Target

by Roderick Bailey

  41 Report by Political Warfare Bureau, 1944, TNA WO 204/10917.

  42 Cipher telegram, J. McCaffery to SOE London, 17 April 1943, TNA HS 6/904.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Cipher telegram, J. McCaffery to SOE London, 29 April 1943, TNA HS 6/904.

  45 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

  46 Cipher telegram, J. McCaffery to SOE London, 30 June 1943, TNA≈HS 6/904.

  47 Cipher telegram, SOE London to SOE Berne, 30 June 1943, TNA HS 6/904.

  48 Cipher telegram, SOE London to SOE Berne, 10 July 1943, TNA HS 6/904.

  49 McCaffery got as far as having a British passport made out for La Malfa, but he was persuaded by Mussolini’s fall that he was better off returning to Italy to watch events unfold.

  50 Cipher telegram, J. McCaffery to SOE London, 15 June 1943, TNA HS 6/904.

  51 Ibid.

  52 Major C. Roseberry to Major-General C. Gubbins, 17 June 1943, TNAHS 9/1119/7.

  53 Cipher telegram, SOE London to SOE Berne, 17 June 1943, TNA HS 9/1119/7.

  54 Ibid.

  55 Cipher telegram, SOE Berne to SOE London, 19 June 1943, TNA HS 9/1119/7. Olivetti told McCaffery that the idea of a committee ‘had been suggested to him by [Egidio] Reale to whom Dulles had sent him before seeing me to [authenticate his] … bona fides’. Reale was an Italian lawyer and prominent anti-Fascist who had been living in exile in Switzerland since 1926.

  56 Cipher telegram, J. McCaffery to SOE London, 3 July 1943, TNAHS 6/904.

  57 Cipher telegram, SOE London to SOE Berne, 5 July 1943, TNAHS 9/1119/7.

  58 Cipher telegram, SOE Berne to SOE London, 15 July 1943, TNA HS 9/1119/7.

  59 Telegram, Berne to Foreign Office, 27 July 1943, TNA HS 9/1119/7.

  60 Since Mussolini had fallen on 28 July, the Foreign Office considered Olivetti’s proposals to be ‘largely out of date’. Sir Alexander Cadogan to Sir Charles Hambro, 31 July 1943, TNA HS 9/1119/7.

  61 SIM report No. 13736, ‘Azione “E-G”’, 30 June 1943, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 224, Folder 55 (B).

  62 SOE’s plan had in fact been drawn up to meet a request from the RAF for help in targeting the Luftwaffe. It called for five agents, all in civilian clothes, to be dropped by parachute with the aim of ambushing in Brittany a busload of enemy aircrew. These airmen belonged to a Heinkel unit spearheading raids on Britain. SOE’s plan was to kill them as they drove from their billets to the airfield. ‘I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated,’ Portal wrote to SOE; ‘there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time-honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.’ In the end, Portal was talked round and SOE’s men went in by parachute, but the enemy airmen changed their routine and the attack never came off. M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France (London: HMSO, 1966), p. 153. Portal’s objections to the ethics of covert assassination are also interesting in view of the fact that he also became a leading advocate of area bombing, the deliberate tactic of targeting cities and their civilian inhabitants as a means of attacking the enemy’s morale and workforce.

  63 Sir Charles Portal to the Prime Minister, 13 July 1943, TNA FO 954/17.

  64 See, for example: ‘How Bomber Harris planned Dam Buster raid on Mussolini’, Daily Express, 12 March 2010; ‘Dambusters hero wanted to bomb Mussolini’, Scotsman, 11 March 2010; and ‘Britain planned Dambusters assassination of Mussolini’, Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2010.

  65 A. Eden to the Prime Minister, 14 July 1943, TNA FO 954/17.

  66 ‘Chiefs of Staff Committee: Review of SOE Activities for Period 12 April 1943 to 10 May 1943’, TNA HS 8/245.

  67 ‘Memoranda on Musso’s [sic] desk’, TNA AIR 20/5383.

  68 Ibid. Only an assessment of the situation in Turin expressed any dismay with this growing dissent. ‘While a really limited number of people [here] follow with interest the developments of the war situation, realising that the future and the very life of the Nation is at stake in this conflict, the greater part of the population shows openly indifference, only seeing in the necessary war sacrifices a limitation of personal liberty, and only caring for its own selfish well-being, showing a most deplorable lack of interest in what is happening to the country. But both of them agree on blaming the Regime for having brought the nation to the present critical situation, because it did not prepare the armed forces and the nation in time for this war, that political circles and propaganda presented as unavoidable.’

  69 Salvadori, The Labour and the Wounds, pp. 154–5.

  70 ‘Fall of Mussolini’, report by the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, 27 July 1943, TNA PREM 3/242/11A.

  71 D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (London: Heinemann, 1948), pp. 202–3.

  13

  ‘The man who fell from the sky’

  Until 1943, the only British candidate considered for SOE work inside Italy had been Captain Charles Piercy, the descendant of a wealthy Welsh engineer who had gone to Sardinia in the 1860s to build railways and stayed. Known to friends and family as ‘Chappy’, Piercy was in his late forties, had served in the Royal Field Artillery and Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, and was married to Maria della Neve Massimo, the daughter of an Italian nobleman and a Bourbon princess with family ties to the Habsburgs. ‘Captain Piercy has an Italian as well as a British passport and is a big land owner in Sardinia,’ SOE observed in 1941. ‘He had a plan for landing in Sardinia and raising the island in revolt. He seems to be slightly mad.’ It was noted that MI6 felt that ‘as well as being mad he was also bad’ and that a question mark hung over his loyalties.1 According to Claude Dansey, ‘the gentleman in question is utterly unreliable, and probably dangerous,’ while his relatives by marriage were ‘undesirable’.2 Apparently there was even cause for thinking that before leaving Italy he was ‘a double agent’.3

  Not much in SOE’s files expands on those statements but they would seem to have been damning enough. There is no indication in any surviving file that much time or effort was expended in exploring what Piercy, whether mad, bad or not, had to offer, even in regard to Emilio Lussu’s plans for Sardinia. In the end, the first Briton to be dispatched to Italy as an SOE agent was Dick Mallaby. He was also the last SOE agent to be sent into Italy before the Armistice.

  It has been claimed by one British historian of wartime Italy that the Foreign Office had sent Mallaby to speed the efforts of Badoglio’s government at negotiating Italy’s surrender.4 That claim is incorrect. Mallaby’s mission had been planned for months, had nothing to do with the Foreign Office, and had not been conceived as a way of assisting anyone to surrender. The real idea behind dropping him into Lake Como was based on a much earlier plan to send in a wireless operator to help the anti-Fascist ‘groups’ in Italy with which Jock McCaffery in Switzerland was believed to be in touch.

  That earlier plan had been tabled in August 1942 when the prospect arose of parachuting an Italian wireless operator into northwest Yugoslavia. From there, SOE hoped, he could be helped into northern Italy and begin working with McCaffery’s various contacts, acting in the same way that Giacomino Sarfatti would do in Milan. By October a suitable man was available. This was Bruno Luzzi, a Tuscan in his early thirties who had been one of Cairo’s first recruits from East Africa. SOE had found him the previous winter working as a clerk in Addis Ababa. ‘This man is physically fit and psychologically well within normal limits,’ Cairo’s medical officer, Major Alexander Kennedy, wrote of Luzzi:

  He is somewhat of an idealist and is evidently willing and able to do something practical about it … He is a man who can, I think, be trusted to work alone and who will face dangers with a full knowledge of their seriousness … There is every reason for his loyalty as he comes from a moderate socialist family and has had his efforts to succeed in Abyssinia frustrated
by the Fascist Party … [He] is fond of women and will always find them but I doubt if he gives much information away in this manner.

  Months went by while SOE tried to get Luzzi into Yugoslavia, everything hanging on the ability of its Yugoslav Section to arrange the necessary parachute drop and reception. The idea was to drop him to a spot from where he would be guided to the coast and put aboard a Trieste-bound steamer in the guise of a seaman seeking work. But postponement followed postponement. ‘He is still keen in spite of his months of waiting,’ Kennedy noted in October, ‘but has become rather stagnant through having nothing to do.’5 As more weeks passed, Luzzi’s mood worsened. By the end of the year he seemed ‘troubled with nerves’. A ‘to-be-expected reaction when a man is kept too long’, Cecil Roseberry observed from London. ‘Still, better to develop nerves before [rather] than after being embarked on an operation.’6 It was at that point that the British sergeant who was instructing Luzzi in the use of a wireless set, a young Italian-speaking Englishman, offered to take his place. This was Dick Mallaby.

  Cecil Richard Dallimore-Mallaby was born on 26 April 1919 in Nuwara Eliya, a colonial hill station in Ceylon, where his father, Cecil, was a tea planter. After Mallaby’s mother, Mary, died when he was one, his father moved to Tuscany where he inherited an estate called Villa Poggio Pinci, near Asciano, a small hill town about fifteen miles from Siena, remarried and started to farm. Young Dick was schooled first in Asciano, then for two years by Franciscan friars in Lincolnshire, before returning to Asciano and finally studying at Siena’s istituto tecnico and a liceo scientifico in Modena. In the summer of 1939, abandoning hopes of university studies to become a wireless engineer, and seen off by his father on the platform at Milan, he travelled back to Britain to join up, reaching Dover on the day that war broke out.

  Mallaby’s military career began in the infantry. In October, after applying for all three services, he was called up into the Devonshire Regiment and, as a private, assigned to signals duties. But a year after that, still in Britain and keen to be more active, he volunteered for 2 Commando, with which Fortunato Picchi would drop into Italy. Three months later, he ended up being posted instead to 8 (Guards) Commando, another new unit. He sailed for the Middle East in February 1941. That summer he was part of a small detachment from 8 Commando sent to the besieged North African port of Tobruk. There he saw action for the first time, patrolling into the surrounding enemy-held hills.

  After Tobruk, 8 Commando was disbanded, and it was in the Middle East in January 1942 that Mallaby joined SOE. At a loose end, he had been detailed as an Italian-speaker to bring back to Cairo SOE’s first batch of Italians recruited in East Africa. Soon, and as a corporal (a commission would come in August 1943), he was on the SOE payroll and escorting groups of Italians from camp to camp around the Middle East. In Palestine, taking the opportunity to share their training, he received repeated instruction in the specialist techniques taught at SOE’s paramilitary school on the slopes of Mount Carmel. He also learned to parachute and polished his wireless operating skills.

  When Mallaby volunteered to replace Bruno Luzzi the following January, he seemed a perfect substitute. ‘There is no doubt that our new man is in every respect a much more satisfactory proposition,’ Cairo told London.7 Hearing of the switch, Cecil Roseberry agreed: ‘a 22-lander [Briton] can be taken more fully into our confidence and can be regarded more completely as our own advance agent’.8 Roseberry would also be impressed by the sound of Mallaby’s character. ‘To take the place of a casualty is one thing, but to volunteer to fill the place of one who has lost his nerve requires an unusual measure of determination.’9 Jock McCaffery would write of hearing from someone who had known Mallaby ‘that he possessed the kind of courage known as the cold, two o’clock in the morning type. But his appearance prompted a Swiss friend who met him later to say that one of the great strengths of England lay in its being full of fresh-faced pleasant youngsters like Dick, who were capable of going out and doing the man-sized jobs that he did.’10

  Eventually, after yet more postponements, Cairo began to look for another way into Italy. Thought was briefly given to a blind drop into France from where Mallaby would make for Switzerland and enter Italy from there. Major Jacques de Guelis, an experienced agent attached to SOE’s ‘Massingham’ base near Algiers, pointed out that for this to succeed Mallaby would have to speak French fluently, ‘otherwise the identity documents and the tightening of police controls would make the operation very dangerous’. Noting that Mallaby spoke only ‘a little French with a foreign accent and physically looked Nordic’, SOE wondered if he might pass as a man from Alsace.11 By May 1943 thoughts had turned to parachuting him directly into Italy. By July he had been sent from Cairo to ‘Massingham’, the RAF having agreed to drop him in from North Africa.

  Eventually a plan was worked out for Mallaby to be parachuted by night, alone, into the middle of Lake Como. Early in August he was issued with his equipment and documents. As well as a diving suit, a ‘Mae West’ life-belt and an inflatable K-type rubber dinghy, he was given a waterproof bag that contained the following: toiletries; spare clothes; a text for double-transposition coding (Giovanni Papini’s patriotic polemic, Italia mia); a torch battery; some toy bricks and various other items. Many of these were not what they seemed at first glance. Hidden inside the hollowed-out battery and bricks were wireless crystals, over 100,000 lire, spare identity documents and microphotographs of his signal plans. A hemp washing line had a flexible wireless aerial running through it. A pullover had been treated with a reagent for uncovering secret writing: the reagent could be extracted by soaking the pullover in an appropriate solution. He was also issued with identity cards in the name of Aldo Guazzini and a cover story that he was studying agriculture in Florence; SOE considered the story ‘extremely well thought out and sufficiently elastic’ (having learned something of farming from his father’s Tuscan estate, Mallaby had suggested it himself).12 Under his diving suit he was to wear a set of real Italian civilian clothes. These had been sent back from Sicily by Malcolm Munthe’s ‘G Topo’ team. For his feet he was given ordinary shoes, carefully weathered and patched, in preference to a pair of Italian army boots that London had originally produced. He had no wireless set, the plan being for him to get his hands on one that McCaffery had sent to Trieste ten months before. Nor was he issued a weapon, save for a knife attached to the sleeve of his diving suit.

  After he left for the airfield, SOE recorded that ‘Olaf’ – using the codename chosen for Mallaby due, no doubt, to his blond and blue-eyed looks – was ‘quite clear’ about his mission. His task was to make his way to Milan, where he would establish a wireless link between McCaffery’s groups and ‘Massingham’ and instruct those Italians in sabotage techniques and the receipt of parachute drops. Mallaby was ‘fully confident’ of his wireless skills, SOE noted, while the hundreds of hours he had spent at the training school in Palestine had left him exceptionally well equipped to handle his other duties: ‘Olaf has done some seven complete paramilitary courses and is therefore fully competent.’13

  The spot in Lake Como selected for Mallaby’s drop was 4.6 miles northeast of Como town and 1.2 miles southwest of the little lakeside commune of Pognano Lario: or, to be even more precise, under the second ‘o’ of ‘Lake Como’ on the 1:100,000 maps that SOE used. The immediate plan for when he hit the water was for him to inflate the dinghy, paddle ashore, use his knife to cut up his diving suit, the Mae West and the dinghy, sink the pieces in the lake, hide the rest of his kit, and set off in the morning for Como. Beyond Mallaby hitting the water, none of this happened, of course. When he parachuted from Alfred Ruttledge’s Halifax at ten to three on the morning of 14 August 1943, the drop was clearly seen from the shore – as well as it being a moonlit night, the villages along the lakeside were packed with refugees from the recent Allied bombing of Milan – and Mallaby was picked up still afloat on the lake.

  On 17 August, a Swiss newspaper published a story of the captur
e of a parachutist dropped from a British aircraft at Como. Enough proof filtered through over the next few days to convince Jock McCaffery in Berne and officers in London that the prisoner must be Mallaby. A long article in the Milanese paper Il Secolo-La Sera, which detailed the capture of a 24-year-old British parachutist speaking fluent Italian with a Tuscan accent, pretty much clinched it. ‘UN PARACADUTISTA’, declared the front page, adding poetically: ‘L’uomo caduto dal cielo fu tradito da un raggio di luna’: ‘The man who fell from the sky was betrayed by a moonbeam.’14