‘It is the duty of all troops and police in my command to adopt the severest measures,’ he announced. ‘Every act of violence committed by the partisans must be punished immediately.’ He ordered ‘a proportion of the male population’ to be shot, while pledging to ‘protect any commander who exceeds the usual restraints’. Hitler added fuel to the fire, ordering ten partisans killed for every German casualty.
Winston Churchill – a key proponent of irregular warfare across occupied Europe – was privy to Kesselring’s orders. Code-breakers working at Bletchley Park had decrypted the German commander’s messages, sending them directly to the British prime minister. They made for grim reading. In August 1944, in the village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, SS troops had machine-gunned 560 men, women and children, as reprisals for partisan operations. Then, in late September, at Marzabotto, they had perpetrated one of the single greatest massacres of the war, wiping out over 700 villagers, including the priest.
These were far from isolated examples, and the level of bestial horror visited on remote Italian populations was terrifying. It reflected the growing desperation of Kesselring. For many this was seen as being out of character for a commander of his long experience. A decorated First World War veteran who had masterminded the rebuilding of the Luftwaffe, Kesselring had commanded the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, the forces of Nazi Germany that had fought alongside the Fascist armies of General Franco.
At the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 he had orchestrated the invasion of Poland, Holland and France. From there he’d gone on to oversee the invasion of the Soviet Union, earning Hitler’s very highest regard. Kesselring had vowed to the Führer to fight for every inch of Italian soil. He was a diehard believer in the Nazi cause and had recently adopted a policy of hanging any would-be German deserters. Allied commanders respected, if not feared, his military acumen.
Come the winter of 1944, Kesselring worried about the partisan threat more than ever. It was a phenomenon that he absolutely hated and reviled – irregular, unpredictable guerrilla operations by forces that could melt into the mountains. He branded Italian resistance activities ‘a degenerate form of war’, deserving ‘the utmost severity’. In short, Kesselring was rattled.
A high-level Allied report, written from the enemy’s perspective, spelled out the ‘Reasons Why the Germans Stay in Italy’. It read: ‘If we wish to defend the Reich it is better to defend the frontier as far south as possible and do the fighting on someone else’s soil . . . The important industrial output of North Italy contributes to our war effort . . . Italy is one of the Axis partners and nearly our only Ally left. It would be a serious blow to the political morale of our own people to abandon Fascist Italy.’
Aware of all this, SOE Maryland’s chief, Holdsworth, fought tooth and nail to counter any directives that might pour cold water on the work of the Italian resistance. He had few doubts what the 150,000-odd partisans positioned north of the Gothic Line could achieve, if properly armed and trained. Crucially, they could ‘harass German lines of communication by sabotage and guerrilla warfare and . . . impede the withdrawal of German forces from Italy, in order that the Allied armies might be able to get at them and destroy them.’
Heaven forbid that they should be stopped, and by what amounted to outright abandonment by the Allies. This was doubly so, for in the winter of 1944 Allied forces were under-strength, compared to those of the enemy. In December, the Allies had nineteen divisions facing Kesselring’s twenty-seven, and while the Allies enjoyed air and sea superiority, the terrain, the weather and the Gothic Line itself favoured the enemy.
Allied commanders reckoned that Kesselring’s attempts to crush the partisans were tying down eleven divisions. Militarily, their role was utterly critical, and so far Holdsworth and his ilk had succeeded in beating off the naysayers. Mike Lees had been promised his new mission courtesy of such efforts, but for how much longer the believers could persevere was anyone’s guess.
In early December Lees was briefed on his coming deployment by Major Charles Macintosh, head of the SOE’s Florence headquarters. Lees mission was critical: he was to parachute to join the partisans positioned to the rear of the Gothic Line, at the exact point at which the Allies planned to achieve their vital breakthrough.
The cold, snow-bound months of winter 1944 had become known as the ‘winter of disappointment in Italy’. Churchill had been promised that the war there would be over by Christmas. Instead, the Gothic Line had held. The fighting had been relentless and the few territorial gains had been won at enormous cost. Troops were exhausted, morale was low and the weather bitter. If Lees could foment havoc in the enemy’s rear, Allied forces might achieve the elusive breakthrough.
Lees’ mission – codenamed Envelope – came with one or two unfortunate caveats. As Macintosh was at pains to point out, Lees was being sent in to join another SOE agent, a Major Wilcockson. Wilcockson was of an age and rank that fully justified his posting, whereas Lees, a twenty-three-year-old captain, apparently was not.
Once in the field, Lees would be under the orders either of Wilcockson, or another SOE agent, Major Jim Davies, who ran a neighbouring mission. Davies had served in the Burma jungle, before deploying to Greece with the SOE and working closely with the resistance. On the upside, he was a die-hard believer in the potential of partisan warfare. On the downside, Lees didn’t particularly relish the idea of being under anyone’s direct control.
Still, a mission was a mission – and this one was not to be sniffed at.
Lees and Farrimond were to be dropped during daytime to a point just a few miles behind the enemy front. They would do so during broad daylight, and Lees could only imagine that the partisans were in real strength and must hold considerable territory. Inserting that close to the Gothic Line, they were bound to see serious action and would need to liaise closely with Allied forces on the opposite side of the lines.
As Lees studied his maps, his enthusiasm grew: the terrain was high, broken and mountainous, so ideal for guerrilla operations. To Lees’ mind, the potential to wage war here appeared unlimited. But while he thrilled to the prospect, he didn’t feel that he’d exactly hit it off with Macintosh. The man had a somewhat effeminate manner, Lees decided, and a ‘limp and clammy hand’.
Macintosh had seen action, before becoming chained to his desk at SOE’s Florence headquarters. In August 1944 he’d driven into enemy-held Florence in an armoured car borrowed from the Americans, with a large white Angolan rabbit called Poggibonsi perched on top of the Vickers machine gun. It was vintage SOE. The 27-year-old Macintosh was of New Zealand extraction, and was tall, broad-shouldered and charming. Women, apparently, went wild about him. On paper, he and Lees should have hit it off, but it hadn’t exactly felt that way.
A few days after his mission briefing Lees was woken at five o’clock in the morning. He dressed quickly, pulling on underclothes and battledress, plus the plethora of kit vital to such a mission: binoculars, compass, fighting knife, revolver, water bottle and medical gear. Over it all went a thick woollen flying jacket, which in turn was zipped inside a set of overalls, fashioned without any buttons or tags that might snag in a parachute harness. Lees knew that he would be thankful for all the layers: outside it was bitterly cold and it would be especially so at altitude.
For today’s deployment – as with his previous SOE missions – Lees was laden down with an extra burden: money. In addition to the several million Lire he was carrying, he’d been given a bag of gold sovereigns. That he’d tied in a handkerchief and stuffed into an ammo pouch on his belt, while thick wads of Lire were jammed into his every pocket.
It struck Lees how ludicrous the situation was: his pay, all thirty pounds a month, would be dribbling into his bank account, yet he here he was entrusted with a king’s ransom in cash and gold. If he cared to steal it, no one could possibly prove that he had done so. But how else was SOE supposed to fund such operations?
The previous night he and Farrimond had transferred to Rosignano Airfield, located a few dozen kilometres south of the SOE’s Florence HQ, which