hide. After more than a month of journeying, just as they were approaching the front line between Isernia and Cassino, they were surprised by two German soldiers at night in a cave in which they were sheltering, and recaptured yet again.

After a few days in a PoW camp at Frosinone, 50 miles southeast of Rome, they were put on a freight train for Germany. Determined not to submit tamely to the rest of the war in captivity, Garrad-Cole and a fellow officer hacked their way through the boards of a freight wagon, leapt out and rolled down a railway embankment. By this time they were near Orte, some 50 miles north of Rome.

Making contact with friendly locals they were passed on to Resistance workers who gave them money and told them that the best way to get to Rome was — by train. After a nerve-racking journey in a packed locale, during which they tried to avoid conversation for fear of giving themselves away, the pair arrived at Rome. There, after further prolonged periods of nervous waiting, they were passed by helpful priests on to the Rome Organisation. though Garrad-Cole swiftly turned himself into a convincing-looking Italian, life was still full of risks in a Rome dominated by its suspicious German masters. It was a bizarre situation. One moment the organisation’s billeting officers might be having cocktails in the Grand Hotel, doing their best to behave like garrulous natives, the next they might find themselves fugitives from the ever-vigilant SS.

On one occasion Garrad-Cole was arrested and marched by two soldiers towards the SS headquarters in the Via Tasso. Realising that neither his forged papers nor his rough-and-ready Italian would stand close scrutiny, he sent one of his captors flying and pelted off down the street pursued by pistol shots from the second. Eluding pursuit he went to ground in the apartment of an Italian contact and lay low until the hue and cry had died down.

Thereafter he divided his time between a refuge provided by Italian friends in the country outside Rome, and the city itself. This perilous cat-and-mouse existence finally came to an end on June 4, 1944, when the Germans withdrew from Rome, enabling the Allies to enter it without a battle.

After the Liberation, Garrad-Cole said his sad farewells to the many friends he had met in Rome, cadged a plane ride down to Naples and thence made his way by an American Liberator back to England, landing at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall on a glorious midsummer’s morning. He had been away from England for six-and-a-half years. One of his first acts was to marry his childhood sweetheart, from whom he had been separated for that time and who had been working in RAF operations at Stanmore.

Garrad-Cole resumed his RAF career, retraining as a fighter pilot and converting to jets. He subsequently commanded No 129 (Spitfire) Squadron and No 267 (Meteors). After passing through the Staff College in 1948 he was seconded to the newly formed Pakistan Air Force, training its first fighter squadrons and serving on the air instruction staff at the Army Staff College, Quetta.

Subsequent appointments included Wing Commander Air Defence 224 Group, Malaya, 1956-59, during which period the country was granted independence. He retired as a wing commander in 1960 as deputy station commander of the flying training school at Syerston, Nottinghamshire.

Thereafter he ran a series of inns in Somerset, enjoying a reputation for serving top-class pub grub. Over the years he and his former colleagues of the Rome Organisation greatly enjoyed their reunions in the city where they had spent some of the most extraordinary months of their lives.

In 1980 he joined the campaign launched by PoWs to recover back-pay to which they felt they had been entitled while they were in captivity. The campaign rumbled on for many years, numbering such RAF officers as the legless fighter ace Douglas Bader among its most militant voices. But, to the end, the MoD maintained that its arrangements for compensation at the end of the war had redressed all just grievances.

Garrad-Cole is survived by his wife Edna, whom he married in 1944, and by a daughter and a son. Another son died while on service with the Army on assignment to the UN in Cyprus.

Wing-Commander E. (Garry) Garrad-Cole, MC, wartime bomber pilot and prison camp escaper, was born on May 21, 1917. He died on January 5, 2003, aged 85.