15 H. Hargreaves, interview No. 12158, IWM Sound Archive.
16 Munthe, Sweet is War, p. 162.
17 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
18 Ibid.
19 Unpublished reminiscences of Captain Peter Cooper, 1985, P. M. Lee papers, Imperial War Museum.
20 In all and at various times, five volunteered their services. Three of these, Leo Valiani, Renato Pierleoni and Giuseppe Petacchi, went on to undertake important operations in Italy after the Armistice.
21 ‘Notes on American Organisations and Personnel’, 1943, TNA HS 7/76.
22 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
23 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, pp. 145–6.
24 A moving account of Arthur Galletti’s short life, drawing on two trunks’ worth of correspondence with his wife, has been published by their daughter, Annette Moat: On Two Fronts: A Soldier’s Life of Travel, Love and War (Long Riders’ Guild Press, 2007).
25 Major C. Roseberry to P. Dixon, 21 July 1943, TNA HS 6/879.
26 ‘Nekic, Branko’, comments dated May 1942, TNA HS 9/1091.
27 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/268.
28 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/237.
29 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/264.
30 Munthe, Sweet is War, p. 164.
31 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
32 H. Hargreaves, interview No. 12158, IWM Sound Archive.
33 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, p. 155.
34 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
35 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, p. 159.
36 M. Salvadori to C. M. Woods, 25 February 1990, Woods papers.
37 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
38 Ibid. Today it is apparent that ‘Professor Canepa’ was Antonio Canepa, a strident Sicilian separatist who had been appointed Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Catania in 1937. Drawing on sources that include the travel-writer Norman Lewis’s The Honoured Society: The Mafia Conspiracy Observed (London: Collins, 1964), some post-war studies of Canepa, who was killed in a shoot-out with the Sicilian police in June 1945, have claimed that he was in contact with British Intelligence before the Sicily landings and, with some of his students, co-operated with a British raiding party on an attack on the German airfield at Gerbini in June 1943. There is even a claim that he may have made three trips to London. See Finkelstein, Separatism, the Allies and the Mafia, pp. 21–2. So far as SOE is concerned, it seems from its records that the first it ever heard of Canepa was from Munthe’s ‘wizened’ journalist in July 1943.
39 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, p. 156.
43 ‘Brief record’, by D. A. MacDonell, Woods papers.
44 A. R. Cooper, The Adventures of a Secret Agent (London: Frederick Muller, 1957), p. 191.
45 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers. The enterprising Gallegos had been the first SOE officer to set foot in Sicily. Briefed to requisition any available local craft that might be suitable for SOE use, he had contrived on 10 July to hitch a lift on a landing craft from Tripoli to Malta, which the tired Canadian crew were glad to allow him to navigate but omitted to tell him about the mine-swept approach to Malta’s Grand Harbour. He then secured a passage from Malta to Siracusa on a motor-torpedo-boat, arriving on 16 July. Although he had to return to Malta the next day, his time ashore was sufficient for him to find a rat-infested schooner, the Gilfredo, which in subsequent months and with an SOE crew was to see valuable service ferrying arms and men all over the Mediterranean.
46 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/264.
50 Report by Major M. Munthe, March 1944, Woods papers.
51 ‘Moro, Attilio’, note by Sergeant E. Saunders, undated but c. 1945, TNA HS 9/1062/4.
52 Ibid.
12
‘Big and serious stuff’
On a series of summer nights in 1943, days before the Allied landings in Sicily, a British submarine, HMS Sportsman, surfaced off the coast of northwest Italy near the resort town of Bordighera. Two secret agents were aboard. Their names, according to British files, were Alberto Rossi and Alessandro Floro. Each night the crew tried to persuade them to leave the submarine and go ashore. ‘3 attempts made in all,’ SOE reported afterwards; ‘Rossi refused every night.’ The first night, Floro, ‘naturally unwilling to go alone’, also refused. The second night he agreed to go but upset his canoe ‘apparently deliberately’.1 On the third night, equipped with money, papers and a wireless set, but on his own, Floro was finally and safely deposited on the shore.
Sportsman’s 27-year-old captain, Lieutenant Richard Gatehouse, was not impressed. ‘[His] submarine was endangered [on] three consecutive nights,’ SOE recorded after receiving his angry feedback on the two agents’ antics. ‘He refuses to carry again “so-and-sos who do not intend to land”.’2 Decades later, in an interview with London’s Imperial War Museum, Gatehouse still remembered these ‘two Italian so-called agents’ and how he had found their refusal to leave his submarine ‘somewhat aggravating’. Gatehouse would also recall his dim view of imperilling valuable assets to place agents behind enemy lines. ‘I used to call it “Boy Scouting in the moonlight”,’ he told his interviewer, ‘and I personally to this day think that this business of landing agents to blow up railway lines or railway tunnels or the like was a complete misuse of a submarine.’3
Gatehouse has not been alone in doubting whether the wartime work of irregular units like SOE justified the resources employed – and put at risk – to support them. Senior Royal Air Force officers, for example, claimed at the time that strategic bombing could achieve much more than sabotage and resistance on the ground, and that RAF aircraft assigned to assisting SOE could be better used elsewhere. Some historians, too, have doubted whether behind-the-lines efforts were really worth the trouble, arguing that the scale and significance of some SOE successes have been grossly exaggerated since the war, and noting that Axis-dominated Western Europe proved incapable of rebelling on the scale that many Allied onlookers had originally hoped.4
A rounded picture of SOE’s wartime record must take account of its failures and the obstacles that had stood in the way of success. Trying to get to grips with Italy, for example, its officers, inexperienced and under-resourced, had learned only slowly that Italian opponents of the Fascist regime, when found, were rarely able to do very much. Early progress, wrote Cecil Roseberry, was badly hampered by ‘a total disregard for the fundamental difference between working into enemy territory and working into occupied, friendly, territory’.5 It took time and casualties for the British to learn the hard way that Italy was no easy target.
But SOE’s activities – Churchill called them its ‘naughty deeds’ – were not limited to encouraging and fostering resistance and waging subversive warfare.6 ‘Bombs, sabotage, parachutes, etc, are of course only the shop window,’ as Lord Selborne, its minister, put it.7 Given the need-to-know nature of its operations at the time and the inaccessibility of its archives for over half a century, it is perhaps not surprising that Richard Gatehouse, for instance, seems never to have discovered that the two Italian agents he tried to land that summer had in fact belonged to the Soviet NKVD, forerunner of the KGB. That the British, through the auspices of SOE and the Royal Navy, had the task of putting them ashore derived from an agreement signed in Moscow in 1941 whereby SOE and the NKVD had pledged to ‘give all possible assistance in introducing each other’s agents into occupied territory’.8 What Rossi and Floro’s precise mission was, SOE never knew; but it was unlikely to have been something very active like blowing up bridges or tunnels. Both men were trained wireless operators. Rossi was si
ck with tuberculosis. Floro had a disabled arm and went ashore with no explosives. Probably their mission was to contact Italian communists.
There are plenty of examples of SOE activities that were a world away from violent sabotage: from blockade-breaking in Scandinavia, where it secured shipments of Swedish ball bearings vital to British industry, to procuring on black markets and in neutral cities vast amounts of foreign currency (funds that proved as valuable to Treasury coffers and those of MI6, the War Office and the Air Ministry as they did to its own operations).9 As Roseberry would write at the end of the war, SOE, by virtue of its versatility and contacts, had been able to act as a medium ‘for handling and developing many issues for which no department or unit has been specifically formed’, and make important war-shortening contributions ‘which could [not] have been foreseen in any charter which might have been given’.10
Another example was its handling of a secret proposal, aimed squarely at shortening the war between Italy and the Allies, that a trusted emissary put before SOE in Berne in the winter of 1942–3 on behalf of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, one of the most senior army officers associated with the Fascist regime. The son of a Piedmontese mayor, Badoglio had resigned as Chief of the Italian General Staff in 1940 but remained one of the regime’s military heroes, with his reputation as a victorious commander linked inextricably to Fascism’s success in pacifying Libya and conquering Abyssinia. Honour after honour had come his way; Roberto Farinacci once remarked that all that was left for Badoglio was to be made a cardinal or canonised.11 He was also, as one historian has described him, ‘a very political man’ who had ‘successfully ducked and weaved with the Fascist dictatorship for two decades’.12 Badoglio was no dedicated Fascist. He openly ridiculed Fascist colleagues. He took pains to ensure that the army officer corps remained free from party interference. And eventually, through the secret emissary sent to Berne, he made this proposal to the British: a military coup, led by Italian Army officers and properly coordinated with Allied plans, to overthrow Mussolini.
That contact between the British and Badoglio began in May 1942, when Jock McCaffery in Berne received a visit from Luigi Rusca, a co-director of Mondadori, the Italian publishing house. Over talks that summer and autumn, Rusca explained to McCaffery that Badoglio, whom he knew, was convinced that the Allies would win the war and, moreover, was prepared to attempt a coup at the right moment and establish a military government. Badoglio and his friends, Rusca added, also wanted the formation of a pro-Allied Italian military force outside the country. As commander, they recommended Annibale Bergonzoli, an Italian general who was currently a prisoner in British hands in India.
Signalling these details to London, McCaffery added his own opinion that this could be ‘really big and serious stuff’.13 Baker Street agreed. Badoglio, SOE noted, ‘invariably crops up whenever there is talk of a movement inside Italy. Such information as we get from time to time indicates that, despite his retirement from active life, he receives an ovation whenever he appears in public and that he does not hide his opposition to Mussolini.’ In London, Cecil Roseberry thought it especially significant that Badoglio reportedly claimed to consider himself no longer loyal to Italy’s royal house, which was publicly associated with backing Mussolini’s regime. As for the captured Bergonzoli, ‘he was always a picturesque and popular figure’.14 A quick enquiry to the War Office about Bergonzoli’s recent ‘attitude and conduct’ confirmed that ‘as a prisoner he is a delightful person to deal with and causes no trouble’.15
A gnarled old general whose impressive beard had earned him the nickname ‘barba elettrica’ (‘electric whiskers’), Bergonzoli had commanded Italian divisions in Spain and, before his capture in Libya in early 1941, a corps of the Italian Tenth Army in Africa. The War Office also knew that he loathed Mussolini’s regime. By March 1941, Wavell was reporting that the imprisoned Bergonzoli ‘talks freely’:
States that he sent back three Divisional Generals from Bardia and that even in Spain his men were “snivelling wretches” who funked and prayed to the saints when they should have been fighting. [He says that] Mussolini will not listen to or believe unpleasant truth. Bergonzoli affirms his dearest ambition is to live so that he can rebel against [the] rottenness of [the] present Italian regime.16
This seemed encouraging.
‘[I]t may well be that he genuinely does desire to throw out Mussolini and put an end to the Fascist regime,’ wrote Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, ‘in which case it seems to me that he would be a more useful [Free Italian] leader than third rate émigrés of doubtful reputation … or antiquated and out of date politicians such as Sforza.’17 This was a reference to Count Carlo Sforza, an ageing Italian diplomat who had fled from exile in France to the United States in the summer of 1940. Well into 1943, Sforza would be periodically discussed and suggested by various exiles and émigrés as a possible leader of a free Italian movement or government-in-exile. Unconvinced that he was sufficiently popular, and wishing anyway to keep its hands free, the Foreign Office refused to touch him.
There were doubts in London as to whether Bergonzoli, too, was cut out to be the right type of free Italian leader. Wavell had reported that Bergonzoli, while evidently anti-Fascist, felt that ‘military dictatorship’ was ‘the only possible form of revolution in Italy’: a report that led Cavendish-Bentinck to wonder if Bergonzoli was ‘sufficiently socialist or democratic to qualify for the privilege of working with us’.18 The War Office chipped in with its own observation that Bergonzoli had ‘an excitable and somewhat unstable temperament’ and that the elite Italian Bersaglieri had considered him ‘rather a mountebank. Rushes about paying surprise visits to units and can rarely be found in his office. Rides horses, motor cycles and ordinary bicycles … apt to interfere in the administration of minor units.’ Reading this, one Foreign Office official concluded: ‘This means, in effect, that we must write “Electric Whiskers” off.’19 From SOE’s standpoint, though, Bergonzoli’s eccentricities would not have mattered much. The real value of a free Italian force, as Roseberry put it, lay in ‘the moral effect inside Italy of the knowledge that Italians outside the country were actively supporting the anti-fascist powers,’ and that there existed ‘a combatant unit armed against the Axis’.20
Still bruised by its experience of Foreign Office priorities during the Emilio Lussu affair, SOE decided to keep quiet about its contact with Rusca until Badoglio made a definite move. By the end of 1942, such a move seemed under way. In further discussions in Berne, Rusca told McCaffery that Badoglio and another senior military man in Italy, Marshal Enrico Caviglia, hero of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in 1918, were united in wishing to treat with the Allies. They had also selected a personal emissary whom they wished to send out as their representative, on the condition that he would be allowed to form a free Italian army. This was General Gustavo Pesenti, a former governor of Italian Somaliland, whom McCaffery reported was poised to fly out for an Allied airfield. ‘Pesenti is unmarried and all arrangements have been taken to look after his only dependents, who are his two sisters,’ McCaffery reported in January 1943. ‘An aeroplane and pilot [in Italy] are now in readiness to take off with [him]. All they require from us is the word Go.’21
Sir Charles Hambro, SOE’s chief, now revealed the full story to the Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Office. Deliberations followed. Papers were requested and read. In readiness for a positive decision and instructions to push forward, arrangements were even made to prepare for the dangerous and delicate task of ensuring the safe arrival at an Allied airfield of an enemy aircraft flying from enemy territory. Pesenti’s plane should aim for Benina airfield in Libya, it was decided. To ensure that it could be identified correctly and not shot down, it would need to make landfall between Tokra and Apollonia at a speed of 150 miles an hour and at a height of 3,500 feet, and either cross the coast with its undercarriage down, or fire green flares every four minutes or when approached by Allied aircraft. Once t
he plane was on the ground, everyone on board would have to disembark unarmed. Pesenti should present himself as ‘General Rosino’ or ‘Count Rosino’ and be ready to share details of Badoglio’s aims, plans, ideas and support.22
On the morning of 18 January, the War Cabinet met in London and discussed Badoglio’s approach – and decided to ignore it. ‘The Cabinet considered that the advantages likely to be derived from this proposal were not sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages and the risks involved,’ the Foreign Office’s Sir Orme Sargent told Hambro afterwards. The ‘main disadvantage’, Sargent explained, was that, if Pesenti managed to come out to Libya, ‘negotiations with him could not continue without some undertakings being entered into on our side. The Cabinet’s final decision was therefore that without further instructions from them no response should be made to Marshals Badoglio and Caviglia.’23 The bad news was dispatched to Berne. McCaffery passed it to Rusca.
An ‘off the record’ explanation for the War Cabinet’s decision, Roseberry would remark scurrilously, ‘was that the left-wing members [of the War Cabinet] could not agree to negotiations with effete Italian aristocrats’.24 In fact, the official reasoning in the records chimes closely with the long-held views of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. As Eden told Churchill a little later, he was ‘quite certain’ that if discussions began with Pesenti or any serious emissary sent from Italy, the question would crop up of what ‘hope’ the British were prepared to hold out for its future. ‘Our present line is to make no promise whatsoever, but merely to offer Italians (through our propaganda) the alternatives of sinking or surviving. We do not promise them a suit of clothes or food. We hope that this tough line, supplemented by heavy [bombing] raids and the threat of invasion, will suffice to frighten the Italians out of the war.’25
The War Cabinet’s decision to dismiss the Pesenti proposal was not the end of the matter. Busy in Casablanca at the latest inter-Allied conference, Churchill had been absent when the proposal had been discussed. At Casablanca he and Roosevelt announced a joint agreement that no armistice would be offered to Germany, Italy, Japan or their satellites until the unconditional surrender of their armed forces. But in February, after returning to London and giving Badoglio’s approach some thought, Churchill instructed the War Cabinet to reconsider the proposal. ‘There can be no harm in hearing what they have to say, as long as we do not make any commitments,’ he explained to Eden. ‘I am not going to take the responsibility of carrying on this war a day longer than is necessary to achieve full victory.’26
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