Damien Lewis

And very reluctantly they do.

So Stokes is then left in an Italian farmstead 200 kilometres north of Rome, knowing he's dying.

He knows he's dying.

Very, very sick.

In fact, he had septicemia.

So he decides there's only one option.

I must steal a bicycle, cycle to Rome.

find my way into the Vatican, persuade them I am who I am, because he'd heard that the Vatican was running this secret escape line for allied POWs, which they were.

And so that's exactly what he does.

I mean, I don't know how he did it because, you know, injured with septicemia, with a very, very, very painful groin in agony, cycling 200 miles through Italy on a stolen bicycle, and then somehow navigating his way through Rome, getting to the Vatican, persuading his way into the Vatican, then persuading them he was a bona fide... Anyway, they don't know whether to believe him.

in his entirety but what they do know is that he's on death's door and so there's a there's an escaped partisan who happens to be a surgeon and he operates on Stokes and he he castrates him he takes off one of his testicles because he's so badly injured that saves Stokes's life now you can imagine at that stage Stokes might have thought yeah I've kind of done enough for the war you

No, what he does once he's recovered is he starts to train the Italian partisans, the Italian resistance, using all the skills he has.

Then he starts to fight alongside them and do sabotage operations.

Finally, he's captured by the enemy and goes before the Gestapo and faces this horrendous torture.

And he tells himself one thing.

He says, look, if I tell the truth, if they break me and I'm forced to tell the truth, I am dead.

Because they knew at this stage that Hitler wasn't very happy about commando and SAS operations.

He didn't really like them very much.

thought they were rather not the done thing and so had authored an order that all captured commandos and parachuters and SAS should be kept alive only for long enough to torture them and then and then murdered they've got a good idea this is what's happening so Stokes sticks to his cover story no matter what they do to his cover story is he's just a regular soldier who was a prisoner of war in Italian camp and escaped the camp

That's his cover story.