Category: Article

The award this year goes to 63 MI Company  Presented to CO 6 MI Battalion, Lt Col Andy Hetherington on Corps Day by Mr Tony  Hetherington, chairman FICM.  Major Francis Edward Foley CMG was a British Secret Intelligence Service officer. As a  passport control officer for the British embassy in Berlin, Foley bent the rules and helped thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht and before the outbreak of the Second World War. He is officially recognised as a British Hero of the  Holocaust.  Following the war, Foley retired to Stourbridge where he lived with his wife…

By Lester Hillman Spitalfields, immediately east of the City of London, is an area historically associated with the Huguenot community. But place names point to ownership roots in Bedfordshire. Osborn is the family name long associated with Chicksands Priory and from Whitechapel, Osborn Street becomes Brick Lane (today famous for curry houses). Chicksand Street is 270 yards long, incorporating Osborn Place one of many courts and alleys that have disappeared. A walk down Chicksand Street offers few clues to life and times in the past, but ‘Fashion Street’ nearby soon brings you to what was once Borer’s Passage where a…

By Harry Fecitt MBE TD The East African Campaign of the Great War Between 1914 and 1918 German and Allied antagonists fought hard battles over some of the most inhospitable  country in Africa. The fighting and associated military activity ranged over today’s nations of Kenya, Uganda,  Tanzania, Malawi, Ruanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, and finally ended in Zambia.  Many troops moved north to fight from South Africa and Zimbabwe.  The enemy to Britain and her Allies was the stubborn and well-managed Schutztruppe based in German East Africa  (Tanzania). This force was led by General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a…

By Harry Fecitt MBE TD, (ex-22 Intelligence Company and various armies)  Hero No. 2: SAMUEL NEWLAND DSO  Indian Army Intelligence Corps  Now that the monsoon has arrived and the G.S.I.z forward parties, which  have been operating in 4th Corps, are coming back, I would like at this  juncture to express my appreciation of the work which these parties have  been doing.  I know well enough the hard conditions under which they have been living  and operating for weeks on end, I know too the strain that the work  imposes on all members of the parties – it has, in fact,…

By Paul Croxson It  was  a  simple  enough  request,  ‘What  did  I  know  about  the  Intelligence  schools and  their  numbering?’ ‘Not a lot,’ was the answer. The title ‘schools’ seemed designed to confuse the enemy.  Their primary function was to direct the search for specific German signals. Not much more than this  was recorded.  To be honest, I hadn’t looked at this subject for a number of years during my Sigint searches and so  just  sent  off  some  scrambled  notes that I  happened  to  have following  some  research  for the  late  Alan Edwards. When I later read them, I realised…

National Service On 7 May 1963, 23819209 Private Fred Turner cooked his last breakfast at  the home of  the 13/18  Hussars. A few days earlier on 4 May 1963, Lieutenant Richard Vaughan, Royal Army Pay Corps had  left his unit in Germany and  travelled back  to England  to be officially discharged on 13 May. What  was  so special  about  these  two  soldiers? They  were  candidates  for  being  thought  to  be  the  last  serving National Servicemen. If you base the choice of who was the last then it was Lt Vaughan but  Pte Turner  had  the  dubious  honour  of  having  the …

By Harry Fecitt MBE TD . . . however many of the latest spies’ wonder-toys they had in their cupboards,  however many magic codes they broke, and hot signals chatter they listened to, and  brilliant deductions they pulled out of the aether regarding the enemy’s  organisational structures, or lack of them, and internecine fights they had, and  however many tame journalists were vying to trade their questionable gems of  knowledge for slanted tip-offs and something for the back pocket, in the end it was  the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defence  scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military…

Introduction By early 1917 the First World War was a stalemate. Germany had known, perhaps from as early as 1915 that it could not achieve an advantageous peace through its efforts on the Western Front. The German High Seas Fleet had remained in port ever since Jutland. There were growing food shortages at home. The position was not much better for the Allies. Both England and France were on the verge of running out of money, and faced the prospect of asking for financial help from the US, which would come at the price of forcing them to start negotiating…

Major Arthur Birse Watching the World at War the other evening, the ‘war’ was finally drawing to an end and the leaders of the three great powers were meeting. My wife was somewhat surprised when I pointed at a soldier sitting at the table next to Stalin and said ‘I knew him, we worked together.’ Coincidentally, it was only a couple of days earlier that I had been looking at some papers, and had come across an article which showed a picture of Churchill hosting a dinner to mark his 69th birthday. It was attended by Stalin and the article…

Or, the Battle for Little Bletchley During my researches into the history of the Corps, particularly relating to the world of signals intelligence and the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), I have been amazed how often personal and service ambitions have played what might have been decisive roles in decision-making. Following the Venlo Incident in which Captain Payne Best played an unfortunately vital role the SIS found itself with virtually no agents and no sources of intelligence apart from that garnered from SIGINT. As a result, control of this intelligence would be a source of controversy between the services…