Observations by escorts and instructors while Serra passed from course to course paint a picture of a quiet, simple and likeable man of modest ability. ‘This man seems to be of a sincere type,’ reads one early report. ‘Does not appear pleasure seeking and usually turned down my offers to take him to the cinema. During the six days I was with him he showed no interest in women whatever.’7 One man who came to know Serra better than most was an Intelligence Corps NCO, Ernest Saunders. In April, Saunders reported from Water Eaton Manor, a training school outside Oxford:
[Serra] only speaks Italian, and … is [further] handicapped by the limited nature of his boyhood education. He cannot do the simplest calculation without laborious resort to pencil and paper. His character is one of extreme simplicity. He does not seem to have any interest in games or pursuits of any description. Slow in his mental processes, I cannot imagine him as an organiser or leader, but he is of the type who will follow a respected leader until the end. He is an ardent Royalist …
He has a great respect for the British people and I do not think this is affected in order to gain our good graces. His anti-fascism is not bitter, not the result of persecution, but has rather been handed down to him from his father.
His morale is high, although he is rather stupefied at the number of the subjects he has to study … Repeatedly he expresses a desire to accompany British Commandos on French coast raids, and he imagines that when he has finished his training he will be sent to join some such special corps.8
‘My early good impressions of this student’s reliability are strengthened with further acquaintance,’ Saunders added a few days later. ‘All persons with whom he comes into contact seem to take a liking to him … He looks forward to the time when he will be able to go into action and feels confident that he will give a good account of himself.’9 Three weeks after that, having accompanied Serra to SOE’s training school at Arisaig, Saunders continued: ‘He is still as eager in his work and as anxious to please as ever … His complete unpretentiousness has made him popular all round.’10
By the end of May, with his training complete, Serra was back in London, billeted in the Victoria Hotel on Northumberland Avenue off Trafalgar Square. Also, Saunders noted, he was unhappy. ‘His shy nature, combined with his lack of knowledge of English, lead him to avoid crowds and public places, and he prefers to sit in the hotel bedroom all day and feel very bored … London has a definitely upsetting effect … and I suggest that he should be kept in the country as far as possible.’11 This was also the time when Emilio Lussu’s scheme for Sardinia was in the process of imploding. SOE had hoped that Serra might be fashioned into a wireless operator of use to Lussu; when he had been found to lack the aptitude for radio work, a hope had remained that he could be used in some constructive way and Lussu was even brought to the Victoria Hotel to meet him. Even as Lussu’s plan fell apart, it was still thought that Serra’s knowledge of Sardinia might prove useful. With no immediate prospect of any operational role, however, and in view of his evident discomfort in London, it was decided that he should kill time in the Cooler, SOE’s holding school in Scotland for trainees and agents too sensitive to release. Serra arrived at the Cooler in early June.
‘A good man and a keen worker, he is settling down nicely,’ the staff reported after he had been in the Cooler a fortnight.12 ‘Spends most of his time cutting the grass … helping [Rinaldo Purisiol] in the forge, and chewing gum,’ read another report a few weeks later. ‘It is amazing how this man and [Purisiol] have formed this habit; they are never without a piece of gum, even on parade.’13 More weeks passed. ‘This man works away quietly and causes no trouble,’ it was reported in August; ‘The other day he asked if there was any news for him from London …’14 In September he was ‘still wondering how much longer it will be before he can leave here’.15 Finally, in October, Serra was escorted back to London and returned to the arms of Cecil Roseberry. Shortly after that, he found himself teaching Sardinian dialect to an Italian-speaking SOE wireless operator. His name was Gabor Adler and he was the man who would land with Serra on Sardinia.
Gabor Adler was neither Sardinian nor even Italian. He was a Hungarian Jew. According to SOE records, he had been born in September 1919 in Satu Mare, a city today in northwest Romania, and had lived in Budapest until 1922 when he left with his parents to live in the northern Italian town of Merano in the Tyrol. From 1930 until 1934 he went to school at Esslingen in Germany. Then he returned to Italy, where he worked in Milan in an advertising office, then for a Russian engineer, then for a Russian fur merchant, before leaving to live in Morocco in 1939 after the introduction of Italy’s new racial laws.
Settling in Tangiers, Adler had worked as a waiter, cook and housepainter before approaching the British Consulate – where he had been doing some decorating – to ask if he might volunteer for the British Army. In November 1941, with the consul’s help, he sailed in a small boat for Gibraltar. After that he was brought to Britain under the auspices of de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, reaching Gourock in January 1942. When Adler’s arrival and Italian background became known, SOE, in its desperate search for reliable Italian-speaking recruits, persuaded the Free French to release their claim on him. He began his SOE training in February.
Adler emerges from the files as independent and highly intelligent. He spoke multiple languages. He was extremely fit. Overall he was a man very different to Serra and much more typical of the sort that SOE was keen to recruit, even if his motives for wishing to fight seemed to be somewhat mercenary. ‘This man is very intelligent and quick-witted and keeps abreast of the course of study without much effort,’ recorded one observer, Sergeant Paul Garvin, who had been assigned to escorting and watching Adler at Chicheley Hall, an SOE school near Newport Pagnall, where he began his paramilitary training.
He takes everything in his stride, without, however, displaying any marked degree of enthusiasm. He is an all-round man and displays an equal aptitude for both the mental and physical side of the course.
He is inclined at times to display a rather superior and critical attitude … In the last few days he has settled down much better and reacts with docility to the various regulations of the school. He has a very redeeming sense of humour even if it is at times markedly cynical, is an agreeable companion and, once you have got to know him, very easy to get on with. He does not appear to have any marked anti-fascist or anti-German feelings, and I would say he is in the game to get as much as he can out of it … I think his main object in volunteering for the British forces is to enable himself to get a British Passport after the war (he is a Jew of the International type, without any particular national root) … and he is continually asking me how much one gets paid for this and that.
I have gathered that one of his professions was that of interior decorator. He can draw very artistic maps … He is quite well educated and seems to have led a fairly athletic life. He denies he has had any previous military training, but the way he handles the various weapons would lead one to suspect that he has had some previous acquaintance with them.16
‘He has no personal quarrel with Germans or Italians,’ Garvin also observed while still at Chicheley Hall; ‘he and his family have suffered no active persecution from them, they have never invaded his own country, and he has only a vague sympathy for his fellow Jews in the sufferings they have undergone.’17 Garvin recorded, too, that Adler ‘finds the continual confinement to barracks very irksome, and frequently talks about the good times he is going to have when he is let out … When he learned that a soldier gets a free railway warrant when he goes on leave, he at once pulled out a map of England and started planning all the towns he hoped to visit.’18
From Chicheley Hall, Adler went to other secret schools. They included Thame Park in Oxfordshire where he learned to use a wireless set. Not untypical of prospective agents as their training progressed and the realities hit home, he also began to display some anxiety about what could lie round the corner.
He stat
es that he is perfectly willing to carry out any task which is assigned to him to the best of his ability, but he does not view with any enthusiasm the prospect of being turned loose on his own in an enemy country. He doubts if he has the qualities necessary for such a mission; for example he says he could never bring himself to kill another man in cold blood, even if his own safety or life depended on it. He maintains that he has never been under fire or experienced actual fighting, and that until he does so he would not have the necessary presence of mind or ruthlessness to carry out a solo mission successfully.19
SOE does not seem to have been particularly worried by Adler’s concerns. Probably it helped that he had been self-aware and honest enough to highlight them himself. ‘Adler was quite frank with me on the point of being unable to say whether he could take a life,’ wrote Cecil Roseberry in November 1942, ‘and in fact asked to be put under fire for a time to test his reactions.’20 In the event, even if Roseberry had been inclined to arrange for an expensively trained agent to be shot at, there was no time for that request to be met. Adler’s training was complete, he was freshly commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army, and plans were in place to send him and Salvatore Serra into Sardinia.
The Second Battle of El Alamein, fought in Egypt in October and November 1942, was the turning point in the North African campaign and one of the most critical engagements of the entire conflict. The greatest offensive victory by the Western Allies since the outbreak of the war, it removed the threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal and was the catalyst for an advance by Montgomery’s Eighth Army that would ultimately prove unstoppable. Then, on 8 November, the Anglo-American invasion of Northwest Africa began with landings at Oran, Casablanca and Algiers, burdening the Axis with another front to their rear. Months of hard fighting lay ahead before all of North Africa was in Allied hands, but the interest of Allied commanders in spreading offensive action to Europe’s southern shores grew quickly. One early outcome was a meeting in London in November 1942 at which senior SOE officers discussed plans for Corsica and Sardinia.
Both islands were occupied by Italian troops. Both islands were potential stepping-stones for any major Allied invasion of southern Europe. For Corsica it was agreed that a small team of French agents should be infiltrated with orders to build and prepare a guerrilla organisation whose principal task, timed to assist an Allied landing in Sardinia, would be to neutralise local aerodromes. For Sardinia it was decided that a second team would go in to help prepare the way for that landing by recruiting friendly locals to receive and guide parties of airborne troops and commandos, and by locating suitable reception points and identifying sabotage targets. SOE’s Italian Section had the job of selecting the Sardinian team. The two men selected were Gabor Adler and Salvatore Serra.
In December, the pair flew to Algiers where they settled down to wait for an available submarine to take them to Sardinia. By now, in line with a general seeping away from Cairo of planning and control in the Mediterranean, SOE had established in Algeria a fresh base close to Dwight Eisenhower’s new Allied Forces Headquarters, the body now commanding most operations across the Mediterranean theatre. This new SOE base, codenamed ‘Massingham’, was housed in a former luxury beach resort just outside Algiers: ‘a big village of splendid villas’, one Italian agent would recall, ‘now devastated by sand, because no one cleans them … on a beach which seems to me one of the most beautiful in the Mediterranean’.21 Responsible at ‘Massingham’ for Italian affairs was an RAF squadron leader, Harold Crawshaw. Born in Brittany, Crawshaw was forty and had worked before the war as a chartered accountant, a job that had included a seven-year stint in Italy. Poached by SOE from the Air Ministry, he had worked in London as Roseberry’s assistant until heading to North Africa in November. Now he arranged for the two new arrivals to be housed in conditions of strict secrecy in an isolated farmhouse outside the city.
‘I am pretty well tied to them as they can’t be allowed out alone very much,’ Crawshaw wrote to London in mid-December; ‘we all mess together and they are fairly happy cooking and looking after the place. Their other physical needs’ – Crawshaw did not enlarge on these – ‘I have attended to but things aren’t as easy here as in London.’ He added that he hoped it would not be long before they were off,
as the security angle is very difficult. Soldiers in British uniform who look a bit queer and who cannot speak a word of English are rather too noticeable here with the result that the boys are confined to the house more than is good for them. However, they are a good couple and they are bearing up pretty well.22
By early January, a Royal Navy ‘S’ class submarine, Ian McGeoch’s P.228, had been assigned to the landing role. More than forty years later, McGeoch recalled that the night before sailing for Sardinia he was taken to a farmhouse ‘where the two agents had prepared a magnificent supper of chicken and pasta and all sorts of things and we had a splendid and fairly bibulous evening. And then the next day we all set off.’23
P.228 got under way from Algiers on the afternoon of 5 January 1943. The Sardinian coast was reached early on the morning of 8 January. Carefully the submarine closed on the pinpoint where the agents were to go ashore. The chosen spot, forty or so miles up the coast from Cagliari, Sardinia’s capital, and below the wooded lower slopes of Mount Ferro, was an isolated beach immediately north of a rocky promontory bearing the Torri di San Giovanni di Sarrala, an imposing conical watchtower built in the 1760s. All seemed quiet. Then McGeoch took the submarine back out to sea where his crew and the agents made their final preparations. Later he recorded that Adler in particular ‘inspired great confidence’. At a minute past midnight on the morning of 9 January, P.228 proceeded landwards a second time. Soon the rubber dinghy was out of the hull and McGeoch was watching it ‘heading slowly but surely for the shore’.24
The following day, when the two Cornishmen were safely back in the submarine, one of them, Frank Taylor, reported that progress had been a little difficult due to a strengthening off-shore breeze, while ‘at the last moment [Serra] got cold feet and was very frightened all the way in the dinghy’.25 Serra had also refused to paddle, so that ‘the efforts of the other agent (Adler) were largely wasted because the boat turned round’.26 But the landing was successful, Serra seemed ‘alright’ when the beach was reached, and Taylor was sure that no alarm had been raised.27
At ‘Massingham’, staff and signals officers waited to hear from Adler that the mission was safely established ashore. On 15 January, an SOE receiving station seems to have picked up a message preceded by Adler’s callsign enquiring about the strength of his set’s signal. Then a month passed without another sound. This silence was not unexpected. Before leaving for Sardinia, Adler had been told not to hurry when opening up wireless contact. Then, on 19 February, a second signal was received. More followed in subsequent days and soon there was a regular flow. These early messages explained that the two agents had found the coast heavily guarded so had decided to bury their equipment, move inland and hide in towns. They had since recovered their kit and were now quite safe in a house belonging to one of Serra’s friends, though finding food was difficult. Serra was reported as about to set off to gather news and find more friends. Urging the pair to be careful and send minimal signals traffic, SOE congratulated them on their progress.28
Today, Italian documents and testimonies reveal that Gabor Adler and Salvatore Serra had been captured within twenty-four hours of going ashore. On 12 January 1943 the Carabinieri in Cagliari reported that ‘an Englishman’ and ‘an Italian subject who was a deserter’ had been arrested on the coast two days before. ‘These men were provided with a wireless transmitting device, and had been landed by an enemy submarine in the neighbourhood of S. Giovanni di Sarala [sic] (Commune of Tertia, province of Nuoro).’29 The two prisoners were promptly passed to SIM, remembered Colonel Mario Bertacchi, who had been chief of its counter-espionage section at the time, and eventually revealed ‘their mission, their signal plan, etc.’ The
n SIM’s Controspionaggio section decided to attempt ‘a double-cross’: ‘W/T [wireless telegraphy] communication with the enemy secret service was established and numerous signals exchanged’.30
Much later, in 1945, SOE ran to ground two Italians who had worked for the SIM counter-espionage section in Sardinia in 1943. One of these men was Major Cesare Faccio, a man warmly regarded by his SOE questioner as ‘bluff, hearty, straight-forward, cheerful, and not too well educated’. Faccio was aged about fifty and a career Carabiniere who had been posted to SIM after convalescing from wounds suffered at El Alamein. He had run the SIM Cagliari office from March until September 1943 after being sent there to replace a Sardinian SIM officer, a major called Sanna, who had been in charge when Adler and Serra were caught. ‘Maj Sanna had not dealt with the case very intelligently and there had been some delay in his reports reaching Rome,’ Faccio recalled. ‘When the reports did arrive, SIM at once realised the great importance of the case, and sent Lt-Col Faga to Cagliari to take the case in hand.’ Faga was ‘a very experienced professional SIM officer’, explained Faccio, and immediately and thoroughly re-interrogated Adler and Serra ‘and at once began doubling the set back to the British’. By the time that Faccio arrived, Colonel Faga had ‘started the doubling off on the right foot’ and felt that
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