Dashing British agent who freed Italy
Dick Mallaby survived brutal interrogation and escaped a firing squad to transmit vital messages between the Allies and Italians. But after the war he told no one — not even his children
AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD by Gianluca Barneschi (Osprey £16.99, 336pp)
ON THE night of August 14, 1943, a British secret agent fell from the sky into Lake Como in northern Italy. Dick Mallaby hit the water carrying codes hidden inside a toothpaste tube, radio equipment in his shaving brush, an antenna disguised as a clothes line and a spool of film concealed in a pot of Vaseline.
After shedding his parachute and activating his self-inflating rubber dinghy, he headed for dry land to make contact with anti-Fascist partisan groups.
Unfortunately for Mallaby’s mission, the nearby city of Milan had been extensively bombed the night before, and many people had fled towards the vast lake (famous today as a celebrity hangout, and the place where George and Amal Clooney have their palatial home).
Far from being shrouded in darkness at nearly 3am, as had been expected, Como was crowded and lit up like a fairground. Mallaby was soon spotted, arrested and handed over to Italy’s feared military intelligence unit.
How the dashing young agent managed to escape a firing squad, and went on to play a vital role in Italy’s unconditional surrender to the Allies, has fascinated Italian writer Gianluca Barneschi for more than two decades.
Despite the avalanche of books about World War II, Mallaby’s role in this pivotal event has, rather mysteriously, been completely overlooked, even in his native country. In An Englishman Abroad, Barneschi sets out to put that right.
Cecil Richard Dallimore-Mallaby was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1919. His mother died when he was just a year old; shortly afterwards Dick’s father, a tea planter, learned he had inherited an Italian estate from his aunt, and the Mallabys moved to Tuscany.
THIS was an idyllic place to be brought up, and young Dick soon spoke perfect Italian with a strong Tuscan accent. He was known far and wide as a daredevil, famous for his trick of cycling at breakneck speed along the parapets of bridges.
On the day Britain declared war on Germany, he returned home to join up. Despite his language skills, it was more than two years before Mallaby’s potential for undercover work was spotted.
In early 1942 he joined the Special Operations Executive and was given the codename ‘Olaf’, a nod to his distinctly Nordic blond hair and blue eyes.
Created to ‘set Europe ablaze’, as Churchill said, through guerrilla warfare, sabotage and espionage in enemy-held territories, the SOE trained its agents in unarmed combat, silent killing, handling explosives and resisting torture and interrogation.
It was famous for its ingenious gadgetry — explosive soaps, knives which could be hidden inside a heel and artificial fruit which concealed twoway radios.
Agents in Italy were given a fake bottle of Chianti, complete with the signature straw basket: one half of the bottle contained wine, the other half a detonator and explosive charge.
None of this was of any help to Mallaby when he was captured and brutally interrogated. What saved him was his quick thinking and his ability, when under extreme pressure, to give away just enough information to keep his captors interested in him.
Despite the ever-present fear of being shot for spying, he cleverly mixed fact with fiction and managed not to betray any other agents. He later wrote in his diary of ‘daily interrogations’, adding: ‘Each day I had to find some different sort of story to tell.’
By a great stroke of good fortune,
Mallaby’s capture coincided with a period when both the Italians and the Allies were desperate to find a skilled radio operator who was fluent in both Italian and English.
Italy, secretly trying to dissolve its alliance with Germany, needed to be in constant radio contact with the Anglo-American HQ in Algiers, but had no expert bilingual radio operator capable of doing the job. The head of the SOE’s Italian section pointed out that just the right man for the role was currently locked up in one of their jails.
Two weeks after being captured, Mallaby was transferred to Rome, convinced he was on his way to his execution. Instead, he was taken to the headquarters of the Italian Army and told to start transmitting messages to the Allies.
To prove he wasn’t acting under duress, he cheekily slipped in a message to his girlfriend, tapping out: ‘Christine, I love you.’
According to Barneschi, the stream of messages sent and received by Mallaby over the next few months, as the two sides negotiated, was ‘the sole means through which the Italian and Allied leaders communicated … the historical relevance of these messages is unique’.
The armistice was signed in
September 1943, although the Germans and some Italian forces continued to fight.
Dick Mallaby received the Military Cross in recognition of his ‘exceptional coolness, perseverance and devotion to duty’ and it’s likely that countless lives were saved due to his efforts.
As the citation said, without his transmissions ‘the Allied landings on the Italian mainland may have been made with Italy still an enemy.’
Mallaby stayed on in Italy to train radio operators, but his adventures didn’t end there. In 1945 he trekked through snowy mountain passes — still controlled by the Fascists — to provide support for resistance groups.
All went well until he was close to Lake Como, site of his previous arrest, where he and his companions were detained on suspicion of being smugglers.
As usual, Mallaby’s quick thinking saved the day. Handed over to the German SS, he calmly insisted he was on a diplomatic mission.
He was once again in the right place at the right time, and through a mixture of charm and guile, he got General Karl Wolff, commander of the SS forces in Italy, to consider a negotiated surrender.
He even convinced Wolff to allow him to go to Switzerland to retrieve his radio equipment, so he could act as a conduit between the Germans and the Allies.
To his intense frustration, Mallaby was arrested by the Swiss at the border due to a bureaucratic mix-up, but once released from prison he discovered that ‘his spur-of-the moment ruse’ had borne fruit and Wolff was indeed negotiating a German surrender.
‘The stone he had rolled had turned into an avalanche,’ Barneschi writes.
BEN MACINTyRE, author of Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, is the undisputed master of books about World War II derring-do.
An Englishman Abroad lacks some of the zip and humour of Macintyre’s books, but Barneschi’s touching admiration for Dick Mallaby and what he achieved carries the book along. He also provides an eye-opening insight into the messy, chaotic way the war in Italy ended.
Barneschi suggests Mallaby, with his good looks, pluck, coolness and ingenuity, could well have been one of Ian Fleming’s models for James Bond.
Unlike Bond, Mallaby opted for a quiet life after the war. He married his sweetheart Christine, moved back to Italy and went to work for NATO. He never spoke of his wartime exploits, and his four children were unaware of them.
He died of heart problems aged 62. From that day on, his widow Christine always wore his Military Cross around her neck.