Dick Mallaby, in his interrogations, had diligently summarized the details of his mission and the events that took place. The subsequent SOE confidential reports relayed this in the following manner:
On 10 March 1945, London had received a message from Bern concerning the establishment of a very important contact with a man in the German military leadership, who had promised Parri’s release to demonstrate his amenability; on the same day SOE Bern had also reported that an English agent named Mallaby was about to be freed to go to Switzerland on a special mission;
The following day Bern had made it known that the important German contact was none other than General Wolff;
Eventually, on 13 March, it was confirmed that Mallaby had returned to Switzerland and had been released following internment in an illegal immigrant camp and had provided a report on his contacts with De Leo and Wolff.
According to Mallaby’s report, moreover, Wolff offered himself as an intermediary between the Allies and Kesselring, or any other German authority with which the Allies needed to get in touch, pointing out that:
–the Italians would defend the cities of northern Italy alongside the Germans;
–reassurances were also given to Cardinal Schuster that no destruction would be implemented;
–the devastation that would have been inevitable would not have required more than a year to return to its previous state;
–supplies to the Communist groups were to be suspended and, should this be the case, the other Partisan groups would have been allowed to freely cross the border to go to the south;
–there was awareness that Germany had lost the war and it was feared that the nation would fall under communist control.
Mallaby had emphasized that he had been released on his word of honour and that he needed to return to Italy, partly because the lives of the other two Italians who had been captured with him and held hostage depended on his return.26
For the purposes of adequately assessing this matter, it is important to highlight that the decisions taken concerning the handling of Wolff’s contact initiated by Dick Mallaby determined not only the course of events at the time, but also the long-standing curtain of secrecy that was drawn across the British agent’s contribution.
The secret documents of the time clearly indicate doubts, perplexities and fears, and confirm that the British leaders considered it inappropriate to develop the embarrassing contact with Wolff initiated by Mallaby. They chose to hand everything over to the Americans, suggesting that the OSS ‘should have sole responsibility for these negotiations’.
Thus, Head of SOE Colin Gubbins advised the ill-informed McCaffery in a general sense to help Dulles only at his request.
The Americans, pragmatically, responded to Wolff’s advances with consequences that were slightly different to those that the SS Obergruppenführer had envisaged, which were, in any case, highly profitable for both the Allies and Italy.
When Mallaby finally returned to the Swiss SOE base, he willingly volunteered to complete his masterpiece in a sort of remake of what happened in August–September 1943. The response was a categorical no. In fact, McCaffery practically shut him away, and he was told not to talk to anyone. Thus, to avoid embarrassment and tension, on 20 March, under the pretext of adherence to local regulations, Mallaby was handed over to the Swiss authorities to complete his period of quarantine, and was bundled into three different Swiss camps, the last of which even involved labouring.
On 28 March, Dick Mallaby returned to Bern, where he remained practically imprisoned until 19 April, before being sent back to Italy.
Following the seismic events unleashed after his meeting with Wolff, Mallaby’s position had become extremely sensitive. The situation was such that in the final report dated 12 April 1945, his name was mentioned only at the beginning, with the preferred term for him being ‘the subject’ throughout.
The reasons for this fury are hard to fathom, even supposing that someone tried to make Dick Mallaby a scapegoat; in fact, scapegoats are more useful when things go wrong. In this case, essentially, some extraordinarily positive things had resulted, and the agent’s behaviour had been both irreproachable and also the start of the fruitful negotiations that followed.
Considering the type of mission and the unforeseen events that Mallaby had to face and overcome, there was no room for dispute, even over his methods. Objectively, Mallaby should have been garlanded with compliments and praise.
It is clear that personal animosities between the various organizational structures, accentuated and fed by six years of elevated wartime tension, had reached levels of acute paranoia laced with an excess of aggressiveness.
Dick Mallaby obviously did not take it well.
With great sensitivity, Roseberry sent him a personal letter dated 11 May 1945 from his headquarters, trying to console him and highlighting the exceptional nature of his deeds and his good fortune in coming out of it alive. From the tone of this very interesting, unpublished and revealing letter, we can sense the disquiet generated by the results of Mallaby’s second mission even within SOE, as well as the agent’s frustration in the aftermath of Edenton Blue:
Dear Dick,
Thanks for your note of the 1st … and fed up as you appear to be, I’m damn glad that you are in a position to write. You seemed determined to cause me headaches from the time your name was first put forward to me from Cairo – and that’s a long time back.
I spent the whole of the Easter weekend thinking out ways and means of getting you out of your latest ‘bag’ or at least of ensuring that you were treated only as a minor miscreant. I still wonder whether you realise how lucky you were. The first time it was one in a million and this time it was one in 100,000, yet I still feel that you think the whole business is easy. I do, at least, congratulate you on your resource in ‘telling a frank story’ and one which, as it happened just fitted in with what the hun was looking for. Pity you got held up at the frontier and so the subsequent fun was handled by OSS. It would have been great to have been in the middle of two surrenders. Anyhow, now you are safe and even though bored, you should be damned thankful. Sorry to hear you are feeling bitter. I did my best to have you sent straight back from V-land to U.K., but somebody was afraid of losing a little reflected glory and said that AFHQ were dying to see you at once. It’s up to you to persuade them that you are more than due for a spot of home leave – others seem to wangle it without the same amount of justification. If I hear nothing on the subject by the time GM gets back, I’ll take it up with him. He should be here in about a week. Had Teddy here wuite [sic] a time waiting for his passport. He was a bit shy with me at first, which did not surprise me but worked back into the ‘J camp’ before very long. It is worth remembering that whatever has been achieved by M’land, the foundation was laid in the old ‘Impero’ days and that events have justified my refusal to alter the lines of policy on which we had started. Although everybody is delighted with the way things have gone, there is no doubt that they could have been vastly better with some forward vision and elimination of personal likes and dislikes. However, that’s only for those ‘inside’ to know. Chris drops in when she is in town and I pull her leg to keep her morale up. I haven’t quite convinced her that you found a better substitute in V-land and definitely better substitutes back where you are now. Have told her she had better buck up and get a decent job so as to be able to support a husband properly. Don’t worry – she’s looking well and seems devoted to you. I haven’t attempted to cut you out – yet. Try to get back before I vacate my chair, so that I can do what there may be to do to try to get you fitted in somewhere for the rest of the war. Be sure I’ll do whatever can be done. Once again congratulations on being free again.
Mallaby’s personal testimony contributes to clarifying and illustrating, after more than 70 years, a fundamental and controversial episode in the history of World War II, which, as he correctly noted, ‘was a point of confusion in the treatments of Operation Sunrise’.27
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But this confusion was not, as the foregoing and the following shows, a result of the misunderstanding that ‘Tucker’, ‘Drucker’, ‘Wallaby’ and ‘Tucker-Wallaby’ were in fact one person: Dick Mallaby.
I have tracked down the documentary source containing the ‘original sin’, and, most importantly, the reason for its creation.
On 20 March, one of the readers of an internal memo circulated among the British leadership declared himself ‘horrified when I saw the suggestion that Mallaby should return in any circumstances to N. Italy.’
A confidential message sent to Bern on 22 March 1945 shows that the oblivion and confusion surrounding the affair were far from coincidental.
This message, penned by an anonymous author, communicated (in familiar terms) the following to an unspecified recipient:
1In view circumstance of Mallaby’s release consider it essential for security reasons to his cover story for circulation in S.O.E. circles here.
2suggest you work out story with Mallaby based on his straight forward exchange for German prisoner in our hands.28
Thus, knowledge of the details of Dick Mallaby’s second mission was limited to a few people, and McCaffery himself forced Mallaby to confirm to everyone else that he was captured and then released following an exchange of prisoners.
Given that behind every situation there is always someone at work, some important personal profiles of the key figures involved are useful at this point. First of all there’s Wolff, who, in his sharp tactical thinking, had wrongly assumed a key element. Among the many poorly reasoned and erroneous suppositions of the Germans who believed they needed to negotiate with the Allies, there was the one that considered the Americans to be better disposed towards them than the British.
Next, it should not be forgotten that McCaffery did not think highly of his American colleague Dulles and his methods (even going so far as to avoid meeting him, at least initially), considering him, along with all his fellow countrymen, a naive amateur to whom he could hand out presumptuous instructions. From the archival documents relating to Mallaby’s missions, numerous compromising messages emerge sent by and to McCaffery concerning the management of Italian affairs and relations with the Americans. They indicate a relationship that was anything but collaborative and transparent between SOE and OSS (at least in Switzerland), and with time this attititude became mutual.29
Besides this, any evaluation of McCaffery’s work must always bear in mind the widespread and heavy infiltration of SOE effected by Italian counterespionage, demonstrating that, in this world, nemesis sometimes takes concrete form in a specific and inexorable way.
Regarding Dulles’ intimate motives over the operation, his political evaluation of the future role of post-war Germany was in anti-communist function. Thus Dulles and his team, according to British presuppositions, probably were meant to behave like ‘useful idiots’, but in fact gained long-lasting results.
The definitive version of what took place is revealed by a very important document, signed by Cecil Roseberry and sent to Sir Orme Sargent, deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. This message, dated 23 March 1945, is proof of and formalizes the handing of the baton by the British to the Americans for contact with Wolff and, in practical terms, the official version of the crucial phase of Operation Sunrise.
In this rather mystifying and carefully crafted message, Roseberry stated that OSS was approached directly by General Wolff, and ‘so as to avoid duplication our representative was told not to pursue the contact and to leave everything to OSS unless he were [sic] asked by them to take a hand’. Beyond the sanitized version of events given, this crucial document, which bears witness to the doubts and fears about the explosive affair, also states: ‘Wolff’s first attempt at contact was apparently through Mallaby, but it seems (although the elements are not sufficiently defined on this point) that Wolff later contacted SOE directly.’30
It is also to be noted that, while:
initial contact with OSS took place the day before Mallaby was taken into German custody, news of it did not reach Wolff until two or three days after he had interviewed him, when indeed Mallaby was already on his way back to Switzerland bearing Wolff’s message to Alexander. Had Mallaby succeeded in delivering this message to McCaffery in Bern on 1 March, two days before Dollmann saw OSS, it is possible that Operation Sunrise might have taken a somewhat different course – but without necessarly significantly altering the eventual outcome.31
Evidently, even though the war was now ending, SOE’s leadership believed that a negotiation with Wolff would not have been welcome.
In other words, the decision not to follow up what was begun by Mallaby was imposed by SOE’s leadership, not only due to the sensitivity and uncertainty that existed in that embryonic phase of the negotiations, but also due to the fact that the British leadership decided to avoid any contact with an important and well-known member of the SS. Had the latter happened, in countries like neutral and free Switzerland, any form of contact could have been disseminated and twisted, even at the level of the press, with extreme ease.32
In fact, added to the embarrassment of the British, who had put about the false, bland reconstruction of developments activated by Mallaby’s mission, was the bad feeling generated in neutral Switzerland.
An encoded, urgent telegram from SOE Bern to SOE London, dated 7 April 1945, in revealing that a morning newspaper the previous day had reported the news of negotiations between the German leaders in Italy and the Allies through Parri (allegedly released for this purpose), stated that the source of the article was the United Press correspondent in Zurich. This information had been censored in Great Britain, but could not be restricted beyond its borders. This telegram requested that Allied Headquarters take immediate action to avoid such dangerous leaks.
The following day, a further message emphasized the point. It suggested that there were doubts and suspicions about the situation, given that a Swiss informant in British service, in reporting the news of the peace negotiations beginning to circulate, interpreted Wolff’s actions as a manoeuvre attempting to create post-war alibis in order to justify the surrender to the German people, and crediting it to a small group of generals. The informer also reported that the interests of Switzerland and Great Britain were identical, and, therefore, the potential and feared destruction of the industrial plants of northern Italy would not have been too high a price to pay in order to counter the cunning tactics of Hitler’s henchmen, who were ‘destined to lie and to incite new German generations through the falsification of contemporary events’. The author of the confidential message wisely concluded that only those who were fully up to date with everything that had gone on between the Germans and the Allies could have commented on the validity and genuineness of the German approaches.33
And so, Britain’s diplomatic and political leaders chose to prevent Dick Mallaby from attempting to deliver his masterstroke in person. However, the conclusion of the war in Italy essentially sprang from Mallaby’s impromptu stimulus.
Dick Mallaby thus broke his promise and wasn’t able to meet Karl Wolff again. For his part, Wolff must have always wondered, in contrast to the actual intentions of the British agent, whether he was just a clever liar who had cheated him across the board, even though he positively reinforced his decisive determination.
Perhaps this is why even in his 1985 memoirs, Der Adjutant, edited by Jochen von Lang, Wolff curiously does not mention his contact with Mallaby and the agreements made between them. However, during his imprisonment Wolff confirmed that Mallaby swore that he really had been sent by Alexander, stating that he ‘seemed to me a good boy’.34
The story told by Mallaby to avoid being shot was more easily accepted by the supreme commander of the SS in Italy, perhaps because Wolff wanted to believe it, than by the uneasy special service members. Wolff’s conversation with Mallaby was to spur him into opening his own personal, and deceit filled, negotiations with the Allies.
According to
a statement by Pino Adriano, author of L’intrigo di Berna, in April 1945 Wolff told Parrilli (the Italian intermediary in Operation Sunrise, whose recollections have not proved to be fully reliable) that ‘in Genoa, a so-called British major had made contact with German intelligence. He had presented himself in civilian clothes, as the bearer of a verbal message from Alexander to forward to the commander-in-chief of the southern front’, seeking to persuade the Germans to abandon negotiations with the Americans and conclude them with the British. According to historian Attilio Tamaro, Wolff even complained that a British captain ‘had brought a message from Alexander to Graziani but no news had been given to the Germans’.35
By mid-April 1945, the German Army Group C in Italy was facing a desperate situation, and lacked the arms, ammunition and supplies to continue fighting. The final Allied offensive across the Po River, which was launched by the 15th Allied Army Group on 6 April, had forced them to abandon large numbers of heavy weapons and vehicles south of the river. As commander of Army Group C, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff had already taken the decision not to carry out Hitler’s scorched earth policy in Italy; surrender was now the only option. Thus Vietinghoff too became actively involved in the negotiations with Dulles and the OSS.
The Instrument of Surrender of what became known as the Surrender of Caserta, the first surrender signed by Germany, was finally signed at the Royal Palace in Caserta, in Campania, at 2.17pm on 29 April 1945 by Wehrmacht Lieutenant-Colonel Victor von Schweinitz, on behalf of von Vietinghoff and Graziani, and SS-Sturmbannführer Eugen Wenner, on behalf of Wolff. The war in Italy was finally over.
The ‘surrender of the 800,000’, as the Italians named it, was a great success both qualitatively and quantitatively for the Allies, and was highly positive for Italy and the Italians, even if the thorny issues of Alto Adige, Friuli and Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia remained unresolved. This, unsurprisingly, is indirectly attested to by the attempts made by many in Italy and even Germany almost immediately to claim credit for their supposed important role in the operation.36
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