During this chaotic time, released or escaped British and Allied POWs risked being recaptured by the Germans, and killed or shuttled off to Germany in cattle cars. Recalling visits by O'Flaherty, some escapees reached Rome and implored him to help them.
O’Flaherty assembles helpers
O'Flaherty then recruited or inspired the assistance, financial and practical, of an international group of Rome residents, often acting without waiting for formal permission from his superiors.
The fugitives needed food, false documents, and medical care, as well as safe lodging, and those who could contributed sacrifically from their own funds, including O’Flaherty.
Among those willing to help were priests, nuns, laymen, and laywomen, including New Zealanders Fathers Owen Snedden and John Flanagan, as well as Italian aristocrats, members of the Free French, British Major Sam Derry, and Sir D’Arcy Osborne, British Ambassador to the Holy See and his butler, John May.
One women who valiantly hid escape allied soliders in her apartment among her children was the Maltese widow Henrietta Chevalier.
Working together, these people hid escaped allied soldiers and Jews in safe houses and apartments throughout Rome, as well as in farms, country cottages, monasteries, and convents.
O’Flaherty becomes a master of disguise and evasion
During this time, O’Flaherty became a master of disguise and evasion, sometimes assuming the uniform of a street sweeper or a postman, and, it was rumored, even the habit of a nun.
During one narrow escape from a Nazi SS raid at the home of one of his supporters, Prince Filipo Doria Pamphili, O’Flaherty raced downstairs to the coal cellar, rubbed himself with coal dust, persuaded one of the coalmen pouring sacks of coal into the trapdoor to lend him his clothes, and climbed out of the coal chute, with his monsignor’s robe and hat stashed in an empty coal sack.
He then strolled past two lines of SS troops to safety.
O’Flaherty’s facility for disguise and for evading capture inspired his admirers to dub him “The Vatican Pimpernel” after The Scarlet Pimpernel, a 1903 novel and a play by Emma Orczy, featuring a self-effacing hero with a swashbuckling secret identity who rescues French aristocrats and others sentenced to death by the guillotine during the French revolution.
The 1934 The Scarlet Pimpernel film based on the play was popular during World War II.
Orczy named her hero after a tiny red flower that grows on creeping stems. The blossoms open only in bright mid-morning sunlight, and close before three o'clock in the afternoon, vanishing from view.
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