25 Telegram, A. R. Glen to B. A. Sweet-Escott, 16 September 1940, HS 5/895.
26 ‘Note on the death of G. S. Frodsham’, A. Lawrenson to Colonel G. Taylor, 5 June 1945, TNA HS 9/546.
27 Section D History, TNA HS 7/4; telegram, A. R. Glen to B. A. Sweet-Escott, 16 September 1940, HS 5/895.
28 ‘Note on the death of G. S. Frodsham,’ A. Lawrenson to Colonel G. Taylor, 5 June 1945, TNA HS 9/546.
3
‘Garibaldi’s curse’
Days after Italy’s entry into the Second World War, police officers arrived at the door of 175 Sussex Gardens, a London boarding house in a terrace of Georgian homes close to Paddington Station. They were there to remove an Italian called Fortunato Picchi. He was five feet tall, balding, a little overweight, forty-three years old and unmarried, and had rented a room there for two decades. Once head waiter in banqueting at London’s Savoy Hotel, he now worked at Fleming’s Hotel on Half Moon Street, the well-to-do Mayfair street that served as fictional home to P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.
Picchi was at home when the police reached the door. At precisely that moment, apparently, Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ was playing on his gramophone. His room, someone would write of it, was ‘modest, tiny, exceedingly well kept, always provided by the solicitude of a rare friend with a bunch of fresh flowers’. On its walls were pictures of blue Italian skies. Among his books were The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti and G. M. Trevelyan’s Garibaldi and the Thousand. And pinned above the bed and written in Picchi’s hand were these words of Garibaldi’s:
England is a great and powerful nation, foremost in human progress, enemy to despotism, the only safe refuge for the exile, friend of the oppressed. If ever England should be so circumscribed as to require the help of an ally, cursed be the Italian who would not step forward in her defence.1
At least 18,000 Italians were living peacefully in Britain in June 1940. Many considered it their home, had found jobs and raised families there. More than a few were Jews who had recently fled Italy to escape Fascist oppression, but the majority had been there for years. Once Italy declared war, however, the British authorities rounded up thousands of them, regardless of their reasons for being in Britain or their opinion of Mussolini. Considered enemy aliens whose reliability and loyalty were uncertain, the majority of these, like Picchi, soon found themselves interned on the Isle of Man in requisitioned camps and drab boarding houses. They included Italians whose allegiances lay with Mussolini’s regime, but a great many were anti-Fascist and pro-British. For the latter it was a miserably unjust fate, though it could have been much worse. In July, sailing from Liverpool for camps in Canada, almost 500 Italian internees lost their lives when the Arandora Star, a British passenger ship, was hit and sunk by torpedoes fired from a German U-boat.
In late 1940, when the British Chiefs of Staff, responsible for the higher direction of Britain’s war effort, laid down that ‘the elimination of Italy’ was of primary strategic importance, it was among Italians interned in Britain that SOE began to search for volunteers willing to be sent into Italy as clandestine agents.2 Precipitated by the personal and energetic intervention of Hugh Dalton, SOE’s minister, this search would provide a sobering introduction to the difficulties of targeting Italy. It was also a search that turned up the first Italian volunteer to be dispatched by the British to fight Fascism on Italian soil. He would parachute into Italy, as a participant in the first operational drop in British military history, in February 1941.
Hugh Dalton prided himself on his knowledge of Italy and Italians. During the First World War, as a young lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, he had served with the British contingent sent to fight on the Italian front and earned an Italian decoration for valour, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, during the retreat from Caporetto. Later he wrote a memoir, With British Guns in Italy: A Tribute to Italian Achievement. Dalton had also spent time in Italy between the wars on parliamentary and diplomatic business. On one occasion, in December 1932, he had met and spoken with Mussolini.
That encounter had taken place at the Palazzo Venezia. They had chatted in Italian of the First World War, public works and politics. It was an occasion that left Dalton more impressed than he later cared to admit. ‘6.15 see the Duce,’ he wrote in his diary at the time.
Approach through a long series of rooms … Many plain clothes detectives including one who sits opposite me while I am waiting.
Finally ushered into an immense room, with marble walls. At the far end the Duce, standing, with upturned eyes reading a book. He advances to meet me, when I am half-way across the room, ‘with a friendly smile,’ as the journalists say.
We spend half an hour together …
He has charm and intelligence. Very small brown eyes. He turns them up and the whites show, like a clown at a circus. Less tall than I expected. But strongly built …
Yes, charm, intelligence, energy, and no play acting. That is for the gallery.
When it was time to go, Mussolini walked Dalton to the door and told him to visit again whenever he was next in Rome. ‘There is no other living man whom it would have thrilled me more to meet,’ Dalton’s diary entry ends. ‘Ruth [Dalton’s wife] thinks he has conquered my susceptibilities too much.’3
Tall, bald, pugnacious and prickly, Dalton was a man of ‘immense energy … genuinely kind-hearted’, remembered Gladwyn Jebb, his closest adviser on SOE business. A career Foreign Office man, Jebb had been assigned to assist Dalton with his new clandestine duties. The pair had known each other for years – Jebb had once been his private secretary – and got on well. ‘It must also be admitted that Dalton was often the reverse of easy,’ Jebb also recalled. ‘[I]n moments of stress, more particularly when the war was going badly, I was often the target of his frustrated energy. The whole of Berkeley Square House [where Dalton had his office] occasionally shook with roared insults.’4 One of those moments may have been sparked by the arrival on Dalton’s desk, in late November 1940, of a report spelling out precisely how little SOE was achieving against Italy.
The drafting of that report had been precipitated by news reaching London of Italian reverses and defeats in Africa and the Mediterranean. An ill-equipped Italian offensive from Libya into British-held Egypt had been halted, while Italy’s invasion of Greece, launched in October, had gone badly from the start with Greek counter-attacks forcing some Italian units to retreat beyond the Albanian bases from which the invasion began. Then, on the night of 11–12 November, biplanes of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm devastated half of the Italian Navy’s capital ships during a lightning raid on the Italian port of Taranto. Days later, noting that the moment seemed ‘particularly favourable’ for intensifying subversive work against Italy, the Foreign Office asked SOE to explain what it was doing about it.5
That inquiry was sent first to Gladwyn Jebb. He promptly passed it to Sir Frank Nelson, head of what was then known as SO2. Early in its existence, SOE was composed principally of two parts: one, known as SO1, was responsible for propaganda and would be hived off in the autumn of 1941 to become a separate organisation, the Political Warfare Executive; the second and larger part was SO2, whose field – the more violent forms of subversion – would be the kernel of SOE’s work throughout the war. Nelson was a quiet, able and well-liked man who had blended a career in business and administration – for which he was knighted, aged forty, in 1924 – with seven years in Parliament as a Conservative MP. Latterly, under the cover of British vice-consul in Basle, he had been working for Claude Dansey’s Z organisation. From when he took up his new post in August 1940, Nelson’s commitment to the job was total. ‘He seemed to have no family life,’ one SOE colleague recalled, ‘and was in the office seven days a week from about a quarter to nine until very nearly midnight.’6
Nelson, who had just moved with his staff into offices at 64 Baker Street, now found himself confessing to Jebb that the matter of action against Italy was ‘one of our major worries down here’. No one was behin
d his Italian desk, Nelson said. There were no Italian recruits and not much in the way of plans. One idea was to parachute into northern Italy a few friendly Italians (though SOE had none yet on its books) but it did not impress him much: ‘I must in all honesty point out to you’, he told Jebb, ‘that the very nebulous advantages of sending the parachutist type into Italy are almost certainly out-weighed by the disadvantages of the information they will almost certainly give away if and when they are caught.’ Getting ‘the desperado type’ into Italy – he meant an agent trained in commando-type sabotage – was also under consideration, ‘but quite frankly, beyond the advantage of being able to say that we have put people into Italy by such and such means, I am not hopeful of any results worthy of the name’. He finished his report: ‘Generally, we never cease to try to get down to this problem, but I fully realise that polite generalities of this kind are of no use to you or the Minister, and all I can say at the moment is that we will re-double our efforts to find some method of penetration.’7
This was the report that now sat on Dalton’s desk. ‘We must buck up our Italian efforts,’ the Minister scrawled across it in red ink.8 And in his diary he wrote:
I feel very explosive, C.D. [Nelson] not yet having got anyone in his Italian section, and nothing serious being done by us to hammer the Italians. I therefore summon Gladwyn, C.D. and A.D. [George Taylor, Nelson’s chief of staff] to a conference and blow them all up … Why don’t they ask for more assistants? I have got to take the Italian thing in my own hands … I could not answer the P.M. if he asked me, ‘What are you doing to Italy?’9
Three weeks later, Churchill did ask that question. ‘In accordance with my instructions from the Prime Minister,’ Dalton told Jebb, ‘I desire that all possible effective action against Italy shall be pressed forward without delay.’10 He carried on fuming in his diary. ‘We must by all means hit hard at Italy,’ he scribbled. ‘I am tired of excuses and obstruction. I will, if necessary, sack all the subordinates who are failing to do their job. This is a critical moment of the war. Italy is in the market.’11
As to the means of taking the war to the Italians, Dalton’s ruthless mind was racing. He told Churchill ‘of the Slovenes with their leaflets, etc.’ and mused to him on the possibility of dispatching future agents to cause trouble in Milan. ‘P.M. says, “They will all be killed.” I say, “No doubt, but that is all in the war. If they can add only a little to the confusion and loss of morale, they will help us to a quicker victory.”’ Dalton also wondered in his diary about offering, ‘and quickly, a fair price to decent Italians who will get rid of Mussolini and his gang’. He even considered backing less decent Italians:
[T]here is no place, today, for stupid doctrinaire prejudices against ‘Fascism’ [sic] as such. If some Fascist toughs will murder Mussolini and a few more and then join with others, representing the Royal Family, the Army, Industry, the Italian workers and peasants, we must not reject them for the sake of some thin theory. What we want is that Italy shall stop fighting against us and, if possible, fight against Germans instead.12
Dalton did not expand on where Fascists like that might be found. In any case it was committed anti-Fascists that he really wanted. Already, in September, he had demanded intelligence about the penal colonies off Sicily where Mussolini was known to imprison his enemies. The first step had been to ask the Foreign Office to help identify the right island where the prisoners were held. A fortnight later, an unfortunate subordinate had to tell Dalton that a reply from the FO had still not arrived. Dalton again detonated – ‘this was all much too damned slow’ – and demanded to know who in the Foreign Office was responsible for ‘this atrocious indolence … A few hours steady browsing through some files is all that they are asked to do.’13 In time it became apparent that the Foreign Office doubted the wisdom of SOE raiding the islands to spring the prisoners. One concern was that ‘large-scale raids’ would be hard to execute. Another was that ‘the Italians would try to make capital out of the fact that we were so hard up for agitators that we had to obtain them by hole and corner methods’.14 The idea was finally given up when General Sir Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, advised against it. By then it had been heard anyway that all political prisoners had been moved from the islands ‘months ago’.15
Dalton also wanted to look for suitable Italians closer to home. Surely, he thought, volunteers could be found among the frustrated and unhappy hundreds now languishing on the Isle of Man. He resolved in his diary to bring ‘George Martelli up from the country to hustle about and get things going’.16 Martelli was an Italian-speaking journalist with an RNVR commission who had covered the war in Abyssinia for the Morning Post and penned two books about inter-war Italy. More recently he had run the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese sections of the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department, preparing reports from Foreign Office and MI6 sources, and had travelled once already to the Isle of Man to recruit Italians for a clandestine broadcasting station.
The plan to scour the camps for SOE was given added urgency when Dalton spoke in early December 1940 with Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, Director of Combined Operations, a new headquarters created in July to devise and carry out raids against the enemy by naval and army forces. A seasoned old warrior now desk-bound in Whitehall, Keyes was formulating plans to assemble a special force to raid Italian targets in the Mediterranean – islands and coastal railways and the like – and wanted from Dalton ‘some good, tough and reliable Italians’ to accompany his men ‘and after landing go off into the blue’. Keyes said he needed the Italians by the middle of December when a convoy containing his raiding force was due to set sail for Malta or Crete. Dalton dispatched Martelli to the Isle of Man to ‘rake the camp for suitables’.17
Half a century later, Martelli’s obituary recorded how in later life he became a ‘prolific’ yet ‘trenchant, contentious and mildly xenophobic’ contributor to the letters page of the Daily Telegraph.18 But he had never been a man disinclined to speak his mind. ‘Martelli is rather indiscreet’, observed one officer who lunched with him in August 1940. ‘I was very upset by the way he kept mentioning SIS [MI6] in a normal voice in a crowded club room at the Reform. On the other hand, he appears to be very intelligent.’19 Now, prior to setting out again for the Isle of Man, he submitted to Frank Nelson a pessimistic but prophetic memorandum on the whole issue of recruiting Italians interned in Britain. The great majority, Martelli explained, were either Fascists or ‘non-politically-minded people of peaceable instincts, e.g. waiters, small traders, ice-cream merchants, etc.’ As for Keyes’s immediate needs, Martelli considered that half a dozen volunteers might come forward, but it would be difficult, in such a short space of time, to be sure of their ability, while any reliable men would be wasted on Keyes’s enterprise unless he could bring them out afterwards. As Martelli put it, ‘to land them on Italian soil with a load of explosives, without any prospect of re-embarkation, would be an invitation to suicide in the most painful circumstances’.20 Nelson and Dalton agreed that the matter required deeper thought. Keyes was told that more time was needed to produce ‘the “strong-arm” men’ requested.21 He replied that he was now in ‘no great hurry’ for his ‘toughs’.22 Martelli left anyway for the Isle of Man and began his enquiries. A few men came forward. Interviews were held. By the time he left the island a few days later, he had found five Italians who seemed to have potential as prospective saboteurs.
Then SOE received a fresh request from Keyes’s headquarters. Two Italians were wanted who were ‘willing and fit to be landed by parachute’.23 This time the call was urgent: they would need a fortnight’s special training and have to be ready by the beginning of February. Pencilled notes in one SOE file state that the pair would require instruction in the use of Thompson sub-machineguns, Colt .38s, fighting knives, grenades and ‘Capsules E’, the latter being ampoules of ether which could be employed as a sedative.24 Parachute training was to follow at Ringway airfield outside Manchester. To allow for
casualties, Keyes’s request was increased to three. SOE told Keyes that it would act ‘without delay’.25
By this time, Martelli’s five Italians – now known in SOE as ‘the Quins’ – were in the Scottish Highlands undergoing paramilitary and physical training at a commando school near the village of Lochailort. Two of them, however, were swiftly assessed to be unsuitable for any subversive purpose whatsoever. Both were aged around forty. Both had lived in Britain for about ten years. Watching them as they went through their training was a young Canadian, John Macalister, a former Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, who would later be sent into occupied France as an SOE agent and die in Buchenwald concentration camp. In early 1941 Macalister’s job was to help monitor new SOE recruits and consider their suitability for operations. He judged these two to be ‘hard working’ but ‘extremely docile’ and ‘completely lacking in heroic qualities’. Both were returned to civilian life.26
Another Quin was Rinaldo Purisiol. Born near Venice, he was a 47-year-old ship’s engineer who had served during the First World War in Italian cruisers and submarines. During the Spanish Civil War, so he said, he had fought with the International Brigades, taking part in the defence of Madrid, before returning to the sea to ship Republican arms from Marseilles to Alicante. In 1940, after the German invasion of Belgium, he had arrived in Britain from Antwerp aboard a British boat on which he was employed as chief mechanic; after being paid off in London, he was promptly interned. ‘A revolutionary with a reasoning mind,’ reads an early report on him: ‘Without doubt he is prepared to go to any length to destroy fascism. Loves Italy.’27 Another observer saw him as a ‘soldier of fortune grown old and wary and somewhat careful of his skin. Socialist and republican in his ideals; has a good, perhaps too good, opinion of himself.’28
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