Tag Archives: MI6

Ralph Stockbridge – Crete Memoir

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Ralph Stockbridge

Almost the very first article I posted back in 2010 when I started this blog was not about Paddy at all, although he does get a mention. It was the obituary of SOE officer Ralph Stockbridge which you can read here.

A fellow blogger, Kyle Glover, spent some time in the National Library of Scotland going through some of the documents in the Patrick Leigh Fermor archive. One of these was the memoir of Ralph Stockbridge (ACC. 13338/412), describing army life on Crete before the invasion, his interactions with civilians, an encounter with the famous archaeologist John Pendlebury, the battle of Crete and his desire to return and help liberate the “brave and wonderful” Cretan people.

Following the battle Stockbridge joined the Inter Services Liaison Department (a front organisation for MI6), trained as a radio operator and returned to Crete to set up an intelligence gathering network. Though not a member of the Special Operations Executive he worked closely alongside and became good friends with many of the SOE agents who were infiltrated onto Crete.

The following text is a direct transcription made by Kyle of Stockbridge’s unpublished memoir including the capitalisation of surnames. Kyle appears to have ceased writing his blog (last post 2024), so just in case it disappears I have posted his work below. Kyle and I have been on touch on Facebook in the past so I don’t think he will mind. His original work can be found here.

Ralph Stockbridge
Crete
December 1940 – May 1941

 

I came to Crete by accident. France was my first love, and I had joined the Field Security” Corps early in 1940 because someone had told me that, as I spoke fluent French, this was the best way of getting to France quickly. But, just as France was falling, I had found myself in one of the first Field Security Sections sent to the Middle East. Fate again intervened, this time in the shape of appendicitis, to prevent me joining the Section in Northern Greece and being involved in the subsequent retreat. Instead, I found myself in the Section sent to Crete at the end of December 1940.

My first impressions were unfavourable. We were under canvas in an olive-grove beside the main Chania Suda road, and it rained incessantly, our encampment became a morass, and we were wet and miserable Of the few weeks spent in Chania I remember curiously little, and the town has never had for me the attraction of Rethymnon and Heraklion. Three things from this period stick in my memory, however my instant liking of the Greek people, my first encounter with the Greek language; and the death of Metaxas. Our Field Security duties brought us into contact with Greek officials, in the harbour and elsewhere, and one met and drank coffee with Greek soldiers on their way to, or on leave from, Albania. Their friendliness and courtesy made a lasting impression on me. I have a photograph of some of them taken by the quayside at Chania, the names of four of them were loannis PALIDES, Michael KOUTROULES, LAMBAKES, and Spyros ORPHANOS, the latter with an address in Athens (108 Patission). The first words of Greek which I heard completely mystified me. They were of a peasant woman shouting at her small boy behind our tents, and she appeared to be saying “Come here at once, Adonis”. As the child was not particularly beautiful I thought this otherwise charming survival of a name from classical times somewhat inappropriate, and it took me some time to work out that his mother was really calling him Antoni (Tony in English) and even longer to learn that the accent is on the first syllable of the name Adonis in Greek.

The sudden death of the Prime Minister, General Metaxas, whose heroic rejection of the Italian ultimatum on 28 October 1940 brought Greece into the Second World War as Britain’s only ally at that time, caused consternation in Chania. I have never, before or since that date, seen people crying openly in the streets, and this was the more remarkable in of all places, Chania, the birthplace of Venizelos whose followers professed then, as their successors still do, hatred for the right wing in general and dictators in particular.

Early in March, two members of our Section, myself and David Bowe, he a well- informed and witty Fleet Street journalist before the war, now with the rank of Sergeant to my Lance-Corporal, were sent off on our motor-bikes to represent the Section in Heraklion. We passed through Rethymnon on March 8th and I contrived to be photographed in the company of the local Gendarmerie commander and a group of bystanders, one of whom was named Polydoros NIKOLOUDES. We rode on, through beautiful scenery, to Heraklion. I nearly coming to grief, and a premature end, on one of the dangerous comers near Yeni Kave (Drosia as it is known today) whose head-man, Mitsos KONTOGIANNES, was to play such a prominent part in resistance activities during the occupation.

Stockbridge (centre, in the spectacles) with some of his comrades in Crete

Stockbridge (centre, in the spectacles) with some of his comrades in Crete

Thus began one of the happiest periods of my life. Bowe and I had the free run of Heraklion. Our section commander was a hundred miles away in Chania, and what our duties were, in this farcical unit to which we belonged I, at least, never clearly understood. I interpreted mine as the identification of pro-Germans in the town. There were probably not more than a score of these and all of them, I suspect, harmless people with business or family connections with Germany. Their names and details I passed on to Chania, to what purpose I cannot imagine Germany had not yet invaded Greece, the British Army certainly had no authority to take any action against civilians, however pro- German, while the Greek security section of the local Gendarmerie presumably knew a great deal more about the problem than we did and were geared to take any necessary action.

Meanwhile we enjoyed Heraklion. My first friend there was George Migades, the leading tailor in the town, who invited me into his shop for a cup of coffee as I was passing by one day. In his fifties, and immensely pro-British, Migades was a mine of information about Heraklion. He was also extremely voluble: his words came pouring out in a torrent I have never heard equalled except, possibly, by Isaiah Berlin. The efforts I made during the following weeks to understand what he was saying were certainly responsible for the fact that, without any lessons, I was fluent in Greek by the time the battle began, though I knew no modern Greek by the time I arrived in Crete five months earlier. This is less strange than it may seem, I had taken my degree in Classics at Cambridge before the war, and modern Greek is only a very much simplified version of the language spoken in Greece two thousand years ago

Migades introduced me to his wife and their four delightful children, two girls and two boys aged between 22 and 16, Modi and Rena, Yanni and Siphi (short for Joseph). All survived the war, the two girls making successful marriages, Rena to Micky Akoumianakes who was to become the most important contact in Heraklion during the occupation of successive British officers conducting resistance and intelligence activities; Yanni is today one of Greece’s best-know artists and stage designers, while Siphi retired as a senior pilot of Olympic Airways. The Migades family house was in the old part of the city which lies behind and to the east of the main street leading from Morosini Square down to the Harbour, an area of narrow streets and old houses with inner courtyards immortalized by Kazantzakes in his great novel Kapetan Mikhales (Freedom or Death in its English translation), and a tale of insurrection against the Turks during the 19th Century.

During this period I met, many of them through Migades, a cross-section of Heraklion society. There was Eleutherios ALEXIOU, scholar and schoolmaster, with a good library, with whom I discussed French literature, talking always French, which was at that time the foreign language most readily spoken by educated people in Greece. There was the honorary British Vice-Consul, M.N. ELIADES, an elderly man who had written in English a history of Crete (CRETE PAST AND PRESENT, published by Heath Cranton Ltd, London, in 1933). After Crete fell, Eliades was arrested and spent the next four years in internment in Germany, where he was, by all accounts, well-treated, and survived the war. Edith and Harry NEWLANDS were particular friends of mine, she from Newport in Essex, he originally from Lithuania and of mixed German-Lithuanian parentage (his real name was NEULANDS-JAUNTZE). They had met and married in Athens before the war where he ran a dancing school. They were kind and gentle people. He spoke German, of course, and during the occupation was obliged, much against his will, to act as a translator and interpreter in Heraklion, for which he was regarded with some mistrust as a result by local people. Both survived the war and lived in Crete, dying there at an advanced age, he in his nineties.

There were many other friends too. Coffee-housing was then, as now, a favourite pastime, and Regginakis’ establishment in the main square, facing Morosini’s beautiful Venetian fountain, our favourite rendezvous. Here we would sit for hours discussing the war and politics and anything else which occurred to us. One day. I recall, an elderly and bibulous English resident, named Foster, who was the representative in Heraklion of the Eastern Telegraph Company, stuffed with oranges the mouth of the fountain lions in a sudden fit of enthusiasm. In the square itself was always to be seen Andreas, the village, or rather town, idiot, whose harmless antics were a constant source of amusement. Andreas, I am told, was the only person in Heraklion allowed by the Germans to ‘cheek them with impunity during the occupation, he was of course often put up to it by the locals, who told him what to say.

This pleasant life came to an abrupt end on May 20, 1941, a cloudless and warm day. Although for some weeks, since the Germans had occupied mainland Greece, we had been expecting an early invasion, it was still something of a surprise when it happened. Proceedings began during the afternoon with some heavy bombing of the airfield area (two to three miles East of the town), but also of the harbour. Then, around 5pm, we saw the troop carriers and the first parachutists. I was in the western part of the city and so saw only those who descended some distance beyond the western entrance to the city. known as the Chania Gate. But a total of some 2000 German troops were landed on this first day, of whom at least half were wiped out by the end of it. They had, it seems, expected to capture the town and the airfield at once and without difficulty, but their intelligence must have been very poor since Brigadier Chapple’s British force consisted of 4000 men and there were also quite a large number of Greek troops plus many armed civilians, from elderly to very young men, who fought most valiantly and effectively. The Germans failed to take the airfield that day, and never did take it until after the evacuation, they did occupy the Greek barracks immediately to the South of the airfield, and they forced their way through the town to the harbour. But from both these areas they were driven out in the next day or two.

Just prior to the battle, I had met John Pendlebury, then in uniform as a Captain. Pendlebury, although still a young man, aged 36, had been Curator and resident archaeologist at Knossos. He knew Crete far better than any other Englishman and during this period, when there were no roads to nine out of ten villages, nor any other modern amenities, he had walked all over the island’s 200-mile length and knew hundreds if not thousands of people. It was not surprising therefore that he had been asked by the War Office (though I did not know this at the time) to organise and lead resistance to the Germans in the event of Crete being captured. In addition to his unrivalled knowledge of the terrain of the Cretans, he spoke Greek and was young and fit enough to face the physical hardships likely to be involved. He was indeed an impressive man to meet, tall, handsome, athletic-looking (he had an Athletic Blue at Cambridge and twice won the High Jump against Oxford) and with an air of considerable authority. The distinction was added to by his having a glass eye (the result of a boyhood accident) and sporting a swordstick instead of a swagger-cane. Pendlebury had in fact made detailed plans for resistance, based initially on the villages round Mount Ida (Psilorites) and this explains why, on May 21, he decided to get out of Heraklion in order to activate his resistance organisation, possibly, while the battle was still in progress and its outcome undecided. What has never been explained, and I for one have never been able to understand, is why so intelligent a man chose to leave the town by the West, or Chania Gate, and by car. All of us had seen the parachutists landing in the area beyond the Gate the day before, and it could be safely assumed that they now controlled the main road Pendlebury and his driver ran straight into a pocket of parachutists, he was seriously wounded in the ensuing skirmish, and taken to a nearby house where his wounds were dressed by a German Army doctor, and he was left overnight. The following morning more Germans returned, and Pendlebury was taken outside and shot. The assumption is that he had been identified by the Germans as potentially their most dangerous opponent in Crete and that they decided to eliminate him there and then. To shoot a wounded and defenceless enemy in cold blood was of course a war-crime, but one which could not subsequently be pinned on any individual German. It is said that, some weeks after the event, Pendlebury’s body was exhumed in order that the Germans could satisfy themselves beyond any doubt, by examination of his glass eye, that it really was Pendlebury whom they had killed. His loss was a serious one to the Allies as it put back resistance and intelligence operations in Crete until autumn when the first British personnel, of whom I had the honour to be one, were infiltrated. His reputation however lived on in the villages, and future resistance personnel always found it a valuable introduction to villagers they did not know to say they were friends of John Pendlebury. But why did he not make his way out of Heraklion on foot and to the South of the city? It must have been safer.

My personal recollections of the battle are a kaleidoscope of confusion. Our Field Security unit had been reinforced, if that is the word, by the arrival just beforehand of some NCOS and the Section Commander, Captain BURR, from Chania. We were billeted now in a half-built house opposite the Prefecture (Nomarcheion). There was no lighting and no hand-guards to the concrete staircase, and Captain Burr shortly fell from the first floor landing and broke his thigh. He was taken to hospital but could not be moved when the evacuation took place and so became a prisoner of war. The unit, composed of linguists (anything except Greek, and so useless) was hopelessly non-combatant, being armed only with Smith & Wesson 38 revolvers. We were only a hindrance to the military proper, but did odd guard jobs, acted as messengers and anything else we were asked to do. It is really only isolated incidents I remember from these seven or eight days of the battle in Heraklion: a German aircraft coming in from the sea on which a Bofors gun scored a direct hit-it became a ball of flame as it came down into the water, finding transport for a community of French nuns so that they could attempt to get out of the beleaguered town (I never discovered whether they did), the bombing of the town, diving very fast and head-first into a ditch as a Messerschmidt machine-gunned the street where I was standing, seeing some German prisoners held near Brigade HQ in a cave somewhere near the airfield- they were very arrogant and confident about the outcome of the battle; hearing my name called out down at the harbour during an air raid, and discovering it was not me but someone else who was being addressed he turned out, from my hurried enquiry, to be from Royston, the town nearest to the village of Melbourn where my family have lived since church records were kept, but I have never discovered who he was and whether he survived the war. During this time I at least had not the slightest idea of how the battle was going. In fact, it was going well as far as Heraklion was concerned, but its fate was being decided elsewhere. The capture of Maleme airfield at Chania, and complete air control, meant that the Germans could now land as many troops as required in Crete and that the battle was to all intents and purposes over. So an evacuation was ordered, the Chania garrison began the slow and arduous retreat to the South coast at Sphakia, and the Navy prepared to lift off Brigadier Chapple’s 4000 men from Heraklion. There was no possibility of rescuing the 2000 mostly Australian troops in Rethymnon most of whom in the event had to surrender though some took refuge in the villages, and were fed and sheltered at enormous personal risk by the inhabitants, often for months and in some cases years. Of these most were eventually secretly evacuated by submarine or small boat once British officers had returned to Crete to organise such operations and co-ordinate resistance

At midnight on May 28th a Royal Navy force of two cruisers and six destroyers reached Heraklion. For three hours the destroyers ferried troops to the cruisers which lay outside harbour and themselves took on board the remainder. We were marched down to the harbour in batches and I shall never forget the silence and desolation of the shattered town I knew so well. I took a vow at this moment to return to Crete as soon as possible and to help liberate its brave and wonderful people.

We sailed about 3.30am. For six hours, from first light until noon, by which time we were out of range of the aircraft, we were dive-bombed continuously. The noise of the screaming planes and of the anti-aircraft guns was deafening. Both cruisers were hit, Orion losing her Captain and nearly a hundred men killed among her crew and troops aboard. Of the six destroyers, Imperial had her steering-gear hopelessly crippled, her crew and passengers were taken aboard other ships and she was sunk. Hereward was badly damaged and had to be run aground on the East coast of Crete, her crew and passengers became prisoners of war. On board Jackal, where I was, we were packed like sardines, but suffered only near misses and minor damage. Towards nightfall we reached Alexandria, where good ladies with tea and sandwiches greeted us on the quayside. Then it was off to Cairo, and the bug-infested Kasr-el-Nil Barracks.

Back in Egypt, my first act was to approach my Commanding Officer Lt Col WORDSWORTH and beg him to get me transferred to whatever unit was responsible for secret operations in Crete, I am eternally grateful to him for abetting such a request. especially from a junior NCO quite unknown to him. I was introduced in the right quarters, given three months training in the operation of a transmitting and receiving wireless set and in encoding messages, and was back in Crete at the beginning of October 1941, where I was to spend a further two and a half years with the Resistance.

While in Egypt I sat down one day and wrote the following poem (not included) [Link to my transcription here]. It is to be read as an allegory of the bonds which unite our two island races, each with a famous history. I always thought of Crete as the last bastion of those allegedly fair-haired invaders from the North who had peopled Greece in pre-classical times, in particular the Dorians. It was noticeable in Crete at that time how many people had fair hair and blue eves, and noteworthy that nearly all of these turned out to originate from those mountain fastnesses to the South and South East of the White Mountains, the area of Sphakia, into which, for hundreds of years, successive occupiers, Venetians, Turks and now Germans never penetrated except to make brief forays. And so the race remained pure, without intermarriage with foreigners. There were even unmistakable traces of the old Greek language of classical times, eg the word “pempo” (I send) was regularly used instead of the modern Greek ‘stelno’.

Note:

Ralph Stockbridge was made an Officer, awarded the Military Cross in 1942 and a Bar in 1944, in which year he also received the Honorary Citizenship of Rethymnon on its liberation from the Germans.

The magnetic John Pendlebury

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Archaeology’s first modern hero was dazzling in life and heroically defiant in death. Paddy wrote the foreward to the 2007 book – The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury by Imogen Grundon.

J. D. S. Pendlebury, excavator of Amarna, Curator at Knossos, he of the glass eye and the swordstick, who died defending Crete from German invasion in 1941, is archaeology’s first modern hero: brilliant, magnetic and self-aware. In The Rash Adventurer, Imogen Grundon gives us the substance behind his dazzling brief career. John Pendlebury evidently possessed an extraordinary determination to overcome obstacles, demonstrated after he had lost an eye as the result of a childhood accident. In spite of this handicap, his Cambridge years included a blue in athletics and a first class in the tripos. Grundon reveals his early interests in archaeology, and the enormous workload he undertook soon after leaving university. His career included excavation both at Akhenaten’s capital of Amarna and at Sir Arthur Evans’s site at Knossos, as Pendlebury moved from one to the other with the seasons of work. By the age of twenty-five he occupied a unique position in Mediterranean archaeology, holding simultaneously the posts of Curator at Knossos and Director of Excavations at Tell el-Amarna.

by Jane Jakeman

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 2007.

The relationship between Egypt and Crete was of particular interest to him, and his Aegyptiaca: A catalogue of Egyptian objects in the Aegean area is still an important resource. At Amarna, the historical background was still very unclear when Pendlebury became Director in 1930, and he was able to extract a possible chronology and a history of that remarkable city. There was a wide gulf between Bronze Age archaeologists and Egyptologists, and Pendlebury had to endure much criticism in Egyptological circles, particularly over his theories concerning the invasion of Egypt by the “sea peoples”, whose leadership he ascribed to Agamemnon. It was not uncommon at the time to look for relationships between mythology and archaeology, but this approach evidently appealed to Pendlebury’s love of Homeric story. It was also a romantic perspective, and from it he viewed his beloved modern Cretans, sometimes presiding over dinner wearing a Cretan cloak and striding through the mountains to meet kapetanoi, the old brigand leaders.

He clearly relished his swashbuckling self-image, but Grundon shows him capable too of subtle and complex achievements. At Knossos, he skilfully negotiated a difficult relationship with Evans, whose colourful reconstructions Pendlebury sometimes disagreed with, in spite of his own imaginative streak. He was in fact working in a new archaeological era: the age of the great individual “dig” patrons was passing, in favour of a more modern system where the locals were no longer regarded as mere workmen, and foreign governments were recognized as significant entities. Pendlebury showed himself well able to manage this transition and he was realistic in matters of archaeological politics and finance, very aware of the importance of finding subscribers to the Egypt Exploration Society, and new sources of funding. Grundon is good on the complications of organizational funding and personalities, academic intrigues and quarrels.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Pendlebury returned to Britain, enlisted in Military Intelligence and was drafted into Military Intelligence (Research). He went back to Crete in 1940 as a British Army captain, in order to organize resistance to invasion in the mountain regions. He was “adopted”, to use Grundon’s appropriate word, by the highly secretive “D” section of MI6, whose task was to train agents, conceal supplies for sabotage, and handle anti-German propaganda. There is no doubt that he loved the atmosphere of mystery and intrigue, as also the adventure of rallying his kapetanoi.

Pendlebury’s part in the Battle for Crete was, however, tragically short-lived: in 1941, he was wounded, then captured, propped up against a wall and shot. Again, Grundon has followed these events very carefully, presenting as much evidence as can now be garnered – although her wider picture of the background to the invasion of Crete is too kind to General Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealander in command of Allied forces on Crete. Antony Beevor’s Crete: The Battle and the Resistance brings out clearly the later Lord Freyberg’s disastrous support for seaborne invasion, and the obstinate misinterpretation of “Ultra” intelligence, which contributed to the loss of the island to the Germans. The downfall of Crete was horribly unnecessary. So was Pendlebury’s death, a tragic waste, except perhaps that his premature decease itself took on an iconic quality. His image has remained unencumbered by the aura of his snobbish wife and untarnished by entanglement in post-war politics.

The Rash Adventurer is a thorough and authoritative biography, based on detailed research, which gives us at every point the facts underpinning the myth of the man. As well as reaching deep in archives and libraries, Imogen Grundon seems to have interviewed almost every survivor in the field. There is one story she omits, however, perhaps because none of her elderly interlocutors cared to repeat it – the story passed down among Egyptologists, that, as he faced the firing squad, John Pendlebury’s last words were “Fuck you!”.

Rare video of Pendlebury excavating in Egypt as well as showing off his athletic prowess.

Audible

Colonel David Smiley

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We have come across David Smiley before. He was one of the occupants of Tara, worked with “Billy” McLean in Albania, and it seems he rearmed and led Japanese troops against the Vietminh. There cannot be many British officers who have led Japanese soldiers! Paddy was a friend and wrote the foreward to Smiley’s 1984 book, Albanian Assignment. One has to wonder, when reading the stories of these amazing characters, whether the British could ever find such people again. I hope so.

First published in the Telegraph 9 Jan 2009.

Special forces and intelligence officer renowned for cloak-and-dagger operations behind enemy lines on many fronts.

Colonel David Smiley, who died on January 9 aged 92, was one of the most celebrated cloak-and-dagger agents of the Second World War, serving behind enemy lines in Albania, Greece, Abyssinia and Japanese-controlled eastern Thailand.

After the war he organised secret operations against the Russians and their allies in Albania and Poland, among other places. Later, as Britain’s era of domination in the Arabian peninsula drew to a close, he commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces in a highly successful counter-insurgency.

After his assignment in Oman, he organised – with the British intelligence service, MI6 – royalist guerrilla resistance against a Soviet-backed Nasserite regime in Yemen. Smiley’s efforts helped force the eventual withdrawal of the Egyptians and their Soviet mentors, paved the way for the emergence of a less anti-Western Yemeni government, and confirmed his reputation as one of Britain’s leading post-war military Arabists.

In more conventional style, while commanding the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues), Smiley rode alongside the Queen as commander of her escort at the Coronation in 1953.

During the Second World War he was parachuted four times behind enemy lines. On one occasion he was obliged to escape from Albania in a rowing boat. On another mission, in Japanese-controlled eastern Thailand, he was stretchered for three days through the jungle with severe burns after a booby-trap meant for a senior Japanese officer exploded prematurely.

Though a regular soldier, Smiley was frequently seconded to MI6. As an assistant military attaché in Poland after the war, when the Soviet-controlled Communists were tightening their grip, he was beaten up and expelled as a spy, after an operation he was running had incriminated a member of the politburo.

After that he headed the British side of a secret Anglo-American venture to subvert the newly-installed Communist regime in Albania led by the ruthless Enver Hoxha. But Kim Philby, who was secretly working for the Russians, was the liaison between the British and Americans; almost all the 100 or so agents dropped by parachute or landed by boat were betrayed, and nearly all were tortured and shot. This failure haunted Smiley for the rest of his life.

Smiley’s exploits led some to suggest that he was, along with several other candidates, a model for James Bond. It was also widely mooted that John le Carré, albeit unconsciously, had taken the name of his hero from the real-life Smiley.

David Smiley with el Hassan and bodyguard in Yemen

Born on April 11 1916, David de Crespigny Smiley was the youngest son of Major Sir John Smiley, 2nd Bt, and Valerie, youngest daughter of Sir Claude Champion de Crespigny, 4th Bt, a noted jockey, balloonist, all-round sportsman and adventurer, also famed for his feats of derring-do.

After the Pangbourne Nautical College, where he excelled in sport, David went to Sandhurst in 1934. He served in the Blues from 1936 to 1939, based mainly at Windsor, leading the life of a debonair man-about-town, owning a Bentley and a Whitney Straight aircraft. Before the outbreak of war, he won seven races under National Hunt rules. In his first point-to-point with the Garth Hunt, he crashed into a tree, suffering serious injuries. Over the years Smiley was to break more than 80 bones, mainly as a result of sport; on two occasions he broke his skull, once in a steeplechase and once when he dived at night into an almost-empty swimming pool in Thailand.

After the war, he held the record for the most falls in one season on the Cresta Run in St Moritz; bizarrely, he represented Kenya (where he owned a farm) in the Commonwealth Winter Games of 1960.

After war broke out, the Blues sailed for Palestine, where one of Smiley’s first jobs, as a lieutenant, was to shoot his troop of 40 horses when it became clear they were of no use in modern combat. His introduction to warfare was against Vichy French forces in Syria. For his nocturnal reconnaissance work in ruins near Palmyra he was mentioned in despatches.

Later in 1940 Smiley joined the Somaliland Camel Corps, arriving at Berbera the very day it was decided to evacuate British Somaliland. Returning in frustration to Egypt, he persuaded General Wavell, a family friend, to recommend him for the newly-formed commandos, in which he became a company commander with the rank of captain. Sneaking from Sudan into Abyssinia, Smiley operated for the first of many times behind enemy (in this case Italian) lines.

In 1941 he returned to his regiment to command a squadron of armoured vehicles being sent from Palestine to raise the siege of Habbaniya, 60 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq, where the king and regent had been overthrown in a pro-German coup led by Rashid Ali. Under Colonel John Glubb, he led a charge alongside Bedouin levies in full cry (they were known to Smiley as “Glubb’s girls”, because of their long black locks). After helping to capture Baghdad, Smiley’s squadron was sent to Mosul with the task, among other things, of capturing the German ambassador, who escaped.

His squadron then moved east, to capture the Persian capital, Tehran, followed by “two weeks’ celebration with plenty of vodka, caviar and women”. After a spell in Palestine, Smiley led a Blues squadron of dummy tanks into the Western Desert pretending first to be British Crusaders and then, on a further foray, American General Grants, which were repeatedly attacked by Stukas. When Rommel broke through, they withdrew to Cairo. Three months later Smiley commanded a squadron of armoured cars at the battle of El Alamein – his last bout of conventional warfare.

After training at a school for secret agents in Haifa and taking a parachuting course with his friend David Stirling and his Special Air Service (SAS) near the Suez Canal, Smiley joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organisation set up at Churchill’s instigation to “set Europe ablaze” by helping local partisans sabotage the Nazis’ infrastructure. He was parachuted with his life-long friend Neil (Billy) McLean into the mountains of Albania, then occupied by the Italians (and later by the Germans). For eight months he organised the fractious partisans in a series of ambushes and acts of sabotage (bridge demolition, sometimes by climbing under them at night while German troops were patrolling above, became a Smiley trademark). He was awarded an immediate MC. In early 1944 he was again parachuted into Albania, with McLean and Julian (later Lord) Amery, to liaise with the royalist guerrillas loyal to King Zog.

Colonel David Smiley, front 3rd right and band of Albanian fighters

Colonel David Smiley (left) in Albania

After leaving Albania, where his activities brought Smiley a Bar to his MC, he was transferred to the Siamese section of SOE, known in the Far East as Force 136, where he liaised with guerrillas operating against the Japanese who ruled the country through a proxy government. It was then that he was injured by the premature explosion of a booby-trap meant for a Japanese officer.

After recovering in Government House in Calcutta, where he consorted with both Nehru and Gandhi, he was parachuted behind enemy lines into eastern Siam, shortly before the dropping of the atomic bombs and the surrender of Japan, whereupon he organised the liberation of several prisoner-of-war camps, including the one on which the film The Bridge on the River Kwai was based. Though only a major, he personally took the surrender of the 22nd Division of the Imperial Japanese Army.

On Lord Mountbatten’s orders, Smiley re-armed a Japanese company and led them against the Communists of the fledgling Vietminh (who later became the Vietcong) in French Indo-China. Among other exploits, he freed 120 French women and children who had been taken hostage by the Communists. The only British officer in an area the size of Wales, he then took the surrender of Vientiane, Laos’s capital, from another Japanese general. For his activities in Siam and Indo-China Smiley was awarded a military OBE.

He later ruefully noted that, at that time, the Vietminh were backed by the American OSS (the CIA’s forerunner); Smiley was wary of what he considered to be America’s naïve enthusiasm for proclaimed democrats and its hostility to the British and French empires.

After his early post-war exploits in Poland and then his efforts to roll back communism in Albania were betrayed by Philby, Smiley returned to more conventional duties in Germany and thence to command his regiment, the Blues, at Windsor.

In 1955 he was appointed military attaché in Sweden, from where he made surveillance trips with his young family along the Russian border with Finland and Norway. But the pinnacle of Smiley’s post-war career was his three-year tenure as commander of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman’s armed forces during a civil war which threatened to bring down one of Britain’s more reactionary allies in the Gulf.

By now in his early forties, Smiley ran a gruelling counter-insurgency which gradually drove the guerrillas back from the scorching plains into their mountain retreat, the 10,000ft high Jebel Akhdar, which had never been successfully assaulted. With two squadrons of the SAS under his command, Smiley planned and led a classic dawn attack on the mountain fastness, finally crushing the enemy.

After leaving Oman in 1961, Smiley was offered the command of the SAS, but chose to retire from the British Army and file occasional reports for Raymond Postgate’s Good Food Guide.

He was not able to relax for long. Within two years he had been persuaded to help bolster royalist forces in Yemen. Liaising with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and MI6, who arranged for former SAS and other mercenaries to accompany him, Smiley made 13 trips to Yemen between 1963 and 1968.

Often disguised as a local, Smiley travelled on foot or by donkey for weeks at a time across Arabia’s most rugged terrain. He won the admiration of his colleagues, both Arab and British, for his toughness, bluntness, and shrewdness as an adviser. King Faisal, whom Smiley greatly admired, personally expressed his appreciation.

After ending his Arabian career, Smiley moved to Spain, where, for 19 years, he grew olives, carobs and almonds, and continued to advise Albania’s surviving anti-Communists, by now all in exile, before returning to live in Somerset and then Earl’s Court.

To Smiley’s delight, he was welcomed back to Albania in 1990, as the Communist regime, which had sentenced him to death in absentia, began to collapse. He forged a friendship with the country’s first post-Communist leader, Sali Berisha.

Smiley was appointed LVO, and Knight Commander of the Order of the Sword in Sweden and Grand Cordon of the Order of Skanderbeg in Albania.

In 1947 he married Moyra, daughter of Lord Francis Scott KCMG, DSO, the 6th Duke of Buccleuch’s youngest son. He is survived by his wife, two sons, a stepson and a stepdaughter.

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Sophie Moss Obituary from Daily Telegraph

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Other SOE Obituaries

Sophie Moss Obituary from Daily Telegraph

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Sophie Moss

Sophie Moss, who has died aged 92, was, as Countess Zofia Tarnowksa, the hostess of a villa in wartime Cairo where high-spirited young SOE agents on leave from secret assignments behind enemy lines held some of the most riotous parties of the war.

With considerable misgivings (and a fictitious chaperone), she agreed to join the all-male household on Gezira island at the invitation of her future husband, the officer Billy Moss, and moved in with her few possessions, which included a swimsuit, an evening dress, a uniform and two pet mongooses.

In the field, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Billy McLean, David Smiley, Rowland Winn and Xan Fielding were cold, hungry, lice-ridden and in constant danger. But on leave with months of back pay to spend, they held uproarious parties at the villa, which they called Tara.

These attracted the most distinguished soldiers, diplomats, writers and, on one occasion, King Farouk, who arrived with a crate of champagne. The evenings grew steadily more rowdy. Usually glasses were smashed. One night some chairs were broken when a mock bullfight was staged. On another, Sophie’s Polish friends shot out all the light bulbs, and on yet another a sofa caught fire then was hurled through a plate-glass window.

Since costly repairs were needed afterwards, Abbas, the butler-cook, tried to raise funds by accosting guests at the gate and holding out his tarboosh for contributions. Sophie put a stop to this, then remembered how soft fruits were added to vodka to make delicious liqueurs on her father’s Polish estates. The household agreed to an experiment using the bath, in which prunes were mixed with raw alcohol from the local garage. The results were disappointing, though Sophie insisted that this was because they were too impatient to wait for the mixture to mature. When they started drinking it after three days, two imbibers passed out.

The bathroom had other uses. In late 1943, when Leigh Fermor and Moss were planning a kidnapping on Crete, they sat around wearing next-to-nothing while David Smiley, fresh from Albania, explained how to organise the perfect ambush – drawing a diagram on the steamed-up tiles. After their success in capturing General Heinrich Kreipe, Leigh Fermor and Moss returned to Tara as heroes.

Zofia Roza Maria Jadwiga Elzbieta Katarzyna Aniela Tarnowska was born on March 16 1917 at Rudnik, a forested estate near Tarnobrzeg, a town in south-eastern Poland founded by her family in 1593. Over the centuries the Tarnowskis had held some of the highest offices in Poland. But Sophie’s father descended from a cadet branch of the family, and wanted to be only a country gentleman. His marriage was unhappy, and Sophie and her brother Stanislaw grew up headstrong and mischievous.

Her tricks and practical jokes turned her governesses into nervous wrecks until her mother sent her to a convent. Sophie got into trouble for standing on a pudding to prove it was inedible, ran away and refused to go back. She was happiest with animals, galloping through the forests on horseback or playing with deer, foxes, a goat and a red squirrel.

In 1937 she married Andrew Tarnowski, a member of the senior branch of the family. Her first son was under two when he died (on the day she gave birth to her second) in July 1939. As war drew closer, Sophie decided that she would never abandon Poland and burned her passport. It was, as her daughter said, “a very romantic and Polish thing to do”, but it changed nothing. On September 8, when the Germans were pouring over the western frontier and the Russians were approaching from the east, she set off by car for Romania with her husband and their baby, her brother, his fiancée Chouquette and her sister.

On arriving in Belgrade she lost her second son before the family drove on to Greece and Palestine. Her husband, now a corporal in the Carpathian Rifles, was on leave in Jerusalem when he told Sophie he was in love with Chouquette. Later Sophie accompanied Chouquette and her son to Cairo, where an uncle of King Farouk, who had often hunted on the Tarnowski estates, had offered them a luxurious villa. She soon moved out.

After joining the International Red Cross, Sophie met General Sikorski, Poland’s prime minister, who suggested she start a Polish branch of the humanitarian organisation. She agreed, but only if it were established without ranks. “Are you a communist?” asked Sikorski. “No” was the reply. But senior Polish ladies might resent a badge of superiority on someone whose husband was only a corporal, she explained. The general agreed, but when he departed she had difficulty confirming her position.

Finally she presented a large bouquet of flowers to the wife of the British ambassador in Cairo, Sir Miles Lampson – with whose help she was equipped with a committee, an office and a truck to
deliver clothes and food. She also visited hospitals and arranged patients’ outings, and helped Polish PoWs in Germany to contact their scattered families.

After divorcing Andrew, she married Billy Moss in 1945. The couple settled in London, where he prepared his Cretan diary about the kidnapping for publication as the best-selling Ill Met By Moonlight. But money was always tight. She lost a third son, but had two daughters. She and Moss translated a book of short stories by the Polish writer Bruno Schultz. But by the late 1950s, their marriage was over. She took in lodgers and spent time in Ireland, where she became a keen gardener.

In 1957 Sophie and her brother were allowed to visit their childhood home, where the NKVD had used the cellars as a jail during the war. They were not allowed into the building, but were treated to an open-air banquet by dozens of old retainers and peasants. At Gora Ropczycki, the house where she and her first husband had lived till 1939, old farmhands thanked her for keeping up their spirits in the first days of the war.

After the fall of communism Sophie’s nephew Adam bought back Rudnik, and Sophie presided over a family gathering in 1999. But too much had changed for her to contemplate settling there.

Last year some of the poems she had written in Cairo were published in a private edition. One, which was translated into English, asks for the white wings of her childhood guardian angel to take her home.

She died on November 22, surrounded by her family in Sussex.

Ralph Stockbridge

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Stockbridge (centre, in the spectacles) with some of his comrades in Crete

Ralph Stockbridge, who has died aged 92, was awarded two MCs for the notable part that he played in the Cretan Resistance to the German occupation; he spent the remainder of his career working for MI6.

During his time in Crete he knew and worked with Paddy.

Read his Telegraph obituary here.