SIMON COURTAULD on four heroic British SOE officers
Four Musketeers, irregular British SOE officers who fought with great distinction in the Second World War and for years after, in various countries, to halt the spread of communism, are the subject of a fascinating new book* by the American historian Shannon Monaghan.
It so happens that I got to know two of these men – ‘Billy’ McLean and Peter Kemp – quite well in their later years. The other two are David Smiley and Julian Amery, and all four fought together with partisans in Albania in 1943.
Kemp had been fighting against communism since he joined the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and was badly wounded. He had served with Commando units on the Brittany coast before Albania, was imprisoned by the NKVD in Poland in 1945 and then went off to Indochina in support of the French, who were opposed by the Vietminh and not helped by the Americans along the Siam-Laos border. He then had the more pleasant duty of liberating Bali.
Peter was the bravest of warriors, and still visiting war zones in his sixties; but he was also the gentlest of men, as my young children would remember when he came to our house for lunch. He was often self-deprecatingly modest and also endearingly impractical. When I once took a flight with him to Spain, he was unable to work out how to fasten his seat belt.
Several parachute drops during Peter’s life ended unhappily. When he landed halfway up an Albanian mountain in 1943 and struck his head on a rock, he remembered, through his concussion, seeing ‘a tall figure in jodhpurs and a wide crimson cummerbund, wearing a major’s crown on the shoulder-straps of his open-necked army shirt’. This was Billy McLean, who was commanding the British military mission to the country.
Billy had fought the Italians in Abyssinia as part of Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force and at the end of the war walked across the Himalayas to serve as military attaché in Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan. The rest of his life was spent travelling in mostly Muslim countries where Soviet influence threatened.
When I met Billy by chance in Teheran, he invited me to go with him to Kurdistan to meet the rebel Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani, but I rather wetly said I had to get back to my legal studies. However, I did accompany him the following year on a bizarre exploit to Algiers, which is described in the book. Among many memories of a potentially dangerous few days was Billy’s amusement as he told me we had no diplomatic relations with the country.
For years he was playing his own version of the Great Game, and it was sometimes difficult to keep up with his objectives. If in his character were shades of Buchan, Lawrence and Thesiger, they coalesced in the Yemen, where he and David Smiley spent most of the 1960s, giving active support to the Imam’s Royalists in order to keep Nasser and his Soviet-backed forces out of Arabia.
At home, Billy revelled in political argument, often while smoking long Italian cheroots and drinking a Spanish aniseed liqueur. He also delighted in banter and teasing. When in Teheran I once mispronounced the name of the Qajar dynasty as Raja, for months after Billy would ask me how the Rajas were doing in Iran.
His memorial service at St Margaret’s Westminster was attended by representatives of the King of Jordan, the Imam of the Yemen, King Leka of the Albanians and the Crown Prince of Ethiopia.
The author has written an absorbing and very well-researched story of the involvement of four remarkable men in 20th-century wars and their political aftermath.
* A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men, Shannon Monaghan (Viking, £25)
