after Milan had been heavily bombed a few weeks earlier. However, in March 1943 Coppi was sent to North Africa to participate in the Tunisian campaign, fighting against British forces. According to Coppi's identification paper, he was captured on 13 May 1943 in Enfidha, 100 km south of Tunis, although he may have been caught the previous month by the British Eighth Army which was in and around the city at that time. He was kept in the nearby prisoner of war camp at Ksar Saïd. In the camp he met other cyclists, including Silvio Pedroni, who had previously given Coppi a tyre after the latter had suffered a puncture in a race in 1939, and Ilio Simoni, who would later become a team-mate of Coppi's at Bianchi. He also shared plates with the father of Claudio Chiappucci, who rode the Tour in the 1990s. He was given odd jobs to do. The British cyclist Len Levesley said he was astonished to find Coppi giving him a haircut. Levesley, who was on a stretcher with polio, said: "I should think it took me all of a full second to realise who it was. He looked fine, he looked slim, and having been in the desert, he looked tanned. I'd only seen him in cycling magazines but I knew instantly who he was. So he cut away at my hair and I tried to have a conversation with him, but he didn't speak English and I don't speak Italian. But we managed one or two words and I got over to him that I did some club racing. And I gave him a bar of chocolate that I had with me and he was grateful for that and that was the end of it". In April 1944, Coppi fell ill with malaria, however this was quickly diagnosed and treated. In November of that year he returned to Italy, arriving at a POW camp in Naples to work as a driver for the Royal Air Force. The British moved Coppi to an RAF base at Caserta in Italy, based in the city's royal palace, in 1945. There he worked as a truck driver and as a personal assistant and handyman for an officer, Lieutenant Ronald Smith Towell, who had never heard of him. Despite this, the two struck up a mutually beneficial relationship: Coppi's popularity in Italy was helpful to Towell in