Tyrants and Mountains: A Reckless Life

"The Spectator" has called Denis Hills "a hero of our times". Yet for most he is simply the man Idi Amin condemned to death in 1975. This brush with Uganda's "village tyrant" was entirely in character: from an undergraduate trip to Germany in 1933 until he left the army in 1949 his life was spent observing or confronting first Hitler and then Stalin. In 1936 he went to work in Poland because a German friend had prophesied that that was where the war would start. In September 1939 he escaped to Romania where he joined the British Council circle in Bucharest, portrayed in Olivia Manning's "Fortunes of War". He then went to the Middle East and served the rest of the war as a liaison officer with the Poles, taking part in the bitter assault on Monte Cassino. Much has been said about the "last secret" - Britain's tragic surrender of the Cossacks to Stalin's mercy in 1945. Denis Hills' role is a further secret now revealed: he regarded it as his job to save every person he could from the cattle trucks. Many thousands of Ukrainians and others owed their lives to his efforts. In the 1950s he taught first in Germany and then Turkey, when not skiing alone over the High Alp glaciers, bicycling to the North Cape, or climbing mountains in Kurdistan and Iran. From 1963 to 1984 he taught and travelled in Africa, including a spell during "the last days of White Rhodesia", before returning to the haunts of his youth - Warwickshire and Poland.