Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943-1945 by Stafford David

Author:Stafford, David [Stafford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

Looking bright

During the remainder of August six more British liaison missions were dropped to the Italian resistance. Significantly in the light of Holdsworth’s brief to General Cadorna and Oliver Churchill about allied strategic requirements, half of these related to Eisenhower’s needs in southern France rather than to Alexander’s campaign in Italy.

On the night of 31 July/1 August, two groups were dropped to liaise with Italian partisans in Piedmont close to the French–Italian border. Four days before, Alexander had radioed the resistance leadership in Turin that the Piedmontese underground could expect an allied signal very soon, at which time it should launch ‘violent and sustained’ operations against the enemy. He promised to despatch more supplies and a liaison officer to coordinate plans. From this, the Piedmontese inferred that the allies were poised for a drive into the Po Valley and that liberation was imminent.

In fact, Alexander’s directive was motivated by the needs of Dragoon, the landings on the French Riviera that took place in mid-August. So were the two drops, as well as a third which took place a week later. Codenamed respectively ‘Ferrula’, ‘Donum’ and ‘Flap/Fin’, all formed part of a plan that was sometimes referred to as ‘Toplink’. This had originated within the allied supreme command in the Mediterranean earlier in the year, and then been refined later by the Special Project Operations Centre (SPOC), the unit at Massingham specially set up to coordinate French resistance activities with the Dragoon landings. The idea was designed to link Italian and French partisans for operations across the border in the High Alps, and No. 1 Special Force was brought into it only very late in the day. Alexander had been told in early July that the campaign in Italy was to be subordinated to the needs of the French landings. [1]

Ferrula was headed by Captain L. Hamilton, the nom de guerre of Leon Blanchaert, a 44-year-old Belgian who had fought with the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa and later escaped from a POW camp near Parma. Donum was led by Captain Pat O’Regan, aged 24, who had worked with Field Security in Syria and the Political Warfare Executive in Cairo. Both had been recruited for SOE the previous May by Major Harvard Gunn, an officer from the Seaforth Highlanders who had lived as an artist in Provence before the war. O’Regan, described by Blanchaert as a ‘very plucky little Irishman’, was the son of a highly respected history master at Marlborough College and had started the war as a registered conscientious objector, working with an ambulance unit in the Middle East, before joining the Intelligence Corps in search of a more active role. [2]

Flap/Fin was in the charge of ‘Major Temple’. In real life, he was Neville Lawrence Darewski, the 30-year-old son of the Polish-born Herman Darewski, a well-known music-hall composer and band leader in England. His mother was the Edwardian actress Madge Temple, from whom he took his nom de guerre . Previously, he had headed a difficult SOE mission into Slovenia.

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