Episode 0 - Introduction

Welcome to “Tales from the Hideout”!

Tales from the Hideout is a history podcast about the adventures of British missions airdropped in Italy during the Second World War.

In particular, these missions happened between 1943 and 1945, during the Italian campaign against the nazi-fascist oppression.

Why I have decided to talk about these missions? Since it is a topic slightly faced in Italian historiography and public memory. This topic is immediately available for a historiographical analysis.

There’s also another reason: these stories have also a high narrative value. Many of these stories are personal stories, tales seen with the eyes of the agents who took part to the missions; it is all about their adventures in a very hostile setting, among odd people whose language was unknown for the SOE agents.

This podcast will tell these missions’ stories told through the eyes of the agents. Its sources will be mainly archive material: those missions have produced lots of reports that are particularly useful for this aim. This include reports and memoranda but also snippets of telegrams and letters, produced by the agents during their activity. Each mission, moreover, also produced a final report detailing all its activities in Italy.

For many agents this final report became a chance to ‘set things straight’, and a way to prove their literary and artistic talents. Therefore, these are very interesting to read and constitute something that is also very interesting to recount.

It’s not by chance if many agents wrote, after the war, what we could call ‘biographies’ of their missions, retelling their exciting adventures with a tone that might be more similar to that of the “Baron of Münchhausen” than to that of military reports. One example above all comes to mind: Stanley Moss and his “Ill met by moonlight”, which tells the story of the abduction of the German general commanding the garrison of the island of Crete.

However, except those few exceptions, more similar to novels, than to historical literature, the missions’ history has been largely forgotten, especially in Italy. And this is a problem with historiography on the subject.

There are, moreover, some initial considerations that I think are worth making in this introduction, to avoid needless repetitions during the next episodes.

So, to start: to which corp or regiment did these officers belong? The liaison officers, in fact, did not belong to the “regular” army so to speak, even if, for bureaucratic reasons, many of them were part of this or that corp, like the artillery or the dragoons… These officers, the liaison officers, were part of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the section of the British secret services in charge of subversion and sabotage in occupied Europe.

This was a relatively young service, which had a troubled history - starting from its birth. Without spending too much time here, the SOE was created after the fall of France, when the UK found itself alone in its fight against the Axis. In this context, the UK was forced to revise completely its war plans, which were based upon the assumption that WW2 - just like WW1 - would be fought largely on French soil, and it would be a rather static war. However, in 1940, after the capitulation of France, the possibility of an invasion of the British isles was very real.

The UK did not have the capabilities to defeat the Axis in an open confrontation, at least in Europe. The plan, thus, was to create great “secret armies” in occupied Europe, partisans armies that would weaken the enemy forces and therefore only a small British expeditionary force would be necessary to deliver the coup-de-grace to the Axis.

This plan was based on the experiences that the UK had in previous wars. For example, the action of Lawrence of Arabia during WW1. But it did not stop there. There was, in fact, almost the myth of the Spanish guerrilleros, who supported the Duke of Wellington. It was thanks to those partisans and the damage they inflicted on the enemy, that the Duke, with a relatively small expeditionary force, had been able to expel the French Bonapartist army from Spain. Thus, Churchill created the SOE with his usual bombastic tone, giving it the mission to “set Europe ablaze”.

However, the SOE never managed to do what, in theory, it was supposed to. First, they lacked the resources to do so, and this opened a very long quarrel with the aviation, the RAF, which did not look kindly upon the service and considered its missions to be dangerous and, in practice, worthless. Therefore, the RAF did not have any intention to “gift” planes and pilots to the SOE. Second, the British soon realised that no partisan army, as well-organised and well-armed as humanly possible, could hope to stand against a regular army, much less the German army. Finally, the period of British isolation came to an end: Germany attacked the Soviet Union with the operation Barbarossa and Japan attacked the USA at Pearl Harbour. The SOE project to create these big partisan armies, thus, ended before it begun and the SOE was cut down drastically.

However, this scaling down was actually beneficial for the SOE, as the service now had a well-defined objective. Its taks was no longer the creation of these vague “secret armies”, but the very specific one of striking at the enemy in strategic points, with sabotage and subversion.

Moreover, this meant that the action of the SOE became more coherent and optimised the way in which resources were allocated. Even if the SOE remained “starved” of resources throughout the war, from 1942-1943 onwards there is a turnaround and it gets more and more. This is particularly important for the Italian partisans, as they join the fray in 1943, at a point when the SOE has a more or less clear objective, it is better organised, and has more resources. They, in a sense, enter the fight in the “right” moment to get the maximum support that the SOE could offer.

Why then, the SOE is not studied enough? First, there is the problem of secrecy. The SOE was, in fact, a very secret secret service, even too secret. Its leaders were obsessed by secrecy almost to the point of paranoia. Of course, to work in secrecy is the very essence of a secret service, but for an historian this is a big problem and becomes almost irritation when one has to deal with a service run by paranoids. Moreover, the SOE, even after its hasty disbandment in 1946, always kept a very low profile, even as far as official histories are concerned. There was a project to publish a series of official histories, with each book dedicated to the action of the SOE in a particular country. So the SOE in France, the SOE in Spain, the SOE in Greece and so forth. However, very quickly, the publication of the first volume, dedicated to the SOE in France, sparked controversy as the French protested vehemently and the then-president of the Republic, de Gaulle, was particularly vocal against it. The whole project, therefore, was put aside for political reasons. The volume on Italy, David Stafford’s “Mission accomplished” was published only in 2012.

This is an especially problematic situation for Italy, because for a long time scholars had examined the SOE’s missions without examining the official documents, more so because the British archives were closed. This meant that the memory of those missions was progressively lost, which is a particularly sad outcome, as the liaison officers were part of the Italian Resistance. Not only they gave material support to the Resistance but they also built interpersonal relations with the partisans. Liaison officers were, for all intents and purposes, partisans. They share with them the life, and the risks, as they were often summarily executed upon capture. Therefore, they are, legitimately, part of the Italian Resistance.

As we were saying, the memory of the missions had been largely lost. There are, in some villages in the Alps, the odd celebrations to commemorate a single agent, often in the anniversary of their death. However, generally, the history of the British missions in Italy remained at the margins of the history of the Italian Resistance. Even more, often the agents were victims of accusations that depicted them as the long arm of the conservative establishment in London, who sent them to Italy in order to control, fraction and weaken the Italian Resistance. These accusations appear to be sadly ironic if one considers that the SOE was often despised by the conservative establishments who often accused the service of being too supportive of Communists or, in general, of being a bunch of Socialists who did not understand how politics worked. And these accusations appear even more out of place if we consider the connections created between agents and partisans. As we said, those men lived together, sharing the risks of the partisan life. It is therefore natural, if only from a psychological point of view, that some form of camaraderie emerged. Even if, obviously, there had been some initial differences, or cases of personal antipathies, or even the occasional dense agent, or partisan, which lead to the souring of the relations.

The objective of this podcast is, therefore, to bring these stories back to life. Not only to make them known, but also to entertain. As we said, these stories have a narrative value in themselves. The SOE officers are all very particular, as it was not a career sought by most regular soldiers, end therefore all gave their very own style to the story of their mission. All those missions, either long or short, tell us something of the relations built between people who were so different. On the one hand, the British, who came from this global empire, this very old democracy. On the other, the Italians, fresh from the collapse of the state after the 8 September 1943 and who, after twenty years of Fascist regime, were trying to win back their country and create a space of political action for themselves.

I hope this might interest you, and that you will join me in listening to these stories.