In an attempt to outflank the German Tenth Army defence, 1st Division, and its 3 FSS, and the 3rd (US) Infantry Division landed unopposed at Anzio on 22 January. However, cautious US leadership missed a golden opportunity to seize Rome. Corporal Malcolm White landed from a tank landing craft and rode his BSA motor cycle over the sand dunes with the intention of finding 2 Infantry Brigade, which he was to support. Following a coast road heading north, he was ‘chuntering’ along in an empty landscape when suddenly he was hailed, ‘Oi! Stop!’ by an infantryman in a ditch who told him that he had just crossed the front line. Rapidly turning around, he returned down the road and eventually found Brigade Headquarters. As the fighting escalated, 3 FSS shepherded civilians fleeing from the fighting in the forward areas. Section HQ was in a farmhouse near an ammunition dump at the assault beach. Once the fighting was over, the work of the NCOs became routine counter-intelligence and learning Italian.
While the 1st (Canadian) Division was advancing from Reggio after Operation Baytown, it was supported by the X Interpreter/Interrogation Section of six officers. Captain Kim Isolani, of Italian parentage and serving as ‘Arnold’, was approached by Captain Gay, a member of the Folgore Parachute Division which had capitulated following the Italian surrender, claiming that his men were demoralized and wanted to fight with the Allies. Isolani discussed the proposal with Captain Sir Ian McLeod, who was serving with the Eighth Army Combined Services Interrogation Centre and was also part Italian extraction, and together they persuaded Army Headquarters to form the volunteers into the 1st Autonomous Italian Detachment. Isolani tested them on several patrols, in which the Italians wore civilian clothes. In January 1944, the Detachment was reinforced by 200 men from the Folgore and Nembo Parachute Divisions and formed into F Reconnaissance Squadron that reported direct to GSO 2 (Intelligence), HQ XIII Corps. Issued with British uniforms and equipment and wearing their parachute wings, the Italians patrolled the Sangro sector throughout the bitter winter. In February, Isolani returned to England and was replaced by Lieutenant Alewyn Birch (Royal Ulster Rifles) and Lieutenant John Amoore from X Interpreter/Interrogation Section. After spending two years at the British Consulate in Barcelona, in 1941 Amoore had returned to England and was then attached to the 3rd Carpathian Division, 2nd Polish Corps in Italy in time to see the 12 Podolski Lancers raise a makeshift Polish flag above the monastery at Monte Cassino. By May, F Squadron had carried out 642 patrols, killing eighty-nine Germans and capturing 118 at the cost of sixteen killed, twenty-seven wounded and two missing. Supporting the Poles was 417 FSS, which had arrived in Taranto from FS Headquarters in Algiers, with 418 and 419 FSS reinforced by Italian-speaking NCOs from 268 FSS, then supporting V Corps in the Sangro River valley and working with the Italian Military Intelligence Service.
As the Allies poured through the breached Gustav Line and the Anzio beachhead broke out, the glory of taking Rome was too much of a temptation for General Mark Clark, and he ordered the Fifth (US) Army to enter the capital but, in doing so, allowed the German 10th Army to retreat north. In April, after Captain McLeod had died of natural causes, Captain Isolani returned to Italy in time to join the US-led S Force entering Rome with the British element in the column of jeep, trucks and motorcycles, including 31, 35, 276 and 314 FSS. Passing through the wrecked town of Cisterna shortly after a bloody battle and along the Appian Way and over the Alban Hills, the Field Security Group entered the city on 4 June and requisitioned 11, Via Rossini, a villa that had been used by SS-Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, the head of the German security forces in Rome and infamous for ordering the Ardeatine Massacre in which civilians were murdered as reprisal for an ambush on a SS patrol. He also frequently accused the Vatican, with some justification, of harbouring escaping prisoners passing along the Rome Escape Line. The offices in Via Sicilia were sandwiched between the Office of Strategic Services on the top floor and US Counter-Intelligence Corps on the ground floor. Responsible for searching the Hotel Flora, which had served as the German headquarters in Rome, was 314 FSS, which rounded up SS, SD and Gestapo and their agents and collaborators.
When the Polish Corps reverted to Eighth Army advancing up the east coast of Italy, British FS detachments served alongside Polish FS attached to the 3rd Carpathian and 5th Kresowa Divisions. The Poles had also formed censorship units, interrogation centres, photographic interpretation sections and signals intelligence units. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1944, the Allies tackled stubborn German resistance until held up by another winter of bloody fighting by the formidable Gothic Line covering the River Foglia. After Ravenna fell in December 1943, Sergeants Collis and Hedderly, of 47 Port and Security Section, interviewed every inmate in the prison and sorted them into ‘dangerous’, to be retained, ‘harmless’, to be released and ‘doubtful’, to be investigated. Two admitted to being Italian Navy frogmen who had buried a cache of mines. At Sulmona, 417 FSS screened Allied prisoners who had escaped from prison camps after Italy’s capitulation. In September, 471 FSS established its HQ in Cortona, Tuscany, where it arrested Abwehr agents and was involved in railway security between Rome and Florence. NCOs were also detached to S Forces as the Allies entered towns and helped interrogate agents at Detailed Interrogation Centres. By the end of 1944, the section was training Italian FS sections. Meanwhile, 314 FSS also joined Eighth Army near Ancona where a woman was recruited to visit German-held towns and report on enemy dispositions. It is said that she wore an Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform on her forays. The section also persuaded RAF technicians to fit a radio transmitter into one of their vehicles and then liaised with other radio operators to triangulate a U-Boat known to be landing three agents, one a woman. Their interrogations netted seventeen spies and saboteurs; most were ‘turned’. The few that resisted were executed and their photographs then dropped to the Abwehr training establishment. The section also lured three S-Boats into Ancona harbour by convincing their crews that they would be useful for operations against the Soviets. In November 1943 85 FSS had landed near Naples and was on port security duties at Barletta where it was involved, a year later, in capturing three Italian frogman tasked to attack ships and, in a joint operation with the US Counter Intelligence Corps, arrested a doctor who turned out to be a Fascist agent; he was convicted and shot.
Prior to mid-1943, the SOE made little attempt to infiltrate Italy until, in March 1944, GHQ in Cairo formed HQ Special Operations Mediterranean, codenamed Maryland, at Monopoli on the premise that it would support military operations. In 1942 the Executive and the Office of Strategic Services formed ‘Massingham’ near Algiers as an advanced operating base for operations in Southern France. Commander Gerry Holdsworth, a former Intelligence Corps, officer, arrived at Bari, after managing SOE seaborne operations from Cornwall, and created No. 1 Special Force as a cover for clandestine operations in Italy. Its security officer, Major Peter Lee established 300 FSS as its pseudonym for the issue and delivery of post and military equipment and, although it had been agreed that no postings should be made to it, it seems that it was used as a convenient administrative mailbox for lodging officers and men posted to Special Operations. Lee had joined the Intelligence Corps from the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940. Force 139 in London controlled SOE operations in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Force 266, reporting to HQ Balkan Air Force at Bari, had responsibility for operations in Yugoslavia, Albania and Hungary and used flights operating from Brindisi. As the Executive had already discovered in Greece and the Balkans, communist Resistance groups were well organized and allied to Moscow. After the German invasion in 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia fragmented into the pro-Axis Croatia, the remainder of the country covered by the royalist Chetniks and the communist Partisans under Josip Broz, also known as Tito. Several Allied missions sent to northern anti-communist Albania proved largely unproductive while communist groups in the south were effective but not entirely trustworthy. When Major Stephen Martin-Leake was appointed Head of the Albanian Desk, among those he recruited was Captain Peter Ke
mp, who had been wounded fighting with the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and had a ‘dare devil’ reputation. Joining the Intelligence Corps in July 1940, Kemp took part in several raids with the Small Scale Raiding Force and then, in 1943, was dropped into Albania. He survived for seven months, during which he was wounded twice, once shot his way out of trouble and, in another instance, escaped arrest by disguising himself as a woman. He was eventually betrayed to the Germans by pro-Nazi Kosovans but escaped. In May 1944, Martin-Leake returned to Albania as part of Operation Sculptor to support Partisan operations, but was killed a month later when German aircraft bombed a guerrilla camp near Permet. Although he was buried with full honours by the partisans, the communist government later reburied Allied servicemen killed in Albania in unmarked graves. He is now commemorated on a memorial in Tirana. Kemp later served in the Soviet Union and the Far East.
Greece and Crete
After a rest from operations in Crete, in November 1943 Captain Xan Fielding returned to the island and landed from a submarine near Koustoyerako. He was joined eleven months later by Sergeant Major William Knox and an officer scheduled to take over from Major Leigh-Fermor in Eastern Crete. Knox had served in six FS sections before he joined Force 133. Also in Crete was Captain Ralph Stockbridge, a Cambridge University classicist, who had enlisted in 1940 and, as a Field Security sergeant, had been evacuated from Crete shortly before the German invasion. Loaned by the MI6 Inter-Services Liaison Department, Cairo, to SOE, he returned to Crete as the wireless operator to an officer co-ordinating the rescue of evading Allied servicemen, but such were their privations that they existed on grass soup and herbs. In February 1942, Stockbridge was commissioned but was then evacuated after being betrayed. Returning as a member of MI6, he landed from a Greek submarine as the senior officer in Crete to concentrate on collecting information, but he was frequently frustrated by supply drops bursting on impact or being lost in ravines. In his book Hide and Seek, Fielding wrote:
Of all the British agents on the island, Stockbridge was the most subtly disguised. He washed and shaved carefully at least once a week, wore shoes rather than boots, an overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles. His appearance, stumbling walk and mannerisms were exactly those of what he was pretending to be: a village schoolmaster.
Awarded a bar to his Military Cross, Stockbridge admitted to trembling when passing through German checkpoints.
Shortly after Italy surrendered, Major Leigh Fermor had persuaded General Angelo Carta, the Italian commander of the 51st (Sienna) Division in Crete, to defect and escorted him to Cairo. Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Friedrich Muller, commanding the German 22nd Infantry Division in Rhodes and Crete, interned his former allies; nevertheless, substantial quantities of weapons were diverted to the Greek Resistance. SOE concerns that it might attempt a coup d’etat quickly grew when two small German garrisons on Crete and a relief force were ambushed. Muller retaliated by destroying several villages and killing about 500 Cretans. The idea of kidnapping a German general from Crete had first been suggested in 1942 and rejected; however, with the island in turmoil, the idea was resurrected and, during the night of 5 February 1944, an aircraft circled the snow-covered and fog-shrouded Kathero Plateau and Major Leigh Fermor jumped out. However, his colleague, Captain Bill Moss, and two Cretans were unable to do so and arrived by boat two months later. Moss describes Leigh Fermor:
He wore a smart moustache, kept his hair neatly under control, and his fancy dress included a finely embroidered Cretan bolero, a long, wine-coloured cummerbund (into which were thrust an ivory-handled revolver and a silver dagger), a pair of corduroy riding-breeches, and tall black boots.
Leigh Fermor told him that Muller had been replaced by Lieutenant General Heinrich Kriepe. Over the next three weeks, they hiked across the mountains to the north of the island, enjoying a typical Easter Cretan celebration in a village. Meanwhile, Sergeant Major Knox had formed an effective relationship with the New Zealander, Staff Sergeant Dudley Perkins, and was ambushing patrols, collecting intelligence and integrating themselves with the villages by attending christenings and weddings. Shortly after a wireless operator arrived in late February 1944, Perkins and his guide were killed in an ambush and their wireless was captured. Knox took over Perkins’ network and withdrew with the radio operator to a cave in a valley in the knowledge that collaborators were helping German searches. Early on 23 March, as a masked Cretan led a German battalion towards the cave, Knox and several Resistence enticed the Germans away from it but at the cost of Knox and two Cyprus Regiment soldiers killed. The Germans withdrew leaving the radio operator undisturbed; however, his recklessness later led to his arrest.
Meanwhile, having concluded that seizing General Kreipe from his villa at Knossos was impossible, Leigh Fermor and Moss decided to intercept him during his twice-daily journey to his headquarters at Ano Arkhanais and focused on the T-junction that linked Arkhanais, Heraklion and Knossos as a suitable ambush site. It was shrouded by high banks and bordered by deep ditches and ideal because cars travelling towards Knossos had to slow down. A 250yd cable connecting two buzzers was run from a hillock to the T-junction and a defence group covered the ambush. At about 9.45pm on 26 April, the buzzer warned Leigh Fermor and Moss in the ditch that the General’s car was approaching. Masquerading as two German military police, they signalled it to stop and then Leigh Fermor dragged the General from the front seat and bundled him into the back, where three Cretans were sitting, while Moss pushed the driver towards the defence group; they later killed him. With Moss driving and Leigh Fermor relying on the Germans recognizing Kriepe’s pennant, they negotiated twenty-two control points and then ditched the car and left a letter and some British equipment at Heraklion to give the Germans the impression that they were meeting a submarine on the north coast, and headed south. Next day, they linked up with the defence group and a wireless operator and crossed the mountains, sometimes staying in villages, and were picked up by the Royal Navy during the night of 14 May. General Kriepe was sent to Special Camp 12 in Bridgend. The Germans concluded that Kreipe had been abducted by a military force and did not retaliate. The kidnapping was dramatized in the book and film of the same name, Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. Leigh Fermor became a renowned travel author. In May 1994, six members of the Corps and three Greek Army commandos followed the route taken by Leigh Fermor and met some of those associated in the kidnapping.
The political solidarity in the Greek Resistance achieved by Brigadier Myers during Operation Harling did not last and while the SOE took a pragmatic decision by equipping those of greatest risk to the Germans, that is the communists, the loyalists secured weaponry after Italy collapsed. Attempts by Allied Military Missions to introduce solidarity largely failed and, although SOE brokered a ceasefire during the 1943 civil war, the communists refused to help sabotage the railways, pleading fear of German reprisals. Major Hammond was dropped into Thessaly as the Macedonia Area Commander in the British Military Mission but spent most of his time defusing internecine strife; nevertheless, he attacked an important bridge in the Tempe Pass in early 1943. By the autumn of 1944 German forces in Greece, in danger of being cut off from Germany by the Soviet advance towards Eastern Europe, began withdrawing. Some right wing groups, such as X led by Lieutenant Colonel George Grivas, agreed not to harass the Germans.
Under the March 1944 Caserta Agreement, the Allies agreed that Greek Resistance should be placed under Allied command when the country was liberated. In early October X Corps landed in the Peloponnese and, by 14 November, 23 Armoured Brigade and part of 2 Parachute Brigade were in Athens. They were accompanied by 20 FSS in western Athens and 24 FSS in eastern Athens and on port security at Piraeus. Between them, they arrested at least eighty pro-Nazi agents, mostly Greek collaborators, and a German paymaster. An 89 (Parachute) FS detachment, reformed after Arnhem, was also in support and 11 Indian Infantry Brigade was in Patras, while the remainder of 2 Parachute Brigade and 9 Comma
ndo were in Salonika. As engineers and logistics troops began aiding a country that was politically, economically and administratively in ruins, hopes that the ideological factions would co-operate creaked when the communists declared that the Greek Mountain Brigade and the Sacred Squadron, which were part of the Allied order of battle and in Athens, should be disbanded. The arrival of the Greek Government from exile on the 18 November attracted some opposition; however, when Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie, who commanded III Corps, suggested that the constitutional armed forces should be reformed, public disorder spread with right wing groups terrorizing the left. Following a serious riot in Athens on 3 December, the communists attacked the Greek police and British troops, cut the road to Piraeus and captured the British-Greek naval headquarters. On 18 December, RAF Headquarters at Kifissia Airfield and about 100 British forces, including 1 Mobile Detachment Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre defending a complex near the Tatoi and Aperghi Hotels, were captured and rescued several hours later. When X Corps divisions were diverted from Italy, 268 FSS arrived in October under control of Security Intelligence Middle East until, in November, it moved with 290 (4th Indian Division) FSS and the Indians to Salonika, where they unearthed evidence of Soviet subversions and collusions with Greek communists. A Censorship Directorate also arrived. Meanwhile, 4th Infantry Division and its 5 FSS took over the Piraeus sector, and by Christmas Day had re-opened the port and the road to Athens, allowing reinforcements to be landed. 31 FSS and 278 FSS arrived with 46th Infantry Division. With its CSM a Savoy Hotel chef and one of the NCOs a wine merchant, in Algeria, 94 (Port Security) FSS had a reputation as a comfortable section. After a largely contrived international conference shortly before Christmas, loyalist support collapsed when it refused to accept the ceasefire. On New Year’s Eve, King George II of Greece appointed a Regent to stabilize the political situation. However, several hundred of 20,000 hostages seized by the communists died of exposure after being marched into the winter-clad mountains. Others were executed by ‘people’s courts’. When both sides agreed to an unconditional ceasefire on 15 January, the second Greek civil war was over, although the right wing pursued the left in the White Terror.
Sharing the Secret Page 13
