After eight days in Lugano, Sarfatti left Switzerland to return to what was now German-occupied northern Italy. He made it across the border, no thanks to the local smuggler employed to assist him who managed it so badly that Sarfatti was caught by a Swiss patrol. Sarfatti got away by saying that he was trying to escape into Switzerland, whereupon the patrol sent him back to where they believed he had come from: Italy. Sarfatti was to remain in northern Italy for another year. Through no fault of his own, it was a period in which his training, qualities and skills went largely to waste. For a while he stayed in Milan. Since he had no papers, no friends and no wireless set, there was little for him to do except take up his old routine. In January 1944 he moved to a village in the Val Camonica and took up with a poorly supported partisan movement called the Fiamme Verdi. Still he had no wireless set, so he worked instead couriering around messages and propaganda. In July, after news reached him that a wireless operator was needed in Milan, he joined a new group and at last got his hands on a set, which he used to keep the partisans in contact with others elsewhere. At first he worked in the city. Later he moved to Veniano, near Como, and it was there, at one o’clock in the morning on 19 August 1944, that the house in which he was operating was raided. Abandoning the wireless set, Sarfatti made it on to the roof, where he entangled himself in electrical wires before deciding to jump into the street. Hurting his feet when he hit the ground, he staggered off into the night in pain but unseen. For ten days he eked out an existence in a wood, nursing his nerves and feet and surviving on peaches, grapes and cupped handfuls of pond-water. In October 1944 he returned to Switzerland.
‘Had bad luck in the field,’ was the accurate opinion of the SOE officer who debriefed him a fortnight later. Sarfatti was ‘full of determination’, he added, and, ‘in spite of his quiet reserved manner, clearly has plenty of go and courage’.2 The war ended before Sarfatti could be given another opportunity to prove himself, but sight should not be lost of the risks he had run and the strain he had endured during eighteen months in enemy territory. Jock McCaffery would remember that in Berne he had thought often of Sarfatti ‘living literally in the shadow of death … Men get high decorations on the battlefield for valour of a lower order.’3
Giacomino Sarfatti survived the war. He went back to his agricultural studies, but in Italy, not Reading. In 1948 he graduated with a degree in agricultural sciences and began a distinguished academic career, studying, teaching and writing about society, science and the environment.4 He died in 1985. At the end of his career he was Professor of Botany at the University of Siena. Today its Department of Environmental Sciences is named after him.
The night after Sarfatti crossed into Switzerland, a four-man SOE team boarded a British troopship in Sicily and sailed for the southern Italian port of Taranto. Going ashore on 12 September, they had orders to requisition a local vehicle or two and make a dash for Brindisi, on Italy’s heel, thirty-odd miles away. It was a dangerous time to be driving around southern Italy. British forces, including the 1st Airborne Division, had landed, unopposed, at Taranto on the afternoon of 9 September, but German ambushes and roadblocks were met as they pushed inland, with one burst of machinegun fire fatally wounding the division’s commanding officer, Major-General George Hopkinson. The SOE party, which included young Teddy de Haan, who had acted as interpreter during the Armistice talks in Sicily, appreciated the risks. Procuring a car and a three-wheeled van, they set off with their wireless set lying on a bed of straw in the back, with two of the party, a pair of SOE signals NCOs, one of them a West Indian wireless operator from British Guiana, sitting either side of it with a box of matches and a can of petrol.5 Later that day they drove into Brindisi on the heels of a machinegun-toting jeep patrol of Popski’s Private Army, a specialist raiding and reconnaissance unit that was spearheading the Allied advance. Although the Germans had gone, de Haan and his team did find Dick Mallaby.
Four days earlier, Mallaby had been in Rome. Within hours of the announcement of the Armistice and as German troops began to secure control, he had then been attached to a party of elite Italians making a break for the Allied lines. Among them were Marshal Badoglio and several of his senior officers, together with the Italian king, queen and crown prince. Mallaby took with him his wireless set and was accompanied by the Italian operators with whom he had been working the Monkey link. First stop was Pescara, on the Adriatic. Next, after passing long German convoys thundering in the opposite direction, was the port of Ortona. There the party was ferried out to a waiting Italian corvette, the Baionetta, and sailed for Brindisi, docking there in the afternoon of 10 September. Installed with his set and assistants on the upper floor of one of the towers of Brindisi’s massive Swabian Castle, Mallaby settled down again to sending and receiving signals between Badoglio and the Allies. He was still operating the link when de Haan, whom he knew, drove in to the port. Hearing that an SOE team had arrived at the Internazionale Hotel, Mallaby, according to a later account, turned up in the foyer, ‘anxiously scanning the faces of the throng and revelling in the new-found thrill of seeing British uniforms once more’. He was still in civilian clothes and the hotel porter refused to let him in, whereupon the resulting altercation caused heads to turn and an SOE officer recognised him.6
Mallaby carried on working the Monkey link until it was closed down a few days later. After that he joined the headquarters of No. 1 Special Force, a new unit responsible for SOE operations supporting the military campaign in Italy. One job was to work as an instructor to Italian wireless operators provided by SIM, which was now working hand-in-hand with SOE, for future missions in the German-occupied north. Cecil Roseberry wrote later that rumours of Mallaby’s exploits ‘created a spirit of emulation among his students’.7
Mallaby’s accomplishments received official recognition when, in December 1943, it was announced in the London Gazette that he had been awarded the Military Cross. No further details were published. War Office records reveal that he had originally been put forward for an immediate award of a higher decoration, the Distinguished Service Order. The recommendation explained that he had ‘dropped alone into Lake Como by parachute’ and found himself ‘in conditions of unexpected difficulty which were a severe test of his courage’. Praising his conduct in captivity where he was first ‘kept in handcuffs and beaten’, it concluded that, but for his ‘exceptional coolness, perseverance and devotion to duty’ while operating the Monkey link, the Allied landings on the Italian mainland might have been made with Italy still an enemy.8
Wireless instructing kept Mallaby in a safe staff role for several months. In July 1944 he was briefly able to do something more active, driving north with another officer to contact partisans in the town of Macerata, in the Marche, from which the Germans had recently retreated. During this trip Mallaby drove over to his childhood home at Asciano, near Siena. To mutual surprise and delight, he arrived, unheralded, to find his father and stepmother safe and well. Back in southern Italy in September, by when SOE was dropping increasing numbers of its missions into German-occupied northern Italy to work with local partisans, Mallaby was eventually earmarked for a mission to Milan. When this was aborted, another plan was drawn up, this time to send him into northern Italy to establish fresh wireless communications in Milan and generally improve them across the north.
To get Mallaby into Milan, it was decided that he should go overland via the Swiss border, which seemed to offer the least problematic route. With this in mind, he was flown from southern Italy to liberated Lyons in eastern France; next, he crossed clandestinely from France into Switzerland. Then, on the evening of 13 February 1945, Mallaby left Berne for Lugano aboard a slow overnight train, travelling third class to keep a low profile. With him were two young Italian priests and an Italian wireless operator, all of whom would accompany him into Italy. Next day they took a car from Lugano to a point fairly close to the frontier, picked up a pair of smugglers en route, and, at about nine that evening, struck off on foot with the smugg
lers leading the way. An hour later they crossed into Italy. Four hours after that, after a nasty little journey in ordinary shoes through deep snow, they reached the Italian village of Carlaccio and the home of one of the smugglers. Around dawn on 15 February, leaving their guides behind, Mallaby and his companions set off again, this time for Milan, walking to Menaggio, on Lake Como, where they tried to hire a car but ended up renting a boat and crossing the lake to Varenna. From Varenna they managed to hitch a lift to Lecco in a lorry carrying nails and odds and ends. It was in Lecco that things went wrong.
Having eaten little and slept even less, the four men entered a restaurant and sat together at a table. Then two soldiers came in: a pair of Italian NCOs of the Brigate Nere, a Fascist military force still loyal to Mussolini. (Rescued from Italian captivity by a crack force of German paratroops in September 1943, Mussolini was now leader of the collaborationist Repubblica Sociale Italiana in German-occupied northern Italy.) Mallaby’s party stood up to leave. The two soldiers stopped them. One of the priests was told to turn out his pockets. ‘As one might have expected,’ reads a later SOE report, ‘his pockets were full of a mass of compromising papers; every sort of travel permit and identity document was produced as well as lots of little notes with names and addresses and messages from [partisan] liberation committees.’ Before long, everyone’s pockets were empty and the two Brigate Nere NCOs were demanding an explanation. ‘All the members of the party had solemnly stated that they did not know one another. When, however, three of their identity cards were put together and all found to bear the same civilian address, this proved too much for the NCOs and they were all placed under arrest.’9 Soon the four were occupying cells in the Brigate Nere barracks in Lecco.
At this point Mallaby decided to embark on an extraordinary bluff. ‘At 2200 hrs on the 15th,’ reads a subsequent report sent personally by the Brigate Nere commander in Como to no less a personality than Mussolini, ‘Captain [Bricoli], commanding the 5th Company of this Black Brigade based on Lecco, brought me a British Captain named Richard Tucker.’ This British officer had been captured at Lecco, the report explained, and now wished to speak to ‘a senior officer only’. The report also explained that Tucker (who was Mallaby) had declared that he was the personal emissary of Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, and had been sent secretly to Italy on a vitally important and highly confidential mission to speak to Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Mussolini’s Minister of Defence in the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.10
‘I immediately telephoned to General [Edoardo] Facduelle [chief of staff of the Brigate Nere] that someone must discuss this matter urgently with Marshal Graziani,’ the Como commander added in his report:
I was assured that a conversation would be requested in my name that night. I then reported to Captain Richard Tucker that I had arranged for him to meet Marshal Graziani. The Captain gave me his word of honour that he would not try to escape, but I told him that he would be placed under surveillance as he had been arrested by us and not reported of his own free will.11
The following day, Mallaby was taken under escort from Como to Milan and delivered to General Facduelle. Facduelle then telephoned Graziani’s headquarters on Lake Garda and, that evening, set off with Mallaby to see him. They arrived late, the drive being made without headlights to avoid being strafed by Allied aircraft, and Mallaby was allowed to get a few hours’ sleep in the comfort of a lakeside villa. Next day, 17 February, when Mallaby was driven to Graziani’s headquarters, it transpired that the Marshal had decided not to see him, since his headquarters was crawling with Germans and he did not want them finding out what was afoot. Mallaby was taken instead to another headquarters, this one in nearby Volta Mantovana. Here he was finally interviewed. His interrogator was the Italian colonel in charge of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa, Graziani’s intelligence service. This man was not unfamiliar with dealing with captured enemy agents. His name was Candeloro De Leo. As a SIM officer in Sicily two years before, De Leo had interrogated Antonio Gallo and Emilio Zappalà and built the case against them that led to their execution.
‘My true name is Richard Tucker,’ begins the Italian transcript of what Mallaby told De Leo. ‘I was born 26 April, 1919 at Ceylon …’ He went on to give De Leo a more or less honest account of his youth and schooling in Tuscany, choosing only to say that his father was now in England when really he was still in Italy. He gave an accurate version of his early soldiering in the Commandos and at Tobruk. Where he was more deceptive was in saying nothing about SOE or his earlier mission. Instead he told De Leo that he had worked as an interpreter at Allied headquarters in Cairo from early 1942 until June 1943; then at Allied headquarters in Algiers from June until September 1943; then, again as an interpreter, for the Allied Military Mission in Brindisi and Caserta for twelve months after that. In September 1944 he had come under Alexander’s direct command, Mallaby said, and in December he had been asked if would be willing to carry out a mission to northern Italy. ‘I accepted the mission, but asked to know its objectives,’ Mallaby told De Leo. ‘I was received by Marshal Alexander in person who told me that the mission was in the interests of Italy.’12
Still bluffing, Mallaby now related to De Leo the instructions that Alexander, he said, had given him personally. With documents provided by the British Legation in Berne, Mallaby was to enter northern Italy via Switzerland as Alexander’s personal emissary and present himself to Ildefonso Schuster, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, with a view to securing an introduction to Marshal Graziani; the three men with whom he had been caught in Lecco had been helpers assigned to getting him over the border and into Milan and introducing him to the Cardinal. Then, once Mallaby was standing before Graziani, he was to tell him that Alexander wished to employ Graziani’s forces in a way that would help ‘avoid useless bloodshed by the Allied and Republican forces on the one hand, and partisan and Republican forces on the other’.13 More specifically, Mallaby was to establish a response to Alexander’s proposal that Graziani’s men should neither impede the progress of the Allies nor attack the partisans, but rather stop the Germans from scorching the earth as they withdrew and help maintain public order once they had gone. Finally Mallaby was to say that Alexander was prepared to receive Graziani, or a representative, at Allied headquarters for further talks. Telling De Leo all of this, Mallaby added that he was not permitted to discuss the proposals but had been authorised by Alexander to return with a reply.
When the Allies captured him a few weeks later, De Leo was himself interrogated. To judge from his responses, he had believed Mallaby’s story. He recalled assuring ‘Tucker’ that he could speak to him freely ‘as the personal representative of Graziani’. De Leo added that he had then passed Alexander’s proposal to Graziani ‘who strongly approved of the idea, but did not dare to make a direct reply to the offer’. Instead, De Leo said, Graziani had referred the matter to Mussolini, who was then living on Lake Garda, whereupon Mussolini had informed the Germans, to whom ‘Capt Tucker’ was then handed over.14
Mallaby was indeed given to the Germans. On 26 February he was removed to Verona where he was interrogated again, this time by the SS, though his questioner was apparently ‘quite cordial’. Quizzed in detail about all aspects of his mission, Mallaby stuck to the story that he had given De Leo, stressing, so SOE learned later, that he was merely a low-ranking staff officer at a large headquarters ‘and that, on account of his junior rank and his age, he had merely been charged with opening a link and putting forward certain generalised suggestions’.15 That night, with the interrogation over, Mallaby was moved again. This time he was taken by car to a private villa at Fasano on the shores of Lake Garda. Escorted inside, he found himself talking to General Karl Wolff, commander of all SS forces in Italy.
Wolff spoke to Mallaby for two hours. ‘The General started off rather coldly but very politely,’ SOE recorded later. It was ‘impossible’, Wolff said, to discuss anything with Mallaby until ‘his identity and
the authenticity of his mission’ could be confirmed. Mallaby ‘pretended to be very surprised and aggrieved at this attitude and said to the General that it was in the very nature of things that he had nothing with him to prove his identity as a British officer. This attitude appeared to impress General Wolff, who hastily reassured [Mallaby] and said that he was, of course, perfectly willing to accept the word of a British officer and that they had better get down to business.’ Mallaby repeated Alexander’s proposals as he had presented them to De Leo and the SS. Wolff said that he had already agreed with Cardinal Schuster not to blow anything up as his forces withdrew. He added that he had also arranged with Graziani for Italian forces to pull out ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Germans.16
Then Wolff subjected Mallaby to a half-hour monologue about ‘how the finest chivalrous ideals of medieval knighthood found their modern expression in the German S.S., and that the S.S. are now the only people in Germany who are in a position to see that any agreement made with the Allies is carried out’. That done, he told Mallaby that he ‘offered himself to the Allies as a link between any person or group, military or civilian, in Germany with whom the Allies wished to establish contact. He went on to say that anyone could see that the Germans had lost the war and that some sort of end would have to be put quite soon to the present conflict. He said also that he was a personal friend of Hitler and [Field Marshal Albert] Kesselring and therefore might be useful.’ To this, Mallaby repeated his story about Alexander’s offer to receive representatives and extended it to include Wolff. The General replied that he would prefer to send Mallaby back with a message for Alexander, making him first give his ‘word of honour’ that he would return with Alexander’s reply. Wolff’s message, evidently aimed at shoring up his anticommunist credentials, was to the effect that, if the Allies stopped supplying arms to communist partisans in northern Italy, he would permit non-communist Italian guerrillas to move freely into Allied territory if they wished. Wolff finished up with a ‘long winded account of his own important position’ and, by the end of the interview, was ‘very friendly’.17
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