Peter Kemp (writer)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Peter Kemp

Requetés
Spanish Legion
Battles/warsSpanish Civil War
World War II
War in Vietnam
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge

Peter Mant MacIntyre Kemp (19 August 1915 – 30 October 1993) was an English soldier and writer. He became notable for his participation in the Spanish Civil War and, during World War II, as a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).[1]

Early life

The son of a

British India,[2] Kemp was educated at Wellington College. He studied classics and law at Trinity College, Cambridge,[3] where he was secretary of the Conservative Association.[4]

Spanish Civil War

As a staunch

Protestant background.[8] On one occasion, his unit captured a Belfast man who had deserted from the Republican side. Kemp attempted to intervene on the man's behalf but was ordered to supervise his execution.[9][10]

Wounded several times, he continued fighting until he suffered a shattered jaw and badly damaged hands in the summer of 1938, the result of a mortar bomb, and was repatriated to England.[1] Just before he left Spain, he had a rare informal private meeting with Francisco Franco.[11]

World War II

Xhelal Staravecke shaking hands with Major David Smiley at Shtylla, August 1943 during the first SOE mission to Albania. To the right, Peter Kemp

Having barely recovered from his jaw injury, Kemp had a chance meeting with Sir

Occupied France and one mission 'Operation Dryad' an official record is cited by (along with later life)[12] was on 2–3 September 1942, where the seven man German garrison of Casquets lighthouse, off Alderney were taken prisoner. Additional details from Gus March-Phillipps' official report of Operation Dryad and Peter Kemp's own recollections of his accidental wounding during Dryad from "No Colours or Crest" are available in Post 7[13]
Another SSRF raid, Operation Fahrenheit led by him, was to capture German servicemen for interrogation by attacking a signals station at Pointe de Plouezec on the north Brittany coast. On the night of the 11/12 November 1942, the mission was not a success [14][15]

He was then posted to Albania, where he spent 10 months in clandestine operations. It was here that Kemp met future leader of Albania Enver Hoxha while working with the communist National Liberation Front. Kemp was frustrated by the inaction and what he saw as dishonest nature of the communist partisans. On one occasion, brigade-commander Mehmet Shehu, leading 800 partisans, had refused to attack 20 German soldiers out of fear of suffering too many casualties.[16] It wasn't until after the war that Kemp learned that Shehu was preserving his troops as much as he could for a future war against non communists. Kemp regarded Shehu as a "gunman and a thug" and the LANÇ as a collection of dishonest murderers who were more concerned with attacking rival partisan groups than the Germans.[17]

In August 1944, Kemp was informed that his next mission would be in Poland assisting the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. The mission was put on hold due to pushback from Stalin who wanted neither the British nor Americans to support the Poles. SOE eventually decided to go ahead with a mission working with the Polish resistance, but by this time, the Warsaw Uprising had already been suppressed. Under the command of Bill Hudson, Kemp and other SOE agents dropped into south eastern Poland, near Częstochowa, with the goal of assisting the Home Army in an advisory role. It was the Mission Freston in German-occupied Poland (1939–1945). On New Years Day, the farm the SOE was using as an HQ was attacked by Germans, and Kemp and the other SOE agents barely escaped while the resistance fighters held back German half tracks to cover their retreat. After the Red Army had taken all of Poland, Hudson had received orders from London to turn themselves over to the Soviets. Expecting to be welcomed as friends and allies, Hudson, Kemp, and the rest of the SOE were instead imprisoned by the NKVD. During this imprisonment, they were regularly questioned and interrogated. Kemp believes they did this due to the ongoing Yalta Conference to see what the future of British-Soviet relations would be like before releasing SOE agents.[18] Released after three weeks in prison, Kemp spent two further months in Moscow awaiting an exit visa before finally being turned back over to the British Army.

For his next mission, he was posted to

Siam in the summer of 1945, where he helped safeguard French refugees from Indochina. He then ran guns to the French across the border in Laos in order to fight Viet Minh
insurrectionists.

His final SOE mission was to Bali, for four months (December 1945-March 1946), then part of the Dutch East Indies, occupied by Japanese forces until March 1946, he was tasked to discover the Japanese intentions and facilitate their surrender.[19][20][21]

Tuberculosis forced his retirement from the British Army once the war had ended.[18]

Later life

After the war, Kemp sold insurance policies and turned to writing. As a correspondent for

1956 Hungarian Revolution and helped some students escape to Austria. He was present in the Belgian Congo during the troubles that led to independence as Zaire, and he also covered revolutions in Central and South America. He was the foreign correspondent for The Spectator in Rhodesia and reported from there in December 1979.[22]

His first memoir, Mine Were of Trouble, described his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Later, No Colours or Crest described his wartime experiences in Albania and Poland as a Special Operations Executive agent and Alms for Oblivion described his postwar experiences in Bali and Lombok.

Before his death, he produced an autobiography in 1990, The Thorns of Memory.[23]

Books

  • Mine Were of Trouble (1957)
  • No Colours or Crest (1958)
  • Alms for Oblivion (1962)
  • The three memoirs have now been published together as Ten Years of War (2020)
  • The Thorns of Memory (1990)
  • Kemp also collaborated with David Smiley, a fellow member of SOE, on Arabian Assignment (1975)

References

  1. ^ a b Foot, M. R. D. (4 November 1993). "Obituary: Peter Kemp". The Independent. Archived from the original on 8 November 2012. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
  2. Independent.co.uk
    . 23 October 2011.
  3. Independent.co.uk
    . 23 October 2011.
  4. ^ Kemp, Peter. Mine were of trouble.
  5. ^ Othen, Christopher (3 July 2016). "Peter Kemp of the Spanish Foreign Legion". Christopher Othen. Archived from the original on 12 August 2019. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
  6. Cassell & Company
    . p. 5.
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4088-5398-6
    .
  8. ^ Keene, Judith (Fighting for Franco) (27 September 2006). "The other volunteers". BBC News UK Magazine. Archived from the original on 8 April 2014. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
  9. ISBN 978-1-901341-13-3
    .
  10. ^ Tremlett (2020) p.467
  11. ISBN 978-1-85285-593-2
    .
  12. ^ "Small Scale Raiding Force". Archived from the original on 16 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  13. ^ "Major Peter Kemp, SOE: The man just liked fighting — a true war lover | WW2Talk". Archived from the original on 21 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  14. ^ "The Small Scale Raiding Force - SSRF". Archived from the original on 30 March 2019. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  15. ^ "Operation "Fahrenheit" : The story of a small-scale Commando raid from Dartmouth to the Pointe de Plouézec, Brittany". Archived from the original on 17 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  16. ^ Nettina, Adam (30 June 2016). "Peter Kemp: 'Set Europe Ablaze'". HistoryNet. Archived from the original on 19 April 2021. Retrieved 22 March 2021.
  17. ^ "Set Europe Ablaze". Imperial War Museums. Archived from the original on 1 June 2021. Retrieved 23 March 2021.
  18. ^ a b "Set Europe Ablaze". Imperial War Museums. Archived from the original on 1 June 2021. Retrieved 27 March 2021.
  19. ^ "KEMP, Peter Mant MacIntyre | ͏". Archived from the original on 21 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  20. ^ "HMS Loch Eck, frigate, later HMNZS Hawae". Archived from the original on 11 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  21. ^ https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/archief/2.22.21/invnr/179/file/NL-HaNA_2.22.21_179_0001 Archived 11 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine in English
  22. ^ "Military stalemate in Rhodesia » 22 Dec 1979 » the Spectator Archive". Archived from the original on 18 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
  23. ^ "Wherever the cold war was hottest . . . » 27 Oct 1990 » the Spectator Archive". Archived from the original on 18 April 2021. Retrieved 20 July 2021.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Kemp_(writer)&oldid=1218670467"