Churchill's Hellraisers. Damien Lewis
course, Michael Lees was privy to little if any of this. His reports made clear that he had few concerns regarding the partisans’ political leanings. Pragmatically, he concluded: ‘At present, the political situation is not dangerous. There is ill-feeling amongst the two main Parties, but as yet no action. With firm Allied control there is no reason why any dissention should arise . . .’
Unaware that moves were afoot to sideline – betray – the Italian resistance, Lees continued to lobby for a return to ‘his’ partisans, as he saw it, rejoining Major Temple’s mission. But in late November 1944 his hopes were to be utterly dashed. Lees received a shattering message: surrounded by enemy forces determined to finish off his partisan forces, Major Temple had been killed. News of his tragic loss had reached SOE headquarters via radio, from Bert Farrimond, Temple’s dour Lancastrian coal miner turned W/T operator.
‘The area was under considerable enemy mortar fire,’ Farrimond telegraphed, ‘and Major DAREWSKI decided we should leave on a truck loaded with stores . . . Before he was able to climb on the truck the driver let in the clutch and the truck seemed to skid and crush Major DAREWSKI against the wall. I was told that he had fractured both arms and probably his pelvis.’
Major Temple had been evacuating his headquarters, as the enemy executed a fierce sweep of the valley. Never one for hyperbole, Farrimond reported that ‘everything went wrong, catastrophe overtook us, the Major receiving fatal injuries in the accident.’ Within forty-eight hours Farrimond had been pulled out by air. ‘With the Major gone the mission was finished, so to this end . . . I came out with eleven others in a bomber . . .’
Lees mourned the loss of such an iconic figure and good friend, not to mention the collapse of the entire Flap mission. A few days after being pulled out, Farrimond met up with him in Florence. They had much to discuss. In the days prior to his death Temple had taken his mission to new and unprecedented heights. Via the landing strip that they’d just finished constructing, he’d requested a drop of fifty million Lire, to fund ongoing partisan operations. He’d also asked for twenty-five cargo aircraft to fly in, with weaponry and arms.
Temple’s 12 November shopping list reflected the scale of combat that he feared was coming: ‘25 81mm mortars (English), petrol 500 gallons, clothing and 3,000 blankets, 2,500 rifles and Stens and heavy automatic weapons. What about Breda 20mm or even 40mm [heavy cannons]. Is it possible to land? If so both the landing ground and the whole area could be held against all-comers.’
He reported on a recent raid by his partisans, one that had been so successful that Il Duce – Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator – himself had decreed that Temple’s partisans were to be destroyed ‘at all costs’. In response, some 3,000 German and Italian troops backed by armoured cars and tanks had thundered into the region, to wipe out Temple’s 500-odd partisans.
It was mostly to resist this offensive that Temple had sent his 12 November shopping list of arms and equipment. Though its tone was somewhat desperate, little had reached him in terms of the supplies that he’d requested, and six days later Temple was dead, his surviving partisans scattered into the mountains. As for Farrimond, he’d got out by the skin of his teeth: he’d been lifted out from the airstrip just before enemy forces overran it.
Had Major Temple received the supplies that he’d requested, his forces might have held firm. The failure to provide them arguably cost him his life and signalled an end to the Flap mission. By the winter of 1944, supply flights to the partisans had dropped off to critically low levels. SOE agents in the field were complaining bitterly that they and their partisans were being thrown to the dogs.
Having lamented the loss of their dear friend, Lees turned to the other business that was foremost in his mind. He had a sense that an alternative mission was about to come his way, and he wanted to know if the long-experienced radio operator might join him. Married to local Lancashire girl Jane Glover, Farrimond was an utterly reliable salt-of-the-earth type. Now approaching his 34th birthday, he was a hugely-experienced pair of hands, hence Lees’ hunger to recruit him.
At outbreak of war Farrimond had signed up to the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, an armoured regiment more commonly known as the ‘Knife and Forkers’ – motto, ‘For Hearth and Home’. But in August 1943 he’d been sought out by SOE. On paper Farrimond was an odd recruit: it was his wireless abilities that would draw him into the cloak-and-dagger world. In October 1943 he’d duly signed the Official Secrets Act, pledging to preserve ‘any sketch, plan, model, article, note, document or information which relates to munitions of war,’ or ‘any secret official code word, or pass word . . .’
In November 1943 the former coal miner was posted to India, to complete a short course at SOE’s Eastern Warfare School, before being sent for wireless training at their specialist radio school, codenamed ME9, situated near Meerut, a city in northern India near the foothills of the Himalayas. In a sense, there was no better training ground for behind-the-lines operations in the Italian mountains. For his subsequent services on Operation Flap, Farrimond was recommended for a Mention in Despatches. But the gritty former collier didn’t much hanker after gongs: what he wanted most was to return to the mountains.
Lees asked what he had been up to since his evacuation. ‘I’m just waiting around for orders,’ Farrimond replied.
‘D’you want to get back into North Italy?’ Lees probed.
Farrimond paused before answering. ‘It all depends on what I’d have to do.’
Lees had already been assigned a radio operator, but he’d far prefer to take a man of Farrimond’s pedigree, one with whom he’d built up such a close rapport. ‘Would you like to come in again with me, Bert?’
Farrimond was silent for a moment. ‘I’d go with you, sir, if I went with anyone . . .’ he ventured. ‘When are you going?’
Lees replied that he didn’t know for sure, but no sooner than a week’s time, at the very earliest. He asked Farrimond to think it over. That evening Farrimond returned to see Lees. He told him that he wanted in: if Captain Michael Lees was deploying, so would Corporal Albert Edward Farrimond. It now only remained for the SOE’s Maryland office to clarify the nature of their coming operation.
SOE’S Italian mission had been codenamed Maryland by its chief, Commander Gerald ‘Gerry’ Holdsworth, for a very specific reason. A still-waters-run-deep type, Holdsworth – a seasoned mariner and a former rubber planter from Malaya (now Malaysia) – nursed a deep passion for the things he cared about, plus an occasionally explosive temper. He’d been described variously as being ‘as brave as they come’, ‘half hero, half pirate’, and an ‘expert in clandestine warfare in all its aspects’.
A former film-maker, Holdsworth had been recruited into SOE by the traditional ‘tap on the shoulder’ method. He’d played a key role organising and commanding the ‘Helford Flotilla’, a collection of small boats that ferried the earliest SOE recruits to and from occupied France. Its base was a farmhouse called Ridifarne, on the secluded Helford River, in Cornwall, from where the flotilla set sail. The Ridifarne HQ had been run by Holdsworth’s wife, Mary, herself a top expert in the use of explosives for demolition and sabotage work.
Fittingly, Holdsworth had named SOE’S Italian mission after her, and he cared about it as passionately as he did its namesake. He was backed to the hilt by Major General Gubbins, SOE’s chief. ‘It is desperately important to encourage resistance in northern Italy by every means possible,’ Gubbins had urged. Likewise, General Alexander had exhorted SOE to unleash maximum efforts against the enemy, and he had gone as far as speaking to the Italian resistance leaders directly, urging ‘violent and sustained’ attacks.
That their work had borne fruit was perhaps best gauged by the reaction of the enemy. By the summer of 1944, German intelligence had reported some 20,000 dead, wounded or missing at the hands of the partisans. None other than Field Marshal Kesselring – Hitler’s chosen commander in Italy – had started to refer to the Italian resistance in the following haunting terms: ‘Our Wehrmacht [unified armed forces] is being stopped by a shadow.’
By October Kesselring had become so concerned that