Target

by Roderick Bailey

  Less success was had in securing and issuing guidebooks and proper maps. Munthe managed to steal from a Tunis library ‘an excellent book with town-plans’.9

  Operation Husky was launched with an assault by parachute and glider-borne troops on the night of 9/10 July 1943, preceded by intensive bombing and followed in the early morning by amphibious landings along Sicily’s southern coast. These opening hours of the invasion did not go smoothly. Strong winds, poor visibility, and anti-aircraft fire caused more than sixty gliders of the British 1st Airlanding Brigade to crash at sea, killing and drowning 250 men. Impatient and uneasy Allied naval gunners shot down two dozen American C-47s. Winds and offshore sandbars, meanwhile, caused serious problems for the seaborne troops as they homed in on the shore.

  In one landing craft was Malcolm Munthe. Some hours before, he had left his team under Randall’s command, made his way down to the docks in Sousse, and boarded a landing craft bound for Sicily with a frontline battalion of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. ‘As I had no experience of landings I thought I had better observe the beaches myself before arriving with my party, vehicles, etc.’, he explained later; ‘G Topo was intended to land on D plus 6 but we understood we might have difficulty.’ It was good that he went. ‘Cape Passero, near where the Camerons landed, looked a very unsuitable place for us to land. I was glad I had not taken my party there. Gliders lay washing about in the shallow water on the rocks.’10

  Returning to Sousse the next night, Munthe collected Randall and the rest of his men, boarded another landing craft and sailed once more for Sicily. They arrived off the coast a day later, going ashore in the dark among a mass of British soldiers, munitions and equipment at a point just south of Siracusa: the ancient port of Syracuse. The town was now in British hands and Munthe intended to make his first base there. ‘Unloading was very rapid in the clear moonlight,’ he remembered, ‘especially as a fire had been started by a local saboteur on the end of a pier, and an air raid for which no doubt it was the signal was expected at any moment. When our two vehicles were ashore the raid started and the place was ablaze with our Ack-Ack fire.’11

  Orders had been issued that no vehicles should move on the roads, but Munthe instructed his party to ‘drive straight through the MP [Military Police] point’ and make immediately for the town, a move that ‘caused some slight confusion but was lucky as a shell fell a moment or two later exactly on the former site of our 15 cwt. truck’.12 ‘I drove the jeep with Capt. Randall beside me on a hair-raising dash through the shell-pocked streets,’ Denis MacDonell recalled. ‘Bombs were falling uncomfortably near but we made it … In the 15 cwt. driven by Major Munthe was enough H.E. to blow us all off the face of the earth.’13 In a bomb-damaged house Munthe found ‘an exhausted Town Major asleep under a writing desk’ but could not trace XIII Corps headquarters, so an uncomfortable night was spent in a gutter, under mosquito nets, and in noisy proximity to a battery of British anti-aircraft guns.14 Harry Hargreaves would remember the imaginative Munthe wanting to secure a nighttime car-alarm to protect the truck. The alarm took the form of an organ grinder’s monkey. ‘We want to get one of those monkeys,’ Hargreaves recalled Munthe saying, ‘because if we put the monkey inside the lorry, and anybody comes and tries to pinch anything out of the lorry, it would wake us up.’15 The owner of the gutter became G Topo’s first Italian contact.

  Before the landings, Munthe had had a reasonable idea of what he would try to do in Sicily. ‘The objective of my unit was immediately to get in touch with any anti-Fascist elements with valuable connections behind the fighting line,’ he wrote later, ‘with a view to encouraging revolt against Fascist forces, and form guerrilla bands which we would arm by parachute.’16 Within four days of coming ashore, he and his men had found five Italians who appeared to have encouraging credentials and potential. They included Antoni Graffeo, a communist with an ‘embryo organisation’ in Palermo, and his friend Guerrino Totis, ‘an ex-communist who had fought in Spain’; an ardent Waldensian Christian by the name of Marchesi ‘who looked upon us as soldiers of the protestant faith militant’; and ‘a wizened journalist of about fifty’ called Giansiracusa who claimed to be friendly with an anti-Fascist professor at Catania University by the name of Canepa. This seemed like a promising start. But as Munthe would also recall, ‘it quickly became apparent that though they could all talk, few of them were prepared to risk their skins or to go in for parachute training with a view to crossing the enemy lines’.17

  If contacts had existed prior to the landings and targeted approaches been possible, Munthe and his men might have achieved more in the weeks they spent in Sicily. As it was, while hunting for contacts in Siracusa and other liberated towns, they were reduced to seeking the help of British Field Security police, ‘who proved invariably helpful and often in possession of valuable black-lists of potential enemies,’ and picking up leads from locals in the street, ‘by chance conversations, by offering cigarettes, etc.’ They also worked with MI6 personnel, who were doing the same thing,

  though more in theory than in practice since they on the whole proved jealous and empty handed behind a façade of omniscience. Under these circumstances it became evident that if one was to be in the running for procuring from Italian police, post, or local government offices, such precious things as blank fascists’ membership passes, rubber stamps, fascists’ black list records, &c, one had to be there before S.I.S. [MI6] and Amgot [Allied Military Government] authorities, or else wait until later on when their material had been collected and sent to their base HQ and then finally redistributed on request to ourselves. This was a roundabout and useless way of working.18

  Lack of local knowledge was one thing. Their work was made little easier by local temperaments and the promise of imminent liberation. Indeed, efforts to find helpers became scarcely more productive even when SOE finally thrust into the frontline the one man among its numbers with hard-won experience of the anti-Fascist struggle: a man whom a passing SOE security officer would remember seeing at Munthe’s headquarters ‘stripped to the waist in the very hot weather, and wearing from chin to waist what appeared to be a thick curly black wig. He stared at me with his very blue, unblinking eyes, expressionless but watchful.’19

  After two-and-a-half years of anti-Fascist work in North America and Mexico, Max Salvadori had been summoned suddenly to London in early 1943. The call reached him via the British Consulate in Mexico City. Salvadori had been living in Mexico with his family since the spring of 1942, having gone there ostensibly as a representative of Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born film producer, to report back on how Korda’s films were doing. Unsurprisingly there had been more to Salvadori’s presence in Mexico than that. Korda had connections to Claude Dansey and British Security Coordination in New York, and the job that he had given Salvadori was a cover for more clandestine activities. Among these was contact work with anti-Fascist Italian refugees arrived from Europe who might wish to work for the British.20 SOE records have Salvadori on a salary of $120 a month with an additional monthly family allowance of $250. His SOE symbol was ‘G.408’.21 On hearing that London wanted him, Salvadori immediately settled his affairs and departed for New York. En route he stopped in Los Angeles and thanked Korda for his help.

  Sailing from Halifax in mid-February aboard the Oregon Express, a Norwegian cargo ship, Salvadori was in London by 1 March. ‘[H]e has been of very great value to this organisation,’ read a preceding letter of praise from SOE’s New York office:

  He is very intelligent, conscientious and energetic and has … good experience in political underground work. He is violently anti-fascist and is prepared to undertake any work which takes the form of aggressive opposition to fascism …

  [Salvadori] is most anxious to become a member of the British fighting forces, and is quite determined to get into the British Army: he wants to be in the ranks and in the front line. We have always told him that he can be of greater service by fighting with his brains. If he is militarise
d for the purpose of his new work we hope that he will find a reasonable compromise.22

  In London Salvadori received a warm welcome. Though they had not met before, Roseberry, having heard that Salvadori was keen on more active work, had been anxious to get him, hoping that this enthusiastic and experienced Italian-speaker would prove especially valuable now that the war seemed poised to spread finally to Italian soil.

  A three-month circuit of SOE training schools followed. To Salvadori’s delight, a swift commission in the British Army was also arranged. It was something he had wanted for years. ‘If one is convinced that the war is right and necessary, one should take part in it as a combatant, not as an arm-chair critic or radio orator,’ he wrote. ‘There can be no victory without military discipline: better to obey some wrong orders than to evade orders.’23 Finally, in July, in uniform and with the rank of captain, Salvadori flew out to North Africa to lead the party about to follow Munthe’s into Sicily. At Sousse, before departing for the island, he went to see the grave of a Royal Artillery officer killed ten days before the end of the North African campaign. The dead man, Major Arthur Galletti, was his cousin. It had been Arthur’s British passport that Salvadori had used to get into Switzerland when fleeing Italy ten years before.24

  Before leaving London, Salvadori had discussed the matter of who should be in SOE’s follow-up party for Sicily. Salvadori had wanted Italians. He had particularly requested the services of Alberto Tarchiani and Alberto Cianca. Having agreed to work more closely with SOE, these two had been brought to Britain from the United States, sailing on the Queen Mary, at the end of June. At first it had been proposed that they should form the nucleus of an Italian political and propaganda organisation in North Africa and make broadcasts from there to Italy in the name of Giustizia e Libertà. When that scheme foundered, Salvadori took on the pair for Sicily instead. Their role, as SOE assured the Foreign Office to put diplomats’ minds at rest, would not be a political one. They would be assisting on the island in enabling trained agents ‘to acquire the necessary atmosphere and cover’ before going into enemy territory, while ‘their prestige and reputation as anti-fascists and their possibility of finding local sympathisers would make them valuable helpers’.25

  Others whom Salvadori wanted included an exile he had found in Mexico, Renato Pierleoni, who had been one of Emilio Lussu’s friends whom SOE had helped to flee from Casablanca. He also wanted two of SOE’s most impressive finds from East Africa, Guido De Benedetti and Giovanni Scudeller, whom he had recently trained alongside in England. He wanted Henry Boutigny, too, the British NCO who had been in charge of that pair since their early days in Cairo and whose money had been stolen during their voyage back to Britain. But as it turned out, apart from Salvadori only two members of his team made it to Sicily in time to participate in operations before the fighting on the island was over.

  Neither of these men was Italian. One, a radio operator, was actually a Yugoslav. This was Branko Nekić. According to SOE files, Nekić was twenty-eight years old and had been born at Crikvenica, on the coast of Croatia. After three years at the Dalmatian naval school at Bakar, he had spent most of his working life at sea: he joined SOE in January 1942 after escaping to Britain from the port of Oran, in Algeria, where the Vichy French had interned the steamer on which he had been sailing as second mate. Sturdy and swarthy, Nekić impressed SOE as worldly, strong-minded and temperamental. He was capable, too, and experienced. ‘Is taking all this in the most natural way,’ it was noted during his training, when it also became apparent that he was not an innocent in SOE’s line of work. ‘Is very reliable on security matters,’ reads another comment; ‘has been in guerrilla schools in C[entral] Europe where he was taught security and … on his wanderings all over the world, found by experience that he could not be careful enough.’26 The nature and location of those schools and his reasons for attending them are not recorded and remain an intriguing mystery. With his training complete, Nekić was commissioned in the British Army as Second Lieutenant Bernard Newton and promptly sent out to Cairo.

  Sicily was to be Nekić’s first taste of action with SOE, but it was not the first mission for which he had been considered. Originally he had been assigned as a wireless operator to a team due to parachute into Yugoslavia to work with royalist ‘Chetnik’ guerrillas. That plan was sidelined when the officer he was due to accompany decided not to take him. Nekić’s personality may have been to blame for that. In Cairo, officers of SOE’s Yugoslav Section considered him ‘a most difficult person to get on with … temperamental, egocentric and opinionated’.27 It was decided to reassign him to Italian operations but his character remained a concern. When, in May 1943, a new plan took shape to send him into Slovenia, SOE officers reported him ‘in a very bad state of mind and of doubtful use to anyone at the moment’. Of note was his ‘overbearing and quite impossible’ attitude towards ‘all people whom he considered as Other Ranks or working class’.28 Nekić was switched instead to the party being sent to Sicily, although there were those who felt he would still be better used ‘in his own part of the world’ as he was ‘definitely anti-Italian’ and ‘could not pass as an Italian’.29 But if he caused any problems in Sicily, none of Munthe’s men left any record of it. Munthe would write that Nekić was ‘placid but keen to serve’ and ‘skilful with our miniature long-distance wireless transmitter’.30 Salvadori would remember him talking about his mother.

  The other member of Salvadori’s team who reached Sicily in time to do something useful was Captain Dick Cooper, a rough and ready soldier with a remarkable past. He had been born in Baghdad in February 1899 to an English father and Italian mother and brought up in Asia Minor. In later life he claimed that by the age of ten he had already been rescued from wolves, kidnapped by wandering tribesmen, and wounded by a bullet during the Young Turk revolution. At Gallipoli in 1915 he had apparently won a Croix de Guerre fighting, underage, with the French Foreign Legion. Between the wars he had spent another decade in the Legion, then, in Britain, worked as a night telephonist at the International Telephone Exchange, penned some memoirs – The Man Who Liked Hell: Twelve Years in the French Foreign Legion – and served eighteen months’ hard labour for ‘robbery with violence’ and another six for stealing; he had also been bound over for assault and, when sentenced for the final time in 1933, asked for ten more crimes to be taken into account. Bringing him on board in 1941 and noting that he had ‘gone straight’ and wished ‘to continue to run straight’, SOE was tempted to see his criminal record almost as a plus. One officer remarked: ‘The fact that he appears to have got away with ten other offences, for which he was not caught, may suggest that he was fairly resourceful.’31

  Sicily was not Cooper’s first SOE mission. After finishing his training he had volunteered for work in French North Africa, which led to him being put ashore with a wireless set on the Algerian coast in the summer of 1942. Quickly arrested as a suspect enemy agent, he had been imprisoned in the desert before being transferred to an internment camp in Vichy France from which he eventually escaped to Spain. Returning to England in early 1943, he joined SOE’s Italian Section and was sent out to the Mediterranean; fluent in Italian, he had served briefly in Italy during the First World War and lived afterwards for two years in Messina, in northeast Sicily, where his sister still lived and their father was buried. Harry Hargreaves would remember meeting Cooper in North Africa before embarking for Sicily and how he ‘took us to a place, it was one of the French forts,’ and into the dungeons, ‘and there lo and behold was his name scratched up on the wall’.32

  Flying out from Tunis on 25 July, Salvadori and Cooper were the first of SOE’s follow-up team to arrive on the island. It was a hazardous trip. Their pilot landed first near Palermo, Sicily’s capital, on a mined airfield still being vacated by the Germans. Then he tried another strip in the south where, Cooper would recall, an enemy fighter strafed them as they sprinted for the cover of a few olive trees. They finally reached Siracusa the following day
and found Munthe installed on the top floor of a building in the old part of town. They were still not out of danger. ‘German aircraft were passing overhead, machine-gunning,’ Salvadori recorded. ‘Two women were hit as we were crossing the marketplace.’33

  Returning to Italian soil for the first time in a decade, Salvadori found apathy and anti-British feeling more widespread and much stronger than he had expected. After a week based in Siracusa and finding no one worth recruiting, he decided to try his luck in Palermo, which was now in American hands. To get there was not straightforward: Munthe would write admiringly that Salvadori, dressed as a civilian and behind the wheel of a civilian car, sped ‘across the most atrocious roads of central Sicily infested with remnants of the escaping Italian Army in 14 hours non-stop’.34 But even in Palermo Salvadori made little progress. Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans among the invading US troops were particularly obstructive. Some locals, he observed, ‘seem to have been coached by those who believe that Britain is the real enemy. Fascism, Germany … these are side issues. The arch-enemy is British imperialism, from which the United States will protect all good Sicilians.’35