Exporting British Policing during the Second World War: Policing Soldiers and Civilians 9781350025011, 9781350025042, 9781350025028

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One: The Detective
1 The Origins of the SIB
Campion’s score
After Dunkirk
2 The Mediterranean Theatre
The Middle East
Honoured societies, partisans and everything in between
3 D-Day to Berlin
Landing, looters and the fiddles
Antwerp to the Rhine
Over the Rhine and the war’s end
4 ‘Dickie’ Hearn and 62 Special Investigation Section
Dickie Hearn: A man at the sharp end
62 Section’s war
Part Two: Administrators and Governors
5 Readying to Govern Europe
Plans
Selecting the men
Training
6 The Italian Job
Sicily: Stepping back in time?
From the South to the North
Venezia Giulia: Hot war to cold
7 The Greek Imbroglio
8 Northwest Europe
Policemen, ‘practicable wisdom’ and Civil Affairs
France and the Low Countries
Restoring the ‘first victim’
Restoring the German homeland
9 Coming Home and Aftermath
Resettling and moving on
Lessons?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Exporting British Policing During the Second World War

Exporting British Policing During the Second World War Policing Soldiers and Civilians Clive Emsley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Clive Emsley, 2017 Clive Emsley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: ‘In Hamburg, Four Days Before Germany’s Unconditional Surrender’, 1945. A corporal of the British 2nd Army erects a sign reading Piccadilly Circus, observed by a German policeman. From The War Illustrated Volume 9 edited by Sir John Hammerton. (© The Amalgamated Press Ltd, London, 1945/The Print Collector) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Klemme, Heiner, editor. | Kuehn, Manfred, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury dictionary of eighteenth-century German philosophers / edited by Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn. Other titles: Dictionary of eighteenth-century German philosophers Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. | Originally published under title: Dictionary of eighteenth-century German philosophers : London : Continuum, 2010. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015040044| ISBN 9781474255974 (pb) | ISBN 9781474256001 (epub) | ISBN 9781474255981 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophers–Germany–Dictionaries. | Philosophy, German–18th century–Dictionaries. Classification: LCC B2615 .D53 2016 | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040044 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2501-1 PB: 978-1-3500-9905-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2502-8 ePub: 978-1-3500-2503-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Jenny, and for the younger generation

Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction

ix x xi xiii 1

Part One The Detective

17

1

The Origins of the SIB Campion’s score After Dunkirk

19

The Mediterranean Theatre The Middle East Honoured societies, partisans and everything in between

39

D-Day to Berlin Landing, looters and the fiddles Antwerp to the Rhine Over the Rhine and the war’s end

69

‘Dickie’ Hearn and 62 Special Investigation Section Dickie Hearn: A man at the sharp end 62 Section’s war

95

2

3

4

19 28

39 49

69 80 84

95 102

Part Two Administrators and Governors

113

5

115

Readying to Govern Europe Plans Selecting the men Training

115 119 127

viii

6

Contents

The Italian Job Sicily: Stepping back in time? From the South to the North Venezia Giulia: Hot war to cold

133

7

The Greek Imbroglio

157

8

Northwest Europe Policemen, ‘practicable wisdom’ and Civil Affairs France and the Low Countries Restoring the ‘first victim’ Restoring the German homeland

169

9

Coming Home and Aftermath Resettling and moving on Lessons?

Notes Bibliography Index

133 138 153

169 172 177 185 199 199 212 217 243 252

List of Illustrations 1.1 1.2 1.3 4.1 6.1 6.2 8.1

The first SIB recruits from the Metropolitan Police SIB warrant card and plain clothes authorization An MP training hut at Mytchett ‘Dickie’ Hearn c. 1945 The arrival of a Civil Affairs Officer, Italy 1943 Lieutenant Colonel Albert Wilcox with Carabinieri in Bari Greeting the Austrian Chancellor at the Vienna Police Training School 9.1 PC ‘Dickie’ Hearn c. 1960 9.2 ‘Dickie’ Hearn c. 1963: ‘Don’t be so daft’

26 30 36 98 139 152 183 202 204

List of Tables I.1 Detectives in English police forces, 1939 2.1 Arrests for serious crimes by SIB in the Middle East and Italy, November 1942–June 1945 2.2 SIB Sections 64 and 67, Italy 1944–45 – Cases, arrests, property recovered 2.3 Homicides investigated by 76 Section in Rome, June 1944–June 1945 3.1 SIB 70 Section, Northern Europe 1944–1945: cases, arrests, property recovered

10 51 53 60 78

Preface and Acknowledgements When in the dim and distant past I was an undergraduate I, like so many of my contemporaries, was inspired by the new social history which explored the lives of ordinary people rather than those who had acquired big names by their exploits – exploits that often could never have been achieved without the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people. During the 1960s the ‘ordinary’ people explored by social historians were generally labourers and artisans; policemen were on the ‘other side’. Yet my father had been a policeman, before making a career move into Bomber Command in 1943 – a move which, the following year, cost him his life and meant that I never saw him, nor he me. This may have encouraged my research to move into police and policing. This book is another result of that move. The focus here is on serving police officers who continued policing roles during the Second World War, but in khaki battledress rather than their blue civilian uniform. The war was fought across the globe, but geographically the focus here is on the European and the Mediterranean theatres. This is partly to keep the book manageable but also because, as Andrew Muldoon of the Metropolitan State University of Denver has pointed out to me, the kinds of sources that I have found for my bit of the story do not exist in the same form for the Far Eastern theatre. I look forward to his forthcoming work. I also hope that Yorrick Small in Brisbane will find the time to work up the material that he collected on the American Army’s training programme for the liberation of the territories occupied by the Japanese. As ever I have benefitted greatly from the advice, assistance and comments of others; my thanks are due to the late George Churchill-Coleman, to Lawrie Austin, Bob Bartlett, Jean-Marc Berlière, Lt. Col. Flavio Carbone, John Dickie, Jonathan Dunnage, Chris Forester, Keith Jackson, Herbert Reinke, David Shonfield, Lawrence Van Haecke, Stephen and Susan Wilcox, to the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, to the volunteers who run the Metropolitan Police Historical Section, and to Richard Callaghan, the staff and volunteers at the Archives of the Corps of Royal Military Police who take such a pride in their corps and ensure that its history is preserved. My thanks also must go to the Police History Society for assistance in undertaking the research.

xii

Preface and Acknowledgements

I owe particular thanks to my colleagues (or perhaps that should be excolleagues, given that I retired so long ago) Paul Lawrence, Georgina Sinclair and Chris Williams who, as good friends, let me bend their ears excessively with some of this material and who made helpful suggestions. Chris was kind enough to read and comment on an entire draft. Some of the ideas for the book grew out of ESRC Research Grant RES-000-22-392, ‘Exploring UK Policing Practices as a Blueprint for Police Reform: The Overseas Deployment of UK Police Officers 1989–2009’, a project for which Georgie Sinclair did the bulk of the research work. I am not sure that my wife got the same buzz from the streets of old Bari as I found walking in the steps of Dickie Hearn and Shagg Sharman, but at least she was game enough to follow, hence the usual dedication. Bedford September 2016

List of Abbreviations AMGOT CA CAB CAO CAPO CID CRMP FFI FTP FO HO IWM KRIPO LIAP

MEPO MPHC NAM OUPA PSB PSO RIC RUC SIB SIS UNRRA WO

Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories Civil Affairs Cabinet (Papers in The National Archives) Civil Affairs Officer Civil Affairs Police Officer Criminal Investigations Department Corps of Royal Military Police Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur: title of different groups of French resistance fighters once unified in 1944 Francs-Tireurs et Partisans: predominantly Communist French resistance fighters Foreign Office (Papers in The National Archives) Home Office (Papers in The National Archives) Imperial War Museum Kriminalpolizisten (German equivalent of British CID) Leave in Addition to Python. Python was the codename for the posting home due to troops who had served four years or more abroad. LIAP, introduced in 1944, granted leave to those with two years and nine months’ service overseas. Metropolitan Police (Papers in The National Archives) Metropolitan Police Historical Collection National Army Museum Open University Police Archive Public Safety Branch (of Allied forces of occupation) Public Safety Officer Royal Irish Constabulary Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Investigation Branch Special Investigations Section (the basic unit of SIB on the ground) United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration War Office (Papers in The National Archives), also warrant officer (senior NCO, most obviously a sergeant major)

Introduction

In the spring of 1969, 140 British soldiers and 50 officers from the Metropolitan Police landed on the small Caribbean island of Anguilla. Since the dissolution of the British West Indies Federation in 1962, the island had been under the administration of its much larger neighbour St. Kitts. The 6,000 or so Anguillans resented this and disorder had flared sporadically since 1967; the local police force of a dozen had been attacked and expelled from the island, an unconstitutional administrative structure had been established, and an unofficial referendum had called for independence. Operation Sheepskin, as the expedition of British soldiers and police to the island was called, was expected to last no more than a month. In the event, over a period of three years, 700 Metropolitan Police officers served tours of duty on the island. The British press had fun with photographs of British Bobbies swimming in the Caribbean wearing their police helmets, and it is tempting to see the affair as a comic turn at the end of empire. For the expedition, which maintained order over the three-year period and succeeded in training a new police force for the island, however, this was far from a tropical holiday and no joke. The Anguillan affair appears comical, at least in its media representation. It was not always funny for the men involved. There are invariably moments of fun, as well as moments of worry, fear and occasionally tragedy for people sent overseas during emergencies. The massacre of six Military Police officers in June 2003 working to restore law and order and an efficient police institution in Iraq offers major tragedy and suggests moments of terrible fear among the victims. These military policemen were doing the same job as many of the men discussed in this book, and their fate might suggest also that the failure to analyse or remember problems from the past, let alone taking account of those of the present, can contribute to major tragedies.1 This book is concerned with Britain’s first major police mission, specifically the use of British police officers during the Second World War integrated into the armed forces in order to conduct policing roles. Those who served in what

2

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

was called Civil Affairs were charged with establishing and maintaining law and order in the wake of ground fighting, and rebuilding institutions such as the police. Those who served in the Special Investigation Branch (SIB) of the Military Police were responsible for investigating crimes committed by service personnel and civilians. Both Civil Affairs Officers (CAOs) and members of the SIB found themselves working alongside former enemies as well as populations that had experienced years of occupation. These British police officers, like everyone else, had personal ideas and opinions, yet they came from a tradition that believed the British Bobby to be unique. They were encouraged in this belief by their superior officers, by politicians and by a variety of commentators who not only considered the Bobby as unique and a model for the world, but who began to voice opinions during the war that, if this model were adopted in some form across the world, then there would be a significant limit on future conflict and oppression. The Anguillan mission might seem an odd place to start, but the first police commander of Operation Sheepskin was Assistant Commissioner Andrew Greville Parry Way, a man who had experience of wartime Civil Affairs. Way had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1934 and he was one of the young men fasttracked for promotion during the 1930s by being sent to the short-lived Police College at Hendon. In an institution whose recruits were largely working class Way’s social origins stood out like many of the 200 or so men selected for Hendon. His father was a clergyman and he himself had been to Christ Church, Oxford. Within two years of joining the police he was an inspector, and not even the prospect of a new world war appeared likely to interfere with steady promotion to the most senior ranks. In 1943, Way was one of the first men to volunteer, to be accepted, trained and commissioned as an officer in the Civil Affairs organization established to restore order and re-establish civilian government in liberated or former enemy territories. Civil Affairs covered much more than policing and drew on individuals with a wide range of skills – economic, industrial, legal. As CAOs they were expected both to use these skills and to take on a range of other activities as required. Senior police officers like Way were appointed to senior posts, while men recruited from the junior ranks of inspector and below were more commonly appointed directly as Civil Affairs Police Officers (CAPOs), but in Italy particularly the Civil Affairs men were so thin on the ground that CAPOs were commonly doing the jobs of CAOs and many of the CAOs had no CAPO to assist. Towards the end of 1943 Way, now a major rather than a sub-divisional inspector, landed in Italy as a CAO in what was originally called the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory. Four years later he transferred to

Introduction

3

the similar special police corps in Venezia Giulia – the Free Territory of Trieste, a disputed region between Italy and Yugoslavia. In 1952, as international debates on the future of Trieste came to a head, he returned to the Metropolitan Police. He continued to serve in the latter force until his retirement towards the end of the year in which the Anguillan operation began. Men from all walks of life and all parts of the army were recruited into the Corps of Military Police during the war to carry out mundane tasks such as the equivalent of civilian police beat patrols, which in the military context looked for soldiers breaking military rules, being drunk and disorderly, absent without leave and so forth. It was, however, civilian police officers that were favoured for the Military Police’s new detective division – the SIB. Most of these held lower ranks in the civilian police than the men recruited into Civil Affairs. A few of them had previous military experience; several of the first SIB men were reservists recalled to the colours in 1939. Once in the field, however, and posted to countries and territories where fighting was continuing, or which had suffered defeat or that were, in some ways, failed states in that their governments and administrations scarcely functioned, the SIB units, like other Military Police companies, regularly found themselves in situations similar to those of the CAOs. They had to deal with local administrations and local police as well as with local criminal offenders who stole Allied stores and equipment, sometimes in league  with absentees or deserters and sometimes in league with personnel that were still serving but happy to profit from fraud, the illicit trafficking of military equipment and the local black market. The SIB is better known than Civil Affairs; it has provided the background for two television series, and Cormoran Strike, the central figure of Robert Galbraith’s (J.K. Rowling) detective stories, was a member of SIB before losing his leg in Afghanistan.2 Yet there is no separate history of the SIB and its role during the Second World War. There are official histories that cover Civil Affairs, but the last of these appeared half a century ago.3 Edward R. Flint’s recent doctoral thesis discusses the importance of Civil Affairs for battlefield commanders. He focuses particularly on France during the three months following the D-Day landings and, writing from a military perspective, he recognizes that, while some mistakes were made, Civil Affairs was useful and proved its necessity.4 Official and semi-official histories describe the origins and the administrative arrangements of these organizations, and the way that the command structure differed between the Italian campaign and that in northwest Europe; but they give little emphasis to the day-to-day experience of CAOs and SIB men at the sharp end of the job.

4

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

The number of British police officers who served in Civil Affairs and the SIB was not particularly great: there appear to have been around 1,000 of them divided roughly equally between the two, but the precise number is difficult to quantify. A few of them left memoirs; some of these were published, but usually privately for friends and family; other, unprinted memoirs are generally short and some of those that survive have been deposited in different archives. The wartime experiences described in these memoirs were important to these men and, they thought, might be of interest to those that knew them. They had no pretentions to being important figures or men that had done anything other than their duty, as they saw it, or ‘their bit’ as wartime phraseology had it. Yet, cumulatively, their individual roles did matter. Those who commanded armies or roared their roles across a national or an international stage needed these ordinary men to give them the opportunity to play their bigger roles and to ensure that their aims and their orders were more than mere rhetoric. The aim of what follows is to give some picture of the efforts and experiences of these ordinary policemen in Civil Affairs and the SIB. Their war involved hardship, dangers and the potential for being victims of violence, but it rarely involved fighting in any major battles. The wartime duties of the men discussed here were envisaged as essentially policing, but war took them a long way from the kinds of policing that they knew and understood in its civilian and British setting. The  police who served in Civil Affairs and SIB came from a civilian police tradition which saw itself as superior to, and a model for, police institutions elsewhere. Among most of the leaders of the two groups, and probably also among at least some of the rank and file, there was the belief that they might bring this model to less fortunate nations by both example and training. ‘If the secret of the success of the British Policeman could be communicated to others abroad in the liberated countries of Europe’, declared the trade paper of British police officers, the Police Review, in 1943, ‘it would be a great and lasting contribution to the peace’.5 There was a strong tradition among politicians, senior police officers and those who wrote about the police in Britain that the Bobby was little more than a citizen in uniform who policed with the consent of his fellow citizens. In some working-class districts, even during the interwar period, it is clear that any consent was enforced by the constable’s baton, his weighted rain cape or his fists. Yet the idea that the policeman was the friend and helper of the population and that he drew his authority from the will of the national community was not something confined to Britain. It was also key to the thinking of Nazi Germany. Here in during the 1930s, the celebratory Polizeitag (the ‘day of the police’) became an increasingly popular event; and very few individuals were

Introduction

5

ever affected by the investigations of those police officers, many of whom could trace the origin of their career back to Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany, known as the Secret State Police – the geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo.6 In addition to the British idea that their police policed by consent was the belief that their superiority to their counterparts on continental Europe and in the United States owed much to their being non-political and non-military; the proudest indication of the latter, and supportive of the notion of policing by consent, was the fact that the Bobby never patrolled with any weaponry other than his baton. The idea that the police were non-political and non-military went back to the nineteenth century; it was strengthened by a conviction that the First World War had been fought to destroy Prussian militarism which, it was assumed, permeated the German police and was to be found in varying degrees in the police forces of other states on continental Europe. Even Britain’s wartime ally, France, had a police institution that carried military weaponry and was answerable to the Minister of War, though many Englishmen would probably have been surprised to know that not all French police belonged to the Gendarmerie nationale. British beliefs about the unique nature and superiority of their police were further cemented by distant observation of Fascist, Nazi and Soviet police forces in the interwar years, even though, admittedly, Fascist, Nazi and Soviet rulers had their apologists in Britain who readily turned a blind eye to the behaviour of the Fascist OVRA, the Nazi Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD. A clutch of histories of, primarily, the English police appeared in the interwar years or within a decade or so of the end of the Second World War. Most were written by men with close links to the police: Sir John Moylan was the Receiver of the Metropolitan Police; H.M. Howgrave-Graham was secretary to the same force; T.A. Critchley was a senior civil servant in the Home Office and secretary to the Royal Commission on the Police which met at the beginning of the 1960s.7 The principal exception here was Charles Reith who was born in Scotland, was enrolled as a medical student at Aberdeen University but became a rubber and tea planter in Ceylon and who served as an officer in the Indian Army during the First World War. Between 1938 and 1956 Reith published a succession of histories that were instrumental in structuring the traditional history of British policing. In spite of its distinct and independent legal system, by implication all of these historians included the police of Scotland with those of England, and Reith in particular stressed the ‘British’ differences with foreign equivalents. The police on continental Europe, he maintained, were imposed on the people by governments; the police in Britain, in contrast, had emerged from the people.8 Such ideas were

6

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

shared across the political spectrum in Britain; in December  1943 Herbert Morrison, the son of a policeman but now a Labour MP and home secretary in the wartime coalition, addressed the Police Federation eulogizing Reith’s work. In terms redolent of Reith, Morrison considered it ‘beyond dispute that the British people have evolved for themselves a high standard of public orderliness – higher probably than that attained by any other large community in the world’. Moreover, he stressed, this evolution had coincided with the emergence of the police. He referred to the presence of British police then serving in the Allied administration of liberated Italy and picking up on Reith’s most recent work as well as echoing the earlier comments of the Police Review, he suggested that the aftermath of the war might benefit from an international police based on the unique nature of that in Britain.9 Any serious contemporary history of policing in Britain now has to admit that the classic differences portrayed between English/British and continental European police institutions require at least some qualification and so too does the idea of a steady, linear progress of English/British police institutions. A brief survey of the some of the complexities and myths about English/British policing on the eve of the Second World War illustrates the extent to which Civil Affairs and SIB men were, in many respects, seeking to establish a chimera in liberated Europe. In terms of accountability, finance and organization the police in Britain were not greatly dissimilar from many of those on continental Europe.10 The traditional historians of the British police generally asserted that the Metropolitan Police of London was the first modern police institution and that other police forces established in Britain more or less used it as their model. In some instances this was the case and a few found their first senior officers from among the ranks of the London force; yet by no means all followed this route and, administratively, the Metropolitan Police was quite different. The Metropolitan Police was answerable directly to the home secretary in much the same way that many European police were answerable to ministers of the interior; local government in London had no role other than ensuring that the local precept towards the force’s cost was paid to the Treasury. The police force in each English and Welsh county, however, was answerable to a Standing Joint Committee (SJC) made up of an equal number of county magistrates and elected county councillors. Generally speaking the SJCs were content to leave decision making to their chief constables; after all, the chief constable was considered as part of the county elite, often a military or naval officer used to command, and, like almost all of the magistrates and many of the councillors, a gentleman. A

Introduction

7

borough force, in contrast, was answerable to a watch committee appointed by the local town council. Watch committee members were generally members of the council. Some of these committees took a close interest in their local police; unlike the  SJCs, they had the ultimate responsibility for recruiting and for discipline. It was possible for the long-standing chair of a watch committee to have a greater experience of police and policing than a young, freshly appointed chief constable; and while there is a tradition that the  police in  England have always been independent of politics and independent in matters of operational decisions, in the case of a watch committee with positive ideas and a determination to enforce a particular policy,  it was for the chief constable to obey their directions. If in the counties the  chief constable was part of the social elite, in most boroughs he was considered as a town servant. Some of the borough forces were very small; the Home Office had been urging that the smaller forces amalgamate with their larger neighbours since the 1850s; in 1932 a parliamentary select committee had urged, once again, the abolition of forces in boroughs with a population of 30,000 or less. The Departmental Committee on Detective Police which was appointed in the following year noted that 41 out of the 181 police forces in England and  Wales consisted of less than 50 men. But the control and ownership of its own police was a mark of pride for a borough; as one MP put it in response the idea of amalgamation, the form of localism that maintained forces of all sizes might not be supremely efficient and might be a little extravagant, but it was part of an Englishman’s ‘cherished rights’.11 In very broad terms the structure and management of police in Scottish burghs and counties were similar to those in the English and Welsh boroughs and counties, though all of this was largely omitted from any discussion or analyses in the traditional histories. Even more marked, however, was the omission from these histories of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and of its successor, following the partition in 1922, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Essentially, the RIC/RUC was an armed police, deployed and equipped on similar lines to a European gendarmerie, a structure of policing for which the French had provided the model. The force was centralized and directly responsible to a government minister specifically, in the case of the RUC, the minister of home affairs for Northern Ireland. The Irish Constabulary was often seen as the model for the police forces of the British Empire, although there was no serious attempt to conceptualize this role until after the Second World War; and subsequent research has demonstrated how police institutions in the empire were formed in a much more pick and mix manner than by any simple

8

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

importation of an Irish model.12 Moreover, on several occasions senior officers from the RIC, and later from the RUC, were recruited to command the larger police forces on the mainland. British politicians might deny that there was any ‘political police’ in the country but, in the same breath, they had to admit that there was, of course, Special Branch which investigated political threats. On occasions Special Branch officers had gone rather further than their remit following their own political agendas and making assumptions about the political commitment of individuals who challenged the status quo, yet such incidents rarely hit the headlines or created an outcry beyond political groups critical of the governing structure.13 At the beginning of the First World War, the government had called upon the Metropolitan Police Special Branch to furnish the army with ten men who could investigate the floods of refugees, mainly Belgians, crossing the Channel to escape the German advance in what is something of a precursor of demands made during the Second World War. The nervousness about political police in Britain was linked with the belief that such police were widely used on continental Europe and with a more general anxiety about police in plain clothes who might set out to entrap an individual. There had been concerns about agents provocateurs and entrapment during the Victorian period; at the same time, there had been an increasing fascination with, and a gradual increase in, public esteem for the police detective. Even so detective police remained few in number in the interwar period, and some forces, especially the smaller ones, had none. In the late 1920s detectives made up about 3.6 per cent of the 56,000 police officers in England and Wales and just over 1,000 of these were to be found in London’s Metropolitan Police. A training school for detectives was established by the Metropolitan Police in 1902; for around thirty years it was the only one of its kind in England and some provincial forces also sent their detectives there. There was no basic textbook for the trainee detectives, though those inclined to read up on the subject could turn to the English translation of Hans Gross’s Criminal Investigation: A Practical Textbook for Magistrates, Police Officer and Lawyers. This book had been first published in 1893 as Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik; it was a guide for those working in the Austro-Hungarian legal system; nevertheless it went through three English editions between 1906 and 1934. In January 1933 the semi-official quarterly The Police Journal began a new series with an introduction from A.L. Dixon, assistant undersecretary at the Home Office, promising more emphasis in future on instruction.14 As

Introduction

9

the decade progressed this promise was kept by the Journal with an increasing number of articles on aspects of detection. However, when Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Morrish suggested to the Home Office first that he could write a textbook on detection for English police and, second, that the Home Office might offer some support while he did it, the official response was that he could tackle it alone when he resigned or retired, and without official blessing. At the same time the artisanal traditions of the British police underpinned the belief that book learning and theory could never properly replace practical experience or the good detective’s innate qualities ‘for ferreting out and getting there’.15 The kind of training offered to French police detectives by Edmond Locard at the Police Crime Laboratory established in Lyons in 1910 did not figure on the English detective’s horizons, even though, amusingly, Locard himself was a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and urged his trainees to think like Holmes and to remember that every contact between an offender and a crime scene left some sort of trace. In Britain, where scientific aids were provided for detection, these tended to be the result of the enthusiasm of a chief constable. George Hatherill joined the Metropolitan Police in 1920. He went on to make a significant reputation as a detective, eventually becoming commandant of the Detective Training School, and his last major investigation was the Great Train Robbery of 1963. In his memoirs, Hatherill recalled that his detective training lasted for five weeks and consisted of two hours in the afternoon of each working day, followed by an exam. He made no mention of any detective training school as such, and he commented that there was next to nothing in the course about forensics, ballistics, fingerprints, interviews with due observance of Judges’ Rules or a variety of other issues which he considered essential for the police detective. Homework for the course had to be fitted in during spare time, of which there was little in a working day that could run from 9.00 am to 10.00 pm.16 By the end of the 1920s, and in spite of its later response to Morrish, the Home Office had come to the conclusion that detective training needed to be more extensive and to take note of some of the new scientific methods. In consequence a small group of senior civil servants began discussions with the three HM Inspectors of Constabulary and a few chief constables about establishing a more systematic structure for detective training as well as better linkages between forces for mutual investigative support. Although the resulting Departmental Committee on Detective Policing, established in 1933, took five years to report, training courses for both new and senior CID officers began to be developed early on, and the first eight-week course began

10

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

in May 1936. Demand for these courses was so great that in September 1938, three months after the Departmental Committee’s report had been issued, a third training centre was established in Birmingham to ease the pressure on the original centres in Hendon and Wakefield.17 Even so, the number of detectives had increased from around 2,600, when the committee began its deliberations, to 3,061 when its report was published; most of these were in the major cities where, on average, they made up about 6 per cent of the local force (Table I.1). While, as a rule, firearms were not carried by British police forces they were readily available for some officers. It is interesting to note that from the late 1930s the printed Central Record of Service form for Metropolitan Police officers had an entry for ‘Pistol Shooting’ under ‘Special Exams’. Moreover, if close links with the army did not exist, there had always been a significant number of army officers among those appointed to command county and bigcity police forces. There was also a significant sprinkling of former soldiers among the rank and file. The  Desborough Committee, which met in the aftermath of the police strikes of 1918 and 1919 to investigate police pay and conditions, found that a majority of new recruits had some military experience. Much of this was, almost certainly, the result of the large number of men who had served between 1914 and 1918, but the recruitment of soldiers was not something new to the aftermath of the First World War.18 The committee did not see any major problem with encouraging soldiers to join the police; rather, it considered it pertinent

Table I.1 Detectives in English police forces, 1939

Total number

Number of detectives

c. 60,000

3,061

5

20,000

1,198

6

Birmingham

1,737

114

6.5

Liverpool

1,725

110

6

Manchester

1,409

82

6

Lancashire

2,150

135

6

West Riding

1,536

58

4

Police force In England and Wales Metropolitan Police

Source: Home Office (1939) para 91.

Detectives as rough percentage (%)

Introduction

11

to draw special attention to the beneficial effects, both physical and mental, which can be derived from a short period of service in the Army, provided that advantage is also taken of the present Army educational system. We consider accordingly that police authorities should be encouraged to give special consideration to men who have qualified themselves in this way.19

While the Desborough Committee brought a degree of uniformity to the more than 200 police forces in England, Scotland and Wales, recruiting policy tended to remain the decision of the chief constable. Probably as a result of many chief constables being recruited from former soldiers, especially those commanding the larger forces, they tended to agree with the committee. In 1937, while the numbers varied between forces, the House of Commons was informed that, on average, one in ten of police recruits was an ex-serviceman.20 During the interwar years some young men joined the army with a police career in mind. Horace Rogers, for example, enlisted in the Grenadier Guards in the late 1920s with the express intention of returning to his native Wolverhampton and joining the police when his three years’ service was completed. Rogers’s three years was almost up when Lt. Col. Frank Stevens, the chief constable of Bedfordshire, requested that the Grenadiers’ Regimental Headquarters send him some guardsmen for interview and examination. Six men were sent, two from each battalion; Rogers and two others were accepted.21 Such a recruitment policy ensured the presence of fit, imposing men, who carried themselves and their uniforms well; but the downside was that, should war break out there were large numbers of police officers that would be recalled to the colours. The government became fully aware of this with figures collected in the summer of 1934 which revealed that almost 3,000 reservists were serving in the police. The number declined by about 400 over the next two years, but concerns were sufficient to organize agreements among different departments of state that there would be three months’ grace following the outbreak of war before the reservists were recalled and during which time the police could activate various police reserves. In 1937, however, the government, anxious to stimulate recruitment into the army by improving the prospects for men when their army service was over, authorized the Home Office to encourage men to join the police when their time with the colours was over. This potentially aggravated the problem of the loss of reservists in the event of war. Discussions ensured that the three months’ grace would still apply, but the War Office was adamant that it could only agree to the period of grace providing the number of reservists did not exceed 5,000.22

12

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

There were about 3,000 reservists in the English and Welsh police forces when war was declared in September 1939 and, at the end of the year with the end of the three months’ grace, they rejoined their units. Arthur ‘Old Pick’ Pickering, a former gunner serving in the Bedfordshire Police, returned to the Royal Artillery; he went on to become a battery sergeant major and to win the Belgian Croix de Guerre. Nat Taylor, another Grenadier Guardsman who was in the West Sussex Police, returned to his regiment but, two years later, he found himself back in the police instructing former colleagues how to use rifles, Bren and Lewis guns, in the event of a German landing.23 Many others stayed with the army but, unlike ‘Old Pick’ a number of these volunteered for, or were transferred to the Corps of Military Police. Antony Wanstall provides a good example. He had been advised by a retired detective inspector of the Metropolitan Police to join the Guards as a stepping stone to the police. After three years in the Coldstream Guards he joined a midlands police force in 1935. Recalled to the colours he transferred to the Military Police and from there, in 1941, to its embryonic detective force, the SIB.24 The War Office believed that police officers were sorely needed to stiffen the ranks of the Military Police and to train new recruits. When, in 1940, the army agreed to release up to 500 reservists who, like Taylor, had come from the police, it insisted that none of those then serving in the Corps of Military Police were going to be allowed to go.25 All units in the British Army had their own Regimental Police, but the tasks of the Corps of Military Police covered all soldiers anywhere and everywhere. The rank and position of Provost Marshal dated back to the thirteenth century; he had overall responsibility for policing the king’s army. Wellington had ordered the creation of mounted provosts to police his troops in the Peninsular, but it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that two military police units, one mounted and the other on foot, were formally established. In 1926, the two bodies were united to form the Corps of Military Police. In 1935, Provost Companies, with a fixed complement, were appointed for each division; by the middle of the war these companies were theoretically composed of 100 men. The policemen, known as ‘Redcaps’ and ‘Cherry Nobs’ (because of the distinctive red cover on their caps) as well as by much ruder and offensive terms, were expected to enforce discipline and good order; this involved, at the minor but perhaps most annoying end of the scale, telling soldiers to do up buttons and look smart. For most ordinary soldiers this was an irritant and aggressive enforcement was not conducive to any civilian notions of policing by consent that lingered among some of the better-off conscripts. At the other end of the scale military policing meant arresting absentees and deserters, as well as

Introduction

13

soldiers suspected of criminal offending on military property. As in the civilian world, however, change and development led to an extension of the policing role. Policing had always included a degree of traffic management; the spread of mechanized transport accentuated this requirement and the first thirty years of the twentieth century witnessed civilian police enforcing new speed restrictions as well as developing new traffic units such as the Treasury-financed experiments with ‘courtesy cops’ in London, Essex, Lancashire and Cheshire. The growth of military transport and the need to direct enormous numbers of men and materiel to and from battle areas during the First World War led to an expansion of military policing involving traffic control. During the interwar years the army became more mechanized and the increasing likelihood of a new war led to the recruitment of Automobile Association (AA) scouts into special Territorial Army units; this appears to have been a development based on the practice of some civilian forces of employing AA and Royal Automobile Club scouts as auxiliaries for traffic management. An interest in, and need for, detective policing within the Military Police, however, did not keep pace with the developments that had gathered momentum in the civilian world during the interwar years. A few detective police had been recruited during the First World War but they were rapidly swept into Army Intelligence rather than investigating conventional crime by troops. At the end of the war a small detective squad was established for the British Army of Occupation in the Rhineland, but it was not maintained when the troops left in 1929. Within weeks of the British Expeditionary Force landing in France on the outbreak of the Second World War, however, the need for detective police within the Corps of Military Police had become painfully apparent.26 What follows is an attempt to describe the war experiences of some of the men who during the Second World War, having exchanged their blue uniforms for khaki battledress, continued often in a very broad sense to carry out policing roles. While this constitutes the broad narrative, however, there is also an underlying attempt to explore the way in which the police officers involved understood the police service to which they belonged in peacetime and the police institutions of liberated countries that served at their side or that were taken under their tutelage. There is a second story here that could be researched and written regarding the perspectives of those people in liberated or former enemy countries who had to deal with SIB or CAOs but that, together with a detailed study of these units in the Far East, must await another historian, one who is more familiar with the geographical area and

14

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

perhaps also with some relevant languages. The focus here is on Europe and the Mediterranean. This book is divided into two parts. The first four chapters deal with the men who served in, indeed who established, the SIB. Some of these already had experience as detectives in the civilian forces in which they served before the war; but work in the wartime SIB was often quite different – more dangerous, much busier and more exhausting. The fourth chapter closes in on a single individual and his SIB section addressing what he and his comrades thought they were doing and their day-to-day experiences. Chapters 5–8 focus on the men and the tasks of those who, like Andrew Way, volunteered for Civil Affairs or similar police missions. A greater proportion of these men came from the higher ranks of the civilian police. Those that volunteered from the Metropolitan Police had to have the agreement of the commissioner; the men from other forces needed the permission of their local watch committee or SJC before they could leave. The commissioner and the local committees recognized the needs of the war effort, but they were often reluctant to see too many of their force, especially men with experience and of senior rank, exchanging their police blue for army khaki; after all, they were still having to cope with multifarious new wartime burdens as well as with crime and disorder, neither of which declined just because there was a war on. If local police authorities were reluctant to see them go, it seems also that some in the army were reluctant to see them arrive. CAOs and the SIB were not considered to be fighting soldiers and it was galling for some officers and gentlemen who felt that they had been born to command and who were rising, or had risen through the army hierarchy, finding themselves having to act alongside ‘temporary’ gentlemen temporarily accorded the rank of captain, major, colonel. Britain was still a society in which social class was significant. John Howard followed the track of some SIB men; a regular soldier in the 1930s he had joined the Oxford Police in 1938, was recalled to the colours in 1939 and was commissioned a year or so later. He recalled county types ignoring him, or ‘cutting’ him when he joined his regiment; on D-Day, however, Major Howard and his men secured the first British objective – Pegasus Bridge.27 NCOs from the SIB were not allowed to interrogate officers so as to maintain the army hierarchy; and most of the CAOs never had to enter the mess of an old-established regiment. They appear to have been viewed by the ‘county types’ who ‘cut’ Howard as socially inferior but occasionally necessary appendages. The CAO himself was often required to be a jack of all trades; like the work of the SIB his tasks were often complex, hectic, exhausting and above all more

Introduction

15

dangerous than those that he undertook in the civilian police. Many of his duties remained those of a police officer but, as will be described below, on the ground these were often extended into judicial and administrative spheres. When peace came, like most of the men drafted into the armed forces, most of the CAOs and members of the SIB wanted to get out of khaki and to return to what they considered to be peacetime normality. In recent years there has been a growing interest in war’s impact on peace, on men coming home and the impact of their wartime experiences on themselves and on their families. The concluding chapter closes in on these issues showing, particularly, how some men appear to have reintegrated reasonably well, how others used their experience to change their career, and others developed a resentment of what they saw as broken promises and continuing class favouritism. Superior officers and perhaps some politicians, for as long as they knew of a man’s wartime career, kept it on file and used it as they felt necessary. Hence Way’s appointment to Anguilla and the deployment of others as the Empire was transformed, sometimes violently, into the Commonwealth. Yet, unfortunately, much institutional memory disappeared with the deaths of the actors. The SIB has continued and, like other army units, the Corps of Royal Military Police is immensely proud of its past and its traditions; but Civil Affairs was relegated and largely dismissed by the British Army. This, together with and combination of wishful thinking and ignorance on the part of some politicians and their advisors, has contributed to problems in the contemporary world.

Part One

The Detective

1

The Origins of the SIB

Campion’s score In a little over one month after the declaration of war in September 1939, there were over 150,000 British troops deployed in France. Soldiers can be drawn from all ranks of society, but this British Expeditionary Force (BEF), like its predecessor twenty-five years earlier, was a professional force. The other ranks of such an army, especially those in the ‘teeth-arms’ like the infantry, were commonly recruited from the poorer social classes – men who had little education and, often, who had experienced a tough family upbringing; such an upbringing could have been especially tough during the depression. This section of society was also, in the traditional view, the one from which the criminal and the criminal class originated. A poor and tough upbringing, however, were not requirements for becoming a criminal offender, and there were men from all social classes and in all ranks of the BEF who thought nothing of acquiring for their own purposes, or to sell on for profit, some of the vast quantities of equipment that was landed daily to feed and equip the army. By the end of October, the quantity of stores that was disappearing was ringing alarm bells among the commanders of the BEF, and they already had the assistance of eight-man squads from the Gendarmerie nationale, the police institution answerable first and foremost to the minister of war in Paris, working alongside their British provost companies.1 The alarm spread from France to London, and, like many of those police forces in England and Wales without, or with only small inexperienced, detective departments, the War Office decided to contact Scotland Yard for advice and assistance. On 4  November  1939, Sir Norman Kendal, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and responsible for the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, wrote to Pierre Mondanel, the head of the Sûreté nationale in the French Ministry of the Interior, about the problem. The implication of Kendal’s letter, and perhaps also the opinion of the army’s high command reluctant to

20

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

admit to criminality amongst its trained and disciplined professionals, was that the offenders were principally French civilians: It is suggested that large consignments of clothing and food are being stolen and Nantes is mentioned as a place in which numbers of the local inhabitants are said to be wearing various garments which must have come from our Army Stores.2

Kendal suggested sending a chief inspector from the Metropolitan Police to consult with someone in Mondanel’s department. Mondanel, a veteran police officer who had risen to prominence under the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, was happy to comply with the request, not least, perhaps, because it gave him some involvement with the war effort. Moreover, by using a few of his men to assist in combatting the serious problem of the theft of supplies, Mondanel probably saw the opportunity for getting his civilian police some kudos and ensuring that the Gendarmerie did not win all the glory. He promised Kendal that he would direct the regional detective squad based at Rennes to investigate. It took rather more time to organize a Metropolitan Police detective to visit France than Kendal had initially thought. In the meantime he received more detailed information from the Provost Marshal at the BEF’s General Headquarters. This reported pilfering: 1. 2. 3.

At all docks where supplies are being off-loaded. In transit between docks and Base Supply Depots. To a lesser degree between Base Supply Depots and Supply Rail Heads.

The police officer eventually selected for the investigation was Detective Chief Inspector George Hatherill. He was an obvious choice; he had served as an infantryman on the Western Front in the latter stages of the First World War and had been briefly in the Army of Occupation in Germany. He spoke French reasonably well, had served as a Special Branch Officer in the embassy in Brussels and, when in 1931 he moved from Special Branch into the CID, he was frequently selected over the next few years to travel abroad for investigations. During two of these visits he had become personally acquainted with Mondanel. On 12 December, Hatherill, together with Detective Sergeant Cyril Charles Nicholls, who had travelled with him, the provost marshal and an assistant provost marshal, again met Mondanel surrounded by an array of French military officers in Paris. Hatherill was surprised to hear about the small

The Origins of the SIB

21

number of British Military Police available for checking and investigating crimes and misdemeanours committed by members of the BEF and requested a break in the meeting to confer with the British officers. When the meeting reconvened Hatherill explained, with the provosts’ agreement, that ‘some reorganisation and effective prevention work on the part of the British Military Authorities’ was required. He then set off on a tour of the bases at Rennes, Nantes, Brest, Le Havre and Rouen.3 On 3  January  1940, Hatherill submitted a report of his tour which was devastating in its conclusions about the extent of theft and unruliness among the troops responsible for unloading ships, about the hostility that this behaviour was creating among the French population and about the overall lack of police officers in the military capable of dealing with the scale and variety of the problems. Some of the thefts he believed were done in the ports of loading; military vehicles, shipped from Barry Docks in South Wales, for example, were found to be stripped of spare parts, tools and various accessories and since there was no market for English car accessories in France it seemed most likely that dockers in Barry were the both the thieves and the beneficiaries. But there were plenty of other goods to be looted on arrival in the French ports: beer, rum, whisky, cigarettes and chocolate for the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI), foodstuffs, boots and clothing. When the SS Baron Nairn was unloaded at Le Havre among the many things listed as missing were 84 vests, 98 pairs of boots, 122 pairs of socks, 143 jerseys, 110 toothbrushes, 764 clasp knives and 50,000 razor blades; a little under a half of all of these goods on the ship’s manifest appear to have found their way to supply depots and from there to the troops. The men serving as dockers in the British Labour Corps at Le Havre had been recruited principally from the dock areas of the large ports in Britain. ‘The men’, concluded Hatherill, finding such an unaccustomed lack of control and with their experience, are taking full advantage of the situation. Where sentries exist, they are usually of a younger type than the dockers and are therefore unable to control them as they should do. Further, owing to the unruly nature of these men, their own N.C.O.s have to think of their personal safety when dealing with them. One N.C.O. has already been found dead and three men have been found drowned at different times in strange circumstances, which illustrates the urgent need for rigid control. These men get drunk at all hours of the day on impure spirits of the lowest quality, with resulting brawls and disturbances. These lead to very serious incidents which are already gravely impairing our relationship with the French.

22

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

Dockers had a reputation for working in packs to liberate goods that they were unloading for their own use, for their close-knit community or as goods to sell on for their own profit; and British ports had their own police or an understanding with their local police to check up on men as they left work.4 The men unloading the BEF supplies, however, were not in their home communities. As one policeman posted to Brest recalled, they were living in very poor conditions, sleeping on concrete floors with a single blanket. Also, one of the companies in the port of Le Havre were not dockers in civilian life but German and Austrian volunteers who had volunteered to serve as noncombatant pioneers. One of their number remembered how they looked forward to boxes or sacks falling to the ground and bursting open when, although it was forbidden, ‘interesting contents’ could be ‘liberated’.5 It was not only dockers from the labour companies that Hatherill reported as responsible for criminal offending. Goods disappeared when they were being transported to depots by train; and, in addition to the theft of stores and supplies, there were reports and allegations of many other forms of offending. In October the body of an artilleryman had been fished from the River Erdre, which cuts through the northern half of Nantes as it flows into the Loire.6 A post-mortem suggested that he had drowned, but his face and upper body were severely battered. Enquiries suggested that he had been on a drinking binge with two gunners from his battery and there had been a fight, but no one in the military present in Nantes had the experience to investigate the matter further. In Rennes it was claimed that three British soldiers were responsible for a smash-and-grab raid on a jeweller. British troops were also accused of two cases of robbery with violence, a major burglary, a score or more lesser assaults, petty thefts, incidents of disorderly behaviour, ‘and leaving cafés, etc. after consuming drinks and meals and refusing to pay’. Across the region there were allegations of assaults on women and rape by British soldiers. Hatherill believed many of these were exaggerated ‘especially where the victim states that she was robbed of her handbag or purse as she is entitled to put a claim against the British Authorities for compensation’. Hatherill noted that such military policemen as were available were stretched and few had any expertise in dealing with crime. The officers serving as provosts were keen and often imaginative, but several had been in post only for a short while. Some of their efforts were yielding positive results, particularly with regard to the prevention of theft, but even where suspected soldiers were arrested, the cases were often so poorly investigated and so poorly presented that they never went to trial. A major in the Judge Advocate General’s department told him that

The Origins of the SIB

23

in eight cases of stealing stores that had been put before him on the day they met, ‘four he had had to throw out completely and the rest he had had to return with direction for further investigation with instruction in detail how they were to be done.’ In Hatherill’s estimation, what was required to deal with both the wide range of criminal offending and the lack of proper investigation and case preparation was a group of experienced detective police officers deployed to work closely with the army. Hatherill’s report rapidly crossed the desks of key figures in the Home Office and the War Office. Manifestly it was not possible to allow such a loss of stores to continue, nor to permit any serious friction between the British military and the French civilian population. Within a week Colonel W. B. Hayley, the provost marshal for England and hence the commander of the Corps of Military Police and responsible for its School of Instruction, had plans to enlist army reservists serving in the police and to initiate courses on criminal investigation. Some of these reservists were sent to ports and towns, where they were directed to supervise the loading and unloading of cargo; they became the nucleus for the ports provost companies charged with preventing the pilferage of war materiel from docks both at home and overseas, a task that did not greatly endear them to dock workers. Together with the plan for courses on criminal investigation there was also a proposal to establish a ‘special investigation section’ modelled on the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was asked for a group of CID officers ‘who might be induced to volunteer … to form the nucleus of this section’. The army proposed a body of thirty-two men consisting of a major, who would also be an assistant provost marshal, a subaltern, five warrant officers and twenty-five sergeants. But the Metropolitan Police presented a rather different plan based, at least in part, on the recommendations of the man selected to command the new section, Superintendent Clarence Campion. Clarence Edgar Campion was born in Peckham, South East London, in 1892; he was the youngest of nine children born to a general labourer and stoker. At the end of his teens he had joined the P and O Steamship Company and he worked in a variety of capacities sailing to India and Australia. In March 1914 he joined the Metropolitan Police; a year later he volunteered for military service and shortly thereafter he left for France with the Army Service Corps. He met a young French woman whom he married in Cassel in November 1916. He became fluent in French and spoke some German which led to him being used as a translator. By 1918 he was a sergeant major and returned to the United Kingdom with the promise of a commission in the new RAF, but he was unable

24

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

to take up the commission as the war ended and, in consequence, he returned to the police. He began to make a name for himself as a detective and in the mid1920s he applied for, and was accepted as a member of, the tiny Police Mission to Greece. The appointment fell through when the Greek government refused to pay for a new member of the mission; and a second appointment, a few years later, also fell through when he failed to give his superiors a full account of the circumstances in which he served a warrant for fraud. This was labelled as ‘neglect of duty’ and, in the commissioner’s eyes, made it unwise to send him to Greece. Nevertheless, by early 1933 he had earned thirty-six commendations for his police activity and in the following year both the commissioner and a judge at the Central Criminal Court commended his acumen in investigating a particularly complex case of conspiracy to corrupt public morals. In 1938, he was appointed superintendent and was put in charge of the Criminal Records Office at Scotland Yard. Campion, it was evident, was possessed of a unique set of qualifications that made him an  ideal choice for commanding  the new investigation department of the Military Police. He was noted for his abilities as a detective; his wartime experience in the Army Service Corps had given him an awareness of the collection, storage and distribution of military supplies; he had some connection with France through his marriage,  and he spoke German together with fluent French.7 On 18 January, Campion wrote to Kendal with his own suggestions on the War Office plan. He explained that he would prefer to have a nucleus of fewer men but with the option to increase the number as circumstances required. He  favoured a subaltern, a warrant officer and a sergeant in each of the five sites indicated by Hatherill as needing police investigators: Brest, Nantes, Le Mans, Le Havre and GHQ. This select group of men could be promoted and transferred as and when the need arose. The number could also be increased by training new men, and he was sure that there were many among the civilian police officers already drafted into the Military Police. The major problem, he believed, was not the theft of army stores but the more conventional crimes committed against civilians and their property. Dealing with these offences would require close co-operation with the civilian authorities; and Hatherill had warned about the ‘enormous sense of their own importance and dignity’ present among the French commissaires de police, some of whom ‘even if approached by senior NCOs consider their dignity affronted’. Campion agreed with Hatherill but no doubt aware of the hierarchical nature of the army and the class distinction clung to by some regular officers, he also highlighted another reason why a commissioned officer was required for each subsection:

The Origins of the SIB

25

it may on occasions be necessary to take statements from officers, or to interview an officer commanding a Unit concerning matters detrimental to those under his command. Identification parades might have to be arranged, or it may even be that the talk in the Officers’ Mess might be of assistance in the investigation. An officer below commissioned rank would soon come to a dead-end in his investigations.

The commissioner, Sir Philip Game, who had served in the Regular Army in the Boer War and the First World War before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps and, subsequently its successor the RAF, agreed with all of Campion’s proposals. In a letter, sent by Kendal to the undersecretary of state for war, Game urged Campion’s proposals but with the implication that they were, in fact, his own. There followed the necessary financial discussions between the Metropolitan Police and the War Office regarding the men’s pay and the continuation of the various allowances that they received as detectives; patriotic commitment and duty notwithstanding, a belief that the continuation of a CID shorthand allowance had been agreed prompted at least one sour argument a few years later. While the financial situation was being discussed and resolved, eighteen volunteers were selected to serve under Campion. There were seven sergeants and eleven constables, including Cyril Nicholls who had accompanied Hatherill on his visit to the BEF at the end of 1939. Nicholls, who had been born in Ipswich, had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1933; he was promoted to 2nd Class Sergeant in the CID after just three years of service and, at the beginning of 1940 he was twenty-seven years old, which made him fairly typical of the men who had volunteered to serve alongside Campion. Two-thirds of them were aged between twenty-nine and thirty-three years and had roughly ten years’ police service. The  oldest, Sergeant J.W. Rignall, was thirty-nine years old and had joined the police in March 1920. The youngest, Constable R.A. Crocker, was just twenty-four and had served for four-and-a-half years. The Metropolitan Police personnel records of the men show that most of them had received one or more commendations for their activities. Half of them were London-born. Before joining the police they had done a variety of things: five of them, including Nicholls, were described as ‘clerks’ which appears to have been a catch-all term for any young man working in an office. Ronnie Crocker, from Shoreditch, had been the ‘assistant manager of a public house’ – a surprising position given that he was just twenty years old when he had joined the police and perhaps this was simply an inflated title for a barman. Frank Elliot, from Chesterfield, had worked on the railways; Surrey-born John (‘Jack’) Ellis had been a ship’s steward.8

26

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

Some of them had experience of life in the armed services. Detective Sergeant George Ripley had served seven years in the Coldstream Guards rising to the rank of sergeant before joining the police. James Rignall, like Campion, had served during the First World War; two others, William Bilyard and George Hooper, had been Territorials, and Harold Dibbens had served for three years in the Royal Navy; but the others had no military experience.9 For two weeks the detectives moved into a hut at the Military Police Training Depot at Mytchett, Surrey, roughly midway between the army town of Aldershot and the Military College at Sandhurst. Here Ripley, promoted to sergeant major, introduced them all to basic drill and took them through the basics of putting their webbing together, of map reading and revolver practice.10 They also received some rapid instruction in military law and court-martial procedure. On 29 February, they arrived in France and moved to their respective postings. On arrival they were joined by another former detective sergeant, now captain, Phillip Attfield from the Metropolitan Police, Special Branch; he had joined the army the previous November with two other Special Branch officers and, presumably because of some experience with the Foreign Office he had been appointed to the provost marshal’s department at the BEF’s General Headquarters.11

Figure 1.1 The first SIB recruits from the Metropolitan Police Back row: Sgt. E. Purslow; Sgt. A. Raisbeck; Sgt. F. Pollard; Sgt. W. Billyard: Sgt. R. Crocker; Sgt. G. Coutts: Sgt. H. Baker. Middle Row: Sgt Major T. Baker (Depot Staff ); C.S.M. H. Green; C.S.M. W. Heddon; C.S.M. M. Good; CSM C.C. Nicholls; C.S.M. J. Rignall; C.S.M. G. Ripley; C.S.M. Brown (Depot Staff ). Front row: Lieut. H.J. Dibbens; Lieut. J.G. Ellis; Lietu.G. Hooper; Major C. Campion; Col. W.B. Hayley D.S.O. (Provost Marshal); Lieut. Col. R.T.S. Kitwood (Commandant Depot at Mitchett); Lieut. C. James; Lieut. F.H. Elliot; R.S.M. Hewitt (Depot Staff ); C.S.M. Jones (Depot Staff ). Photo: Reproduced by Permission of Royal Military Police Museum

The Origins of the SIB

27

Campion’s eighteen volunteers were all given military ranks and, on arrival in France, they were divided into groups of three each comprising one second lieutenant, one sergeant major and one sergeant. Each group was sent to a military base with orders, according to Frank Elliott’s recollection, to build up an average strength of six sergeants. These new sergeants were to be found from civilian police officers already serving with the Military Police. Ripley, who was posted to Rennes with Elliott, recalled that they rapidly acquired a section of six men in this way. Harold Dibbens, posted to Brest, ‘co-opted three “Redcaps”, ex-reservists and civil policemen’ to deal with the problems on the docks; he also took over responsibility for an army detention centre in the city, staffed by a warrant officer and four sergeants.12 There is little information about what the men achieved during their few weeks in France though Norman Phillips, whose book appears to have been based partly on interviews, wrote in glowing terms about Detective Sergeant, now Lieutenant, Jack Ellis’s success in breaking up a gang that had succeeded in taking £10,000 worth of supplies from the local NAAFI in Nantes.13 There was also a serious pilferage problem on the docks where the stevedore battalion, recruited from among Liverpool dockers were allegedly taking ‘every possible opportunity … to “relieve” the BEF of attractive items for consumption or sale’. Kenneth Thrift, a Maidstone Borough detective constable, and Horace ‘Old Bill’ Cooper, an ordinary police constable in St. Albans, like most of the recalled reservists that were recruited into the Military Police of the BEF, were former guardsmen; they had been sent to Nantes to deal with the problems before Ellis’s arrival. Ellis took Thrift, Cooper and another five reservists with detective or plain clothes experience to work as his investigation section.14 By the third week of March Colonel S.V. Kennedy, the provost marshal of the BEF, had met most of the new investigators. ‘We are very impressed by their efficiency and the way they have already set about their job’, he told Kendal; and Campion himself was ‘extremely pleasant, efficient and very easy to work with’. Seven weeks later the German assault on the Low Countries began and the BEF was forced to begin its painful withdrawal to the Channel coast. Campion’s men found themselves engaged in very different duties from those that they had expected. Ripley was ordered to leave his section during the retreat and was put in charge of a company of Redcaps whose officer was missing. Ripley eventually got away on a tramp steamer from St. Nazaire. Ellis, who had been investigating the murder of a British sergeant by a French soldier, also escaped through St. Nazaire, picking up another ninety Redcaps en route as he did so.15 Just before the German attack Dibbens had been ordered to Douai, and when the situation

28

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

became serious he was made second in command of a basic Military Police unit, 102 Provost Company. Like many of the provost companies in the BEF this was made up of Territorials and included about fifty former AA scouts. During the retreat the company found itself reconnoitring and keeping open routes for the withdrawal. Dibbens’s commanding officer described him as ‘a typical policeman, utterly reliable’ who should have received a gallantry medal for the way in which he had courageously taken charge of an ammunition convoy under air attack. On the beaches of Dunkirk Dibbens and 102 Provost Company further distinguished themselves by destroying equipment and vehicles that could be of use to the enemy, by marshalling troops to the jetties and distributing rations. For five days they assisted with the evacuation. Dibbens himself, using his previous naval experience, organized the construction of a jetty made with army lorries anchored into the ground and covered with planks, which greatly facilitated the embarkation of troops. This earned him the first of two mentions in dispatches.16 While his men distinguished themselves in unexpected ways, during a German air attack Major Campion received a mortal head wound.17 He was the only one of the detectives that failed to make it back safely across the Channel with the bedraggled remnants of the BEF.

After Dunkirk Defeat and a sudden withdrawal from continental Europe had not been envisaged when Campion’s men first joined the BEF, but the army still required policing for soldiers in the United Kingdom, in the Middle East and also across the Empire. Moreover the army was growing in numbers and required increasing amounts of supplies to keep it fed, moving and sufficiently equipped to continue fighting. The provost companies patrolled towns and cities, and especially railway stations, watching for absentees and deserters; they also dealt with thefts from military installations by both soldiers and civilians. During 1941 and 1942, for example, the provost company based at Catterick Camp made a string of arrests for the appropriation of both War Department and civilian property; the offenders included privates selling army clothing and civilian workmen in the camp somehow acquiring military articles; and a tenyear-old boy was arrested for appropriating a number of whistles, cap badges and cigarette lighters. The company also apprehended soldiers for poaching and, occasionally, for sexual assaults.18 Yet while the provost companies and, from September  1941, the new port provost companies patrolled, prevented,

The Origins of the SIB

29

made some investigations and many more arrests, the army’s high command remained sufficiently impressed by the  achievements of Campion’s men to keep them on as Military Police detectives  to investigate the more complex criminal offences involving  military personnel. In consequence, over the months following the Dunkirk evacuation  Campion’s men maintained their new military ranks and  criminal investigation sections were appointed to each of the Home Commands. Early in 1941, the detective establishment was increased and each section commander was promoted to captain and appointed as a deputy assistant provost marshal (DAPM).19 Jack Rignall, together with two other Campion men, George West and Bill Heddon, was first sent to Western Command in Chester. Towards the end of the following year he was ordered to the Middle East, but was taken ill en route, and spent most of November and December 1941 in hospital in Durban before being returned to Britain. It was back home in Britain that Rignall was slotted into a post for which he was an ideal candidate. Even though, in the popular mythology of the war, everyone was allegedly pulling together and united by a common, patriotic spirit, this pulling together did not mean that petty pilferage at the workplace ceased. As had been found in France, dock workers continued to be tempted by the vast quantities of supplies that were being shipped for the armed forces – clothing, footwear, razor blades, foodstuffs and, for the NAAFIs, cigarettes, tobacco and spirits; at one point later in the war dockers in South Wales were reported to be stealing the clocks from Sherman tanks and self-propelled guns, even damaging the dashboards to get them. Many, probably most, of the purloined articles were for personal use, and it may well have been that, given the fierce aerial bombardment of dock areas especially in London and Liverpool, the dockers felt that they were owed just a little bit extra. On  some occasions, however, particularly when men involved with railways  or other kinds of haulage became involved, the thefts were much greater. Jack Rignall had been born in Poplar close to the London Docks. His nineteen years’  experience in the Metropolitan Police, which included four years in H Division which covered the dock district of the East End, gave him a better idea than most of dock communities. Dockers were a traditional working-class group, labouring in what was to all intents and purposes a closed institution. They were bound by close ties of kinship with sons following fathers into the job. They lived in, or close to, their place of work so that work, home and leisure were closely intertwined. At work they acted in teams: the holdsmen in a ship’s hold; hatchmen, winchmen and signallers to ensure that moving cargos did not  endanger the lives of mates; and stowers working in the warehouses.

30

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

In the way that they worked, and in the way that they fiddled, they supported and stood up for each other. Rignall, like everyone else, was an outsider to these communities, but he had been among them enough to know how they worked and by the beginning of 1943 Rignall, now a captain, was in command of a section of around two dozen military detectives, based in Liverpool at the headquarters of the port provost companies.20

Figure 1.2 SIB warrant card and plain clothes authorization Given the nature of their investigations, much SIB work was conducted in civilian clothes, hence this warrant card showing the holder in mufti. John Albert Lofthouse was a member of the Scots Guards before joining the Military Police. There is no record of him serving as a civilian police officer. Photo: Reproduced by Permission of Royal Military Police Museum

The Origins of the SIB

31

On his return from Dunkirk Jack Ellis, the one-time ship’s steward, was posted to Northern Ireland where there were serious problems involving the smuggling of military stores across the 180 miles of border with the Irish Free State and where contractors were thought to be defrauding the government over, among other things, the supply of granite chippings for the building of aerodromes. Ellis’s creation of an effectively patrolled, 5-mile deep ‘no-man’s land’ along the border significantly reduced the smuggling, while investigations, and some luck, brought about the arrest and convictions of several of those involved in the contractor frauds. Ellis, among the first to be promoted to captain and DAPM, was awarded the MBE for ‘excellence in the performance of his duties’ in Northern Ireland. At the same time it was noted that his tact had served to augment the relationship between the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the provosts.21 Nor was Ellis the only one of Campion’s men to be commended. The Judge Advocate General’s Northern Command Branch and the regional deputy provost marshal (DPM) sent thanks to Sir Philip Game after Harold Dibbens, Henry Green and Albert Raisbeck solved a case of large-scale, systematic forgery perpetrated over a twelve-month period by a major, two warrant officers and seven NCOs. The DPM reckoned that their investigations resulted in a saving of £6,000 a year in travelling expenses alone; and he added that Dibbens’s detective abilities, his presentation of the case and his gallantry at Dunkirk had contributed to his promotion to captain. George Hooper and Ernest Purslow were sent to Southern Command, where they earned the praise of the chief constable of Wiltshire for the assistance that they had offered his men, particularly in dealing with store-breaking and larceny by soldiers.22 But not everything passed off particularly well for all of Campion’s men or for the army. In Western Command, at Chester, George West clashed with his superior, the DPM. There may have been an element of class in this. West, born in Tottenham, had been a boot salesman before joining the Metropolitan Police. During his fifteen years in the police, at least when it came to arguing his corner, he had fully absorbed the ideas that everyone was equal before the law and that ‘the primary object of an efficient police force is the prevention of crime and next the apprehension and punishment of offenders when crime is committed’. The key issues in the argument with the DPM were who was responsible for the discipline of West’s section and who gave the orders. West claimed that when he arrived the various units in the command did not take advantage of the service that he and his men offered, so he began looking for work. He contacted the local police and various unit commanders, and the investigations put in his way

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Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

began to grow. In July 1940 there were only eleven, but these increased to thirtythree in both September and October, to forty in November and to fifty-one in both December and the following January. What annoyed the DPM most seriously, however, was West’s decision to send a report to the assistant quarter master general disclosing the fact that certain Officers of the Provost Staff (who I feel should set an example to others) have been drawing Servants Allowance to which they are not entitled. It is suggested that I should have submitted my report to the DPM in the first instance. I suggest that this would not have been the correct procedure in this case owing to the fact that to some extent the DPM was involved inasmuch that it was his duty to certify monthly that the Officers were entitled to the Allowance. The DPM himself draws the Allowance I believe and also employs a full time servant. As I stated in my report to the GOC this may be in order.

West may have been able to deal with this without going above the DPM’s head. The DPM might also have seen West’s detective section as something a little too far away from his control; after all, the detectives were allowed to carry out their investigations in civilian clothes, and while all of West’s men lived in a barrack, elsewhere some lived independently in civilian accommodation. The DPM filed an adverse report on West, who, in turn, wrote an appeal which the DPM took as further ‘disloyalty’. There is no evidence of how far the situation was permitted to fester through 1941.23 Charles James’s problems were different. He was posted to Scottish Command on his return from Dunkirk and here he distinguished himself particularly in unravelling the affairs of John Sloan Larmour, a contractor in Edinburgh. Larmour had served for nine years in the Royal Army Service Corps and afterwards in the Reserve, and he had learned how army contracts were awarded. While in the Reserve he had set himself up as a military contractor supplying the War Office with forage, sanitary services and hospital supplies; but he also knew the value of being able to undercut his rivals. Between 1927 and 1941 Larmour had executed military contracts to the value of £700,000; he eventually admitted that £25,000 of this had been obtained through improperly obtaining information by bribing army clerks and others who had information about contract bids. The bribes that he paid usually were relatively small but, at his trial at the High Court in Edinburgh in August  1941, it was estimated that they amounted to £1,784 in total. Larmour faced twenty-three charges, was found guilty and sentenced to three years’ penal servitude.24 His conviction

The Origins of the SIB

33

was followed by a series of other trials involving soldiers and civilians who had accepted his bribes and General Sir Percy Laurie, the provost marshal of the United Kingdom, told Sir Norman Kendal that it was largely due to James that there were so many prosecutions and convictions.25 But James was unwell. He had been seriously concussed during heavy bombing raids while serving in France. He had been fit when he joined Campion’s volunteers, but for years after his escape from Dunkirk, he suffered from headaches and swellings in his leg, feet, arm and neck joints. The opportunity for resolving the problems of James and West came early in 1942 when both were sent before Army Medical Boards and were both graded permanently as Category C and hence unfit for the military. Aside from James’s war injuries and West’s clash with a senior officer, General Laurie was also experiencing difficulties since ‘“finance” [were] “barking” at the cost’ of Campion’s men. They had all been promoted, or were about to be, and around half of them, like Dibbens and Ellis, were now captains. Laurie thought that he might appease the finance officers by offering up James and West ‘as a “beau geste” … a palliative to them’. He reckoned, moreover that, while they were good investigators, they were possibly handicapped by their lack of a military background and they were both ‘inclined to be rather tactless and saucy’. West, moreover, had a form of psoriasis which required his wife to look after him and prevented him from joining his mess. Sir Philip Game agreed to take both men back, but added that he was not prepared to send any replacements. James, who was now unable to walk without the use of sticks, was discharged from the police as medically unfit; and even though he had been incapacitated while serving with the BEF, the army refused him a pension. Eventually the police agreed to pay him a disability pension. West, in spite of his psoriasis, continued to serve in the Metropolitan Police until 1955 rising to the rank of detective inspector and earning three more commendations, bringing his total on retirement to fourteen.26 While individuals had problems and major disappointments, the army also had difficulties. In the aftermath of Dunkirk, and in spite of the concerns expressed by its finance department, most of the senior ranks began to recognize that Campion’s detectives, and those police officer-reservists recalled to the colours in 1939 who had been co-opted by the detectives, were insufficient to investigate the incidence of crime in the army and affecting its supplies. In  short, the army was sharing the awareness that had gripped the British press and civilian authorities, particularly those involved with the civilian

34

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

criminal justice system, during the late 1920s and 1930s that there were too few detectives and that these were insufficiently trained for modern investigations of criminal behaviour. Most of the men co-opted in France to assist Campion’s detectives seem to have been uniformed constables whose main task was what the British understood as the ‘prevention of crime’, and which involved patrolling a beat at a steady pace with the intention of dissuading offenders, warning suspects and occasionally taking them into custody on suspicion. Such patrolling by the uniformed Bobbies had some impact on street offences and disorderly behaviour; it might also have prevented some opportunist theft. Similarly patrols by Redcaps dealt with drunken soldiers and fights, picked up absentees and deserters, and, occasionally, apparently acting on hunches, they also netted more serious offenders;27 but the theft of stores and equipment, and the various frauds and embezzlements sometimes obscured in military paperwork and commonly involving army supply and transport, were rarely likely to be prevented by the usual pair of uniformed Redcaps on patrol through streets, and around railway stations and ports. More often such offences required careful investigation to discover and apprehend suspects. The civilian police remained a reserved occupation throughout the war and, with occasional exceptions and calls for volunteers, there was a bar on police officers volunteering for, or transferring into, the armed forces. The solution was for the army to establish its own detective training school primarily for former police officers, most of whom had served as uniformed constables, and who wished to be considered for what was now called the SIB. The new school was established in April 1942 at the Depot of the Corps of Military Police at Mytchett, where Campion and his men had trained briefly before going to France. The syllabus at the school was devised by Captain Jack Ellis, who, on his return from Northern Ireland, was appointed chief instructor. The students now had the opportunity to read two basic text books. Detective Inspector Morrish, whose ideas for such a book had been given short shrift before the war, had honed his training ideas by becoming one of the first instructors at Hendon Police College, and in 1940, after retirement, he published The Police and Crime Detection Today. In January 1942 the Police Review Publishing Company published his second book, Criminal Law and Police Investigation, a rather more weighty volume which was reprinted for the first time the same month that Ellis’s new school was established.28 These books might have been available and probably were used by some of the trainees, but Ellis based his syllabus on that developed during the mid-1930s at the time

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35

of the Departmental Committee on Detective Work and Procedure. It closely resembled that which was offered to detective constables in the civilian police seeking promotion to sergeant, and the course examination was similarly based on the civilian police equivalent. There were lessons on evidence, Judges’ Rules and so on, but all closely tied to the military and the wartime situation. Thus, in the final examination, men were asked to comment on evidence statements, complete charge sheets and write answers to particular issues or situations such as: Question No. 1 (a) Explain the difference in procedure when carrying out a search for W.D. property (i) in Cairo (ii) outside Cairo. (b) Describe briefly your actions in searching a house for a suspected absentee. … Question No. 4 Write a short report concerning the following:No. 123456 Pte. ADAMS, A., ‘B’ Company, 2/Blankshire Regiment, reports the loss of a wallet. Contents: P.T. 250., photographs, leave pass, letters and stamps. Place: ‘Happy Hour’ Cabaret, Snaria, Maruf, Cairo. Report to be concise.29

According to the police service weekly The Police Review, the course devised by Ellis was ‘neither a “walk over” nor an automatic attendance at just another course – to be forgotten as soon as it disperses’. Indeed, the Review believed that it should be of interest to all chief constables and superintendents ‘to know that the Special Investigation Branch man is keeping up his civil Police studies and practice’, and that this ‘should be borne in mind at the cessation of hostilities and when the men return to their Forces’.30 This idea appears to have become fixed in the minds of at least some of those who served with the SIB, and some probably thought that their experience as army detectives would provide them with a sideways shift into becoming a civilian police detective. A few months after the end of the war the commander of 87 Section based in Düsseldorf noted that the pressure of work denied his men the opportunity of participating in the Army Education Scheme, ‘but the nature of the work undertaken will certainly prove extremely useful for the members of the civilian force upon their return to England’.31 Not all of the men recruited into the SIB went through the new school. Several of those co-opted in France by Campion and his men had already

36

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

Figure 1.3 An MP training hut at Mytchett The lesson here is to ordinary Redcaps and concerns traffic, but the photo gives an idea of the rooms in which training was conducted. The mix of battledress and greatcoats among the trainees suggests that the huts were not especially well heated. Photo: Reproduced by Permission of Royal Military Police Museum

made their mark as investigators. Kenneth Thrift, for example, the reservist guardsman and Maidstone police detective who had been attempting to deal with dock pilferage in Nantes when Jack Ellis arrived, had accompanied Ellis to Northern Ireland in 1940, where he was promoted to company sergeant major. In April  1941 he was granted an emergency commission as second lieutenant and, three months later, he left for the Middle East alongside three of Campion’s original volunteers, Ronnie Crocker, Harold Dibbens and Maurice Good. All four men rapidly took a step up from the SIB investigation sections to become DAPMs: Crocker was posted to Suez, Dibbens to Jerusalem, Good to Alexandria and Thrift to Cyprus.32 Bill Cooper, who, like Thrift, had been recruited by Ellis from the Redcaps in Nantes, had found himself caught up in the defence of Arras in May 1940, and had fought his way to the Dunkirk beaches with the Welsh Guards. But on his return from France he was reassigned to the nascent SIB; initially he served in the northwest where, amongst other things, he was appointed as an investigator in the Judge Advocate General’s

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37

Department based in Chester. He was commissioned in May 1942 and became second in command of the SIB section in the district; the CO there was a Campion man – George Ripley, now Lieutenant Ripley. In April 1943 Cooper was ordered to Mytchett, where he was charged with organizing one of the new SIB Sections which were being formed for overseas duty. Towards the end of May Cooper and his new section sailed for North Africa.33 Detective work for SIB men in the United Kingdom was not greatly different from such work for CID officers in the civilian police, though there could be issues over jurisdiction. Such issues appeared from time to time in the courts and Dibbens recalled finding himself, on one occasion, at the difficult end. In the period after Dunkirk, when he was posted to Northern Command, he investigated the theft and resale of army rations involving army cooks and civilians, including a former mayor, in Morpeth. Having arranged the arrest of thirteen suspects variously charged with theft and receiving, he and Bert Raisbeck celebrated rather excessively. The following morning, suffering from a serious hangover, he was summoned to the local headquarters by a general furiously demanding: ‘Why have you had my sergeant cook arrested by the civil police?’ According to the general, the man should have been placed under close arrest in the camp. Dibbens explained that civilians had been charged with receiving, but that to prove the offence of receiving in court, it was also necessary to prove theft, and the thieves in this instance were soldiers. His explanation appears to have satisfied the general. His actions also appear to have satisfied the sergeant cook who, when he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment by the Morpeth magistrates, thanked Dibbens in the belief that, had he been sent before a court martial, he probably would have received a sentence of three years.34 Problems of jurisdiction continued throughout the war years when soldiers were arrested for civil offences. Sometimes the military were happy to see the accused prosecuted in civilian courts; they were happy to be rid of them. On  other occasions judges or magistrates criticized the Armed Services for seeking to excuse an offence or planning to try the accused a second time in their own courts.35 Overseas things were different; here awkward issues of jurisdiction, the problems of absentees and deserters, and those of the theft of supplies and equipment were compounded by cultures and environments that were alien to all but a tiny minority of those in the army’s legal departments and to even fewer in the SIB.

2

The Mediterranean Theatre

The Middle East At the beginning of the war the provost marshal in the Middle East had a small investigation team comprised of one lance sergeant and three lance corporals who were based at Bab-el-Kadid barracks in Cairo; another lance corporal with similar duties was in Alexandria. These men were not members of the SIB which did not yet exist; rather, they appear to have been ordinary Redcaps given some investigative responsibility but without any detective training. When war broke out, and with it the increased problems of dock and depot pilferage, with the various forms of theft of supplies in transit and with the offending by the British and Imperial troops who were poured into the region, the provost marshal sought help. Members of the nascent SIB began to arrive in 1941; and one of the first to arrive was Frank Elliott, the former railway employee from Chesterfield who had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1931, risen to the rank of detective sergeant in August  1939, and been one of Campion’s volunteers. The credit for establishing the SIB in Cairo and, indeed, in the Middle East as a whole, however, is generally given to Claude Harper, a man that may have been closer to Army Intelligence than to the detective force. Early in 1943 Harper was awarded the OBE. The citation praised him for building up the SIB in the Middle East to a force of 500 men with 250 native informers and trackers and it credited the force for already having conducted 2,500 investigations and recovered War Department property to the value of £300,000 (Egyptian). Yet harper remains something of a puzzle. In his account of the SIB in the Middle East published in 1954, Norman Phillips described Harper as an English businessman who had fought in the First World War and settled down in Cairo at the war’s end. ‘His ability to get on with the Egyptians helped him in building up a first class undertaking and later the Cairo office of the International Tea Bureau.’1 It is impossible to know where Phillips got this information. He clearly spoke to a number of SIB men

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in preparing his book and Harper himself was still alive in the 1950s, but every aspect of this account of Harper is contradicted by the file on him in the Archive of the Corps of Royal Military Police.2 Claude James Spencer Harper was one of three sons born to a shipping manager and his wife. Harper was born in August 1903, which made him too young to fight in the First World War. He was educated at Reigate Grammar School and, privately, and had sufficient connections to join the prestigious territorial unit the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) in 1926. He served in the HAC for nine years. He  also served for three years in the Special Constabulary of the Reigate Police and then for a further eleven in the Specials of the Surrey Constabulary where he became deputy divisional leader responsible for the uniforms and equipment of eighty-five men. On several occasions, while acting as a special constable, he assisted local CID officers. Although he appears to have been a little chubby and wore spectacles, Harper played football for the HAC; he also organized and supervised a Boys’ Club. Like his father, Harper worked as a manager for a shipping line, but not in the Middle East. His employer from 1920 was the John Cockerill Line which ran a daily goods service between Tilbury and Ostend and a biweekly one between Tilbury and Antwerp. Business had also taken him to many parts of Europe and he had a working knowledge of French and German. In August 1940 Harper made an application directly to join the Provost Service and was interviewed personally by Sir Percy Laurie. In March the following year, like other SIB officers, he received an emergency commission and undertook a course of some sort at Mytchett. It could well be that Harper arrived in Cairo after Frank Elliot; once there, according to some of those interviewed long after Phillips’s book was published, he usually wore civilian clothes, did not like to be acknowledged in public, had a car and chauffeur and, allegedly, a penchant for collecting information in brothels. If Phillips presents a John Buchan-type hero, the CRMP file suggests more of a John Le Carré-style downmarket, if relatively honourable, schoolboy. Admittedly Harper had some military and police experience and ability, but it was not detective experience in the same league as that of Campion’s men; what counted most, perhaps, unlike Campion’s working-class volunteers, Harper was a gentleman with a relatively easy path to the right connections. The region covered by the SIB in the Middle East was considerable, and it expanded far beyond Egypt and Palestine when what was to become Paiforce (Persia and Iraq Command) was created in 1941 to forestall any pro-German government within, or German movement into, Iraq and Persia. According to the official history of Paiforce there were parts of Persia where there were men

The Mediterranean Theatre

41

happy to cripple British power for their own profit and where ‘certain tribes never needed much encouragement to lawless behaviour’.3 Indeed, British officialdom appears to have had a low opinion of the indigenous peoples of the Middle East and a guide prepared for troops entering the theatre warned ‘the population … is enormous and many of those who accost you are potential thieves … . Crowds of any kind are happy hunting grounds for the pickpocket but public vehicles, such as trams are their favourite resorts’.4 More graphically a British officer described the region as ‘the home of the Kleftie-wallah and what he does not know about thieving isn’t worth thinking about’.5 However, according to a brief résumé of the activities of SIB in the Middle East and Mediterranean theatres between November 1942 and June 1945, the principal problem was the wholesale theft of War Department stores, particularly on the docks at Algiers.6 It was not just the locals who engaged in criminal activity, however. As well as some among the indigenous populations there were those among the European colonists keen to turn an illicit profit; there were also soldiers who seized the opportunity to make a little, and sometimes a lot of, money through black market trading and corruption. A table of arrests made by five SIB sections in North Africa in the four weeks from 26 September to 23 October 1943 records 1,085 persons arrested, of whom 812 were described as ‘Arabs’, 132 as ‘Military personnel’, 76 as ‘Civilian French’ and the remainder as merchant seamen. Rather more than half of these individuals – 581 Arabs, 60 military personnel, 49 French and 3 merchant seamen – were accused of the theft or improper possession of War Department property or supplies. An accompanying list giving details of some forty cases handled by 60 Section SIB reveals these running the whole gamut from the usual offences of absenteeism, desertion and illegal possession of War Department property, to attempted murder, as when a jeep was apparently driven deliberately into two senior NCOs; and from taking and driving a military vehicle without consent, to grievous bodily harm, as when a private in the Pioneer Corps attacked a comrade with a carpenter’s hammer. This list also indicates the need for diplomacy since in some instances it was not French civilians and members of the indigenous population that were involved either as victims or suspects, but French soldiers.7 Other evidence points to the SIB sections having to investigate clashes, sometimes leading to fatalities, between soldiers and different ethnic groups, and between soldiers from the different Allied armies engaged in North Africa.8 As ever, drink was considered the cause of much of the violence; but the difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that,

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initially, troops were not allowed to walk about unarmed. The résumé of SIB activities concluded: The indiscriminate discharge of all types of firearms by drunken troops in blacked-out towns where, because of recent liberation a tense atmosphere existed amongst all, brought many unfounded complaints of sniping by fifth column elements, and motiveless woundings of soldiers and civilians, that gave us a great deal of unnecessary work and seriously taxed our resources. Eventually troops were forbidden to carry loaded firearms, except on duty, and this order undoubtedly eased the situation.9

In an article for the Police Review published at the beginning of 1945 Jack Ellis looked back on his wartime career and on the impact that time served in the SIB had on the men who had been trained by, or served under, him. He had left the depot at Mytchett after a year to take command of an ordinary investigation section in North Africa. When the section moved to Italy in January 1944 he relinquished command but followed the section to visit others before taking up a new post organizing the SIB in India. The young men in the SIB sections, he reflected, some of who had less than three years’ experience as civilian police officers, had been tackling without Police organisation of any kind, murders, frauds and crimes of violence which in civilian life would be undertaken only by Inspectors or Superintendents. There were no police wireless cars, no telephone box system, no ‘express messages’, no stolen car or cheque indices, no ‘modus operandi’ sections, etc to assist.10

These detective aids may have been new and relatively undeveloped among the civilian police detectives in Britain – wireless and police boxes with phones had begun to appear in the 1920s – but Ellis’s comments are indicative of some of the pressures and difficulties faced by the SIB sections throughout the war. As had happened with the BEF in France, police officers who were reservists and who had been recalled to the colours and posted to the Middle East were co-opted as investigators before any other men arrived from Campion’s group or from the new course at Mytchett. Percy Whatley, for example, had served for three years in the Scots Guards before joining the Metropolitan Police. Until Dibbens arrived in the summer of 1941, Whatley was the investigating officer in Jerusalem. He was then transferred to the port city of Haifa and came close to creating something of an international incident when he had the French candidate for election as president of Syria arrested for drug smuggling.11 The need to maintain good relations with allies on the ground was recurrent and

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complex throughout the Middle East. Kenneth Thrift, for example, the former guardsman and police detective in Maidstone recalled to the colours as a reservist and recruited by Campion’s men while serving with the BEF, was among the first SIB men sent to the Middle East. Thrift was appointed to command the SIB in Paiforce and in this position he had to liaise frequently with representatives of the Iraqi and Persian governments, with the American and Soviet forces, and with powerful and influential civilian organizations such as the major oil companies that had interests in the region. Yet it was relations with the French, Britain’s old imperial rivals in the area, which appear to have given rise to most concerns. The brief résumé of activity mentioned above noted that the French authorities had no problems with the SIB dealing with indigenous people that were suspected or arrested by the detectives. However, the situation became rather more difficult when the suspects were French nationals. It required an order from General Henri Giraud, the French commander-in-chief and, at the time, co-president, alongside De Gaulle of the Comité française de la Libération nationale, to ensure that French troops accused of theft or the improper possession of military materiel be prosecuted properly before French courts martial. In general the SIB units seem to have enjoyed good co-operation with the French police and the gendarmerie; indeed, in Algiers the Police Scientific Laboratory was put at their disposal.12 Nevertheless, tension remained close to the surface, especially with the French colonial authorities. Frank Elliott looked on powerlessly as the French authorities refused to prosecute a sheik for illegal possession of British Army weapons; but he steadfastly resisted French pressure on him to return two pistols to the man.13 The army in the Middle East was always conscious of French sensibilities and it is indicative that the lecture notes of a junior military policeman in Egypt at this time recorded, with reference to Syria, ‘Avoid all political arguments at all cost … . Remember the French are in charge of the place – we must have their permission’.14 The profit-minded, not particularly scrupulous soldier found plenty of opportunities to organize or participate in frauds, or to trade in foodstuffs and military equipment. Sergeant Dickie Hearn of 62 Section SIB recalled, ‘Everybody was fiddling in one way or another, nobody got hurt, only the British taxpayer, so what mattered, tomorrow you could be dead’.15 Just about every item of military equipment had a price. It was reported that one soldier managed to sell a Bren gun carrier to a local farmer as a tractor. Tyres brought a good price, and could be sold in considerable numbers; even some of the municipal buses in Alexandria were reported to be running on British Army

44

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

tyres.16 Major Michael James McGee, a former Fleet Street journalist, used his position as deputy assistant director of Pioneer Labour to plan an imaginary pipeline for freshwater from Port Said to Geneifa; the workforce that he hired was equally imaginary, but the pay that he collected on their behalf was not.17 On the expulsion of the Italians from what is now Libya, Captain Gerald Walker was appointed as head of the local police detectives working under the British Military Administration of Tripolitania. He used his new post to profit from the theft of military stores and from opportunities for more general corruption that enabled him to organize local men to work in his rackets and to threaten any witnesses that could give evidence against him.18 A former member of the Palestine Police, appointed as a police inspector in the same territory, was court-martialled in May 1944 for fraudulently issuing captured German and Italian rifles to local men, and then charging them for permits to carry them.19 Frank Elliott remembered Egyptians scouring battlefields for weapons to use themselves or to sell. He led an SIB squad in pursuit of a gang of smugglers towards the Red Sea exchanging shots over three days. Three of the smugglers were killed, five of their camels captured together with fifty rifles. A recommendation that a reward be paid for every weapon handed in was initially successful; but the smugglers responded simply by offering more money for weapons.20 The Middle East Theatre guide book warned troops about ‘the arms collector’ and ‘the silent speed’ with which he gathered arms if they were left unguarded even for a moment.21 The official history of Paiforce explained that tribesmen in its area of operations ‘hungered after firearms’ and some individuals appear to have acquired and sold a large number of Lee Enfield rifles, together with NAAFI whisky to the Zorba tribesmen in Iraq. Kenneth Thrift praised his men for detecting and arresting two British deserters, living as civilian traders in Bagdad and engaged in serious arms trading.22 Two other SIB officers, the Campion man Ronnie Crocker and another former Metropolitan Police detective, ‘Monty’ Mountford, found themselves in a difficult confrontation with a large number of Zorba warriors armed with British rifles now ‘mounted with silver, engraved and studded with precious stones, gold bands [around] barrels and stocks … butt plates … replaced with ornate gold and silverwork.’23 Croker was subsequently able to turn the tables on a group of Bedouin when he persuaded them to hand back stolen weapons in exchange for packets of opium that he and Mountford had with them. What the Bedouin did not know was that Croker and Mountford had replaced three-quarters of each packet with stoneless dates.24 Mountford  later went undercover successfully to trap

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a  gang of Egyptians prepared to pay good money to any soldier prepared to sell captured weapons or,  better still, British army rifles, Bren guns, pistols, grenades  and ammunition.25 As the war concluded, and as the very efficient Jewish independence groups went into the business in  a major way, gun theft and sales became even more serious, especially since it was now British troops who were likely to find themselves at the sharp end of such weaponry. The Jewish groups recognized that by latching  on to absentees and treating them well, they could require them to carry out rather more serious offences when, by being registered as ‘absent’ for more than three weeks, they officially became ‘deserters’. Desertion was a far more serious offence than absence, and a man needing money and help as a deserter could be leaned on to continue wearing his uniform but to act as a smuggler and trafficker.26 Both the construction of military facilities and the supply of fresh meat provided local entrepreneurs with opportunities for committing frauds that the SIB sections investigated. Cattle were fed salt, for example, followed by vast quantities of water to slake their thirst but which also increased their weight by up to 20 pounds; and this was organized for the beast’s weight to be at its highest when army inspectors arrived to check the animals and pay for them. On occasions the best cattle were rustled just after the inspectors had left, and these were replaced with inferior animals.27 As in other theatres, the unloading of military equipment and supplies at various docks provided opportunities for both petty and large-scale theft and kept busy the port provost companies. Goods in transit were also at risk. In the vast area loosely controlled by Paiforce the SIB’s problems were compounded by the enormous quantities of war materiel unloaded in the Persian Gulf and then transported by rail, river and road to the Soviet Union.28 Most of the depot facilities and much of the railway system had to be repaired, improved or built from scratch and, to the consternation of the upright British gentlemen who served as Paiforce commanders, this meant relying on local men ‘some of whom were uninstructed in the laws of cause and effect, of hygiene, ownership and truth’. Moreover an instruction book prepared for Paiforce supply officers warned that ‘local thieves are recognized as superior to those of the North-West Frontier of India’. Equally troubling, security on the railways and the clumsy use of old engines was reported to have shocked the British railwaymen serving with the army. Armed troops, mainly from the Indian Army, were posted as guards on the trains and small garrisons were established to patrol the tracks to ensure that supplies reached advanced bases and the Soviet Union.29 Dibbens faced similar problems with railways in the Canal Zone and recalled that offenders

46

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War regularly put sand in the axle boxes of railway waggons and when the wheels seized up, then the bandits would appear over the sand dunes with their camels and donkeys and literally strip the train of everything saleable. The driver or the guards were either involved or were threatened and knew exactly where to stop the train. Armed troops invariably escorted ammunition trains.30

Yet, even if overseas the scale and variety of fraud, corruption and theft was greater than the SIB men had experienced as police officers at home, the Middle East also brought them face to face with new problems. The enormous expanse of territory within which British and Imperial forces were engaged across the Middle East grew as the Germans fell back and then when Italy surrendered. A special mobile unit was established to follow the Eighth Army following its victory at El Alamein. Its first tasks were to organize anti-pilferage measures in the various ports that were seized along the Mediterranean coast and in the enormous supply dumps that were established. At the same time locals had to be relieved of any weapons and ammunition sourced from both the supply dumps and the battlefields. They were also relieved of any enemy equipment such as tents, water carriers and jerrycans that could be reused by the War Department, as well as clothing and footwear that could be recycled for the Italian police that were deployed in the areas. Ronnie Crocker recalled that as areas became static behind British lines and as Italian and Libyan civilians returned so, cases of murder, manslaughter and rape began to be reported more often and, as a consequence, investigations of such offences began to take up more and more time.31 It was not as if a Special Investigations Section (SIS) was large; the establishment was two commissioned officers, two warrant officers, ten sergeants and two corporals. At the beginning of 1944 there were two sections posted to the north coast of Algeria: 60 Section had its headquarters in Algiers; 65 Section had its headquarters some 300 miles to the east in Bône, but with small detachments midway in Constantine and southwards in Sétif. At the beginning of October  60 Section moved to Italy and 65 Section moved its headquarters in Algiers; it left a detachment in Bône and kept the detachment in Constantine, but it was now responsible alone for investigating offences along 300 miles of coast, still occupied by thousands of troops not to mention the locals still keen to acquire useful Allied materiel.32 In addition to being stretched on the ground, SIB personnel in the Middle East found themselves investigating offences scarcely known to civilian police. Drugs were not much of an issue in interwar Britain, but in the Middle East hashish was plentiful and some soldiers were tempted to try it or at least to

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earn additional money by smuggling it. Some soldiers divided their water bottles and sealed the lower half specifically for trafficking drugs; but anyone who had the run of a vehicle travelling over vast distances might be persuaded to carry a packet of drugs so as to make some additional money. It was alleged that despatch riders of the Royal Signals, who were waved through Egyptian customs posts, were particular profiteers in this trade, though in recounting the story a former Signals’ officer confessed that he personally had never heard of a despatch rider caught, charged and convicted of the offence.33 Dibbens, however, arrested a Royal Army Ordnance Corps captain for drug smuggling. The man had made £20,000 (Egyptian) on one trip. He was court-martialled and reduced in rank to private, but at the end of the war he successfully applied to have his Egyptian money returned.34 Soldiers were also tempted to sample the local brothels which were readily available, notably in Egyptian cities. British police officers were not used to inspecting prostitutes. There had been a period towards the end of the nineteenth century when, under a succession of Contagious Diseases Acts, a few Metropolitan Police officers had been based in the great garrison towns and dockyards to supervise prostitutes rather like the long-standing morals police that existed in many states of continental Europe. During the First World War, there were concerns about troops being incapacitated by venereal disease, but in the interwar years the civilian police seem to have been rather more concerned with containing prostitution rather than drawing attention to it, while legislators preferred to let the ‘social evil’ continue in the shadows without sanctioning medical supervision like the French police des moeurs and the German Sittenpolizei, and without offering any protection to the women workers. Troops landing in North Africa and the Middle East were warned: CMP and SIB patrols arrest about 350 free-lance prostitutes per month in Cairo and Alexandria. A very large number of these girls have VD; and it is almost certain that you will be infected if you visit a brothel area.35

In Alexandria, Dibbens found himself responsible for making inspections of six brothels at least once a week together with a major from the Royal Army Medical Corps. The women were inspected by a Greek civilian doctor who jokingly claimed that he should have the rank of brigadier since he was keeping so many soldiers in the front line.36 The problems in Palestine were also different to most of those faced at home, although the SIB units remained largely concerned with gunrunning on behalf of both the Arabs and the Jewish independence fighters. The political policing

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and the suppression of armed fighters on both sides was left largely to the Palestine Police and, from 1946 to the army and the two sinister undercover squads established by Brigadier Bernard Fergusson and commanded by two SAS officers, Alistair McGregor (who had also served in MI6) and Roy Farran.37 It is, perhaps, little wonder that Dibbens was replaced in Jerusalem from mid1942 to early 1944, by the former Special Branch detective Phil Attfield. Even so, Dibbens was warned that he was number six on a Jewish terrorist group’s hit list, while an SIB sergeant was escorted to a bar at gunpoint and offered a significant bribe for weaponry by a gang that seemed to know everything about his wife, her whereabouts and their home at Littlehampton.38 The considerable profits that could be made by the least scrupulous wartime entrepreneurs, by drug-running, by the local Arabs’ desire to carry weapons and the enormous quantities of weaponry available both in use by armies and seized from the defeated, together with the local rivalries and independence groupings, all served to make the life of a British Military Police detective rather more nervewracking and potentially dangerous than that of a British civilian police detective. One of the most celebrated of the shoot-outs in the Middle East involved Costa Leotatis, the leader of a gang of absentees and deserters who trafficked guns and drugs between Egypt and Palestine. The SIB had rounded up most of the gang in September 1944 but Leotatis, a deserter from the Royal Army Service Corps, had a charmed life and had escaped from military custody on three occasions. Towards the end of January 1945 two SIB warrant officers in Ismalia received a tip-off concerning his whereabouts. During the ensuing gunfight in a local café, RSM John Coe was seriously wounded in the thigh but CSM Gordon Wright, returning fire, hit Leotatis in the head and chest. A few days later Wright received a warning: ‘Get out of Ismalia or we’ll finish you off ’; it was signed: ‘The Cypriot Brotherhood.’ Wright’s unit responded by having all Greek and Cypriot units in the vicinity inspected while mine detectors were swept over their equipment yielding, in some instances, collections of weaponry including knives and pistols. Wright, a native of County Durham, had been a regular soldier for three years before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1937; he had been recalled as a reservist in 1939. But his previous soldiering had been in the Royal Artillery, not a unit accustomed to close fighting in buildings or to shoot-outs more likely to be found in a cinema western. On demobilization he rejoined the Metropolitan Police and served in the Mounted Branch until his retirement in 1969. It was said that, ever afterwards, he always carried with him two bullets fired by Leotatis that had missed him by inches and that had been dug from the café wall.39

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The Middle East and North Africa were exotic places for British soldiers who had probably never been outside their home country before the war. Those that recrossed the Mediterranean for the Italian campaign probably thought that they were returning to Europe and a society that was not entirely different from their own. Many were rapidly disabused, especially the SIB sections that found themselves not only enmeshed with the usual cases of serious assaults, frauds and thefts, but also with criminal fraternities often linked with local politicians, the messy legacy of Fascism, an international border dispute and their first experience of major war crimes.

Honoured societies, partisans and everything in between At dawn on Saturday 10 July 1943 the Allies launched their first assault on Axis Europe. Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily and the following campaign to seize the island, lasted less than six weeks. It provided a sharp warning of the kinds of criminal offending that the Allies would face as they fought their way up the Italian boot and, from the summer of 1944, as they fought their way across northern Europe. But in Sicily, and in other parts of the Mezzogiorno, the problems were aggravated by the existing economic and social structures and the traditions of banditry and violence manifest in what the locals referred to as the honoured societies. At the end of the 1920s the Fascist regime decided that it had solved Italy’s ‘southern questions’ of crime, corruption, poverty and general backwardness. Local Carabinieri officers disputed this, but newspaper editors were happy enough to follow directives from Rome and to make no further references to the South’s problems; indeed, following exhortations from the head of the Fascist press corps, they ceased referring to the ‘south of Italy’ and the common term for it, the Mezzogiorno.40 The Allies had heard of the mafia but they had little idea of how it was intricately woven into politics, society and the economy. They had little idea of how dangerous it was and, as will be discussed later, a number of significant figures in the Allied Military Government (AMGOT) seem to have accepted, at least in part, the Fascist government’s claims to have defeated it. Moreover, this ignorance of the power of the mafia in Sicily was replicated by their ignorance of the honoured societies in and around Naples – the camorra – and in Calabria – the ‘ndrangheta. Building on their experience in France in 1940, however, the British Army quickly deployed SIB sections to investigate crimes and to pursue and apprehend offenders.

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In the spring of 1943, around three months before Operation Husky, new SIB sections were formed at Mytchett and the men, all of whom appear to have been former civilian police officers, embarked on Jack Ellis’s detective training course. Among the first of the new units were 62 and 67 Sections commanded, respectively, by Lieutenant Bill Cooper, the former Grenadier Guardsman and police officer from St. Albans, and Lieutenant Bill Hutchins from the Maidstone Borough Police. Cooper was allowed to poach one of Ellis’s assistant instructors, CSM Sammy Wilsdon, formerly of the Baccup Borough Police, as his second in command; however, on his promotion to lieutenant Wilsdon was poached once again and this time was moved to Head Quarters’ Staff. 62 and 67 Sections sailed together to North Africa at the end of May. They spent their first month overseas in Algiers, getting acclimatised, before moving on to Tunis, where they assisted 61 Section which was already established there under the command of a former police officer from Rochdale Borough, Lieutenant G.T. ‘Sandy’ Saunders. By the end of the year each of these sections, together with 64 Section under the command of Captain William Bilyard, one of Campion’s original group, had been transferred to Italy. For most of 1944, 61 and 64 Sections were in the southwest, the former principally in the area of Naples, the latter in Sicily; 62 and 67 Sections were in the south-east, in Bari and Taranto respectively. Other units were formed throughout 1944. The men would assemble as a section with an alphabetic title at a base in North Africa or, later, at Ottaviano, a municipality of Naples close to the rim of Vesuvius. Having been brought up to strength, issued with their equipment and their vehicles and sometimes acting briefly alongside an existing section, they were given numerical titles and dispatched to where they were needed. Thus ‘X’ Section, established in Algiers in January  1944, embarked for Naples in June as 75 Section. Another ‘X’ Section, together with ‘Y’ Section, was formed at Ottaviano in July, and proceeded north in August as 78 and 79 Sections. As had been the case in France in 1939 and 1940, and as was still the case at home and in North Africa, the movement of military materiel and supplies and large dumps of petrol acted as magnets for thieves working on both the small scale and the large scale. Robbery, as Table  2.1 indicates, generated the greatest number of arrests by SIB for what were termed ‘serious crimes.’ The less serious offences, and especially those involving soldiers, were commonly dealt with summarily by regimental officers. Yet the army and the SIB detectives had never confronted anything like the thieving in the Naples region. Probably the majority of the Neapolitans, as well as the Sicilians arrested, were relatively small fry; the major players got away with it, unless they were set up and removed

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Table 2.1 Arrests for serious crimes by SIB in the Middle East and Italy, November 1942–June 1945 Crime

Military

Civilians

Murder

203

107

29

–

Robbery

Rape

498

253

Assault involving indecency

253

25

Unlawful wounding and assault occasioning actual bodily harm

339

235

Total number of arrests for all forms of crime: 43,381. Approximate value of property recovered: £807,463 17 shillings 4 pence. Source: WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, ff. 3, 4

from the scene by equally powerful rivals who fed information to the police. An additional problem here was that the major players worked their charm, persuasiveness and money on key figures within AMGOT, especially it would seem, Italian-American officers. Vito Genovese had been born near Nola, close to Naples in 1897. He emigrated to America in 1912 where he became a prominent New York mobster; charged with murder in 1936 he escaped back to Italy, where he became a prominent Fascist. Following the arrival of the Allies he cast off his Fascist allegiance and made himself an indispensable guide and translator for American officers in AMGOT. He also ran a massive black-market racket and  used his influence with AMGOT to ensure that, when he was arrested, no  one was prepared to take responsibility for seeing the case progressed. A further problem, noted in his wartime diary by Norman Lewis, an Intelligence Officer who later found success as a novelist and travel writer, was that Genovese was influential in the appointment of the new, antiFascist mayors.41 Docks where supplies were unloaded remained a problem throughout the war. Pre-war Naples had a population of over 800,000; it was the biggest port in the south of Italy and, following the landings, it was the obvious entry point for Allied materiel. The city’s docks had been badly damaged by Allied bombing but were rapidly repaired and brought into feverish activity once Allied troops moved into the city at the beginning of October 1943. However, the problems of Naples were legion; the people were poor, much of the city was damaged or destroyed, and there was little food. Crowds might have cheered the liberators as they entered the city, but they saw them as meal tickets. Young women prostituted themselves for money, food or other goods; young

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men stole, and some came together to acquire, as it came ashore, some of the largesse that was landed for these strange, heterogeneous, white, brown and black liberators.42 An existing black market was greatly extended by thefts of Allied food, clothing, medicine, vehicles and vehicle parts. Army boots offer a good, if rather unexpected, example of the value of Allied materiel. The peasants of the Mezzogiorno had complained bitterly about their inability to get sturdy footwear for work during the Fascist period; by 1943 hardy work shoes cost 1,000 lire, six times the pre-war price.43 The boots of Allied soldiers were a godsend. Soon anything and everything was available in Via Forcella, a street in the teeming centre of the city close to a significant American Army depot, half a mile west of the railway station and half a mile north of the docks. The docks of Naples became notorious for the theft of Allied supplies. In May 1944 Lewis noted official sources reporting that ‘the equivalent of the cargo of one Allied ship in three unloaded in the Port … is stolen’. A Public Safety Officer, who served as a public prosecutor in the AMGOT, recalled, ‘Truck loads of Allied supplies unloaded from Liberty ships rolled out of the port never to be traced. Equipment was spirited away from Army dumps’; and 68 Section had not been in the Naples district for a month when its commander, Captain J. McKinnon, tersely reported, ‘Many cases being dealt with of Italian civilians in possession of Allied property.’44 Yet Naples was not unique; wherever Allied materiel came ashore or was stored in dumps, the locals, regardless of the guards posted at the sites, sought to help themselves. The SIB sections spent much of their time investigating such thefts. In their war diaries a few gave monthly estimates of the amounts of War Department property recovered (see Table  2.2); and some of the thefts were surprising. Following information in November  1944, for example, 76 Section based in Rome recovered 500 kg of raw silk which, rather than being brought into Italy, was bound for Britain, where it was intended for making parachutes.45 Every Italian port where Allied war materiel was brought ashore became a target for thieves, and on a much greater scale than those in France at the beginning of the war. Port provost companies were deployed to patrol docks but, once unloaded from cargo ships, supplies continued to be vulnerable. In April 1944, 67 Section reported the arrest of sixty-three individuals working in two armed gangs that were robbing trains; about the same time the army decided to introduce train guards though, given the pressures on manpower, there was no SIB section appointed to deal solely with investigating rail thefts until March 1945. Similar gangs were reported to have men ‘jumping’ lorries at night to seize goods and throw them off for others to collect.46 These gangs were made up of Italians,

Table 2.2 SIB Sections 64 and 67, Italy 1944–45 – Cases, arrests, property recovered 64 Section, HQ Catania (till March 45) HQ Genoa (from April 45) Arrests as a result

Value of property recovered

Arrests as a result

Value of property recovered

January 1944

241

305

£691-10-8

February 1944

217

278

March 1944

120

220

£2,767

219

268

April 1944

125

229

£1,427

140

280

£1,192-1-4

May 1944

109

170

£1,900

114

145

£832-13-8

June 1944

99

123

£12,379

183

212

£2,256-4-10

July 1944

98

145

£921-18-6

145

155

£1,045-13-8

August 1944

83

113

£366-19-9

September 1944

79

154

£1,102-15-6

138

124

£1,872-3-5

October 1944

63

132

£1,010-6-2

99

107

£3,693-13-11

November 1944

28

48

£265

102

137

£2,227-18-10

December 1944

49

115

£1,505

100

124

£3,929-14-8

January 1945

67

97

£1,572

63

79

£440-19-11

February 1945

43

80

£98-10-6

57

67

£1,395-6-3 1/2

March 1945

32

56

£520-13-9

68

66

£1,511-3-4*

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Date

Cases investigated

67 Section, HQ Taranto (till May/June 45) HQ Trieste (from June 45)

53

54

Table 2.2 (continued)

Date

Cases investigated

Arrests as a result

Value of property recovered

67 Section, HQ Taranto (till May/June 45) HQ Trieste (from June 45) Cases investigated

Arrests as a result

78

88

Value of property recovered

April 1945

In transit

£656-11-3

May 1945

18

17

£319-6-6

6

3

June 1945

69

73

£409-1-9

In transit at beginning 35

33

£1,539-5-6

July 1945

67

74

£1,216

75

43

£9,951-8-3

In transit

August 1945

48

70

£2,423

57

19

£8,605-15-0

September 1945

57

67

£1,985

35

22

£1,394-15-0

October 1945

43

47

£978

24

17

*In addition £824-7-9 was recovered in cash, believed to be the proceeds of the sale of War Department property and held by the Section pending receipt of disposal instructions. Source: WO 170/3591, WO 170/3594, WO 170/7056, WO 170/7059.

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

64 Section, HQ Catania (till March 45) HQ Genoa (from April 45)

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but when the opportunity arose the locals would make use of a deserter or absentee who, in an Allied military uniform – especially an officer’s uniform – could, at least initially, imply that what amounted to theft or extortion was a legitimate demand. In September  1944, for example, 64 Section arrested and interrogated a deserter from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who had been sheltered by an Italian family and who was employed as an ‘English policeman’ to assist in the extortion of goods from shopkeepers and merchants around Palermo. Twelve locals were arrested and handed over to the Italian authorities; the Carabinieri struggling with the black market in Palermo were particularly pleased.47 But there were plenty of other gangs made up of either a mixture of locals and deserters, or of deserters alone. The deserter gangs engaged in brigandage and highway robbery usually travelled in stolen military vehicles; the use of vehicles, and their reliance on getting petrol, meant that they generally stuck to the roads, which made them slightly easier to pursue and apprehend.48 Early in 1944 Bilyard’s 64 Section had to deal with a gang led by a soldier named Norton. The arrests of five British soldiers and one Canadian in March appear to have broken up the gang which had been responsible for the theft of jeeps, wheels and thousands of gallons of petrol.49 Yet a cluster of gangs were active between Rome and Naples towards the end of 1944 including one led by William Robert Croft, a deserter from the Royal Navy who was eventually court-martialled and shot by a firing squad for murdering two men in Rome during an argument over his girlfriend. Croft’s gang also shared a prison escape, and then had a run-in with the most notorious of the deserter groups which was known as ‘Lane Gang’. This group was led by an American private known as Robert Lane, but whose real name was Werner Eric Schmiedel – not a name that would immediately spring to mind for an Allied soldier. A special squad of four American military police detectives, two SIB men and two Italian police detectives was set up to hunt down Lane and his gang. Similar squads were established elsewhere, and SIB sections were given substantial backup from ordinary provost companies to establish road checks and to conduct raids; the raids led to serious casualties on both sides. At the end of October 1944 Captain R.A. Archer proudly claimed that his 76 Section alone had arrested two such gangs, comprising thirteen and six men respectively.50 Sandy Saunders, transferred from 61 Section to be the staff officer responsible for organizing all SIB units across Italy and Sicily, was awarded an MBE for coordinating operations against these gangs.51 In addition to these gangs and the theft of supplies, the SIB Sections were involved in investigating internal military offences, for example the forging of

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the signatures of censorship officers to ensure that private and personal letters written to loved ones at home remained private and personal.52 They also investigated the incidents of soldiers fighting men from other British regiments, or from the regiments of foreign allies. In November  1944, for example, 64 Section investigated a brawl in a café between British and Italian troops, which began with a British soldier doing an impression of Mussolini and ended with the Italians throwing a grenade. A few days later a carabiniere drew his revolver when five British soldiers and another four sailors, all drunk, accosted him. The gun went off and seriously wounded one of the soldiers; RSM Howarth, investigating the case, concluded that the shooting was unintentional.53 There were other offences that were much more in common with those experienced by the SIB men when civilian police officers at home. Civilians suffered from petty theft by soldiers; this could involve the theft of alcohol, but anything that might give a break from the war was vulnerable and on one occasion the theft of a radiogram and records was investigated, with men’s kit being searched and some soldiers appearing very ‘defiant’ when questioned.54 Sometimes soldiers insisted that they stole out of necessity. Men questioned about a dock theft insisted that they had taken the coal only because they had not been issued with any fuel and had no other means of cooking.55 A civilian in Catania locked up the premises for which he was responsible and left for the hills as Allied troops began to assault the town. On his return he complained that a typewriter had been taken; the culprit appeared to be an Eighth Army press officer, but when he was identified 64 Section did not think that they could pursue him and find him as the army fought its way up the boot.56 Not all thefts were petty, however. In February 1944 Sergeant Cross of 64 Section investigated a robbery in Palermo during which a considerable quantity of household goods was taken and a pregnant woman was severely beaten causing her to miscarry. Two deserters were identified and found with a large quantity of stolen material; each was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.57 A number of sexual assaults required investigation. Occasionally these involved homosexual activity; two members of the Royal Army Medical Corps were investigated by 64 Section for sodomising, masturbating and fellating men in their charge.58 Unsurprisingly, however, most investigations of sexual assault involved female victims. The twenty-nine arrests for rape listed in Table  2.1 seems ridiculously low. It is possible that some of the arrests for serious ‘assault involving indecency’ were rapes which the victims had downgraded to ensure conviction, to avoid being cross-examined in an all-male court of foreign strangers or, more probably, to avoid a loss of reputation. Moreover it was not

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just the victim’s honour that was at stake; the admission of being a victim of rape could affect a woman’s future but it also affected her family’s honour. Yet Norman Lewis believed that rape was an everyday event in the communities around Naples where overseers on the big estates routinely raped peasant girls and latifundia owners offered members of their workforce to visitors. ‘Concealment of what has happened is what matters, to avoid a personal slump in value in the sexual market’; one of Lewis’s comrades had a doctor for an informant whose speciality was the restoration of hymens.59 In general the attitudes to family honour were more finely tuned than in Britain, but the fear of miscegenation was marked in most European cultures. Asian and African troops, especially the North Africans serving with the French Army, acquired a notorious reputation in Italy, and this may have affected the manner in which investigations were conducted. 76 Section, for example, investigated reports of two gang rapes, both of which resulted in the arrest of non-white soldiers; in the first incident the men apprehended were Arabs serving in a Pack Mule company; in the second, they were soldiers from the Indian Army.60 77 Section, following on the heels of the advancing Eighth Army, reported a large number of sexual offences in the summer of 1944, but only two gang rapes, both of which ended with the murder of the victim. Three Algerians serving with the French Army were arrested for the first of these; the second, involving a gang of masked attackers, was allegedly committed by soldiers from a Polish unit, but there was insufficient evidence for any arrests to be made.61 There was also a novel legal problem for the Military Police in Italy. The age of consent in England was sixteen years but in Italy it was fourteen years. Lord Russell of Liverpool, serving as deputy judge advocate general, was concerned that the Army Act meant that soldiers were being tried for something that was an offence in English law but not in Italian law. The Italians, he thought, were bewildered when British soldiers were tried before courts martial and, if convicted, were imprisoned for something that they did not consider to be an offence. Moreover, in England a man aged twenty-three years or under who was accused of carnal knowledge of a minor could use as a defence the fact that he had reasonable cause to believe that his victim was over sixteen years. It was not, of course, possible, even had it been desirable, to alter the law, but I managed to persuade the Adjutant General’s Branch to issue a directive that no British soldier would, in future, be brought to trial in Italy upon such a charge where it was quite clear that the girl had been a willing party and was over the age of fourteen.

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As Russell saw it, Italian girls matured at an earlier age than those in England; in addition, they were ‘lovely and desirable’.62 If the young girls were desirable and willing, the implication for Russell appears to have been that carnal knowledge was acceptable. There were rather different attitudes if the victim appeared to be a prostitute; also there was always the problem of finding and identifying suspects – one battledress could look much like another. In December 1943 Redcaps from an ordinary provost company brought a woman to 64 Section who claimed that four soldiers had attempted to rape her. The woman had the names of the four soldiers but the investigating sergeant subsequently explained: extensive enquiries were made, and it became apparent from the evidence obtained, that the complainant was a prostitute. It also became evident that the statement which she had volunteered to the police and the SIB, did not contain authentic information as to the real facts of the case. Under the circumstances the case was not continued by the Branch, as it would appear that an allegation of Rape could not be substantiated.63

There was probably some prejudice towards this woman, but attacks on prostitutes were not always dismissed. In February 1945 a Royal Marine deserter was apprehended for the murder of a woman in an out-of-bounds brothel. There was an extensive search for a group of three soldiers accused of attempted rape at the beginning of 1944. The difficulty here was that the men appear to have come from a transit camp and most of the men in the camp had moved by the time that SIB received information and began investigations. Another case, in May 1945, resulted in an identification parade at which a suspect was picked out.64 The cases described above are interesting for the way that they demonstrate the similarities between civilian and military detective work. The cases were reported to the police responsible for ordinary patrolling, like the men of the provost companies, who then passed the information on to the detectives for investigation. The apprehension of a suspect could then lead to an identification parade at which the victim, possibly together with other witnesses, was invited to see if he or she could recognize the offender. The provosts appear to have patrolled looking for offenders and their suspicions occasionally achieved surprising discoveries and arrests. But they could also be overzealous. In September 1944 Captain Bilyard received a report that a sergeant had been seen driving an army vehicle after midnight in Via Etna, Catania, with two women beside him. Investigations revealed the truth of the matter. A REME

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sergeant had indeed been driving an army vehicle with two women beside him, but it was official business; the women were from an ENSA troupe entertaining soldiers in the area, and the sergeant was taking them back to their hotel.65 Responding to reports by asking questions of victims and witnesses, tracking down suspects where possible and holding identification parades were pretty basic practices for civilian police detectives, and such investigative techniques were employed where possible among the SIB units. When troops were constantly on the move, however, it could become very difficult to locate and interview witnesses and suspects. The sections tried to conduct ballistic examinations though quite how is unclear.66 There were no facilities in the field to enable fingerprints to be checked; indeed, the process of fingerprinting in England depended on access to records held in Scotland Yard and, even if SIB had had access, the careful investigation of loops and whirls was time consuming. Moreover the résumé of SIB activities complained that, in Italy, it was impossible to get any scientific assistance, even in Rome.67 Thefts and receiving were the principal problem for civilian detectives. But in a theatre of war, such as Italy, large numbers of armed men, be they desperate, callous deserters, local bandits, soldiers or police officers nervous or drunk, meant a higher number of homicide and serious assault investigations for the SIB sections than they would ever have experienced as civilian detectives at home. Table 2.1 lists 310 homicide arrests in total for North Africa and Italy from November 1942 to June 1945; between the beginning of June 1944 and the end of June 1945, 76 Section based in Rome investigated twenty murders and suspicious deaths (see Table 2.3). 77 Section, moving with the Eighth Army, also reported a large number of homicide investigations, several of which appeared to stem from clashes between different sections of the army; Cypriots and Poles in particular did not seem to get along with each other.68 Then there were incidents where the availability of firearms meant that a quarrel between men in the same unit might result in lethal violence. In the late spring of 1944, for example, Bilyard investigated the case of a private who returned to his billet drunk, argued with a comrade, shot him dead and then wounded a corporal. The soldier was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude.69 There were other crimes, specific to the war, which began to take up SIB time particularly when the fighting had stopped and the extent of atrocities began to accumulate. In December 1944 Sergeant Downing of 60 Section took a sworn statement from a British officer which led to a massive investigation, spread over the next two years, of the ill-treatment, assaults upon, even murder of POWs by Italian Fascist troops in a prison camp at Bari.70 In October 1945,

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Table 2.3 Homicides investigated by 76 Section in Rome, June 1944–June 1945 Date

Victim

Perpetrators/Suspects

June 1944

Polish soldier

Italian civilians (absconded)

June 1944

British soldier

US Military Policeman

October 1944

Italian civilian

4 (?) Allied soldiers (deserter gang – some arrested)

October 1944

Café proprietor (shot)

2 as above

October 1944

Italian woman

Polish soldier

November 1944

US soldier found dead – possible murder

Unknown

November 1944

Italian civilian stabbed to death with pen knife

British soldier

December 1944

4 Italian civilians machine gunned

Unknown

January 1945

British soldier

3 Italian civilians (believed to be a gang)

January 1945

Italian civilian

2 British soldiers

March 1945

British soldier shot

A carabiniere

March 1945

Soldier from Mauritius

Allied soldier (?)

April 1945

British soldier beaten over head with stone and bottle

Unknown

May 1945

British soldier guarding train Italian civilian

May 1945

British soldier shot in vehicle Italian civilian gang park

June 1945

Italian woman shot

Polish soldier

June 1945

Italian woman stabbed

French colonial soldier

Source: WO 170/3598 and WO 170/7063.

60 Section based in Caserta submitted five reports involving different investigations regarding the murders of eight American soldiers, two British soldiers and one Polish soldier, and another crime against a British POW.71 The major issue, however, was the massacres and atrocities committed by German troops as they withdrew before the Allied advance. In November  1944, for example, Captain C.T. Dawson, a former constable of the Leicester City Police who had assisted Ellis in the training programme at Mytchett, ordered his Section (77) to investigate reports of a small group of Jews killed by the SS near Forli. Such investigation was not strictly a part of the duties of an SIB Section and, when Dawson’s men unearthed a mass grave, two NCOs from 78 Section were sent on attachment to make further enquiries.

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78 Section had emerged from a discussion at Eighth Army Headquarters in August 1944, which recognized that ordinary SIB Sections did not have the time to investigate often complex war crimes and that other security units in the field did not have any appropriate criminal investigation knowledge. 78 Section’s sole purpose was the investigation of war crimes committed in Italy against Allied prisoners of war and civilians. The section was commanded by a Suffolk policeman, Norman Middleton, and one of its first members was John Baxendale, another policeman who, in March  1944 after five years with the Royal Artillery, had requested a transfer to SIB. In a short memoir Baxendale described two interviews with an assistant provost marshal and then a group of SIB officers before his acceptance; a knee injury in May delayed his transfer and he did not begin training until August. ‘The course itself wasn’t hard’, he wrote, ‘but after 5 years of total absence [? unclear] of police work my mind was awfully rusty.’ He passed with an average mark of 87 per cent, then moved to the muster centre at Ottaviano and then into the field with the section.72 The work of 78 Section was unremittingly grim and time consuming; the reports of 3,000 interrogations of former POWs held in the Middle East and Italy were examined; there were also interviews with officers of the AMGOT and with partisans and ordinary civilians. An elaborate card index was established to identify enemy units and individuals involved. There was also the gruesome task of having to oversee the exhumation of bodies, some of which had been buried for a long time. Captain Dawson’s request from Forli concerned the killing of Jews; other investigations arose from reports of the ill-treatment and  even murder of POWs. Baxendale had to investigate the killing of two SAS men, probably the result of Hitler’s notorious Commando Order of October  1942  which directed that captured commando raiders be interrogated and then shot. Exhuming the  bodies of the two men was a singularly unpleasant task since they had been  buried in a shallow grave for almost two years and were identified only by the identity disks worn by one, together with his captain’s pips, and the  shreds of uniforms and boots. Most of 78 Section’s enquiries, however,  did not concern the murder of Jews and POWs but atrocities carried out in response to partisan activity and the killing of German troops. The numbers involved were enormous; in June  1945,  for example, the section presented its report on the  slaughter of forty-four men, forty-five women, twenty-two children and twenty-six partisans at Vallucciole over three days in April  1944.  The following October they reported on their investigations of a massacre by men of the Reichsführer Division of the SS and the Italian Fascist  Mai Morte Battalion at Bardine San Terenzo in August 1944

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where 454 houses, thirty-three farm buildings and a church had  been totally destroyed, more houses had been  severely damaged, 369 people – mainly women and children – had been killed and another 160 deported for labour. There appear also to have been  rapes, but the women involved and who survived the orgy of killing appear to have been reluctant to talk.73 The diligence of 78 Section’s investigations was re-emphasized in 2010 when evidence collected  by Sergeant Charles Edmondson, a former Household cavalryman and  mounted  policeman,  was used to convict three elderly Germans in an Italian court for the murder of 184 men, women and children in the Fucecchio Marshes near Florence on 23 August 1944.74 War crimes were specific to the war itself; elsewhere, as at home, different offences were more apparent at different times. In the summer of 1944, for example, Bill Hutchins perceived a decline in violence in the Taranto area. This enabled 67 Section to spend more time recovering War Department property, and hence he was pleased to record an increase in the amount recovered that June.75 This decline in violence was, arguably, the result of the northward movement of the front and the consequent reduction in the number of troops in the area. But, as noted here throughout, thefts and violent offences that required SIB investigations involved civilians as well as soldiers. The provost marshal for the Rome Area believed that the principal Allied base installations being located in the Naples area gave rise to a huge civilian crime problem. Invariably the number of charges per month preferred by CMP against civilians greatly exceeded the number preferred against troops. Systematic raids were carried out by civilians working in quite large groups on various base depots giving SIB sections not only a full time job but more than with which they could cope.76

Moreover the arrest of an Italian civilian by a British military policeman could prompt a backlash by other civilians even when the military policeman’s intention was to hand the suspect over to Italian police, and, so too, could a British serviceman’s failure to treat local ceremonies with the appropriate respect.77 All SIB sections found themselves having to deal with civilians and, if following rapidly on the heels of fighting units, it meant liaising regularly with CAOs deployed to restore order and civil administration to liberated areas. This, in turn, meant employing the local legal system and co-operating with the local police. Hutchins had little time for the Italian legal system which he considered

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to be too slow for dealing with the petty theft of War Department property; but he felt that things improved when a Legal Liaison Officer was appointed in March 1944. In contrast, he thought that co-operation with the various Italian police forces worked well; his arrests of train thieves, for example, in April 1944 were carried out with assistance from the Carabinieri.78 Dawson made little comment about either his Italian allies or their legal system, though he found 77 Section having to work with both the Carabinieri and officers of the civilian police the Pubblica Sicurezza.79 In Naples 61 Section found itself co-operating with a third Italian police organization, the Guardia di Finanza – the Finance Police – on a serious case of currency trafficking.80 The résumé of SIB activities considered that some individuals in the Italian police and the Carabinieri provided competent and willing assistance; overall, however, it complained of a lack of organization and numbers as well as a general lethargy present among them. This was echoed by the provost marshal in Rome, who believed that the co-operation with the Italian police worked well, though he noted also that the Italian civilian police rarely did more than four hours’ work a day, which he put down to them lacking the physical standard of British military policemen, and the difficulties in feeding and finding transport for them.81 It was not only the Italian police working with the British that had transport difficulties. Hutchins complained on several occasions about a lack of transport for his section, delays in replacements and difficulties in getting spare parts. Most policing in Britain was done on foot during the interwar years and immediately afterwards, but the ability to walk to a crime scene to carry out an investigation was rare, given the size of the districts covered by an SIB Section. Even at the war’s conclusion Captain Middleton was complaining that while 78 Section needed jeeps for investigating war crimes and atrocities in mountainous regions, it only had three of the nine promised.82 Captain Dawson, close to the front with the Eighth Army, was constantly protesting about his vehicles, adding on one occasion, ‘Many man-hours spent on Section vehicles by personnel who are not artificers.’83 McKinnon’s 68 Section arrived in Taranto early in January  1944; they immediately drove northwest, over the southern Apennines, to Naples. The roads had never been particularly good, and those around Naples had suffered under bombardment. By mid-February three out of the section’s seven vehicles were in Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers workshops. On 23 March, 68 Section was ordered to Lanciano ‘as quickly as possible’. Four men were sent off to find new billets, but the rest of the section stayed put ‘not having enough roadworthy vehicles to transport personnel and kit’. Five days later, having acquired two new vehicles, the bulk of the section

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moved.84 Bill Cooper complained of similar problems and was furious when in May  1944 a Motor Transport Inspection criticized the state of 62 Section’s vehicles.85 He wrote a blistering letter pointing out that his men were chosen for their knowledge of Police Law and Procedure, not for their ability to service and repair motor transport. Each of his investigators needed transport, yet the unit did not have the transport that it was supposed to have. Usually his men worked in pairs, but when called out it was often necessary to take an interpreter and, if the investigator knew that he was going to deal with the local population, he might also need a local police officer. In addition, given that a suspect, a prisoner or property might have to be brought back, this meant that that sending just one investigator and one two-seater vehicle was generally impossible even for relatively simple investigations. If a vehicle was off the road even for a day, then the section’s operational abilities were significantly reduced. Sunday mornings occasionally offered slack periods when the men could do some maintenance, but reports often came in regarding events on a Saturday night that required immediate action. The decision as to whether a shooting or stabbing case, or loss of a considerable amount of valuable property is more important than vehicle maintenance has then to be made, and, I have in the past taken the view that bodily harm to a person or the chance of the recovery of perhaps £200 - £300 worth of property is more important than maintenance to a vehicle valued at less than £100. I would like to point out that up to the present for this month alone [June 1944], approximately £3500 worth of property has been recovered.

Cooper’s anger steams from the carbon copy attached to his Section’s diary. He pointed out that ‘criminals’ did not stop their activities because the police had weakened themselves by having to check their vehicles, and he declared that the inspector’s report was not in keeping with the standards set by the Military Police, the SIB and the record of their work. There was a second inspection on 24 August carried out by a different officer from the Unit Maintenance Inspectorate who reported ‘great interest in vehicle maintenance … shown by all ranks’. He also gave ‘great credit … to all concerned for the very great improvement in the general standard of maintenance. The  documentation is as near perfect as is possible, and cleanliness and lubrication of all vehicles is of a particularly high standard’. Whether significant changes had been made in the way that the unit dealt with its vehicles, whether an officer who was less of a vehicle martinet had been sent in response to the complaint or whether there was a combination of the two is unclear. But

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the proximity of the inspections, and Cooper’s fury, suggest that someone in authority had taken that fury to heart. In passing Cooper explained that serious problems were taken to the MT staff of the local provost company, though he added that they were ‘grossly overworked’. He added also that, as well as not having any fitters in 62 Section, there were no cooks and no clerks. This meant that the cooking had to be done by the investigators themselves, as did all the typing up of reports. There was also a shortage of typewriters; not too dissimilar, perhaps, to the situation in the Eighth Army Press Office which had prompted the theft enquiry in Catania in the summer of 1943. In September 1944 Bill Hutchins pointed out that while 67 Section, with its headquarters still in Taranto, had sent small detachments to Brindisi, Foggia and Ortona, it only possessed two typewriters leading to ‘considerable difficulty … in submitting reports etc’. On this occasion the shortage was dealt with relatively quickly, though the legibility of some of Hutchins’s monthly reports suggests that he should also have been indenting for typewriter ribbons rather more often.86 As Hutchins’s reports suggest the SIB sections did not always remain together in their headquarters town; as in Algeria small detachments sometimes of just two NCOs could be sent some distance to another town or towns as a local detective unit. Thus when 75 Section moved to Perugia in July 1944 it sent detachments to Florence and Siena; then, when it advanced its headquarters to Florence it kept the detachment in Siena and sent another to Arrezzo.87 Sections that advanced close to the army followed the troops into Austria at the end of the war, but others hardly moved at all during the fighting. Most notable among these were the sections established in the ports of the south like Bari and Naples and their semi-permanence was not surprising, given the fact that these ports provided the safest route for landing supplies for the Allied forces as they fought their way up the boot. Safest, of course, in the sense of being further and further from the battlefront and the likelihood of enemy attack; they were never safe from the depredations of petty thieves and the larger, better organized gangs. In March 1945 Bilyard’s 64 Section moved north in the wake of the armies to Livorno and from thence to Genoa arriving a few days after the German commander in the city had surrendered to partisans. Shortly afterwards Hutchins’s 67 Section moved up the eastern side of Italy to the port city of Trieste. Here there were also partisans, but a local and international situation far more complex and dangerous than the friction between the various political factions that made up the guerrilla fighters of Italy’s Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale.

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The city of Trieste and the surrounding region had, to all intents and purposes, been captured by Yugoslav partisans who envisaged it as the seventh republic of Yugoslavia. The Germans, however, preferred to surrender to the New Zealand troops that reached the city in small numbers shortly after the partisans. The  region was ethnically divided between Italians and Slavs. Old enmities had been accentuated by the Fascist annexation of much of the province of Ljubljana in 1941 and, following the beginnings of resistance, by the internment of thousands of Slovenes in concentration camps where large numbers died. In preparation for settling its future the victors agreed a temporary geographic division of the region: Zone A contained the city and port and much of the coastal region and was administered by the British and Americans; Zone B, which embraced the hinterland, was run by the Yugoslavs. There were immediate problems. Zone B contained bauxite mines and electrical plants that Italians in Zone A claimed were essential for the steel production and oil refineries in their districts. The port itself was central to the supply of Allied troops in Vienna.88 Like other ports bringing in military supplies, that in Trieste provided opportunities for both small- and large-scale thefts. The ethnic and political divisions in the region had been greatly aggravated by the ferocious behaviour of Italian troops and police following their invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the subsequent annexations. At the war’s end the Yugoslavs began their own persecutions of the Italian population in the areas that they occupied, notably Fiume (or Rijeka to the Yugoslavs). In the split territory of Trieste the frictions and hatred led to demonstrations and outbreaks of violence, which, in turn, made investigations difficult for foreign military police officers. The situation was compounded by the fact that there was no effective civilian police functioning in Trieste until the creation of the Venezia Giulia Police led by British officers drawn from the Civil Affairs pool and discussed later. Bill Hutchins recalled that the Venezia Giulia Police was not much in evidence before September 1945 and he commented in both June and July that lack of a civilian police meant that 67 Section was required to investigate all civilian crime in addition to criminal offending by members of the military.89 These investigations often required delicate negotiations with suspicious Yugoslav partisans and political leaders. Sergeant Dickie Hearn recounted some lively stories of his experiences with the Yugoslavs, but as the year drew to its end the Section appears also to have been growing ‘demob happy’ and its numbers were steadily reduced as men packed their kit and headed home, often to exchange their faded khaki for their former police officer’s blue. In September Hutchins left to train as a CAO; Hearn was stuck for a few months longer, but his journey

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was for home.90 In the closing months of 1945 the war diaries of most SIB sections report men going home on extended leave on the LIPA programme, or even the section’s disbandment with men being posted to other existing or, more commonly, amalgamated detachments once again designated by a letter rather than a number. Thus, in November 1945 the remnants of 64, 68, 75 and 80 Sections were brought together in Milan as ‘D’ Section, while the remnants of 61, 62, 63 and 76 assembled in Naples as ‘E’ section.91

3

D-Day to Berlin

Landing, looters and the fiddles When Allied troops landed in Normandy in June  1944, Redcaps were again present to direct traffic off the beaches and down the appropriate roads, to receive prisoners of war, and to check looting and theft by Allied troops. Behind the frontline troops that provided the spearhead of Operation Overlord came the SIB. On the army’s return to France the detectives were much better organized and better prepared than those that had landed with Campion four years earlier. They had received military training at Mytchett; they had also taken the detective course designed by Jack Ellis and passed the exam. Nevertheless, as with the men then serving in Italy, probably little could have prepared anyone for the variety and the scale of offending, and the complexities of the economic, political and social contexts in which they found themselves. Perhaps an ecstatic welcome was expected from the French, Dutch and Belgians who had been subjected to Nazi occupation since 1940. Unquestionably, the Allies were welcomed as liberators, though some of the troops slipped easily into looting and vandalism, thus losing welcoming friends as quickly as they had been made.1 Rather more serious for the SIB Sections were the needs occasioned by the war and the fighting in the streets and fields of contested territory; the fighting destroyed homes, killed civilians and livestock, ripped up crops, arable land, roads and railways, all of which led to serious shortages in food, shelter and transport. These shortages were aggravated by the harsh winter of 1944 to 1945 which brought the need for additional fuel and warm clothing. The grim situation fostered an extensive black market as honest civilians, as well as the less scrupulous, cast envious eyes at the seemingly inexhaustible supplies available to their liberators. At the same time there were absentees and deserters, as well as men, who continued to serve in the Allied armies who were prepared to make a quick profit, if necessary at gunpoint.

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At the close of 1943, the first SIB recruits were mainly in the Middle East or Italy while Ellis, now a lieutenant colonel, had moved from Mytchett to establish military detective policing in the Far East. With the invasion of northwest Europe imminent, a cluster of new Special Investigations Sections were created and brought together for training at Mytchett. The first sections, based in North Africa and Italy, had been given two-digit numbers running from 60 to 69. The first sections destined for the invasion of Northern Europe were given the numbers 70–74; new sections organized in Italy became 75–80, and additional sections subsequently created for northwest Europe were given the numbers 81–89. The size and structure of the sections organized for northwest Europe was the same as those in the Mediterranean: two commissioned officers, two warrant officers, ten sergeants and two corporals. Like their predecessors the men were mostly young, former police officers who, from 1941, had been given permission to volunteer for military service.2 Immediately following their formation the first sections established for northwest Europe were given leave, and then mobilized for training in January  1944. In addition to Ellis’s detective course, the men were all taught French for one hour a day, five days a week. They had to pass the detective exam, but the success rate in French seems to have been variable. Lieutenant David J. Fawcett, a former police officer from the Isle of Wight, believed that his section, 71, progressed favourably; but Captain Frank Pollard, one of Campion’s original volunteers noted simply of his 70 Section: ‘Progress – fair.’ Most of the remainder of the training at Mytchett was taken up with military instruction in map reading, the use of small arms and sport – mainly swimming and football. Finally, the men were all taught how to drive and given basic instruction in motor maintenance. Once this was done, each section was issued with its transport. Fawcett was unimpressed with his section’s Hillman Utility two-seaters; the cylinder heads were of an inferior finish and there were constant problems with the gaskets. These were the first complaints about section transport for Northern Europe and they were to recur in different forms throughout the following campaign. On 13–16 February, all of the men attended Peel House in London, the old Metropolitan Police Training School, which had been taken over for training the junior CAOs whose task was to re-establish civil society in liberated areas. Pollard recorded with reference to the short course that he and his men followed: ‘It is most essential for a close liaison to be maintained between C[ivil] A[ffairs] Police and SIS personnel when operations commence, as civilians are certain to become involved with WD property.’3 This suggests that lessons had been learned from France in 1939–1940 and also from the continuing problems

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in Italy. And Pollard himself was destined for more important tasks than commanding an SIB Section; by the end of the war he was responsible for the entire SIB of the 21st Army Group in northwest Europe and was rewarded with an MBE on returning to the Metropolitan Police at the beginning of 1946. During March and April, the training was briefly interrupted by dental check-ups and typhus inoculations and the sections began moving from Mytchett to towns in Kent and Essex on the heels of the units destined to storm the beaches on D-Day. In May, the section officers began to attend briefings on Operation Overlord and tragedy struck 71 Section when one of its corporals was seriously injured when his motorcycle was involved in a serious accident with a three-ton army lorry. The corporal’s wife and parents hurried down from Leeds to be with him in Southend General Hospital. He died ten days after the accident; Fawcett recorded that the whole section was deeply upset. Some provost companies landed on the beaches immediately after the first assault troops. There were early losses of men and equipment and there were problems with some of the landing ferries.4 Other companies and the first of the SIB sections followed a few days after the D-Day assault. Fawcett’s section was the first SIB unit to land. It embarked from Southend on 9 June but was held up at sea. When it arrived off the landing beaches it was too dark to disembark, but not too dark for a brief attack by the Luftwaffe. The ship’s American crew shot down one of the attacking planes, but it exploded close to the ship blowing in a hatch and injuring several of the soldiers on board. Fortunately, 71 Section itself suffered no new casualties and it landed, finally, on 15 June. It spent the first few days in trenches under fire; one of its first investigative duties was to find out who was responsible for appropriating the rum ration due to the men in trenches. After a few days the section established its headquarters at St. Aubin sur Mer, a midpoint between Sword and Juno Beaches. It was given jurisdiction over an area stretching from Port-en-Bessin, on the western end of what had been Gold Beach, to Ouistreham, at the eastern end of Sword Beach. The SIB men were issued with Smith and Wesson six-chamber revolvers only; the experience of being under fire in trenches on their first day and thereafter led them to think that such weaponry was insufficient and they began to acquire unofficial weapons. Sergeant Major Howden, for example, acquired a German rifle.5 70 Section landed the day after 71 and moved down the Orne River to establish its headquarters at Ranville,6 just south of the 6th Airborne Division’s drop zone and Pegasus Bridge. 72 Section, commanded by Lieutenant Richard S. Warman, formerly of the Wiltshire Police and who had been an acting sergeant major

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when the section was formed, spent most of June and July based at Orpington in Kent. The section crossed the Channel at the end of July, landing on 1 August. It was ordered to Caen, where Warman set up its headquarters.7 Caen, the largest city in Normandy, had been in Allied hands for nearly two weeks when the section arrived. It had been home to 60,000 people, but after fierce fighting and Allied carpet bombing to drive out the German defenders, thousands had left; gradually they trickled back to seek shelter in the ruins and to find food.8 In the weeks immediately following the landings, the SIB Sections, and also some of the provost companies, found themselves primarily involved in responding to complaints from the local inhabitants about looting and theft by the liberators. The day after his arrival in Ranville, for example, Frank Pollard recorded three soldiers arrested for housebreaking and awaiting court martial; a few days later he was in pursuit of a deserter from the Black Watch suspected of stealing 12,000 francs.9 Even the ruins of Caen were looted and Warman noted that, unfortunately, for ‘the majority of the complaints received little can be done. Thousands of troops are moving through Caen and are undoubtedly responsible for a large percentage of the looting’. A snap raid and a search of one unit’s kit yielded a significant amount of French civilian property. There was also a scattering of other offences.10 At the beginning of July, 70 Section was investigating the suspected murder of a British marine; two other marines were eventually arrested and charged with manslaughter. A few days later, the section had its first experience of investigating a war crime, specifically the alleged murder of Canadian prisoners by German troops.11 Lieutenant Harold Purslow,12 a former police officer from Cheshire and the second in command, arrested a major on a charge of indecency; at the end of August the section was investigating the rape and murder of a French woman by a British soldier. Rape and sexual assault were serious problems, and the fears surrounding rape seemed particularly to attach themselves to black GIs and French colonial troops from North Africa; there were no non-white units from the British Empire involved in Northern France during or immediately after D-Day. The fear of miscegenation possibly meant that more of such rapes were reported and prosecuted. It is clear that a disproportionate number of black GIs were prosecuted and punished for rape and that white GIs were given the benefit of the doubt or simply treated more leniently. Quite possibly the French police and the American military, sharing similar prejudices, either wittingly or unwittingly collaborated to impose their perspectives of racial order.13 Moreover, whatever the seriousness of the offence, Sergeant Major Howden recalled regular difficulties with the officers commanding units in which rape suspects were serving. The officers commonly

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stuck up for their men and argued that there was a war to be fought. ‘[I]t was very difficult’, Howden recalled, ‘to overcome this sort of stumbling block to follow up on our enquiries’.14 All of the SIB sections that landed in France and Belgium following Overlord found themselves with administrative and housekeeping problems similar to those experienced by their counterparts in Italy. The French lessons had not left any man competent to deal easily with French civilians, and there were no Flemish lessons for those who subsequently found themselves in Belgium. Warman acquired a local interpreter and clerk shortly after arriving in Caen, but he felt ‘seriously handicapped without [a] clerk (English)’. His handicap was aggravated when, less than a week after the unit landed, Sergeant Trump was taken seriously ill and moved, first to hospital and then back to England. Trump had been responsible for the unit’s clerical side, and he had been good at it. ‘One typewriter is ridiculous’, protested an exasperated Warman in the wake of Trump’s removal to hospital and echoing the complaints of the SIB Sections in Italy.15 That same month, also in terms similar to those of his counterparts in Italy, Fawcett reflected: It does occur to me that if the establishment of a [sic] SIB Section was laid down by someone who knows the working of such a section, then I am sure we would not be so reliant on what we can scrounge. In brief, it is my opinion than an [sic] SIB Section should be self-supporting, with a clerk, cook, quartermaster, instead of being perpetually reliant on a Provost Company, as we are now. At the moment, if the Provost Company to which I am attached had to move, I should have to ask another unit to feed my men.

At the beginning of September the Provost Company did move and Fawcett’s section had to cook for itself ‘in a hole in the ground … scrounging utensils from empty billets’.16 The advance of the Allied armies led to changes in the focus of SIB investigations; increasingly they found themselves having to deal less with looting by front-line troops and more and more with the problems emanating from a ravaged local economy and a hard-pressed civilian population struggling to restore some normality to their lives, but who had learned how to survive under German occupation by dealing through a significant black market.17 Civilians often had money, but little petrol, food or clothing; soldiers often had little money, but were sitting on a wealth of supplies. In September, Fawcett’s section seized 4 tons of tinned food that had made its way from military supply centres into civilian hands. Halfway through that month the section moved to

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Amiens, where, it seemed to Fawcett, there were more private cars than there were in London. Moreover: It is becoming more and more apparent that these cars are running on W.D. petrol. It is hard for the soldier to resist the offer of 400 Francs for one Jerrican of petrol, but the French will go to any lengths to get it.

It was the same with clothing and also with cigarettes that cost 7 francs for twenty, but which would fetch 30 francs on the black market.18 Identical problems emerged when the Allies crossed into Belgium. In November, from his headquarters in Sonnis, a few miles east of Brussels, Captain Harold Heathcote, while complaining about a lack of personnel and transport, reported that 70 Section was mounting raids on private houses and cafés; the former yielded ‘bales of clothing of all descriptions’ and the latter foodstuffs.19 France and Belgium did not have the problem of honoured societies such as those in the south of Italy which had infiltrated local politics and which engaged in all forms of violent crime and intimidation. Yet there were armed gangs active, generally drawn from deserters. There were three particularly dangerous groups made up of American, British and Canadian deserters that held up vehicles and committed robberies in the Brussels–Antwerp area during the early months of 1945. Dealing with them appears to have taken considerable time and effort.20 Given the pressure of work the SIB Sections found themselves conducting investigations with, and borrowing men from, the provost companies; in midNovember Captains Harold Heathcote and Frank Pollard, who had exchanged commands of 70 and 74 Sections, interviewed fifty-six military policemen for potential permanent transfer into SIB sections.21 At the same time the delicate situation surrounding the raiding of private houses and civilian cafés and of having to deal with civilian offenders meant that the sections also had to work alongside local police. The British have the unfortunate habit of referring to all French police as ‘gendarmes’: the Gendarmerie nationale was a branch of the army that had civilian police functions and were generally based in small barracks of half a dozen men in rural areas; until 1941, when they were nationalized and centralized by the Vichy government, the police proper were principally responsible to local government but with centrally appointed commanders – commissaires de police. When the section commanders wrote about ‘gendarmes’ in the war diaries they were probably referring to members of the Gendarmerie nationale, but not necessarily. Either way they often did not

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have a high opinion of French police officers. Lieutenant Warman thought that they did more harm than good when he was investigating a murder at the end of August and that, in general, they ‘had little idea of dealing with crime’. Fawcett considered those in the Amiens district to be unreliable. ‘I know well it would be folly to tell them if we intend to raid a café or garage the next morning, because it is almost certain that nothing would be found when the raid took place.’ Concerns of a similar nature were expressed by Lieutenant Frank Hort when his section moved to Belgium and he found ‘Belgian policemen … amongst those arrested for stealing W.D. property and it is difficult to place trust in these people’.22 But the gendarmes and the police in both France and Belgium had serious problems of their own. They had their own families to look after in the economic and social upheaval of liberation and, more seriously, they had been compromised by the German occupation. During the occupation the ordinary enforcement of the laws regarding theft could lead to the exposure of resistance activists and put a gendarme, or a police officer, in an awkward whatever their feelings towards the Germans.23 With liberation came a purge and some people appear to have been tempted to settle old scores with gendarmes. ‘Most of the complaints are for insignificant actions’, insisted the Gendarmerie commander for the company with headquarters in Lille. ‘The spirit of vengeance is the dominant trait in the attacks on the men … and among the complainants are a great number of individuals previously linked by the gendarmerie with robbery or the black market.’24 It is not surprising that some gendarmes and police were inclined to look to their futures and their families and, as a result, they tipped off the occasional influential local who was involved in the black market and who might be happy to see them purged. While the SIB often had little time for the French and Belgian police, the same was also true of Allied soldiers who, like the Germans before them, were reluctant to show them much respect or to acknowledge their legitimacy. Also, just as the British found themselves having to accommodate French and later Belgian differences, so the liberated often had problems with the practices of some of their liberators. On at least one occasion the dress of a soldier from a Highland regiment led to an arrest by Brussels police officers: Policemen no. 379 and 513 handed over … a Scottish soldier who had been found showing his sexual parts while sitting on a bench. The policemen in question had been asked to intervene by a woman who has not been identified. The soldier was sober and was not acting in the way with intention … the policemen were told that it was not compulsory for Scottish troops to wear pants under their kilts.25

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The move of 71 Section to Amiens, with detachments being posted periodically to Boulogne, Dieppe and Rouen, coincided with a general growth of the SIB in the ever-expanding liberated regions of northwest Europe and a strange game of musical chairs imposed on the personnel by their superiors. In mid-October, 70 Section, which had followed the army into Belgium, lost its second in command, Lieutenant Purslow, and one of its warrant officers, CSM Mumford. They were recalled to Mytchett to take command of one of a number of new sections, rapidly formed and posted to France and Belgium with equal rapidity. Purslow and Mumford, the latter now commissioned as a second lieutenant, had less than two weeks to get to know their new unit, 82 Section, before it embarked for France. Almost immediately Purslow was posted to 81 Section in Antwerp and was replaced by Fawcett. The latter had received orders to go to Antwerp at the end of October, which were promptly countermanded. Lieutenant Frank A.G. Hort, who had been second in command of another of the new units, Section  81, and who had brought the orders transferring Fawcett to Antwerp,  was given command of Fawcett’s seasoned 71 Section. Hort was soon expressing his disquiet  about the moves between sections. Fawcett’s section clerk, Sergeant Dunn, moved with him and this, Hort declared, created confusion. ‘Good men of his calibre are difficult to replace and cause endless difficulties for  O.C.s of sections.’ Echoing the sentiments of others, he went on to insist that SIB units required permanent,  office-trained clerks. He was also concerned about the regular deployment of men on detachment to other towns, often at some distance from the Section headquarters. Police officers,  he stressed, needed to get to know the districts and the inhabitants of the areas in which they worked. Fawcett, with his new command based in Lille, made similar  complaints. Section  82, he wrote, was ‘hopelessly under strength with one officer and eight NCOs on detachment’. Moreover, since ‘for some unknown reason the powers  that be’ did not consider clerks necessary for SIB, he  was left performing the duties of ‘OC-cum-clerk’.26 The constant administrative shuffling and personnel shortages did not mean that there was any let-up in the usual day-to-day issues that faced the different sections. Drink was always a problem in the masculine environment of front-line soldiers and unscrupulous café owners were always ready to rip off unsuspecting soldiers who had money in their pockets. In December 1944, a bar in Antwerp was closed by the British Military Police for selling soldiers cider as champagne. The cider had been purchased at 95 francs a bottle and was being sold to the soldiers at 300 francs a bottle.27 This kind of thing had already happened in Italy, where civilians were arrested for making illicit whiskey and other alcohol

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which they sold to the troops at inflated prices. Much more serious, however, was some of the French and Belgium alcohol distilled illegally and sold as brandy. In the harsh winter of 1944–1945, both 71 Section in Amiens and 70 Section one hundred miles further east faced the problem of illicit and highly dangerous alcohol being marketed to both troops and civilians. Heathcote reported the confiscation of stills and the arrest of civilians who had been making a ‘very potent drink’ from wood alcohol which was then sold to troops ‘with bad results’. The illicit liquor in Hort’s district was manufactured from methyl alcohol, sugar and water and sold as cognac. ‘It would appear that quite of lot of imitation liquor is being sold on the continent at all times’, he reported, ‘with consequent danger to the consumers’. The phoney cognac sold in a café in Amiens led to the deaths of seven British soldiers and four French civilians.28 In December 1944, Fawcett reported that there had been nothing unusual or of special importance during the month, Except perhaps a new racket which has been exposed, that is the making of ladies coats from W.D. blankets. As a result of a coat being found displayed for sale in a shop window in Lille, our enquiries took us to Paris, where we found that in the Montmartre district Jews had obtained W.D. blankets and were converting them into ladies coats. These coats were priced at 8000 Francs.29

This might have been new to Fawcett, though it had already been found by the SIB Sections in Italy; nor, following Overlord, was it confined to France. Hort, who with 71 Section followed the advance into Belgium and established a headquarters in Ghent in January, found a similar problem with local seamstresses making ‘Bond Street creations’. Two months later he found more seamstresses branching out into ‘hats, handbags, dressing gowns and sports coats’. Similar enterprising civilians were using the soft uppers of American combat boots to make ‘very handsome slippers [while] ordinary US Army brown boots were also being made into men’s’ shoes’.30 82 Section may have been scattered across north-eastern France and, like its fellows, lacking in administrative support, but in January  1945 Fawcett reported that his men had recovered supplies and equipment amounting to nearly £5,000. It had also arrested several absentees who were acting on behalf of Belgian tobacco merchants, running tobacco into France to evade customs duty. Given the value of property that Heathcote reported recovered by 70 Section in Sonnis (see Table 3.1) the SIB was also demonstrating its usefulness in the east of Belgium; and its achievements in investigating crimes, recovering property and arresting suspects continued on a par with the sections in Italy,

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Table 3.1 SIB 70 Section, Northern Europe 1944–1945: cases, arrests, property recovered

Date

Cases investigated

British military personnel arrested

Belgian civilians arrested

Dutch civilians arrested

October 1944

56

60

52

November 1944

83

17

132

December 1944

67

84

80

January 1945

231

53

166

78

February 1945

320

84

204

101

March 1945

265†

71

122

153

April 1945 In transit

136

18

56

77

May 1945

55

34

1

8

June 1945

33

18

*Includes twenty-five wheels and tyres valued at £500 and about £1,000 worth of clothing. †Includes one murder, five robbery with violence, two indecent assaults, six cases of sodomy. Source: WO 171/3409; WO 171/7804

Other civilians arrested 3 (French)

Value of property recovered £2,637 £3,265 £7,017 – 13 -10* £4,262-2-3 £2,650-17-9

8 (Germans) 10 (Germans)1 (Pole) 6 (Germans)4 (others)

£2,729-10-9

Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

70 Section, HQ Sonnis, Belgium (till March 1945) Helmond, The Netherlands (till early April 1945) nr. Solingen, Germany (till early May 1945) nr. Luneburg (till mid-June) Brunswick

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as it was transferred first to the Netherlands and then to Germany and as can be appreciated from a comparison of the details in Tables 2.2 and 3.1. ‘SIB justifies its existence’, Fawcett declared with some satisfaction in his unit war diary. During the early months of the 1945 Fawcett combined with the French police to raid cafés and houses suspected of being the meeting places of black marketeers who dealt in War Department foodstuffs and equipment. Tyres, as in Italy and the Middle East, were at a premium and soldiers were offered ‘fabulous sums’ for them. Jeep tyres could fetch as much as £50 ‘and though we continue to recover many … we do not manage to find the soldiers who sold them, the civilians are always reluctant to give information on soldiers’. Moreover the civilians were continually pestering the soldiers to sell food; ‘this section could spend all the time raiding cafés and houses recovering W.D. foodstuff, which has been sold by the troops.’ In February, after eight months in France, Fawcett had the impression that the country was ‘full of rackets of all kinds, big and small, and the most surprising people seem to be engaged in one’.31 Another officer commented cynically that the population around Antwerp ‘looked upon all Allied property as though it had been brought to the Continent for their personal benefit’.32 In the context of war, recent occupation and, particularly, the terrible winter of 1944–1945, however, at least some of the black market and pilferage on the part of ordinary French and Belgians can be explained by the privations. Different national laws and tariffs meant much to the restored governments keen to establish their legitimacy, to revive their shattered economies and to collect duties and taxes; but frontiers did not mean much to the Allied armies involved in fighting the Germans, and they meant still less, other than the opportunity for profit, to black marketeers. In November, Section 71 had much of its time taken up in pursuit of smugglers moving contraband across the Franco-Belgian border. British Army deserters, using stolen military vehicles, were heavily involved in the trafficking. Across the border in Belgium, a detachment from 81 Section posted to Ostend also had a problem with an organized gang of deserters who were stealing vehicles and housebreaking. The gang generally wore the badges of rank of senior NCOs or commissioned officers in the Allied armies; and as far as SIB were concerned, to add insult to injury, they operated under the title of the ‘Field Corps Police’. On 11 December, the Ostend detachment was delighted to report the arrest of four of them.33

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Antwerp to the Rhine No Channel port was an objective during the Normandy landings themselves and the Allies created their own harbours, the Mulberries, with breakwaters of boats and concrete caissons as close to the shore as possible and floating piers to bring supplies ashore. Yet impressive and efficient as these were, they were no substitute for a major port, especially as the Allies moved further inland and along the coast towards the Low Countries. The American capture of the deep-water port of Cherbourg took longer than had been expected because of stiff German resistance, and the port itself was thoroughly wrecked by Allied bombardment and by German demolition. Cherbourg was captured on 30 June but was not even partially useable until mid-August. British troops entered the Belgian port city of Antwerp at the beginning of September 1944. Antwerp, the second city in Belgium, is situated on the curving estuary of the River Scheldt, about a dozen miles from the North Sea. During the Second World War it had a population of around 300,000; it had been a thriving port from the Middle Ages until the mid-seventeenth century when the Treaty of Münster closed the Scheldt to international shipping. Its fortunes were briefly revived under Napoleon and, with permanence, in the mid-nineteenth century. It had been besieged in the early weeks of the First World War, yet it still boasted a fine Gothic cathedral and other sixteenth-century buildings, broad avenues and elegant long terraces  of fine houses that reflected its years of commercial  prosperity. Considerable extensions had been made to the dock facilities at the end of the nineteenth century and were continued during the interwar years; these  made the docks far more serviceable than those of Cherbourg in the late summer of 1944. However,  rather than pressing their advantage and clearing the banks of  the  Scheldt of battered and disorganized  German troops so as to make  the docks available to Allied shipping, the Allied military commanders  chose to embark  on the ill-fated Operation Market Garden to establish a bridgehead  across  the Rhine. When Market Garden came to its bloody and costly end at Arnhem, Antwerp remained much as it had been when the British arrived and there was no large-scale port available for landing Allied supplies where the eastern end of the Channel gave way to the North Sea. It took weeks of further fighting to dislodge reinforced and reorganized German forces from the Scheldt, and not until 29 November did the first Allied ships enter the port at Antwerp. The emergency military docks, like the Mulberries, might not have been large enough to cope with the needs of the armies as they grew in numbers and

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advanced deeper into north-western Europe, but they had some advantages. The men working to unload the ships in such harbours were service personnel, the facilities were closed to civilians, they were not bordered by civilian properties and, while it would be foolish to suppose that there were not army or navy personnel prepared to acquire supplies for their own purposes or to sell on to civilians, the whole environment of a purely military dock was more easy for the Military Police to patrol and probably less likely to suffer from major thefts. The Belgians, like the French and later the Dutch, may have been happy to be liberated from German occupation, but liberation did not mean an immediate end to the wartime economy and serious shortages remained. Indeed the shortages were worsened by the Allies’ purchase of local fruit and vegetables, and some soldiers continued to loot and to seize goods without any thought of payment. Thousands of tons of coal dug from Belgian mines also went to the Allies, thus aggravating the fuel shortages of the freezing winter. All of this, together with the temptation offered by seemingly limitless supplies available to the liberating armies, meant the usual problems for SIB units. 81 Section had been established under the command of Lieutenant Cyril Clewes at the end of September; just one month later it arrived in Antwerp. Its immediate problems were that no one in the section could speak Flemish and there was no interpreter, while the sheer number of cases with which it was presented led Clewes to conclude that dealing with them all would be impossible. He did not have a problem with the Belgian police and found them willing to help, but they were insufficient in number. Like his comrades elsewhere he was soon protesting that ‘the one typewriter allowed is hopelessly inadequate’. The offences investigated by Clewes’s section were little different from those investigated elsewhere, except that Belgian civilians seemed illicitly to have acquired large amounts of German property. At the end of November, he was concerned that once the port of Antwerp was reopened, the burdens on his section would become even greater.34 Clewes’s worry about the difficulties of policing the docks were probably based on the general knowledge gained elsewhere, rather than any intimate knowledge of Antwerp itself, yet the vast expansion of the city’s docks from the late nineteenth century was considered by the local Belgian authorities as fostering widespread theft and it had prompted the creation of a large private security company the Garde Maritime et Commerciale.35 Clewes was not alone in recognizing the potential difficulties of entrusting the investigation of crime on the docks to a section already heavily involved with investigating other military offences across the city. On 25 November, 83 Section of the SIB was established at Mytchett; it landed at Ostend

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on 17 December and travelled immediately to Antwerp, where it assumed responsibility for investigating offences on the River Scheldt, for the thirty or so miles of the Antwerp docks and for the railhead that linked the docks with the rest of Belgium. Captain N.L. Whittaker, who commanded the new section, was soon reporting a constant pilfering of ships’ cargoes by both Belgian civilian dockers and Allied military personnel. Like section leaders elsewhere, he also complained regularly that his section was weakened by his men having also to police Ostend and Ghent; in addition small parties occasionally had to be detached to deal with sudden emergencies, such as a spate of robberies during March and April apparently committed by bargees on the Scheldt at Bornem, about ten miles south-west of Antwerp. The Antwerp Docks, however, took up most of his men’s time and efforts.36 Antwerp is not quite thirty miles north of Brussels, and at the end of January  1945, the newly formed 85 Section, under the command of the experienced Richard Warman, newly promoted to captain, took post in the Belgian capital. Brussels had become a hub for the movement of illicit goods and stolen War Department property, much of which was brought down from Antwerp. Warman and his men spent much of the time checking traffic on the Brussels–Antwerp road, the Brussels–Antwerp railway line and searching civilians arriving off the trains. The section also followed the criminal links south to Paris. In June, for example, members of the section were making enquiries in the French capital about military vehicles being trafficked illicitly from Brussels. As earlier, when he was stationed in Caen, Warman peppered 85 Section’s war diary with complaints about the lack of clerical assistance and typewriters; his point was underlined by the fact that he wrote the diary in pencil.37 Office and vehicle shortages affected the sections in Antwerp but, far more serious for all and everyone, the port city was a regular target for V weapons; indeed, it suffered more hits from these missiles than any city other than London. The Germans had scarcely had time to wreck the port and transport facilities before being driven from the city, but in the aftermath they struck back with a ferocity which saw three or so V weapon attacks each day. At about noon on 27 November, for example, one such missile hit one of the principal streets, Keyserlei, while it was crammed with military personnel and civilians. Nearly three weeks later, on 16 December, there was even greater carnage when a V2 hit the Rex Cinema, next to the headquarters of 185 Provost Ports Company. It was estimated that over 1,100 people were in the cinema to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s western The Plainsman starring Gary Cooper; twenty others were in

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the provost company HQ. All of those in the provost HQ escaped with their lives, though several were seriously injured; but of those in the cinema  567 were killed, including 296 servicemen, and another 291 were injured. In the aftermath of such attacks that hit the docks, looters were invariably active. Many of these appear to have been civilians seeking to use the chaos and confusion to take whatever they could from damaged barges and ships; and sometimes the looters, or the receivers of looted goods, were people in positions of responsibility. In mid-January, 83 Section arrested eighteen British Civil Defence workers for looting after a raid; in the following month men from 185 Ports Provost Company raided the houses of Belgian detective police officers and in eighteen instances found War Department stores.38 Gradually petty thefts and pilferage by civilians declined; Whittaker put this down to the increase in food brought into the country for civilian consumption. But while the petty theft declined, and the war came to an end, large-scale theft involving gangs did not. In June, 83 Section was busy with the black market arresting large numbers of civilians and military personnel, and recovering considerable amounts of stolen goods including seven and a half tons of soap, 8,370 yards of hospital sheeting and 2,304 tins of salmon. In October, the section was still arresting absentees and deserters ‘who have been living by committing crimes of violence; also Military Policemen have been arrested on Bribery and Conspiracy charges’.39 81 Section, commanded by Purslow, was more centrally situated in the city and in February the rear of its headquarters received a direct hit from a V1, wrecking the property and seriously damaging both documents and the unit’s vehicles. Purslow suffered head wounds and one of his sergeants had lacerations to his face and hands; both were held in hospital for a few days. 81 Section’s replacement headquarters, at 23 Quellinstraat, was about half a mile south of that of 83 Section on Italielei, and that much further from the docks, yet its investigations involved the same kinds of offences, namely the theft of, and trafficking in, military supplies and vehicles. In February, Purslow was delighted to report the arrest of an armed gang made up of Canadian deserters. In March, the section was preoccupied with the trafficking in military vehicles which were being repainted and given civilian registration plates. In April, there was a major investigation into an officer of the Royal Engineers who appeared to be appropriating stores through the use of forged documents; goods worth some £60,000 had been misappropriated in this affair. For the month of April as a whole Purslow reported, in addition, the recovery of property to the value of £14,215.40

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Exporting British Policing during the Second World War

The offences investigated by the SIB in Belgium, as elsewhere, involved both military personnel and civilians. Increasingly, as will be described in the discussion of the role of CAOs later, the Belgians were entrusted to handle things in their own way and this included dealing with Belgian nationals involved in the theft, the fencing of goods or just the possession of Allied supplies. The  Belgian military courts dealt with over 50,000 such offences, and by the end of January 1945, of the thirty Belgian military magistrates in Antwerp, ten devoted their entire time concluding cases regarding what was termed ‘the protection of the Allied economy’.41

Over the Rhine and the war’s end On 4 May 1945, at his tactical headquarters on Luneburg Heath, Field Marshal Montgomery accepted an unconditional surrender from representatives of the German High Command. Four days later, and three after the shooting had ceased, Captain Whittaker and 83 Section managed a few hours off to celebrate VE Day before going back to their normal duties. They remained in Antwerp until the end of the year; their policing problems were largely unchanged, but they were no longer harassed by the attacks of V-weapons. In November, the section was required to organize for a visit by Winston Churchill during which he received the freedom of the city. Simultaneously though without any apparent connection, they were called upon to investigate the disappearance of 243 cases of whisky from the docks. As the Allied armies had advanced so the amount of territory exposed to criminality by soldiers had correspondingly increased. Some seasoned SIB units followed the armies; 81 Section travelled from Antwerp to Preetz in Schleswig-Holstein, a few miles south-east of Kiel; 82 Section moved from Lille to Hamburg. 83 Section remained in Belgium after the German surrender and was joined in August by the newly mobilized 90 Section. The new section was commanded by Captain George Corney, who had followed the well-worn track of being a regular soldier in the Scots Guards, joining the police at the end of his service – in his case the Hampshire Constabulary – being recalled as a reservist in 1939 and then joining the SIB. He had distinguished himself sufficiently in tracking gangs of deserters and other thieves in Egypt during 1943 to earn the MBE. 90 Section was given a vast area to police and from the outset was spread very thinly; Corney and his headquarters were in Ostend, half of his section was in Calais and another detachment of two men was in Bayeux.42 Three other

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new sections – 87, 88 and 89 – were assembled in Brussels for final training and to mesh as units rather like the sections that were assembled at Ottaviano on the fringe of Naples the year earlier. Brussels had acquired a reputation for criminality and vice, and here the men got to know each other better and gained some initial experience of their tasks before they crossed the Rhine into Germany. In Germany, the SIB found most of the policing problems that they faced elsewhere in northwest Europe, but on a massive scale. Germany in the aftermath of war was in an appalling state. The period became known as die Stunde Null, ‘zero hour’. The destruction in parts of some towns and cities was almost total – the result of the round-the-clock strategic bombing offensive and ground fighting; cigarettes and women’s bodies were the currency. Like the other occupying powers the British forbade fraternization with the German population, though this did not put much limitation on exchange between troops and civilians or upon small-scale thefts and fiddles. There were also some large gangs working well beyond the law and the limits of the nonfraternization orders running black-market enterprises and trading in petrol, motor vehicles and spares, and medical supplies. While the number of largescale black marketeers was relatively small, it has been estimated that around 95 per cent of the population was involved in barter or small-scale buying and selling on the black market.43 Fawcett described civilians in Hamburg prepared to give or do anything to get food from soldiers, and the troops were happy to make all kinds of exchanges for goods such as cameras, watches, rings and so forth; they rarely exchanged for cash. Yet in spite of this Fawcett was surprised that generally the troops behaved well, particularly given that, with the war’s end, they had so much time on their hands. ‘One might have expected a good many sexual crimes in view of the non-fraternisation order’, he explained in the Section’s War Diary, ‘but that is not the case’.44 Purslow’s 81 Section, in contrast, found itself investigating several rapes; many of these appeared to have been committed by the displaced persons (DPs) wandering the war-torn country, but in July Purslow reported two cases involving, respectively, soldiers from Belgium and Canada, and in August a similar case involving a British officer.45 As in other liberated and occupied areas in Italy, France and the Low Countries, it is difficult to assess the incidence of rape in the zone of Germany first fought over and then occupied by British soldiers after the surrender. A recent investigation has argued that the incidence of rape committed by British and American troops was much greater than the traditional picture would suggest and, perhaps, not greatly different from the assaults by the Red Army especially when sexual coercion was included with soldiers providing food, clothing and

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other necessaries for the use of a woman’s body.46 As was the case in Italy, the number of rapes given in the army’s crime statistics was negligible, but clearly the offences reported to, and investigated by, the SIB sections were the tip of an iceberg. Fawcett had few reported to his unit, but Andrey Kodin, a Viennese Jew who had escaped from Austria in 1938, served in the Royal Engineers during the war and moved into SIB at the end, estimated that hardly a week went by without being called upon to investigate a rape in the years of occupation before 1950.47 Kodin reported that offenders, once identified, usually confessed protesting that they thought the woman had agreed; and in the circumstances of the time, when desperate parents were known to offer their daughters in exchange for the necessaries of life, this may sometimes have been true. But there were the other, common reasons why investigations may never have reached the SIB. Throughout western society there was a stigma about being the victim of rape which may have deterred many women and their families from coming forward with a complaint; and any such concerns were doubtless aggravated by fear – after all, the British were armed conquerors. The Germans were aware that, following the discovery of the concentration and death camps there was often little sympathy for them even among men such as army chaplains who might have been expected to show some magnanimity. Moreover there was the continuing problem recognized by Sergeant Major Howden in France, that many commissioned officers appear to have been determined to protect otherwise good soldiers under their command. In the face of clear evidence, they provided men with alibis or simply denied that there could be a case to answer.48 British troops entered the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen on 13 April 1945. 86 Section SIB had been formed at Mytchett at the beginning of February, had crossed to Ostend three weeks later and began normal criminal investigations based in Ostend and Bruges. On 26 April, the section’s commander Captain Alfred Fox and one of the unit’s two CSMs were ordered to assist No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Unit which was investigating the atrocities uncovered in Belsen. There was to be no SIB unit dedicated solely to such investigations in northwest Europe in the same way that 78 Section had been established in Italy. Indeed, while the Allies had found countless examples of German massacres in Italy and had some limited knowledge of what had been happening in Nazi Germany and its occupied satellites, neither the British nor the Americans had made preparations for seeking out, apprehending and interrogating Nazi war criminals. The head of No. 1 War Crimes Investigations Unit was Lieutenant Colonel Leo Genn, who had given up his career as a barrister for the theatre, volunteered at the beginning of the war and served

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in the Royal Artillery. Shortly before his appointment Genn had served on a Court of Inquiry examining the massacres of Allied troops taken prisoner at the beginning of the Normandy campaign. Yet while Genn had legal training and some recent experience of war crimes, the bulk of his unit did not and they were not police officers; they came from different units and were more often recruited for their linguistic abilities than any detective experience. Manfred Werner – now Lieutenant Fred Warner – was a good example. He was a German refugee who had reached England early in 1939, volunteered for the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps and served on the docks at Le Havre before Dunkirk; he had then been commissioned and parachuted into Austria for SOE in the closing weeks of the war.49 In May, three more of 86 Section’s sergeants were ordered to assist the Belsen enquiries, which meant that the normal duties of 86 Section could be continued only with reinforcements from the unit based in Ghent. Frank Pollard, now a major and responsible for the whole of SIB in the 21st Army Group, leant a hand conducting one of the interrogations of Josef Kramer, the so-called Beast of Belsen. Elsewhere in liberated territories or occupied former enemy territory SIB sections made investigations of war crimes either as they came across them or specifically, since the offence was in their jurisdiction, at the request of the War Crimes Commission.50 The scale of the industrial killing and the brutality of the Nazi regime were far greater than anyone had anticipated, as were the problems of pursuing individual killers; and there were still plenty of other crimes committed by British service personnel, sometimes in league with civilians, which needed the SIB to investigate. In the late spring, the remnant of 86 Section followed the advancing army into Germany establishing its headquarters at Verden, a few miles southeast of Bremen. Fox rejoined the Section on 21 June, disappointed with what he had been able to achieve at Belsen owing to ‘insufficient investigating staff … to do the job’. Over 30,000 potential witnesses there but it was impossible with the staff available to interview any but a small fraction. Large staff for this purpose should have been standing by before Belsen was liberated. Even now valuable evidence is being lost through lack of staff.51

There were many other problems. The war in Europe ended in May and men, including those in the SIB sections, wanted to go home. The government wanted to bring them home and to set about trying to restructure and rebuild the economy and to restore the nation’s shattered finances. There was little inclination to find vast sums of money to maintain military investigation

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units. The war crimes investigation units, like the SIB throughout the war, found themselves with shortages of dependable vehicles, interpreters, office equipment and, indeed, everything that they felt was necessary for their tasks.52 A few of the hundreds of middle-ranking Nazi murderers were caught and prosecuted; but one of the most successful war crimes teams was composed of members of the SAS who came together initially to investigate and avenge the murderers of comrades in the Vosges in 1944. The unconventional attitudes, behaviour and persistence of the SAS pursuers did not endear them to several senior British officers, nor to the French, whose territory they cavalierly entered without request or authority.53 As the war ended there was uncertainty as to whether Nazi diehards would continue armed resistance, especially given the fanaticism with which some Hitler Youth units had fought Allied troops advancing in the Ruhr. ‘On entering Germany’, recalled one officer of the Royal Signals, ‘I had a greater fear of civilians who might convert themselves into WEREWOLF [sic] guerrillas, than the uniformed German Army.’54 From the winter of 1944–1945 to the immediate post-war period ‘Werwolf ’ groups probably accounted for the deaths of between 3,000 and 5,000 people that they considered collaborators and traitors. Yet these groups had little support from the majority of Germany’s exhausted, war-weary population, and the Allies found them little more than ‘a minor irritant’.55 Desperation and the number of guns in circulation encouraged those so inclined to take to armed robbery. In December 1945, a gunfight on the streets of the Ruhr town of Iserlohn led to the arrest of eleven persons aged between fifteen and eighteen years who had been involved in armed robberies. Several of the gang were wounded, but no members of the Military Police. A woman, with 47,000 reichsmarks in her possession, was suspected as the ringleader.56 Fortunately, such gangs were rare; the great majority of Germans had little desire to continue fighting a war that had left their country in ruins and many of them destitute. The victorious Allies, now reorganizing themselves into armies of occupation, once again found that the main problems for their military police were the black market, the trafficking of Allied supplies, the looting of such desirable property as remained in German hands and sexual assaults by the triumphant soldiery. In addition, there were enormous numbers of DPs in the western allies’ zones of Germany and these were identified as serious threats to order and stability. The number of foreign labourers in Germany at the end of the war is unknown; in the summer of 1944 there had been about 6 million, constituting more than half of the labour force.57 Most of the Belgian, Dutch and French labourers

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recruited or forced to work in the Reich returned home shortly after the German surrender; but there were also thousands of Poles as well as people from the USSR and Baltic territories who had welcomed German invaders and some of whom had fought in the German Army. These individuals had no desire to return to where they feared having to face Soviet justice. Remaining in Germany, however, the displaced persons, or DPs, acquired an unenviable reputation for committing violent crimes; probably this was not always deserved. It may have been because they had no fixed abode, because they were often seen apparently wandering aimlessly and spoke a foreign language, that they were always suspect and the first to be accused of any violent criminal behaviour. Certainly the native Germans, in a population which, at the time, was overwhelmingly female appear to have been scared, and the Allies looked on the DPs with similar suspicion.58 According to the Manchester Guardian for British soldiers they represented ‘a headache for which no aspirin can be found’, and, according to The Times, in the British zone of occupation during the six weeks up to mid-June, there had been 100 murders, 60 rapes, 200 robberies with violence, 150 cases of theft and slaughter of cattle and around 1,000 cases of looting, most of which appeared to be the work of DPs.59 Fox reported that 86 Section was swamped with investigating crimes attributed to DPs. In August, for example, there were investigations into four murders, of which one was alleged to have been committed by a British soldier and the other three by DPs. In September, Fox reported the arrest of eighteen DPs, all accused of violent crimes. In the final months of the year, he expressed concerns that German civilians were becoming more involved with dealing on the black market and taking War Department property, yet he had insufficient men to investigate the number of offences for which DPs were accused, let alone anything else.60 Len Higgs, a former Metropolitan Police officer now a sergeant in Purslow’s section, requested half a dozen infantrymen from a local camp to help in the pursuit of a gang of Polish DPs suspected of robbing and murdering a farming family; the pursuit ended in a gun battle, during which one of the suspects was killed and all the others arrested.61 88 Section, based in Sassenburg, had two camps full of Polish DPs in its area of jurisdiction. The inmates of the camps appear to have occupied a disproportionate amount of the section’s time, and regular raids upon them yielded both suspects and firearms.62 Nor was it only violence that led to accusations against DPs; at the end of 1945, 82 Section had a case pending that involved a Polish gang engaged in black-market offences from Brussels to Hamburg.63 As often as not some DPs were as hostile to the British and the Americans as they were towards the Germans; they recognized that it would very likely

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be British and American troops that handed them over to the Soviets. In the closing weeks of the war, 120 Provost Company based in Bad Salzuflen, near Münster, reported difficulties with Polish DPs, and when three SIB sergeants from 74 Section were called in to take one into custody, the suspect produced a pistol from his overcoat and shot all three. Sergeant E.R. Southcott was killed; his two comrades were severely wounded. The Polish DP, Theo Walasck, was subsequently tried and sentenced to death.64 A year later another Polish DP was arrested by Polish troops for the suspected possession of firearms. Unfortunately he was not searched as carefully as he might have been. Thomas Lewis, a member of the Glamorgan Constabulary serving as a captain in the Control Commission, was called in to investigate. The DP promptly produced a pistol, shot Lewis dead and then committed suicide.65 Every one of the SIB sections in northwest Europe thought itself stretched in the immediate aftermath of the war, and none more so than the relatively new 89 Section which was given a particularly odd jurisdiction. From 7 July its headquarters and the majority of the men were billeted in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin; the second in command and a small detachment of NCOs, however, were stationed in Paris, and in October two of these were sent to Toulon to detect and prevent larceny on the docks. It was not as if the situation in Berlin was easy; the war was over, but relations between the four powers occupying Berlin were tense. That part of 89 Section in Charlottenburg became deeply involved with the campaign against the black market. This had grown to enormous proportions in Berlin and the situation was complicated by the involvement of members of the Red Army. A raid on the centre of blackmarket activities near the ruined Reichstag and, within the British sector of the city, was considered dangerous enough to require the support of troops and a cordon of tanks. The raid resulted in nearly 2,000 people being detained, including twenty-two officers and nearly eighty other ranks from the Red Army; two British soldiers were also arrested, but these were members of 89 Section planted to avoid any Soviet accusations of prejudice.66 There were always rivalries between soldiers from different units and these could be more serious when involving men from different countries. This was not simply the result of ideological conflicts between national leaders. In Berlin, the Allied occupation zones were porous; young soldiers, armed, with nothing much to do, were tempted to get drunk, jeer at others and commit offences such as fighting with, and assaulting and robbing members of different armies, or attacking civilians. At the end of October, 89 Section reported:

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A number of reported cases investigated, which involved armed robbery. Two to five soldiers are going around BERLIN in bands, in the darkness, stopping and robbing at the pistol point German civilians and then using unnecessary violence by hitting their victims, chiefly on the head, with their revolvers, or fists. Observations kept by personnel of this Section without much success. The scope for success in this direction is limited as the main part of this Section here is fully occupied in investigation and detection work. Shots were exchanged on more than one occasion and a British Sergeant was shot. A civil policeman was also stabbed near the lungs (not fatally) by, it is believed, American soldiers … . Civil Police now often going round on duty in threes or fours.67

The commanders of the SIB sections had often complained about the transport supplied for their units, about the lack of personnel for non-policing tasks and various shortages of equipment. It was not necessarily the case that these deficiencies increased as the war drew to a close or at the war’s end, but the sections appear to have become more aware of them, and their commanders were more prepared to voice their annoyance. Warman, as noted above, had been complaining regularly ever since he arrived in France a few weeks after D-Day. In May  1945, when his section in Brussels was dependent on several captured German vehicles, he protested about an order from the Headquarters of the 21st Army Group that all captured enemy vehicles were to be returned.68 The previous March Fawcett had protested from Rennes about the permanent ‘head-ache’ of transport; four civilian cars had recently been allotted to his section, but only one turned out to be in working order.69 In the following month Purslow reported that the shortage of transport for 81 Section had been marginally alleviated by the recovery of the unit’s 15 cwt truck which had, rather embarrassingly for the policemen, been stolen the previous October; but the unit was still awaiting replacements for two vehicles recently damaged by enemy action. At the beginning of June, in Preetz, he was still complaining about the shortage of vehicles, now made worse by the order that captured German vehicles could no longer be used; and in the following month 50 per cent of the unit’s transport was in workshops requiring repairs. The problems here had been compounded by the need for members of the section to make frequent round trips to Antwerp and back, roughly 1,000 miles, to give evidence at the courts martial of soldiers arrested before the move to Germany. The hammering that the vehicles received making these journeys increased the need for repairs, and while vehicles, and personnel, were in Antwerp, they were not available for investigations in and around Preetz.70 The newly formed 87

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Section, based in Düsseldorf, made similar protests, pointing out that 15 cwt trucks were unsuitable for usual enquiry work and that the enormous extent of the unit’s jurisdiction from Gennep on the Dutch border down beyond Bonn made sufficient, roadworthy vehicles essential.71 At the end of the year, the introduction of petrol rationing for the army further impeded inquiries. Captain Baldwin, who had recently replaced Purslow in command of 81 Section, protested that the amount allowed to the section was ‘totally inadequate, in fact the … allocation [for November] was utilised in the first four days of the month’. Baldwin made a ‘special case’ for an increased allocation and this appears to have met with a favourable response by the middle of the month.72 Other requests, however, either fell on deaf ears or simply could not be met by senior officers or the supply depots. There were, for example, constant protests about a lack of fountain pens and, above all, given the need for formal, clear reports of investigations before proceeding to prosecutions, about the lack of typewriters; the state of the sections’ war diaries, written in pencil or with typewriter ribbons so well used as to contain precious little ink, in themselves testify to the shortages. Howden recalled typewriters being regularly removed from buildings so that every investigator in his section ultimately had either a German or an English one. The requirement of up to eight copies of some case papers, when only one top copy with three carbons could be done at a time, did little for the life of either ribbons or carbon paper; and no doubt increased the annoyance of the SIB investigators.73 As in the complaints made by the sections in Italy and those made by Fawcett when his unit was left to its own devices by the advance in September 1944, there were still no cooks allocated to the sections, nor were there any trained clerks who might have taken on some of the minor administrative tasks. However there was one significant benefit that emerged when the SIB sections crossed into Germany; they were able to call upon the scientific assistance of the Kriminalpolizei (KRIPO), the German detective police. In Düsseldorf, for example, 87 Section considered itself fortunate to have the assistance of the local forensic laboratory; and even Fawcett expressed delight when, on his arrival in Hamburg, he was able to use the photographic and fingerprint departments of the local KRIPO. However, he could not resist commenting that it was a pity that such ‘scientific aids to Crime Detection’ were not made available earlier. They would have been of much more use than ‘Lamps Hurricane, Traffic Sleeves, and other such items, ridiculous items, which are of no use to us’.74 Fawcett was, perhaps, getting demob-happy, but he had never been one to keep silent about what he saw as deficiencies and poor planning by his superiors.

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And as Andrey Kodin reported, calling on the German detective police for scientific aids such as photographic assistance and forensic examinations remained a necessity for SIB units for several years after the war.75 Fawcett was not the only SIB man getting ‘demob happy’ in the summer of 1945; indeed ‘demob angry’ might be a better term from a glance at the letter columns of the Police Review. Many had assumed that their demobilization would be relatively quick. They were aware that, at home, the numbers of regular police officers had declined during the war as a result of the opportunities to volunteer for the armed forces and the wartime freeze on ordinary police recruitment. Civilian police ranks had been filled with auxiliaries or by keeping on some men that might normally have retired. The police officers in khaki protested that there were no longer any battlefronts for which supplies and materiel had to be ensured from ports, railheads and supply dumps. And if there was a black market in liberated territory, they could also point to a thriving black market and thousands of deserters at home. In August 1945, a warrant officer serving with the SIB in the Mediterranean theatre protested: The only conclusion which serving P.C.s out here can reach is that we are being kept in the Army through lack of foresight on the part of the War Office, as it is apparent that a Special Investigation branch will always be maintained, even in the peacetime Army.76

Men wrote similar protests from other theatres, and so did their wives.77 ‘Still Hoping’ claimed that he had been given the opportunity of a commission in November  1944 but, thinking that this might delay his demobilization at the end of the war, he had opted to transfer to the Military Police in the hopes of joining the SIB. He was refused his request to join the SIB on the grounds that all civilian police would be released shortly once the war in Europe had ended. He was apparently unaware that from shortly after the defeat of Germany the commanders of SIB sections were asked to note monthly which of their men were, and which were not, suited to being posted to the Far East. By November 1945, the unfortunate ‘Still Hoping’ was stationed in Malaya, ‘apparently the land of the forgotten’.78

4

‘Dickie’ Hearn and 62 Special Investigation Section

Dickie Hearn: A man at the sharp end In his memoir of the last major British campaign of the Second World War, George MacDonald Fraser contrasts the broad sweep of the usual military histories with the perspective of his ‘marras’ – the ten or so men of an infantry section of the Border Regiment with whom he served in Burma fighting southwards down the road to Rangoon. It was the section that mattered most to the private soldier. It was his military family; those seven or eight other men were his constant companions, waking, sleeping, standing guard, eating, digging, patrolling, marching, and fighting, and he got to know them better, perhaps, than anyone in his whole life except his wife, parents, and children. He counted on them, and they on him.1

Sometimes a member of the section did something stupid, but while he might be moaned at, he was a ‘marra’, a mate, and mates stuck together. The official history of the campaign in Burma describes a series of raids out of the town of Meiktila, detailing casualties and the loss of a supporting tank. Fraser’s section was at the sharp end, and he suggested that ‘each official work should have a companion volume in which the lowliest actor gives his version … it would at least give posterity a sense of perspective’. In Fraser’s recollection it was a lorry, rather than a tank, that was lost. It seemed to burn all night attracting a large number of Japanese soldiers, while Fraser’s section, part of a mixed force of 200 British, Gurkhas and Sikhs, pressed themselves into the ground hoping the Japanese would not find them. Suddenly an argument flared over a chaggle, a canvas water bag. The argument involved a Sikh and one of Fraser’s marras, a man who, as a scrounger, ‘was gifted beyond the ordinary’. ‘Stupid sods! … Can you beat it? Forster’s thirsty, so 200 men risk getting killed!’2 Fortunately the altercation was not heard by the enemy, and Fraser lived to create one of the

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greatest comic military characters of twentieth-century British fiction – Sir Harry Flashman VC. Fraser was a Scot but his marras were a cross section of Englishmen. They came mainly from the towns and countryside of Cumberland. One was a forester who spent his spare time rescuing people stranded on Lake District peaks. There was a cinema projectionist, a sagger carrier from the Potteries and a professional soldier from London who had fought in the closing stages of the First World War and served as a mercenary thereafter in China, South America and Spain. Fighting as infantrymen on the hot Burmese plain and in the steaming jungle was quite different from their civilian lives and jobs. A high percentage of SIB investigators, in contrast, were recruited precisely because of their peacetime occupation. In theory at least, what they were doing in wartime was what they did in civvy street; but the questions of what they thought they were doing, what they thought they were contributing, how different they considered themselves to be from the police and the populations in which they found themselves are significant and worth exploring. The SIB did not have a George MacDonald Fraser. One or two men wrote memoirs or brief recollections, some of which have been quoted earlier, and several were privately printed.3 C.V. Hearn, however, stands out for producing two volumes of memoirs and two other books on policing, all of which had a commercial publisher. Hearn, known as ‘Tashy’ during the war and ‘Dickie’ afterwards, was not in Fraser’s league as an author. His memoirs are reminiscent of those of other police officers of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. They focus on important cases, and they contain the sort of dialogue found in a crime novel or movie. Moreover since some of this dialogue is put into the mouth of offenders – often non-British offenders – when there was no one else present who might have reported or verified it, there were clearly moments where Hearn’s imagination took over. It is possible that some of this imagination was that of a ghostwriter or editor, though Hearn appears to have written the books himself, at least in first draft. His adopted son did not recall anyone else being involved in the writing, and a cadet constable remembered him writing the first memoir while on night duty at Walton-on-Thames Police Station. The  cadet, Nick Brent, looked after the station switchboard and any ‘customers’ while Hearn sat at a desk and wrote; he later received a free copy of the book signed: ‘To my pal Nick for your kindness.’4 ‘Old Bill’ Cooper, who commanded Hearn’s SIB section for most of its time in North Africa and Italy, thought the memoirs ‘racy’, but he did not challenge their accuracy.5 Like an increasing number of police officers who produced

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memoirs in the first half of the twentieth century, Hearn put greater emphasis on entertainment value rather than attempting any educational or intellectual elements in his narrative. The thinking among these police authors and their publishers was that real-life crime ‘provided a treasure-trove of material which no fictional author could match’.6 The raciness and entertainment aside, however, Hearn’s memoirs provide a clear, positive and very favourable understanding of English/British law and policing. This understanding is situated in a comparison with the structure and use of law elsewhere and with other systems of policing; it is also suggestive of Hearn’s more general attitudes to class, to ‘criminals’ and to different kinds of foreigner. While, particularly after the war, Hearn was regarded as a ‘character’ and very much his own man, given the close bonding of small military units and the fact that Hearn remained with the same unit for well over a year, it seems unlikely that his opinions of law and police were wildly different from those of the other members of his section. In 1940, George Orwell published his essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, which addressed the tricky issues of national characteristics together with class divisions in British society and popular British attitudes towards a range of traditions and institutions. He had much to say about judges and the law, though little to say about crime and criminals. For all his patriotism and pride in things British, Orwell was too astute an observer to believe that the law was always just; but he considered that the British working class and the expanding sections of the lower middle class believed in the ‘powerful illusions’ of justice, liberty and objective truth. ‘Everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected and feels a sense of outrage when it is not.’ Above all, Orwell believed, people saw the law as ‘above the state and above the individuals’.7 It is not known whether or not Hearn read ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, yet Orwell’s description of the ordinary British understanding of the law and liberty is something echoed in Hearn’s writing and broadly also in the behaviour of Hearn’s comrades. ‘Ordinary British people’, Hearn wrote, ‘are not greatly concerned with the intricacies of legal systems, preferring to leave it to judges, lawyers and policemen’; and he rounded this comment off with the kind of phrase likely to be penned by Orwell, though perhaps at greater length: ‘They are, however, keenly interested in fair play, a fair trial.’8 Hearn knew that there were problems with the law and he had little regard for anyone who considered himself to be socially superior, yet his memoirs show a belief in the ultimate superiority of English/British law, police and justice. His views might be said to be Reithian but with rather more hard-headed realism than Reith. It may be that for Hearn and the small group of policemen in his section this faith in the British system was also a way of

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coping first, in the environment of war and its devastation, and second with the experience of foreign lands where alien, possibly sharper social and economic divisions made them appear significantly harsher. This chapter, drawing heavily on Hearn, sets out to describe wartime detective policing from the perspective of an SIB section from its arrival in North Africa in the summer of 1942 to the close of the Italian campaign in 1945. Cyril Victor Hearn was born in Battersea, London, in April 1912. On leaving school he became a printer but in October 1931 he joined the 2nd battalion of the Coldstream Guards, serving for nearly seven years and rising to the rank of sergeant.9 On 13 November 1938, he joined the Surrey Police, a medium-sized county force of around 550 men then under the command of Major Geoffrey Nicholson CBE MC. Two weeks after joining the police, Hearn got married. For the first few months of his police career he was a beat constable in the small town of Oxted just a few miles from the Guards Depot at Caterham and close to the boundary with the Metropolitan Police district. At the end of February  1939, however, he was transferred about twenty miles west to Dorking and it was

Figure 4.1 ‘Dickie’ Hearn c. 1945 This photograph of Hearn in army uniform is taken from the card which accompanied one of his Italian medals. Photo: Courtesy of the late George Churchill-Coleman

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from here on 1 December, after little more than a year as a police officer and a husband, that he was recalled to the colours together with sixty other reservists in the Surrey force.10 Most of the police officers who wrote memoirs in the first half of the twentieth century briefly described their early life and the reasons why they joined the police. Hearn, in contrast, omitted the personal details of his early life, the reasons why he joined the army and why he then joined the police; the focus of his two memoirs is his war experience. As noted earlier, a few young men saw the  minimum three-year period of army service as a stepping stone  to a police career.11 Hearn, however, had served in the Guards for almost seven years when he joined the Surrey force. He gives no hint as to how, on his  recall to the colours, he came to join the Military Police and, specifically, the SIB. As a uniformed constable with a year’s service, he would have had little experience of detecting offenders. Major Nicholson had created the nucleus of a detective force with five sergeants in the mid-1930s, but Hearn was not attached to it. Indeed Hearn’s seven years in the Guards might have made him seem a good bet for the kind of smart Redcap that patrolled wartime streets and railway stations checking leave passes, travel  warrants and ensuring that men in uniform had  their buttons fastened, webbing blancoed, brasses bright, boots polished and clothing generally in good order. Equally, it could have been seen as good  training for the  military policemen (MPs) who worked close to the front,  directing units along designated routes, watching for stragglers and deserters, and moving prisoners.  Nevertheless, in the late spring of 1943, Hearn was appointed to be one of the sergeants in 62 Special Investigation Section. The usual compliment of a Special Investigations Section was two commissioned officers, two warrant officers, ten sergeants and two corporals. All of the first members of 62 Section appear to have been civilian police officers. Like Hearn, Captain Cooper, the CO, had been a guardsman before becoming a police officer; Sergeant Major Harry Coburn and Sergeant Bill Sharman came from the Metropolitan Police; Sergeants ‘Spud’ Murphy and Paddy Kelleher appear to have come from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC); Sergeants McLachlan, Fred ‘Ginger’ Payne and Bob Still came, respectively, from the West Riding, Blackburn Borough and Bristol Borough forces.12 The unit was slightly larger than the contemporary infantry section of ten men, but small enough for the same kind of tight bond that bound Fraser and his ‘marras’. The intention appears to have been that the men should work on investigations in pairs and Hearn usually paired with Bill ‘Shagg’ or ‘Shagger’ Sharman. Born in Gorleston, Norfolk, in 1912, Sharman was a few months older than Hearn.

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He had served for six years in a hussar regiment in India, where he had become a good horseman and proficient at ‘tent-pegging’. He had gone from the hussars to the Metropolitan Police, serving for about a year in West Ham before his recall to the colours. In the SIB both Shagg and Hearn developed pistol-shooting skills. They revelled in what Hearn called fancy ‘gun-slinging’, even taking an opportunity to show off to some of their US counterparts.13 While on occasions skill with firearms appears to have stood them in good stead, messing around with guns could also be dangerous. When Sergeant Freddie Payne was shot and wounded by a former Fascist who was stealing parcels from the mail and trafficking in penicillin taken from Allied medical supplies, an incensed ‘Shagg’ knocked the suspect down with a blow to the head. After this Hearn and ‘Shagg’ considered that the best way to encourage their prisoner to give information about his contacts was by firing their revolvers into the wall on both sides of his head. After their first shots, however, Hearn recalled that they became as shaken as the suspect; they feared that dust and stone chippings blasted from the wall by their bullets had damaged the man’s eyes. We were only hoping to frighten him, to put an end to Freddie’s misery. If his eyesight became permanently impaired, we would be for the high jump and rightly so, because we had gone just that much too far. Headquarters would not treat the matter lightly.14

Yet throughout his narratives Hearn emphasized the unique situation of war and the problem of dealing with criminal offenders, notably those in Italian gangs, who carried guns as a rule. He took the traditional, what might almost be called the ‘official’ line – and one shared also by Orwell – that guns were alien to English (British) police officers.15 Like the theorists Hearn omitted the RUC from his British police, even though two of his companions, Murphy and Kelleher, seem to have been RUC men and, as such, had carried pistols as a matter of course. Hearn took a similar, traditional view about what he considered to be the superior nature of the law and of the methods and practices of the police in Britain. He drew unfavourable comparisons with the practices of the Germans of course, but also with those of the French. Indeed, for their own ends he considered that the Germans treated the peoples of North Africa better than did the French; he thought also that French police, and other members of the French legal administration, were often corrupt. He was critical of the American police for their use of ‘the third degree’ to get confessions and information; but then this also reflected the traditional view that was held of the British Bobby and, during Hearn’s teenage years, there had been concerns about Bobbies employing

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American methods after having read of them in novels and seeing them used in the movies. Hearn may never have seen an American film in which police fired close to a suspect’s head to persuade him to give information, but such an action had all the elements of Hollywood’s presentation of the third degree. Moreover in North Africa Hearn was fully prepared to act on information gained by use of violence and intimidation by members of both the French Police and the Foreign Legion; from the late nineteenth century the French police used the euphemisms la cuisine de la sûreté and le passage à tabac to describe the regular beatings given to suspects.16 In November 1944, as head of the SIB in Palestine and Trans-Jordan, Harold Dibbens wrote a paper on the questioning of suspects and accused persons to which he attached extracts on the subject from several legal authorities. What concerned Dibbens was the number of reports of SIB personnel using ‘unorthodox methods when interrogating’, and the problems that such created for them at courts martial and disciplinary hearings. He wanted his officers to discuss these matters with their subordinates for an hour a week over the next month, and threatened a test on the matter sometime in January.17 Dibbens’s proposals do not appear to have reached, or to have been copied by, any other SIB commander in the Middle East and Italian theatres. In Italy the SIB often worked alongside Italian police officers. Unlike some of his superiors, Hearn made no critical comment about any lethargy on the Italians’ part, or any desire to work a short working day. He recognized that some of these policemen had been Fascists until the ousting of Mussolini, but a British soldier or British police officer probably had little idea of the complexities of being a Fascist member of the Italian police. Some of the older Italian police may have been early supporters of the Blackshirt Movement; some may have joined the party out of obligation or may have been sympathetic though not necessarily fully committed. Some of the younger Italian policemen who had entered the police in the late 1930s or early 1940s, however, would have been socialized through party organizations and could have occupied positions in the party’s various affiliated bodies.18 Without recognizing these niceties, Hearn and his mates had no objection to Italian policemen who had been involved with Fascism provided that they did their job and could be depended upon when necessary; after all, he wrote, all Italians at that time were ex-Fascists in one way or another … . We adhered rigidly to the rule that a man’s political convictions were no concern of ours. The SIB were not a political department of the Army. Our concern was purely crime. The more criminals we placed behind bars, the greater our comfort and peace of mind.19

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Gino Borrelli, a young Italian detective who worked with the Bari Questura, was possibly one of the young policemen socialized through the party. He was linked with Hearn’s section, and Hearn identified him as a former Fascist. Borrelli’s courageous, but foolhardy, investigation of a suspect car resulted in him being shot and killed. In Hearn’s eyes the interrogation of the suspects by the Italian police ‘was extremely grim’. He ‘didn’t enjoy’ watching, but ‘did nothing to stop it … . A dead cop in any language spelt the same to any policeman’.20 As the case of Freddie Payne shows, even a wounded cop spelt the same, particularly when he was a member of a small, tightly knit unit like 62 Section. Throughout the two memoirs Hearn stresses the fact of 62 Section being British ‘police’ officers. The books were published, respectively, sixteen and eighteen years after the end of the war; and by this time Hearn had spent more years wearing a blue police tunic rather than a khaki uniform. By this time, if not earlier, Hearn had fully absorbed that powerful mythology of policing in Britain which had emerged by the mid-twentieth century, a mythology to which Hearn himself subscribed and underlined in another book, A Duty to the Public, in which he described ‘the British [Police] service for all its shortcomings [as] still the finest, fairest, most legally honest body of its kind’. The basic secret of its efficiency, he claimed, lay ‘in its unique relationship with the public, not the state’; it was a ‘civilian’ and not a ‘state force’ and it was bound by the same laws as the general public that it served.21 Yet in wartime circumstances, when it suited and was useful to him, Hearn was prepared to tell people that he was part of ‘the British/English Gestapo’ (Gestapo inglese) or, particularly in Italy, Branca Speciale (‘Special Branch’).22 In addition, while he was a soldier and a police officer proud of what he considered to be the unique British system of law and generosity towards colonial peoples, he also had the squaddie’s disrespect for officers who were full of their own importance and insisted upon the best spit and polish turnout. And he shared the squaddie’s dislike of red tape, which was reflected in his and Shagg’s outrageous behaviour at the war’s end. 23

62 Section’s war 62 Investigation Section was established together with 64 Section in the spring of 1943. Bill Cooper and Bill Hutchins, both recently commissioned from the ranks, were posted to Mytchett as the section commanders. Towards the end of

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May the new sections took ship in Liverpool for Algiers. They arrived on 27 May, five days too late to qualify for a campaign medal, as the Axis powers were being squeezed towards Tunis.24 Hearn began his narrative with the arrival in North Africa. Even though he had spent seven years in the Guards for Hearn, like so many of the squaddies, it was the first time that he had been out of England.25 The section spent the first month in Algeria, getting acclimatized, before moving to Tunis. Many of the problems with which the unit had to deal concerned vice and the threat of venereal disease; Hearn was sure that some soldiers sought to contract this to avoid being sent to the front.26 Drugs were also available and some soldiers began to acquire a habit. Hearn confessed that he and Shagg became rather too well acquainted with Hashish while acting undercover to investigate a vice and drugs ring, and that he feared slipping into addiction.27 Disguise for the SIB was relatively easy; at home they often worked in mufti while overseas disguise could be effected with a cap badge and shoulder flashes. When on campaign SIB personnel rarely, if ever, wore the MP’s distinctive red cap or any other MP armbands or markings. At least one of Hearn’s section also tried his hand at disguising as an Arab while on the lookout for German paratroops, allegedly left in Tunis to act as saboteurs. No Germans were found but, since ‘Mohammed’ was Harry Coburn, one of the section’s sergeant majors, the rest of the section took great delight in ensuring that he was, to their satisfaction and perception, sufficiently dirty to be an Arab. Consequently, he was roundly abused and pelted with rotten fruit – an interesting alternative view of the British treatment of the local population to the one that Hearn generally emphasized, particularly with reference to the law.28 Yet it would be difficult to argue that Hearn was racially prejudiced, given his later support for recruiting black police officers which ran counter to the policy of both senior officers and the Police Federation during the 1950s and early 1960s.29 Moreover he argued continually throughout his wartime memoirs that English/British law should be administered to all ethnic groups, not least because the fair and equal treatment that underpinned it was so appreciated by the indigenous peoples. He wrote with pride of the way in which he fought for the life of a man that he had arrested for murder in the highly charged atmosphere of post-war Trieste. Neither the Italians nor the Yugoslavs could understand it, yet the court yielded to his evidence and to the basic tenets of British law sentencing the man to four years’ imprisonment on a reduced charge of manslaughter. They were greatly impressed that a mere solitary British policeman could stand alone and confound their heretics, simply because he believed that an individual was an ordinary human being and came well before politics.30

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There may have been special pleading here together with a dramatic representation of his own role and a romantic portrayal of the British system that were designed to suit the British reader, but it also demonstrates the pride that even a maverick like Hearn could boast of existing within British institutions. There are no crime books or war diaries for any SIB section during the British Army’s campaigns in North Africa. There are no crime books and no monthly reports in the war diaries of Hearn’s section. It seems probable, however, that 62 Section investigated the usual offences such as fraud, theft, assault and, very occasionally, a rape or suspicious death. Small-scale offences do not make good stories for a police memoir aimed at a popular audience, and there are few such incidents of this sort to be found in Hearn’s narratives. But, as emphasized throughout, war provides opportunities for significant theft and fraud when members of a civilian population need, or simply want, what an army can have in abundance. SIB had been created, at least in part, because of the thefts of BEF stores from French docks. Hearn described his role in apprehending a group of offenders responsible for taking several tons of flour from the docks at Tunis. It was a mixed gang: two British soldiers, a French civilian checker and nine local men. But what made the case particularly significant for Hearn was the fact that, during the pursuit and arrest of the offenders, Hearn shot and killed a man for the first time. His response is worth recording as it seems rather unexpected from a tough ex-guardsman, though it chimes well with his ideas about the police in Britain, his belief that firearms had no part to play in their equipment and, perhaps also, with his hostility towards the ‘callous absurdity’ of capital punishment. I turned him over on his back and saw his life’s blood pumping away. His eyes were wide open and the muscles of both his hands were making them twitch open and shut involuntarily. I turned away from him and was violently sick. I had not meant to kill him, only to wing him. That he could be tried and executed for his part in the plot did not relieve my conscience at all. I walked slowly back to the truck, filled with remorse. If he was married, it was probable that he had many children. His widow would not be able to claim compensation as he was committing an unlawful act. She would have all those mouths to feed, with probably another baby on the way. I stopped once more and wretched violently … . I stumbled almost blindly over my first captive, who was still rolling about on the ground, holding his head. I turned on him savagely and booted him to his feet. It was the reaction setting in!31

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Six months after 62 Section arrived in Algiers the Allies landed on the Italian mainland. Operation Slapstick, nicknamed ‘Operation Bedlam’ as a result of the speed with which it was put together and launched, saw the British 1st Airborne Division landing from Royal Navy ships at Taranto on 9 September 1943. There was no opposition from the Italians who had recently signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies and, though German troops staged rearguard ambushes, within two days the British had liberated the ports of Brindisi, to the east, and Bari, to the north. ‘Liberated’ is, perhaps, rather generous given the circumstances; the first, and for some time the only, British soldier in Bari was Major Ian Greenlees who had been sent forward with three Italians to take over the radio transmitter in the city and begin broadcasts on behalf of the Allies. Greenlees found that the Italian garrison was loyal to the new anti-Fascist government, but that patrols of Germans moved through the streets during the night. Eventually Royal Marine Commandos entered the city and secured it.32 The Redcaps followed and undertook their usual tasks of directing traffic, rounding up stragglers and deserters, and acting as prisoner escorts; and then came 62 Special Investigation Section. The section established in one of the elegant buildings on the wide, tree-lined avenue of Corso Cavour. This headquarters was roughly midway between Bari’s docks and its railway station. Every Italian city and town has its Via or Corso Cavour, alongside its Via or Corso Mazzini, Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele II and other streets named after heroes of the Risorgimento or selected from Italy’s, or the region’s independent, past. Bari is no exception. It is the capital of the Puglia region; it is also the principal city of the province of Bari, one of six provinces making up the region as a whole. The city is situated on a coastal plain running up the heel of Italy; the plain is flat, scrubby land with vineyards and, especially, thick clusters of old, gnarled olive trees. Puglia was largely agricultural. In newly united Italy the Puglian landowners, as in so much of the country, were powerful figures in local government; the Puglian labourers, in turn, were known for their organization and for protracted strikes. Bari, however, had a significant, if shabby, port. It had a population of 160,000, according to the census of 1936. Its odd dialect was the result of sailors and fishermen merging Greek and the Puglian version of Italian over the centuries since classical times. There was a little industry, and much of this was concerned with the processing of olive oil, olives, citrus fruit, almonds and tobacco for export. In Unconditional Surrender, the third of his novel-cum-memoir trilogy Evelyn Waugh’s central character is briefed in Bari before his mission to Yugoslavia. According to Waugh few foreigners had

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visited the city since the Crusades though it had much to attract them and in early 1944 it had recovered the cosmopolitan martial stir it enjoyed in the Middle Ages. Allied soldiers on short leave, some wearing, ironically enough, the woven badge of the crusader’s sword, teemed its streets; wounded filled its hospitals; the staffs of numberless services took over the new, battered office-buildings which had risen as monuments to the Corporative State.33

Bari was also in ferment over Italy’s future. When the king of Italy and Marshal Badoglio overthrew Mussolini at the end of July 1943, Bari had been one of the first urban centres to hold a large political demonstration. But whatever their attitude towards the Duce, the king and his marshal had no intention of permitting free political demonstrations. Troops were ordered to disperse the assembled crowd; twenty-three people were shot dead and another seventy injured. On 28 and 29  January  1944, anti-Fascist parties held a congress in Bari and resolved that, once the war was over, there should be an elected assembly to decide on a new constitution and the future of the monarchy. The congress demanded that the king abdicate, considering him to be compromised by his former relationship with the Fascist regime, and the members refused to join Badoglio’s government electing an alternative and, as they saw it, a more legitimate Giunta or executive. The problem was that the congress and the Giunta covered the whole range of opposition from Communists to Liberals and there was little common ground regarding the kind of government and administration that should replace Mussolini’s regime.34 The politics, the economy, the artisans of the city and the peasants of the hinterland were probably as alien to the men of 62 Section as the population of North Africa, from which they had just departed. The Corso Cavour, where 62 Section was quartered, made a right angle with the north-eastern end of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. While these two avenues had names drawn from men of the Risorgimento they had been laid out on a grid system during the reign of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Marshal Murat, who was created king of Naples in 1808. Corso Vittorio Emanuele II divided the wide streets of the new town from the maze of narrow streets and alleys that ran up to the seaport. The old town still boasts its medieval castle, the cathedral which holds relics of the sixth-century Saint Sabinus and the Basilica of Saint Nicolas, both glorious examples of Romanesque architecture. Many of the streets have recently been gentrified, tidied and cleansed for the tourist trade; as in the past plump mammas sit at tables preparing the local pasta (orecchiette

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since it looks like tiny ears), but now as much for the cameras of tourists as for the family table. For much of the twentieth century, however, the old town was run-down and shabby, its population was poor and feared as dangerous and criminal. Whether the fears were justified, or whether the poverty and the squalor engendered them is open to question, but certainly the pursuit of offenders in the twisting alleys was difficult. As Hearn testified, the alleys were ideal for ambushes or the rescue of arrested comrades, while the overhanging balconies and upper windows provided good positions for anyone wishing to discourage (or kill the police) with bullets or grenades.35 Crime in Bari and its neighbourhood was different from that which Hearn and his comrades had dealt with at home. There were the usual fights, frauds and thefts involving troops, and there was a black market involving troops and locals. Waugh’s alter-ego, Guy Crouchback, visits an illicit family-run restaurant where payment was not in paper currency but where ‘petrol, cigarettes, and medical supplies’ were accepted.36 Given the vast quantities of supplies that might be appropriated and sold on, however, and the weapons available, the offences that 62 Section was called upon to investigate were often on a much larger and more dangerous scale. The dangers were aggravated by a number of desperate deserters; as elsewhere some of these, often from different armies and sometimes linked with locals, formed small gangs engaging in brigandage and highway robbery. Puglia was not home to any of the Mezzogiorno’s wellknown Honoured Societies – the Sicilian mafia, the camorra of Calabria or the ‘ndrangheta of Campania. Puglia’s ‘mafia’, the Sacra corona unita, was not established until 1981, though there appears to have been an antecedent in La Malo Vita, a society that surfaced in the 1880s like the ‘ndrangheta from within the prison system, and which, at the end of the nineteenth century, looked very similar to the camorra and the ‘ndrangheta.37 Moreover Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, shared a border with Calabria and it was separated from Italy’s ‘toe’, Campania, by the bleak, mountainous, thinly populated ‘instep’ of Basilicata. The mafia, the camorra and the ‘ndrangheta were involved in profiteering from Allied supplies. The original leaders of the Sacra corona unita had links with their western neighbours; so too, it seems, did some of the Puglian gangsters of the war years. Puglia in general, and Bari in particular, did not experience the destruction, poverty and vice of liberated Naples. When the Allies arrived they found that food was available and restaurants were open. Yet, as elsewhere in the Mezzogiorno, there were thugs who were greedy, dangerous and violent as well as being influential in society and local politics. Hearn described one

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corrupt local bigwig in Bari who had avoided prosecution before the Allied liberation because of his links with the Fascist elite and who, following the fall of Mussolini, continued to deal in the black market through a relative in Naples. He also recounted his section’s clash with a local criminal family, the Santinos, eventually resolved by an agreement with the elderly head of the family who, at a meeting in a Bari café of 62 Section’s choosing, agreed to end offending by his clan while the SIB men promised to ‘see what [they] could do’ when fifty-seven of the gang came up for trial.38 In March  1944 the Daily Express reported that a gang of about twenty men had been prosecuted for looting ninety-seven boxes of Allied mail in the Bari area.39 Cooper, Hearn, Sharman and the section’s interpreter, Umberto Pugliese, all received Italian awards for their involvement in the break-up of several large gangs working in the district. Shagg went undercover posing variously as a British deserter and a Greek; he was mentioned in despatches for this work by the British Army, but shot in the foot by US Military Police in the midst of some confusion about which members of a gang were actual offenders and which were police in disguise or police informants.40 Perhaps Hearn was playing to his readers’ assumptions about Italian and Fascist stereotypes when he described the local corruption: ‘the activities of their black sheep … followed a familiar pattern: corruption in office, and power at all costs’. He also highlighted what he saw as a significant difference between Italian criminal offenders and those that he found in England. ‘Where a British crook was content to rob alone, or with one or two of his pals, the Italians preferred a gang. Our own criminals rarely carried weapons, whereas it was extremely rare for an Italian to go unarmed.’41 There was almost certainly some special pleading here since the deserter-brigands were armed and the principal action described in the citation for Hearn’s BEM was breaking up an armed gang of British deserters and Italians. The gang, known as ‘Dixon and Co’, was led by a gunner who had deserted from the Royal Artillery; and using goods stolen from Allied troops and Italians, it fed and clothed the populations of four villages just outside Bari. On 5  December  1944, Hearn received information that Dixon and some of his men were in a crowded Bari piazza, not one in the old town however, but in the elegant grid system of the Napoleonic town. Hearn and two others entered the piazza in unidentifiable clothing; a squad of uniformed Redcaps hung back watching the SIB men but making sure that they did not alert the suspects. Dixon and his men were armed with automatic pistols and opened fire on Hearn; the SIB men pursued them and the uniformed Redcaps returned fire. Hearn seized Dixon personally. In the

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follow-up operation two dozen Italians were arrested and property valued at more than £4,500, excluding War Department vehicles, was recovered.42 This was all a far cry from policing in leafy Surrey or even in Metropolitan London, though there were other incidents in Italy that could easily have occurred anywhere. Hearn was giving evidence at a superior court in Bari when one of the accused collapsed. Hearn gave the man artificial respiration and a heart massage bringing him back to life, and earning an Italian decoration in the process.43 Hearn’s memoirs and the papers held by his family are useful documents for fleshing out the activities of 62 Section; unfortunately the section’s war diaries are far less helpful than many of the others for understanding what the unit did day by day or even month by month.44 Only the unit’s officers are regularly named in the diaries and, unusually, as noted above, there are no monthly report sheets. Captain ‘Old Bill’ Cooper had taken command when the section was formed in 1943 and remained the senior officer throughout, with temporary secondments and a spell in hospital in April 1945. Lieutenants (also acting captains) Walter G. Horton and Robert W. Calder, promoted respectively from the ranks of the Coldstream Guards and the Life Guards, served successively as second in command – the former until the end of June 1944, the latter thereafter. Horton appears to have been one of the men that followed the well-trodden route from the regular army, to the police, in his case the Gloucestershire Constabulary, then back to the army as a reservist, shifting from there to the SIB. The names of the units’ NCOs are not given, except when in hospital or when given some official recognition. Even then, such recognition could be ignored in the diaries; both Cooper’s OBE and Shagg being mentioned in dispatches at the beginning of 1945 were noted, but Hearn’s BEM was not, possibly because he was no longer with 62 Section in September 1945, though the citation identifies this unit as the one in which he had served with gallantry and distinction and the recommendation was written by Captain Calder.45 While the section’s diaries contain little detail, in two instances there are papers attached to the usual monthly printed forms which shed some additional light on it. Bari docks suffered two appalling incidents during the Allied occupation. The worst of the two was the result of a German air raid on 2 December 1943 when a bomb struck an American ship, the John Harvey, which was carrying mustard gas bombs. No one could ignore the massive loss of life and the other casualties, but the sensitivity of the ship’s cargo meant that the true nature of the incident remained secret for a generation after the war’s end. The diaries of 62 Section are not extant until the month following the

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explosion and Hearn makes no mention of it. On 9 April 1945, however, there was a second major explosion at the docks. Again the seat of the explosion was an American Liberty ship, the Henderson, carrying aerial bombs and other war materiel; and again the loss of life was considerable. This time there was no air raid and suspicions abounded of sabotage by Fascists, by Germans, a raid by frogmen or midget submarines. Thousands of statements were taken, many by members of 62 Section, but rather than their investigation of the cause, it was the section’s actions in organising rescue teams that earned them the real praise. As Hearn put it, he and his mates showed ‘that they were capable of far greater things than reporting soldiers for having their buttons undone’. Hearn and Shagg had been among the first on the scene, speeding north up the Corso Cavour to the docks in the unit’s riot truck and then climbing through burning, collapsing buildings to look for the dead and injured. The war diary contains a Special Order of the Day together with a series of letters complimenting the section on its actions. The other incident for which papers survive in the diary surrounds the vehicle inspections of the summer of 1944, described earlier and which so provoked Bill Cooper.46 Hearn makes no mention the vehicle inspections nor of the need for the men in the unit to service and repair the vehicles. Even the briefest of trips to the terrain suggests the hammering that the vehicles received along the dusty roads of the coastal plain or pulling further inland and up hills on narrow winding roads which, by their very appearance, illustrate the ease with which gangs were able to carry out their highway robberies. If he is silent about the driving and the vehicles, however, Hearn is careful to describe how each of the section developed a speciality. He himself became responsible for the supervision of hotels, cafés and NAAFIs; Shagg dealt with licensing and the control of food, wine and brothels; Alan Tapsell dealt with frauds; Tommy Moon supervised rail transport – while the docks were at the northern end of the Corso Cavour, the Bari railway station and yards were towards the southern end. When Hearn and Shagg were worried about the dope that they had been smoking in the pursuit of drug dealers in Tunis, they turned to Freddie Payne as the section’s firstaid expert. This expertise ensured that Payne was put in charge of all aspects of crime affecting hospitals and medical supplies; and for some reason this responsibility was linked also with crimes affecting the postal services.47 By the late spring of 1945 the pressure of work was having a serious impact on Hearn; he was 2 stone underweight and appeared to the local medical officer to be heading for a breakdown. He was given leave and money and set off to explore liberated Italy. After a good rest he returned to Bari but to

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the unwelcome news that he had been transferred to another section. A good SIB section, like the sort of infantry section described by George MacDonald Fraser, was a close-knit family in which the men looked out for, and depended upon one another. 62 Section appears to have been such a unit; at least Hearn considered it as such, and he wrote: It was a wrench to move away from my colleagues, we had been through much together and had even refused promotion to officer rank, rather than break up an excellent team. Our loyalty to each other was a byword in SIB circles and the parting was all the harder.

Bill Cooper, however, had arranged for Shagg to be transferred to the same unit as Hearn – 67 Section based in Trieste. ‘When perpetrating this little act of kindness, Bill Cooper never realised the upsurge of gratitude that I felt for him, but perhaps his ears may have burned just a little.’48 North Africa and Bari had been alien to British Bobbies, and Trieste was no different with its complex ethnic mix and the potential for friction between the British liberators on the one side and Yugoslav partisans keen to claim their seventh republic on the other. At first, Hearn and CSM P.W. ‘Jock’ MacCallum were the only two members of the section permitted to cross the border into Yugoslavia and, according to Hearn, they spent much of the closing months of 1945 negotiating carefully, or arguing and bluffing with Yugoslav officials and partisans.49 Within a short period Hearn was making the crossing with Shagg and in what seems to be a well-honed story Hearn records them stopping off on their final trip and using a paint pot to doctor some ‘Long Live Tito’ (Zivio Tito) signs to read Zivio Tommy Handley, Zivio Mae West, Zivio Mickey Mouse and, finally using the old Indian Army slang for women, Zivio Bint. Not content with mocking Yugoslav propaganda, cheered by the prospect of finally going home, they doctored their own passes to read Ima Barman for Sharman and Ima T. Earn for Hearn.50 At the end of October a much depleted 67 Section was amalgamated with 65 Section and formed into ‘C’ Section SIB. Bill Hutchins, the commander of 67 Section, had left in the middle of the month to join a Civil Affairs course, and other members of the unit had been demobilized. Hearn and Shagg’s turn followed shortly after.51 They, at least, do not appear to have suffered from the confusion and uncertainty over demobilization that affected so many other SIB men at the end of 1945, though Hearn was to find himself being told off for one final prank which he claimed to have carried out on the ‘overbearing pomposity’ of those now in charge of AMGOT with ‘their chair polishing drones’. The sign outside the headquarters of AMGOT

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was replaced with a notice taken from a swimming pool flooded by a ruptured sewage facility: OFF LIMITS THIS BUILDING AND WATER IS CONTAMINATED DO NOT ENTER

The sign from AMGOT Headquarters itself was hung on the door of a local brothel. This was, Hearn maintained, ‘a soldier’s farewell’.52

Part Two

Administrators and Governors

5

Readying to Govern Europe

The British Police ideal has impressed all civilised nations by its remarkable success in the country of its origin. It is rightly regarded as a wonderful achievement that a body of 65,000 men should be able with so little friction and so high a degree of efficiency to maintain law and order among a population of some 45,000,000 people. If the secret of the success of the British Policeman could be communicated to others abroad in the liberated countries of Europe it would be a great and lasting contribution to the peace.1

Plans In January  1940, Cambridge University began the first of four eight-week courses to train army officers for liaison duties during post-war reconstruction. The courses provided a background to the war and to the enemy as well as elements of recent racial theories and social psychology. The last course ended in December  1941, the month during which the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and the United States entered the war. The following month the American provost marshal general authorized the creation of a School of Military Government, and in February 1942, such a school was established at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Here military officers were given lectures on the history, economy, politics and society of the principal Axis powers together with instruction on the skills necessary for re-establishing and administering government in both these countries and those liberated from their rule. The background lectures were based in part on the Cambridge courses.2 The British were well aware that once fighting troops had captured or liberated an area and moved on, there was the need for a different body of men to follow in order to re-establish and maintain public order, to restore civil administration, the economy and, particularly, the food supply. They had experience of such tasks at the close of the Boer War and the First World War.

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The issue was raised directly as early as December 1940 when General Wavell was expecting to occupy Italian East Africa. The Cambridge courses on liaison during post-war reconstruction were not revived, but by the summer of 1942, a particularly low point for the Allies in the European war, the British began to think of what would be necessary when they crossed back to continental Europe with their American comrades. The Allies recognized that there were two distinct kinds of territory that victory would result in them occupying: those that had been subjected to enemy occupation; and those of the enemy. It seemed reasonable to expect that, in the former, responsibility could be handed over fairly quickly to indigenous governments, several of which were waiting in exile in London. In the enemy countries, in contrast, it was considered that some kind of supervisory control of any new government would be necessary. As a consequence the British and the Americans developed plans for civil affairs administrations to work with the military governments that accompanied initial occupations, and as part of control commissions responsible for supervising the development of governments, economies and civil society in former enemy countries. Drawing precise divisions between the civil affairs sections of military governments and the control commissions becomes difficult. The British, the Americans, the Soviets and eventually the French each had rather different approaches to control commissions for Germany and Austria; and in Britain there were sometimes jurisdictional boundaries between the War Office, the Foreign Office and the Home Office, each of which had some involvement in the recruitment and deployment of CAOs.3 The focus here, however, is not on the departmental divisions and sensitivities but on the police officers who served  in civil affairs and the duties that they undertook. Most of the men discussed here began as CAOs attached to military governments; temporarily they became soldiers and were given military rank. The majority undertook tasks broadly related to policing and were known as Public Safety Officers. At the end of the war many of these transferred to the Public Safety Branches of the control commissions. Here they kept their army uniforms and their military ranks; they did similar jobs to those that they had undertaken when linked more directly  with the military, and their numbers were increased by men recruited solely for the control commissions. While departmental divisions and sensibilities are not central to the narrative here, some discussion is needed to provide the context for those police officers who served overseas in Civil Affairs. In October 1942 Brigadier S. Swinton Lee was appointed as Deputy Chief Civil Affairs Officer in the War Office. Lee was probably not the best choice; some of those that served with

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him did not hold him in particularly high regard.4 Yet, whatever his abilities, he was directed to prepare plans for the restoration of civil administration in liberated territories in northwest Europe. Possibly aware of Lee’s appointment and orders, the following month Ferdinand Tuohy, a journalist who had written accounts of military intelligence and the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, published an article in the Daily Mail asking, ‘Are we ready to govern Europe?’ Tuohy described the American training course established in Charlottesville and suggested that ‘there would be nothing premature in the War Office paying considerable attention from now on, to the art and business of military government in occupied regions’. Things could, he argued, be done better than they had been in 1919. Not surprisingly, given his interests, he saw the principal role being taken by Army Intelligence officers, though he acknowledged that many others would be needed.5 Brigadier Lee and the men in his new department did not think in terms of using intelligence officers, but they rapidly concluded that men with expertise in everything from local government administration to catering and from public health to the management and maintenance of transport would be required. A large number of local government authorities, public utilities and branches of agriculture, industry and trade were contacted for advice and volunteers. Reestablishing civil administration in the aftermath of battle, with civilian injured and wounded, refugees, food shortages and a probable black market, also suggested the need for recruiting police officers. A course was planned to begin in late February; it was to be held in a Civil Affairs Staff Centre established in Southlands House, Wimbledon, which, before the war (and indeed afterwards), had been a Methodist college for training women teachers. In consequence of his need for police officers on 2  January  1943 Brigadier Lee sent a secret circular to the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and to a few local police authorities asking whether they could recommend individuals in their employ for the new Civil Affairs Organization. Brigadier Lee rapidly found that he had misunderstood the relations between local authorities, the police and the Home Office.6 Stalybridge had one of the smaller borough police forces in the country; on the eve of the war there was an authorized compliment of a chief constable, two inspectors, five sergeants and twenty-three constables. The chief constable, Stanley Pickering, was a career police officer; the kind of working-class man who by his own aptitude and effort could, in the smaller urban forces, rise from police constable to chief constable. Pickering had joined the Sunderland Borough Police in 1912 after a period in the Royal Artillery; he rejoined the

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army in 1915 and was appointed to a policing role in the Special Branch section at the headquarters of the 2nd Army. He was then appointed to the staff of the British Mission to the Belgian Army. On his return from the war he had run the Aliens Department of the Sunderland Police, rising rapidly to inspector. In 1929, he applied for and got his position in Stalybridge.7 When Brigadier Lee’s circular arrived, the town clerk passed it on to Pickering, who wondered whether he should put himself forward; and at this point the circular came to the notice of Major Michael J. Egan, originally an officer in the RIC, chief constable of Southport from 1920, and now one His Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary.8 Egan immediately raised the question as to whether the Home Office had been consulted about the circular and Lee was summoned to a meeting at the Home Office involving, most significantly, Sir Frank Newsam, the deputy undersecretary of state who had a long administrative experience of criminal justice and policing, and Egan’s two colleagues, Lt. Col. Sir Frank Brook and Col. Jacynth d’E. F. Coke, who were permanent Inspectors of Constabulary. Coke, moreover, had experience of advising on police forces overseas, having been head of the interwar Police Mission to Greece during its final years.9 Lee’s mistake had been to assume that, with regard to recruiting police officers for the Civil Affairs organization, he should contact directly the commissioner for men from the Metropolitan Police and the local authorities for men from the provincial forces. He explained that it was planned to begin training courses for men selected for the organization in February and, further, that he would be happy if the Home Office would select some senior police officers to attend. Honour was satisfied, and Newsam had no doubt that both the Home Office and the Scottish Office would be happy to assist. Probably Lee should have recognized the need to consult the Home Office at the outset, yet he was also right to recognize the importance of local government in the administration and direction of police forces. The relationship between the Home Office and the provincial police forces, the standing joint committees (SJCs) and the watch committees was a murky one, but one which suited most parties. It had been convenient, for example, for the home secretary to avoid investigating serious complaints about the behaviour of a particular force on the grounds that this was a matter, not for him, but for the relevant SJC or watch committee; equally a locally controlled investigation, or the shelving of such, could be convenient for the local authority involved. The relationship was changing, but very gradually. Since the late nineteenth century the Home Office had strengthened its links with head constables at the expense of the localities and various legal rulings of the interwar period increasingly asserted that the

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police officer was more a servant of the Crown than of local government; and during wartime the Home Office claimed operational control over the deployment of personnel. But the formal situation of local police linked closely with local government remained among the traditions of an Englishman’s, or at least an English borough’s, unique rights.10 Tangentially it is interesting to note that, even though there was talk of establishing indigenous police personnel, particularly for Sicily, ‘in line with British colonial practice’,11 there does not appear to have been any suggestion of involving police officers from the RUC in the Civil Affairs organization. The RUC’s immediate predecessor in the whole of Ireland, the RIC, was seen by many as the model for British imperial policing. RUC officers still carried revolvers, had access to rifles and bayonets and, in addition to their more conventional policing duties, were charged with preserving a disputed border, and detecting and supressing any dissent among the province’s Catholic minority. Given its armament, deployment and administrative structure, the RUC was closer to many of the police institutions with which the CAOs and, particularly, the Civil Affairs police officers were going to have to deal following the invasion of Fascist Italy and Nazi-dominated Europe. RUC officers did have a prominent role in the British Police Mission to Greece, discussed later; but the Home Office officials, army and senior police officers involved in the discussions about how best to restore civil society in Europe put their faith primarily in English, Welsh and Scottish policemen. Their faith was based on the understanding that the British Bobby was ‘the best in the world’ and the belief that post-war Europe was going to be democratic without the need for any paramilitary, colonial-style police.

Selecting the men Once the War Office and the Home Office were in agreement over the selection of police officers for the Civil Affairs organization, matters progressed rapidly and smoothly. A meeting of specially selected senior police officers was held at the Home Office in early February at which the army presented their plans, and particularly their proposals for a training course. Of the fifteen police officers present, all but three immediately volunteered to attend the course. The Home Office whittled the number down to eight and made the requirements that the local police authorities to which these men reported agree to three conditions: to release them for overseas service, to keep their posts open pending their return and to make up the difference if their army pay was less than that of

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their pay and allowances in the police.12 The eight selected police officers, together with various other senior administrators and managers from key civil government departments, joined the first training course in Wimbledon at the end of February. They wore their police uniforms while training, but it was acknowledged that they would hold the military rank of major or above when sent overseas. In  the usual style of the British civil service during this period strict secrecy was maintained, though at the end of February the police trade journal Police Review reported that the chief constables of Leicestershire and Warwickshire were going to attend a three-month staff college course. The course, it revealed, was to enable them to act with an invasion force in reestablishing civil administration within liberated territory.13 For all the relatively smooth progress, the War Office and the Civil Affairs organization felt the need for close liaison with the police; they also considered that there was a need for an increase in the number of men trained for working overseas, especially for men of more junior rank to organize and run any restored civil administration on the ground. In early March Sir Frank Brook was appointed as the first point of call for advice on police affairs and, with the approval of the Oxfordshire SJC, the county’s young chief constable, Eric St. Johnston, was appointed full-time to assist with planning. At roughly the same time a decision was made to establish a training course for the men who would serve in junior positions and who would be commissioned as lieutenants and captains. The Metropolitan Police training school at Hendon was acquired as the venue for the course, and the position of commandant was given to another high-flyer, Arthur Edwin Young, the assistant chief constable of the Birmingham City Police. Young had not yet finished the course at Wimbledon when appointed to his new post, but he had made a considerable impression at the Home Office meeting in February where he had been one of the first to volunteer for the Civil Affairs organization. St. Johnston was thirty-two years old when he took up his planning role in 1943; Young was four years older. Neither was typical of most of the men in the most senior ranks of the largest borough and county police forces at the time. Most of the chief constables appointed to one of the county or the larger borough forces in the first thirty or so years of the twentieth century came from some kind of gentry background and had served in either the military or in a colonial police force. During the 1920s there had been concerns about the quality of the senior management of the police forces and the over-reliance on military men and officers from imperial police forces. In 1929, a proposal was prepared in the Home Office for a college to train young men as future police

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leaders. It was to be open to men under thirty-five years of age, with at least five years’ police service and who had passed an examination for promotion to sergeant. The idea was unpopular with the Police Federation, however, and also, it seems, with the rank and file for whom the Federation spoke. There was an assumption that an officer class was a step on the road to the militarization of the police. At the same time different areas of local government, and those who cherished local independence, worried about the financial cost and feared that this could be the first step towards the end of local control of the police and the creation of a single police institution for the whole country. Financial stringency finally scuppered the proposal, but Lord Trenchard, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1931 to 1935, decided to press ahead with his own college. Trenchard’s plan for an officer class for the police was more radical than that of the Home Office and equally unpopular with the Federation and many of the rank and file. The Police Review was initially favourable but later condemned it as ‘a horrible distortion of the plans which had been evolved and discussed in a democratic atmosphere’. This dislike appears to have arisen from the artisanal tradition shared among the police that men started at the bottom and learned their skills through experience. Trenchard’s college, in contrast, was prepared to accept any well-qualified young man regardless of whether he had any police experience. On entry the student was considered to hold the rank of junior station inspector and on completing the course successfully he could expect to be appointed as a station inspector. The college took its first intake on 31 May 1935; it closed on the outbreak of war. In all it had seven intakes with around 220 men in total, most of whom graduated successfully. The majority of the students came from the Metropolitan Police, but the entrance examination was open to any serving police officer. It was also open to men with no police experience, though very few of such ever applied.14 Arthur Young did not attend Trenchard’s college; Eric St. Johnston did. Neither had served in either the Regular Army or an imperial police institution. They were career officers in the English police who, unlike most recruits, came from a middle-class background; both men had parents established in trade.15 Young’s father was a respectable, successful builder and contractor in Eastleigh, Hampshire. St. Johnston’s parentage had rather more pedigree. His father was a wine and spirit merchant, and his mother’s family were successful bicycle manufacturers in Coventry, but the St. Johnstons also boasted a Scottish ancestry with forebears who had supported Robert the Bruce. St. Johnston attended a minor public school; he had progressed to Cambridge from which he graduated with, in his words, ‘a mediocre Second’ in law.16 Young attended Portsmouth

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Grammar School, but had left in 1924 determined to become a police officer. His mother and grandmother were opposed, but his father appears to have pulled a few strings with local politicians and in 1924, aged only sixteen, Young was appointed as a cadet clerk in the Portsmouth Borough Police, a force of around 300 men. St. Johnston’s route into the police was rather more convoluted. When he left school, he had taken a commission in the Territorial Army, and when he left Cambridge and began to read for the bar, he applied for the Colonial Service. Financial cutbacks meant that only fifteen candidates were selected for the service in 1932 and St. Johnston was sixteenth on the selection list. He had an interest in criminal law, and also some voluntary involvement in social welfare. In the belief that changes were imminent in the Metropolitan Police he applied and was accepted as a junior executive officer in the Commissioner’s Office. This was a civil service, rather than a police post, but in 1935, the year after he was called to the bar, he relinquished his civil service rank, resigned his commission in the Territorial Army, and entered Trenchard’s Police College. St. Johnston graduated from the college top of the class and received the Baton of Honour, but since he had no police experience, he was required to serve for eight months as a constable and four months as a sergeant before taking the rank of junior station inspector. In 1940, encouraged by Colonel Gordon Halland, the commandant of Peel House, the Metropolitan Police School at Hendon, he applied for the vacancy of chief constable of Oxfordshire. He was short-listed and, in spite of turning up for the interview with a face bearing the marks of arresting a drunk in a Chelsea pub shortly beforehand, he got the job.17 Young was also among the men interviewed for the Oxfordshire post, and while his police career had not benefitted from the fast-track promotion guaranteed by passing through the police college, his progress had been remarkable and rapid. In 1932, still serving in Portsmouth, he was promoted to detective sergeant; five years later he was an inspector and it was clear that his aim was set much higher. As a young inspector he began to make applications to be a chief constable as and when vacancies arose. In 1938, he was appointed as acting chief constable for the small borough of Leamington Spa; the following year the ‘acting’ disappeared from his title. The war brought new opportunities. In 1940, following the blitz on Coventry, he was seconded to assist the chief constable there. A year later he became the assistant chief constable of Birmingham which, with a force of just under 2,000 men, was second in size only to the Metropolitan Police. Young was part of a new command structure for Birmingham that was created following the retirement of Cecil C.H. Moriarty as chief constable in September 1941. Moriarty was well known to generations of police officers for

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a series of books and guides, most notably Police Law: An Arrangement of Law and Regulations for the Use of Police Officers first published in 1929 and which had become a veritable bible for officers in England. In Birmingham Young appears eagerly to have taken up Moriarty’s mantle as a trainer of police officers; in addition he encouraged significant developments in the force’s use of wireless technology. St. Johnston was also a moderniser and reformer, and the task that had confronted him in Oxfordshire had been considerable. The county force, onetenth of the size of that in Birmingham, had scarcely changed since its creation a century before. There was little systematic training, ferocious discipline, no detective or traffic departments, and no section responsible for managing the wartime emergency. St. Johnston set about improvements with alacrity and enthusiasm but, by his own account, at the beginning of 1943 with many reforms achieved, he felt that he should be doing more to assist the general war effort rather than solving the problems of the Oxfordshire Police. In his autobiography he claimed that he urged his case with the Home Office, but there is some discrepancy between his account of his role in the initial development of the Civil Affairs organization and that in the War Office papers. St. Johnston described himself as playing an important role during the meetings at the Home Office in January and February 1943 and in planning the courses at Wimbledon and Hendon. The War Office account, in contrast, made no mention of him until his appointment as planning officer, subordinate to Brook, on 11 March, and according to the official history his appointment was only part-time until August. In his autobiography St. Johnston dated his appointment as February, and in a letter to Brook of 23  December  1943 he thanked him for ‘rescuing me from the rather despondent frame of mind I was in at the beginning of the year’ while still in Oxfordshire. He wrote also of ‘the past nine months’ working with Brook which would seem to fit better with the War Office document, though he made no mention of his appointment being initially part-time. In his autobiography St. Johnston also claimed credit for picking ‘off the top of my head’ the number of 500 officers to be trained on the different courses. Again this does not marry precisely with the War Office account which describes a feeling, once the first course had begun at Wimbledon, that the initial numbers were insufficient and that there needed to be an additional forty senior police officers to hold the rank of major and above, and an additional sixty, more junior men, who would be trained at Peel House for executive duties not greatly dissimilar to those that they already performed in Britain. But however the number of 500 police officers was arrived at, on 3 May 1943 a new secret circular was sent to

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all chief constables requesting that they submit the names of possible recruits; age limits were set at fifty years for the men proposed for the senior posts, and between thirty-two and forty years for those proposed as the junior officers.18 Whether or not the numbers were the product of St. Johnston’s instant thinking, on Brook’s recommendation he was appointed as chief of what became known as the Public Safety Section. By the summer of 1944, 113 senior police officers had gone through the instruction course at Wimbledon and 438 men of junior rank had attended courses at Peel House; of the total, eleven were found to be unsuitable for the tasks, nineteen failed their medicals and forty-eight others withdrew after training mainly, it appears, following disputes about their army rank. According to a list in the War Office files there were 188 men from the county forces, including the chief constables of Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, and the assistant chief constable of Sussex. Each of these chief constables was a former military man. So too was Major Harold Golden, the chief constable of Shropshire; he was a Cambridge graduate, a barrister at law, had served for twenty years in the Royal Engineers becoming an instructor at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before taking command in Shropshire. Like St. Johnston, he was not required to attend either of the training courses. There were another 329 men from the borough forces, including the chief constables of six, northern industrial towns – Accrington, Blackburn, Derby, Macclesfield, Newark and, of course, Stanley Pickering from Stalybridge. The remaining twenty-four men came from Scottish forces, including the chief constables of Dundee, Kirkcudbrightshire, Inverness and the assistant chief constable of Glasgow.19 Town councillors and watch committees were proud that their senior police officers were chosen for Civil Affairs duties but there were also concerns. William Johnson, the chief constable of Birmingham, was among those selected, and in July 1943, now a lieutenant colonel, he was appointed as commandant of the college at Wimbledon. At precisely the same time Johnson’s deputy in Birmingham, Arthur Young, was preparing for the invasion of Italy. There was some disquiet among the watch committee that only one of the three senior officers in their force remained in post.20 In September 1943 Glasgow, which had already sent four officers, refused to permit the release of any others; the Tyne Improvement Agency did the same. The Corporation of Dundee was immensely proud that its police chief was selected and met that same month to pay tribute to Joseph Neilans, now Lieutenant Colonel Neilans; but in November it was locked in an argument with the Scottish Office over the title of Neilans’s acting

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replacement. ‘It is ridiculous’, protested the city’s Police Convener, ‘that a city of Dundee’s size may be left without a Chief Constable’.21 Similar concerns were expressed with respect to county as well as borough forces as the war drew to its end. There is no mention of any Metropolitan or City of London police officers on the War Office’s list of men attending either the courses at Wimbledon or Hendon; adding the men from borough forces to those of the county forces and of Scotland, and subtracting that from the total of 551 men attending the courses, leaves only ten men who may have come from the two London forces. There was a significant London presence, however; sixty volunteers from the Metropolitan Police were rushed to North Africa, without training, to serve with the invasion force that landed in Sicily in July 1943. Several other Metropolitan officers can be identified positively as attending the Wimbledon course, notably Andrew Way and Albert Wilcox. Like St. Johnston, both of these men had gone through Trenchard’s college scheme, and like most of Trenchard’s graduates, they were to progress almost effortlessly to senior police posts in different forces: Way was to become an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; Wilcox became chief constable of Hertfordshire in 1947 and continued in that post for twenty-two years. Rather like St. Johnston and Young, Way and Wilcox had both enjoyed good schooling. Way was the son of a clergyman and had progressed from school to Christ Church Oxford. Wilcox’s father was colourful character who had not settled until he was in his mid-fifties and inherited money from his elder brother. Wilcox was born in Bristol in 1909 and, by his own efforts, secured a grammar school place. When his father died in the early 1920s the family’s finances were in difficulties and Wilcox went to work in a boot and shoe warehouse from where, at the age of nineteen, he secured a place in the Bristol City Police. He was soon frustrated by the lack of opportunities and the moment that he saw Trenchard’s call for applicants for his new college by open competition he applied and was accepted in the first intake. Wilcox was a big man – 6 feet, 4 inches – and a young man in a hurry. When he finished the course he spent his savings on a short visit to America so as to study policing in New York and Massachusetts as well as the relatively new Federal Bureau of Investigation. On his return he wrote a report, with recommendations which he sent to Scotland Yard. It seems to have done little more than annoy one of the assistant commissioners and there was no follow-up to it in the Metropolitan Police. Wilcox, however, was undeterred and spread his ideas and recommendations further with articles in the Police Journal and the Metropolitan Police College Journal. In

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1941, while an inspector in the Metropolitan Police, he was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn.22 While few were as equipped and determined as Wilcox and Young more grammar school boys appear to have been joining the police during the interwar years. Such men, as well as those of higher social standing, appear to have been prominent among the police officers sent on the Wimbledon Civil Affairs course. Most of the men that joined the police during the interwar years were still from the working class, even if the previous calling of ‘clerk’ was put on their record of service. ‘Clerk’ was the catch-all term to indicate some sort of office job as opposed to skilled or manual labour. Leslie Tompkins was rather closer to the typical interwar police recruit than Way and Wilcox. He was born in Dunstable, where his father and uncle ran Tompkins Brothers Garage. He  had left school at fourteen years in 1918 and had been apprenticed at Vauxhall Motors in Luton. The intention appears to have been for him to take over the garage but, following the General Strike in 1926, he saw little future in the motor car business; Vauxhall, he recalled, had new cars lined up in the factory, but no one to buy them. A big man, 6 feet 1 inch, and burly with it, he decided to join the Bedfordshire Police. The chief constable, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Frank Stevens, had a penchant for appointing strapping ex-guardsmen with waxed moustaches who carried themselves with panache; Tompkins found himself surrounded by men many of whom were even bigger than him but he possessed something that the ex-guardsmen did not. Given the growth of motor transport during the interwar years, his experience and knowledge of cars were invaluable to a force whose jurisdiction was cut by two major trunk roads, the A1 and the A5. In 1936, he was made a sergeant in charge of an embryonic Motor Patrol Section and he was sent on the new Motor Patrol Course in Lancashire where he obtained a First Class Ticket for driving. The responsibility which he acquired probably helped develop his confidence and, in spite of his limited education, he began writing articles on the policing of motor vehicles for the Home Office Journal and the Police Journal. On the eve of the war he had been promoted to inspector and he also set about learning to fly as a member of the newly formed Civil Air Guard. Colonel Stevens, doubtless aware that members of the Civil Air Guard would be called up to serve in the RAF and reluctant to lose his motor transport expert, tore up Tompkins’s membership card. Thereafter Tompkins appears to have felt frustrated that he could not volunteer for service in the wartime armed forces and, with a new chief constable in post, he put his name forward as a volunteer for Civil Affairs as soon as the opportunity was offered in 1943.23

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Training The men attending the Civil Affairs courses at Hendon and Wimbledon were not all from the police. Wilcox recalled them as a motley crowd … who had professed some claim to expert knowledge of maintaining essential services – doctors, lawyers, railway and transport managers, bank officials, electricity and gas engineers … . Most had dressed themselves in khaki, though a group of American officers wore olive green. Some were in formal uniform with Sam Brownes while others were in battle dress. One or two were in kilts or trews. Headgear ranged from forage caps to berets and glengarrys.24

Generally the police tended to wear their blue uniforms until the end of the course, when they went out to purchase army uniforms. Tompkins, who attended the junior course at Peel House, recalled receiving £50 to pay for this uniform, his officer’s accoutrements and ‘a tin trunk’ to transport his possessions. His brief account of his move from police inspector to army officer says nothing about the course at Peel House, though he mentions an additional, brief period in Scotland for physical training. Some evidence has survived about the curriculum and training at Peel House and Wimbledon. Wilcox described a group of which he was a member being required to make a detailed study of Pas-de-Calais in northern France, and some duplicated notes printed to accompany lectures survive in the private papers of a few of the students.25 The official historian of Civil Affairs noted that it was resolved to give the courses more of an army feel and to make them less ‘overly academic’ than those given earlier at Cambridge.26 Yet according to a regular army officer, Captain A.G. Puttock, who had just completed an Army Staff course, the course that he and his comrades were sent on at Peel House shortly before D-Day was ‘a farce’. Puttock and the men with him found themselves posted to Civil Affairs because of a lack of staff jobs and while he was to show some sympathy for the problems of the police officers subsequently serving alongside him in occupied Germany, his comments on the course he attended at reflect some of the snobbish attitudes towards the ordinary police officer. The ‘schemes’ which we were set were quite useless and the instructors, though probably very good with rather slow and stolid ex-policemen, were quite incapable of dealing with some forty ex-Staff Officer students who had been taught to criticize and pick holes in the subject matter produced … . A very good time was had by all – except the instructors!27

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In contrast in the summer of 1943 The Spectator published a glowing account of the situation at Wimbledon: The visitor to the Civil Affairs Staff College cannot fail to be impressed by the way in which the job of training is being tackled. Instruction is largely in the hands of men with actual experience of the kind of problem which the future C.A.O. will have to tackle. The fullest use appears to be made of the latest reports of actual experience from Sicily. At the end of the course, student officers must go through a practical ‘exercise’, in which they are confronted with the sort of situation, and the sort of problem, which it will be their task to meet. They are trained to regard themselves as units in a completely fused Anglo-American service, in which, thanks to the system of ‘interleaving’, an American Brigadier will be sandwiched between a British General and British and American Colonels, or vice versa.28

Unfortunately, for all its length, the article provides no clear examples about what went on in the lecture rooms. A string of notable academics and highranking civil servants gave visiting lectures on subjects such as the German mentality, the administration of justice on continental Europe, the laws of war and safeguards against inflation; it is unclear whether these individuals spoke on every course or whether they made occasional guest lectures leaving the dayto-day running of each course to others. St. Johnston gave some lectures mainly on the general principles and basic policy devised for Civil Affairs; he gave similar lectures to the Military Police and to the Staff College at Camberley.29 The men at Peel House were told that while their focus might shift from time to time they were to keep three major requirements in mind: (a) maintenance of law and order (b) promotion of production for military and (secondarily) civilian needs (c) preservation of the population from want and fear Other basic lectures introduced the systems and practices of the legal systems and police institutions of the countries where the new CAOs might find themselves, as well as the broad structure of international law on occupation particularly with reference to the ways in which this affected persons and property.30 More prosaically there were talks on how to complete military message forms, on rationing and on how to request indents for any necessary supplies. At the beginning there was an emphasis on language skills and the plan was that, during the nine-week course at Wimbledon there would be 360 contact hours, of which sixty would involve language teaching in classes of not

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more than eight people. This was a sensible idea and was reinforced by the experience in Italy from where some Civil Affairs veterans stressed the need for language skills and good interpreters. The early assumption by those planning the course at Wimbledon appears to have been that men would be recruited who had some basic language ability; there was talk of a ‘refresher’ course in one language which could then be augmented by elementary German leading to a knowledge of 800–1,000 words for those who would be posted to Germany. Such an aim could not be met, however; native speakers or British personnel with qualifications in a foreign language constituted only 27 per cent of the total accepted for the training course in February 1943 and only 20 per cent of those accepted in June 1944.31 These are the statistics for all of those attending the courses, not just police officers; and given the working-class background of many of the policemen selected, particularly those selected for the junior course at Peel House, the number of these with foreign language skills was, in percentage terms, quite possibly fewer. The police officers in training at Peel House or Wimbledon probably had contrasting understandings of policing. They all would have had some experience of the beat patrol and would be aware that the declared object of policing in Britain, going back to the early nineteenth century and Sir Robert Peel, was ‘the prevention of crime’. Yet as sergeants and above some were likely to have a specialism, such as Tompkins’s knowledge of motor vehicles; and they all had some experience of police administration and the supervision of those in junior ranks. Every one of them would have been familiar with the descriptions and definitions of different forms of offending and complexities of the law as outlined in Moriarty’s Police Law. Probably too, they had all absorbed the ideas that their different forces were part of ‘the best police in the world’. The Civil Affairs lectures stressed the ‘primary necessity’ of an efficient police force in an area of military government, and also repeated the usual mythical contrast between British and continental European police: Continental administrative systems based on the Napoleonic model are highly centralised. As a result the police force is under complete and direct control of the Central government. The policeman becomes the servant of the State rather than of the public, he possesses powers greatly exceeding those of the citizen and cannot generally be prosecuted for illegal or excessive use of his authority, except through special administrative courts.32

But any policemen who had volunteered for Civil Affairs in the belief that they would be doing their bit for the war effort by doing what they had done

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at home, possibly with the opportunity also of demonstrating the better British system to less-fortunate continental Europeans, were rapidly disabused of such assumptions when they began their new tasks overseas, not least because their tasks were so many and so varied. In his report on the work of British police officers in Italy Young freely admitted that ‘many of them at first expressed dissatisfaction at not being employed on purely police work’.33 It rapidly became clear that the training of the first CAOs would not be completed until after the planned invasion of Sicily. As a result another circular was sent to senior officers of the Metropolitan Police asking for volunteers ready to serve with the armed forces and ready also to depart immediately. Some sixty men came forward, though it seems probable that some men were carefully chosen and offered the opportunity to volunteer. Gerald Richardson, for example, another graduate of Trenchard’s college, described being summoned to a meeting with Sir Norman Kendal and wondering, nervously, what offence he had committed. In the event Kendal asked him if he would like to go ‘abroad’.34 The volunteers met together for the first time on 31 May 1943 when they were addressed by the commissioner and sent on leave to get their affairs in order. They reassembled on 10 June; a week later they took a train to Liverpool and set sail for North Africa arriving in Algiers on 27 June; they appear to have been with the same convoy that took the SIB sections that included Dickie Hearn and Shagg Sharman. About two-thirds of the new volunteers were sent for hasty training in a camp at Chrea, about 30 miles south of Algiers. A group of twentyfive accompanied the 160,000 Allied troops that went ashore in Sicily on 11 July, the day following the initial assault. The remainder were with the troops that disembarked in Palermo just over two weeks later. These men experienced a nauseous 36 hours in storm-buffeted landing craft and one recalled, ‘it would have taken more than a Division of Germans to prevent us from getting off those landing craft. We stumbled ashore in the morning, looking, as one cynic put it: “more like immigrants than conquerors” ’.35 The party of Metropolitan Police officers that landed with the invasion force was commanded by two London-born veterans of the First World War. Charles Briggs, born in Lambeth in May  1892, had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1913; he gave his calling as ‘library assistant’. In June 1915 he joined the army and served for four years before returning to the police. Promotions had followed steadily during the interwar period, culminating in his appointment as a superintendent in February 1938, and when he landed in Sicily he had been granted the army rank of lieutenant colonel. Arthur William Rowlerson, the second in command, was nearly two years younger than Briggs. He had been

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born in Plumstead towards the end of 1893 and had been one of the first to answer the call to arms in 1914, enlisting on 6 August. During the war he had risen to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He was demobilized in March 1919 and joined the police at the beginning of 1921 giving his previous occupation as the ubiquitous ‘clerk’. As with Briggs his promotions had come steadily during the 1920s and 1930s; he reached the rank of chief inspector in December 1937. He landed in Sicily commissioned as an army major. Putting former soldiers in command of the initial party was sensible, given that no one could be quite sure of what to expect in the way of opposition to the initial landing or the reception that might be given to the CAOs. But then, besides the potential fighting, no one really understood the complexities and frictions that awaited the Allies when they landed in Sicily.

6

The Italian Job

Sicily: Stepping back in time? Arthur Young eventually took overall command of the British Police serving in Civil Affairs in Italy. At the end of the campaign he produced a report on the men’s work and the social, political and economic context in which they worked. Typical of his time he implies an understanding of history moving in a linear direction with some societies ‘ahead’ of others. The Italians, he believed, spent too much time looking back to the glories of Rome and were like ‘children who had not yet learned that civilized life imposes duties and obligations’. They also needed to learn that democracy meant respecting other peoples’ rights. The Sicilian, in Young’s estimation, was the worst of all in that ‘generally speaking, [he was] unscrupulous, cunning and revengeful’ holding ‘every life cheaply except his own’; and the British policemen under Young’s command, ‘accustomed to the phlegmatic, law-abiding and helpful British public’, found Sicilian attitudes ‘strange’. To make matters worse the agricultural system in Sicily was feudal and approximating that of medieval England.1 It was almost as if he was commenting on the people and territory of an outpost of the British Empire, but the Allies had not landed in Sicily to establish a colony. They saw their role as defeating Fascism, and their CAOs were to establish government and administration on lines compatible with a democratic system. This meant finding appropriate leaders and administrators within the local community, and it was here that the problems began. The men who had been running Italy for almost twenty years were Fascists. Former administrators, police officers and others all had some sort of Fascist past, yet often their experience and local knowledge was desired. Some of these men were reappointed, but their pasts were investigated and a policy of ‘defascistisation’ was introduced. For Gerald Richardson, a graduate of Trenchard’s college, this policy had a ‘Gilbertian side’. The word itself was regarded as uncomfortable and was replaced with the French epuration, but after that ‘we

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ran into the really baffling situation of nobody in Italy ever having been a fascist!’ Men argued that the only way to acquire a job or position was to be a member of the Fascist Party; ‘but that wasn’t the same thing as being a fascist, we were repeatedly asked, was it?’2 In Sicily, however, there were local men who compelled the respect and obedience of others, and who often had the ear of anyone in local administration. Arthur Young appears to have been quite unconcerned about the mafia. He accepted the propaganda of Mussolini’s regime that the mafia had been effectively suppressed by Fascist efforts, but perhaps this is not surprising given that in 1932 the semi-official Police Journal had carried an article by Giuseppe Dosi, one of Italy’s leading detectives, titled ‘How Mussolini, Mori and the Italian Police smashed the Mafia’.3 In reality, however, the mafia had not been smashed by Mussolini and his Iron Prefect, Cesare Mori; rather, the Fascist regime imposed a news blackout on what appeared to be mafia offences. A report was written in 1938 by the Royal General Inspectorate for Public Security for Sicily, a combined force of Carabinieri and police; it concluded that, while the mafia might have been weakened, it was still a potent and corrupting influence; but the report did not conform to the regime’s thinking. It was shelved and lay unopened in the Palermo State Archive until discovered in 2007.4 Not all members of the Allied forces in Sicily were as ready as Young to accept Fascist propaganda and to consider the mafia to be a broken criminal force. In October 1943, a US Army Intelligence Officer, Captain W.E. Scotten, produced a perceptive report arguing that Mori had dealt only with low-ranking mafiosi and a few of the more notorious groups and leaders. Scotten was no stranger to Sicily, having been the American vice-consul in Palermo for three years before the war. He believed that Mori had been told to ease off when too many influential men and leading Fascists appeared to be threatened by his campaign, and that the mafia remained a problem. He suggested a range of alternatives for dealing with it. The head of AMGOT, Major General Francis Baron Rennell of Rodd, a product of Eton and Oxford who had fought in the First World War and subsequently made his name as an explorer of the Sahara and an expert on the Tuareg, shared Scotten’s concerns. AMGOT as a body, however, chose to work under a form of truce which enabled the prosecution of the war effort, ensured that the widespread thefts of food supplies were investigated and that suspects were prosecuted, but which also largely left the island to the mafia. According to Richardson the mafia was seen as a local problem and, as long as it did not impede the war effort, it was largely ignored. Allied commanders, with one eye on their political masters, worried more about the potential for communists to

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take key positions in local government; in retrospect, Lord Rennell feared that mistakes were made by turning to dubious characters who appeared to have the appropriate authority and credentials. Some of the British, in particular, appear to have thought that they could select local aristocrats and landowners to do the Allies’ bidding rather like the way in which they used local maharajahs in India, and, at times, CAOs were hard-pressed quickly to find replacement mayors and other local administrators. They failed to recognize that such men in Sicily who were clearly not communists were more than likely to have close links with the honoured society. The other problem was that the American agents of the Office of Strategic Services did develop a relationship with the mafia, partly because of their desire to outwit their British allies.5 Other problems arose from the passage of the armies, lack of liaison between different groups within the Allied armies and the relatively backward state of the island. Difficulties with the water supply offer a good example. One CAO reported how in his district war damage, together with troops washing their laundry and watering animals in the wrong places, had created one set of problems which were then aggravated by the Field Hygiene Section, without any consultation, pouring chemicals in the water to destroy mosquitoes. ‘Even malaria is preferable to dying of thirst, and a little co-operation in the first place would have avoided any trouble.’6 Henry Strand, who had served seven years as an infantryman during the 1920s and who found himself CAO in the Sicilian sulphur-mining centre of Caltanissetta, spent a night in the local mountains trying to divert water into the town, only to find that it had never before enjoyed a water supply during the summer. David Hopkins’s efforts in constructing a new water system for Sciara were rather more successful but like other CAOs, Hopkins, a Metropolitan Police sergeant who hailed from Llanelly, was soon to be confronted with the problem of food shortages and food riots.7 The war had worsened the economic situation of the island and when the Allies landed they found that aerial bombardment had wrecked the infrastructure, especially the railway network. The ordinary people were suspicious of the Italian state that had promised much since unification, but had delivered precious little. The peasantry considered much of the land to be rightfully theirs, but land reform had been little more than broken promises under both the Fascists and their Liberal predecessors. Poor and distrustful the Sicilians had already developed a black market to enable their survival in the latter years of Mussolini’s regime. In theory, Sicily was self-sufficient in wheat, but the landowners, who were largely absentees and gloried in their wealth

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and consumption, profited from inequitable contracts. The Fascist regime required that grain be sold at a fixed price; the peasantry had resented this, and they resented the same requirement when it was ordered by AMGOT. Much of the early work of police-turned CAOs concerned the enforcement of food regulations and conducting drives across the island to seek out grain. There was a market for some Sicilian produce in Britain, and both almonds and sulphur were also purchased and shipped back. Yet a determination to settle old scores with those that had collaborated with the Iron Prefect resulted in violence and this, together with the black market, fostered levels and types of crime which British police officers had rarely confronted at home. Local police and carabinieri were not always helpful as they too required the black market to provide food for themselves and their families. In consequence, it was courageously and often alone or with a soldier driver for their jeep, that CAOs stood up to those hoarding grain or confronted mafiosi. The hoarders might conveniently lose the keys to suspect farm buildings when the officer arrived, but one British CAO in the notorious mafia lair of Corleone would give 3 minutes for the keys to be found before setting about locks with the axe from his jeep. At the summary court that he held every Saturday he did not shirk from imprisoning black marketeers and he was fully prepared to dismiss any mayor that he deemed unsatisfactory.8 As a way to co-ordinate the campaigns against, specifically, food hoarders and the black market five former Metropolitan Police officers were established in the Carabinieri barracks in Palermo as ‘a miniature Scotland Yard’. In Ragusa in the south of Sicily, Captain W.I.R. Wilkins, another graduate of Trenchard’s college, was appointed as the local Chief Allied Police Officer. Wilkins established his own squad to combat the extensive black market; it consisted of six carabinieri, six agenti from the civilian police, six members of the Guardia di Finanza, and was commanded by another British captain who was also from the Metropolitan Police. ‘This’, according to Wilkins, ‘was following out the practice in the Metropolitan Police where one officer can devote his whole energy to any special problem that may arise’. Even the New York press noted the significance of ‘Scotland Yard’ in crackdowns on the mafia and Sicilian criminality.9 In addition to dealing with the black market and other forms of criminality the CAOs were required, often on their own and with limited resources, to reestablish local administration and utilities. Bertrand Dyer, for example, a native of Bridgewater who had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1924 after four years in the Royal Marines, found himself posted as CAO of Trapani Province to the west of the island, in the area of American army operations. Dyer appears to have been

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competent, conscientious and hard-working, and he rapidly discovered how illequipped and ill-supplied he was for many of his tasks. Having moved quickly from French North Africa he had French francs but no Italian currency and none of the ‘spearhead currencies’ authorized for the beginning of the campaign to cover necessary assistance and expenses. It was about two months before he was able to make contact with a field cashier. As for appointing interpreters, liaising with local officials, moving between the four principal towns of his jurisdiction and the myriad of other things that needed doing, he found himself having to learn on the job.10 A little more than two months after the first landings in Sicily the London Times wrote proudly, and with more than a little wish-fulfilment, that ‘The London bobby is already recognised in Sicily as the same imperturbable friend of the people as at home’.11 By this time the Allies had crossed the Straights of Messina and the long campaign up the boot of the Italian mainland had begun. In the wake of the assault, troops came some of the CAOs from Sicily, as well as others from the courses in Wimbledon and Peel House via the training camp near Tunis. Arthur Young came with them. He had been moved from his position of commandant at Peel House, been promoted to colonel and appointed director of the Security Branch of AMGOT. The new position gave him a roving brief to visit his men in the field. At the beginning of September 1943 he informed Sir Frank Brook that the work was ‘interesting’ and ‘that the fellows in our service have distinguished themselves with the utmost credit’. A month later he again reported that things were going well, though he thought that either Brook or St. Johnston or both should come out, or that he should come back to report.12 Young shared a billet with Colonel Horatio Rawlings and Rawlings was simultaneously expressing concerns about some of the Americans with whom they were required to work. Rawlings was an experienced police officer. Born in 1891 he was a veteran of the First World War who had joined the Nottingham City Police in January  1920 and enjoyed rapid promotion. He became chief constable of Neath in 1921 and chief constable of Derby five years later. Rawlings wrote to Brook explaining that Young was upset because some of his advice had been ignored by the Americans. He appears to have disliked the decision to use the term ‘Public Safety Officers’ for the police charged with establishing law and order; possibly he thought this an Americanism. In addition, Young told St. Johnston I also have been a bit cross because people have been allotted to regions without any advice from us as to their suitability as individuals or as a team.

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Now we are having a number of Americans in PS who don’t know anything about [it], if I have any foisted on me who are not up to scratch I shall send them back.

Unfortunately he was unable to send them back and a year later Albert Wilcox was writing similarly about American PSOs with little or no police experience and who were, in his estimation, quite unsuited to the job.13 All of this suggests that the glowing description of ‘interleaving’ British and American officers described in The Spectator article quoted earlier could turn out to be rather different on the ground, perhaps because of different traditions and personalities. Rawlings became especially concerned over the treatment of another British officer, C.E. Lynch Blosse. Lynch Blosse, a member of a family that could trace its ancestry back to landing with William the Conqueror, was also an experienced police officer. He had served in the Indian Army as well as for three years as deputy commissioner of the Bombay City Police before returning to his native Wales to become chief constable of Montgomeryshire in 1925. Two years later he was briefly assistant chief constable of Lancashire before moving on to become chief constable of Leicestershire. In Leicestershire, he had shown himself to be an enthusiast, if perhaps a rather impractical one, for police communications. ‘Poor’ Lynch Blosse, according to Rawlings, was one of the British officers who had been ‘well and truly messed about’ by being made subordinate to ‘men who have no police experience at all’. In Lynch Blosse’s case, it was an American cavalry colonel; since Lynch Blosse had been an officer in the Poona Horse it is possible that he would not have thought much of his commander’s horsemanship either.14 Perhaps there is some significance in the fact that Rawlings was moved from Public Safety shortly afterwards while Lynch Blosse appears to have been back in Leicestershire from where he wrote an article for the Police Review in praise of the wartime role of the Special Constabulary;15 and while Rawlings’s name is given in the list of officers included at the end of Young’s Report of the Italian mission, there is no mention of Lynch Blosse in the list and no mention of his brief period in Italy in the biographical sketch carried by the Police Review when he was knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours in 1946.16

From the South to the North The first landings on the mainland, on the Calabrian ‘toe’ and at Taranto, were only lightly opposed. After that it became infinitely more difficult. One group

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of CAOs, including Albert Wilcox, landed under fire at Salerno, where senior officers of the US VI Corps, understandably, had no time for them or their tasks. ‘Get the hell out of here!’ were the only instructions that Wilcox recalled receiving from a harassed colonel. The group congregated at a railway station away from the fighting and Wilcox persuaded his CO that he and others could begin their Civil Affairs duties to the south in the area around Agropoli. Wilcox and another officer then set off in two jeeps with Italian-speaking drivers and a local lieutenant of the Carabinieri to post proclamations, recruit and appoint local officials who could enforce the liberators’ regulations, order the imposition of a night-time curfew with passes for necessary workers such as doctors, and order also the surrender of all guns, cameras and binoculars. Local townsfolk and villagers greeted the liberators with cheers, requests for chocolate and cigarettes, and Fascist salutes. ‘In accordance with [their] training at Wimbledon’ Wilcox and his comrade began to make an assessment of the district. They found the population badly in need of food, clothing and medical supplies. There was also a looming transport problem; the Germans had demolished local bridges and  while this was not a problem in the parched summer, they needed rebuilding before the autumn rains made river crossings impossible. After a couple of weeks, however, Wilcox moved northwards with the American army and entered Naples.17

Figure 6.1 The arrival of a Civil Affairs Officer, Italy 1943 This scratched and battered photograph shows Albert Wilcox (on the left) shortly after landing at Salerno in September 1943. Wilcox has already had his Civil Affairs proclamations posted on the walls of the town where this was taken. At 6 foot 4 inches he towers over the newly appointed mayor and two GIs; according to his note on the reverse, they were the first Allied troops in the town. Text from Hertfordshire Police Archive, Wilcox Papers, Autobiography pp. 29–30. Photo: Courtesy of Susan and Stephen Wilcox

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Naples had risen against the occupying German forces at the end of September 1943, and Allied tanks entered the city on 1 October. Like Sicily it had suffered badly from the war. As Wilcox entered the city the Luftwaffe was regularly bombing the docks. Some buildings, notably the Central Post Office, were still being blown up by delayed action mines. The electricity system had been disrupted. The most serious hazard was the destruction of the water supply and the sewers. Sea water had to be distilled from the bay. Our own health suffered to some extent, especially from dysentery, but in the crowded alleys where the population took shelter from the air-raids disease was rampant.18

Indeed, as described earlier, most of the ordinary people were in a desperate state: cigarettes became the currency; prostitution became rife; rats and rubbish filled the streets; a black market thrived and the city was dangerous. Colonel O.W. Wilson, a former American police chief who had made a name with his writings on police management and reform leading him to the Chair of Police Administration at the University of California, Berkeley, was given command of the Public Safety Officers in the city; Walter Doherty, formerly assistant chief constable in Glasgow and now a lieutenant colonel, was appointed chief of police.19 Glasgow had a grim reputation during the interwar years, not least because of first, H. Kingsley Long and Alexander McArthur’s novel No Mean City (1935) with its focus on the razor gangs, and then Chief Constable Percy Sillitoe’s public boasts about cleaning up the problem. But Glasgow’s hard men with their razors, clubs and brass-knuckles kept largely to themselves and their own districts where they fought fiercely but not often with lethal results. As a result of the rising against the Germans many Neapolitans were now very well armed and with much more than stabbing, cutting and bludgeoning weapons. The camorra was not an honoured society as well known as the mafia, and again there had been an article in the Police Journal to the effect that it was no longer a serious threat.20 At the end of the 1920s, however, as the Police Journal carried this article, a major in the Carabinieri had warned that extraordinary policing was still needed in Campagnia and that local functionaries, including party members, seemed to be working with camorristi.21 In truth the camorra was not the power that it had been, yet its way of life was by no means dead. The people living in the Zona di Camorra in and around Naples still lived by their own rules with a code of silence – omertà – much like that of Sicily. Fuelled by the desperate nature of the times, the opportunities for office in place of ejected Fascists, the material abundance that poured through the port to supply the Allied armies

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and the resulting opportunities for racketeering, the camorra revived spreading dangerous, and for many seductive and traditional, tentacles throughout the city and the region. Moreover the scores of well-armed gangsters and bandits in Naples and the surrounding area often had their numbers augmented by armed and equally dangerous deserters. Roy Hobbs, a Metropolitan sergeant born in Bath, was given command of a unit of Carabinieri. In a police operation quite unlike anything he could have known in London he had to lead his men into a Neapolitan district occupied by bandits armed with machine guns. Hobbs survived; his raid was a success and resulted in fifty-six arrests.22 The local prisons, which also fell under Civil Affairs’ jurisdiction, were equally dangerous. Captain John Whyte, a former detective sergeant in Cumberland and Westmoreland, found himself leading a mixed force to quell a prison riot on the island of San Stefano some 30 miles north-west of Naples, where armed convicts had established their own mini-republic.23 Given the violence and corruption of the prison officers, and the way that small fry, and sometimes even the innocent, were sacrificed for the safety of the big men, this riot may have had more complex causes than the official history suggests, though this is not to deny Whyte’s courage and leadership. Naples contained other threats quite unknown in London, or anywhere else in Britain. In March 1944, a little over six months after the Allies had entered the city, Mount Vesuvius erupted and for a week it pumped ash into the air and lava down its slopes. Fortunately the number of casualties was small, but around eighty American B-25 medium bombers parked on an airfield to the east of the city were damaged. Stanley Pickering, now far from his police command in Stalybridge, organized the evacuation of people from the path of the lava; while it fell to Captain L.W. Toes, a former sergeant from the Scarborough Police and now Fire and Civil Defence Officer for the Naples region, to conduct an assessment of the situation.24 In addition to bandits, the black market, vice, violence and natural disaster, there was still the German Army to contend with, together with those Italians that remained loyal to Mussolini and his new Italian Social Republic, generally known as the Republic of Salò after the small town on Lake Garda where its Ministry of Popular Culture was established. Leslie Tompkins, the former Vauxhall apprentice and Bedfordshire police inspector, reached Italy after the first landings in the toe and was briefly posted to Naples. Here he, together with a former police officer from Exeter, was assigned to a ‘legion’ of 150 carabinieri and shortly afterwards they were transported nearly 100 miles up the coast and landed on the beaches of Anzio. Coming ashore at Anzio was the first time that Tompkins had been under fire and he spent his nights on the beachhead in a

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slit trench which his carabinieri decorated with photographs of the pope to keep him safe. The battlefield of Anzio was not the environment for which Tompkins and the CAOs with him had been trained; they just did what they considered appropriate. The beachhead was about the size of one of Bedfordshire’s police districts and, in addition to the troops on the ground, there were also around 18,000 refugee civilians. Everyone kept an eye on the nearest foxhole, and when the shelling or bombing became concentrated, everyone made a dive for that shelter. Tompkins’s mission became one of trying to keep the civilians calm. He and his carabinieri made themselves useful by organizing food, shelter and whatever else they could for the refugees. ‘Line-crossers’, as the refugees were called, moving from the area of German control to that of the Allies, also had to be carefully checked for fear that some of them were enemy agents and saboteurs. Tompkins established a refugee reception centre in Anzio’s relatively new church of Saint Theresa; while it looked solid and medieval, the foundation stone had only been laid in 1926 and the sanctuary inaugurated in 1939. The high altar was screened off as a hospital and maternity wing run by a few nurses that he found; there were no doctors to be pressed into service. Tompkins recalled that it was in the church that he had an argument with a senior British officer over the diagnosis of running noses that affected many of the refugees. Tompkins’s reported the local use of the word febbre for the malady, and mis-spelt it as fibre in his account.25 In a sense the senior officer was correct in believing that this febbre, or fever, might have had a serious effect on the army by being a first inkling of malaria. Anzio was at the northern end of the Pontine Marshes, drained by Mussolini’s public works in an effort to stamp out malaria; it had been deliberately flooded by the Germans to hold up the Allied advance. Fortunately there was no major outbreak in the region; a number of Allied soldiers were struck down by the fever at this stage of the campaign, but some of these may have been suffering a recurrence of an infection contracted in North Africa. Following the breakout at Anzio, Tompkins was one of thirteen British police officers to enter Rome with American troops. Lieutenant Colonel John Pollock, a native of Lanarkshire and former Metropolitan Chief Inspector who had spent some years supervising the nightlife of London’s West End, raised the first Union Jack over the city, and was appointed chief of police. His deputy was Major Alfred Saunders, one of the few individuals in Civil Affairs with some experience in the role; before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1925 Saunders had spent six years with the British Army of Occupation based in Silesia during the construction of the Polish Corridor. He was one of the first

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Metropolitan officers to land in Sicily; he then moved on to Reggio Calabria, where he organized the first newspaper published in liberated Italy. In planning for the occupation of Rome Saunders had been appointed superintendent of Carabinieri; he organized and trained 3,000 of them, including Tompkins’s legion. Saunders’s carabinieri meant that Pollock had around 25,000 police and soldiers under his command. Tompkins himself, supported by those of his legion that had survived the Anzio bridgehead, was made responsible for part of the city centre including the Vatican. Liberated Rome, like other Italian cities, rapidly degenerated into a centre of vice, with widespread theft, especially of Allied materiel, and a flourishing black market. It teemed with Allied soldiers, who took the opportunity of a break from the battlefield to get drunk and disorderly and to find female company. There were also absentees and deserters who looked for profit in joining those local groups that soon became adept at stripping vehicles of tyres and any tools. At some point Lieutenant Colonel Charles Francis, another former Metropolitan chief inspector, took over from Pollock; and while the SIB sections and provosts dealt with military offenders, the carabinieri followed Francis’s orders to round up local gangs, seek out concealed arms and ‘restrain the enthusiasm of Roman youth for acting as impromptu barbers on the hair of “signorine” who preferred the company of Allied soldiers to their own’.26 The widespread theft in the city led to concerns for the treasures of the Vatican. Saunders, whose first task on arrival in Rome was to ensure that the pope had not been taken hostage by the Germans and to wake him at 2.00 in the morning to inform him of the Allies’ arrival, was deputed to take responsibility for the protection of the Vatican’s property. Tompkins appears to have been his deputy, though he made no mention of Saunders in his account. The Vatican’s treasures remained untouched and Tompkins concluded that it was his efforts in ensuring their safety that earned him an audience with Pius XII. During the audience he claimed that he simply could not resist asking the pope whether the photographs that his carabinieri had put in his foxhole at Anzio had, indeed, protected him. Pius XII allegedly responded, ‘As Christ’s representative here on earth, there may be some virtue in my photographs.’27 If the photographs worked at Anzio, then Tompkins needed them again when he left Rome after his new appointment as a ‘Spearhead Officer’. It was the task of such officers to follow up the assault of a town by immediately occupying the municipal buildings, or buildings suitable should the Municipio have been destroyed or severely damaged. Like Wilcox and his comrades at Salerno, but now with some experience and examples to work with, they were to bring together local representatives drawn from members of the National

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Committee of Liberation, from the partisans and from other anti-fascist groups, and proceed to appoint a new mayor (sindaco) and a five-person committee (giunta) to administer the town under the supervision, and in accordance with the CAO’s directives. In Tompkins’s more down-to-earth phrasing, they were to ‘get in quickly to gather up the bad boys (Fascists) and create a new mayor, restore water and food supplies and the thousand things never thought of ’. The task was obviously dangerous as it was not always clear when a town had been captured. It was something of a joke that Edward Bye, a former soldier and chief inspector in the Metropolitan Police, had walked into the town of San Giorgio in Sicily and ‘captured’ it, only to be driven out when both sides began to shell it. In the assault on Florence, there were four Spearhead officers with Carabinieri platoons ready to follow the infantry and carry out the usual Civil Affairs’ duties. Unfortunately the four platoons became real spearheads during the assault; they were caught up in serious fighting and Captain James Taylor, a former Metropolitan Police sergeant born in Perth, was severely wounded. Tompkins first experience in the spearhead role, entering Faenza, nearly had a similar conclusion. German troops turned out to be still occupying parts of the town; Tompkins and a Carabinieri officer nearly walked into a German, who appeared to have comrades close at hand. Tompkins and his carabiniere promptly ‘made a dignified retreat’.28 The CAO’s appointment of a sindaco and a giunta was only the first task among many. The problems of what to expect when a town was liberated – wretched inhabitants turning to vice, theft and the black market to survive; soldiers rather too enthusiastically enjoying a temporary victory respite – became well known. The Police Plan for Florence carefully spelled out the respective activities and responsibilities of different CAOs. At the top of the hierarchy were four Chief Allied Police Officers; they enjoyed the acronym CAPO, particularly relevant given the Italian word capo means ‘boss’ or ‘chief ’. The Florence plan divided the city into four districts naming a CAPO for each, including the unfortunate Captain Taylor. Each CAPO had a platoon of around forty carabinieri except for Major Alfred Saunders, the senior officer, who had been transferred from Rome as a Spearhead commander. Saunders’s platoon numbered sixty-five since it included both dispatch riders and a reserve of eleven men and it had the additional duty of guarding the Palazzo Vecchio, the city’s magnificent town hall begun at the close of the thirteenth century but gloriously enhanced some 200 years later. The plan for Florence required the CAPOs and their platoons to report any unexploded bombs and mines immediately, to ensure the protection of museums, banks, supply dumps and warehouses; to disarm civilians; to

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enforce a curfew; to place signs to limit civilian movement in and out of the city; to control civilian vehicles and traffic; to post proclamations and notices relative to the liberation/occupation; to implement provisions for the sale of wine and spirits; and to close brothels. The CAPOs were expected also to issue curfew passes for doctors and midwives, and vehicle passes for any transport essential to the new civic authorities. Finally they were expected to be aware of, and to assist in enforcing, Eighth Army orders; these put the city out of bounds for troops not on active duty for the first 48 hours and they divided the city’s restaurants into three categories: those operated by Army Welfare and those civilian restaurants authorized to supplement the NAAFI might be patronized, but all of the others were declared out of bounds to all ranks.29 In an article written for his local newspaper and published at the beginning of 1945, Tompkins gave a colourful and dramatic picture of ‘spear-heading’. It was, he wrote, ‘a single-handed job. There is no-one above to appeal to for advice; there is no-one below you to appeal to for help; what you do, you do alone …’ He described driving a small truck along dusty, war-ravaged roads to meet the tanks and infantry about to assault a town. No one came back to report when the town had fallen but, entering the rubble-strewn streets littered with helmets, cartridge case and the detritus of recent fighting, Tompkins met a soldier who told him that the enemy had gone. Very gradually citizens began to appear. The  first policeman was given an armband, told that he now worked for and would be fed by Tompkins; he was then ordered to find the rest of the police. When the police were assembled, they were given a proclamation to post all over the town telling the people of the liberation and the promise of respect of their rights and of the new laws to be obeyed. Then the great flags of the British and Americans are flown from the ruined town hall. Allied Military Government has begun. Now to find a worthy man to be Mayor, and a town council … . A meeting of the new Council is held, together with the priest, the banker, the doctor, the leader of the partisans, and the Chief of Police. The spearhead officer presides and gives them all their orders. Somewhere about this time the spearhead officer slowly changes into ‘The Governatore.’

Tompkins went on to discuss his wide powers as governor. He had a local doctor imprisoned for failing to organize a hospital in the town hall within the time designated. After setting up the hospital himself Tompkins had the unfortunate man released and ordered him to get on with his tasks properly. He presided over the local court. He fixed the price of flour, meat and other food ‘with due regard to it being within the reach of the poorest’. He wrestled with

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the black market, supervising shopkeepers and keeping an eye on what they bought and sold. He had to organize room for civilians fleeing the continuing fighting; and when the advance moved on to the next town, the governor had to transform himself back into a Spearhead officer to go through the whole thing again.30 One of the key responsibilities that is only implicit in Tompkins’s account is the Spearhead officer’s judicial role. From the landing in Sicily the proclamations posted by Civil Affairs explained that, in areas where the Military Government was active and where the Italian judiciary was not functioning, there were to be three kinds of military court hearing civil and criminal cases: General, Superior and Summary. The first two of these required the membership of a judicial officer, in other words a trained lawyer. The summary courts, however, were made up of one army officer, not necessarily legally trained.31 Former civilian police officers like Tompkins, who had regularly appeared in magistrates’ courts at home, probably carried this role off better than others. For some CAOs the role of governatore became semi-permanent as they were given significant regions to manage; in general they seem to have done the job well and several individuals became very popular in their administrative regions. Alfred Saunders, Tompkins’s former commander in Rome and Florence, left Florence with a parchment of thanks from the city’s mayor and council which had been endorsed by the commander of the American 5th Army; his name was also entered in the Libro d’Oro, the Golden Book of the Medicis. From Florence he moved on to administer Sienna, where he reverted to his CID past by solving the murder of a local professor by a GI, by saving a money changer from a beating by Italian Police seeking information and, at the same time, exposing the man’s involvement with a smuggling gang responsible for printing 7 million phoney lire.32 Major G.W. Manifold, a former superintendent of the Sheffield Police, ended the war running the police in the town and hinterland of Locarno; when the Italian government took over he was given the freedom of the city ‘in grateful recognition of his enlightened work as Chief of the Provincial Police, and for his unfailing impartiality in the administration of justice’.33 The Allied armies were not always as congratulatory when CAOs encroached on the prerogatives of different military departments and appeared to prioritize the needs of the local population. The CAO appointed to run Ischia, for example, was severely criticized by his superiors for organizing schooners to collect supplies and thus usurping the role of the Economic and Supply Division, and, when he was transferred from the island the population, organized a petition for his return.34 Equally, at times, there

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were Italian divisions and sensibilities to be negotiated. Tompkins, for example, finished his time in Italy as chief of police in the province of Ravenna, a lonely job where he had to tread a difficult line between his own police, mainly carabinieri and guardia di Finanza, and the partisans.35 A rather more prosaic description of the Spearhead officer’s job, though one that confirms Tompkins’s outlines of the tasks, was provided by James Reynolds for the Catholic journal The Tablet when he was demobilized in 1945. My first duty was to put up endless notices, some saying that everyone was now free and liberated, others saying that upon pain of death they must not do this, that or the other. Next, I had to disarm the Partisans, a complicated and hopeless task in which I was ably assisted by a few frightened Italian police. In  this task, evasive action of the richest ingenuity was always evident. Then came the choosing of the Mayor and his council, followed by the fixing of the prices of everything.

Reynolds believed that the CAOs fell broadly into two types: ‘the blood-andthunder boys, who thumped as they shouted orders, and the school of honeyed words and smiling requests’. He thought that both categories could get results, but put himself in the second. In Reynolds’s eyes the major problems for officers like himself were the corruption that pervaded Italian life, frightened police, the inability to ensure fixed prices and control the black market, and the partisans. The partisans had become a growing force since the early summer of 1943 when young men took to the hills following Mussolini’s order to call up new classes of conscript and the Germans deciding to increase the number of workers deported to the Reich. The  armed insurrection against the Germans in Naples was the only major example of armed resistance against the occupiers in the south; indeed, the Germans did not maintain a presence in the south for very long. North of Rome, however, the young men in the hills ambushed parties of German troops and those Italians serving the Republic of Salò. They committed acts of sabotage, assisted peasants in fiddling their grain quotas and in negotiating wages with landowners. Some of the groups were little more than bandits working in their own interests, but many more were affiliated to political parties, if not always committed to the ideologies. There were partisans linked with the socialists, the new Action Party and the Christian Democrats, but the greatest numbers were linked with the Communists who had the Garibaldi Brigades in the countryside and the Patriotic Action Groups (Gruppi di Azione Patriottica or GAP) in the towns and cities. As the war turned more and more in favour of the Allies, and as the Germans and the Fascists of Salò

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committed more and more reprisals, so the partisans grew in numbers. There were 20,000–30,000 in the spring of 1944, about 80,000 by March the following year, and perhaps 250,000 at the end of April. ‘Among the Partisans I met some really fine men’, wrote Reynolds, and a few well-disciplined bodies of men, but by far the greatest majority are gangsters out for personal gain and glory, and therefore keen for a revolution of the proletariat. They are building up a rich and entirely false mythology about themselves, which will for ever be taught in Italian schools. According to this, they alone are responsible for the liberation of Italy, the Allied Armies having avoided all casualties by walking slowly in their wake. They always spoke to me as warriors to a civilian, and I, being proud of my bit of fighting, found it woefully hard to bear.36

Seeking to restore civil society in an area where a significant part of the fighting had been undertaken by partisans, often with heavy losses and with appalling reprisals by the enemy, was no easy task. As the Allies moved north the CAOs were not merely part of a liberating army but they became entangled in a vicious guerrilla war and an equally vicious Italian civil war; partisans or not, many Italians wanted vengeance on their former Fascist rulers. In Rome, the CAOs organized a raid on the headquarters of the Communist partisans when the partisans refused to surrender their weapons. More serious were the attempted lynchings of suspected Fascist killers and those who had collaborated with the Germans bringing about the deaths of other Italians. Lieutenant Colonel Pollock and an American lieutenant found themselves confronting such a crowd outside the Palace of Justice in Rome. The crowd had just lynched a Fascist prison governor whose beaten, drowned corpse was now hanging in front of his former prison; now it wanted to mete out its form of justice on the Fascist Police chief who was on trial in the court charged with handing over to the SS the 335 Italians who were massacred in the Ardeatine Caves as a reprisal. The American lieutenant spoke Italian well but had a soft voice; Pollock had a slim grasp of Italian but his broken Italian, delivered with a fearsome Lanarkshire roar and backed up by two jeeps with armed Redcaps, was sufficient to calm, if not cower, the crowd.37 Months later, when the Allies liberated Ravenna, Tompkins found himself with the unpleasant task of having to supervise the execution of a Fascist by firing squad. The man was not killed by the volley, and one of Tompkins’s Carabinieri officers administered the coup de grace with his pistol. An Italian lawyer who was present protested furiously that such behaviour was contrary to Italian law; as the man was not dead, the lawyer protested he should have been taken to hospital. The Carabinieri officer was unrepentant. His fingernails had been pulled out during a Fascist interrogation, and he insisted that

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the coup de grace would not be necessary in future since, henceforth, he would be sure to use a sub-machine gun in any execution.38 Arthur Young’s report of the work of the British police officers under his command contained a considerable amount of national stereotyping. Similar stereotyping informed much of the recollection and reporting of the campaign. There were those who, following the traditional line of the unique nature of British police officers, stressed the courage and unflappability of the Bobby in the most trying circumstances. The official history of Civil Affairs, for example, relates the story of a British policeman who, ‘armed only with an ash walking stick’, broke up a confrontation between Italian communist and non-communist partisans.39 Similar stereotyping was also plain in the Daily Express’s report of Pollock’s role in quelling the Roman lynch mob. The Italian police, identified in the paper as carabinieri, were ‘elegantly useless as ever’; they ‘cowed or stood helplessly by’.40 Pollock himself left Rome in November 1944 and on his departure he sent an open letter to the Carabinieri, the Guardia di Finanza and the Interior Ministry Police recognizing their problems of food and general supply shortages, but urging them to adopt a different pattern of policing from their traditional one. He did not describe it as such, but he was essentially advocating the model that the British claimed as their own. Police officers, he urged, should do their duty fearlessly, honestly and with true resolve, without inclining towards any political party or faction, protecting and helping all persons who find themselves virtually under your care and guidance. We must only concern ourselves with the strict observance of the law, and shun any personal hatred, bitterness and malice which has to interfere in our duty. Doing whatever is in your power towards the public, you will inspire the respect, obedience and goodwill without which a police force becomes useless – armed but without weapons.41

The Daily Express, and others, might consider the various forces that made up the Italian Police as ‘elegantly useless’, but others did not especially many of those who worked alongside them. The Italian police could be tough and brutal; such behaviour, including the torture of suspects, long predated the Fascist regime.42 In November 1943 it was believed that bribery, corruption and ‘vicious methods’ employed by the carabinieri provoked a riot among farmers about 60 miles south of Salerno. Yet the various branches of the Italian Police had problems of their own. Visiting a Carabinieri post in a town just outside Naples, Norman Lewis found the commander ‘in a state of shock’. He was suffering from daily gunfights between rival gangs, bandits, pillaging army deserters, vendettas, kidnappings, mysterious disappearances, reported

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cases of typhus, the non-arrival of his pay and the shortage of supply of every kind, including ammunition.

At the same time the commander of the Carabinieri in Naples accepted that his men often dealt with black marketeers by handing back their stolen goods, and even freeing them on payment of a ransom. ‘Yet what was to be done? If he sacked the men they couldn’t be replaced, and his force [was] only onequarter of its regular strength.’ At least they kept a degree of law and order, and some were killed in doing so.43 William Lessa, an Italian-speaking American CAO, found corruption among the Carabinieri when he took command in Cefalù in Sicily. He noted how they had low prestige and low morale, and he was full of praise for ‘those splendid officers of the London Metropolitan Police’ who took supervision of them and rapidly restored morale ‘by treating them as professionals supervised by professionals’. In no time the British police had organized patrols of Carabinieri to work alongside American and British Military Police. According to Lessa ‘the ultimate transformation was little short of miraculous’.44 The British policemen serving in Civil Affairs in Italy usually spoke highly of the Carabinieri. Young thought them ‘the best disciplined and the least tainted with Fascism’ of all the Italian police. Major Edward Aust, who had served as a regular soldier for twelve years before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1919, reported that they were invaluable to him when serving as CAPO in the Sicilian Province of Caltanisetta. Tompkins considered them to be ‘the Italian counterpart to our Brigade of Guards’ even though, in addition, they performed the duties of military and civil police.45 At the beginning of October 1944 it was suggested that 2,000 of them, then in North Africa as prisoners of war and guarding German prisoners of war, might be returned to Italy to assist with maintaining internal security. They were, it was noted, members of ‘a corps with sound traditions’ and their role in a future, non-Fascist Italy would be of ‘definite value’.46 The Carabinieri was but one of a number of police institutions in Italy, but its military organization and proud military tradition made it stand out. It had been modelled on the French Gendarmerie and had played a significant role in the unification of Italy during the nineteenth century. Mussolini had favoured it in the early years of Fascist rule but he and his ruling group were suspicious of its pre-Fascist patriotism and suspected that its loyalty remained, first and foremost, to the monarchy.47 But if the Fascists feared that the Carabinieri might be too close to the monarchy, so too did the Italian partisans, especially the communists. This meant that members of the corps could not be employed in the delicate task of disarming local partisans once

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the Germans had been driven from an area. The situation became equally tense when the Allies incorporated other Carabinieri units into their ranks during the advance north of Rome; most of the men in these units had taken an oath of allegiance to Mussolini’s puppet Fascist republic. Major Ronnie, formerly of the Buckinghamshire Police, considered that the majority had taken the oath ‘from force of circumstances involving the necessity for providing the means of livelihood for their families and not from political conviction’, but this did not ameliorate the hostility of either the partisans or those Carabinieri that had fought their way to Rome, and beyond, with the Allies.48 In August 1945 it was proposed that an Allied police mission of between ten and thirty men be sent to Italy to advise and assist in reorganizing the country’s police. The mission was to be composed of both British and Americans with police experience. It was also suggested that some input from the British colonies and White Dominions would be especially useful; and this tied in with what, in modern eyes, appear to be patronizing comments in Young’s Report and his implication that the Italians were not unlike the indigenous peoples of the British Empire. The Italians, according to Young, were like ‘wayward’ children; however, ‘given good leadership – a factor he usually lacks, it is surprising what the Italian policeman can achieve’.49 Colonel Wilcox, now Chief Public Officer in Vienna, and Colonel Bye, the man who had ‘captured’ San Giorgio and who was now the director of the Public Safety Division Branch for the American 5th Army, prepared reports on the problems, the size and structure of the police in Italy. Wilcox regarded the Italian system as highly complex; he listed five distinct kinds of police institution and overlaps in command. He believed that the ordinary police were distrusted because of the activities under the Fascist regime and their corruption. He was also concerned about the suspicion which many showed towards the Carabinieri because of its traditional allegiance to the discredited royal family. Bye, like others, thought highly of the Carabinieri, but his report reflected the assumptions about the superior and unique qualities of the police in England. In addition to the problems of poor pay, poor conditions and accommodation – problems that went back generations in the Italian police – Bye singled out what appeared to be an ignorance of what was held as the first object of the English police: the prevention of crime. In Italy, he noted, there was no proper system of beat patrolling and too much time and attention was given over to the static guarding of public buildings. The military nature of much policing stifled initiative and limited the individual responsibility of police officers. These problems were compounded by political appointees and

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Figure 6.2 Lieutenant Colonel Albert Wilcox and the Carabinieri in Bari ‘[D]uring the lull before the Allied Commission moved its headquarters from Salerno to Rome … I found an opportunity for visiting Bari … where my sister-in-law, Sophie Marguerite was stationed. My mission was to report on the state of readiness of the Carabinieri legion which was in training … waiting to move forward in the wake of the Eighth Army to police the Ancona province. I had made an appointment with the Legion commander to discuss with him and his senior officers the strength, organisation and equipment of his units, and to see what kind of training was being given to ensure co-operation between the police and the Allied troops. The Legion commander, however, saw my visit in a different light. It was the occasion to impress me with the spectacle of a full-dress parade of the Royal Carabinieri in their magnificent uniforms … . Unaware of this splendid reception being prepared for me I had taken my sister-in-law out for lunch, dressed in an open-necked battle dress and shorts. Unluckily, when I was taking her back to her office the jeep broke down and we just managed to get towed to the Carabinieri barracks in time for the appointment. The Colonel who greeted me must have been just as disconcerted by my appearance as I was by the sight of the parade on the square. He seemed to accept Sophie-Marguerite as part of my entourage … . The Colonel and I must have presented an incongruous spectacle, for in his immaculate uniform he was no more than 5 feet 5 inches in height while I towered above him in my travel-stained Khaki … . My last duty … was to take the salute of the Legion, headed by the mounted men at a trot … . By this time, the [Carabinieri] adjutant with the ability to cope with unforeseen emergencies that is the hall mark of a good staff officer had procured a bouquet of flowers to present to Sophie-Marguerite [and] had seen to it that my jeep had been repaired so that our departure though not impressive had a less ludicrous aspect than our arrival.’ Text from Hertfordshire Police Archive, Wilcox Papers, Autobiography pp. 29–30. Photo: Courtesy of Susan and Stephen Wilcox

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provincial prefects, who had no policing experience, supervising and directing the police institutions.50 But the mission never happened. The Italian coalition government would not agree to it; few ministers took kindly to being told that their police were inadequate, badly managed and poorly directed. According to the British, however, the main stumbling block was that the communists were opposed and insisted that, should any such mission go ahead, then there must also be Soviet involvement.

Venezia Giulia: Hot war to cold As the debate stalled on a police mission for Italy, so, in the north-east, the Allies were seeking to organize policing in the disputed territory of Venezia Giulia. They had become concerned in the previous autumn that Yugoslav partisans might occupy the region before Allied troops arrived, and AMGOT had no intention of handing over what had been Italian-administered territory to what might be communist committees. When the Allies arrived in Trieste slightly later than the Yugoslavs, the policing problem within the region was that, essentially, there was no police – or at least nothing that the Americans or British would grace with the name. There was a body called Difesa Popolare or Guardia del Popolo but for Gerald Richardson, promoted colonel and director of Public Safety for Trieste, while ‘reasonably well organised … [the Difesa Popolare] contained … many undesirables, in fact subversive elements’. In his later memoir Richardson was even more critical, suggesting that this police was essentially a Communist force that financed itself through a system of protection. Richardson organized a coup which effectively disarmed the Difesa Popolare and replaced it with an ad hoc body of local citizens. Issued with armbands these men patrolled with British Redcaps, but the Redcaps rapidly became their protectors on the streets, and there were reports of the citizen police volunteers being attacked while off duty and even in their homes. Plans to bring in 1,000 carabinieri were rapidly dropped since it was clear that, however much Allied policemen rated members of the corps, they would not help ease the inflammable tensions between Italians, Slovenes and others. Within a matter of weeks the Allies decided to establish a completely new police institution with Richardson as its commander. He was initially advised by Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey White also from the Metropolitan Police but who was serving as deputy provost marshal and commander of the Military Police in Trieste. Richardson was also supported by two other English police officers: Majors Rowbottom and Sykes. Rowbottom

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was a particularly interesting character; according to the Police Review at the beginning of the war he was serving as a constable in the Southport Borough force; he had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the war, but when demobbed he returned to Southport as a constable.51 In an effort to maintain the policy of Anglo-American interleaving in Civil Affairs, Richardson’s first ‘director of civilian police’ was an American major who came from the Virginia State Police. Richardson asked for ten British police officers to run his new police. At least nineteen such can be identified as serving across the nine years of the force’s existence: ten of these are named in Richardson’s memoir and another nine were named in the Police Review; a dozen originated from the Metropolitan Police, and there was one each from Aberdeen, Exeter, Glasgow, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent, Surrey and Warwickshire. Most, if not all, like Richardson, had long, if different, experiences of Civil Affairs from the first landings in Italy. Captain Bolt from Plymouth had assumed command of a mine clearance company in order to clear a bakehouse in Pescara and allow bread to be made; Captain Robertson from Stoke-on-Trent had been a Spearhead officer and had played an important role in retrieving Florentine art treasures. Among the Metropolitan officers were Captain David Hopkins who had re-established the water supply in Sciara, Sicily and then gone on to serve as a PSO in Rome; and Captain Roy Hobbs, the former station sergeant who had led a unit of Carabinieri against machine gun–carrying Neapolitan bandits and who, later, had assumed control of a commune in Reggio Calabria.52 The police of Venezia Giulia were originally to consist of no more than 3,500 men, but the number was quickly increased to 6,000. Richardson and White initially recommended that ‘the Colonial system be adopted’ by which they appear to have meant that the officers be drawn from the Allies and that firearms, including rifles and sub-machine guns, be available. They looked for recruits among former members of the Carabinieri and men from other Italian police who had served with the partisans or who were known to have anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi sympathies. Members of the old Difesa Popolare were also recruited, provided they were thought to be trustworthy. Richardson sought to recruit among both Italians and Slavs, provided they were residents of Venezia Giulia, but it took some time before it was possible to get Italians and Slavs to serve or co-operate together on the selection committees. By mid-summer, however, there were sufficient recruits to open a training school and the timetable was in draft. In the first two weeks, it was planned to have

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forty-four lectures outlining the role of the new force, giving instructions on how to prepare reports, the penal code, public order and various major crimes. Lecture 36 was untitled, but was to be given by a member of SIB; the final lecture covered what was a perennial problem for British police officers with rural beats, ‘Animals – General, Cruelty and Diseases.’53 Time was also allocated to sports and physical education; and there were also periods set aside for firearms training, though Richardson found his new police a little too fond of their weapons, at least in the early days. From its shaky beginnings the force developed in competence and efficiency. Richardson claimed, probably correctly but perhaps also because he knew what his readers would expect, that he wanted to create a distinct and independent tradition for his force. He rejected the Carabinieri’s code of discipline as too harsh. Also, rather than continuing to emphasize the colonial style of policing he wrote of keeping his own experience of the Metropolitan Police in mind and encouraging ‘a feeling of individual responsibility’ among his men. ‘There were times’, he wrote, ‘when I almost believed that our Venezia-Giulia Police Force was becoming a Metropolitan Police in miniature.’54 The force remained in being for nearly ten years, with Richardson at its head, until October  1954 when the Italian Police moved in to take over the thin strip of land running down the Adriatic to Trieste. The police established in Trieste were something of a postscript to the activities of those police officers working as CAOs in Italy. Generally speaking these officers acquitted themselves well. They knew that they would be entering a war zone, though whether they expected the kinds of dangers and difficulties that they experienced is a different question. They had respect for many of the Italian police that worked alongside them, particularly the Carabinieri, and like ‘Dickie’ Hearn most probably clung to the ideas of British difference, indeed superiority in policing and legal matters. It was never their task to encourage change among the Italian police, and the failure of the plan for an Allied police mission ensured that it never would be. Yet this was to be precisely the task set for a police mission sent to Greece following the liberation of that country and the end of the war in Europe.

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The Greek Imbroglio

The proposal for the small Allied police mission to Italy was put forward one month after the first members of another British Police Mission had arrived in Greece. The British wanted to ensure a non-communist regime in the country and were suspicious of the largest of the resistance groups EAM (the National Liberation Front) and its more overtly communist military partner ELAS (the National People’s Liberation Army). The mission was not created in the usual fashion of Civil Affairs practice. Its aim was simply and specifically to reorganize and train the police, the Gendarmerie and the prison service in Greece so as to ensure that they were efficient, effective and free from politics. Unfortunately, the mission arrived as the country lurched into a civil war which was interpreted as reflecting the increasing division in Europe between a ‘liberal-democratic’ west and a pro-Soviet east. There was little truly ‘liberaldemocratic’ about the anti-communist side to which the British were seriously committed, but they were not keen, and in the wake of the Second World War could ill-afford any extended commitment of their own troops and police. The problems in Greece were not merely the result of the war and occupation. Interwar Greece was riven with social and economic problems aggravated by the 1.5 million refugees who arrived following the disastrous conflict with Turkey in 1919–1920. There were also fierce political rivalries which, during the 1920s, led to assassinations and a first, but relatively short-lived, military coup. Shortly before the end of the First World War, however, the Greek government had requested that Britain send a group of police officers to introduce British policing methods in major urban areas. The mission was commanded by Sir Frederick Loch Halliday, a former commissioner of the police in Calcutta; the other members were two Metropolitan Police officers, initially Inspector John Concannon from the uniformed branch and Sergeant Ernest Hill from the CID. After three years Concannon and Hill were replaced, respectively, by Alfred Boobyer and Trevitt Read. It was when Read’s wife was taken seriously ill following an accident at Gare de Lyon while en route for Greece that Sergeant

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Clarence Campion was lined up to be a third officer for the mission; the intention was that he should serve during Read’s absence.1 In 1929, Colonel Jacynth d’E. F. Coke, the chief constable of the West Riding, replaced Halliday, who, by then, was in his mid-sixties. In December 1931 the Greek government decided not to renew the contract. This first police mission had mixed success. After two years Concannon reported that there had been improvements in traffic regulation, beat patrols and the understanding and use of fingerprints; at the same time, however, he considered that the unsettled state of the country and the enormous costs of the army meant that the overall results were ‘very disappointing and very discouraging’. The Foreign Office report on the mission for 1925 regretted the ways in which General Theodoros Panaglos’s dictatorship was interfering with policing and reducing the British Mission–trained police to traffic control, preventing profiteering and otherwise dealing with mainly trivial offences. Two years later, after a counter-coup had removed Panaglos, a member of the British embassy in Athens praised what were known as ‘Halliday’s Police’; ‘they go about their duties like London policemen, unarmed [which] has not failed to arouse respect and confidence.’ The Gendarmerie, which had backed Panaglos, was now principally deployed back in the countryside instead of ‘pursuing politics in the cafés of the towns’. At the end of 1929, however, Colonel Coke found himself facing a strike by the police over government plans for their pay and the government’s counter-threat to replace them with gendarmes. British proposals to reorganize the Gendarmerie were rejected on the grounds that this could upset the force which had already been advised by the Italian Carabinieri and had recently had enjoyed significant success against brigands; in addition the force was known to resent having lost some functions to the town police.2 Liberal, modernizing members of the political classes regarded the continuing presence of brigands as a humiliation for the state; they also winced to hear of the heads of dead brigands being collected and publicly displayed. The social and economic unrest by peasants and workers continued during and after this first British Police Mission, and was usually dismissed as ‘anarchy’ and the fault of ‘communists’. In reality the Greek Communist Party was small and electorally insignificant; even so in 1929 legislation was passed that made the discussion of communist ideas punishable by six months’ imprisonment. Greek police officers and gendarmes became increasingly involved in political policing and saw themselves as guardians, particularly of the moral purity of school and university students. Towards the end of the 1930s, in spite of the tensions that had arisen during the British presence, links were forged between the Greek Police

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and Gendarmerie and the Nazi SS.3 Yet the increasing political developments in Greek policing during the 1930s seem to have passed the British by. When John Concannon died at the end of 1940, the Police Review could still write of the ‘admirable results’ achieved by the mission in which he was involved. ‘The Greek Police, discarding the rifles they had hitherto carried, were taught [by the mission] to exercise a moral authority, and became a civilian Force rather than a military one.’4 When Greece fell to the Axis powers in May 1941, the swing back to the old ways of doing things continued. Initially, the Italians took responsibility for administering the occupation of Greece, but when the Italian position changed in September 1943, the Germans took over. Some Greek police and gendarmes fought with the resistance, especially under Italian occupation. The Germans, however, put a greater emphasis on the struggle against communism; they fostered anti-communist militias and enrolled many gendarmes into Security Battalions. In Athens most notably these battalions put ferocious pressure on, and terrorised, those suburbs noted for a significant Left-wing presence; they shot suspects on the spot and marched others off to camps where they were later shot in reprisal for resistance activity. The battalionists insisted that the Germans were merely giving them autonomy to act against the communists since they were a Greek problem. A small British force landed in Greece in October 1944 and rapidly occupied Athens. The Greek Government in Exile, which accompanied the British troops, was fragile. There was concern that EAM/ELAS might stage a coup, yet EAM/ ELAS on their part appear to have been favourable towards the British. It was also the case that the agreement between Churchill and Stalin that Greece should be in the British sphere of influence appeared to have been accepted and enforced on Stalin’s part. EAM/ELAS accepted ministries in the new provisional government, but at the beginning of December these ministers resigned over the composition of the police and the control of armed force in the post-war state. On 3 December 1944, crowds gathered in the centre of Athens. Enormous numbers marched into Constitutional Square, at one side of which there was a police station. Officers in the station panicked and opened fire. The commanders of British troops in the city concluded that the police had fired ‘unnecessarily’. George Papandreou, the prime minister of the National Unity Government, attempted to resign; but in London Winston Churchill demanded that he be forced to stay where he was. Churchill put the trouble down to a Left-wing attempt to seize power and he ordered that British troops and aircraft deployed against EAM/ELAS. The British, desperate for local assistance, rearmed former gendarmes, battalionists and others who had collaborated with the Germans. By

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the middle of 1945 a National Guard of some 60,000 had been established; men of the Left were excluded and the Guard became notorious for its brutality and partiality with Guards frequently using their authority in their own personal interest. 79 Section SIB had arrived from Italy at the beginning of November  1944 with the usual tasks of investigating offences committed by British troops, thefts of military supplies on the docks at Piraeus and the sale of such goods on the black market. Lieutenant Edward Owen, the section’s commander, met the head of the Greek Police and attached two members of the local police to his unit. He was also delighted when a professor at Athens University agreed to the section using all and any of the scientific aids that he had available for criminal investigation. Everything appeared to be progressing favourably until 3 December, after which Owen began commenting in the section’s war diary that normal SIB work was now complicated and restricted by the political situation. There were the usual problems of the theft of War Department property, and two rapes were investigated, but the section was also called upon to watch for ELAS suspects and to investigate the killing of British and Indian soldiers who, allegedly, had been murdered after they were taken prisoner by ELAS.5 This was the situation that greeted the British Police Mission to Greece, designed to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor a quarter of a century earlier. The intention of the police mission was to establish a policing system independent of politics and relevant to the kind of liberal democracy that Britain and her allies hoped to see emerging across Europe. In the words of Herbert Morrison the police in Britain had, after all, ‘helped the community to feel that good order, together with the absence of disturbance, and the absence of the use of physical violence, is the way in which men and women should behave’.6 However, the British government and their civil servants in London, possibly drawing on Colonel Coke’s experience and the existence of both armed opponents of the Greek government and the Greek Gendarmerie, appear to have considered that the situation in Greece required a police mission with a more military form of leadership than that provided by the police officers usually deployed in Civil Affairs. The mission’s commander, Sir Charles Wickham, had followed a quite different career path from Eric St. Johnston and Arthur Young. Wickham was the fourth son of an established Yorkshire family who, after schooling at Harrow, had gone straight into the army and straight to South Africa, where he fought with the Norfolk Regiment in the Boer War winning the DSO. He also served in France during the First World War and with the expeditionary force sent to assist the white Russians. In 1920, having risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel,

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he joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) as divisional commissioner in the province of Ulster. Following partition, he was considered sufficiently acceptable to the Protestant majority in the six northern counties to be appointed as the first inspector general of the new RUC. Wickham’s tenure as head of the RUC was never particularly smooth. He had hoped to create a force in which the numbers of Catholic and Protestant officers were proportionate to their numbers in the population, but the Northern Ireland government’s insistence that he stop recruiting Catholics from the south who had previously served in the RIC wrecked this ambition and the police became increasingly Protestant. When, for fear of violence, the Orangemen’s parade on 12 July 1935 was banned, the Northern Ireland minister for home affairs was warned by a Unionist MP that his police chief ’s advice could cost him his job since ‘the Inspector-General is an Englishman [who] has queer ideas about Northern Ireland’. As a military man, however, with concerns about an attack from the south, Wickham refused his men’s requests to be more like their English counterparts with an eight-hour day and a reduction in their weaponry. The men protested particularly about the requirement for them to carry rifles which could sometimes aggravate a situation.7 Immediately before the First World War the old RIC had rarely patrolled with rifles and, but for the dark green of their uniforms, they appeared more and more to resemble British Bobbies; but the Irish War of Independence had suggested to many that this had been a mistake and that the Irish constables had lost their skills in dealing with armed Irish republicans. Wickham, with his experience of the Russian and Irish wars, insisted that the RUC keep their rifles in their barrack armouries and he continued to advocate this for the local police when he served in Greece and later advised on British policing policy in Palestine. Given his experience as someone who had fought the Bolsheviks and commanded a Gendarmerie-type institution, Wickham appeared the ideal man for training and reorganizing the police in Greece in 1945. One of his leading deputies, who did much of the administrative work in the early months of the mission and who was charged with supervising the Greek Gendarmerie, was John Regan, a county inspector of the RUC. Regan had joined the RIC as a cadet officer in 1908; he volunteered for army service in the First World War, serving first in France as a captain in the Royal Irish Rifles before moving to a command in the King’s African Rifles. At the end of the war, he returned to the RIC, where he served as a district inspector in Limerick during the war with the IRA. He was one of the few Catholics who, on partition, followed the flag to Ulster and continued his police career in the RUC. Yet his religious affiliation appears to have been one reason, perhaps the principal one, why he failed to become the

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police commissioner of his native Belfast when the post became vacant during the Second World War. Regan had met sectarian prejudice during much of his career; a true loyalist he did not blame the government for being passed over but he wondered whether his failure to get the post in Belfast was the reason why it was suggested that he put his name forward for the Public Safety Branch of the Control Commission for Germany. Before he reached Germany, however, Wickham asked him to join the mission to Greece.8 As plans for the police mission became public there was already scepticism about Churchill’s claim that the events in Athens in December 1944 had been the result of an attempted Left-wing coup. The appointment of Wickham and men like Regan with experience of paramilitary policing and civil war brought suspicion and criticism of the mission itself. For example, Charles Challen, the Tory MP for Hampstead, received a letter from one of his constituents criticizing the British role in Greece and singling out the choice of Wickham as head of the police mission. It appeared to Challen’s constituent that the British Embassy in Athens was censoring what was being reported in Britain, while British involvement appeared to be supporting a corrupt governing class and enabling the creation of a police state. [T]he sending of members of the Ulster Constabulary to Greece can be interpreted in only one way. This police force is trained in the use of fire arms and is associated with many acts of brutality in Northern Ireland; its chief was associated with the discreditable episodes of the ‘Black and Tans’. These members are being sent to help the Greek Government. In what? … One asks ‘law in whose name; order for whose benefit?’9

In fact, in spite of his career in the army and with a paramilitary police, Wickham, like the imperial policeman Halliday, appears to have acknowledged the traditional English/British model as the ideal form of police and the model that he wanted to develop for Greece. While the mission was being considered he made a short visit to Greece and wrote a report outlining what he considered its aims should be. At the top of his suggestions were, in the case of the police in towns, to try ‘to stop any monkeying with the officers by politicians’, and, in the case of the Gendarmerie, to turn it into ‘a lightly armed police force (civil)…. The less they play at soldiers the better’.10 He remained wedded to these aims throughout his years with the mission. In March 1946, taking a rather different stance from that which he had adopted in the RUC, he told the Foreign Office bluntly that the rifle was ‘a bad police weapon, being too conspicuous, liable to be provocative and when carried in crowds invariably leads to scuffles and attempts to disarm the police’. The RUC and colonial police, he explained

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perhaps as a caveat to his earlier position, kept their rifles in police stations and carried them only when absolutely necessary. In the current situation it was not possible to send Greek police officers out unarmed, but just a pistol should be sufficient and would help create greater confidence between the police and the people.11 The following month, in a letter to the Greek minister of public order, he repeated these points, again pulling no punches: It would not be an exaggeration to say that there are too many cases in which the Gendarmerie has actively or passively assisted … Right bandits and murderers. … We shall never get an efficient and impartial force until all ranks are convinced that they will be safe in their jobs as long as they do their duty and that political influence will not be permitted to interfere with their security or prospects. They must realise that as servants of the State and not of the party their duty is to enforce the law impartially regardless of what party may be in power … . The functions of every police force are the prevention and detection of crime, the prevention of disorder and if necessary its suppression. To perform these functions police must be widely disposed and each man must have a thorough knowledge of his area and the people in it. The foundation of all police work is information without which anticipation of events, prevention and the recognition and arrest of criminals is rendered almost impossible. … Crime will only be suppressed if adequate force supported by good local knowledge is immediately available at the scene of the crime and before the criminals have had sufficient time to disperse and settle down to their normal avocations.12

Wickham presented similar arguments when, later in the year, he was sent to investigate the police in the troubled mandate territory of Palestine.13 Whatever the worries of people like Charles Challen’s constituent, and whatever Wickham’s previous career, the men who served in the police mission to Greece were not greatly dissimilar to those serving elsewhere as CAOs. The mission numbered about forty-five officers: a few were drawn from British provincial forces; a few came from the imperial forces; but the largest numbers were recruited from the Metropolitan Police, which was usual given that force’s size and dominance, and from the RUC, which was unusual.14 Among the first were R.A. Noble, deputy chief constable of Norwich and a graduate of the Police College at Hendon; three superintendents coming respectively from the  East Riding, Middlesbrough and Oxfordshire, and two chief inspectors from Newport and Swansea.15 There were also two superintendents (A.G. Ralph and R.J. Smith) and

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Chief Inspector Arber from the Metropolitan Police;  Inspectors Henry Baker and Leonard Ashton, and Sergeants Frederick Hayward and Charles Noble, also from the Metropolitan Police, transferred from Italy where they were  already serving as CAOs. The Foreign Office was unhappy when, within a year of their two-year appointment to Greece, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police requested the return of Arber and Smith who were to be promoted. Wickham held up Arber’s departure for about a month so that he had time to complete an investigation on which he was  engaged, and, ever concerned about costs, the Foreign Office was concerned that some of  the £100 spent on Smith’s equipment should be repaid. It was also hoped that  the commissioner would find replacements, but it is unclear whether he did so.16 Early in 1946, the mission had still not fully filled its quota and one of the officers, the detective chief inspector from Newport, had suffered a serious breakdown. The man himself claimed that he was suffering from heatstroke, but various medical officers, including the Treasury Medical Adviser, disagreed. The  Foreign Office did its best to help him; he had an impressive career in Newport where he had served for fifteen years rising to the rank of chief inspector in the CID, and he had joined the mission with a view to advancement. Given what had happened in Greece, there was no chance that he could be sent back to duty there, but the Foreign Office followed up two other options to let him gain overseas experience: either a posting to the Control Commission in Germany or service in one of the dominion or colonial police forces. Colonel Halland, in charge of the German commission, did not want him because of his breakdown in Greece, but softened the blow by saying that he had no vacancies. On investigation the Foreign Office concluded that there was no chance of the man being declared medically fit for a post in the empire. Fortunately, it appeared that, in the end, Newport was prepared to have him back; at that point the civil servants decided that there was nothing more that they could do.17 In the spring of 1946 offers were made to new men who had volunteered to fill the mission’s ranks. Six were appointed to improve the situation in Greek prisons and to be responsible for that aspect of the mission’s task. They all appear to have had experience in the British Prison Service; two of these were still working in prisons while the others were serving in the armed forces. Another superintendent, T.W. Martin, was appointed from the Metropolitan Police; he was a veteran in every sense with twenty-six years of service behind him. There were eight more superintendents coming respectively from the forces of Hampshire, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Salford, Southport, Surrey, Wiltshire and Wolverhampton, and two sergeants from Cardiff and Glamorganshire. Colonial

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police forces were represented by two men from the Palestine Police and two more from the South African Police in Southern Rhodesia. The superintendent from Surrey declined the offer, as did those from Hampshire and Wiltshire. The  Hampshire man lived in a police house and could find no alternative residence for his wife. The Wiltshire superintendent explained that, after giving the matter ‘careful consideration’, he felt that he could not sacrifice pensionable police service for service in Greece.18 No one wanted to jeopardise their pension but after a few months Superintendent Ralph reported that the job of training the young Greek recruits had got into his bones and that it was necessary to stay until the mission had ‘made good’. Ralph had become Wickham’s deputy; he was highly thought of by the previous commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Philip Game, who recalled promoting him three times in ten years until he was superintendent of ‘C’ Division, the smallest of the divisions but the one that covered the West End. Ralph wrote frankly to Game about the Greeks and their country. He revealed the kind of assumptions and prejudices towards them that Young had shown towards the Italians and especially the Sicilians. ‘They talk too much and work too little.’ He confessed that it was a struggle to establish impartiality in the police, but he was impressed by the ‘enthusiasm, affection and desire to serve’ among the young recruits. He regretted that they were so badly paid, underfed and badly equipped, things which, at times, made him ashamed to face them. He described successfully using the ‘old dodge’ of getting those who called demonstrations to ask their supporters to depart quietly, ‘not to cause trouble and bring discredit on the movement’. This worked successfully, but Ralph had little time for Greek Communists who seemed ‘all criminals and murderers, unkempt, lousy and brutal’. They were different from the British variety and ‘too near the Russian type to appeal to the London Policeman’. He urged Game to pass this on when he spoke with ‘people who matter’.19 Establishing police training schools, welcoming the recruits and teaching them how to behave like good British Bobbies was the relatively easy part. It was also the part that the British Mission concentrated upon. Following the lead of their superiors they ignored the extreme Right-wing individuals that remained within the police and the Gendarmerie; there was no serious purge and Wickham was inclined to take men at their word when they told him that they disliked the corruption and the spoils system.20 By the end of July  1945 the mission had five police training schools in operation and had accepted nearly 2,400 recruits; but after a few months of instruction those recruits found themselves on the outside where the culture of political involvement among

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the police remained unaltered and where crime and disorder were at levels that had rarely been experienced by members of the British mission. At the end of July 1945 the statistics of crime were rising fast, particularly with reference to breaches of price controls and thefts of British War Department property. It was also reported that there were numbers of DPs and armed gangs anything from fifteen to fifty strong active in the west, in Macedonia and Thessaly.21 Wickham’s monthly report for January 1946 lamented an increasing tendency on the part of the responsible minister ‘to ignore the mission’, and at the same time the levels of disturbance were rising and some gendarmes were shooting people out of hand. His report for the following month was equally gloomy. Especially alarming now was the increase in murders, from 59 in January to 104 in February; 50 of the February murders occurred in the Peloponnese and 38 of these were labelled as ‘political’. Members of the police mission were denounced as ‘occupiers’ by the communists and subjected to abuse by crowds.22 It may have been this kind of thing that contributed to the breakdown of the inspector from Newport, though his posting was to Salonika which was described as one of the least violent regions. ‘Occupiers’ was hardly a justifiable criticism to be levelled at Wickham’s mission. There was a British Military Mission and a large number of troops in Greece but, together with Wickham and his men, they hardly constituted an occupation. Members of the police mission sometimes found themselves involved in interrogations, but they were also involved in other things that seemed even less relevant to the duties to which they had been assigned. A minute on the monthly report for October  1948 expressed surprise that two of the mission’s officers were having to superintend the maintenance of police vehicles.23 The members of the mission, spread out across the country, drafted monthly surveys that provided the substance for the broader report for British officialdom; it was feared that they were spending time ‘over-correcting’ the translations of reports from Gendarmerie officers and scaling down their statistics; and then there was the civil war. A minute appended to the Mission Report of April 1947 declared: There is little point in reading this as a report on Law and Order in the sense that the term is usually accepted. It is clear that the civil war has made it almost impossible for the Police Mission to get ahead with their task of organising the police and gendarmerie along sound peace-time lines.24

As long as the British were intent on supporting one side in a civil war in which many of the police and gendarmes behaved in a ferociously partisan fashion,

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the kind of moderate, politics-free police institution that Wickham, and his superiors, were hoping to create was a most unlikely outcome. Wickham’s men appear to have had some success in persuading the police in Athens to control political meetings without recourse to violence, but they were unable to dissuade them from prosecuting leftists for innocent political activity and beating up leftist prisoners. Indeed, the prison section of the mission had little or no impact on the ferocious treatment and sexual abuse meted out to prisoners, even those recognized in Greek law as minors. There were occasional personal successes in the countryside; early in 1946, for example, Colonel R.A. Noble climbed a mountain to take charge of some hostages freed from a Royalist gang. But generally the mission seems to have been even more out of its depth in the countryside where heads continued to be collected to prove the claimed body count of communist guerrillas and where anyone who had fought the Italians or the Germans in a leftist partisan group was liable to a beating or even to be killed. Even a small boy could be beaten up by police for wearing a red jumper. The  Gendarmerie became a reasonably effective force against communist guerrillas, but the gendarmes seem to have achieved this less by winning civilian support and rather more by making the rural population more frightened of them than of their enemies. Among the Slavic-speaking minority in northwest Greece, for example, the gendarmes claimed innocence of charges of the assault and rape of women villagers; but on a number of occasions they were reported as able to do this simply because they had handed women over to paramilitaries fighting for the government who had no qualms and faced no likelihood of sanction from the government’s police.25 It is conceivable that the police mission to Greece could have had a much greater degree of success, but the odds were stacked against it. There was the legacy of the war and a tradition of corrupt behaviour and political partisanship among the police; this may not have permeated the new recruits when they joined and had their initial training, but it has always been easy for novice police officers to follow the lead of the old sweats. Most of the politicians involved with policing and public order appear to have had little inclination to reform the system and to put an end to their personal authority over the police. Such politicians were also fearful for their own position, and possibly also for their own lives in the savagery of the civil war. In December 1951 the Greek government expressed its gratitude to the men who had served in the mission and announced that, for reasons of economy, it had decided not to renew the contract.26

8

Northwest Europe

Policemen, ‘practicable wisdom’ and Civil Affairs For Britain the Second World War had begun in September 1939, and it ended in Europe in May 1945. British preparations for the restoration of civil society in Nazi-occupied territory had begun in September 1942; and preparations were begun to close Civil Affairs in December 1945 as Allied Control Commissions with both civilian and military personnel took over the administration in Austria and Germany. As part of the closure Civil Affairs looked back on its achievements and its personnel. The Commandant of the Civil Affairs Staff College reported, among other things, that of the 3,591 successful applicants to join Civil Affairs in northwest Europe only 111 (3.1 per cent) were from the police. There is some confusion with these numbers, however. They do not tally with the numbers of police officers listed in the War Department records, namely 113 policemen taking the course at Wimbledon and another 438 at Peel House, Hendon. Perhaps the figure of 111 deliberately excluded the men sent to Italy or the junior officers sent on the courses at Peel House; but it does not seem possible that more police officers served in the Mediterranean theatre than in northwest Europe. To complicate the issue still further it seems possible that some police officers were included among the members of the armed forces who joined Civil Affairs. There were, for example, 1,308 ‘War Emergency’ men (36.42 per cent of the successful applicants) who had been commissioned initially for other roles during the conflict. Bill Hutchins, who was one of Dickie Hearn’s officers and who moved from SIB to Civil Affairs, may have been included under this heading.1 The majority of men that served in Civil Affairs, especially it seems in northwest Europe, were army, or former army personnel. Brigadier A.E. Hodgkin, a Civil Affairs staff officer with Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, was full of praise for the ordinary police officers, though not the chief constables, who served in Civil Affairs. These ordinary policemen, he thought, were

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‘first class’. He was much less complimentary; indeed, he was scathing about many of the military men that were appointed. His first chief, he recalled, had ‘a fine pair of field boots, two Aberdeen terriers, and a brain like a shrivelled pea’. In his diary he asked, ‘is it possible to devise so rotten a system? It runs all through our organisation. “Old George” must be found a job; and found a job he jolly well is’.2 Yet not every applicant was appointed, such as the retired Indian Army officer who, although sixty-eight years old, pointed out that he was ‘still a good polo player’, or the solicitor who had been ‘struck off the rolls’, and the man keen to spend two weeks in Paris and who appeared to think that such a visit would constitute his Civil Affairs service.3 There were also plenty of appointable applicants who were not from the police. Major A.J.M. Johnson of the Royal Engineers saw Civil Affairs as a means of getting away from a desk job. Basil Reckitt was serving with an anti-aircraft unit in Northern Ireland at the beginning of 1944; the weakening of the Luftwaffe led him to the conclusion that a future in the anti-aircraft artillery was ‘unpromising’. He was selected to work in the Trade and Industry section of the Public Safety Branch (PSB) for Germany and began his six weeks’ course at Wimbledon in 1944. His was the first course to deal with Germany alone and addressed the county’s history as well as civil administration, economics, law and food supply. Nevertheless, he wrote in the introduction to his published diary: The most useful practicable piece of wisdom which I took away with me from Wimbledon was the answer to a question as to what was the first thing to do on taking over a town in ruins, lacking food, electricity and water supplies, threatened with an epidemic and overrun with rioting displaced persons … . The answer was form a police force, for without some semblance of law and order none of the problems could be tackled.4

This piece of ‘practicable wisdom’ learned at Wimbledon is, understandably, pretty much identical to that concerning police that was transmitted in the lectures and the lecture notes handed out at Peel House. It reflects the formative role of men like St. Johnston and the reports that were prepared, on request, from men when on leave from Civil Affairs in Italy – a large number of who were police officers. Indeed, if the number of policemen serving in Civil Affairs was relatively small, their significance, together with the importance of the policing role, was central. That said, however, Captain W.I.R. Wilkins, a Metropolitan Police inspector and graduate of Trenchard’s college, reporting on his time in Italy lamented that way in which some CAOs without police backgrounds had created confusion by issuing their own orders. ‘For some reason’, he wrote, ‘it

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appears to be a common misconception that everyone is a “born policeman” and that no particular training is necessary to run a police force successfully.’5 As if in response to Wilkins’s complaint, when the Allies moved into the Nazi heartland a large number of the CAOs drawn from the police were deployed as Public Safety Officers charged with restructuring Austrian and German police forces. Although men began and often finished their training in 1943, those destined for northwest Europe returned to their civilian police forces to await the call for the invasion of northwest Europe. Frederick Arthur Fitton was an inspector with sixteen years’ experience of policing in the Buckinghamshire Constabulary when, in September  1943 at the age of thirty-five, he attended the third Civil Affairs course at Peel House, Hendon. Following his training he returned to his civilian force and it was not until the end of February 1944 that he was summoned to a refresher course at Rushton Hall near Kettering. The Buckinghamshire Constabulary were not to see him again for seven years. Fitton might have been present when, on 9 May, General Eisenhower addressed a group of CAOs reflecting on recent experience in North Africa and Italy, and on the importance of their ‘humanitarian’ role following the invasion of Europe; but, present or not, he received a copy of the address advising the men of the tasks. You have got to get the rear areas organised – electric lights, roads, and supply – you must keep them working and get them restored as quickly as possible to some semblance of peace-time standards, so that they can support to the utmost the armies that are fighting at the front. You must take responsibility for dealing with civilian affairs, whether it is restoring public utilities or helping a nursing mother who cannot get milk; and if you don’t do your job the armies will fail.

Eisenhower recognized that, for the moment, his CAOs might be bored with nothing to do but hang around waiting for the armies to move. Your time is coming … . I will never forget a Civil Affairs Captain who came up to me in Italy and told me that he hadn’t had any sleep in three days. I would enjoy my leisure, if I had any, right now, because if you get distributed over a war-torn country where there are no facilities – lights are gone, and there is no coal, and there are no doctors and no medicine and there is not anything else, and it is all on you, you are going to be busy – very busy. So be prepared.6

A month later Fitton and others like him were landing on the Normandy beaches in the wake of the assault troops. In northwest Europe, though trained as far as possible for what they would have to do and updated by additional

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information circulated from men with experience in Italy, the CAOs did indeed find themselves very busy and often confronted with situations for which they were not prepared.

France and the Low Countries In June 1940, as the French and British armies crumbled before the German blitzkrieg and Marshal Petain sought an armistice, General Charles de Gaulle, the French undersecretary of state for national defence, flew to England vowing to continue the fight. The British were not always sure what to make of him and his Free French organization which, while based in London, had no constitutional legitimacy. Nor was the general himself a particularly easy person to deal with. Churchill’s quip about the biggest wartime cross he had to bear was the Gaullist cross of Lorraine is well known; but Henry L. Stimson, the US secretary of war, described De Gaulle as a ‘narrow minded French zealot with too much ambition for his own good and rather dubious views of democracy’.7 A year before the Allied landings in Normandy the Free French in London had begun their own planning for the re-establishment of civil administration; at the same time they were excluded from the discussions of the Allied military until April 1944. There was uncertainty among the British and the Americans about the extent of support for De Gaulle within France. The British appear to have been rather more conciliatory towards him and his supporters than the Americans, and this division led to fractious debate over a range of issues about the planned Allied Military Government for France. The question of currency was central in this dispute; AMGOT banknotes were printed and, briefly, these were in circulation immediately after D-Day.8 For De Gaulle and his supporters, however, the main issue was the authority and extent of Anglo-American Military Government on French territory. There had been, as described earlier, tension between the British and the French in the latter’s middle-eastern and North-African colonial territories. St. Johnston recalled that Civil Affairs relations with the French were ‘tricky’, and that the Public Safety Manual for France had to be revised four times. The first version contained instructions to the effect: ‘When you enter France you will do so-and-so.’ This was revised to, ‘When you enter France you will assist the French authorities to do so-and so.’ The third version was altered to, ‘When you enter France, if you find that the French Authorities have not done so-andso, you will advise them to do so-and-so.’ In the end the officers were directed to

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take action only when the French failed to do so. St. Johnston was alarmed when he found that the French Government in exile had prepared brassards bearing the Cross of Lorraine for all of those that they intended to make police officers; they refused to change the insignia, even though it was clear that not all of those participating in resistance were Gaullist. Equally, the Gaullists had made their own plans regarding public safety tasks and had selected those who they were intending should take over responsibility for managing liberated towns.9 When the Allies landed in Normandy the CAOs were fully prepared to act alongside the Vichy French officials who were in post. British CAOs seem to have shared the attitudes of their counterparts and members of the SIB in Italy who thought that most local officials and police officers were only serving the enemy regime in order to keep their jobs. Pierre Rochat, the sub-prefect based in Bayeux, was a good example. Rochat was a career civil servant who had served in the ministries of public works and of the interior before his appointment to Bayeux two years before the landings. He had close links with high officials in the Vichy regime, but there was also a report that the secret police doubted his loyalty. CAOs found him very helpful in maintaining local control and directing the local police. Among other things he organized food supplies, assistance for refugees from the fighting and hospital facilities for 900 wounded. The man supported by the Gaullists, Raymond Triboulet, was a local landowner and, though he had connections with the resistance, he was little known, had no power base within the local administration that Rochat continued to run effectively and efficiently, and he failed to impress the Civil Affairs men who met him. A week after the landings, however, De Gaulle made a surprise visit to Bayeux, where he addressed a public meeting. The first that the British Army knew of the visit was when soldiers found a French officer with a broken-down car close to their headquarters. During the initial meeting between the British and François Coulet, who De Gaulle had appointed as his civil commissioner for the area, the British found Coulet suspicious and reluctant to use the term ‘Civil Affairs’. Yet De Gaulle’s reception in Bayeux made it clear to the Allies that he was the obvious individual to supervise a restored French government and that he had the tacit support of many of those who did not share his political ideas and vision. On 15 June, Coulet replaced Rochat with Triboulet.10 CAOs continued to play the kind of spearhead roles that they had in Italy, and the policy of having British and American personnel serving together, or ‘interleaved’, was maintained. The first significant Civil Affairs unit active in France, Detachment A1A1, was commanded by an American, Lt. Col. Frank O.

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Howley, who had moved from a combat unit following a serious leg injury in a motorcycle accident. The second in command was Major R.L.H. Nunn, originally an officer in the Royal Artillery and a veteran of Dunkirk. The American officers included two lawyers as well as the director of public works for the state of Indiana and the fire chief of Ohio. These men brought their specialist expertise with them but, in Nunn’s estimation, they were seriously lacking in military experience. The British officers were a similar cross section, but one had served with AMGOT in Italy. The two Public Safety Officers were both British police officers; the more senior of the two, Major William Palfrey, was chief constable of Accrington who always insisted that he was ‘just a copper’. A1A1 Detachment followed the American army from Utah Beach to Cherbourg, where it was to establish its first headquarters; the detachment’s advance guard arrived on 27 June as sporadic fighting and sniping continued. There was some concern as to how the French would regard Civil Affairs, and the example of Coulet was not encouraging; generally speaking, however, things went well except that the detachment began to find itself as piggy-in-the-middle between French civilians who wanted normality and thousands of troops passing through for whom life was anything but normal and might suddenly be ended. Resolving the complaints from both sides was a headache, so too was trying to repair the docks and railway that the Germans had destroyed on their withdrawal. Throughout July other CAOs were sent to Cherbourg for instruction and seeing how things worked on the ground, but in August A1A1 Detachment was ordered to hand over to a smaller unit and to follow the army to Paris.11 Again the detachment entered the city while fighting continued, but in Paris Palfrey’s role became particularly significant and demanding. The Paris Police, which had established a heroic, if rather one-sided, image as a result of their participation in the FFI uprising against the Germans, appear largely to have ignored him; at least there is little or no reference to him in the French archival record. Yet supervising the Paris Police was the least of Palfrey’s concerns. Other groups were taking over policing roles, particularly members of the Resistance forces, the FFI and the FTP. The police were reluctant to confront anyone claiming to be one of these ‘heroes’, not least because the resistance units were very well armed. Both the FFI and the FTP were accused of exacting vengeance on collaborators, sometimes on evidence that smacked of personal vengeance. Palfrey also investigated and exposed a racket run by staff in the Richelieu Prison; people, it seemed, were arrested and incarcerated in the prison to settle old scores. One group of ‘patriots’ arrested and fined

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men that they claimed were black marketeers, but they kept the fines and divided the money among themselves. There were allegations of torture and assault; a group of Chinese alleged that they had been beaten up on the grounds that they were Japanese. There were also more mundane policing chores: issuing travel permits, the licensing of motor vehicles, the supervision of liquor sales and, as ever, the suppression of a vigorous black market. If little remains in the official record concerning Palfrey’s activities, at the time he was highly praised by Howley and Nunn, and he received a commendation from Eisenhower.12 Towards the end of September the British and the Americans began to ‘unscramble’ the interweaving of Civil Affairs units. The Americans took greater interest in the role within France, while the British began to concentrate more with the army moving along the Channel coast into Belgium. Lieutenant William E. Abel, an Edinburgh police officer, landed in France in September 1944 with Number 1 Civil Affairs Group. Number 1 Group consisted of 244 officers; half of these were British and half American; there were also 288 other ranks, of whom about a third were British and the remainder Canadian. After a week in France the group was unscrambled in accordance with the new thinking: the Americans were sent towards Paris and the British were divided into different units. Abel was ordered to travel to a detachment near Falaise, but then this was promptly countermanded and he was ordered to join a new detachment, 126(P), and sent to Belgium. His diary lists the section heads and subsections commanded by the detachment’s officers and this in itself demonstrates the range of duties to be undertaken by Civil Affairs in northwest Europe: 1. Economics: a) Public Works; b) Public Health Facilities; c) Trade and Industry. 2. Fiscal: a) Finance; b) Custody of Enemy Property. 3. Food and Agriculture. 4. Interior: a) Public Safety; b) Civil Defence and Fire. 5. Labour. 6. Legal. 7. Road Transport. 8. Property Control. 9. Displaced Persons: a) Allies (refugees); b) Others. 10. Supplies: a) R[oyal] A[rmy] S[ervice] C[orps] supps; b) Ordinary supps. 11. PTT: a) Posts; b) Telegraph, telephone and radio; c) Finance Services 12. Psychological Warfare: a) Propaganda; b) Press

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13. Education and Religion. 14. Monuments and Fine Arts. When Abel joined the detachment as the Public Safety Officer in the Interior Section, there were no officers appointed for sections 12, 13 and 14, which possibly reflects the understanding of priorities.13 Eric Thornber crossed into Belgium at roughly the same time as Abel. He was in the country as a Public Safety Officer for roughly a month. In a notebook that he kept apparently to assist him with his formal reports he describes tasks similar to those undertaken in Italy: meeting various officials; recording the size of the population of the towns and villages in his jurisdiction, the numbers of refugees; the issuing of travel permits for local officials, doctors and nurses, and for those who need to travel for emergencies. The notebook also contains his personal investigations, in the absence of SIB assistance and specific war crimes investigators, of atrocities committed by German troops as they withdrew. In particular he includes the statements that he took regarding the torture and murder of a wounded Belgian soldier.14 The British, however, were not greatly involved in Civil Affairs in Belgium. The Belgian king had surrendered in person to the Germans in 1940 and had remained in the country. Though he was accused of sympathy towards the occupiers, he was deported to Germany in June 1944 and did not return until March the following year. Some saw him as a symbol of national unity in a country with serious potential divisions; others saw him as a problem. The Belgian Brigade Piron saw action in Northern France and entered Brussels just behind the British Guards Division in September 1944; not far behind was the Belgian government which had been in exile in London since 1940. The government in exile was unsure whether it would be accepted on its return given the tensions between different political factions inside the country. The British were equally concerned but joked about the government in exile’s ‘Eaton Square Jitters’, so called after its London address.15 As the Germans were pushed back, so began the purges and trials for different forms of collaboration. The British and Americans largely left the Belgians to get on with their own business. British troops and armoured vehicles were held in reserve during a violent confrontation in Brussels in November  1944, and while a police line broke the local gendarmes held and brought the trouble to an end.16 Friction remained among different political and resistance groups, but ultimately there was a restoration of national government without the need for significant Allied involvement or close supervision. The Civil Affairs detachments in the Netherlands similarly had relatively little to do in the sense of policing, but the

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liberation took far longer than that of Belgium and the harsh winter, with food and fuel shortages and the behaviour of vengeful German troops who continued to occupy parts of the country until the end of hostilities, combined to produce dreadful suffering. Excluding the removal of the Dutch prime minister, the  government which with Queen Wilhelmina had travelled to London in April 1940 eased back into power without the friction and violence experienced in Belgium. As in Italy and, briefly, France, CAOs acted in a spearhead role with the advancing troops. Where necessary they appointed local administrators and sought to get ruined towns functioning and their populations  fed, but once the Germans were gone, the Allies generally left the  Belgian and Dutch governments to get on with running their own affairs  with the minimum of involvement.17 As one Civil Affairs commander saw it, ‘the French and Belgians were well-able to look after themselves’ and only wanted help with transport and those necessaries that were lacking.18 He might well have added the people of the  Netherlands here. The most significant Civil  Affairs involvements in northwest Europe were, unsurprisingly, in Austria and Germany.

Restoring the ‘first victim’ Although Hitler had united Austria with Germany in 1938, the Allies saw a distinction between the two countries. Among the British in particular there were very few who believed that the Anschluss could have been prevented by anyone seeking to stand up to Hitler. There was initial uncertainty about how Austria should be treated, not least because it was seen as a victim of Nazism rather than a willing partner in the Third Reich. Early in 1943 the British in particular, while they had no intention for the union with Germany to remain, were reluctant to commit to an independent Austrian state at the end of the war. There was little knowledge about the attitudes of the people, and about what had been happening in Austria immediately before and during the war, though there were plenty of assumptions. Eventually the Allied planners decided to hand control over to a civilian government as quickly as possible.19 During the summer of 1944 the British established their Austrian Planning Unit. This was to plan the British contribution to the Allied Control Commission that was to supervise the formation of a new government and administrative structure in the country. Within the unit there was a PSB whose tasks included re-establishing and supervising the Austrian police, prison and fire services. Initially the branch consisted of three men: Lieutenant Colonel Graham Rutherford, another

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former Hendon graduate who had already served in Italy; Lieutenant Colonel N.G. Ferguson, a former member of the National Fire Service; and Captain M.H. Tavinor, a former inspector in the Warwickshire Police. Tavinor also had Civil Affairs experience, but it was decided that he should take responsibility for prison reorganization and management and in consequence he was sent to Wakefield for a brief course on the subject. In September these three were joined by the man seconded to command the Public Safety Branch of the Commission for Austria, John R.H. Nott-Bower. John Nott-Bower’s grandfather was a general, and his father had been chief constable of Liverpool and then commissioner of the City of London Police. He  himself had passed the competitive examinations for the Indian Civil Service in 1911 and for most of the next twenty years he served as a senior police officer in India. In 1933, he returned to London to take up a senior post in the Metropolitan Police. Nott-Bower was an officer and a gentleman. He had distinguished himself for bravery in India; he was an accomplished horseman and a formidable bridge player, indeed it seems that he spent rather more time exercising his competent brain over bridge than policing. When selected for the Austrian Control Commission, however, he had been an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard for a decade. At the beginning of the 1945 another seven men were appointed to the commission from the Metropolitan force; four of these were inspectors in Special Branch who had been involved in dealings with the Austrian community in London. The private secretary of the commissioner, W.W.J. Bolland, was also a member of the group. Neither Nott-Bower nor any of these seven men were given military rank and instead of army battledress they wore a variant of the British civilian police uniform.20 Forty-seven men, including Nott-Bowyer, are listed as having served with the PSB in Austria in the official report on their activities; the majority – thirty-seven  – held army commissions. Thirty-one of the total came from the Metropolitan Police; two from Bradford City; one each from Boston, Cumberland, Edinburgh, Gateshead, Glasgow, Gloucestershire, Manchester, Nottingham and Bradford; and there was also a colonial police officer. Twentytwo of the commissioned officers are named in the report prepared by Arthur Young as former police officers serving in Italy, and it appears that others had also served there such as Bill Hutchins, Dickie Hearn’s last commander in 67 Section. The new men underwent the usual training at Wimbledon, but to give them some first-hand experience in the closing weeks of the war they were sent to Italy to gain experience in the field. This experience meant working alongside

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weary CAOs in their usual tasks of reorganizing civilian life and establishing order in territory evacuated by the retreating Germans. It also led to their first difficulties with men avowing a very different political ideology. At first it was the significant communist elements among the Italian partisans; but increasingly they came face to face with Yugoslav partisans – ‘Jugs’ as the British disparagingly referred to them – who were present in considerable numbers in northeast Italy. Colonel Rutherford, for example, a veteran of Civil Affairs from the earliest days in Italy, drove into Monfalcone, some twenty miles north of Trieste, expecting to perform the usual tasks, and found himself having to leave unceremoniously as the Yugoslavs were in occupation and he had no backup either with him or in the immediate vicinity. Rutherford appears to have been rather more successful taking charge in the Austrian town of Brucke, but later in the summer of 1945 he left the Control Commission to take up the post of chief constable of Oxfordshire. The first group of British Public Safety Officers entered Austria on 8 May 1945 in a small convoy headed by a jeep full of Redcaps. Their route, in places, was decorated with the red and white flags of the pre-Nazi state and groups of schoolchildren watched but rather more, it seems, out of interest in the troops than the excitement of liberation. The convoy spent its first night in Villach, a few miles from the Italian border. The town was in chaos with refugees, former prisoners of war, Chetniks and Ustachi. The Chetniks had initially resisted the Axis invaders but, increasingly, had collaborated with the Germans; the Ustachi were themselves Fascist subscribing to a fanatical Croatian Catholic ideology; both groups were now terrified of retribution from Tito’s partisans. Already at the end of April the Austrians had established the rudiments of a provisional government drawing on all of the old political parties including the communists; one of its first acts was to declare separation from Germany. All of the Allies were prepared to accept this government in spite of the emerging tensions between the liberal-democratic ideas of the western Allies and Soviet communism; in the province of Carinthia the British had first-hand experience of these tensions but primarily as a result of the Yugoslav presence. Like Rutherford in Monfalcone, as the PSB officers spread out from Villach to begin their duties, they commonly confronted Yugoslavs. Captain Leonard Ashton drove into Klagenfurt, the provincial capital, hoisted a flag and persuaded the Yugoslavs in the city that it was under British control. Captain Percival Harold Bricknell, another former Metropolitan Police sergeant, a native of Monmouth and a former car salesman, had a slightly more intimidating task in facing down 250 Yugoslav partisans intent on annexing the town of Ferlach. Bricknell’s

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determination and strong words allegedly reduced to tears the female political commissar in command of the partisans. Towards the end of July, as Soviet troops pulled back, the PSB officers extended their presence into another province, the Steiermark. Their entry into the provincial capital of Graz was met by welcoming crowds, but in the Steiermark the Public Safety men began to be confronted directly by some unpleasant issues emanating from the immediate past. Captain Thomas Hunter had been born in Deal and was a golf club maker until he enlisted in the army at the close of the First World War. In 1943, when he had achieved the rank of sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, he volunteered for Civil Affairs and was posted to Italy. When the British moved into the Steiermark, he became a PSO in Leoben, where he received a report of the massacre and secret burying of slave workers near Eisenerz by members of the Volkssturm – the German people’s militia created in the closing months of the war and recruited from old men and boys. Like Eric Thornber in Belgium, Hunter had not SIB or warcrimes investigation team to call upon, so he followed up the report himself. Two trenches were found in local woods containing the bodies of 115 people, thought to be Hungarian Jews. Hunter’s investigations resulted in the trial of eighteen members of the Volkssturm; ten were sentenced to death, three to ten years’ imprisonment, one to six months’ imprisonment and four were acquitted. At the same time Captain Frank Massingberd-Munday, a product of Bradfield College and of Trenchard’s Police College and another veteran of Civil Affairs in Italy, went undercover as a British renegade officer to collect information on an SS escape organization. The principal task of the officers serving in Nott-Bowyer’s PSB, however, was ensuring an efficient and effective system of law and order for Austria. As in Italy the individual PSB officer established himself in the principal town of his district and from his office he reorganized and supervised the local police, fire brigade and prison. He issued passes and permits for anyone wishing to travel outside of the British Zone and motor vehicle licences to those individuals such as doctors and local government officials that required use of a car. He prepared cases for the British military courts where, in the early months of occupation, about 80 per cent of criminal cases were heard; it also fell to the PSB officer to act as the prosecutor in these courts. The glowing report of the branch’s service in Austria emphasized how ‘British justice’ as administered in these courts made a good impression on the Austrians, not least on the accused when they were invited to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty since this was ‘a startlingly new procedure for a continental who has hitherto been regarded as guilty unless he can prove

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himself innocent’.21 The PSB officer also facilitated arrangements between, for example, the British Military Police who needed investigative resources and the Austrian police who possessed them. There was a need to dismiss or arrest police officers who had been committed Nazis, though there were also concerns about opportunities for spiteful and false accusations. The completion of questionnaires (Frageboten) was required from those who had served under the Nazi regime and who sought employment in the new. Wilcox believed that often this only served ‘to disqualify from employment harmless officials who had loyally continued to serve their country to the best of their ability’.22 He was not alone in such thinking. As in Germany, the need for some men with experience to serve in the police may have led to individuals with a dubious past being recruited or simply kept on. Perhaps it was easier in Austria given the image of that country as the first victim of the Nazi occupation of Europe. A general election was held at the end of November, from which identifiable Nazis were disenfranchised. The communists were virtually wiped out in the election but the new chancellor, Leopold Figl, was prepared to maintain some element of the pre-election coalition and had one communist minister. Figl, and others, saw this as one way of not completely alienating the Soviet Army that was still present in a zone of occupation. It was against this background the reorganization of the Austrian police proceeded. Reorganizing the Austrian police meant different things to the four Allied powers that sought to work together under a quadripartite system. ‘It was not part of the British policy’, explained the official report on the PSB, ‘to impose British police methods or organisation upon Austria and the intention was simply to re-establish the Austrian Police Force on democratic lines’.23 The Austrian police consisted of urban forces (Sicherheitswache), a gendarmerie which was largely confined to the rural districts and a distinct force in the capital Vienna. This was very much the structure of continental European police systems that had developed during the nineteenth century. The British occupiers were prepared to see the system continue and to accept that the police in Vienna and other cities and towns should be armed with revolvers, while the gendarmerie had access to rifles. The problem was a lack of professional officers and men, at least in part because those seriously tainted with Nazism had fled or were in hiding. The British established training schools in their zone; initially the course was to last for three months, but the demand for police officers was such that the course was made more intensive and reduced to two months. The new police were also supplied with new uniforms, transport and communications equipment.

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In the capital, Vienna, the situation was rather more complicated. Even though it had ceased to be an imperial capital at the end of the First World War, anyone in Britain during the interwar years who thought about the city probably still thought of it as full of men in bright uniforms sweeping women across ballrooms to the rhythm of a waltz. Perhaps it was not until 1949 and the appearance of the prize-winning but bleak film The Third Man that the popular image began to change. The film, directed by Carol Reed from a script by Graham Greene, portrayed the city in the aftermath of war, divided by the victorious powers and full of mysterious characters, some anxiously seeking refuge from their own country, others involved with a murderous black market. The Vienna of The Third Man is bleak and appears to exist in perpetual night. Among those endeavouring to restore order, find and apprehend the traffickers are British Military Policemen based on SIB and Public Safety Officers. The Soviet Army had occupied the city in April. It took responsibility for policing and established an auxiliary force (Die Hilfspolizei) under the command of Rudolf Hautmann, a former tram conductor and a notable local communist. The Red Army also selected police chiefs for each of the city’s twenty-six districts (Die Bezirke). These were local men who, if not communists, were at least sympathetic; and they were authorized to appoint their own men. The western Allies entered the city in July. There were nine British Public Safety Officers, all of whom had served with the Eighth Army in Italy; Wilcox was the senior officer, though he was not present when the others moved in since, looking to his demobilization and future, he was in England being interviewed for a senior civilian police role. The four Allied powers – Britain, France, the United States and the USSR – agreed to have a joint Public Safety Committee; the chair of the committee was to rotate between the Senior Public Safety Officers in accordance with the similar rotation of the Military Commander of the city. Thus when, for example, the British had the military command, they would also have Public Safety command. However, though there was a single military commander and a public safety chair at any one time from the same power, each of the four powers had its own distinct zone; the British zone was made up of five Bezirke. All four of the Allies had their own ideas about police institutions and what should be permissible for Vienna. The French and the Soviets objected to anyone serving in the police who had been an officer in the Wehrmacht or who had served as a soldier and been decorated by the Nazi regime; they were also concerned that a single police force for the city might provide the basis for a new Austrian Army. Nevertheless, in the end it was agreed that there should be

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Figure 8.1 Greeting the Austrian Chancellor at the Vienna Police Training School Major Noble, Lt. Col. Wilcox and Captain Kaye look on as Brigadier Verney greets the Austrian president Leopold Figl at the British Training School for Viennese police recruits. Photo: Courtesy of Susan and Stephen Wilcox

a single Viennese police institution with a single commander; a former police president of the city, 79-year-old Ignaz Pamen, was brought out of retirement to reassume the role that he had left many years earlier. Each of the Allies had its own system for supervising its Bezirke; the British appointed a PSB officer for each one. In November 1945 the British established a small training school for police recruits in Bezirk III. The barracks designated as the police training centre was in Bezirk IX in the American zone, but it was not possible to open it before January  1946 when the Soviet troops who had been using it finally moved out and when the building had been repaired and prepared for teaching purposes. For the school’s commandant the Allies looked, once again, to the pre-Nazi past and appointed the officer who had held the post before the Anschluss. Crime in Vienna appeared to be worse than in the countryside. The official British account considered that the people were worried about reporting offences by soldiers to the police and that even if any such complaints were made, then the police would do nothing. Given that the fledgling force available from the late summer of 1945 contained many with little or no police experience and that there was no effective system for recording offences, such fears had some justification. Statistically, however, serious crime in the city began to decline rapidly.24 How much of this reduction, however, was due to

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the improving police presence, and how much to an increasing stability and the return to peace and normality, must remain a matter of debate. The number of arrests that the police made of people working in the black market or evading food control regulations was impressive, running into several hundred a week. There were problems for the Viennese police, however, given the scale of black market offending and the number of thefts and sexual assaults allegedly committed by members of the Red Army. Indeed the number of such reports led the Soviet commanders to insist that any such allegations should not state that the offender was from the Red Army but merely that he was wearing the uniform of the Red Army. Small detachments of British Infantry were ordered to assist the police in the three British Bezirke that looped into the Soviet Zone. Eventually eighty-five men from the Essex Yeomanry were trained as a Provost Battery to patrol  alongside the civilian police; three armoured cars were also made available. In September 1946 Albert Wilcox left Vienna to take up the post of assistant chief constable of Buckinghamshire. He reflected that the efforts of British police officers had left little permanent legacy in Italy, where the police had welcomed material help but ‘had no sympathy with the reforms we advocated and would return to their former practices as soon as we left’. In Austria, however, he thought that matters were rather different. Here, he concluded, the police were grateful for the British presence, though ‘particularly as we provided protection from Russian domination’.25 Probably, since this was a reflection written some years later, he could now see the republic as a stable democracy and was looking back through the rose-tinted spectacles that saw Austria as the first victim of the Nazis. In contrast, in a secret memo of May 1946 he had expressed concern that attempts were being made by those Communists and Socialists still in position of authority to give senior police posts to men lacking police experience but loyal to their party. Presumably it is one of the tasks of the Allies to ensure not only the removal of Nazis from the police, but to eradicate Nazi methods and institutions. A Police Force on a political Party basis is essentially a Fascist and Nazi institution. On  this ground I submit that the Austrian Government should establish an impartial Police Force free from Political Party pressure.26

Wilcox never served in Germany, where the Public Safety Officers faced similar problems but where the situation was more complex and where, at least for some, the German people were as guilty as the Nazi leadership.

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Restoring the German homeland Plans for the reorganization of civil affairs and public safety in the heart of the Reich were under way well before the end of 1944 but it is unlikely that anyone expected the sheer scale of destruction and ruin that was found as the Allied armies fought their way into the country and gradually took over its administration. The first CAOs set out to do what had been done in Italy and elsewhere. Both William Abel and Eric Thornber entered Germany while the fighting was continuing, and they began the usual tasks of Spearhead officers re-establishing some kind of administrative structure together with a system for preventing, or at least controlling, looting and racketeering. Thornber appears to have made something of a habit of appointing local clergy as temporary burgomasters and in one town, where the previous burgomaster was known to be a staunch Nazi, he authorized his new, clerical appointee to take over the former Hitler Youth centre and transform it into one for Catholic youth. Again there were problems that police officers in Britain never had to face in normal circumstances and for which neither the courses at Hendon nor Wimbledon had prepared them. Abel, for example, had to organize drovers to round up and move cattle out of an area where preparations were being made to cross the Rhine; and Thornber was faced with the problem of German farmers being denied access to small parcels of land that they owned in the Netherlands by zealous and hostile Dutch border patrols.27 The CAOs, like the SIB sections, had to confront the problems of a bewildered hungry population living in war-damaged property and fearful of marauding, armed bands of angry displaced persons. Leslie Tompkins had some experience gleaned from his time with Civil Affairs in Italy. At the German surrender he was still in Italy in charge of the police in the province of Ravenna treading the delicate line between his Carabinieri and the partisans. He transferred to Westphalia, where, as earlier, his duties involved prosecuting civilians for having Allied property in their possession; but in his own words, ‘one day [he] realized that enough was enough’. The people were hungry and were exchanging what little they had with troops for food; besides, the prisons were full. Tompkins decided to offer no evidence against those charged. He also rubbed up at least one British officer the wrong way by inserting ‘please’ in his instructions to his subordinate German police officers.28 More than a hundred miles to the northeast the shambles left by conflict in the city of Hanover made it, according to a British journalist, worse than a ‘wild west town of the last century’. Two

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police officers, now serving with Civil Affairs, restored order as best they could; essentially they made their remedies up as they went along. There were some Dutch Police in the city who had been brought in by the Germans to maintain order during air raids. These were organized into patrols alongside British and French former POWs who were armed and ordered to patrol in ‘looted’ cars. It is unclear how these cars were acquired, but a senior American CAO praised the initiative of one of his British subordinates who was also a policeman in civilian life. This man was more effective and less self-aggrandizing than his American equivalents. He simply ‘used the police approach – talk loud, look official (as though you were going to make an arrest), and walk off with whatever you are after at the moment’.29 In many areas of the ruins of Hitler’s Germany there was a complete breakdown of any form of licit economic activity as well as of civil life and order. It is probably fair to say that before and during the war German police had been more efficient than their Italian equivalents. They had been well woven in to the Nazi regime, but by the end of the war they had virtually ceased to exist. Abel recalled that British soldiers could rarely tell the difference between a German soldier and a German policeman, hence many of the latter found their way into POW cages.30 There had been no recruitment during the war so that the police still available were often men who, but for the war, would have been pensioned. In September 1945, it was estimated that the average age of police officers in the British Zone was 47.31 Major Nunn took command of the Tiergarten district, one of the four Bezirke that made up the British zone of Berlin. He estimated that for a population of about 150,000 he had 400 policemen and, unfortunately, only around ten of these had any regular police experience. [T]he rest were new recruits, lacking experience, proper uniforms, and being mostly of poor physique owing to privations, they were not a force to be relied on. Added to this they were forbidden to carry any arms, even truncheons, and so were practically useless in quelling disorder.32

A key feature of Allied policy was, of necessity, the recreation of a police institution, but, unlike in Austria, there was no agreement about creating single national institutions of police and gendarmerie. The Soviets insisted on a totally new organization within their zone, with nothing of the old police permitted to remain and there was no place for any member of the previous institution. The British and the Americans were rather more relaxed and pragmatic about recruiting men with experience, providing they were not shown to be seriously committed former Nazis. They wanted to establish a democratic

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police with regional and municipal forces replacing the centralized system created in 1933, and they assumed that decentralization would automatically mean demilitarization, whereas the Germans tended to see de-Nazification as a return to the sort of police institutions that had existed in the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Police were in some respects democratic along the lines sought by Britain and America. They were also decentralized; but they were far from demilitarized. Most of the British police officers who served in the Control Commission for Germany belonged to the PSB, and it fell to them to train the new police using the imagined British model. The man appointed as inspector general of the commission’s British PSB and who was given responsibility for this reorganization was Colonel Gordon Halland. Like Nott-Bower, Halland was an officer and a gentleman who had served with courage and distinction in the Indian Police; but while autocratic and a staunch supporter of the empire, his expressed belief that Indians holding senior positions in the civil service and the police should be accepted into British clubs did not endear him to many of his peers. He retired from the Indian service in 1931, aged forty-three, and was appointed chief constable of Lincolnshire; four years later he was selected to head the new police college at Hendon. In 1938, he was appointed as one of His Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary, and in 1942 he was sent to Ceylon to reorganize the police there. Halland’s plans for Ceylon were broadly implemented, but he upset the local police and fell foul of the tensions between the colonisers and the indigenous peoples, which combined to force his resignation early in 1944. His return to Britain coincided with the need to find a director of public safety for Germany and the Home Office agreed to lend him as such to the Foreign Office. Unlike Nott-Bower, Halland thought carefully about policing. He accepted the traditional line that British police officers were not members of ‘a state force or the servants of any local authority’, though he acknowledged an increasing element of centralization particularly in terms of pay, promotion and discipline.33 Halland was wedded to the notion of the unique nature of the British/English police and a lecture which he prepared for CAOs in July 1944 could have been something drafted by Charles Reith. Yet he was also concerned that modern inventions such as the motor vehicle, phones and radios were changing the tradition of preventive policing and undermining the important links between police and public. Halland was determined to recreate the German police in the image of the British model as he understood it; in consequence he intended that the new forces were to be non-political and unarmed.

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Halland was happy to employ former policemen already working in Civil Affairs as PSB officers; at least seven men from the Metropolitan Police serving as CAOs in Italy were rapidly transferred to the German Control Commission. There were others, already trained but for whom Germany was to be their first real Civil Affairs posting. It was clear to Halland, however, that he would need many more men and he planned to recruit these directly with a new drive for volunteers from the British police forces. In October 1944 he appointed Douglas Osmond, another of the pre-war graduates of the Hendon Police College, as his personal staff officer. Osmond’s father had been killed serving in the Royal Navy early in the First World War and his mother had become a teacher to earn enough to provide a good education for him and his elder brother. Osmond had won a scholarship to University College London in 1932 and a gained degree in mathematics; he had then decided to join the Metropolitan Police. He left the police for the Royal Navy in 1943, where he began as an ordinary telegraphist rising rapidly to lieutenant instructor. Osmond worked closely alongside Halland in Germany for several months before returning home at Christmas 1945 to begin recruiting reinforcements for the British police in Germany.34 According to the Police Review, however, it was difficult to find volunteers from the police primarily because of the parsimony of the Foreign Office. Volunteers were promised promotion to the rank directly above the one that they held; thus an inspector at home would become a superintendent in Germany. Yet this promotion was only to be temporary and would make no difference to pay. ‘In the meantime the chances of pensionable promotion at home would be missed altogether during the period of foreign service.’ There was also the annoyance that American police officers would be doing the same job at much higher rates of pay.35 Developing an unarmed, non-political, non-centralized police force along the lines of the British borough and county force structures was at the top of the agenda for the officers of the British PSB, and alongside the traditional view of the British police and its superiority, the PSB officers were also imbued with traditional prejudices about the Germans. William Abel believed that during the Third Reich ‘the German policeman had been used for the oppression of the people’ and it was one of the tasks of the PSB men to persuade the German people that the police officer was ‘a friend and counsellor’ as in other democratic countries. Yet Abel also considered that there were ‘thoughtless’ Germans who considered the friendly police officer to be weak. They ‘were inclined to scoff, and in some cases become insolent’.36 No doubt this was the case in some instances, yet the Public Safety Officers were also showing their

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own traditional prejudices which had been fostered during their training and which continued to be proclaimed by official and semi-official sources.37 At Wimbledon and Hendon the Civil Affairs courses had included lectures about the German way of thinking as well as their police and their system of law and government. The third Training Letter for CAOs issued on 27 July 1944 contained a short article on ‘The German Mind.’ It pointed to Germany’s ‘persistent hostility to the ideals and traditions of western and Mediterranean Europe’. The Englishman will not go far wrong if he thinks of Germans as obedient and happy to give or be given orders; they like ranks and hierarchies not so much for the responsibility which these bring as for the prestige they command.

This article appears to have been an edited, possibly bowdlerized version of a paper prepared by Brigadier W.E. van Cutsem, a veteran of the First World War who had an extremely critical, not to say hostile, attitude towards the ‘German personality’. The complete version of the paper was supposed to be issued to every member of the Control Commission when they arrived in Germany. Whether they did receive Van Cutsem’s paper or not, it was with this kind of perspective in mind, and with their nine duplicated pages each containing about thirty useful German words listed under four headings – Civil Defence and Fire Fighting, Legal and Public Safety, Supply, and Welfare – that the British PSB officers set off to restore civil society in Germany and to rebuild the German police as far as possible on the English/British model.38 Some of the PSB officers, like Abel and Thornber, moved quickly in the wake of the Allied armies. Others were less fortunate and before they could begin the duties for which they had been trained a number of them fell foul of an officious element among the headquarters staff of the 21st Army Group. Several members of Civil Affairs commented on the difficulties that they faced in this respect; there were personality clashes and some army officers had a superior attitude towards temporary officers in the civil affairs role. Some men in Civil Affairs lay the blame for such attitudes on the army group commander, General (and from 1  September  1944, Field Marshal) Montgomery. According to Major General Stanley W. Kirby, the director of Civil Affairs at the War Office, Montgomery was an empire builder, ‘a megalomaniac and quite impossible’.39 Eric St. Johnston was not as blunt, but he complained that in December 1944 he had to struggle to get authority to visit some Civil Affairs men cooped up in Lille, twiddling their thumbs. They had not even been issued with the manuals that were intended to guide them on entering Germany and which were held by

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the Army Group staff at the headquarters. St. Johnston was equally infuriated by the Army Group headquarters staff ’s refusal, on the grounds that this was contrary to policy, to allow police officers in the field as Civil Affairs/Public Safety Officers to write regular reports. This refusal came in spite of the fact that the Home Office requested such reports. St. Johnston believed that the root of the problem was to be found in the perspective of an individual member of the staff, and given the requirement that all military units keep official war diaries, such as those employed here for the earlier chapters on the SIB sections, he may well have been right.40 The first training school for German post-war police officers was established in February 1945 by Major R.B. Tindall, formerly an inspector in the Manchester Police. Its setting was a camp at Vught in the Netherlands about thirty miles from the German border. Tindall’s recruits were German civilian prisoners of war who had been screened ‘and found perfectly sound’. After their speedy training these new police followed the British Army into Germany and were distributed in small groups at different places in the army’s wake. Tindall established a second school at Bedburg in March and, at the end of the year, he was commandant of a third school in Düsseldorf, where some 200 students attended each course. Another school was established in the British Zone of Berlin in the late summer under Colonel J.D. Stewart, formerly the chief constable of Inverness. A few months later, with much celebration and the appearance of Colonel Halland, yet another school was opened in Westphalia with particularly good facilities and capable of running courses for 500 students at a time. The man initially selected to run the Westphalian school was Major R. Carson, who had been on the training staff of the Glasgow City Police; his deputy, Captain W.J. Simmons, had held a similar post in the Kent Constabulary. Tindall took exception to a report in the Police Review which ignored his work and implied that the Westphalian school was the first such.41 The running of these schools did not merely require the administrative and management duties that police trainers had known at home. Leslie Tompkins from Bedfordshire, who had never run a training school but who had spent more than a year making things up as he went up the Italian boot, eventually took over in Westphalia. The directors of the police schools had to know how to how to improvise, even to scrounge, to make things work, to find the necessary buildings and instructors, stationery, appropriate textbooks. One of the greatest difficulties for these directors in ruined Germany seems to have been acquiring sufficient food to feed the students, and if they acquired a suitable building for their school that was clean and undamaged, the army might decide that the place should be theirs and to order the police school

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director to find somewhere else. A police training school was established in the German Naval Signals School near Flensburg in November 1945. VIII Corps of the British Army liked the look of the building and in early April 1946 the police school was shifted forty miles south to Eckernförde.42 Hamburg had been the second-largest city in Germany before the war; it had extensive docks and a considerable number of factories which made it a key target for the RAF and the USAAF. Raids at the end of July 1943 flattened considerable parts of the city and created a firestorm with roasting winds sufficient to ignite the asphalt on the roads; some 40,000 were killed in the firestorm alone. In 1945, Hamburg became a part of the British Zone. The docks, like those elsewhere, provided opportunities for widespread theft and petty pilferage. Crime statistics are always dubious since they depend on so many variables, but those for the British Zone suggest a significant increase in theft in the aftermath of the war and in Hamburg pilferage, much larger thefts from the docks, together with a black market that just about everyone had to use in order to stay alive, underlined the need for an effective, revitalized police force.43 The British were also keen to see an effective police in Hamburg not only to prevent the theft of War Department supplies, but also to release their soldiers from public order duties and to hasten their demobilization. A large police training school for the city and its district was created towards the end of 1945. Early in the New Year reports expressed confidence in its progress. The students ranged from complete novices to former police officers undergoing refresher training, and there were specialized courses for KRIPO officers and those planning to work on the city’s extensive waterways. By 1  March  1945, 399 men and 29 women had successfully graduated in Hamburg and another 283 men and 23 women were undergoing instruction.44 Unfortunately the British desires for policing Germans with Germans and for getting them on to the streets quickly appears to have led, initially, to a failure to acknowledge the reality of the situation in Germany with its war damage, wrecked economy, rampant black market and surplus of wartime weapons. Some of the police were soon involved in blackmarket activities themselves; in the eighteen months from January  1946 to June 1947, 324 of them were dismissed for dishonesty.45 Many of the problems were compounded by an emphasis on a British Bobby image for the police men and women who wore such new uniforms, often a mixture, as could be provided. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force had ordered the disarmament of the German police as their troops pushed into Germany in the closing weeks of the war. Hallam and other senior British were keen that they should remain disarmed; after all, the model British Bobby patrolled with

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nothing but his wooden baton. Unfortunately in the aftermath of war there were many firearms available in Germany that could be acquired by black marketeers, by those desperate for the necessities of life, or by vengeful DPs, and there was also the potential for violence from armed, sometimes drunk and homesick Allied soldiers. The new German Police had to maintain order, and they were often the victims of violence; Captain Puttock was amazed at the bravery of some of the aged German police officers who, unarmed, courageously confronted armed and dangerous DPs.46 PSB officers began to worry about civilians taking the law into their own hands, and the British Army found itself having to take on a public order role. At the close of 1945 some 3,000 armed auxiliaries had been recruited locally to relieve British troops of various guard duties, and their numbers continued to rise. The following summer proposals were made for a new, centrally controlled German Gendarmerie. Halland and some British generals resisted. In part this was because, in contrast to the other Allied powers and to the British stance in Austria, there was a concern that a gendarmerie could become the basis for a new German Army. Equally Halland was keen to stick to his plan for an unarmed force that, like the police in Britain, would maintain order through good relations with the population and high morale. The point had been made succinctly in a directive from the military government in the British Zone in September 1945: The morale and prestige of the police, both individually and collectively, come not from a show of force by carrying weapons, but from the proper exercise of authority, a high conception of police duty and discipline, and the exercise of such qualities as courtesy, tact and strict impartiality.47

The internal situation was such, however, that in February  1946 firearms training was introduced in the Hamburg School with the students instructed in the use of both carbines and pistols.48 It is unclear whether the paucity of rounds permitted for each student to fire – three for a carbine and five for a pistol – was the result of parsimony, the British belief that the ideal police officer should not be armed, or the recognition that many of them had learned the use of firearms during the war. If Halland’s desire to create unarmed German Bobbies foundered on the debris of the ruined Reich, his attempts to create a decentralized, non-political police on the British model did not fare much better. The Allies had redrawn the borders of Germany’s Länder (states) to ensure that none had any more than 30 per cent of either the population or the total territory of the country. The British Zone comprised what were to become three of the modern Länder – North-

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Rhine Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Schleswig Holstein. Halland believed that a single force for each would frustrate the aim of developing democracy, and he set out to establish county and borough forces, each responsible to a local police committee which itself was independent of both local politics and the interior ministry of the Land. By the beginning of 1947 he had established twenty-three forces in cities and large towns (Stadtkreis) and sixteen forces for each administrative district resembling an English county (Regierungsbezirk); there were also an additional six forces to police the railways and another five for the waterways. But this separation of forces met with bewilderment and some hostility. The German government in Schleswig Holstein was strongly opposed to the division between Regierungsbezirk and Stadtkreis police forces; it was irrelevant in their Land. In North-Rhine Westphalia there was opposition to the way that police committees were to be chosen. The Germans could not understand why police officers should not be permitted to join a trade union; nor could they understand why the Verwaltungspolizei (Administrative Police) was abolished. The  British considered that the use of police for enforcing administrative matters, such as building regulations, fire and factory regulations, requisitioning houses for evicted tenants and dealing with the homeless in general, was unwise and undemocratic since there was the potential for such powers to be used for political ends. Yet as far as the Germans were concerned, these duties were part and parcel of Polizei as it had been understood since the late medieval period. Verwaltungspolizei was not restored when the PSB left; however, in the early 1950s the three Länder in the British Zone largely incorporated all of the local police forces into their own state forces and shelved most of the other British changes. Arguably democratization in the German police owed as much to the restoration of their trade unions as to the image of the British Bobby. The arguments over arms and the organization deemed necessary to achieve a democratic police tended to conceal the number of police officers that found their way into the new forces with service records from the Nazi period. Moreover these service records were in the hands of, and were known to, the PSB. As soon as the war finished the Allies embarked on a de-Nazification programme. The British and the Americans were appalled by what they had found in the concentration camps and the few death camps in their zones. They were suspicious of Germans who claimed to know nothing of the defeated regime’s murderous practices. Major Nunn noted that the Germans seemed to put the blame for everything on the Nazis, insisting that they, personally, were anti-Nazi, and Brigadier Hodgkin was outraged when the bishop of Munster denied of

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German responsibility: ‘It is always “they” who did these things; never “we”’.49 But the British and the Americans appeared increasingly to move towards the bishop’s position and to become more pragmatic than the other Allies in the way that they applied the de-Nazification programme to the police. All of the most senior Nazi police officers and all members of the Gestapo that could be identified and found were arrested and transferred to internment camps. Recruits to the police, at least in Westphalia, were required to strip off their shirts and raise their arms so that they might be checked for the SS tattoo.50 Yet the British, even more than the Americans, were surprisingly and sometimes shockingly flexible over the employment of former Nazi police officers. Moreover, since the British did not employ a centralized and standardized system, dismissals of former police officers varied from district to district across the British Zone. In July  1946 North-Rhine-Westphalia, which encompassed the power house of the Ruhr and which was within the British Zone area of occupation, had twenty-four senior police commanders; fourteen of these had never been in the Nazi Party, but six or possibly eight were former members and it is unclear whether any of these had been responsible for any war crimes.51 The British appear to have adopted the view, similar to that voiced by some about Italy and Austria, that in Hitler’s Germany all policemen had to be Nazis in order to keep their jobs, and that many paid only lip service to their membership of the party. The British also saw value in keeping, or re-employing, some men of experience to help in maintaining law and order. The KRIPO in particular was regarded as indispensable to the control of crime. Perhaps the extent to which this body had enforced the Nazi concept of preventive policing was simply unknown and in spite of de-Nazification and the training, many of the Kriminalpolizisten continued to regard the powers that they had held during the Third Reich as effective and efficient ways of dealing with crime. The British decision to keep such men in post also enabled detectives of KRIPO to contribute to the myth that, in fact, they were innocent of any involvement in Nazi war crimes.52 In addition to beliefs about police officers having to join the Nazi Party, there were members of the Control Commission and the PSB who feared that if all police officers with Nazi connections were removed, then there would be no police left. When there was a scandal, however, and especially if it involved the contemporary political situation in Germany, the British acted. The policing of Hanover offers a good, perhaps the best, example. When the British arrived the head of the civilian police in the city was Adolf Schulte; he had been in the post for two years. He appeared to be a competent commander and was promoted to regional command in June 1945 and then, in November, to be chief of police

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for the whole of Hanover. Schulte, however, had a murky past. He had made no mention of the fact that he had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1933 and that he had been a senior Nazi police officer in the occupied Netherlands. It appears that he was transferred to Hanover from the Netherlands when his black-market activities became too notorious. When Schulte took command under the British he appointed old Nazi colleagues, including the two men who were to serve as his deputies in Hanover. The man appointed to be head of the Hanover Police School was a former Nazi initially arrested by the British as a threat to security but released and appointed to the post as a result of Schulte’s intervention. In addition, the director of the KRIPO School in Hanover had been one of the earliest members of the Nazi party; his membership went back to 1923. The Schulte case blew up early in 1946 when Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the Social Democrat Party and a man of enormous prestige for his stance against the Nazis and his imprisonment in three different concentration camps, noted and protested about the presence of Nazis in the Hanover police, particularly among his security escort. Schulte was brought before a British military court, principally for being silent about his role in the occupation of the Netherlands. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; in the event he only served two.53 Towards the end of 1945 it was estimated that some 900 British police officers were required for the various control commissions and police missions either operating or in contemplation across Europe, and an additional 270 were required for Germany. At the same time it was recognized in British government circles that it was a bad moment to make a call for additional men, given the shortage of police at home and the desire of men to be demobilized and allowed to return to their civilian jobs. The call for new volunteers from the police prompted annoyance and concern among local police committees; the complaints were stronger than those expressed when the first volunteers left to take up military careers two years earlier. Exeter City Council criticized its Watch Committee for allowing an inspector and two sergeants to volunteer for the Control Commission in Germany. There was similar annoyance in Fife, where there was seen to be a need for more police, not fewer, and Bedford Watch Committee refused to allow Captain, formerly detective sergeant, Stanley Plumb to transfer from Civil Affairs in Belgium to the Control Commission in Germany, though it subsequently relented when the Home Office permitted an increase of one man for the Bedford force.54 The chief constable of the West Riding informed his SJC that a dozen of his men wanted to take the opportunity offered by an invitation to a secondment in Hong Kong. The SJC insisted that all

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of the men would have to resign and leave the force; it could not keep their jobs open at such a time. The Police Review recognized the SJC’s concern and shifted the blame to the government whose pay scales, it maintained, undervalued the police. It is generally accepted that the British have the finest Police Service in the world and that the British Policeman is without peer. It should not be necessary for him to go to Hong Kong to find a job for which he will be adequately paid.55

The clerk of the West Riding Council, however, commented that some police officers wanted ‘the best of both worlds’ by seeking secondment overseas – a comment that brought a counterblast from ‘Birdie’ serving in the Control Commission in Germany. ‘Birdie’ painted a grim picture of crime in warravaged Germany. We work amongst the ever-present danger of epidemics; not infrequently tottering buildings fall into the streets; shooting at passing cars after dark is becoming all too common; entertainment for what little leisure time we have is almost negligible.

Yet, ‘Birdie’ insisted, he and his fellows were engaged in a vital task, that of rebuilding a post-war German Police ‘on constitutional and democratic lines’.56 Fred Fitton shared such ideas, and so too did the Buckinghamshire SJC which allowed him to transfer into Halland’s new civil police for Germany. Fitton kept his Civil Affairs military rank and was promoted to major; he served with the Civil Police for Germany until June 1951 when he returned to Buckinghamshire and his old rank of inspector. Generally speaking the police officers serving in the Control Commission in Germany appear to have been a relatively honourable set of individuals who shared Halland’s vision for rebuilding the German Police so that it was more like ‘the finest police in the world’. Again probably apocryphal stories circulated similar to those told of traditional, and mythical, Bobbies in Italy. One such tale concerned an officer who dealt with a confrontation at Soltau after a group of Russian DPs had murdered a German famer. The officer, allegedly, took out a notebook (probably he also wet his pencil with his tongue in some versions of the tale) and then addressed the crowd with the traditional ‘What’s all this, we can’t ‘ave this ‘ere.’ The crowd on its part, of course, duly and meekly went home.57 Unfortunately, however, some of the successful applicants to the Control Commission succumbed rather too easily to the temptations that offered themselves. Nazi Germany had amassed industrial diamonds, platinum, gold, radium and other minerals in considerable amounts and large numbers

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of individuals saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for making a lot of money. The  British also believed that some governments were involved, particularly those of the USSR, Poland and Yugoslavia. A top-secret report prepared in the summer of 1946 identified at least two American officers, people from UNRRA and the Red Cross, as well as former SS members, involved both in this and in profiteering on the black market. Some British officers in the Control Commission were also thought to be involved, while others were turning a blind eye. At the same time questions were asked in parliament and stories circulated in the British press about corruption among members of the Control Commission ‘at the expense of the British taxpayer’s pocket and British prestige’. Just as, six years earlier, a senior Scotland Yard detective had been sent to investigate the criminal offences affecting the BEF during the Phoney War, so, in August 1946, Detective Superintendent A. Thorp, supported by Detective Inspector T. Hayward, was sent to Berlin to look at this new problem and recommend a solution.58 Thorp estimated that the British Zone had 2,900 KRIPO officers and 2,400 Redcaps, of which 200 were in SIB; ‘some of the latter are experienced investigators but their duties are confined to military matters.’ Yet demobilization meant that the numbers of Military Police were declining. Thorp held discussions with Halland and they agreed that what was needed was a force of at least forty detectives backed by an efficient clerical staff. Thorp considered that the Metropolitan Police would be the best source for such men; Halland thought that he could probably find twenty from among the police officers already serving with the PSB. Detective Inspector Hayward was appointed as assistant inspector general and given command of a new Special Enquiry Bureau. His deputy, Detective Superintendent R. Donaldson, came from the Metropolitan Police, but was only prepared to serve for twelve months. Two lists in the relevant Foreign Office file suggest that many men were reluctant to take on any extended commitment. A list compiled in November 1946 named thirty men and gave their period of experience as detectives; only nine of these came from the Metropolitan Police and seven of the men had military rank as a major or a captain which suggests that they had come through the training courses for Civil Affairs. The second list, dated March  1947, gives the names and postings of thirty-two men and notes eight vacancies in the Bureau. Only eleven of the thirty-two appear on both lists; two of the Metropolitan Police officers had dropped out, as had five of the men with military rank.59 No doubt some of those who had served in Civil Affairs thought that now the war was over it was time to go home and think about a future, civilian career. Some of those who had continued to serve in the

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police at home throughout the war wondered whether the experience was really going to be useful in furthering their career and not endangering their pension. This was especially relevant given the murmurings and, at times, expressions of annoyance that were coming from watch committees and SJCs. While the question was not necessarily asked openly, clearly many were thinking – don’t they know the war is over?

9

Coming Home and Aftermath

Resettling and moving on At the end of the war the perception of the superiority of the police system in Britain was undimmed; indeed, in many respects among some groups of the population it was enhanced. Together with the British Council Frederick Tarry, the chief constable of Southampton, organized conferences on the history, methods and system of the ‘British Police’ for Allied police officers serving in Europe. The delegates to the first of these were welcomed by the local mayor, who was quoted by the Police Review declaring, in terms reminiscent of those used by Charles Reith and, eighteen months earlier by Herbert Morrison, ‘the British Police system is an excellent illustration of true democracy, for it represents the discipline of liberty, without which liberty becomes licence’.1 Tarry’s initiative and perspectives on policing were recognized the following year, 1946, when he was appointed as one of His Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary. No doubt, in so far as they thought about these matters, many agreed among the civilian police officers serving in the SIB, the Civil Affairs organization or elsewhere in the armed forces, but in the second half of 1945 the principal concern of most such men was demobilization. As described earlier, the letter columns of the Police Review were filled with letters on this subject, and the Review noted that it only printed some of those received. There was also confusion and suspicion. Two men wrote a joint letter explaining that their wartime role was at an end, that they were idling their time on garrison duty, but had just been offered transfers to SIB. They thought that the transfer might be an opportunity, but that it also might transform them into ‘essential personnel’ and thus delay their release from the army. They wanted some ‘definite statement’ about the situation and their position.2 Some, particularly those from the lower ranks of the civilian police who had joined SIB, were beginning to wonder about the vague promises made that their experience and service would be

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recognized within their forces when they returned. The Police Review published a leader on this, again reflecting letters that it published; the letters that it printed were, it claimed again, far fewer than the numbers received.3 Eric St. Johnston was concerned enough to call a meeting in Kiel of all those men from his new force, the Durham Constabulary, who were then serving in Germany as PSOs. He promised them promotion on their return, though at least one of the officers opted to leave the force and another told him that ‘he could stuff his job’.4 In June 1946, a senior officer from Wiltshire who had been appointed to Wickham’s mission to Greece turned down the offer explaining: ‘I have given the matter careful consideration and I have come to the conclusion that I cannot sacrifice four and a half years Police pensionable service in Greece.’5 Yet while men fretted about their positions in, and their pensions from, the police when they came home, probably few recognized the problems that were likely to arise when they found themselves having to get to know their families again, especially their children to whom, in many instances, they were strangers. At the beginning of the war ‘Bill’ Austin was a constable in the Surrey Police. He married in 1940 and became a father the following year, just as he left the civilian police for the SIB. He was a big man; 6 feet 4 inches with a physical build to match. He hated his Christian name of Archibald, preferring to be called ‘Bill’; but in the army he was always known as ‘Bunny’ after Bunny Austin, the English tennis player who had reached three Wimbledon finals during the 1930s. Bill/Bunny spent the war in Egypt. On one occasion he went under cover for thirteen weeks in the local ‘glasshouse’ to find out how a particularly clever fraudster was smuggling letters out. He solved the case; but lost about one and a half stone in the process. At the end of the war, with the rank of regimental sergeant major, he was offered a commission, but his wife did not want to have to go to Hong Kong as the promotion required. Bill returned to Surrey, where it took him until 1951 to move from constable to sergeant. More seriously his son, who was almost six years old when the big man came home, could not remember him and was very frightened of this large, strange man.6 Shagg Sharman also came home in 1946 and was a stranger to his first son who had been born in 1942. Shagg returned to the Metropolitan Police and served in the Mounted Branch at Bow until his retirement in 1968. The detective skills that he acquired with 62 Section never drew him away from the horses, nor did they win him promotion, but they reappeared when, following his retirement and working as a security officer at a gaming club in Park Lane, he distinguished himself in breaking up a gang involved in roulette fraud. This earned him a commendation from a judge at the Old Bailey. Shagg was known

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as a man who enjoyed his drink and the day before the annual Police Horse Show, shortly after his death in 1989, his son turned up at the door of another retired comrade with £25 and a note: To his cronies, Bill Sharman wishes it to be known that he is no longer able to attend the annual shindig. On his behalf and in a way in which he would approve, I would like you to have a drink at his expense.

The money was all spent.7 Dickie Hearn returned to the Surrey Police. ‘It is said’, his publisher maintained in an unlikely boast on a dust-jacket blurb, ‘that his war decorations have never been equalled by any “other rank”’.8 But there was to be a problem with the decorations that he was awarded by the Italians and whose ribbons he wore on his police tunic alongside his British medal ribbons. Towards the end of his life, possibly because of queries from his superiors, he wrote to the Italian Embassy for some detail on half a dozen awards and parchments that he had received. In reply he was informed that they ‘were not, at that time (and thereafter), legally recognized by the Italian Government as they were founded ex novo, by the end of war or soon afterwards, without any authorization or were illegally and artfully brought to light from extinguished ancient patrimonial or dynastic institutions’. Hearn was, to put it mildly, displeased. He apologized for being ‘such a nuisance’, but he went on to point out that he was given one of these awards in Rome by the deputy prime minister, that the awards were given in the presence of senior Allied officers and Italian noblemen, that everything was signed and stamped by an official notary, and all of this was before the end of the war. ‘The war ended in Italy in 1945. I happened to be there when it did.’9 Hearn was conscious of the ways in which the war had taken its toll. He was 6 feet 2 inches in height and had left England weighing 13 stone; he returned weighing 9 stone 7½ pounds. He had become a heavy smoker and drinker; he wrote of having ‘more bumps and scars than an old tom cat’ and being ‘a mental and physical wreck’. For a year or so he needed medical treatment and was on a special diet.10 He went back to his old beat in Dorking, and then served in a variety of other small towns with a period as a police driver. Rather surprisingly he failed his sergeant’s examinations on five occasions – once, for example, on the Criminal Law paper, and another time on Police Duties. Yet he expressed a lack of concern, responding that anyone posing questions about his absence of rank appeared to imply that being no more than a police constable was some

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Figure 9.1 PC ‘Dickie’ Hearn c. 1960 Hearn wrote that he and Shagg came home ‘mental and physical wrecks with more bumps and scars than a couple of tom-cats’, but, as can be seen from the above, he had ‘a fistful of gongs’. Some of the Italian medals, as noted in the text, were disputed, yet chapter and verse seems to have been available for them even if Hearn appears to have taken a leaf out of Italian splendour by adding a Mentioned in Despatches leaf to one. Photo: Courtesy of the late George Churchill-Coleman

sort of social disgrace. ‘My reasons for not ascending the dizzy social police heights of higher promotion are uncomplicated. It is entirely my own fault. I am quite happy as I am. A happy man is a contented man.’11 The senior officers of the Surrey police probably found him irritating and a little too independent, but he was popular among the lower ranks and acquired the reputation of being a character. He looked it too, with his height, his neatly trimmed moustache and his rows of medals. Everyone who knew him seems to have had a story or two. At Walton-on-Thames he was confined to station duties as a result of poor health, but whenever there was a call from the local cinema for an officer

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to eject rowdy youths, he was remembered for refusing to find younger, fitter men and, instead, to abandon his duties and do the job himself. A constable in a traffic car was instructed to respond to the report of an intruder at the house of the popular comedian Tommy Trinder. When he arrived he found the intruder, handcuffed to Hearn, seated between Hearn and Trinder; all three had glasses of whisky in their hands.12 When the Beatles received their MBEs in 1963 Hearn was among the individuals who announced that they were returning their own medals in protest. Hearn’s wife, allegedly, told him not to be so daft and his BEM was eventually passed on to his adopted son. Hearn always remained his own man. His book A Duty to the Public was written in response to a wave of media and public criticism of the police and against a background of statistics suggesting that crime was increasing. The book was a celebration of what he considered to be common-sense policing; ordinary men being allowed to do their job, for the sake of their civilian peers, unhindered by ‘administrative idiocy’, by silly laws and regulations. Hearn remained his own man nursing a dislike of pettifoggers that would have delighted both Dickens and Orwell, and that reflected his outrageous behaviour when he left SIB in 1945. He explained to his readers that ‘the system’ required that every manuscript written, even by a retired policeman was supposed to be submitted to his chief constable for vetting. He wrote of being ‘repeatedly reminded’ that if he published A Duty to the Public his pension would be in jeopardy. His defiant ‘It is a chance I am prepared to take’ reads like a dare to the Surrey Police authorities.13 In July 1964, suffering from angina, he was forced to retire on health grounds. He moved to Egham, where he established the Hearn Detective agency which appears to have done a lot of work for a local solicitor. He and his wife had no children, but they took in and looked after a boy whose parents had died while he was young. Hearn had a profound influence on the boy who went on to join the SIB and then the Metropolitan Police, where, in 1985, he became commander of the Anti-Terrorist Branch.14 Hearn spent much of his time in his later years working on his hobby of carpentry; amongst other things he built a large boat. He died in May 1981 not long after his sixty-ninth birthday. Hearn was happy, when it suited him, to thumb his nose at authority, and his books were one way of celebrating his pride in the ordinary policeman and his dislike of senior officers who lived by the official rule book. Others were less prepared to take slights on their character or abilities. Cornelius Looms had been appointed chief constable of Blackburn in 1932. He was among the first to be trained as a CAO, but shortly after arriving in Italy he was discharged on medical grounds and sent home. He resumed his duties in Blackburn, where he

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Figure 9.2 ‘Dickie’ Hearn c. 1963: ‘Don’t be so daft’ In 1963, Hearn announced that he was sending back his BEM as a protest about the MBEs awarded to the Beatles. His wife told him not to be so daft and he held on to it. Photo: Courtesy of the late George Churchill-Coleman

became the target of unpleasantness. On Valentine’s Day 1944 letters were sent to Looms’s home, to the town clerk and to the leader of Blackburn Council. Each letter contained a white feather and a message. That to the town clerk read, ‘Kindly hand this to Second-Lieutenant Looms. The only decoration he has ever earned’; the other two claimed simply that they were ‘from the men

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who are bound to tolerate him’. A former inspector of the Blackburn Police who had been disciplined and reduced to sergeant was suspected and prosecuted, but a judge at the Manchester Assizes directed the jury to acquit on grounds of insufficient evidence.15 The attack on Looms was personal. Possibly, in spite of his denials, Hearn felt slighted by his failure to make police sergeant, but he could always put this down to the class system and the power of those in authority over him. Others among the police who returned also felt let down. It could come as a shock to a man who had been promoted to captain, major or colonel suddenly to find himself back in the rank that he had held before the war and even passed over for promotion by those who had not exchanged the blue uniform for a khaki battledress. It was noted previously that when the SIB course was established at Mytchett in 1942 the Police Review had urged that, when the war was over, those taking it ought to be remembered for developing their skills.16 Harold Dibbens recalled meetings with Assistant Commissioner Sir Norman Kendal both before his departure for France in 1940 and on his return from Dunkirk, during which he was informed that his police career would not be affected by military service: ‘In short, he [Kendal] indicated it would be improved.’ When Lieutenant Colonel Dibbens was demobilized he was disappointed not to be found a posting at Scotland Yard, as he had expected, but to be sent back to Bow Street Police Station as a detective sergeant.17 Jack Ellis had also reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. After establishing the first detective course at Mytchett he had served as chief instructor for a year before travelling to North Africa to take command of an SIB section first in Algiers and then moving to Tunis, pausing briefly in towns en route that needed, in his words, ‘attention’. He crossed to Italy to visit the men he had trained before being posted to India, where he established the SIB for the army fighting in the Far East. Ellis was immensely proud of the men that he had trained who he considered ‘fit in every way to fill a Detective Constable’s or Sergeant’s chair … having little to learn in dealing with crime in the civil sense of the word under the worst possible conditions’.18 Admittedly, on returning home, men had to wait for a vacancy, but for Ellis it must have seemed a very long wait. He was back with the Metropolitan Police in January 1946, slightly earlier than Dibbens; but like Dibbens he had to wait until the following December before being promoted to inspector. Ellis’s abilities were realized and, while he was never promoted higher than detective inspector, he eventually became deputy commandant of the CID Training School at Hendon. He died serving in that post in May 1957.19 Frank Pollard, who had ended the war as a major in command of all the SIB sections in the 21st Army Group, had

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to wait even longer for significant promotion. Pollard, born in London in 1910, had been a glazier before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1934. He had passed his sergeant’s exams in 1938, but he was still a detective constable when he joined the SIB in February 1940. He returned to this rank in January 1946 and was only promoted to detective sergeant the following December. Subsequent promotions followed quickly through the 1950s, however, and he retired at the end of 1967 as a deputy commander.20 Several of the men who had gone to France with Campion in 1940 and then gone on to achieve significant military rank returned to their old police ranks at the end of the war and subsequently scarcely moved from those ranks. Ernest Purslow had passed his sergeant’s exams in 1935; he became a major in the SIB, but retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1963 still serving as a sergeant. Bert Raisbeck’s career followed an almost identical pattern. George Ripley, possibly seeing no future in the police, decided not to rejoin on his discharge from the army in 1947; and James Rignall, who had progressed from Campion’s volunteers to organize the SIB for the port provost section of the Military Police, also resigned on his army discharge in 1946. Some men may have embraced their failure to win significant promotion as the luck of the draw or, like Dickie Hearn, they may have enjoyed being characters with colourful pasts and, perhaps, minor chips on their shoulder when it came to their superiors. Another of Campion’s volunteers, who reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, was demoted from detective inspector to detective sergeant for insubordination towards a divisional detective inspector in 1948.21 St. Johnston suggested that one reason why police officers did so well in Civil Affairs was that ‘they were the only people with a good job to which they could return and who had joined C.A. because they were champing to help and this was the only thing they were allowed to do’.22 But the war also opened new horizons for both those that had served in Civil Affairs and those that had been in SIB. It may have been reluctance to return to his old rank in the Metropolitan Police that encouraged yet another of Campion’s men to remain with the army. Frank Elliott, the one-time railway worker from Chesterfield, had gone to Egypt at the end of 1940 to assist in developing the SIB there. He had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the war but, rather than return to the police, he opted to remain with the army and by the end of the 1940s, working from an office in Knightsbridge, he was responsible for the entire SIB both at home and overseas.23 The war had opened new opportunities for Elliott and he seized them, as did Ronnie Crocker, also promoted to lieutenant colonel and who transferred from SIB to the Control Commission

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until he was discharged with bronchitis in June 1952. After twelve months back with the civilian police in Kent, Ken Thrift rejoined the SIB as a lieutenant colonel serving in Germany and Egypt. He retired from the army in 1958 and took a senior position with the Admiralty Constabulary in Southern England and Singapore; a second retirement in 1969, it was said, finally left him more time with his family and more time for golf.24 It was the same for some of the men who had volunteered for Civil Affairs at the beginning. Leonard Ashton was a real Londoner, born in Drury Lane in 1907. He had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1928, giving his occupation as the ubiquitous ‘clerk’ and his rise through the ranks was rapid: sergeant in 1933; clerk sergeant in 1935; inspector in 1939. In 1943, he volunteered for Civil Affairs subsequently serving in Italy, then in Austria, where he raised the British flag in Klagenfurt and by that time he appears to have been bitten by the bug to continue working overseas. From Austria he joined Wickham’s mission to Greece, where he remained until pensioned at the beginning of 1951.25 Leslie Tompkins, the motor apprentice from Luton who had joined Civil Affairs in 1943, decided not to return to the Bedfordshire Police. His wife had sold the contents of their home so as to join him while he was training German Police in Westphalia, and when they eventually returned to England, Tompkins applied for and got a post with the department for the administration of African territories in the Foreign Office. His new duties took him to various outposts of the retreating empire in Africa as a police officer and to Nigeria as the vehicle examinations officer for the colony. He finished his working life as a security officer working for the United Nations in the Middle East, before retiring to Cornwall.26 Two graduates of Trenchard’s college similarly chose to work abroad when the war ended. Lieutenant Colonel Wilfred Ivor Randolph Wilkins, who had organized the squad of Italian police officers to combat the black market in Sicily and had then followed the armies with Civil Affairs in northwest Europe, dropped the Wilkins surname in favour of his third Christian. As Wilfred Randolph he spent four years as chief of Police and Fire Brigade on the island of St. Vincent, followed by four years in the Commonwealth Investigation Service, Australia, before returning home in the mid-1950s. Gerald Richardson, who had gone from inspector in the Metropolitan Police to command the police of Venezia Giulia, also opted for a more exotic life after the war. In 1954, when the Italian government took over Trieste and his ‘Metropolitan Police in miniature’, he crossed the Mediterranean to the city of Tangier to become its Commissaire, Chef de la Sûreté, Police Générale.27 He later took up, briefly, police roles in Nigeria and Malaya.

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Others who, like Wilkins and Richardson, were graduates of Trenchard’s College played significant roles in the ranks of Civil Affairs. Joseph Harvey, for example, was attached to the Security Branch of AMGOT charged with screening refugees, reviewing the cases of political internees and prosecuting enemy agents. He acted as deputy to, and then replaced, Arthur Young as head of the branch in February  1945. On demobilization he left the Metropolitan Police to become chief constable first of Rochdale and then of Birkenhead. After rising to be deputy chief constable of Norwich, R.A. Noble served with Wickham’s mission to Greece. He returned to England as chief constable of Burnley and later Derby.28 Douglas Osmond, the maths graduate who was Halland’s personal staff officer in Germany and who had been in charge of the Planning Policy and Intelligence Section of the Public Safety headquarters, returned to be chief constable of Shropshire moving, in 1962, to Hampshire. Osmond’s abilities as a police commander were recognized by a knighthood in 1971, and he was also appointed to several key and sensitive investigations such as the enquiry into the RUC during the late 1970s and the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, whose report led to the significant Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984. The graduates of Hendon College were already destined for senior rank in the police and, if volunteering for Civil Affairs and Control Commission duties did not necessarily accelerate their promotion, it gave them wide experience of command and of using their initiative in difficult situations. It also provided them with a military rank with which to preface their name. Gordon Rutherford and Albert Wilcox both served with Civil Affairs in Italy and the Control Commission in Austria, and both achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. Rutherford followed Eric St. Johnston as chief constable of Oxfordshire, moving from there to command the larger county forces of first Lincolnshire and then Surrey. Wilcox followed Arthur Young as chief constable of Hertfordshire, where he served for twenty-two years until 1969. St. Johnston himself became chief constable of Durham in 1945, moved to Lancashire in 1950 and ended his career as chief inspector of Constabulary. St. Johnston liked to be referred to as ‘Colonel’, but to his predecessor in Lancashire, Captain Sir Archibald Hordern, he remained ‘the young upstart’. To his men he was ‘the Saint’, a title that was not always used in a way to be flattering. John A. McKay and Geoffrey White also followed the road from Hendon, to a police role with the army to senior police rank at the end of the war. McKay was another of the well-educated recruits to the Metropolitan Police in the 1930s with a degree from Glasgow University. He served as a CAO in Palermo, and then

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transferred to the Austrian Control Commission. On his return from Europe he rejoined the Metropolitan Police, moved to Birmingham in 1953 as assistant chief constable then, and seven years later he was appointed chief constable of Manchester. In 1966, he joined H.M. Inspectorate of Constabulary and followed St. Johnston as chief inspector in 1970.29 White did not go through Civil Affairs, but volunteered, and was accepted for army service in 1941. He became a staff officer, but his police experience led to him being posted as a provost marshal. In the summer of 1945, he was working with Richardson the plans for the police of Venezia Giulia and on his return to Britain he became assistant chief constable of Northumberland, and then chief constable of Warwickshire. In July 1956 he was appointed to command the police of Cyprus, where he linked up with an old comrade from the Italian campaign, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, who was then governor on the troubled island. At the end of eighteenth months in Cyprus, White moved back to England as chief constable of the Kent Police. He died suddenly, in office, in 1961 at the relatively young age of forty-nine.30 While the vestiges of the class system could still be found in the police as in many other British institutions after 1945, coming from a well-to-do background, or at least from good stock if now on their uppers, and having passed through Trenchard’s College were not the only routes to success in Civil Affairs, SIB or the post-war police service. Since the nineteenth century it had been possible for a particularly capable man to rise from a trainee constable to be the head constable of a borough. Stanley Pickering was a prime example; following his Civil Affairs service he returned to Stalybridge and in the King’s Birthday Honours in 1946 he received a knighthood. At the end of the war such opportunities were extended to senior appointments in the larger county forces, and particularly to those men with experience of military command. The man who succeeded Eric St. Johnston as chief constable of Lancashire, second in size only to the Metropolitan Police, provides a notable example. William J.H. Palfrey, or ‘Palf ’ to the Lancashire constables, was born in Exeter and never lost his West Country accent. He  joined the Portsmouth Police in 1926, rose rapidly to inspector and in 1940, aged only thirty-four years, became chief constable of Accrington. Three years later he volunteered for Civil Affairs. Palfrey’s first postings in Civil Affairs were delicate. As described above, he appears to have got on well with his American superiors in Detachment A1A1; but in Cherbourg where he first served as chief Public Safety Officer, the French regional commissioner, appointed by General De Gaulle, was determined to assert French independence and authority. Palfrey moved with the American advance to become the senior Public Safety Officer

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in Paris, a position that once again must have taxed both his patience and his diplomatic skills. He subsequently joined the Control Commission in Austria, where he was involved in seeking out and arresting former Nazis. Palfrey returned to Accrington in 1947 just as the borough’s police was amalgamated with Lancashire. He became St. Johnston’s deputy but, unlike his chief, Palfrey was known as ‘a copper’s copper’. He disliked pomp and never used his military title of lieutenant colonel, and he was a reformer responsible for the increased use of police cars, the introduction of personal radios and the deployment, borrowed from practice in Northern Ireland, of radar traps to catch speeding motorists. It was twenty years before ‘Palf ’ took over as chief constable. He served in this post only for three years before retirement, and the period was not uncontroversial, particularly when his fervent Christian beliefs led him to join a march with the bishop of Blackburn urging a return to Christian morality in the country. The  Tory party sought to persuade him to stand as a parliamentary candidate, but he refused, preferring involvement with an initiative to reduce unemployment.31 The men who came home after the war and returned to the police may not have always been as vocal as Dickie Hearn in their beliefs about what a British police officer was but, whatever rank they eventually achieved in the civilian police, the majority, as far as can be judged, seem to have accepted the image of the Bobby as avuncular, unflappable, unarmed, non-political and non-military. There were some, like Dibbens, who felt that promises had been broken and some who resented men who had not done their bit in the armed forces but had stayed in the civilian police and acquired advancement by being around when promotion became available and when men serving in the SIB, Civil Affairs or other arms were not around. Yet probably the majority, like Hearn in his own distinctive way, got on with the situation and continued to live up to the image of the Bobby that they had boasted of and tried to take overseas. Their understanding of this image might not have changed, yet it is difficult to believe that they had not acquired new insights as a result of their wartime experiences. Just five years after the war ended the image of the Bobby was given its classic statement with the first appearance of PC George Dixon in the feature film The Blue Lamp (1950); the image may have been part of what The Times film critic called ‘an indulgent tradition’ but it continued to hold sway in the post-war world.32 In their experience as Military Police detectives or CAOs the veterans had observed the police in liberated and formerly enemy territories; they had even worked alongside men that had served under Mussolini and Hitler. They had had to work with paramilitary police like the

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Carabinieri and other gendarmeries, and even had to countenance the arming of civilian police because of the dangers that they faced in war-ravaged Europe. Probably there were elements of national pride, even national superiority, in any revisions of their beliefs, but they still considered that they were different, and they noted that Britain had won the war – the internment and shabby treatment of enemy aliens by civilian police and the state was forgotten. In the post-war narrative great stress was placed on Britain being victorious without recourse to creating an oppressive police state and, after all, in no way could the quickly forgotten internments camps be seriously compared to Nazi concentration camps. A number of the veterans came home with field rank (the rank of major and above) and could, therefore, use their military rank as they rose to the highest positions within the police; Palfrey declined, but many others did not and the non-military British police forces after 1945 had a clutch of majors and colonels taking command. This was an interesting shift from the various majors and colonels that had often been brought in to command British police forces before the war; these earlier chief constables had learned to command on the parade ground at Sandhurst and their experience of command had, more often than not, been learned in imperial outposts. Some of the men who returned to the police in 1945 may have been temporary wartime ‘gentlemen’, but they were not going to be ‘temporary gentlemen’ anymore. In a similar shift their combined military and police experience made a few of them attractive to the Colonial Service as the empire was transformed, often bloodily, into the commonwealth. As noted previously, Lt. Col. Geoffrey White went from Warwickshire to supervise the police of Cyprus when the conflict with the Greek Cypriot guerrilla fighters (EOKA) entered its most violent phase. Colonel Arthur Young went from being commissioner of the City of London Police to reorganize colonial forces in a succession of troubled colonies: the Gold Coast (1951), Malaya (1952–1953) and Kenya (1954). His final appointment to a trouble spot was in 1969 when he was sent to Northern Ireland to set about the demilitarization of the RUC. Young shared the heroic vision of the British Bobby and was always focussed on the idea that police officers should enjoy good, even friendly, relations with the people that they served. This was not something that always worked in the context of determined independence movements and especially when talking had given way to the gun; nor was it something that he could easily sell to some of the hard-headed veterans serving under him. ‘Young was tall and burly’, recalled a special branch officer serving in the Malayan Police,

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and there was something about his style and manner that reminded us of a typical London ‘bobby’…. The main gist of what he said was that the police should present themselves as ‘friends of the people’ as the same way the police did in Britain. Many of us thought that while this might be suitable for London and we would have a go to support him, the situation we faced in Malaya was quite different from Britain’s. For starters we were very much in the front line of the ‘shooting war’ against communist guerrillas and most of the crime we were dealing with as ‘politically motivated’.33

Lessons? ‘History teaches us that …’ is a common phrase; it is also one about which there could be considerable debate. History, after all, is not a series of events out there that anyone can just pick up and learn from. Most of what we consider as history is a set of conclusions from those traces of the past that remain and which historians have filtered and interpreted. The events and experiences described previously are my interpretation of what, in many respects, were the interpretations and recollections of the men who had those experiences. Yet there are some messages here that might usefully have been considered by politicians and others since the end of the Second World War and which were available, not just in the memoirs of those who wrote such memoirs, but also in the relatively anodyne official and semi-official histories. Seeking to impose one county’s style of policing on others that have understood policing in a rather different fashion is one example of this. To the Germans in 1945, for example, British policing was odd given that many of the matters that came under the German understanding of Polizei were handled in Britain by civilian inspectors acting under a variety of ministries or departments of local government.34 Exposure to British policing and the guidance of CAPOs in Italy, and similar experience in Germany with training in British-run police schools, fashioned neither il Bobby italiano nor der deutsche Bobby. Indeed in both Italy and Germany it appears that behaviour learned and developed under the dictatorships could be continued as methods required by the job, but without the political ideology that had underpinned the behaviour during the 1930s and early 1940s.35 Moreover Fascist and Nazi ideology in many respects had also built on traditions for their policing. In the aftermath of the PSB’s activities in Germany Richard Chapet de Saintonge, the undersecretary for the Control Office in London, reflected, ‘It is clear … that it was a mistake for us to have

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sought to transplant a British institution in Germany, contrary to their whole tradition.’36 The superiority of the British Bobby may have been more imagined than real but it was, and indeed it remains, appealing and potent. Developing a British police solution for a British problem might be done fairly quickly and efficiently – though this should not be taken to suggest that is always is. During the interwar years probably the army should have recognized the likelihood of dockyard theft and other forms of pilferage in the event of a new war; after all the generals had made other preparations such as the recruitment of traffic police. There might be an excuse in the fact that serious detective training among the civilian police was only slowly improved during the 1930s and there is no question but that the army moved quickly given the problems experienced at the end of 1939. Arguably the retreat from Europe in the summer of 1940 gave time to develop and to train a small cadre of civilian police as soldier detectives, and this cadre was expanded as the war continued and as new fronts were opened. The SIB was never a greatly favoured institution. Generals and senior officers applauded SIB successes, but their main interest was fighting the war. Probably they had little idea of their detectives’ requirements as the complaints in SIB war diaries suggest, but like soldiers everywhere the men of SIB moaned and got on with it to the best of their abilities. Yet, if there was an initial failure to acknowledge a need for soldier detectives, even in some of the darkest periods of the war the British and their American allies appreciated the need to train men who would restore civil society to liberated and captured enemy territory. Early on it was recognized that police officers would have a central role here to reestablish and to maintain social order; it also became apparent that they would have to train, or retrain, the police in these territories, ideally, as far as the British were concerned, making them as close to British Bobbies as possible. The first problem with this was that the British were thinking in terms of stereotypes: British police were like this; continental European police were like that. Writing just after the First World War, Walter Lippman concluded: For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped by our culture.37

In many respects the British were trying to destroy one stereotype and replace it with another, and with little regard to either the institutional memory that would remain with European police institutions or the cultural and

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legal traditions of different countries. The belief that some kind of post-war international police structure, based on a British model, that could be used to help guarantee peace was an extension of this policy. However, while it may have been wrongheaded to assume that it was possible to transfer a model institution from one country to another – let alone to the world – regardless of the culture and traditions of the recipient’s own form of that institution, it is probably even more serious to embark on a campaign with no preparation whatsoever. At the beginning of the 1950s the British received an invitation to train the police of Colombia. It was commanded by Cecil Newing, a product of Trenchard’s college and a veteran of the Control Commission in Germany. It was still a disaster. Both sides blamed the other, with British officials criticizing the Colombians for simply failing to understand the traditions of British policing.38 Yet since 1945, and especially since the 1990s, there has been a significant growth of what is now called ‘international policing’. This has seen police officers sent on missions by their own governments, by regional groupings and by the United Nations to advise or assist in the upholding of order and the reconstruction of states that have emerged from civil or international war or that face some form of governmental or administrative failure. A European Genadarmerie (Force de gendarmerie européene) was inaugurated in 2006; it now draws on gendarmes seconded by the forces of seven EU countries.39 Again however, the idealized model of the British Bobby has been a brand marketed by British governments and the men sent abroad from English, Welsh and Scottish forces have commonly subscribed to the model. As one chief superintendent who served in Kosovo, Bosnia and Georgia put it, in terms that would have been shared by many of those serving during the Second World War: UK [sic] policing is not seen as corrupt, it’s seen as implementing the rule of law. It’s seen as working … policing by consent, working with communities, to detect and prevent crime and it is very much as emphasis on prevention and trying to improve communities. So it’s not seen as a direct arm of the state imposing law, imposing a political view or keeping a system in power. So Britain is still viewed, I think, as the outsider, not universally because I know the world is changing, but as a fairer society. We still have elections, governments change … whilst there is social unrest and riots it’s not the same and so British policing is seen as one of the good by-products of that society.

Others argued similarly, and stressed both political independence and the way that the Bobby patrolled without a firearm. At the same time, police officers from Northern Ireland emphasized their gendarmerie style and their

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superiority in certain situations. ‘When I was in Iraq’, recalled a member of the Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI), ‘the number of Belfast accents was overwhelming’.40 There are also governments in the states requesting British assistance that see PSNI and former RUC officers as offering the kind of policing that they want, rather than the beat-patrolling, preventive Bobby. Financial constraints and the reluctance of senior officers to authorize the temporary loss of good, capable police officers for overseas duties has often impeded such deployments; but then for forty years, from the Suez crisis to the peacekeeping problems in former Yugoslavia, British generals and politicians saw little or no need for such individuals. In the United States since the Second World War, even though there are complaints about the militarization of police forces at home, little thought appears to have been given to such tasks. The United States did maintain a significant Civil Affairs section in its order of battle after 1945, but towards the end of the century many political generals and politicians appear to have assumed that when a regime had been swept aside, somehow policing would remain intact and that there would be no need for reconstruction or retraining. The most astonishing example, and consequently the most serious, was the belief by those who planned and undertook the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that there was simply no need to prepare for the restoration of law, order and civil society in the defeated enemy. No one in authority, or in the media, appears to have raised a variant of Ferdinand Tuohy’s question from 1942: ‘Are we ready to govern Europe?’ Still less did anyone consider the ‘precedent’ that Eisenhower saw when writing to the US War Department at the beginning of 1943 with reference to plans for the landings in Italy and the deployment of Civil Affairs personnel: This is the first United States operation involving the invasion and occupation of enemy territory. It is the first British operation involving the invasion and occupation of enemy territory other than colonial … . It will inevitably establish precedents far-reaching in scope and importance and will set the pattern for later operations in Europe.41

The Chilcot Inquiry into the origins and aftermath of the war in Iraq in 2003 stated that: In December  2002, the MOD described the post conflict phase of operations as ‘strategically decisive’. But when the invasion began, the UK Government was not in a position to conclude that satisfactory plans had been drawn up and preparations made to meet post-conflict challenges and risks in Iraq and to mitigate the risks of strategic danger.42

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According to the National Security Advisor of the US government in 2003, ‘the concept was that we would defeat the [Iraqi] army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces’.43 This demonstrated a sorrowful lack of an institutional memory on the part of the governments that attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and that were instrumental in bringing about the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya a decade later. These were governments in the same countries that, from 1942, were aware of the need for Civil Affairs administration in liberated territories and those of defeated enemies – governments that understood that, even if they were forced to work with and to employ police officers who had served Fascist and Nazi regimes, then those police officers would need careful vetting to weed out those who could not be trusted or who had committed atrocities and the more serious abuses. The police that were kept on also needed some instruction in how a liberal democratic society required its police to behave with reference to the law and the public. The CAOs that landed in northwestern Europe after June 1944 had gone through fairly intensive training given the time available, and they had information passed on to them by the men who had already gone through the experience in Italy. For a variety of reasons the British efforts discussed in the forgoing pages were not always especially successful; and in Germany some of the Civil Affairs personnel appear to have relied rather too readily on individuals who had experience, but who had acquired this experience as committed members of the Nazi Party. The British official history of Civil Affairs was largely congratulatory and made no serious attempt to see what worked, what did not and why. Indeed, as far as matters of law and order were concerned, they were conveniently slotted into the pre-war imaginings about the superiority of the British police system. The efforts of the police officers, and others, who served in khaki in the SIB and, especially, in Civil Affairs deserve better, and it might usefully be fed into current and future thinking about first, planning and attempting to work alongside existing police officers and second, restructuring policing in failed states and states emerging from civil and international conflict.

Notes Introduction 1

The massacre at Majar Kabir has echoes of some of the incidents recounted in what follows: the Redcaps were acting in a Civil Affairs role. Like the Civil Affairs, and SIB officers during the Second World War, they appear to have come at the bottom of the list for equipment and weaponry – their radios did not work and they were given only a fraction of the ammunition needed. There appears also to have been some hostility – perhaps the notion that they were not ‘real’ ‘fighting’ soldiers. See, inter alia, The Observer, 8 January 2006: 23. 2 The television series were Redcap (1964–66) with John Thaw as Sergeant John Mann and Red Cap (2001–2004) with Tamsin Outhwaite as Sergeant Jo McDonagh. The first Comoran Strike novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was published in 2013. 3 F.S.V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government: North-West Europe 1944– 1946 (London: H.M.S.O., 1961); F.S.V. Donnison, Civil affairs and Military Government: Central Organisation and Planning (London: H.M.S.O., 1966); C.R.S. Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy 1943–1945’ (London: H.M.S.O., 1957). 4 Edward R. Flint, ‘The Development of British Civil Affairs and Its employment in the British Sector of Allied Military Operations during the Battle of Normandy, June to August 1944’, PhD diss., Cranfield University, 2009. 5 Police Review, 1 October 1943: 470. For an extended version of this quotation see below p. 115. 6 Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing from the 18th Century to the Present (London: Quercus, 2009), 212–18; Clive Emsley, ‘Peel’s Principles, Police Principles’, in The Future of Policing, ed. Jennifer M. Brown (London: Routledge, 2014), 14, 15. 7 J.F. Moylan, Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police, 2nd edn. (London: Putnam, 1934); H.M. Howgrave-Graham, Light and Shade at Scotland Yard (London: Murray, 1947); T.A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales, revised edn. (London: Constable, 1968). 8 Charles Reith, The Blind Eye of History (London: Faber, 1952), 20. 9 Police Review, 24 December 1943: 621. 10 For the similarities with continental forces see Clive Emsley, ‘A Typology of Nineteenth-Century Police’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 3, no. 1 (1999): 29–44.

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Notes

11 Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd edn. (London and Harlow : Longman, 1996), 161–3; Home Office: Report of the Departmental Committee on Detective Work and Procedure (1939), vol. 2, para 5. 12 Clive Emsley, ‘Policing the Empire/Policing the Metropole’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 18, no. 2 (2014): 5–25. The conceptualization of the RIC as the British Imperial model is best found in Sir Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (London: Max Parrish, 1952). 13 Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Janet Clark, The National Council for Civil Liberties and the Policing of Interwar Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 14 There were, for example, beginning in January 1936 a series of eleven articles on scientific aids to criminal investigation and six on fingerprints. There were also articles by overseas experts. J. Edgar Hoover published an article on science in American law enforcement in July 1937, and another on forensic firearms identification in October 1939. 15 Colin R. Moore and Gerry R. Rubin, ‘Civilian Detective Doctrine in the 1930s and Its Transmission to the Military Police in 1940–42’, Law, Crime and History (online journal), 4, no. 3 (2014): 14, 15; Police Review, 22 June 1934: 467. 16 George Hatherill, A Detective’s Story (London: Andre Deutsch, 1971), 40. 17 Moore and Rubin, ‘Civilian Detective Doctrine’, 14–15; Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Keith Laybourn and David Taylor, Policing in England and Wales, 1918–39: The Fed, Flying Squads and Forensics (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Chapter 4; Sir Arthur L. Dixon, ‘The Home Office and the Police between the Two World Wars’ (official typescript, 1966), Chapter 19. Volume 2 of the Home Office: Departmental Report, which was not made available to the public until after the Second World War, contains in Appendix 6 the syllabus prepared for detective training. 18 Clive Emsley and Mark Clapson, ‘Recruiting the English Policeman c. 1840–1940’, Policing and Society, 3, no. 4 (2002): 269–86. 19 Report of the Committee on the Police Service in England, Wales, and Scotland, Part II (commonly known as the Desborough Committee), 1920, Cmd 574: 543. 20 Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 319 (1937): 181. 21 OUPA: interview with Horace Rogers, 11 February 1987. 22 Sir Arthur L. Dixon, ‘The Emergency Work of the Police Forces in the Second World War’ (official typescript 1963): 14, 16 and 139. 23 OUPA: interview with Arthur Pickering, 20 February 1987; and interview with Nat Taylor, 7 December 1987. 24 CRMP Archive, File ‘Personal Recollections’, tape transcript of Wanstall.

Notes

219

25 Dixon, ‘Emergency Work,’ 145. 26 The best history of the Corps of Royal Military Police is Gary Sheffield, The Redcaps: A History of the Royal Military Police and Its Antecedents from the Middle Ages (London: Brassey’s, 1994). 27 John Howard and Penny Howard Bates, The Pegasus Diaries (Barnsley : Pen and Sword, 2006), 10 and 17, 18.

Chapter 1 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

WO 167/1345, Deputy Assistant Provost Marshal GHQ. War Diary entry of 4 October 1939 notes the first Gendarmerie detachment joining 5 Provost Company. MEPO 2/7150. Unless otherwise stated the material in the following paragraphs, particularly that covering Hatherill’s report, is drawn from papers in this file. For Mondanel, his wartime career and its aftermath, see Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les policiers français sous l’occupation d’après les achives inédites de l’épuration (Paris: Perrin, 2001), especially 98–105. Hatherill, A Detective’s Story, 22–4, 26–8, 76 and 110. Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in Twentieth-Century England (London and Harlow : Longman, 2011), 91, 92; Clive Emsley, ‘Cops and Dockers’, History Today, 65, no. 8 (August 2015): 19–25. IWM Sound Tape 6388, Dibbens, reel one; IWM, Document, Private Papers of Fred Warner, f. 13. Hatherill mistakenly called the river the Idre in his report. MPHC Central Records of Service; MEPO 2/7908. MPHC Central Records of Service. MPHC Central Records of Service. CRMP Archive, George Ripley to Ron Roberts, undated. Norman Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters: The Special Investigation Branch in the Middle East (London: Werner Laurie, 1954), 21, 22. Attfield had recently received a commendation, dated 29 September 1939, on his Central Record of Service, for his role in preventing a ‘conspiracy to cause explosions’, presumably involving the IRA. In 1954, Phillips described Attfield as a Special Branch officer once again, but on loan to the Foreign Office where his principal duty was the protection of the Foreign Secretary. WO 305/454; Harold Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries as a Sailor, Soldier, Policeman, Civil Servant, 1925–1972 (Chichester: Privately Printed, Lt. Col. Harold Dibbens, 1989), 18, 19. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 21, 22.

220

Notes

14 CRMP Archive, H.W. Cooper to Capt. Barry Davies (never posted but recovered from Cooper in March 2001); from: Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Gordon Thrift, OBE; Lt. Col. John G. Ellis, ‘C.I.D. in Khaki’, Journal of the United Services Institution of India (January 1945): 97. 15 Ellis, ‘C.I.D. in Khaki’: 97; WO 167/166, II Corps APM, diary entry 5 March 1940, notes that the probationers inspected that day were, for the first time, not all drawn from the Guards. 16 John Spencer Churchill, Crowded Canvas (London: Odhams, 1961), 158; Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 24–35; http://www.corpsofmilitarypolice.org/soldier/2610/ 17 Daily Express, 23 May 1940: 8; Daily Mirror, 23 May 1940: 3. 18 WO 166/53; WO 166/9849. 19 WO 305/454. 20 CRMP Archive H.W. Cooper to Capt. Barry Davis, March 2000; WO 169/2553, Provost Units: SIB 1 October–30 December 1941; WO 166/13659, HQ CMP Ports, January to December 1943, General Notes on Port Provost Operation; and see in general, Gerald Mars, Cheats at Work: An Anthology of Workplace Crime (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1983), 96, 97 and 100–06; Emsley, ‘Cops and Dockers’. 21 Ellis, ‘C.I.D. in Khaki’, 98; MEPO 2/7150, DPM Northern Command to Game, 30 April 1941. 22 MEPO 2/7150, Laurie to Chief Inspector Duncan, 10 April 1942; Chief Constable of Wiltshire to DPM Salisbury, 11 March 1942. 23 CRMP Archive, West file, Discipline – Officers. 24 The Scotsman, 9 August 1941: 3; and for related reports and additional trials see, 21 October: 3; 29 October: 3; 19 December: 6; 5 February 1942: 3; 6 February: 8; 14 February: 6; 11 June: 3. 25 MEPO 2/7150, Laurie to Kendal, 17 June 1942. 26 MEPO 2/7150, Laurie to Kendal, 26 March 1942; CRMP Archive, James Papers; MPHC Central Records of Service. 27 Early in 1944, for example, two Redcaps in Philippeville, Algeria, suspicious of a soldier in British battledress, found they had arrested an American GI wanted in Algiers on charges of rape and murder (WO 170/453, 6 Armoured Division Provost Company, commendation for L/Cpl. Vallans and L/Cpl. Armstrong); Clive Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89–90. 28 Moore and Rubin, ‘Civilian Detective Doctrine’, 23–6. Morrish also began publishing ‘Study, Lecture and Essay Notes’ regularly in the Police Review; see, for example, the weekly articles running from August to October 1944 on different kinds of offences and how investigations should be pursued. At the end of the following year he accepted the post of principal of the Police Training Division of the British Tutorial Institutes revising their courses for policemen seeking promotion; see the advertisement in Police Review, 23 November 1945: 577.

Notes

221

29 30 31 32 33

CRMP Archive, John Lofthouse file. Police Review, 22 May 1942: 257; Ellis, ‘C.I.D. in Khaki’, 99. WO 171/7814, August 1945. CRMP Archive, from: Lieutenant Colonel Thrift. CRMP Archive, H.W. Cooper to Capt. Barry Davies (never posted but recovered from Cooper in March 2001). 34 Dibbens, Dibbens Diaries, 38. 35 Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief, 31–3.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 23. CRMP Archive, File on Claude Harper. War Office/Central Office of Information (1948), 121. NAM 1993-06-75, Middle East Theatre, 26. CRMP Archive, MS chapter ‘Special Investigation Branch’, by Major S. OgdenSmith, March 1945, no fol. numbers. WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, fol. 1. CRMP Archive, HQ SIB CMP North Africa; Monthly Report, October 1943. See, for example, WO 170/3592, 9 and 18 November 1944. WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, fol. 1. Police Review, 2 February 1945: 52; WO 170/3595, January 1944. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 23, 24 and 88, 89; Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 42; MPHC Central Records of Service. WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, ff. 1 and 4. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 98–101. At this point in his book Phillips began spelling Elliott’s name with only one ‘t’. IWM, Document 13416, Private Papers of R.H. Grose, Box 2, Folder: ‘Papers’, Second Exercise Book, Lecture XV ‘Civil administration of ME’. C.V. Hearn, Desert Assignment (London: Robert Hale, 1963), 69. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 17, 95, 96 and 165, 166. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 2–36; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 68–72; Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 53. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 18–48. WO 71/884. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 91, 92. NAM 1993-06-75, Middle East Theatre, 28. CRMP Archive, from: Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Gordon Thrift, OBE. War Office/Central Office of Information (1948), 112; Phillips (1954), 93.

222 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42

Notes Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 54. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 7–16. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 115, 116. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 158, 159. CRMP Archive, from: Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Gordon Thrift, OBE. War Office/Central Office of Information (1948), 53, 83, 94, 95 and 100, 101. Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 51. CRMP Archive, MS chapter ‘Special Investigation Branch’, by Major S. OgdenSmith, March 1945, no fol. numbers. WO 170/3592. IWM Document 10519, Private Papers of Lt. R.J. Hunting, f. 51. Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 56, 57. NAM 1993-06-75, Middle East Theatre, 28. Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 47. Charles Smith, ‘Communal Conflict and Insurrection in Palestine, 1936–48’, in Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–65, eds. David M. Anderson and David Killingray (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 74–8. Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 42; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 74–8; Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 104–7; WO 169/6642 and WO 169/17738. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 58–66; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 113–20; MPHC Central Record of Service. John Dickie, Mafia Brotherhoods: Camorra, Mafia, ‘ndrangheta: The Rise of the Honoured Societies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), 306, 307. Dickie, Mafia Brotherhoods, 334, 335 and 360–3; Norman Lewis, Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (London: Eland, 2002: first published 1978), 70 and 110. While Naples was a seaport, its population was largely ethnically homogeneous. The Allied armies contained white men from Europe and America, but also African Americans, Algerians and Moroccans (in the French army) and Indians (in the British Imperial forces). Drawing on the situation in 1943 Eduardo Nicolardi wrote the Neapolitan lyrics ‘Tammariata Nera’ (interspersed with a chorus from the then popular American song ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’) about the birth of a black baby to a Neapolitan woman. In an English translation it begins:

Don’t understand what’s happenin’ sometimes you don’t believe your eyes, nay, you don’t. A baby’s born and he’s all black, and his mom calls him Ciro, yeah, she calls him Ciro! Ciro being a popular Neapolitan name.

Notes

223

43 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), 35. 44 Lewis, Naples ’44, 122; Donnison, Civil Affairs, 279; WO 170/2595, February 1944. 45 WO 170/3598. 46 WO 170/3594, War Diary, 67 SIS, January–December 1944; WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, ff. 4, 5. 47 CRMP Archive, No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–45, cases 272, 273. 48 WO 204/2492, Col. C.E.L. Lewin-Harris, 4 September 1944: ‘Terrorising of countryside by bands of British and American deserters’. 49 CRMP Archive, No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–45, cases 188–9. 50 CRMP Archive, Copies of Appendices to the 1945 Report to the War Office from the Provost Marshal’s Office Rome Allied Area Command, Item 4; CRMP Archive, File ‘Italy WWII’; WO 170/3598, 28 and 31 October 1944. 51 WO 373/72. 52 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 21. 53 CRMP Archive, No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–45, cases 368–9. 54 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 22. 55 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 94. 56 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 20. 57 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 141. 58 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 190, and No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–45, case 160. 59 Lewis, Naples ’44, 52, 53 and 171. 60 WO 170/3598, 2 May and 4 July 1944. For the problems of assessing the scale of military rape see Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman Thief, 122–31. 61 WO 171/3599, 21 July, 9 September and 11 December 1944. 62 Edward Russell (Lord Russell of Liverpool), That Reminds Me (London: Cassell, 1959), 171–2. 63 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 71. 64 CRMP Archive, No. 296 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1943–44, case 159; No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–45, cases 126 and 159. 65 CRMP Archive, No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–48, case 271. 66 WO 170/3599, 13 July 1944 reports ‘prolonged enquiries and ballistic examination of exhibits’ in the case of a murder in the area of the Indian Division. 67 WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, fol. 4. 68 WO 170/3598. 69 CRMP Archive, No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–48, case 75. 70 WO 310/9; WO 310/10. 71 WO 170/7052. 72 IWM, Document 12648, Private Papers of J. Baxendale.

224

Notes

73 WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, ff. 5, 6; WO 170/7065; IWM, Document 12648, Private Papers of J. Baxendale. 74 Mail online, 26 May 2011. My thanks to David Shonfield for this reference. 75 WO 170/3594. 76 CRMP Archive, Copies of Appendices to the 1945 Report … Rome Allied Area Command. Item 1, p. 2. 77 CRMP Archive, No. 298 Crime Book, SIB 64 Section 1944–45, cases 22 and 29. 78 WO 170/3594. 79 WO 170/3599, April 1944. 80 CRMP Archive, No. 257 Crime Book, SIB 61 Section 1945, case 266. 81 WO 170/7050, ‘Brief resumé of SIB activities’, fol. 3; CRMP Archive, Copies of Appendices to the 1945 Report … Rome Allied Area Command. Item 3. 82 WO 170/7065, April 1945. 83 WO 170/3599, 11 April 1944; on 19 August he wrote that 50 per cent of the section’s transport required workshop attention. 84 WO 170/3595. 85 WO 170/3590. 86 WO 170/3594. 87 WO 170/3597. 88 Maura Hametz, Making Trieste Italian, 1918–1954 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2005), 71 and 174, 175. 89 WO 170/7059; Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 348. 90 For Hearn see below pp. 66–7; for Civil Affairs Officers in Venezia Giulia see below pp. 153–6. 91 WO 170/7070; WO 170/7071.

Chapter 3 1 2

3 4 5

Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief, 4–6. The number of regular police officers fell from 57,000 in 1940 to 43,000 in 1944; the numbers were made up by special and reserve officers and a small increase in the number of women police; see Critchley, A History of Police, 225–7. WO 171/3409; WO 171/3410. WO 171/281, 6 June 1944; WO 171/423, 6 June 1944. CRMP Archive, ‘The Normandy landing …’, WO2 F. Howden. Howden states that 71 Section landed on 16 June, the unit’s war diary states 15 June. Howden’s acquisition was, presumably, a Mauser HSc, a small (152 mm, or 6-inch-long) semi-automatic pistol of the type in common use by German service personnel and police. It had a magazine carrying 7 or 8 rounds, depending on the type.

Notes 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

225

Pollard wrote ‘Banville’, but there is no such town in the area. Similarly Fawcett wrote of ‘St. Aubier sur Mer’. WO 171/3411. William I. Hitchcock, Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 35 and 44. WO 171/3409. WO 171/3411. WO 171/3409. Lieutenant H. Purslow is not to be confused with Ernest Purslow, one of the detectives who volunteered to serve with Campion in 1940. Hitchcock, Liberation, 51–5; and for American GIs see J. Robert Lilly, Taken By Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). CRMP Archive, ‘The Normandy landing …’, WO2 F. Howden. WO 171/3411. WO 171/3410. Fabrice Grenard, La France du marché noir (Paris: Payot, 2008). WO 171/3410. WO 171/3409. CRMP Archive, Capt. E.M. Glover, ‘The Normandy landing …’. WO 171/3409. WO 171/7805. Jonas Campion, ‘Practiques policières en temps de guerre: Les gendarmes belges, français et néerlandais au prisme de l’épuration’, Crime, histoire & sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 16, no. 2 (2012): 79–87. Quoted in Jonas Campion, ‘La gendamerie, des années noires de la Libération’, in Histoire et dictionnaire de la Gendarmerie de la Maréchaussée à nos jours, eds. Jean-Noël Luc and Frédéric Médard (Paris: Ėditions Jacob-Duvernet/Ministère dela Défense, 2013), 74. Benoît Majerus, Occupations et logiques policières: La police bruxelloise en 1914– 1918 et 1940–1945 (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 2006), 335. WO 171/3410; WO 171/3415. WO 171/3393, 26 December 1944. WO 171/3409; WO 171/7804; WO 171/7805. WO 171/3415. WO 171/7805. WO 171/7810. CRMP Archive, Capt. E.M. Glover, ‘The Normandy landing …’. WO 171/3410; WO 171/3414. WO 171/3414.

226

Notes

35 Pierre Leloup, ‘The Private security Industry in Antwerp (1907–1934). A Historical-Criminological Analysis of Its Modus Operandi and Growth’, Crime, histoire & sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 19, no. 2 (2015): 119–47. 36 WO 171/3416. 37 WO 171/7812. 38 WO 171/3380, 26 November and 16 December 1944; WO 171/7825, 15– 16 February 1945; WO 171/7811; Hitchcock, Liberation, 67, 68. 39 WO 171/7811. 40 WO 171/7809. 41 Lawrence Van Haecke, ‘Repressie en epuratie. De bescherming van der uitwendige veiligheid van der Staat als politiek-juridisch probleem tijdens de Belgische regimecrisis (1932–1948)’ (PhD diss., Ghent University, 2014), 223–6. 42 WO 171/7817; for Corney’s career see Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 153, 154 and 161, 162. 43 Alan Kramer, ‘“Law-Abiding Germans”? Social Disintegration, Crime and the Reimposition of Order in Post-War Western Germany, 1945–9’, in The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Routledge, 1988), 241. 44 WO 171/7810, June 1945. 45 WO 171/7809, 19 June, 7 July and 6 August 1945. The DPs were also singled out as rapists in the British press; see, inter alia, Times, 29 June 1945: 4; Manchester Guardian, 24 July 1945: 5. 46 Miriam Gebhardt, Als die Soldaten kamen: Die Vergewaltigung deutscher Frauen am Ende des Zweiten Weltskrieg (Munich: Deutsche-Verlag-Anstalt, 2015). 47 IWM, Sound Tape 30403, Andrey Kodin, reel 10. 48 Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief, 128–31. 49 IWM, Document 7965, Private Papers of Fred Warner. 50 A.T. Williams, A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016), 94–8 and 124. Purslow’s 81 Section, for example, was requested to investigate some offences for the War Crimes Commission, WO 171/7809. 51 WO 171/7813. 52 Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany – A Pledge Betrayed (London: Granada Publishing, 1983), 230–48; Williams, A Passing Fury, passim. The latter, a professor of law and an expert in human rights, is far more restrained, reasoned and less accusatory in respect of British failures. 53 Anthony Kemp, The Secret Hunters (London: Coronet, 1988); Lori Charlesworth, ‘2 SAS Regiment, War Crimes Investigations and British Intelligence: Intelligence Officials and the Nazweiler Trial’, Journal of Intelligence History, 6, no. 2 (2007): 1–48; Williams, A Passing Fury, 312, 313.

Notes

227

54 IWM, Document 10519, Private Papers of Lt. Raymond J. Hunting, fol. 326. 55 Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 279, 280. I take the term ‘minor irritant’ from Kershaw. 56 WO 171/4027, 14 December 1945; the Reuters Agency reported several similar clashes that some month, see Launceston Examiner, 21 December 1945: 1. 57 Kershaw, The End, 226. 58 Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (London: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 258–63. 59 Manchester Guardian, 31 August 1945: 4; and see in general, Liberation, Chapter 7. 60 WO 171/7813. 61 CRMP Archive, Higgs File. 62 WO 171/7815. 63 WO 171/7810, December 1945. 64 WO 171/10792, 8 April and 20 May 1945. 65 Police Review, 3 May 1946: 264. 66 WO 171/7816. 67 WO 171/7816. 68 WO 171/7812, June note. 69 WO 171/7810. 70 WO171/7809. 71 WO 171/7814, August. 72 WO 171/7809. 73 CRMP Archive, ‘The Normandy Landing …’, WO2 F. Howden; Capt. E.M. Glover, ‘The Normandy Landing …’. 74 WO 171/7814, September and October; WO 171/7810, July; see also CRMP Archive, ‘The Normandy landing …’, WO2 F. Howden. 75 IWM, Sound tape 30403, Kodin, reels 11 and 12. 76 Police Review, 24 August 1945: 411. 77 See, for example, Police Review, 7 September: 453; 19 October: 513; 26 October: 534; 2 November: 546; 21 December: 635. 78 Police Review, 30 November 1945: 595. For notes of who was, and who was not, suitable for the Far East, see, for example, the roles in 87 Section’s War Diary, WO 171/7814.

Chapter 4 1 2

George Macdonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma with a New Epilogue 50 Years On (London: Harper, 2000), 7. Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, xi–xii and 84, 85.

228 3 4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21

Notes Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries is probably the best example. Conversations with George Churchill Coleman; my thanks also to Bob Bartlett for the information on Brent, and see his ever-expanding history of the Surrey Police at http://www.surrey-constabulary.com. CRMP Archive, H.W. Cooper to Capt. Barry Davies (never posted but recovered from Cooper in March 2001). Paul Lawrence, ‘“Scoundrels and scallywags, and some honest men …” Memoirs and the self-image of French and English policemen c. 1870–1939’, in Comparative Histories of Crime, eds. Barry Godfrey, Clive Emsley and Graeme Dunstall (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2003), 140. George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Vol. 2, My Country Left or Right, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 81, 82. C.V. Hearn, Russian Assignment: A Policeman Looks at Crime in the USSR (London: Robert Hale, 1962), 20. George Churchill-Coleman still had the tankard that Hearn was given by his Sergeants’ Mess when he left the Coldstreams. A.J. Durrant, A Short History of the Surrey Constabulary, 1851–1951 (Guildford: Surrey Constabulary, 1951), 59. See above p. 11–12. CRMP Archive, Cooper to Davies. C.V. Hearn, Foreign Assignment (London: Robert Hale, 1961), 103. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 60. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 37–9. In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’: 79, Orwell wrote, ‘England is a land where the bus conductors are good tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers.’ Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 59 and 96; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 18, 19, 41, 42, 73–6 and 101. For the ‘third degree’ and the British police, see John Carter Wood, ‘“The third degree” Twentieth-Century British History, 21, no. 4 (2010): 464–85; and for its French equivalents see Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des polices en France (Brussels: Ėditions Complexe, 1996), 50, 51. CRMP Archive, Dibbens Papers, ‘Questioning of Suspected and Accused Persons’, 13 November 1944. Jonathan Dunnage, Mussolini’s Policemen: Behaviour, Ideology and Institutional Culture in Representation and Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 144; see also, Hearn, Desert Assignment, 31–3. Hearn, Desert Assignment, 151. C.V. Hearn, A Duty to the Public: A Frank Assessment of Today’s Police Force (London: Robert Hale, 1956), 24, 25.

Notes

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22 Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 32 and 129; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 43, 85, 133 and 151 23 See pp. 111–12; and for pompous officers see Hearn, Desert Assignment, 124 and Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 129 and 138–40. 24 CRMP Archive, H.W. Cooper to Capt. Barry Davies (never posted but recovered from Cooper in March 2001). 25 Hearn, Desert Assignment, 75. 26 Hearn, Desert Assignment, 58. 27 Hearn, Desert Assignment, Chapter 5. 28 Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 17, 18. 29 There was tremendous resistance in Britain, not least from the Police Federation, to the recruitment of black officers in the generation following the Second World War; see James Whitfield, Unhappy Dialogue: The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in Post-War Britain (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2004). In 1965, Hearn wrote:

We studiously ignore that we have a coloured problem and just as studiously turn a blind eye in the direction of coloured policemen joining the ranks, yet we give our pennies to a smiling efficient coloured public transport conductor, and return his cheerful smile. But let him try to join the service. Nobody can do our job more efficiently than a white man! We dutifully ignore the Southern Irishman in our ranks. Citizens of Eire. But for the citizens of the Commonwealth – phooey! Is it so difficult to recruit a few of them, to relieve the pressure? Hearn, A Duty to the Public, 28, 29. 30 Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 150, 151. 31 Hearn, Desert Assignment, 49. For Hearn’s hostility to capital punishment see Hearn, A Duty to the Public, Chapter 14. 32 IWM, Document 97, Private Papers of Major I.G. Greenlees OBE MA. This is Chapter 3 of an unpublished biography. Greenlees, a man with extremely good Italian connections, later became the director of the British Institute of Florence from 1958 to 1981. 33 Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 167, 168. 34 David W. Ellwood, Italy 1943–45 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985), 79–82. 35 Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 37, 38 and 40. The dubious reputation of parts of Bari continues. Gianrico Carofiglio, an Italian public prosecutor-turned-crime writer, has set several of his contemporary detective novels in the city. 36 Waugh, Unconditional Surrender, 169.

230 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Notes My thanks to John Dickie for information on La Malo Vita. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 32, 33 and 40–2. Daily Express, 13 March 1944: 3. Hearn Papers: ‘Foreign Awards received by members of the SIB. CMP’; Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 104–10. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 32 and 37. Hearn Papers: ‘Foreign Awards received by members of the SIB. CMP’; ‘Recommendation for BEM for No. 6769162 W/Sergt. C.V. Hearn’; Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 74–84. In his memoir Hearn refers to Dixon as ‘Williams’. Hearn Papers: ‘Foreign Awards received by members of the SIB. CMP’ WO 170/3590; WO 170/7054. WO 373/73/1064. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, Chapter 13; WO 170/7045. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 55, 56; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 66. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 128. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 17–20. Hearn spells MacCallum’s name ‘MacCullam’. Hearn, Desert Assignment, 188–90. WO 170/7059, October 1945. Hearn, Desert Assignment, 190, 191.

Chapter 5 1 2

3

4 5

Police Review, 1 October 1943: 470. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 275, 276; Isobel Williams, Allies, Italians and Occupation: Sicily and Southern Italy 1943–45 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16, 17. Harry L. Coles and Albert K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1964) are primarily concerned with the American experience and do not move beyond Civil Affairs in Italy and northwest Europe to explore the control commissions in Austria and Germany. Their book contains an enormous number of documents which include useful references to the British role in the Civil Affairs and the occasional frictions between the Americans and the British. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, Chapter V discusses the origins of the control commissions but, on the grounds that he is contributing to the history of the Second World War, he avoids a ‘general account’ of the work of the commissions. CAB 101/73, Letter from St. Johnston, 19 April 1953, described Lee as ‘clever but dissolute’; letter from Gen. Kirby, 1 October 1954, described him as ‘nuts’. Daily Mail, 11 December 1942: 2.

Notes 6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19 20 21

231

This account of the development of police involvement in the Civil Affairs organization is based largely on an unsigned, nine-page account of the events in WO 220/528; see also, Dixon, ‘The Emergency Work of the Police Forces’, 206–10. Police Review, 5 July 1945: 401. Police Review, 7 August 1942: 385; 27 November: 569 and 18 December: 603. Egan’s appointment as HMIC was temporary in August 1942, but made permanent later in the year. FO 286/1076. Emsley, The English Police, 160–6. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 275, quoting the Appreciation and Outline Plan submitted to the chief of staff at Allied Force Headquarters, 24 March 1943. The third requirement was possible under the Police and Firemen (War Service) Act, 1939. Police Review, 26 February 1943: 98; see also 12 March: 122, where the chief constable of Blackburn is named as destined for the same course. David S. Wall, The Chief Constables of England and Wales: The Socio-Legal History of a Criminal Justice Elite (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 206–20; Police Review, 3 January 1941: 4. Hertfordshire Police Historical Collection Archive: Wilcox Papers contains a photocopy of a Register of the men who attended the Hendon College. Whereas Wall writes of 196 men, the Register names 217 men, of whom only two dropped out while students. The DNB has articles on both St. Johnston and Young. See also Eric St. Johnston, One Policeman’s Story (London and Chichester: Barry Rose, 1978). St. Johnston, One Policeman’s Story, 32. Police Review, 2 August 1940: 72, appears to describe the incident reporting a man appearing before a magistrate in Westminster charged with committing grievous bodily harm on St. Johnston. In uniform, and accompanied by another inspector, St. Johnston was taking the names of people in a Chelsea pub after closing time. One man became abusive and, surrounded by a supportive crowd, he assaulted both St. Johnston and the inspector when they left the pub. St. Johnston claimed that he brought the man down with a rugby tackle, but the man turned and kicked him in the mouth, cutting his lip. St. Johnston, One Policeman’s Story, 90–2; Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 271; WO 220/528; OUPA ESJ 1/1/12/1/7, letter of 23 December 1943. WO 220/528, Report on Police Agencies and Maffia [sic]; Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 277. John W. Reilly, Policing Birmingham: An Account of 150 Years of Police in Birmingham (Birmingham: West Midlands Police, 1990), 108. Police Review, 24 September 1943: 459, and 26 November: 577.

232

Notes

22 Hertfordshire Police Historical Collection Archive: Wilcox Papers. These papers include a typed autobiography and a copy of his report on American Police. Among the articles that he wrote were ‘America’s G-Men’, Metropolitan Police College Journal, 2, no. 1 (1936): 51–6; ‘The American Line-Up’, idem, 2, no. 2 (1936): 218–22; ‘Detectives in Fiction’, Police Journal, 7, no. 4 (1934): 486–93; ‘The Police and the Press’, Police Journal, 8, no. 2 (1935): 143–9. 23 IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of Capt. L.A. Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman (privately printed and circulated). The Records of the Bedfordshire Police give slightly different dates for some of the stages of Tompkins’s life and career; Tompkins, for example, gives his year of birth as 1906, whereas his Personnel Card gives 1904, and the Personnel Card has no entries after 1938. My thanks to Keith Jackson who runs the Bedfordshire Police Archive for the details of Tompkins’s Personnel Card and for drawing my attention to a 28-page typed recollection of his time in the Beds Police written by Tompkins in 1987. An example of his writing on police traffic issues can be found in L. Tompkins, ‘Brake Testing by the Police’, Police Journal, 12, no. 3 (1939): 39–68. In his report on the work on the British Police officers in Italy (WO 220/492) Young wrongly describes Tompkins as coming from the Metropolitan Police. 24 Hertfordshire Police Historical Collection Archive: Wilcox Papers. Autobiography, Chapter 7, p. 1. 25 NAM 2005-01-93, the papers of Frederick Arthur Fitton, an inspector in the Buckinghamshire Constabulary who joined Civil Affairs and who appears to have thrown very little away with reference to his time attending the course at Peel House; IWM, Document 7093, Private Papers of Capt. W.F. Wright. Wright was not a policeman and for Civil Affairs he specialized in food and agriculture and attended a Civil Affairs course in February 1945. 26 Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 297 and 300. 27 A.G. Puttock, First Things First (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1946), 5. 28 Peter Matthews, ‘AMGOT Men’, The Spectator, 26 August 1943: 6. 29 OUPA ESJ 12/1/6, letter of 15 December 1943; Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government … Central Organisation and Planning, 307. 30 NAM 2005-01-93, Fitton papers. 31 Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly, Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 82, 83. For comments on the Italian experience see WO 220/300, reports of Captain K. Heller and Captain G.T. Sugden. 32 NAM 2005-01-93-13, ‘Police in Areas under a Military Government’; and 2005-0193-46, ‘General Principles of Police Organisation and Administration’. 33 WO 220/492, 12. 34 Gerald Richardson, Crime Zone (London: John Long, 1959), 49, 50. 35 WO 220/492, f. 11.

Notes

233

Chapter 6 1

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

WO 220/492, ff. 2 and 14, 15. Much of the detail in Young’s report was taken from a paper prepared by Major J.A. McKay, another product of Trenchard’s college and later chief constable of Manchester and Chief HMIC. Mckay’s paper is in the Wilcox Family Papers, Italy File, ‘Report on Work of British Police Officers of Allied Commission in Italy’, 17 February 1945. Richardson, Crime Zone, 58, 59. Giuseppe Dosi, ‘The MMM War in Sicily. How Mussolini, Mori and the Italian Police smashed the Mafia’, Police Journal, 5 (1932): 184–202 and 356, 357. Dosi rapidly fell from Fascist favour when he began a campaign on behalf of Gino Girolimino arguing that he had been wrongly accused of a series of rapes and murders of girls and young women between 1924 and 1927. He was removed from Rome and, when his protests did not end, removed first to a prison and then to an asylum. He was released in 1941. In 1944, he saved documents from a fire at an SS prison in Rome and handed them to the Allies. He subsequently worked for the Allies in the prosecution of war crimes and rejoined the Italian Police at the end of the war. (See Rafaele Camposano, ed. Giuseppe Dosi, il poziotti artist ache inventò l’Interpol italiana (Rome: Ufficio Storico della Polizia di Stato, 2015.) Dickie, Mafia Brotherhoods, 336–45. Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 63; Richardson, Crime Zone, 61; John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 237, 278 and 242, 243; Tim Newark, The Mafia at War: Allied Collusion with the Mob (London: Greenhill Books, 2007), 188–96, 202–6 and 209–11; Williams, Allies and Italians under Occupation, 110, 111. NAM 2005-01-93-42, Training Letter Two, Appendix D. WO 220/492, 35, 36. Newark, The Mafia at War, 190. WO 220/492, 14; WO 220/300, report of Wilkins; Newark, The Mafia at War, 197, 198. WO 220/338, Southern Italy, Report on Civil Affairs Experiences in the Field. For ‘spearhead currencies’, specifically Italian lire captured by the British in North Africa, British Military Administration notes and US ‘Yellow Seal’ dollars, see Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 11–13. Times, 21 September 1943: 5. OUPA, St. Johnston Papers, 1/1/12/1/1, Young to Brook, 3 September 1943; 1/1/12/1/4, Young to St. Johnston, 2 October 1943. Wilcox Family Papers, Italy File, Wilcox to Brook, Report on Public Safety Experiences in Italy, 17 October 1944, fol. 25. OUPA St. Johnston papers, 1/1/12/2, Rawlings to Brook, 29 September 1943. For Lynch Blosse’s previous career see Times, 11 September 1925: 9; for his proposals

234

15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Notes to have radio links between aircraft and police cars, and car registration numbers painted on the top of cars to enable better pursuit of ‘motor bandits’ and others, see Times, 13 July 1934: 8, and 20 October 1934: 19. Police Review, 26 May 1944: 250. Police Review, 5 July 1946: 401. Lynch-Blosse’s son, said to be the youngest squadron leader in the RAF, had been captured by the Germans early in 1941: Police Review, 11 April 1941: 231. Hertfordshire Constabulary Archive, Wilcox papers, Autobiography, Chapter 7, ff. 7–10. Hertfordshire Constabulary Archive, Wilcox papers, Autobiography, Chapter 7, ff. 14, 15. Police Review, 22 October 1943: 514. Tiberinus, ‘The Camorra’, Police Journal, 1 (1928): 361–73. Dickie, Mafia Brotherhoods, 306; Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 71, the official history of AMGOT, takes the line of the wartime allies and states ‘the Camorra had been dead long before the birth of Fascism’. WO 220/492, fol. 37. For the camorra and the general problems of Naples following liberation see Dickie, Mafia Brotherhoods, 358–65. Police Review, 10 December 1943: 599. WO 220/492, ff. 33 and 40. Police Review, 19 May 1944: 236; IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 63, 64. Police Review, 23 June 1944: 294, and 2 February 195: 52; WO 220/492, ff. 22 and 24; IWM, Document 02191, Private Papers of major C.H. Butt, ff. 6, 7, 23–7 and 36. WO 220/492, 35; IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 70; for Saunders’ account see Police Review, 23 April 1982: 782, 783. IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 71, 72; WO 220/492, ff. 12 and 24, 25; WO 220/452, Policing City of Florence, June– July 1944: Police Plan. WO 220/452, Policing … Florence…: Police Plan. Bedfordshire Times, 5 January 1945: 6. William A. Lessa, Spearhead Governatore: Remembrances of the Campaign in Italy (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1985), 70. Police Review, 2 February 1945: 52, and 23 April 1982: 753. Police Review, 14 September 1945: 450. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 282, 283. IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 81. James R. Reynolds, ‘AMGOT in Italy: Impressions of a Civil Affairs Officer’, The Tablet, 22 September 1945: 137, 138. WO 220/492, p. 23; Daily Express, 19 September 1944: 3.

Notes 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51

52 53 54

235

IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 79. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 280. Daily Express, 19 September 1944: 3. Quoted in Williams, Allies and Italians under Occupation, 216, 217. Williams, Allies and Italians under Occupation, 215. Lewis, Naples ’44, 71 and 73, 74. Lessa, Spearhead Governatore, 30. WO/220/300, reports of Lt. Col. W.J. Arnold and of Major E.W. Aust; WO 220/492, fol. 4; IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 62. WO 204/2492, Italy: Internal Security, Memo from Major General Lammie, 1 October 1944. Dunnage, Mussolini’s Policemen, 26, 27 and 42; for the origins of the Carabinieri, see Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 11. WO 220/492, ff. 25 and 27. WO 204/2267, Italy: Allied Police Mission; for the comments from Young’s report; see WO 220/492, ff. 2 and 5. Wilcox Family Papers, Italy File, Wilcox to Young, ‘Notes on the Italian Police’ n.d.; WO 220/528, Report on Italian Police Agencies and Maffia [sic]. WO 204/2264, Special Police Force for Venezia Giulia; Police Review, 5 October 1945, p. 490; Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 271, 272 and 343–8; Richardson, Crime Zone, 71, 72. Police Review, 7 December 1945: 615; WO 220/492, 35–40; Richardson, Crime Zone, 75. WO 204/2265, Training Schedule for First Two Weeks. Richardson, Crime Zone, 73–5.

Chapter 7 1 2 3

4

MEPO 2/7908. The above quotations from FO 286/1076. This and the following two paragraphs rely principally on Heinz Richter, ‘The Battle of Athens and the Role of the British’, in Greece: From Resistance to Cold War, ed. Marion Sarafis (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1980); Mark Mazower, ‘Policing the AntiCommunist State in Greece, 1922–974’, in The Politics of Policing in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives, ed. Mark Mazower (Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997). Police Review, 8 December 1940: 360.

236 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes WO 170/3601; WO 170/7066. Police Review, 10 October 1941: 623. Keith Jeffery, ‘Police and Government in Northern Ireland, 1922–1969’, in The Politics of Policing in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives, ed. Mark Mazower (Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), 156; Derek Shiells, ‘The Politics of Policing: Ireland, 1919–1923’, in Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism and Public Order, 1850–1940, eds. Clive Emsley and Barabara Weinberger (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 142–9. Joost Augusteijn, The Memoirs of John M. Regan, a Catholic Officer in the RIC and RUC, 1909–48 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 212, note 4. In his memoir Regan says virtually nothing about the mission to Greece; his name regularly appears on the documents relating to the mission in FO 371. FO 371/48271, Challen to Foreign Office enclosing letter from Bernard J.F. Orna, 19 May 1945. WO 204/8933, Wickham to Smith Dorrien, 31 March 1945. FO 371/58756, Wickham to FO, 24 March 1946. FO 371/58757, Wickham to Spiro Theotokis, 24 April 1946. Georgina Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame 1945–80 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 108, 109. The Times, 9 July 1945: 3, gave the number of officers in the mission as forty; just over two month later (15 September 1945: 3) it gave the number as forty-five. It is unclear from the newspapers and from papers in FO 371 exactly how many of the men came from the RUC. Police Review, 22 June 1945: 306; 6 July: 327 and 332; 20 July: 354. FO 371/58753 and 58754 for information on Ralph and Smith; FO 371/58757 for information on Arber. There are separate files on this case in all of the files FO 371/58753 to FO 371/58757 See especially, FO 371/58755 and 58757. FO 371/58753, Ralph to Game, 14 January 1946. Heinz Richter, British Intervention in Greece: From Varkiza to Civil War, February 1945 to August 1946 (London: Merlin Press, 1986), 327, 328. WO 204/8933, Fortnightly Progress Report, 7 July–21 July 1945. FO 371/58755, Report on January 1946; FO 371/58754, Report on February 1946. FO 371/72317. FO 371/67131. David H. Close, ‘The Reconstruction of a Right-Wing State’, in The Greek Civil War, 1943–50: Studies in Polarization, ed. David H. Close (London: Routledge, 1993), 162 and 176, 177; Lee Sarafis, ‘The Policing of Deskati, 1942–1946’, in After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960, ed. Mark Mazower (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 217–19; Katherine Stefatos, ‘The Victimisation of the Body and Body Politic during the Greek Civil

Notes

237

War, 1946–49’, in Rape in Wartime, eds. Raphaëlle Branche and Fabrice Virgili (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For Noble, see Police Review, 22 February 1946: 114. For outrage, and graphic photographs, in the British press over British involvement (in this case the involvement of British troops) with people who collected heads, see Daily Mirror, 10 November 1947: 1. According to the Manchester Guardian, 13 November 1947: 8, the outrage in Britain led to the Greek minister of public order instructing that the practice of collecting heads should cease. 26 Times, 17 December 1951: 5.

Chapter 8 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

On 3 August 1945 (p. 373), for example, the Police Review reported that there were still 500 police officers involved in Civil Affairs. Also, see above pp. 123–4. CAB 101/73 letter of 2 August 1954, and diary entry 17 November 1945. Patricia Meehan, A Strange Enemy People: Germans under the British 1945–50 (London: Peter Owen, 2001), 45, 46, takes a similar critical line towards the men appointed to govern Germany. She makes no mention of any British police officers. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 294. IWM, Document 1250, Private Papers of Major A.J.M. Johnson; B.N. Reckitt, Diary of Military Government in Germany 1945 (Ilfracombe: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1989), 14. WO 220/300. NAM 2005-01-93-41. Quoted in Mario Rossi, ‘United States Military Authorities and Free France 1942–1944’, Journal of Military History, 61, no. 1 (1997), 61. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 661–96. St. Johnston, One Policeman’s Story, 95, 96. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 709, 710 and 726, 727; Flint, ‘The Development of British Civil Affairs’, 239, 240. IWM, Document 11231, Private Papers of Lt. Col. R.L.H. Nunn, vol. 1, ff. 4–7, 26–8, 43 and 50. IWM, Document 11231, Private Papers … Nunn, vol. 1, ff. 61–8 and 80–3; Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 730, n. 5 and 744; Police Review, 8 December 1944: 592; Guardian, 1 January 1970: 4. Jean-Marc Berlière, the leading expert on the history of the French police, confessed to never having seen any reference to Palfrey or to an active PSB in liberated Paris. Personal communication 3 March 2015. IWM, Document 4897, Private Papers of Capt. W.E. Abel. IWM, Document 19568, Private Papers of Lt. Eric Thornber. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 801–2.

238

Notes

16 Flint, ‘The Development of British Civil Affairs’, 235, 236. 17 The administrative detail of Civil Affairs and Allied military governments in France, Belgium and the Netherlands can be found in Donnison, Civil Affairs … North-West Europe. 18 CAB 101/73, interview with Brigadier Ian Bruce, 23 June 1954. 19 Alice Hills, Britain and the Occupation of Austria (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), especially 32–8. 20 The following account relies heavily on a printed, but restricted document, Public Safety – Austria (London: Receiver of the Metropolitan Police District, 1947), in Albert Wilcox’s papers deposited with the Hertfordshire Police. There is a manuscript version of the same document in HO 45/21998, Police: Control Commission for Germany and Austria. Report of the Public Safety Branch in Austria: Problems encountered by policemen serving in the Special Police Corps (1946–1947). I have also relied heavily on the Wilcox Family Papers, Vienna File. 21 HO 45/21998, fol. 48; Public Safety – Austria: 45. Appendix A of this document give an account of ‘A Day in the Life of a P.S.O.’ written by an anonymous officer. 22 Hertfordshire Police Archive, Wilcox Papers, Autobiography, Chapter 8, f. 9. 23 HO 45/21998, fol. 18; Public Safety – Austria (1947), 19. 24 HO 45/21998, ff. 19–20 and 34–5; Public Safety – Austria, 20 and 32. 25 Hertfordshire Police Archive, Wilcox Papers, Autobiography, Chapter 8, p. 19. 26 Wilcox Family Papers, Vienna File, Politics in the Vienna Police, Wilcox to Controller Public Safety Branch, 19 May 196. 27 IWM, Document 4897, Private Papers of … Abel; IWM, Document 19568, Private Papers of … Thornber. 28 IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 83–6. Saying ‘please’ ran counter to the ‘Do’s and Dont’s’ listed in Brigadier van Cutsem’s paper; see note 37 below. 29 Flint, ‘The Development of British Civil Affairs’, 182. 30 IWM, Document 4897, Private Papers... Abel. 31 Puttock, First Things First, 75. 32 IWM, Document 11231, Private Papers … Nunn, vol. 1, fol. 164. 33 NAM 2005-01-93-47, ‘The British Police System’. 34 Police Review, 1 March 1946: 126. 35 Police Review, 10 November 1944: 538. 36 IWM, Document 4897, Private Papers of … Abel. 37 Humphrey Jennings’s short film A Defeated People (Crown Film Unit, 1946) offers a good example. At one moment in the film, over an innocuous shot of a German Police band in what appears to be one of the training schools, the commentary explained that ‘the new German policeman has to understand he is the servant of the public not its master’. It also commented that ‘You will never get Nazi ideas out of the heads of some of the adults, particularly those away from the devastated areas’.

Notes

38

39

40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50

239

The film concluded, however, with an upbeat image of cheerful German children intercut with new German judges being sworn in and promising to uphold justice. The film was not to be shown to the general public without specific permission. NAM 2005-01-93-49, Training Letter Three (there is another copy in IWM, Document 11231, Private Papers … Nunn, vol. 2); NAM 2005-01-93-56, Vocabulary. For the background to Brigadier van Cutsem’s paper, see Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 54–6. CAB 101/73, Interviews with Kirby 1 November 1954 and with Bruce, 23 June 1954; letter from Hodgkin, 2 August 1954. The superior attitude of the army continued in Germany, where the CCG (Control Commission Germany) was referred to as Charlie Chaplin’s Grenadiers and Complete Chaos Guaranteed (see Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 53). St. Johnston, One Policeman’s Story, 109, 110. Police Review, 7 September 1945: 441; 9 November: 556; 23 November: 586; 21 December: 635. This seems to have been the old Vught Concentration Camp, though quite how Tindall was able to use part of it is unclear. The Dutch wanted it for refugees and suspected collaborators, but the Germans had filled it with civilians evacuated from their homes around Aachen. The Canadian Army also wanted it to accommodate some of their soldiers (Donnison, Civil Affairs … NorthWest Europe, 140, 141). Presumably Tindall’s student police were linked with the German refugees. Donnison, Civil Affairs … Central Organisation and Planning, 279; Puttock, First Things First, 76, 77. For the crime on the post-war Hamburg docks see Kramer, ‘Law-Abiding Germans?’. FO 1050/245. Kramer, ‘Law-Abiding Germans?,’ 254. Puttock, First Things First, 76. Quoted in David Smith, ‘“Trusted Servants of the Population”: The Public Safety Branch and the German Police in the British Zone of Germany’, in Policing and War in Europe: Criminal Justice History, vol. 16, ed. Louis A. Knafla (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 163. This paragraph, and the following, draw on Smith, as well as Stefan Noethen, Alte Kameraden und neue Kollegen: Polizei in Nordrhein-Westfalen 1945–1953 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003); Herbert Reinke ‘The Reconstruction of the Police in Post-1945 Germany’, in The Impact of World War II on Policing in North-West Europe, ed. Cyrille Fijnault (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004). FO 1050/245. IWM, Document 11231, Private Papers … Nunn, vol. 1, fol. 172; CAB 101/73 ‘Extract from an announcement by Graf von Galen, Bishop of Munster, August 1945’ with ‘comment’ by Hodgkin. IWM, Document 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 93.

240

Notes

51 Noethen, Alte Kameraden, especially 141 and 198. 52 Stephan Linck, ‘“To exploit this product of German genius … is surely good business.” Zur Pesonalpolitik der britischen Besatzungsmacht gegenüber der deutsche Kriminalpolizei nach 1945’, in Nachkriegspolizei, Sicherheit und Ordnung in Ost- und Westdeutschland 1945–1969, eds. Gerd Fürmetz, Herbert Reinke and Klaus Wienhauer (Hamburg: Ergenisse Verlag, 2001) 53 Frank Liebert, ‘“Die Dinge müssen zur Ruhe kommen, man muss einem Strich dadurch Machen” Die politische “Säuberung” in der niedersächsischen Polizei 1946–1951’, in Nachkriegspolizei, Sicherheit und Ordnung in Ost- und Westdeutschland 1945–1969, eds. Gerd Fürmetz, Herbert Reinke and Klaus Wienhauer (Hamburg: Ergenisse Verlag, 2001), 79 and 84–85; Frank Liebert, ‘Von der Diktatur zur Demokratie. Die niedersächsische polizei von 1945 bis 1951’, in Von der Polizei der Obrigkeit zum Dienstleiter für öffentliche Sicherheit. Festschrift zum 100 Gebäudejubliäum des Polizeipräsidiums Hannover 1903–2003, ed. HansJoachim Heuer (Hilden: Verlag Deutsche Polizeiliteratur, 2003), 152–4 and 174–5. Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, 211–12 makes much of the Schulte incident, but misses the final ‘e’ off his name and appears to have misinterpreted some of the documentation. 54 Police Review, 2 November 1945: 538; 7 December: 606; 4 January 1946: 4. Plumb had been a detective inspector, but he blotted his copybook early in 1942 after ‘selling silk stockings and submitting a false report to his superior’. My thanks to Keith Jackson who runs the Bedfordshire Police Archive for this information. 55 Police Review, 12 October 1945: 497, 498 and 502. 56 Police Review, 9 November 1945: 559. 57 Donnison, Civil Affairs … North-West Europe, 219. 58 FO 936/741, Operation ‘Sparkler’ and large scale Black Market activities, 1946–47; FO 936/743, Allegations and Investigations of Corruption in C.C.G. British Zone. The quotation about the British taxpayer is from a cutting from the Daily Mirror, 9 July 1946: 2. 59 FO 936/744, Services of Police CID Men in Germany to detect large scale Black Market Dealings, 1946.

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5

Police Review, 15 June 1945: 289. Police Review, 13 July 1945: 339. Police Review, 24 November 1944: 561–2; and see letter from ‘Lieut.’: 563. IWM, Document 24269, Papers of Major William Lamb. F.O. 371/58757, Clack File.

Notes 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29

241

Personal communication from Lawrie Austin, 26 July 2013; for Austin going undercover in the ‘glasshouse’ see Hearn, Desert Assignment, 72. Personal communication from Chris Forester, 24 July 2013. Dust jacket note on the author, Hearn, A Duty to the Public. Hearn Papers. S. Berlinguer to Hearn, 21 July 1969; Hearn to Berlinguer, 29 July 1969. Hearn, Foreign Assignment, 190; Hearn, Desert Assignment, 192; Hearn, A Duty to the Public, 23, 24. Hearn, A Duty to the Public, 23. See the historical website at http://www.surrey-constabulary.com. I am also grateful to Bob Bartlett for additional information on Hearn’s career. Hearn, A Duty to the Public, 12. George Churchill-Coleman (1938–2015) to whom I am greatly indebted for sight of Hearn’s private papers and for information about the man. Police Review, 26 May 1944: 246, and 21 July: 346; Daily Mirror, 15 July 1944: 8. See above, p. 35. Dibbens, Dibbens’ Diaries, 36 and 61. Dibbens’s Record of Service indicates that he while he rejoined the police in March 1946 as a detective sergeant, he was promoted to detective inspector the following December. Police Review, 2 February 1945: 52. MPHC, People Files, Harold J. Dibbens, Mrs D.K. Ellis to Dibbens, 21 September 1990. MPHC Central Records of Service. MPHC Central Records of Service. CAB 101/73, interview with St. Johnston, 19 April 1953. Phillips, Guns, Drugs and Deserters, 23, 24. CRMP Archive, ‘Obituary, Lt. Col. Kenneth Gordon Thrift, OBE, 31 December 1909–7 December 1988.’ MPHC Central Records of Service. IWM, (D) 20713, Private Papers of … Tompkins, A Nomadic Policeman, 94–6. Richardson, Crime Zone. The Police of Tangier had been created by the Treaty of Algeciras which had concluded the Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906. The force consisted of about 200 men, with its commanders and trainers from Europe and its rank and file from the local population. Police Review, 6 July 1945: 327, and 4 January 1946: 8. Young makes no mention of Harvey in his list of officers who served with him in Italy, which is probably a mistake. There are other mistakes in this account. Leslie Tompkins, for example, is described as a Metropolitan Police, rather than a Bedfordshire Police, officer (WO 220/492, f. 38). WO 220/492; HO 45/21998; Cowley and Todd, The History of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 80.

242

Notes

30 Times, 17 October 1961: 15; WO/2264, Special Police Force for Venezia Giulia, Report of Visit of Provost Marshal (BR) to Venezia Giulia, 24 June 1945; Times, 17 October 1961: 15. 31 Dobson, Policing in Lancashire 1839–1989 (Blackpool: Landy Publishing, 1989), 70 and 76; Police Review, 8 December 1944; Guardian, 1 January 1970: 4; 7 March 1972: 7; 18 September 1973: 3. 32 Times, 20 January 1950: 8. 33 Quoted in Leon Comber, Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–60: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency (Melbourne: Monash University Press and Monash Asia Institute, 2008), 181. 34 Wolfgang Friedman, The Allied Military Government of Germany (London: Stevens and Sons, 1947), 106. 35 Klaus Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik Zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Inner Sicherheit: Die turbulenten sechziger Jahre (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003); Jonathan Dunnage, ‘Historical Perspectives on Democratic Police Reform: Institutional Memory, Narratives and Ritual in the Post-War Italian Police, 1948– 1963’, Policing and Society (advance publication online November 2015 consulted at http://dx.doi.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/10.108/104394463.2015.1102254) (accessed 10 January 2016). 36 Quoted in Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, 214. 37 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1997), 54, 55. 38 Clive Emsley, ‘Marketing the Brand: Exporting British Police Models, 1829–1950’, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 6, no. 1 (2012): 53. Newing went on to be the Assistant Commissioner of the CID on Bermuda. 39 The Revue de la gendarmerie nationale devoted its entire edition for September 2015 to Opérations sous mandate international et forces de police à statut militaire focussing on the stabilization of states and civil affairs operations. 40 Quotations taken from interviews conducted by various officers as a part of ESRC Research Grant RES-000-22-392, ‘Exploring UK Policing Practices as a Blueprint for Police Reform: The Overseas Deployment of UK Police Officers 1989–2009’. My thanks to Georgie Sinclair for collecting and passing these quotations to me. See, in general, Georgina Sinclair, ‘Exporting the UK Police Brand: The RUC-PSNI and the International Policing Agenda’, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 6, no. 1 (2012): 55–66. 41 Quoted in Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 160. 42 Report of Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary (London: HMSO, 2016), 79, para 592. 43 Quoted in B.K. Greener, The New International Policing (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 81; and see also, inter alia, Robert M. Perito, Where Is the Lone Ranger When We Need Him? America’s Search for a Postconflict Stability Force (Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace, 2004); Sinclair, ‘Exporting the Brand’.

Bibliography Archival sources The National Archives FO 286 FO 371 FO 936 FO 1050 HO 45 MEPO 2 WO 71 Courts martial WO 166 WO 167 WO 169 Provost Units SIB WO 170 War Diaries SIB, Italy WO 171 War Diaries SIB, North-West Europe WO 204 WO 220 WO 373

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Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes AA (Automobile Association) 13, 28 Abel, William E. (CA) 175–6, 185–6, 188–9 Algiers 41, 43, 46, 50, 103, 105, 130, 205 American Military Police 55, 60, 108, 150 AMGOT 49, 51–2, 61, 111–12, 134, 136–7, 153, 172, 174, 208 Anguilla (Operation Sheepskin) 1–3, 15 Antwerp 40, 74, 76, 79–82, 84, 91 Arber, C.I. (Greece) 164 Ashton, Leonard (CA and Greece) 164, 179, 207 Attfield, Philip (SIB) 26, 48, 219 n.11 Aust, Edward (CA) 150 Austin, Archibald (‘Bill’/‘Bunny’) (SIB) 200 Badoglio, Marshal Pietro 106 Baker, Henry (CA and Greece) 164 Baldwin, Reginald A. (SIB) 92 Bari 50, 59, 65, 102, 105–11, 152 Bergen-Belsen 86–7 Baxendale, John (SIB) 61 Berlin 90–1, 186, 190, 197 Bilyard, William (SIB) 26, 50, 55, 58–9, 65 Blum, Léon 20 Blue Lamp, The 210 Bolland, W.W.J. 178 Bolt, C.E. (CA) 154 Boobyer, Alfred 157 Bricknell, Percival Harold (CA) 179–80 Briggs, Charles (CA) 130–1 British civilian police detectives 8–10, 14, 19–20, 23–5, 35, 37, 42, 48, 58–9, 99, 123, 197, 205–6, 213 national/self-image 2, 4–6, 8, 96–7, 100, 103–4, 115, 129–30, 149, 187–8, 196, 199, 210, 213–14, 216

British colonial and imperial police 119–21, 138, 155, 157, 162–5, 178, 182, 211 British Military Police (‘Redcaps’) 1–3, 12–13, 15, 21–3, 26–8, 34, 36, 39–40, 57–8, 64, 69, 74, 76, 81, 83, 88, 93, 99, 105, 108, 128, 148, 150, 153, 179, 181–2, 197, 206, 217 n.1. See also Provost Brook, Lt. Col. Sir Frank 118, 120, 123–4, 137 Brussels 20, 74–5, 82, 85, 89, 91, 176 Buchan, John 40 Bye, Edward (CA) 144, 151 Caen 72–3, 82 Calder, Robert W. (SIB) 109 camorra 49, 107, 140–1 Campion, Clarence Edgar (SIB) 23–9, 31, 33–7, 39–40, 42–4, 50, 69, 158, 206 carabinieri 49, 55, 63, 134, 136, 139–44, 147–55, 158, 185, 211 Carson, R. (CA) 190 Challen, Charles 162–3 Chapet de Saintonge, Richard 212–13 Cherbourg 80, 174, 209 Chilcot Inquiry 215 Churchill, Winston Spencer 84, 159, 162, 172 Civil Affairs selection 118–20, 124–6, 129 spearhead officer 143–7, 154, 173, 177, 185 training centre Hendon (Peel House) 120, 123–5, 127, 129, 137, 169, 171, 185, 189 training centre Wimbledon (Southlands) 117, 120, 123–9, 137, 139, 169–70, 178, 185, 189

Index training curriculum 127–9 training schools in Europe 155, 165, 181, 183, 190–2, 195, 212 Clewes, Cyril (SIB) 81 Coburn, Harry (SIB) 99, 103 Coe, John (SIB) 48 Coke, Col. Jacynth d’E.F. 118, 158, 160 Concannon, John 157–9 Cooper, Horace (Old Bill) (SIB) 27, 36–7, 50, 64–5, 96, 99, 102, 108–11 Corney, George (SIB) 84 Coulet, François 173–4 criminal gangs 52, 55, 60, 65, 74, 83–5, 88, 100, 108, 107–8, 110, 140–1, 143, 149, 166. See also camorra; mafia; ‘ndrangheta crime black market 3, 41, 51–2, 55, 69, 73–5, 79, 83, 85, 88–90, 93, 107–8, 117, 135–6, 140–1, 143–4, 146–7, 150, 160, 175, 182, 184, 191–2, 195, 197, 207 dock and supply theft 3, 20–3, 27, 29, 36, 39, 41, 45, 51–2, 56, 81–4, 90, 104, 160, 191, 213 drug smuggling/usage 42, 46–8, 103, 110 fights (generally between soldiers) 22, 34, 41, 56, 90, 107 looting 69, 72–3, 83, 88–9, 108, 185 murder 27, 41–2, 46, 51, 55, 57–62, 72, 75, 78, 88–9, 103, 146, 160, 166, 196 rape and sexual assault 22, 28, 46, 51, 56–8, 62, 72–3, 85–6, 88–9, 104, 160, 167, 184 robbery 22, 50–1, 55–6, 75, 78, 88, 91, 107 war crimes 59–62, 72, 86–8, 147, 176, 193–4 Critchley, T.A. 5 Crocker, R.A. (Ronnie) (SIB) 25–6, 36, 44, 46, 206 Dawson, C.J. (SIB) 60–1, 63 D-Day (Operation Overlord) 3, 14, 69, 71–3, 77, 91, 127, 172 De Gaulle, Gen. Charles 43, 172–3, 209 Departmental Committee on Detectives 7, 9–10, 35

253

Dibbens, Harold (SIB) 26–8, 31, 33, 36–7, 42, 45, 47–8, 101, 205, 210, 241 n.17 Dixon, A.L. 8 Doherty, Walter (CA) 140 Donaldson, R. 197 DPs (displaced persons) 85, 88–90, 166, 192, 196 Dunkirk 28–9, 31–3, 36–7, 87, 174, 205 Düsseldorf 35, 92, 190 Dyer, Bertrand (CA) 136–7 EAM (National Liberation Front, Greece) 157, 159 Edmondson, Charles (SIB) 62 Egan, Major Michael J. 118 Eisenhower, Gen. Dwight D. 171, 175, 215 ELAS (National People’s Liberation Army, Greece) 157, 159–60 Elliott, Frank (SIB) 27, 39, 43–4, 206 Ellis, John (Jack) (SIB) 25–7, 31, 33–6, 42, 50, 60, 69–70, 205 EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) 211 Farran, Roy 48 Fawcett, David J. (SIB) 70–1, 73–7, 79, 85–6, 91–3 Ferguson, N.G. (CA) 178 Fergusson, Brig. Bernard 48 FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur) 174 Figl, Leopold 181, 183 Fitton, Frederick Arthur 171, 196 Flint, Edward R. 3 Florence 62, 65, 144, 146 Fox, Alfred (SIB) 86–7, 89 Francis, Charles (CA) 143 Fraser, George MacDonald 95–6, 99, 111 FTP (Francs Tireurs et Partisans) 174 Gaddafi, Muammar 216 Galbraith, Robert (J.K. Rowling) 3 Game, Sir Philip 25, 31, 33, 165 gendarmerie 7, 211 Austrian 181 Belgian 176 European 214 French 5, 19–20, 43, 74–5, 150, 219 n.1

254 German 186, 192 Greek 157–63, 165–7 Genn, Lt. Col. Leo 86–7 Genovese, Vito 51 Gestapo 5, 102, 194 Giraud, Gen. Henri 43 Golden, Major Harold 124 Good, Maurice (SIB) 26, 36 Green, Henry (SIB) 26, 31 Greenlees, Major Ian 105, 229 n.32 Gross, Hans 8 Guardia di Finanza 63, 136, 147, 149 Halland, Col. Gordon H.R. 122, 164, 187–8, 190, 192–3, 196–7 Halliday, Sir Frederick Loch 157–8, 162 Hamburg 84–5, 89, 92, 191–2 Harding, Sir John 209 Harpur, Claude James Spencer 39–40 Harvey, Joseph (CA) 208, 241 n.28 Hatherill, George 9, 20–5 Hayward, Det. Insp. T. 197 Hayward, Frederick (CA and Greece) 164 Hearn, Cyril Victor (Dickie) (SIB) 43, 66, 96–104, 107–12, 130, 155, 169, 178, 201–6, 210, 229 n.29 Heathcote, Harold (SIB) 74, 77 Heddon, Bill (SIB) 26, 29 Hitler, Adolf 61, 177, 186, 194, 210 Hitler Youth 88, 185 Hobbs, Roy (CA) 141, 154 Hodgkin, Brig. A.E. 169, 193 Hooper, George (SIB) 26, 31 Hopkins, David (CA) 135, 154 Hordern, Captain Sir Archibald 208 Hort, Frank A.G. (SIB) 75–7 Horton, Walter G. (SIB) 109 Howard, John 14 Howden, F. (SIB) 71–3, 86, 92 Howgrave-Graham, H.M. 5 Howley, Lt. Col. Frank O. 173–5 Hunter, Thomas (CA) 180 Hussein, Saddam 216 Hutchins, Bill (SIB and CA) 50, 62–3, 65–6, 102, 111, 169, 178 Iraq 1, 40, 43–4, 215–16 James, Charles (SIB) 26, 32–3 Jewish Independence Fighters 45, 47–8

Index Johnson, Major A.J.M. (CA) 124 Johnson, William (CA) 124 Kelleher, Paddy (SIB) 99–100 Kendal, Sir Norman 19–20, 24–5, 27, 33, 130, 205 Kirby, Major Gen. Stanley W. 189 Kodin, Andrey (SIB) 86, 93 Kramer, Josef 87 KRIPO (Kriminalpolizei) 92, 191, 194–5, 197 Larmour, John Sloan 32 Laurie, Sir Percy 33, 40 Le Carré, John 40 Lee, Brig. S. Swinton 116–18 Leotatis, Costas 48 Lessa, William 150 Lewis, Norman 51–2, 57, 149 Lewis, Thomas (CA) 90 Lille 75–7, 84, 189 Lippman, Walter 213 Locard, Edmond 9 Looms, Cornelius (CA) 203–5 Lynch Blosse, C.E. 138, 233 n.14 MacCallum, P.W. (Jock) (SIB) 111 mafia 49, 107, 134–6, 140 McGee, Major Michael James 44 McGregor, Alistair 48 McKay, John A. (CA) 208–9 McKinnon, J. (SIB) 52, 63 Manifold, G.W. (CA) 146 Martin, T.W. (CA and Greece) 164 Massinberd-Munday, Frank (CA) 180 Middleton, Norman 61, 63 Mondanel, Pierre 19–20 Montgomery, Field Marshal B.L. 84, 169, 189 Moon, Tom (SIB) 110 Mori, Cesare 134, 136 Moriarty, Cecil C.H. 122–3, 129 Morrish, Reginald 9, 34, 220 n.28 Morrison, Herbert 6, 160, 199 Mountford, Leonard Bertram (Monty) (SIB) 44 Moylan, Sir John 5 Mumford, John Henry Frederick (SIB) 76 Murat, Marshal Joachim 106 Murphy, ‘Spud’ (SIB) 99–100

Index Mussolini, Benito 56, 101, 106, 108, 134–5, 141–2, 147, 150–1, 210 Mytchett (Military Police Training School) 26, 34, 36–7, 40, 42, 50, 60, 69–71, 76, 86, 102, 205 Naples 49–52, 55, 57, 62–3, 65, 67, 85, 106–8, 139–41, 147, 149–50, 222 n.42 Napoleon 80, 106 ‘ndrangheta 49, 107 Neilans, Joseph 124 Newing, Cecil 214 Newsam, Sir Frank 118 Nicholls, Cyril Charles (SIB) 20, 25–6 Nicholson, Major Geoffrey 98–9 Noble, Charles (CA and Greece) 164, 183 Noble, R.A. (CA) 163, 167, 208 No Mean City 140 Nott-Bowyer, John R.H. 178, 180 Operation Husky (landing in Sicily) 49–50, 125, 130 Operation Market Garden 180 Operation Slapstick (Operation Bedlam, landing at Taranto) 105 Orwell, George 97, 100, 203 Osmond, Douglas (CA) 188, 208 Owen, Edward (SIB) 160 Paiforce (Persia and Iraq Command) 40, 43–5 Palermo 55–6, 130, 134, 136, 208 Palestine 40, 47–8, 101, 161, 163 Palfrey, William J.H. (CA) 174–5, 209–11 Pamen, Ignaz 183 Panaglos, Gen. Theodoros 158 Papandreou, George 159 Paris 19–20, 77, 82, 90, 170, 174–5, 210 partisans Greek 167. See also ELAS Italian 61, 65, 144–5, 147–51, 155, 179, 185 Yugoslav 65–6, 111, 153, 179–80 Payne, Fred (Ginger) 99–100, 102, 110 Peel, Sir Robert 129 Pétain, Marshal Philippe 172 Phillips, Norman 27, 39–40 Pickering, Stanley (CA) 117–18, 124, 141, 209

255

Pius XII, Pope 142–3 Plumb, Stanley (CA) 195, 240 n.54 police American 100–1, 140, 154, 188 Austrian 177, 180–4 Belgian 75, 81, 83, 176 French 5, 9, 19–20, 24, 43, 47, 72, 74–5, 79, 100–1, 173–4 German 4–5, 47, 91–3, 185–96, 207, 212 Greek 157–67 Italian 5, 46, 55, 62–3, 66, 101–2, 134, 136, 145–7, 149–53, 185, 207, 212 Palestine 44, 48, 165 Soviet 5 Venezia Giulia 153–5, 207, 209 Police Federation 6, 103, 121, 229 n.29 Pollard, Frank (SIB) 26, 70–2, 74, 87, 205–6 Pollock, John (CA) 142–3, 148–9 prostitutes, prostitution 47, 51, 58, 140 Provost Battery 184 Ports Provost Companies 23, 28–30, 52, 82–3, 206 Provost Companies 12, 19, 28–9, 45, 55, 58, 65, 71–4, 90, 143, 206 Purslow, Ernest (SIB) 26, 31, 205, 225 n.12 Purslow, Harold (SIB) 72, 76, 83, 85, 89, 91–2, 225 n.12 Puttock, Capt. A.G. (CA) 127, 192 Raisbeck, Albert (SIB) 26, 31, 37, 206 Ralph, A.G. (Greece) 163, 165 Rawlings, Horatio (CA) 137–8 Read, Trevitt 157 Regan, John (Greece) 161–2 Reith, Charles 5–6, 97, 187, 199 Rennell, Major Gen. Francis, Baron Rennell of Rodd 134–5 Reynolds, James (CA) 147–8 RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) 7–8, 118–19, 161 Richardson, Gerald (CA) 130, 133–4, 153–5, 207–9 Rignall, James W. (SIB) 25–6, 29–30, 206 Ripley, George (SIB) 26–7, 37, 206 Robertson, D. (CA) 154 Rochart, Pierre 173 Rome 49, 52, 55, 59–60, 62–3, 133, 142–4, 146–9, 151–2, 154, 201

256 Ronnie, Major (CA) 151 Rowbottom, Major (CA) 153 Rowlerson, Arthur William (CA) 130–1 RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) 7–8, 99–100, 119, 161–3, 208, 211, 215 Russell, Edward, Baron Russell of Liverpool 57–8 Rutherford, Graham (CA) 177, 179, 208 St. Johnston, Eric (CA) 120–5, 128, 137, 160, 170, 172–3, 189–90, 200, 206, 208–10, 231 n.17 Saunders, Alfred (CA) 142–4, 146 Saunders, G.T. (Sandy) (SIB) 50, 55 Schulte, Adolf 194–5 Schumacher, Kurt 195 Scotten, Capt. W.E. 134 Sharman, William (Shagg) (SIB) 99–103, 108–11, 130, 200–02 SIB aid from foreign police 43, 59, 92, 160 establishment of a section 46, 70, 99 lack of equipment and support 63–5, 73, 76–7, 81–2, 7, 91–2 recruits to 3, 14, 24–7, 74 training 34–5, 70–1 Sillitoe, Percy 140 Simmons, W.J. (CA) 190 Smith, R.J. (Greece) 163–4 Southcott, E.R. (SIB) 90 Special Air Service (SAS) 48, 61, 88 Special Branch (British – especially in Metropolitan Police) 8, 20, 26, 48, 102, 178, 211 Stalin, Josef 159 Standing Joint Committees (SJC) 6–7, 14, 118, 120, 195–6, 198 Stevens, Lt. Col. Sir Frank 11, 126 Stewart, Col. J.D. 190 Still, Bob (SIB) 99 Stimson, Henry L. 172 Strand, Henry (CA) 135 Sykes, Major (CA) 153 Syria 42–3 Tapsell, Alan (SIB) 110 Tarry, Frederick 199 Tavinor, M.H. (CA) 178 Taylor, James (CA) 144 Third Man, The 182

Index Thornber, Eric (CA) 176, 180, 185, 189 Thorp, Det. Supt. A. 197 Thrift, Kenneth (SIB) 27, 36, 43–4, 207 Tindall, R.B. (CA) 190, 239 n.41 Toes, L.W. (CA) 141 Tompkins, Leslie A. (CA) 126–7, 129, 141–8, 150, 185, 190, 207, 232 n.23 Trenchard, Hugh, 1st Viscount 121–2, 125 Trenchard’s Police College 121–2, 125, 130, 133, 136, 170, 180, 207–9, 214 Triboulet, Raymond 173 Trump, Victor Ernest (SIB) 73 Tunis 50, 103–4, 110, 137, 205 Tuohy, Ferdinand 117, 215 V weapons 82–4 Venezia Giulia 3, 66, 153–5, 207, 209 Vienna 66, 151, 181–4 Walker, Capt. Gerald 44 Wanstall, Antony (SIB) 12 War Crimes Investigation Units 61–3, 86–8 Warman, Richard S. (SIB) 71–3, 75, 82, 91 Warner, Fred (Manfred Werner) 87 watch committees 7, 14, 118, 124, 195, 198 Waugh, Evelyn 105, 107 Wavell, Gen. A.P. 116 Way, Andrew Greville Parry (CA) 2, 14–15, 125–6 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of 12 ‘Werwolf ’ groups 88 West, George (SIB) 29, 31–3 Whatley, Percy (SIB) 42 White, Geoffrey (CA) 153–4, 208–9, 211 Whittaker, N.L. (SIB) 82–4 Whyte, John (CA) 141 Wickham, Sir Charles 160–7, 200, 207–8 Wilcox, Albert (CA) 125–7, 138–40, 143, 151, 181–4, 208 Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands 177 Wilkins, William I.R. (CA) 136, 170–1, 207–8 Wilsden, Sammy (SIB) 50 Wilson, Col. O.W. 140 Wright, Gordon (SIB) 48 Young, Arthur E. (CA) 120–6, 130, 133–4, 137–8, 149–51, 160, 165, 178, 208, 211–12