Target

by Roderick Bailey

  As for Salvadori, he had flown home from France at the end of May and resigned himself to the fact that he had little future in Britain. Making propaganda was one thing, but he had always wanted to do more active work. Since arriving in London the previous autumn he had tried repeatedly to secure a British Army commission. Every attempt had been knocked back: there were long waiting lists; there were concerns about the implications of his Italian background. Also, as a family man who, since turning up from the United States in September 1939, had always worked for the British on an occasional and temporary basis, he needed a regular income. Frustrated, he contemplated a return to the United States to resume his university duties and fight Fascism from there. ‘I feel that the place for those who are fit for active service is in the Army,’ he explained to Section D in May 1940. ‘Civilian work, including propaganda, can be carried on perfectly well by those who, being elderly, in bad health or foreigners, are unfit for active service … My family and employers [in the United States] would understand [if] … I remain in Europe as a member of the fighting armies. But after eight months of absence, there is no justification for my permanence in this country if I am simply doing [propaganda].’50

  One last-ditch appeal for help was to Claude Dansey. ‘Because of my foreign accent, a commission in a unit exclusively composed of 100% English people would be out of the question,’ Salvadori wrote to him in early June. ‘I wonder if I could not be of some use in a colonial unit. The little Swahili which I used to know would still be handy …’51 Dansey regretted that he was unable to help, ‘much as I should like to … [P]ersonally I know you would make an excellent officer.’52

  On 11 June, hours after Italy had finally declared war on Britain and France, Salvadori sailed from Liverpool for New York. He would not return for two and half years.

  Notes

  1 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

  2 Recommendation for the award of the Distinguished Service Order, 26 April 1945, TNA WO 373/11.

  3 M. Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds: A Personal Chronicle of One Man’s Fight For Freedom (London: Pall Mall Press, 1958), p. 12.

  4 Quoted in ‘Fascists and Their Critics: Assault on a Florence Professor’, The Times, 11 April 1924.

  5 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, p. 16.

  6 Manchester Guardian, 6 December 1929.

  7 Other variations/suggestions include the Opera Volontaria di Repressione Antifascista and the Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo.

  8 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, pp. 46, 52.

  9 Ibid. p. 93.

  10 M. Canali, ‘I cedimenti di Max Salvadori’, Liberal, No. 27, December 2004/January 2005.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds pp. 94–8.

  13 M. Salvadori, ‘With SOE in Italy: As I Saw It’, undated note written for Christopher Woods, c. 1990, private papers of M. Salvadori (hereafter, Salvadori papers).

  14 The Times, 1 November 1922.

  15 It is possible that ‘Mr Constable’ was Kenneth Cohen, a retired naval officer recruited by Claude Dansey in 1937.

  16 ‘David’ (C. Dansey) to ‘Peter’ (M. Salvadori), 2 March 1938, Salvadori papers.

  17 ‘Girl Beatrice. Report Re: Accident 26th August, 1938’, Salvadori papers.

  18 ‘David’ (C. Dansey) to ‘Peter’ (M. Salvadori), 2 June 1939, Salvadori papers.

  19 ‘David’ (C. Dansey) to ‘Peter’ (M. Salvadori), 22 August 1939, Salvadori papers.

  20 Telegram, ‘David’ (C. Dansey) to ‘Peter’ (M. Salvadori), 28 August 1939, Salvadori papers.

  21 J. R. M. Butler, History of the Second World War: Grand Strategy. Volume II: September 1939 to June 1941 (London: HMSO, 1957), pp. 12, 295.

  22 ‘Secret War Diary of M.I.R. from September 3rd, 1939 to October 2nd 1940’, TNA HS 8/263.

  23 Handwritten manuscript by L. Grand, untitled and undated, TNA HS 7/5.

  24 ‘D Section: Early History [of SOE] to September 1940’, TNA HS 7/3.

  25 Section D History, TNA HS 7/4.

  26 ‘Propaganda in Italy in favour of the Allies’, memorandum by M. Salvadori, September 1939, Salvadori papers.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Minute by Sir Andrew Noble, 7 October 1939, TNA FO 371/23787.

  29 K. Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 423.

  30 M. Canali, ‘I cedimenti di Max Salvadori’, in Liberal no. 27, December 2004/January 2005.

  31 Ibid.

  32 See, for example: M. Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), and M. Canali, ‘L’uomo che visse due volte: prima al servizio del Duce, poi di Sua Maesta’, Corriere della Sera, October 2004.

  33 M. Canali in la Repubblica, 5 July 2005.

  34 P. Ross, writing on behalf of ‘Mr Douglas’ (Major Lawrence Grand), to ‘Mr Sylvester’ (M. Salvadori), 17 November 1939, Salvadori papers.

  35 M. Salvadori to Miss Ross, 21 November 1939, Salvadori papers.

  36 ‘Accounts for Journey November 29 to December 27, 1939’, Salvadori papers.

  37 M. Salvadori to ‘Adriano’, 6 December 1939, Salvadori papers.

  38 ‘My meeting with an agent of the OVRA’, report by M. Salvadori, sent under covering letter, M. Salvadori to ‘Mr Douglas’ (Major Lawrence Grand), 27 December 1939, Salvadori papers.

  39 Ibid.

  40 M. Salvadori to ‘Mr Douglas’ (Major Lawrence Grand), 27 December 1939, Salvadori papers. ‘The account of your meeting was extremely interesting,’ Section D replied. ‘We are very glad that you have returned safely … As regards finance, I note that you will forward to me a cheque for L40, and that 120 French francs and a total of 500 Swiss francs will also be refunded to us …’ P. Ross to M. Salvadori, 6 January 1940, Salvadori papers.

  41 M. Salvadori to ‘David’ (C. Dansey), 25 April 1940, Salvadori papers.

  42 Salvadori’s papers shed little explicit light on his initial contact with the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC. However, his hostility to Fascism was so deep-rooted, and his contact with the devious Claude Dansey was so established and supportive, that it is hard to believe that his motives were different. It is not impossible, though, that that earlier move was a lone wolf initiative that he started himself and later shared with the British.

  43 ‘Report by the Right Hon. Sir Percy Loraine, Bt., GCMG, on his Mission to Rome, May 2, 1939, to June 11, 1940’, TNA FO 371/33232.

  44 Ibid.

  45 Quoted in W. Churchill, The Second World War. Volume II: Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), pp. 107–8.

  46 ‘Summary of a policy to be adopted by the pro-Allied propaganda in Italy’, May 1940, Salvadori papers.

  47 P. Hope to M. Salvadori, 23 May 1940, Salvadori papers.

  48 ‘SOE Personnel: SOE History Sheet’, TNA HS 9/134/4.

  49 It is possible that Cianca was able to put this money to good use. According to Section D records, two clandestine printing presses were subsequently subsidised in Turin and Milan.

  50 M. Salvadori to Mr Martin, 14 May 1940, Salvadori papers.

  51 M. Salvadori to ‘David’ (C. Dansey), 2 June 1940, Salvadori papers.

  52 ‘David’ (C. Dansey) to ‘Peter’ (M. Salvadori), 6 June 1940, Salvadori papers.

  2

  ‘Pottering about’

  At a quarter to five on the afternoon of 10 June 1940, the British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, arrived at the Palazzo Chigi, a grand sixteenth-century palace overlooking the Via del Corso and the Piazza Colonna. He was there to speak with Italy’s Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano. At that moment Britain and France had been at war with Nazi Germany for nine months. French collapse seemed imminent. Italy had remained estranged from the conflict but seemed unlikely to stay out for long. Days earlier, Ciano, who was also Mussolini’s son-in-law, had openly told Loraine that his country was poised to enter the war on Germany’s side and the only doubt remaining was the dat
e. Now they met again, shook hands, and sat down; and this time Ciano announced to Loraine that Italy and Britain would be at war from midnight.

  The urbane Loraine was nicknamed ‘Ponderous Percy’ by unkind underlings but was not a man easily wrong-footed. ‘In the previous months everything had been said and done to make clear Britain’s disinclination for war with Italy,’ he told the Foreign Office afterwards, ‘and enough had been said to show that though we did not seek war, we did not fear it thrust upon us. The moment was not one for covering the ground again [and] … dignity forbade a retort.’1 Instead he took cold and careful note of the declaration, scribbled the details on a sheet of headed paper from a pad on Ciano’s desk, double-checked that Italy was declaring war also on France, then left to return to the Embassy and make arrangements for his journey home. Ciano wrote in his diary that Loraine had been ‘laconic and inscrutable. He received my communication without batting an eyelid or changing colour.’2

  An hour later, Mussolini spoke from the balcony of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia to an excited crowd below. ‘This is the hour of destiny for our country – the hour of irrevocable destiny,’ he declared. ‘We are going to fight the democracies of the West … Run to your arms, show your stubbornness, courage and valour …’3 Radio and loudspeakers carried his words across the country. London, meanwhile, heard the news from Loraine. ‘Mussolini decided to come into the war, and we had to wake up Winston from his afternoon slumber and tell him,’ reads the Downing Street diary of Jock Colville, the Prime Minister’s assistant private secretary. ‘All Winston said [was] … “People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in future”.’4

  ‘At least it was not unexpected,’ Colville continued in his diary. ‘There has never been such a flourish of trumpets to announce a grand entry; but the Italians have a sense of the melodramatic.’ Certainly Britain had had forewarning. Where Colville was less accurate was in adding that it had ‘given us time to make our dispositions’.5 Declassified British files from this period reveal some very obvious facts: the paucity of preparation for Italy joining the war; the shallow and amateurish nature of the clandestine resources on which Britain could draw when the gloves came off; and the subsequent snail-like pace of progress towards targeting Italy clandestinely, despite the creation of a fresh organisation, the Special Operations Executive, in July 1940 with subversive action against the Italians as one of its priorities.

  A sense of that under-resourced amateurism can be found among documents charting the near-farcical course of one of the few anti-Italian schemes – besides the limited dealings with Max Salvadori and Giustizia e Libertà – to engage much of Section D’s attention before Italy entered the war. This was a plan to disrupt the rail traffic between Germany and Italy that ran through neutral Switzerland. Trains snaking into Italy along that route imported goods of vital importance to the Fascist war effort. Coal coming from Germany, for example, which the British estimated in 1940 to be at least a million tons a month, met most of Italy’s industrial needs.

  Section D’s first step towards targeting that traffic was to make contact in London in the autumn of 1939 with a friendly Austrian railway engineer by the name of Strauss. In the past he had worked on the Swiss railways. Latterly he had been employed in London as foreign editor of a British weekly called Modern Transport. Sponsored jointly by French Intelligence, Strauss was then dispatched on an exploratory mission to Switzerland. He returned with a few useful contacts in the form of some anti-Nazis and trade unionists employed by the Swiss Federal Railways.

  Next, Section D decided to recruit, train and send out to Switzerland a British agent to develop those contacts with a view to beginning sabotage. A candidate was found, interviewed and selected. Soon he was being put through a course in basic sabotage techniques and signals. By now there was growing urgency to the business. By April 1940, with Italy becoming more anti-British by the day and the ban on anti-Italian planning lifted, Rome and Berlin were known to have reached an agreement whereby the Germans undertook to provide Italy’s entire coal requirement and send all of it overland, a commitment that would mean coaltrains reaching Italy from the Reich at a rate of one every twenty minutes.

  The name of the British agent now poised to leave for Switzerland was Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis. It is fair to say that the decision to select him for such a covert job was ambitious. Educated at Westminster and the universities of Oxford and Munich, Hamilton Ellis had worked before the war as a journalist on The Railway Gazette, a popular read among schoolboys and train-spotters. He had also written a few children’s books and liked to paint pictures of steam trains. Noting that he spoke fluent German and adequate French ‘including technical terms’, Section D thought that he stood a good chance of settling into the Swiss railway milieu on the strength of his claim to be ‘a good mixer’ having ‘lived amicably with a Scandinavian engine-driver for some time’.6 A friend and fellow railway enthusiast would later recall that ‘Cuthie’ in uniform cut ‘hardly a striking figure’ but could be roused under pressure, ‘as when we were standing together in the corridor of a London-bound train one morning when it was attacked by a German aircraft just south of Polhill Tunnel. He had spent some time in Germany after Oxford and occupied much of our journey through the tunnel conjuring up choice remarks to direct at the hostile pilot.’7

  When he joined Section D, Hamilton Ellis was thirty years old and had recently become a private soldier in the Royal West Kent Regiment. In the end, delays in securing his discharge from the Army (the War Office lost his papers) and problems arranging a visa (the Swiss raised eyebrows when his application said he was a railway engineer) saw him spend weeks kicking his heels at his home in Sevenoaks before the call to go eventually came. Finally leaving London on 5 June, he reached Switzerland on 8 June armed with a ten-day visa, a false passport, a false job as a correspondent for Modern Transport, and the rather eccentric pseudonym of Elmer T. Rudd. ‘The travelling was not bad,’ he reported happily on arrival, having checked in to Berne’s Hotel Bären.

  [T]he Swiss railways are a treat after those of England and France under wartime conditions. The weather has been perfect ever since I left home; there was a bit of a thunderstorm in the mountains today, but that merely made the scenery look more imposing and laid the dust. Were it not for the damned war, this would be a most enjoyable job, in a lovely city like Berne with no black-out.8

  As Section D recorded later, Hamilton Ellis had arrived on a Saturday, ‘which prevented him from making any contacts over the weekend’. Sunday, which happened to be his thirty-first birthday, he spent ‘watching the traffic on the Berne–Simplon line from which he could confirm the considerable volume of traffic between Italy and Germany. He obtained a certain amount of railway information while pottering about, but it was purely of academic interest.’9 On Monday Italy entered the war.

  After a few hastily arranged and unproductive meetings with three or four of Strauss’s contacts, Hamilton Ellis consulted the British Legation in Berne and was advised to leave immediately for Britain. He decided to follow that advice. A slow train took him from Geneva to Bellegarde, just inside the French frontier. France, in the final throes of defeat, was not a healthy place to be. Sensing that it was unlikely that any trains would be running that could take him west or north, he abandoned his luggage, save for a briefcase containing his papers, jumped on a bicycle, and pedalled all the way to Marseilles, a distance of some 250 miles. From there he proceeded by collier to Gibraltar where he boarded another boat and sailed home.

  On his return, thought was briefly given in London to employing Hamilton Ellis as an agent on other projects. It was noted that he was ‘very keen on going out again’.10 Someone wondered if he might be suitable for a mission to Spain. It was also noted that he must have shown ‘considerable initiative during his escape’ and that ‘there is no doubt that on the subject of railways his character assumed a decisiveness that was not apparent in his ordinary manner’.11 U
ltimately it was decided that his talents lay elsewhere and he was signed out of the secret world in November 1940. After the war he continued to devote himself quietly to all things rail and was widely published, his books including such titles as The Splendour of Steam, The Trains We Loved, and Rapidly Round the Bend.

  ‘There seems little doubt that Ellis would have been better advised to have remained in Switzerland rather than run for it,’ observed Section D after he made it back to London. ‘It must, however, be said on his behalf, that, as a new and untried agent, he was put in an extremely difficult position, particularly since he had no contacts in any British intelligence organisation [there].’ It was also noted that the Legation’s advice that he should abandon Berne ‘was given without any knowledge that Ellis was engaged on other than purely journalistic activity’.12 A perceived need to prevent future cases of poor coordination – there had been plenty of instances more serious than this – was one reason why, in July 1940, the British War Cabinet agreed to establish something new: a single secret body devoted to sabotage, subversion and supporting popular resistance inside enemy territory.