Target
Page 16
At the end of the war, the anonymous author of an in-house SOE history of its Italian work would state that Lussu’s plan for a Sardinian revolt, had it received the required support, could have shortened the war against Italy by nine months.38 Given that Lussu’s preliminary chats in Lisbon, London, and the United States were as far as that plan ever went, this was an ambitious claim. No evidence was produced to back it up. There was no explanation for why nine months was the chosen estimate as opposed to twelve, for instance, or one (probably it had something to do with the fact that Allied fortunes in the Mediterranean began to recover in late 1942). In reality, it is highly unlikely that Lussu could ever have primed Sardinia for revolt.
There were many reasons why a rising on the island might have been hard to get off the ground. Lussu claimed that a Sardinian insurrection was the best way to inspire rebellions on the mainland: the island, he liked to point out, had been a cradle of revolt after the French Revolution and the last part of Italy to be conquered by Fascism. At least one of Lussu’s trusted confidants, Dino Giacobbe, the old soldier whom Lussu wanted to command his force of Sardinian volunteers, was much less confident that the island offered such rich possibilities, at least while the Axis remained dominant. ‘What will the Sardinians do?’ Giacobbe wrote to Lussu in October 1941.
I will tell you at once what they will do; they will stand and watch … I advise you to save the time and danger. So long as things go so unhappily for the cause of democracy (or rather for the cause of the gold standard) you will not find in Sardinia more than the usual fifty fanatics ready to do something serious for the sacred cause … And anyway, how will the Sardinians welcome the English? With dignified reserve so long as things go indifferently for them.
Reading Giacobbe’s letter, SOE observed that he was ‘a red hot communist’.39 It also agreed with him. The arrival in North Africa of Rommel’s battle-hardened Afrikakorps had rapidly strengthened the Axis grip on the Mediterranean. Elsewhere Hitler’s U-boats were causing havoc in the Atlantic, the Soviet Union was coping badly after being invaded by Germany in June 1941, and the Japanese would soon appear to have the upper hand in the Far East. Only in late 1942, after the British victory at El Alamein and Allied landings in Northwest Africa, would the war in the Mediterranean turn decisively in the Allies’ favour. ‘Surely no popular uprising or open dissention in Italy is possible as long as the Italians think the Germans are in the stronger position,’ one officer remarked when he read Lussu’s plan; ‘the Italians have not the reputation of forsaking the strong side for the weaker.’40
Others privy to his plan wondered if Lussu was really the right sort of man to garner enough support. ‘Lussu, in view of his antecedents, could obviously try to start some revolutionary movement by appealing to the “left”,’ Gladwyn Jebb thought. ‘At the same time a great proportion of the population of Sardinia is Catholic and conservative.’41 Jebb was not alone in questioning whether Lussu’s ‘sentimental Marxism’ – as his old colleague Alberto Tarchiani described his politics – was really suited to winning over the Italian population.42 ‘Emilio does not think of other than the proletariat of workmen and peasants,’ Tarchiani would write of him in 1944. ‘[T]he immense number of small bourgeois, who languish, and of the medium bourgeois, who suffer, and are becoming poor, do not interest him, although they are the centre of Italian life, and are those who will express political will, and will have the maximum influence on the so-called proletariat. Emilio wishes to proletariarise [sic] everybody.’43
There were other problems, too. In May 1942, before the idea was shelved, SOE concluded that getting Lussu into France and landing agents and stores on Corsica seemed feasible, while weapons for his rebels appeared to be available in Egypt. But it also knew that Allied forces in the Mediterranean were over-stretched and on the back foot and that the prospect of transporting arms and a body of men to Sardinia looked remote. As for his liberation force of Sardinian volunteers, SOE secured permission to recruit and train a party of fifty and began scouring prison stockades and internment camps as far away as India, but in the end no one suitable was found and no force was ever formed. All the old reluctance and apathy was encountered, plus a new attitude in India: ‘Conditions most unfavourable,’ London heard from its mission there, ‘as prisoners enthusiastic at Japanese successes.’44
Stores, weapons and volunteers were as important to Lussu’s plan as the principle of securing an Allied declaration about Italy’s future borders. Perhaps his enthusiasm would have flagged had he been fully informed about these problems. As it was, they hardly featured during his talks in Lisbon and London because, to avoid discouraging him, the British chose not to mention them. ‘Lussu was not told of these difficulties,’ one officer recorded coolly at the end of the war, ‘for it was considered that even if the rising were not successful it would still form a substantial contribution to SOE work.’45
Finally it should be noted that as Allied fortunes began to improve at the end of 1942, Lussu’s collapsed. In October a coded letter reached Lisbon saying that he and his wife were safe in France and about to start work. In December came news that he was still in France but had made contact with sympathisers in Turin, Milan, Florence and Rome. He was in touch, too, with Sardinia. Corsica, however, was ‘completely cut off’.46 Days earlier, the Germans had occupied the southern half of France in response to Allied landings in Northwest Africa. It was a move that so tightened the Axis grip on French territory that it extinguished any chance of Lussu establishing himself in Corsica – his vital stepping-stone to Sardinia – as he had always proposed. Overtaken by events, he would not return to Sardinia before conventional Allied forces occupied the island in late 1943.
Notes
1 E. Lussu, Sardinian Brigade (New York: Knopf, 1939), pp. 122–3.
2 J. Lussu. Freedom has no Frontier (London: Michael Joseph, 1969), p. 10.
3 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/265.
10 ‘Lussu’s Plan’, G. Jebb to F. Nelson and H. Dalton, 13 November 1941, TNA HS 6/907.
11 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
12 Ibid.
13 Cipher telegram, L. H. Mortimore to Major L. Humphreys, 19 December 1941, TNA HS 6/907.
14 Hansard, HC Debates, Volume 377, Column 1017.
15 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/265.
16 Note by C. M. Woods on conversation with Leo Valiani, May 1989, Woods papers; Stafford, Mission Accomplished, p. 13.
17 Author’s interview with Margaret Jackson, MBE, wartime personal assistant to General Sir Colin Gubbins, 28 October 2012.
18 C. Roseberry to Brigadier C. Gubbins, 27 January 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
19 C. Roseberry to Brigadier C. Gubbins, 10 February 1942, TNA HS 9/621/7.
20 G. Jebb to Sir Frank Nelson, 11 February 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
21 C. Roseberry to Brigadier C. Gubbins, 10 February 1942, TNA HS 9/621/7.
22 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
23 ‘Notes on conversation between M. [Brigadier C. Gubbins] and Simon [E. Lussu]’, 14 February 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
24 Minute by G. Jebb, 16 February 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
25 Minute by H. Dalton, 18 February 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
26 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Hambro had achieved a lot with his life by then and his opinions commanded respect. In 1917, as a very young lieutenant on the Western Front, he had won a Military Cross for a display of ‘conspicuous gallantry’ when taking prisoners, rescuing wounded, and shooting four of the enemy with his revolver (The London Gazette, No. 30466, Supplement, 8 January 1918, p. 612). Between the wars, while a thirty-year-ol
d banker in the City, he had been made a director of the Bank of England. Joining SOE in 1940, he had been knighted the following year for overseeing, among other things, the successful smuggling from Scandinavia of vital ball-bearing supplies.
30 Sir Charles Hambro to Lord Selborne, 14 May 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
31 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Minute, G. Jebb to Sir Frank Nelson, 6 March 1942, TNA HS 6/907.
35 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/232.
36 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
37 Ibid.
38 ‘History of Italian Activities of SOE, 1941–1945’, TNA HS 7/58. Earl Brennan, head of the Italian desk of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC, was another who would think Lussu a man of the highest potential. Brennan wrote to Bill Donovan, the head of OSS, in August 1943 that Emilio Lussu ‘is sometimes referred to as “the uncrowned king of Sardinia”’ and ‘is the greatest single factor which will contribute to the success of operations in Sardinia. In fact I am satisfied that with Lussu’s co-operation a well-conceived and well-operated Sardinian plan cannot fail to be successful.’ E. Brennan to General William J. Donovan, ‘Emilio Lussu (Emilio Dupont)’, 24 August 1943, NARA, RG 226, Entry A1-211, Box 14.
39 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
40 Ibid.
41 ‘Lussu’s Plan’, G. Jebb to F. Nelson, 13 November 1941, TNA HS 6/907.
42 A. Tarchiani to M. Ascoli, 26 June 1944, TNA HS 6/881.
43 A. Tarchiani to M. Ascoli, 3 August 1944, TNA HS 6/881.
44 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
45 ‘History of Italian Activities of SOE, 1941–1945’, TNA HS 7/58.
46 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/262.
6
‘More or less a suicide job’
In August 1942, a nine-man team of Britain’s Special Boat Section, a uniformed specialist force of army commandos trained in coastal raiding, was flown from the Middle East to the battered and besieged island of Malta. On arrival they went immediately to an old limestone-bricked quarantine hospital on Manoel Island, in Valletta’s northern harbour, where the Royal Navy had a submarine base. It was in this hospital, eighteen months earlier, that Fortunato Picchi and the rest of the Colossus party had spent their final night before dropping into Italy. And it was here, too, that the little SBS team began preparing for an urgent task. One of them was a 22-year-old officer in the Black Watch, Lieutenant Eric Newby. The opening pages of Newby’s later memoir, Love and War in the Apennines, would recount the disastrous mission that followed.
At that moment, the Axis had a firm grip on the Mediterranean. Malta, fast being reduced to rubble by waves of enemy aircraft, remained a vital Allied outpost but was firmly on the defensive and running low on key resources, from food and fuel to medical supplies and anti-aircraft shells. Recently a plan had been approved in London to dispatch the largest possible convoy to restock Malta with supplies crucial to its survival, but the planners knew that the Axis would throw everything at the ships as they began to close on the island. One last-minute idea to distract the enemy’s attention was to send a team of elite British soldiers to attack the enemy’s airfields on nearby Sicily before the ‘Pedestal’ convoy came within range; tabled on 4 August, it was codenamed Operation ‘Why Not’. By then the convoy was already steaming for the Mediterranean. Whatever was left of it was expected to reach the Sicilian Narrows – the ninety-mile strait between the island and the coast of Tunisia – around the night of 12–13 August.
The little commando team arrived in Malta in two groups on 6 and 8 August. Briefings followed. It was then, as Newby wrote later, that ‘the bare, gruesome bones’ of the plan were revealed. First, they would be shipped by submarine to Sicily’s eastern coast. Then, having paddled ashore, they would penetrate the defences of a German airfield and plant explosives on as many as possible of the twin-engined Junkers 88 bombers that they should expect to find parked by the runway.
There would be no time for a preliminary reconnaissance. We had to land and go straight in and come out if we could. The beach was heavily defended and there was a lot of wire. It was not known if it was mined but it was thought highly probable. The whole thing sounded awful but at least it seemed important and worth doing. Irregular forces such as ours were not always employed in such ostensibly useful roles.1
Captain George ‘Shrimp’ Simpson, the commanding officer in Malta of the Royal Navy’s 10th Submarine Flotilla, recorded that three airfields were considered as potential targets: two some distance inland and one, near Catania, a lot closer to the coast. The last was chosen after George Duncan, the young army captain in command of Newby’s team, expressed a preference for it. ‘It was suggested to him that Catania was likely to be a most efficiently guarded aerodrome,’ Simpson noted, ‘and its proximity to the shore and complete German control only enhanced the enemy’s precautions. However his previous experience of German sentries had not impressed him whilst the importance of the aerodrome was an encouragement.’2
Newby makes no mention of it, and he was probably unaware of it, but SOE, in the shape of Major Atherton Hayhurst-France, helped his team prepare.3 In charge of SOE’s slim presence on Malta, Hayhurst-France issued Duncan and his men with maps and emergency lire. ‘[I]n spite of his preference [Duncan] was confident of success,’ SOE observed once the briefings were done. ‘He had about two miles to go [and] his target was on the nearest part of the aerodrome to his line of approach. None of the party spoke fluent German or Italian though [Duncan] had learned certain phrases.’4
On the morning of 9 August, with their weapons, explosives and ‘Folbot’ canoes, Duncan and his men boarded one of Simpson’s submarines berthed in the waters lapping the old quarantine hospital. This was Una, a U-class submarine. Intended initially as an anti-submarine training aid for surface ships, U-class boats were small, fast at diving and hard to detect, and had proved well suited to Mediterranean work. In command of this one was 28-year-old Lieutenant Pat Norman. They sailed later that morning. On the evening of 11 August, just after ten, Una surfaced off Catania. Duncan’s party climbed out and assembled on the casing. When the Folbots were launched, one was immediately swamped and three men had to be left in the submarine. They would be the lucky ones. Una last saw the remaining six, Duncan and Newby among them, paddling for the shore.
The plan required Una to return before dawn to re-embark Duncan’s team, who, it was hoped, would have executed the raid, withdrawn to the beach and paddled back out to sea. Pat Norman kept to the plan and, at three o’clock, resurfaced and searched the dark for a torch-flashed ‘S’: the agreed signal that the men had made it and were ready to be picked up. There was no sign of anyone. Two nights later, having had to move offshore to recharge batteries, Una returned, resurfaced, and searched again. By then, reminded that Triumph, the same submarine that had been earmarked to pick up the Colossus party in 1941, had disappeared in the Aegean in January 1942 trying to rescue a party that turned out to have been captured two days before, ‘Shrimp’ Simpson had signalled Norman to abandon the pick-up as too hazardous. Simpson would record that, since the night was dark and calm, Norman chose to keep looking. Still there was no sign of Duncan’s party. When he finally withdrew, ‘Lieutenant Norman felt very sure that no person was awaiting recovery.’5
Norman was right. All six men had been caught. They had made it ashore, buried their canoes, cut their way through the thick barbed wire and made their way through the dunes and into the flat countryside beyond, but found the airfield impregnable. Shots were exchanged with an Italian patrol. Searchlights were switched on. Flares exploded in the night sky. On the retreat to the beach they lost one of their number when he stumbled into an Italian strongpoint in the dunes. The remaining five, aboard two canoes, one of which soon sank, pa
ddled and swam out to sea but failed to pick out the submarine. Eric Newby spent hours treading water before a passing Sicilian fishing-boat pulled them aboard, took them into Catania and handed them over to the authorities. ‘I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat,’ Newby would recall,
discussing with the others the possibility of taking it over and forcing the fishermen to head for Malta … And if we had been in a war film made twenty years later this is what we undoubtedly would have done, but we had been in the water for nearly five hours and were very cold and could hardly stand.6
Newby would describe ‘Why Not’ as ‘the worst possible kind of operation, one that had been hastily conceived by someone a long way from the target, and one which we had not had the opportunity to think out in detail for ourselves. I felt like one of those rather ludicrous, ill-briefed [German] agents who had been landed by night on Romney Marsh in the summer of 1940, all of whom had been captured and shot.’7 He would remember, too, the strength of the coastal defences: wire entanglements twenty yards thick, stretching as far as the eye could see; blockhouses positioned every 150 yards. Even the crew of Una would report spotting shore patrols, ‘noticed due to the enemy lighting cigarettes’.8
Another secret landing on Sicily took place two months later. At one o’clock in the afternoon of 12 October, with Una again berthed by the old hospital, two men in civilian clothes arrived and stepped aboard. An hour later, the submarine slipped its moorings and headed cautiously out to sea. It was a dangerous time to be sailing in daylight. After a few weeks of relative respite for the island, the enemy had suddenly renewed the bombing offensive with five raids on Malta the previous day, two during the night, and another three already that day. Una’s logbook records that by half-past three, barely ninety minutes into the journey, the submarine had been forced to dive twice to avoid two more.9 Pat Norman’s patrol report describes what happened next, when, on the evening of 14 October, Una arrived safely off Sicily once again: