Roderick Bailey

This is a highly readable account of the activities of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) agaiinst Fascist Italy, from their declaration of war against Britain in 1940 to the unseating of Mussolini and the armistice of 1943 by which Italy changed sides. The story is framed by the introduction of two key figures: Dick Mallaby, dropped by parachute into Lake Como in August 1943 (when Mussolini had been deposed but Italy was still at war with the Allies), and Max Salvadori, an expatriate Italian born in London, who volunteered to work with the British as early as 1937. Salvadori provided much of the bedrock of British Intelligence's efforts against Italy; Mallaby's role didn't become critical until much later.

Pre-war British intelligence interest in Italy was minimal, so when Mussolini declared war, MI6 was wrong-footed and possessed little or no knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the new enemy. A frantic search for possible agents was made amongst the expatriate community, now usefully corralled in the giant detention camp that the Isle of Man had become. However, this was not a great success. Many Italians presented themselves as disinterested in politics; of those who were prepared to take the risks associated with what would undoubtedly be seen as treachery in their homeland, many of them were of advanced years or not possessed of the necessary fire in the belly to undertake dangerous undercover work. Injecting friendly agents into the homeland of a belligerent nation is not the same as doing the same with a nation under occupation, such as France, the Low Countries or Norway: it has to be assumed that the local population will not be well-disposed towards "enemy agents". And so it proved; most of the agents SOE or MI6 inserted into Italy were captured very quickly. Many of them were tortured and executed; a few were played to pass false information back to the Allies.

Worse still, the SOE representative in Switzerland considered that he had found a secure channel to Italian dissidents, rebels and anti-Fascists, and started sending them equipment and money. Reports soon came back with tales of outstanding success - factory fires, freight train derailments, ships sunk - all were attributed to the network of spies and saboteurs SOE was running out of Switzerland. Except the SOE contact through which all this was arranged had been working for the Italians all along. The glowing reports of success that were being passed back were real incidents, but they had not been caused by saboteurs because their organisations didn't exist. (It should have been a bit worrying to the Italians that they were having so many industrial accidents, train derailments and other accidents purely through natural consequence, but it seems that there was an attitude of "not my department", and the Italian secret service, SIM, could point to the extent to which they were deceiving the Allies and feeding them false information.)

And yet: the one instance where an agent appeared to have been turned by the Italians was detected early on because agents had been instructed on how to invalidate information they sent in the very event of capture. And what is, for perhaps the first half of the book, a catalogue of disasters with agent after agent compromised, suddenly becomes a triumph when all the groundwork, cultivation of a few dissident exile Italians and insertion of agents suddenly paid off when Mussolini fell from grace and elements of the Italian military began to consider what might happen both to themselves and the country when the Allies won, and began to cast around for a back channel to start talks about an armistice with the Allies.

In the meantime, SOE had identified a number of British soldiers with Italian connections - indeed, one wonders why they didn't begin looking at their own ranks first, rather than casting around amongst waiters and ice cream sellers - and these soldiers were able to make a better account of themselves on active service. With a little imagination and the sort of confidence required of an effective field commander, they were sometimes able to turn situations to their advantage. Actually admitting that they were British officers seems to have cut some ice with Italian military officers they came across, and sometimes even with Germans. This culminated in Dick Mallaby offering the SS commander in Northern Italy, General Karl Wolff, a means of securing the safe withdrawal of all German forces in an armistice, effectively bringing the war in Italy to a close. (This was the action that provoked the split between the Western Allies and Stalin, as Stalin felt excluded from these discussions and considered that they demonstrated ill intent towards Russia by the Allies. The fact that this was the result of some clever talking by a fairly junior British officer to get himself out of a scrape was possibly regarded as too simple to be true by Stalin; the fact that his knowledge of it came from undercover NKVD officers in Switzerland rather than from anyone at the sharp end probably caused this perspective to be lost in transmission.)

So victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat, though at considerable cost to the agents involved. This is not forgotten by the author. Bailey considers the extent to which agents might have been considered expendable, to promote the idea that Europe truly was aflame with internal dissent, and whilst he agrees that inserting agents into enemy lands had the effect of tying up resources to guard against threats that might emerge internally, he does not consider that these agents were considered expendable. He also points out that SOE did a lot of work behind the scenes that was important, especially in terms of information analysis, code-breaking, financial and economic warfare and winning hearts and minds in third party countries. But these important aspects of SOE's war work are beyond the scope of this book.

"Beyond my scope" is, indeed, something Bailey says quite a few times, especially when events in Italy have a bearing on other theatres of war (and vice versa). But there is plenty of detail about matters seemingly far detached from the Mediterranean theatre of war, such as the explorations made of enlisting the help of Italian Americans or the Mafia - though Bailey does comment that once Sicily had been successfully occupied the British found that relations with the locals were rather soured by an attitude amongst Italian and Irish American troops that the real enemy was Britain. Other fascinating details include the secret war of Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis, a name that British railway enthusiasts of a certain age will recognise as a major writer on and artist of Edwardian steam trains. He was actually inserted into Switzerland by SOE early in the war to investigate the potential for enlisting anti-Fascist Swiss railwaymen into a sabotage force to disable the trains rumbling through the country to keep Italy supplied with German coal, oil and steel. In the end, his efforts came to little, though Bailey omits to mention that these trains would have been targeted by the Swiss themselves had Germany ever decided to take direct military action against Switzerland. But again this was outside the scope of the book...

But all told, this is a fascinating look at a little-known theatre of war and the brave men and women who worked against the odds to defeat Fascism. The 2015 paperback edition has additional information that came to light after the hardback first edition appeared the year before. Recommended.… (meer)