Notes
1 ‘Crastinus’ (Silvio Corio), ‘Fortunato Picchi: Hero of “New Italy”’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 26 April 1941.
2 ‘Subversive Activities in Relation to Strategy’, first Chiefs of Staff directive to SOE, 25 November 1940, TNA CAB 80/56.
3 B. Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1918–40, 1945–60 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), pp. 173–4. For Dalton’s later and less generous account of the meeting, see: H. Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931–1945 (London: Frederick Muller, 1957), pp. 34–5.
4 G. Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1972), pp. 104–5. Certainly Dalton’s manner was not to everyone’s taste. Within a month of arriving he had argued with and dismissed Lawrence Grand, the old Section D chief. Absorbed into SOE along with many of his personnel, Grand had found the transition to new management hard to take. Another who shared his unhappiness was Peter Hope, a young linguist whom Grand had instructed in May 1940 to set up an Italian sub-section for Section D; Hope left SOE in early 1941 to join MI5.
5 H. Hopkinson to G. Jebb, 25 November 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
6 B. Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 56.
7 Minute, Sir Frank Nelson to G. Jebb, 27 November 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
8 Note by H. Dalton on minute from Sir Frank Nelson to G. Jebb, 27 November 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
9 Pimlott, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 113.
10 Minute, H. Dalton to G. Jebb, 19 December 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
11 Pimlott, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 128. Even before Nelson’s report reached him, a bristling Dalton had been unhappy with SOE’s progress on Italy. In October he had been reminded by an SOE subordinate ‘that the difficulty in Italy was that, when the balloon went up, we had no apparatus there at all’. Dalton, a vigorous opponent of pre-war appeasement policies, replied ‘that I fully realised this and had openly stated as much in the Cabinet and elsewhere; we had been completely let down by the ineptitude of HM’s previous Government, and of certain of their advisers in the Foreign Office and in the Embassy at Rome.’ H. Dalton to G. Jebb, 5 October 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
12 Pimlott, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 128.
13 Minute, H. Dalton to G. Jebb, 5 October 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
14 G. Thomas to P. Broad, 22 December 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
15 R. Leeper to Sir Orme Sargent, 2 January 1941, TNA HS 6/901.
16 Pimlott, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 113.
17 Minute, H. Dalton to G. Jebb, 4 December 1940, TNA HS 6/901. Keyes had joined the Royal Navy in 1885. Since then, among other adventures, he had sailed anti-slavery patrols off the African coast in the 1890s, scaled the walls of Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, been naval chief-of-staff off the Dardanelles in 1915, led the Dover Patrol and daring raids on Ostend and Zeebrugge in 1918, sat in the House of Commons since 1934, and been in charge of the British mission to King Leopold III of Belgium, in spring 1940.
18 ‘Lt-Cdr George Martelli’ (obituary), Daily Telegraph, March 1994.
19 P. Hope to Major L. Humphreys, 30 August 1940, TNA HS 8/305.
20 G. Martelli to Sir Frank Nelson, 5 December 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
21 H. Dalton to Sir Roger Keyes, 6 December 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
22 Sir Roger Keyes to H. Dalton, 7 December 1940, TNA HS 6/901.
23 G. K. Logie to Brigadier C. Gubbins, 2 January 1941, TNA HS 6/793.
24 ‘Colossus’, undated note, TNA HS 6/783.
25 G. K. Logie to Brigadier C. Gubbins, 2 January 1941, TNA HS 6/793.
26 Report by Lance-Corporal J. K. Macalister, 13 February 1941, TNA HS 9/238/6.
27 Report by Lance-Corporal Searle, 28 January 1941, TNA HS 9/1218/2.
28 Report by J. Dobrski, 31 March 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
29 Report by J. Dobrski, 15 April 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
30 J. McCaffery, ‘No Pipes or Drums’ (unpublished memoir), Imperial War Museum.
31 J. Nicol, Meet Me at the Savoy (London: Museum Press, 1952), p. 42.
32 D. Tangye (ed.), Went the Day Well (London: Harrap, 1942), p. 208.
33 ‘Crastinus’ (Silvio Corio), ‘Fortunato Picchi: Hero of “New Italy”’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 26 April 1941.
34 Tangye, Went the Day Well, p. 209.
35 ‘Crastinus’ (Silvio Corio), ‘Fortunato Picchi: Hero of “New Italy”’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 26 April 1941.
36 Ibid.
37 Tangye, Went the Day Well, p. 210.
38 Ibid. pp. 210–11.
39 ‘Report on Picchi’, by Lance-Corporal Searle, undated, TNA HS 9/1185/2.
40 ‘Report on Picchi’, by Pilot Officer Roche, 27 January 1941, TNA HS 9/1185/2.
41 ‘Picchi, Fortunato,’ TNA HS 9/1185/2.
42 Lieutenant-Colonel T. Pritchard to Brigadier B. Fergusson, 24 October 1946, TNA DEFE 2/1345.
43 A. Deane-Drummond, Return Ticket (London: Collins, 1953), pp. 13–14. Deane-Drummond was destined for a long and illustrious military career that would see him escape from a POW camp in 1942, land and again escape capture at Arnhem in 1944, and command the SAS in Malaya and Oman. He would retire as a major-general. He died in December 2012 at the age of ninety-five.
44 General Sir Hastings Ismay to Prime Minister, 8 January 1941, TNA PREM 3/100.
45 Prime Minister’s inked annotation, 9 January 1941, on General Sir Hastings Ismay to Prime Minister, 8 January 1941, TNA PREM 3/100.
46 According to one account, an emotional Roger Keyes had paid a visit to Mildenhall earlier that day: X Troop paraded in the hangar where Keyes shook hands with every man and was overheard whispering ‘A pity … a damned pity,’ before surprising everyone by coming to attention and saluting them. R. Foxall, The Guinea-Pigs: Britain’s First Paratroop Raid (London: Robert Hale, 1983), p. 48.
47 Deane-Drummond, Return Ticket, p. 21.
48 ‘Narrative of the Air Phase’, in ‘Operation COLOSSUS: Report Covering Period in Malta’, 13 February 1941, TNA DEFE 2/153.
49 Ibid.
50 Minutes of Chiefs of Staff Meeting held on 13 February 1941, TNA CAB 79/9.
51 Sir Roger Keyes to W. Churchill, 13 February 1941, TNA PREM 3/100.
52 Comment (dated June 1941) by Sir Roger Keyes on the report of the commanding officer of HMS Triumph, quoted in Appendix XIV of the report on Colossus, November 1943, TNA DEFE 2/152.
53 Quoted in The Times, 15 February 1941. A few weeks later, the American military attaché in Rome reported that he had visited the imprisoned men, found them in excellent spirits, and heard their claim to have put the aqueduct out of action for several days. In time, via the Red Cross, letters scribbled by members of Colossus began to reach family and friends. Several contained cryptic or coded comments about the operation. To escape the attention of the Italian censors, these comments were necessarily brief. Nevertheless, they suggested that the men had accomplished something. ‘I know that the West Wing of the Old Hall was made untenable – no doubt the insurance will fit the bill,’ Tag Pritchard wrote in June from an Italian POW camp, a statement interpreted in London as an allusion to repairable damage having been done to the aqueduct’s western end. Quoted in Major M. Lindsay to Major D. Macfie, 26 June 1941, TNA DEFE 2/153. Several second-hand reports would also reach London from repatriated soldiers who had met men of the Colossus party in prison camps in Italy. The reports were oral and their accuracy varied. One returning medical officer reported that a Major Pritchett [sic] whom he had encountered in his camp had found his party’s containers of ‘pelican soup’ to be particularly bulky to move around. He had misheard the word ‘pemmican’. Appendix IX of report on Colossus, November 1943, DEFE 2/152.
54 Born in May 1919, George Robert Paterson had left Canada in 1937 and been studying forestry at the University of Edinburgh when war broke out. In September 1943, shortly after Italy’s surrender, he escaped from a train taking him and oth
er British prisoners to Germany. Joining a band of Italian partisans near Brescia, he worked to help other Allied fugitives reach the safety of neutral Switzerland until he was captured again in January 1944. After six months in an SS prison in Milan he escaped again and made his way to Switzerland. There he contacted SOE’s Jock McCaffery and agreed to return to Italy as an SOE agent. In October 1944, while fighting alongside Italian partisans, Paterson was captured for the third time. Narrowly avoiding being shot on the spot, and after some brutal treatment and more imprisonment in Milan, he made his third escape in April 1945. For his work in Italy, Paterson received two Military Crosses.
55 ‘A narrative of the execution of the operation based on information given by Lt A. J. Deane-Drummond’, Appendix XV in report on Colossus, November 1943, TNA DEFE 2/152.
56 Deane-Drummond, Return Ticket, p. 38.
57 Lieutenant-Colonel T. Pritchard to Brigadier B. Fergusson, 24 October 1946, TNA DEFE 2/1345.
58 Lieutenant A. Deane-Drummond, ‘Report on Picchi’, Appendix X in report on Colossus, November 1943, TNA DEFE 2/152.
59 ‘A narrative of the execution of the operation based on information given by Lt A. J. Deane-Drummond’, Appendix XV in report on Colossus, November 1943, TNA DEFE 2/152.
60 Deane-Drummond, Return Ticket, p. 42.
61 Lieutenant A. Deane-Drummond, ‘Report on Picchi’, Appendix X on report on Colossus, November 1943, TNA DEFE 2/152.
62 Foxall, The Guinea-Pigs, pp. 160–1.
63 Lieutenant-Colonel T. Pritchard to Brigadier B. Fergusson, 24 October 1946, TNA DEFE 2/1345.
64 ‘Interrogatorio dell’italiano catturato fra i paracadutisti inglesi’, undated but c. mid-February 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
65 American Embassy in Rome to the Foreign Office in London, 18 October 1941, TNA DEFE 2/153.
66 A copy of Fortunato Picchi’s last letter can be accessed through the website of L’Istituto nazionale per la storia del movimento di liberazione in Italia (National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy): http://www.italia-liberazione.it/ultimelettere.
67 ‘The Project and Outline Plan’, 2 January 1941, quoted in Appendix I in report on Colossus, November 1943, DEFE 2/152.
68 W. Churchill to General H. Ismay, 15 February 1941, TNA PREM 3/100.
69 Evening Standard, 14 February 1941.
70 Evening Standard, 15 February 1941.
71 Sunday Pictorial, 16 February 1941.
72 The Times, 17 February 1941.
73 Comment broadcast by radio from Berlin and quoted in the Daily Telegraph, February 1941. The Germans overlooked the fact that they had taken the idea of parachute troops from the Soviets.
74 The Times, 15 April 1941.
75 Note by Lieutenant F. Snow, undated (but 15 April 1941), TNA HS 9/1185/2.
76 The Daily Express, 16 April 1941.
77 The Times, 16 April 1941.
78 Time, 28 April 1941.
79 ‘Pentad’, The Remaking of Italy (London: Penguin Books, 1942).
80 Tangye, Went the Day Well.
81 Nicol, Meet Me at the Savoy p. 44.
4
‘Desperados’ and ‘Thugs’
In December 1940, Frank Nelson recorded without enthusiasm that he was sending a man from London to sweep for recruits among Italian prisoners of war captured in recent fighting in North Africa. This officer would have ‘a charter to collect and train a band of anything up to a hundred Italian desperados’. Nelson, who was under mounting pressure for action against Italy, not least from an increasingly impatient Hugh Dalton, did not like hurried action, which would ‘undoubtedly result in some kind of half-baked scheme reflecting credit upon no-one, but I have no alternative in view of the direct instructions I have received from the Minister, which may be taken as a Cabinet Order’.1 The officer given command of the mission was the brother of the man who would create James Bond.
In 1940, Peter Fleming was already well-known in his own right as an author. Brazilian Adventure, published in 1932, told of his travails in the jungles of central Brazil trying to nail down the fate of the missing Percy Fawcett, a British Army colonel who had gone there looking for the lost city of El Dorado. One’s Company and News from Tartary, both published in 1936, covered Fleming’s subsequent journeys in the Soviet Union and China. In 1940, after joining the Army and seeing a little action in Norway, he had been tasked with preparing and equipping stay-behind parties of local volunteers, men of the MI(R)-inspired Auxiliary Units, who would emerge from hidden dens to harass a German invasion of Kent; ‘very keen on poisoned arrows’ one colleague remembered of him.2 An adventurer with little love for military convention, Fleming, by then a 33-year-old captain in the Grenadier Guards, joined SOE that December. ‘What are your hobbies?’ asked one of the forms that he was given to fill in. ‘Filling up forms’ he scribbled, adding ‘Medium’ when told to describe his physical appearance and ‘Very few’ when asked for his political views.3
French was the only language that Fleming said he spoke. Six months after Italy entered the war, SOE still had scarcely a man at its headquarters with detailed knowledge of Italy or able to speak to Italians in their own tongue. This is not to say that it had not tried to recruit them, but an Italian recruited from an internment camp would never have been considered sufficiently reliable for a senior staff role, while few British nationals could be found with the requisite skills. Italian studies were not widely developed in pre-war Britain, which hardly helped. On rare occasions, names came to light of serving British officers with Italian backgrounds: men who had worked or studied in Italy, for example, or had Italian parentage. But SOE, being new and unproven, found itself poorly placed to compete with the host of other organisations, from the Ministry of Information, the BBC, MI5 and MI6 to the many branches of military, naval and air intelligence, that suddenly needed to increase their own stocks of Italian-speakers.
One man whom it did manage to acquire was George Logie, who became the first head of Frank Nelson’s one-man Italian desk at about the time that Fleming was brought on board. A pre-war employee of Lazard’s Bank, Logie had a little Italian background, which included a stint in Rome in 1939–40 gathering intelligence for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, but was much more familiar with Germany. Born to British parents living in Dresden, he had spent the First World War interned in Germany and even served briefly in the German Army. A friend would recall that Logie, ‘fired with a neophyte’s enthusiasm’ on joining SOE, though he was then pushing fifty, had first volunteered ‘to be dropped blind with a transmitter into the Rhineland where he had many friends’.4 Logie was not behind the Italian desk for long. The following spring, the War Office poached him for a finance post. This led to the leaderless Italian section being combined with the Greek desk under the command of Derrick Perkins, a pre-war merchant banker, who knew more about Greece than he did about Italy.
Logie was not the only Italian-speaker whose services SOE failed to retain for long. It would lose the straight-talking George Martelli when SO1 became the Political Warfare Executive in 1941. By the time he had left, Martelli’s pessimistic assessments of SOE’s ability to find the right sort of Italians in Britain had proved, if anything, too optimistic.5 Hopes were briefly raised when dozens of Italians were released from internment and allowed to join the Pioneer Corps, a British unit used mostly as manpower for labouring and engineering. Then, in early 1941, Martelli visited their training centre at the seaside town of Ilfracombe, in North Devon, taking with him a list of thirty pre-selected names. He ended up interviewing about half the hundred-odd Italians there. All but nine he rejected out of hand. Of those nine, he recommended just one as ‘really suitable’. His expectations had not been high, but Martelli found the result ‘more disheartening’ since the Pioneers represented ‘the pick of the Italians in this country from the point of view of (i) fitness, (ii) political reliability [and] (iii) willingness to serve our cause’.6 Subsequent sweeps by other recruiters were similarly unproductiv
e.7 Not all Italians were uninterested in fighting; some volunteered with enthusiasm. But even many of these declined to continue when told they might have to kill their own countrymen.
When attempts to recruit Italians in Britain were effectively drawn to a close in the summer of 1941, SOE also felt that the publicity given to Fortunato Picchi’s capture and execution had done more harm than good. Picchi, although loaned to Sir Roger Keyes for the duration of Colossus, had been recruited by SOE and remained on its books, and staff officers at headquarters had tried to keep his name and fate out of the public eye, even managing to stop the War Office from making a film about him. Some tense correspondence with Sir Walter Monckton, Director-General of the Ministry of Information, was necessary before the reality hit home that the story was never one they were ever likely to control. ‘I will of course remember how essential it is that no reference should be made to the existence of SOE,’ Monckton replied when asked to tone down the reporting.
[But i]t is always rather a delicate matter to criticise the handling of a story which we have no power to stop. I think that the Editor would tell us that the story of this little Italian waiter from the Savoy, giving his life to help us against the Fascists, was, in his view, moving and inspiriting. He would, no doubt, say that it was rather like telling the story of a brave fireman killed at work in an air raid. You would not refrain from publishing such a story, lest you should discourage the other firemen.8
Picchi’s death did cause some Italians in Britain to wonder what fate had in store for them, too, if they did what the British wanted. When he was killed, SOE had eight Italian volunteers in training. Two were the pair of Spanish Civil War veterans who had almost been selected for Colossus. The others had been found during further searches among internees and the Pioneer Corps. These eight were then reduced to six when two of them, including one of the original Quins, Rinaldo Purisiol, became too undisciplined and indiscreet to keep. Then the unsettling news about Picchi appeared in the papers. Soon afterwards, a more impressive man decided to drop out. This was Leonida Rosa, a forty-year-old former maître d’hôtel at the Piccadilly Grill Room who had lived in London since 1920. Then another trainee, a twenty-year-old Jew from Trieste of Polish-Turkish parentage who had come to London in 1939 to escape Italy’s new racial laws, was deemed unsuitable for further training. This left four, of whom one, Emilio Salsilli, the last of the Quins, was also side-lined. He remained ‘anxious to do real work’, it was noted, but ‘in view of the Picchi incident, [he] absolutely excludes the possibility of going to Italian territory’. Salsilli was ‘convinced that the Italian Government already have his name and photograph and that his relations in Italy have probably been arrested’.9
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