The Wildest Province by Roderick Bailey

Author:Roderick Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

8

* * *

‘SECOND FRONT STARTED.

HUNS ALL AROUND’

* * *

‘WHY DO YOU have to go?’ Peggy Prince remembered asking when Philip Leake told her he had decided to drop into Albania. ‘Why don’t they send someone else?’1 Leake was then based in Bari, where the section had resettled from Cairo in April and set up office at 86 Via Melo, a modern apartment block on one of Bari’s canyon-like boulevards. According to Julian Amery and Peter Kemp, who both passed through Bari that month, Leake hoped to act as a mediator and try to persuade the Partisans to reach an agreement with Kupi: a corollary to what McLean had been sent to do in the north. Possibly Leake also felt that he ought to experience what life out there was like. Kemp recalled him saying that ‘for a year now I’ve been sitting on my bottom, sending other people into the field. Now I feel I must go in myself – and apologize.’2

There was more to Leake’s decision than that. In the north that winter the Partisans had suffered severe reverses. In the south, however, although the Germans and Balli Kombëtar had come after them hard, they had managed to survive and, by the spring, were recovering and returning to the attack. Enver Hoxha and the LNC Council were also on hand to motivate and lead them, having escaped the German–Balli Kombëtar cordon that had closed round Davies’ mission. And in the light of impassioned reports from SOE officers working among the Partisans’ mountain bases, it had seemed in Italy that some encouragement to Hoxha was now deserved and needed and someone suitably informed should be sent in to meet him.

Most of the British who had watched what was happening in the south had been earmarked initially to join Trotsky Davies in the north. Terrible weather had then intervened, leaving them stranded and frustrated in Libya. Senior among the men hanging around was Lieutenant Colonel Norman Wheeler of the Royal Ulster Rifles, a twenty-eight-year-old, staff-trained, professional soldier with long experience as a quartermaster, most recently in the Sudan and Eritrea. Davies had now wanted him as his own quartermaster and they knew each other well: Wheeler had been one of his subalterns when the regiment lined the Coronation route at Piccadilly Circus. Rifleman Pickering, assigned as Davies’ bodyguard, was another RUR man in Wheeler’s party: a tough Ulsterman and a crack shot who, Jack Dumoulin recalled, ‘liked to pick fights in Cairo pubs’.3

Dumoulin, the young doctor who had qualified barely twelve months before, was another of Davies’ specialists. Arriving in Cairo, he and another medical officer, Bill Felton, had been set various written intelligence tests and put in a joint effort, cribbing each other’s answers. Dumoulin came top. Davies had said he would take the man with the best score, so Dumoulin found himself bound for Albania and Felton went to Greece. ‘Aquiline, dark, with very clear blue eyes,’ remembered Marcus Lyon, Dumoulin was to prove ‘immensely well qualified for the

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