Later Salvadori reflected that most Sicilians simply did not want to fight. ‘From Syracuse/Catania to Palermo I met many people,’ he wrote of his time on the island:
Not one could be recruited for SOE activities on the Continent [sic] or could give useful and reliable information on the situation. For Sicilians the war was over and this only mattered … For most, to fight alongside Britons (inclusive of Commonwealth and Empire troops) was treason [while] to fight for a free and democratic Italy was laughable … [To fight] against Germany was understandable, but why risk one’s life to do the Allies’ job?36
While Salvadori was hunting for helpers in Palermo, Munthe was sticking to the heels of the frontline British infantry and coming under pressure from Eighth Army to employ his little force in a tactical role that would help reap more immediate rewards. Eighth Army’s task was to push northwards from its footholds on Sicily’s southern coast, capturing in succession Augusta, Catania and the airfield at Gerbini, before a final thrust for Messina in the northeast. Augusta had been in British hands since 13 July and Munthe was being called upon by Eighth Army headquarters to ‘get something going’ in the busy industrial port of Catania.37 Overlooked by the imposing mass of Mount Etna, Catania was Sicily’s second largest city and still in German hands. The British had halted a few miles short of it along the line of the Simeto River, the muddy watercourse that curled across the Catania plain. Vicious fighting was taking place along its banks and in the malarial marshes, canals, ditches, fields and orchards all around.
Munthe set up camp near a spot called Lentini on an escarpment above the plain, among olive trees and the stench of rotting bodies, and put his mind to doing what he could to help. His first effort took the form of sending two friendly Sicilians, in local clothes and carrying forged passes, over the Simeto, through the enemy lines and into the city. Their task was to look for Professor Canepa, the university man rumoured to be a staunch anti-Fascist; they also had instructions to encourage Canepa’s organisation, if he was found to have one, to cut German telephone lines and otherwise ‘harass the enemy in every way possible without causing instant reprisals’. Both messengers apparently made it to Catania. Both came back with news. The first returned saying he had failed to find Canepa. The second came back saying that the professor had left for Florence and, without him there to lead it, ‘local patriot action’ seemed unlikely.38
Next, Munthe decided to send one of his own men over the river and into the city. The chosen agent was Branko Nekić, the wireless operator of Max Salvadori’s team. He had arrived from Algiers a few days before. The instructions that Munthe gave him were to interfere with the railways between Catania and Messina, disrupt the local telephone system, kidnap or otherwise dispose of certain Fascists known to be assisting the Germans, report enemy dispositions, and deliver a letter urging surrender to two Italian generals still fighting in northeast Sicily. To help him he was assigned a fresh pair of volunteers, two more local youths, to whom Gilbert Randall had given some rudimentary training in explosives and fieldcraft.
On the eve of their attempt to get through to Catania, Munthe carefully disguised Nekić and the two young Sicilians as farmers, with ‘baskets and a sack containing food, melons, wine and clothes in the approved local style’. He also took pains to secrete various items and devices among their belongings:
I had worked on the melons for hours and when we at last packed them into the jeep they showed no signs of containing 30lbs of explosives, nor were the time pencils detectable in the wine bottle. The wireless set was hidden in the old clothes. Each man had sewn in his trousers’ lining a note written on silk in a special code of my own to enable him to pass back into our lines at the end of his mission.39
When the time came to leave, Munthe and Randall drove the party in turns to a point twenty miles west of Catania where soldiers of the 5th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment were preparing an attack for the night of 2/3 August. Slow progress and severe casualties in the fighting on the Catania plain had prompted Montgomery to launch a flanking offensive through more rugged terrain. An experienced unit that had fought in North Africa, the 5th Northamptons had arrived in Sicily a week before. Now occupying positions north and east of the town of Catenanuova, they had lost more than forty men killed and wounded from mortars and machineguns when trying, on 1 August, to push up the road towards nearby Centuripe and engage the Germans on the ridges around. The plan for 2 August was to attack again into the hills. At the last moment, the battalion’s adjutant asked Munthe if he would assist through the lines an Italian youth sent up by the intelligence staff at headquarters. Munthe was ‘entirely opposed to this idea in principle’ but reluctantly agreed for the boy to follow in the wake of Nekić’s party. Then, under cover of darkness and ‘in the confusion of bangs and flashes as the retreating Germans blew up their ammunition and bomb stores on [Gerbini] aerodrome, we got our men through the line and safely into enemy territory unobserved at a quiet point on the north bank of the Simeto’.40
Nekić’s little wireless set had a range of less than fifteen miles. In order to ensure that any messages from it could be heard, Munthe borrowed a mobile army signals van plus its driver and a pair of operators. Then he added young Harry Hargreaves to transmit and receive Nekić’s messages and pushed the van as far as possible in the direction of Catania. ‘We moved it up to “Dead Horse Corner”, the furthest point we dared move it in daylight,’ Munthe wrote later, ‘then waited for the dark to fall and rushed it over a low pontoon bridge while our guns were just opening up a considerable barrage and holding the enemy’s entire attention. Once over the river we dug it down amid bamboo reeds on the edge of a vine field littered with German corpses.’ Under mortar fire, in hundred-degree heat, surrounded by swamps, mosquitoes and heat-bloated bodies, Hargreaves sat in the van and listened hard in his headphones for any incoming signal from Nekić. Nothing was heard. Eventually, and ‘with a feeling of great depression’, Munthe had to withdraw the listening van to ‘more healthy regions’ and out of range of Nekić’s set.41
For a day or two, Munthe, in his olive grove at Lentini, continued to think of ways of getting men into Catania. One idea was for Dick Cooper to try to get through in civilian clothes. This was abandoned after he and Munthe conducted a sobering reconnaissance. The Germans, they discovered, were turning back all refugees trying to flee the fighting line. A similar idea, but even more ambitious, was for Munthe himself to get through disguised as an elderly peasant woman riding a donkey and accompanied by Corporal Beggs, whose job, if they made it, would be to operate the miniature wireless set hidden under the old woman’s skirts. Beggs, though he came from Blackpool, seemed sufficiently dark to look like a local. Before that plan could be attempted, however, Catania fell. British troops entered the city on the morning of 5 August. At once Munthe and his men moved up from Lentini. ‘There wasn’t a living soul to be seen between the river and the city, only corpses along the road,’ Salvadori recorded. ‘The city itself seemed to have been abandoned.’42 There was no sign of Branko Nekić.
Settling into a fresh headquarters in Catania’s Piazza Cavour, Munthe drew up fresh plans to meet a new request for intelligence about enemy equipment in Messina, the last enemy stronghold in Sicily. On the night of 9/10 August, near the bombed-out town of Bronte, Gilbert Randall managed to put through the lines a man from Messina who was willing to contact friends and deliver letters. It was a nasty moment for Randall. Approaching a ravine full of snipers, he was nearly shot. It was also the last of SOE’s attempts to do something in support of the campaign in Sicily; and, once again, little came of it. By the evening of 17 August, the entire island was in Allied hands.
‘We were all glad when this campaign ended,’ Denis MacDonell reflected years later. ‘Many memories of Sicily remain – the oppressive heat of the Catania plain, the freshness of Mount Etna’s slopes, the stench of Dead Horse Corner, not to mention the numerous air raids, panic stricken civilians, etc.’43 Dick Cooper ha
d one particularly horrible experience once the fighting was over. After a successful search for his sister, Hetty, whom he found alive and well in a village outside Messina, Cooper joined her on a pilgrimage to their father’s grave. The cemetery, not far away, had suffered months of bombing. Blown out of the soil, shattered coffins and their contents lay scattered everywhere and their father’s coffin was among several that had slid into the bottom of a crater. ‘All had burst open and as we reached the edge of the hole we could see my father’s feet protruding.’44
With the enemy gone, Munthe and his men stayed in Sicily for some days. Max Salvadori made a few more contacts that it was hoped could prove useful on the mainland. Their quality remained very mixed. One or two of local interest were passed along to regular British forces. One result was that a German-inspired stay-behind group of snipers and telephone wire-cutters was run to ground in hills near Floridia, a town west of Siracusa. Another contact that Salvadori apparently made was Guido Jung, a Sicilian Jew who had once been Mussolini’s Finance Minister.
Munthe’s team also managed to get its hands on a large stock of German and Italian weaponry, which he and his men quickly loaded into trucks and hid under a requisitioned villa near Siracusa. SOE had told Munthe to try to get his hands on weapons like these, which were urgently required for guerrilla groups with whom it was working in the Balkans. Getting the arms off the island, however, was not straightforward. In the way was a complex web of military bureaucracy and officers demanding the correct paperwork. That the task was achieved at all, Munthe recalled, owed much to ‘bluff, home-made seals and rubber stamps’ and ‘the frantic efforts and tact’ of SOE’s Adrian Gallegos, an Italian-speaking naval officer who, aboard a requisitioned schooner, finally sailed the arms out of Siracusa harbour and into SOE’s arsenal.45
Later, Munthe would describe that last escapade as ‘only one example of many instances where the lack of proper recognition and understanding of [SOE]’s legitimate means obliged us to have recourse to time wasting and apparently privateering devices’. His mission’s directives in Sicily had been approved at the highest levels, but the problem was that, in the field, ‘an advance party like ours comes up against men much lower in the Army hierarchy but who are nevertheless all powerful on the spot and who require to be convinced by more than a mere major’s word’. Some ‘useful things we lacked’ included:
(a) Sufficient and convincing looking documents, movement orders, passes and ‘authorities’ permitting one to operate with the various units of the Regular Forces one is apt to mix with. Thus when [one is] finally obliged to approach a high placed officer at Army HQ or Army Group HQ he is not able to veto an immediate operation by saying, ‘Your documents authorising you to be attached to us makes no mention of using MTBs, parachute aircraft, fishing vessels, etc.’
(b) Unit rubber stamps for use on movement orders, and other instructions issued by the CO to cover the activities of members of his force, are absolutely essential. To carve one out of an old piece of India rubber and use blood for an ink pad takes time and is dirty and what is worse often will not stand close examination …
(c) A convenient name like ‘Special Forces’ was not in use in North Africa and the name ‘G. Topo. Liaison Group’ proved a rather heavy strain on efforts to keep the group’s security story intact. All explanations broke down when without any maps at all we were recommended by a well meaning officer of Movements at Sousse to the Colonel in whose camp we lived, to draw him a rather special map. We made excuses lasting three days and on the fourth he arrived at 0800 hrs. Our only course was hastily to leave the camp. On another occasion we were referred to in a crowded mess as the ‘Explosive Topo Lads’.
It is arguable that SOE should never have been used for such a dangerous tactical activity as trying to run agents and operations in the middle of a battlefield. Doing the same job at Anzio in January 1944, Munthe’s fighting war would come to a premature end when he was seriously wounded by a mortar bomb that killed another SOE officer, Captain Michael Gubbins, the 22-year-old son of Colin Gubbins, SOE’s chief. Most of Munthe’s recollections quoted in this chapter come from a report that he wrote in hospital.
Nevertheless, lessons learned in Sicily did prove useful when the Allies began to land on the Italian mainland: SOE teams that went ashore at Salerno and Anzio were, as a consequence, better prepared in terms of kit and authority. But that benefit aside, Munthe and his men had achieved little more in Sicily than recruiting a handful of volunteers of limited and short-term worth, securing a few enemy weapons and playing an indirect role in uncovering some enemy stay-behind parties. Munthe wrote later with regret that when Catania, Eighth Army’s most costly objective, finally fell, ‘apart from getting intelligence we had been able to do virtually nothing to assist in its capture’.46 It was not much of a record for the risks run. It also came at the cost of Branko Nekić.
In October 1943, the two young Sicilians with whom Nekić had crossed the Simeto suddenly regained contact with SOE. The pair explained that they had never reached Catania. After getting across the river that night together with the local boy whom Munthe had also put through the lines, the little group had bedded down together in an abandoned hayloft. Next morning, they said, the boy had betrayed them: ‘after eating breakfast off our iron rations,’ Munthe recorded, the boy ‘had gone straight to the nearest German HQ … and led the way back to their hiding place’.47 All were caught. The two Sicilians said that they had been separated from Nekić and eventually removed to a mainland prison near Reggio. There, during an air raid, they had managed to escape. The last they had seen of Nekić, they said, was in Sicily, and they knew nothing more about him.
Word of Nekić’s ultimate fate reached SOE a few weeks later. The source was unexpected. At that moment Munthe was in Naples, having gone ashore with the recent Allied landings at Salerno, and was engaged once again in searching for Italian volunteers who might wish to fight for the British. One man who came forward was a Carabiniere called Attilio Moro. ‘He had no idea who I was,’ Munthe wrote after talking to him, ‘and was merely recounting how the loathsome pressure of the Germans made his squad of Carabiniere [sic] in Sicily kill one of the bravest men he had ever seen. His chance allusion to the “Good idea of hiding explosives in melons” made me realise he was relating Newton’s [Nekić’s] death.’48
Moro had also explained that Nekić had given away nothing during three days of interrogation by the Germans. Everyone present was convinced that he was a Pole. Moro recalled, too, how impressed the Carabinieri had been as Nekić dug his own grave. He also remembered Nekić’s final words. ‘Before they shot him he had cried in Italian, “God bless you Mother. I shall not see you again. Damn the vile Germans.”’49 In his memoirs Munthe would add that the Carabinieri had refused to kill him and that the overseeing officer had had to take out his pistol and do it. Branko Nekić’s name can be found today on a panel on the Cassino Memorial in Italy, which commemorates 4,000 servicemen with no known graves.
Moro himself did not have long to live. On 14 November 1943, ten days after giving Munthe his account of Nekić’s death, he was attached at the last moment to a four-man team of SOE saboteurs, all Italians, due to embark on a raiding mission to sabotage enemy vehicles behind the German lines. ‘I will lead,’ he was reported to have told the others while lying in a bamboo thicket before crossing no-man’s land, ‘and if I am not shot, you follow.’ He apparently added: ‘I have seen a brave man give his life for the Allies, so I know dying is not difficult.’50 Moro set off and was killed ‘almost instantaneously’, taking the full force of a burst of fire from a concealed German machinegun.51
Very little about Moro is recorded in SOE’s files. ‘My impression was that [he] clearly felt it his duty to do whatever he could to combat the Germans and Fascists,’ recalled Ernest Saunders, one of SOE’s Italian-speaking field security NCOs, who had been responsible in Naples for looking after its Italian volunteers prior to them going into action. ‘He was
a supporter of the Monarchy and I remember him saying that as a Reale Carabinieri [sic] he must follow the lead given him by his king.’ Saunders felt ‘fairly sure’ that Moro was unmarried and came from the northern Italian town of Alessandria, in Piedmont, where he lived with his family.52 When the time came to search for next of kin, however, SOE knew so little about him that none could be found. His name appears on no British memorial.
Notes
1 ‘Action in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Italy’, Major General W. Smith to Commanding Officer ISSU-6, 9 February 1943, TNA WO 204/10240.
2 ‘Special Operations Executive Directive for 1943’, Chiefs of Staff memorandum, 20 March 1943, TNA CAB 80/68.
3 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/237.
4 Corvo, OSS in Italy, p. 73.
5 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/264.
6 H. Hargreaves, interview No. 12158, IWM Sound Archive. Another of Munthe’s wireless operators remarked forty years later that ‘if he turned up tomorrow looking for my services, I’d follow him without hesitation’. ‘Brief Record’, by D. A. MacDonell, Woods papers.
7 Ibid.
8 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
9 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/264.
10 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers. In his memoirs, Munthe would write – incorrectly – that he and his team landed with the Camerons on the opening day of the invasion. M. Munthe, Sweet is War (London: Duckworth 1954), p. 162.
11 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
12 Ibid.
13 ‘Brief record’, by D. A. MacDonell, Woods papers.
14 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
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