For Temple, Lees was the only man able to execute such a hazardous mission. In addition to the two Italian resistance leaders, he would be leading a group of fourteen, including escaped prisoners of war and downed US airmen. Brits, Americans, Australians, French and Italians, his was a distinctly motley escape party, many of whom had little military training of the type required to sneak through enemy territory. It would take superlative leadership skills, immense daring and real single-minded tenacity to shepherd such a disparate party to safety.
Fortunately, Lees had such attributes in abundance. Following the long months that he’d spent in Yugoslavia, none other than Major General Colin McVean Gubbins – known simply as ‘M’ and the head of SOE – had poured lavish praise on the young Lees, then only twenty-one years of age. ‘An enthusiastic and reliable officer. Had a difficult area in southern Serbia and did all he could to carry out operations there against the Axis . . . most successfully maintained good relations between the Mission and Jugoslav forces . . . has plenty of go and initiative.’
Scion of a titled, landed family hailing from Lytchett Minster, a village in deepest rural Dorset, Lees’ means of recruitment into the SOE had been highly unconventional. In 1943 he’d been kicking his heels in Cairo, lamenting the lack of action he seemed to be getting with regular forces, when he’d ended up in Shepherd’s Bar, one of the city’s more popular drinking dens. He’d got talking to an intriguing individual who’d let slip that he served with ‘the Tweed Cap Boys’. Upon learning that this mysterious force was sending in lone operators to Europe charged to wage war no-holds-barred, Lees desperately wanted in.
He’d never for one moment imagined there might be scope for himself to operate deep inside enemy-occupied Europe. It was a tantalising proposition. He proceeded to get that ‘Tweed Cap Boy’ as drunk as possible, all the while pumping him for information. It turned out that the route into the SOE was somewhat convoluted. It was hardly possible to advertise for volunteers to join a secret service that was not supposed to exist: you could only be recruited at the personal behest of someone already in.
As Lees wasn’t personally known to any of this exclusive club, he decided to manufacture a ‘recommendation’ from his new Shepherd’s Bar acquaintance. Learning that he was just about to take several weeks’ leave, a day or so later Lees brazenly walked into the SOE’S Cairo office, claiming to be there at the personal behest of a ‘schoolboy chum’ – in truth, the man he’d met in the Cairo bar. He even had a freshly-forged letter to back up his claims.
To those charged to investigate Lees’ story, it appeared to have merit. He hailed from the right kind of background. He’d been educated at Ampleforth – the Roman Catholic boarding school known as the ‘Catholic Eton’, of which David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, was a fellow alumnus – plus the Lees family was steeped in military tradition. Grandson of Sir Elliott Lees, the First Baronet of Lytchett Minster, Michael’s father, Bernard Percy Turnbull Lees, had served with distinction in the Queen’s Own Dorset Yeomanry during the First World War, winning a Military Cross (MC).
Bernard Lees had died in a shooting accident when Michael was just two years old, so he had never got to know his father. After the tragic loss, Michael had grown very close to his cousin James Lees – direct heir to the baronetcy – hunting, fishing and riding together in the Dorset countryside. They’d become inseparable, to the extent that James’s father had become an honorary guardian to Michael. Bereft of a father and brought up by his widowed mother and elder sister, Dolores, Lees was effectively the man of the house and felt fiercely protective over all. When he was just twelve, he caught an older boy trying to kiss his sister. He stepped forward and punched the boy firmly on the chin.
Lees hungered for more male and martial company, which was largely why at age seventeen he’d joined the Queen’s Own Dorset Yeomanry, the regiment that his father and grandfather had served in, before volunteering for airborne forces at the outbreak of war and being posted to India and Egypt.
Michael’s sister Dolores would serve as a nurse with both the French Army and later the French resistance (the Maquis), with whom she would earn the Croix de Guerre twice – once for walking into a minefield to rescue a wounded comrade. Michael Lees’ cousin, James, was also about to start serving on special operations. At the very moment that Michael was trying to blag his way into the SOE in Cairo, James was volunteering for the Special Boat Service (SBS), the sister regiment to the SAS, which specialised in daring seaborne sorties.
The Lees family pile, the grand edifice of South Lytchett Manor, had been turned over to war use, the grounds harbouring American tanks and the house itself becoming war offices. Likewise, during the First World War the Manor had served the war effort, being transformed into a hospital for those evacuated from the battlefields of France. In short, the Lees family was steeped in the kind of special duty warfare of which Churchill would be proud, but that didn’t earn anyone an automatic right to join an outfit like the Tweed Cap Boys.
With Lees’ ‘sponsor’ away on leave, he performed a sterling act at the SOE’s Cairo office. After several robust cross examinations, he’d bluffed his way in. His SOE recruitment file listed Lees’ ‘Hobbies and Sporting Interests: Riding, shooting, running, rugby football, fishing, skiing, driving, sailing.’ His subsequent SOE training courses included: ‘April ’43, Para Military. May ’43, “Cloak & Dagger”. July ’44, Lysander – Above Average.’ (The Westland Lysander – nicknamed the ‘Lissie’ – was a light aircraft used for inserting lone SOE agents into enemy-occupied lands.)
At grand country mansions scattered across Britain the SOE had established their Special Training Schools – teaching the dark arts of killing, sabotage, espionage, deception and more. In what became known as their ‘school for mayhem and murder’, at the apparently genteel Ashdon Manor, in Hertfordshire, recruits were trained to fight ‘without a tremor of apprehension, to hurt, maul, injure or kill with ease.’ Instructors taught killing by silent strangulation, how to disable with a powerful blow by boot or fist to key organs, and how to wield a pistol fast and deadly, shooting from the hip. In a pistol duel, the first on the draw was almost always the winner, and by firing from the hip the shooter was very likely to get the drop on his or her opponent.
One such school, in Borehamwood, was devoted entirely to the arts of camouflage and subterfuge in all its forms. Part of its remit was to furnish agents with proper clothing, documents and accoutrements, before they were dropped into occupied Europe. Whenever the genuine article wasn’t available, the SOE’s forgery factory would rustle up a convincing copy. At MD1, an SOE facility nicknamed ‘Churchill’s Toyshop’, boffins and inventors worked on perfecting the most secretive and innovative forms of weaponry. These included booby-trapped rats and animal droppings, plus exploding ‘coal’ – the latter to be slipped into the fuel supply of an enemy train, so blowing up the steam engines.
After passing through various such training schools, Lees was ready to pursue Churchill’s 1940 edict – issued during Britain’s darkest hour, following Dunkirk and the surrender of France – ‘to set Europe ablaze’. The formation of the SOE – after the Army, Navy and Air Force, the ‘fourth armed service’ – was in response to such calls. Gubbins defined the SOE’s early remit as being ‘paramilitary and irregular warfare, the sabotaging and subversion of our enemies by every possible means . . . a free-for-all . . . with no holds barred. Germany was engaged in total war . . . and total war is a very cruel business indeed.’
The SOE was a secret service whose very existence was deniable. The normal rules of war would not apply. In the SOE’s version of total war, the unethical and illegal were to be commonplace. Agents were expected to lie, deceive, bribe, blackmail, and where necessary, assassinate and kill. If captured, an agent would be disowned by his or her government, and torture and execution would doubtless follow. Before deploying on his first mission, Lees, like all agents, had been given ‘communion’ – a suicide pill that he could take if he feared he was about to break under torture.
The SOE recruited from a broad church. Its early volunteers included actors, professional burglars, peers of the realm, a rubber-goods salesman, several baronets, a pimp, prostitutes, jockeys, art experts and bankers. They shared certain traits in common: