Target

by Roderick Bailey

  Three of the discarded trainees were sent eventually to a secret establishment hidden in the Highlands known as ‘Number 6 Special Workshop School’. Also known as ‘The Cooler’, it was a place where ex-students and ex-agents could be held until their SOE knowledge was irrelevant to operations. All three remained there until almost the end of the war, with one, Leonida Rosa, becoming the camp cook, and another, Rinaldo Purisiol, being given the boiler to look after. Purisiol calmed down after being sent to Scotland, where, among the British staff, he also became a regular subject of affectionate, if facetious, commentary. ‘From the loving care he gives to the boiler (commonly known to the staff as “Mrs Purisiol”) even to the extent of getting up in the middle of the night to feed it, it might appear that he would welcome some work connected with mechanics,’ one officer noted.10 A skilled metalworker, Purisiol eventually found such an outlet by ‘producing queer shapes’ from a small hand-forge.11 The nature of his creations would suggest that he remained of a warlike state of mind. Apparently they included special equipment for Norwegian raiding parties and a folding steel bow for silent killing.

  In the end, SOE would turn up in Britain only three Italians, in addition to Fortunato Picchi, whom it would manage to use for more than stoking boilers and cooking. One was Giovanni Verdeu, the one ‘really suitable’ man whom George Martelli had found at Ilfracombe. In his early forties, technically Italian but born in Trieste to Slovene parents, Verdeu had fought in the Austrian infantry during the First World War before becoming a professional seaman, eventually fleeing Italy in 1930 when police found anti-Fascist propaganda in his house. ‘He came over the Alps, without a passport, to France,’ SOE noted, ‘and walked 620 kilometres on foot.’ After a few odd jobs in France he became a mechanic on a yacht belonging to the racing driver Montague Grahame-White. Then he moved to England, where, when Italy entered the war, he was working in a boatyard.12 Despite condemning his ‘primitive’ education, SOE had no doubt about Verdeu’s aptitude for action: ‘all the individual qualities of an old hand … great cunning and determination … tenacious and can be guaranteed to turn up trumps on any job. A born saboteur.’13 One training school commandant was more brisk with his verdict: ‘no brains, but is prepared for anything’.14 There was one problem: Verdeu’s hatred of Italians was uncomfortably extreme. Never destined for Italy, he was eventually sent out to the Mediterranean and did useful work on motorboat, submarine and schooner operations.

  Like Verdeu, the other two Italians were ex-internees recruited from the Pioneer Corps. Both were Jews who had come to Britain to escape persecution. One was Ernesto Ottolenghi, a businessman aged about fifty, who had studied in Britain, served during the First World War in the Italian Air Force, and, afterwards, become a director of textile factories in Bradford, Naples and Turin. SOE liked him but concluded that he was ‘too old and unfit’ for an operational role.15 ‘Convinced anti-Fascist,’ it was noted as he went through paramilitary training on the banks of Loch Morar. ‘First class intellectual and moral qualities, worn out body … Has a dislocated shoulder. His hand is so small that he cannot reach the trigger of a .38 revolver except with his middle finger.’16 Considered ‘too good a man to be wasted’, he ended up in the Middle East helping with recruitment and propaganda.17 Lastly there was a much younger man, Giacomino Sarfatti, who had been studying agriculture at the University of Reading. Other than Fortunato Picchi, Sarfatti was the only Italian found in Britain who would prove both willing and able to return to Italy before the Armistice.

  The idea of recruiting from among Italian prisoners of war had occurred first to SOE’s office in Cairo in the summer of 1940. More precisely, it occurred to SO1, whose officers at that time were the only ones outside the Balkans doing any kind of anti-Italian SOE work. In charge in Cairo was Lieutenant-Colonel Cudbert Thornhill, a veteran intelligence officer who had been British military attaché in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution in 1917.18 Much of his current job involved drafting and disseminating propaganda – subversive leaflets and the like – to be scattered by the Royal Air Force over Italian-occupied African territories and circulated among prisoners of war.19 In August 1940 Thornhill began suggesting steps to forge Italian prisoners into ‘anti-Fascist instruments’. Efforts should not be limited to making these Italians ‘vaguely friendly’, read a proposal he co-wrote with Freya Stark, the explorer and travel writer, who was then working for the Ministry of Information in Aden. ‘We should, in fact, be training a “Fifth Column”.’20

  The principal stimulus to the idea of recruiting prisoners came with the spectacular series of military victories masterminded by General Sir Archibald Wavell, British Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East. After Italian forces had invaded Egypt in September 1940, a stunning counter-attack by Wavell’s combined British and Commonwealth forces, though heavily outnumbered, chased the Italians out and away, then thrust deep into Italian-held Libya. Some 20,000 Italian soldiers were captured within hours. Thousands more gave up as the advance drove on; 133,000 would be in the bag by February 1941, by when Wavell was waging another successful campaign against Italy’s colonies in East Africa.

  For a time, both the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister wanted to exploit Wavell’s successes by raising a military force of ‘free’ Italians recruited from prisoners and civilian internees. Presciently, the War Office and Wavell himself were much less keen: they agreed that harnessing Italians to the Allied cause would have intelligence and propaganda worth; they were much less sure that suitable volunteers could be found with ease.21 In the end, no free Italian force was ever formed. But Hugh Dalton, at Churchill’s insistence, made sure that SOE pressed ahead with a plan of its own to sweep the Middle East for Italian candidates for its less conventional purposes. This idea soon grew into a scheme to send a mission to search for anti-Axis Spaniards, Frenchmen and Italians – especially Italians – and establish a school where they could be trained. Peter Fleming was put in charge of it.

  Fleming moved fast. First, he handpicked a team to go to Egypt with him. Most he had known for some time. Captain Norman Johnstone, for instance, was a fellow Grenadier. Oliver Barstow, a second lieutenant in the Royal Horse Artillery, was the younger brother of an old friend whom Fleming had invited first but was too busy to come along. Next, he took his team to the Highlands for a crash-course in commando training. Done with Scotland and before leaving London, the party was then issued with various tools that it was felt that Fleming might need. These apparently included £40,000 in notes and sovereigns, some of which could be used as bribes, and a mini-arsenal of explosives and booby traps plus a pair of Thompson sub-machineguns. According to one source, a supply of poison was acquired too.22 Since the plan envisaged the mission as responsible for training and raising a force suitable for raiding the Italian coast, orders were also sent out to Cairo to put a mass of additional material at Fleming’s disposal ‘for instructional and operational purposes’. This included 20,000 pounds of gun cotton, tens of thousands of feet of fuse, 100 pistols, ten Bren guns, thirty-five more Thompsons and two Vickers machineguns.23 Only one of Fleming’s officers could speak Italian, so the party was also issued with Italian grammars.

  It was about now that Fleming’s pre-war travels in Tartary gave birth to the mission’s name: Yak. It was also about now that a rumour reached the sensitive ears of Hugh Dalton that some considered that what Yak Mission was about to do might infringe international law. ‘From whom does this fatuous defeatist inhibition emanate?’ Dalton demanded of Gladwyn Jebb, fuming at this ‘new snag-hunter’s triumph’ and ‘new spanner flung into my works’:

  I recall in the last war finding Czech deserters arrested by one of my sergeants in a high Alpine village for speaking neither Italian or English. I had them liberated as Allies. They played their part in the battle of Vittorio Veneto, and my guns covered their advance. I recall also that the Germans recruited, from among Irish prisoners of war, help-mates for [the Irish nationalist Roger] Casement … It is utterly
intolerable that we should be warned off the great host of more than 100,000 Italian prisoners of war on some thin-lipped and thin-blooded pretext of pseudo-legality … I just won’t have it!

  George Martelli has been vainly combing internment camps of Italian civilians in this country. There is nothing tough there at all; all waiters and small tradesmen, and so it will be with the Italian communities of like texture in Cairo and other Levantine rabbit warrens. Do I understand that obstacles are being put in the way of recruitment among these Italian prisoners of war for service in our adventures against Italy? If so, tell me who is responsible and I will do my damndest to do him in.24

  By now Peter Fleming was already thinking about how to accomplish his task. He expected to recruit Slovenes and some Piedmontese and was wondering about placing stool pigeons among the more ‘disgruntled’ prisoners. He also felt that concern for prisoners’ rights, as laid down in the Hague Convention, was ‘stupid and unhelpful’. ‘Peter Fleming came to see me this afternoon,’ Dalton recorded as Yak Mission prepared for the off. ‘I liked him.’25

  With their instructions unchanged, Fleming and his men finally left for the Middle East at the end of January 1941, sailing from the Clyde, aboard a troopship of commandos. A complicated journey lay ahead. Italy’s belligerence and France’s collapse had closed the most direct routes to Cairo and limited to a minimum all passage via the Mediterranean. Yak Mission disembarked at Freetown and transferred to a Dutch freighter that took them to Takoradi on the Gold Coast. From there they eventually flew to Egypt, whereupon the central task with which the mission had embarked was almost immediately abandoned. As they began to poke about the camps around Cairo, it quickly became clear to Fleming and his men that very few prisoners were even remotely interested in being recruited.

  This failure prompted a bored and restless Fleming to give up and look around for something more interesting to do. He quickly found it. Wavell, whose Middle East responsibilities included the eastern Mediterranean, was at that time anxiously watching events in the Balkans where the Italians, from their bases in southern Albania, had attacked Greece in October 1940. For a while, the Greeks had done well. By 1941, however, the fighting had reached a wintry stalemate with both sides grimly dug in. Wavell had dispatched a British force to help but his resources were terribly thin, especially since he was fighting the Italians in East Africa as well. When word reached him that Fleming’s irregular services were available, he felt he knew where they could be put to good use. Fleming and his men found themselves heading for Greece, ostensibly to train and organise stay-behind parties ‘on [the] lines [of the] work done by him in Kent’.26

  Arriving at the end of March, Yak Mission was not in Greece for long. On 6 April the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and sent more forces sweeping across the Greek frontier, tipping the balance so decisively in the Balkans that, within days, they easily ejected Wavell’s force: the last British troops in action on mainland Europe. After various adventures, Fleming’s team was caught up in the frantic evacuation. At the dockside at Piraeus they boarded a private yacht, the Kalanthe, which the Royal Navy had requisitioned and placed at the disposal of the British Legation staff from Athens. Packed with British and Greeks, including women and children, and protected by Yak Mission’s guns, the yacht got under way at dusk on a late April evening.

  The following afternoon, while moored in the bay of a little island called Polyaigos in the Cyclades, the Kalanthe was spotted by three marauding Junkers 88s. ‘First attack comes over the hill from the east,’ Fleming wrote in his diary:

  He comes on machine-gunning hard, masthead high, and we engage him, eight men standing nakedly to the tall Lewis gun mountings. You really need a grouse butt of some kind for this sort of thing. He is shooting short, and when he has gone over his tail gunner sprays the water miles beyond us.

  I think my gun has jammed, but it is only the cocking-handle forward. Nobody seems to have been hit. A Marine is coming aft to look at my gun. I send Clarke forward to take his place, then the second bugger comes into the attack, not giving us more than two minutes between doses. This time he has us … I daresay his bullets whistle round us but I don’t remember noticing them.

  Four bombs come out of him. Our fire has no effect. I think two bombs were short, one a near miss, and the fourth a direct hit just forward of amidships …

  The ship flies skywards in the middle. The air is black with smoke, steam, oil and coal. I find myself staggering, holding on to the tilted deck.27

  The Kalanthe had exploded. Nine on board were killed. Two of these were Fleming’s men: thirty-year-old Lance-Bombardier Philip Edgar Clarke; and 28-year-old Oliver Barstow, whose sister, Nancy Caccia, wife of the Legation’s first secretary, had been on the boat with him. Fleming himself received wounds to his head, shoulder and leg. He and the other Yak Mission survivors returned eventually to Cairo, but they had lost their coherence as an organised force and soon went their separate ways. Fleming left SOE not long afterwards.

  When searching overseas for Italian volunteers, SOE did not confine itself to the Middle East. Hopes were high of finding more than enough in the United States alone. In February 1941, certain that plenty of Americans among the millions of Italian extraction would want to help the British rid Italy of the Fascists, SOE’s Baker Street headquarters instructed its New York representative to find and recruit up to 200 volunteers suitable for being shipped across the Atlantic for special training in Britain. One in three, Baker Street said, should be suitable for long-term missions in enemy territory. The remainder should be ‘thugs’ suited to sabotage and commando-type raids.28

  Since the United States was still neutral, covert Canadian help was laid on to allow any suitable men to be dispatched quickly to Britain once they were recruited. In small groups, wearing civilian clothes, and with the assistance of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they were to be smuggled over the border into Canada without the knowledge or permission of the American authorities. From there they would be taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and put aboard boats bound for British ports. SOE was well aware that it had to tread carefully in this way. ‘Operations here must be conducted with utmost delicacy,’ New York told London. ‘Any slip on our part in the present temper and violent opposition to [the] Lease-Lend Bill [sic] might [result and] affect great issues.’29

  Soon New York reported that they had found some good recruits and that the first batch was poised to set sail. London expected at least some of these men to be experienced and motivated veterans of the Spanish Civil War. As Hugh Dalton put it, he was eagerly awaiting the imminent arrival of ‘tough Italian recruits from the U.S.A. who will want to be trained somewhere for eventual employment against Fascist Italy’.30 Then, on 19 April, the first twelve volunteers arrived, stepping ashore at Gourock from a Canadian troopship, and it became very clear that they were not at all what Baker Street had expected. On paper they might have seemed to possess adequate potential. All were Italian-born, seven were now American citizens, and most could offer varying degrees of military experience: six had fought in the First World War; four had fought in Spain; and one had fought as a French Army officer in France in 1940. Their occupations seemed a little lowly, ranging from cook, liftman and lamp-manufacturer to trouser-presser, bricklayer and doll-maker, though there were also two doctors among them. Ages were a worry: seven were over forty and one was probably sixty although he said he was fifty-five. But it was the attitude of the majority that caused SOE the most concern. All of the party had been under the mistaken impression that they were going to the Middle East to spread anti-Fascist propaganda and start a ‘Free Italian Legion’ raised from prisoners of war. It was also what they wanted to do, and some persuasion was required before they agreed to be sworn in to the Pioneer Corps and begin paramilitary training, at an SOE school at Belasis, near Dorking in Surrey, whereupon several were promptly found to be irretrievably unfit. None said that they were willing to do active operational work.31 In the end, most were sent ins
tead to India to work among Italian prisoners on behalf of the Political Warfare Executive.32

  While the party was still in England, the most problematic member had been 46-year-old Andrew Ingrao, whose own fate provides an interesting glimpse of wartime British attitudes to the detention of foreign nationals without charge. A Sicilianborn doctor who had fought as an Italian infantry officer in the First World War, Ingrao had practised medicine in Naples before moving to the United States in 1929 and taking up a post in Psychology at Columbia University. In 1937 he became an American citizen. ‘He is grumbler No. 1 and the main factor in stirring up discontent among the others,’ read one early SOE assessment. ‘He is a “know all” and will not be taught anything.’ It was also felt that he was intolerably indiscreet. ‘Makes himself conspicuous in public by gesticulating and talking in Italian, although he has been told many times to speak English … He goes out for walks by himself at any hour of the day, and again in local cafés attracts attention by drinking out of the bottle.’ It was observed, too, that it seemed unlikely that he would achieve much with Italian prisoners anyway. ‘His lack of self-control and manner of shouting down anyone who disagrees with him would hardly produce the effect desired.’33