Hills was born in the
Birmingham suburb of
Moseley. He attended
King Edward's School, Birmingham before going on to
Lincoln College, Oxford in 1932, where he read
Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In 1935, he left Oxford to travel through
Germany, funding himself by writing for the
Birmingham Post. Returning to England, Hills worked briefly at
Shell-Mex & BP before moving to
Poland in 1937 as English editor of a cultural magazine. Hills' book
Return to Poland showed his fascination with pre-war Poland, and in 1939 he moved to
Warsaw to teach English. At the outbreak of war, he moved to
Romania where Hills worked with the
British Council. He was for a time seconded to
General Kopański's
Polish Carpathian Lancers Brigade, and then to the
King's Own Royal Regiment. Polish-speaking, he joined the
5th Kresowa Division in
Iraq and
Palestine before being sent to
Italy in 1944. In 1944, Hills served as an officer of the British
Eighth Army in Italy. He fought with the Polish Carpathian Lancers Brigade and the King's Own Royal Regiment in the
Second World War. After the
Battle of Monte Cassino, he was involved with the implementation of the Yalta Repatriation agreements. He found that thousands of Ukrainians and Russians were being sent to gulags or condemned to death. This was known as
Operation Keelhaul. Hills could not accept this as they had fought alongside the
Allies against the
Nazis and he did everything in his power to thwart the return of all but a bare minimum.
Norman Davies in his book
Europe: A History and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in
The Gulag Archipelago recognised Hills's part in this. These papers contain much valuable correspondence that Hills had with
Nikolai Tolstoy, Professor
Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Lord Bethell and many others together with
Public Record Office documents help to show what really happened. Hills took a similarly humane and independent line over the question of the SS
Fede, a decrepit hulk which was anchored off
La Spezia and crammed with 1,200 Polish
Jews, survivors of the
Holocaust who were determined to make their way to Palestine in the face of a British blockade and quota restrictions on Jewish immigration. The Jews were already on hunger strike, and their leaders were threatening to blow up the boat if the British refused to allow them to sail. Hills persuaded the authorities to look the other way as the
Fede raised anchor, an episode immortalized by
Leon Uris in his novel
Exodus. When the war was over, Hills became an interpreter and liaison officer with the Soviet military mission at
Taranto. After being demobilized, he taught English in Germany and restless by nature cycled from the
Arctic Circle to
Salonika in
Greece. In 1955 he moved to
Turkey teaching English in
Ankara before becoming an instructor at the Technical University. In 1963 Hills moved to Uganda. He was teaching at
Makerere University in
Kampala when Idi Amin seized power in 1971. Hills spoke out regarding Amin in the book he was writing,
The White Pumpkin, and was arrested in April 1975, charged with espionage and sedition. Tried before a military tribunal chaired by
Juma Butabika, he was condemned to death by firing squad for referring to the dictator as a 'black Nero' and a 'village tyrant'. Queen Elizabeth II interceded on Hills' behalf, and the then-Foreign Secretary,
James Callaghan, flew out to Kampala to bring Hills home. In 1981 Hills played himself in the film
Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. The incident was alluded to by Welsh comedian
Max Boyce in his tribute song to the Rugby legends known as the Pontypool Front Row, "We've had trouble in Uganda, with President Amin/We had to send an envoy with a message from the Queen/To stay the execution, but Amin answered "No"/Until a card was sent from the Viet Gwent – the Pontypool Front Row". Hills returned to Africa in 1976, travelling through
Southern Rhodesia, which was the subject of his book
The Last Days of White Rhodesia. In 1982 he taught in
Nairobi. In 1985 Hills returned to Poland but was summarily expelled as a result of a piece in
The Daily Telegraphs Peterborough column, in which he was described as travelling through Poland in order to write a "less than complimentary book about the Communist regime". Hills had a daughter, actress
Gillian Hills, by his first wife Dunia Leśmian, daughter of Polish symbolist poet
Bolesław Leśmian, and two sons by his second wife Ingrid Jan. ==Books==