Well my name is Davidson and I'm an old gentleman living in the country but I went through the war from January… the war is the centre of my story though I existed before the war, naturally. January 1940 I joined the British army and was in it until April 40, May, June, May, July August 45. Five years and aft, right through the thing, and then the war stopped and so I was demobilised, in one piece quite to my surprise, but it was so, and so there we are. And I was at the beginning of - when the war broke out I was living in London and I was a young journalist making his way. In other words anything went, whatever I could do I would do, whatever job I could find I would try to do it. And so I joined the Evening Star, then existed, no longer there but it was the Standard, the News and the Star in the evening, three evening papers. I joined the Star and was, well I think you could say that I was an odd job man who was doing whatever news came along, covering it that's to say, evening paper and you work in the morning for an evening paper, as you probably do know.

So you worked from 6 in the morning to say 9 or 10 and the paper came out and then you didn't do anything again till the next day, only I found a weekend job with the Economist which was then a small paper. They needed someone who'd run around and chase up stories as they thought and I did that until one day, to my surprise the war began. And the war began in the most ragged and chaotic way, the British were not prepared for it, didn't expect it and said it didn't want it, government I mean, Chamberlain. And the rest of us could see that the war was coming and what sort of a brutal business it would be, because I'd spent part of 38 and most of 39 wandering around south-eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and so on, and it was clear to me that we were in for a very rough time. But the situation in which you were a young journalist, you couldn't stay out of it, the war's coming, so you said all right I'll get in, and I thought the clever thing to do is to get in before I got in and then I could perhaps choose what I'll do. Well I couldn't choose what I did because they said at once, where've you been in the last two years, so I talked about Yugoslavia and Greece where I had been off and on as a young journalist chasing up stories, you know what it is, you can imagine what it is anyway. And they said "all right fine, we're going to found a series of news agencies to distribute British propa... British information, not propaganda, information. And this will be done by the Ministry of Information". It was the Ministry of Information, it'd just been founded, and one of their tasks was, a minor task right down the line, was to furnish this…these news agencies plural if there were going to be news agencies plural as they intended there should be, with daily… they sent… sheafs of telegrams would come out and you will turn those into news stories in whatever language you happen to be in, and I started in Belgrade where I could speak rather bad Serbocroat but you could easily find people who could translate. So that was, it was a friendly atmosphere and the Serbs above all were anti-Nazi, were determined to fight if they got a chance and they will always fight at the drop of a hat in Serbia, and so we'd no problem there and London said, "go to Hungary and do the same thing in Hungary." That's a country of course of which I knew absolutely nothing, and it's not a Slav language, you probably know, it's the Slav languages all more or less relate to each other. You could move from Serbian to Croatian, from Croatian to Slovak without much difficulty. But you can't move into Hungarian, which is an Asian language by origin, with entirely different syntax and you have to learn everything from the word go. This, I said to them "I can't speak the language", they said "look, we're not interested in what you can do and don't do, do what you're told". So I said "very well" and I went to, I went back to Belgrade, my agency was functioning by that time, with a small Yugoslav staff, none of whom survived the war I'm sorry to say, they were all taken by the enemy and shot, if not shot tortured and then killed in one way or the other, which was a very awful experience, as you can imagine.

But in Hungary it was both more difficult and easier. There was no question of finding friends, there weren't any friends. You had to find Hungarians who were anti-Nazi in themselves, who were more or less left-wing if you like, who were prepared to say "all right I'm a Hungarian and I hate the Nazis, and I will be on your side, what can I do for you." And so you found a small nucleus of young men and young women too, who were prepared to do this, and who were volunteers, so we took them on in Budapest, a nice office in Budapest, right on the Danube quay, I don't know whether you know Budapest but a splendid place, physically I mean. Very hostile to us then, and so it was. And I think it took me some time to get going there, but by the end of, by the beginning of the autumn, end of the spring, round about May or June I began to, the agency began to function. It was called Kufernihirak, foreign news, and by this time I had learnt some Hungarian - it was very difficult you had to, there's nothing given to you, you have to start everything from the start and the syntax is altogether different.

But I applied myself to this and made several good friends, who are all alive except one, he's a very old man now. They all ended up in exile, in the United States or here of course, getting out, surviving if they could, and those who were not able to get out died in one way or another, partly because some of them were Jewish in origin and that meant that they were going to be taken and killed. We didn't know all this at the beginning of the war but it unfolded itself, the whole horror of the Nazi war unfolded itself as, so that by the end of 40, 41, by say the beginning of 41 we knew very well what we were up against. It's you or us, either one or the other, not both of us are going to survive. And it became therefore… the war became more and more a savage affair.

I had good fortune in that, I had a lot of good fortune in fact, because we started to, with our official agency, which is perfectly legal, legal stuff, Hungarian foreign office allowing that amount of bias in their foreign policy that they were, they weren't sure who was going to win the war either, but they thought we'd better allow for the fact that just possibly the Germans may lose it. It seemed unlikely in those days, but we'll allow ten or fifteen percent for that, and I was one of the ten or fifteen percent, they allowed me to start my news agency, to recruit four or five young Hungarians who would do the work, because we didn't know the Hungarian language, we couldn't write Hungarian of course, we had to have native Hungarians to do it, and they started it, it was rather good, rather successful, and got more and more support as the nature of the war gradually became clear. It was kill or be killed, and the people who were going to be killed were all those of left wing or Jewish origins or in our case British origins, and you would survive as well as you could and gradually start to function. And I can say that, I can say that by June, May or June 41 we were functioning.

I went on in that way until the Germans themselves, who invaded having, they had Hungary but they invaded Yugoslavia in May 41 if you, June, April May 41, because the regime in Hungary started to become anti-German, anti-German, so the Germans stepped and said we're here, they've put in the army, the army came in with the SS right behind them of course, and introduced themselves and started to arrest people and take them off to concentration camps from about July or August 41. And that's where the war became really nasty, whereas before that there was a notion that we might be able to, or it was thought that the war might not become a brutal affair, --- it would be all right, but the Germans, the Nazis decided that it was going to be a brutal affair and started to behave brutally.

I was fortunate again because at the embassy, they had a small embassy it was called a legation in those years, in Budapest and the foreign office people in Budapest were not very helpful but the foreign office people in Belgrade, all decided they were all active anti-Nazis. So when the war broke out I simply took the first train, the last train out of Hungary to get into Belgrade and a taxi up to the embassy, legation, and they said all right fine, we can't stay here because, I don't know if you remember but the Germans were rapidly successful. They invaded, they invaded Yugoslavia in force and the army collapsed, Yugoslav army collapsed, and within two or three weeks they were uncontested, in uncontested control.

So the embassy, the minister, the ambassador, ministers they were called in those days, he said "well go and buy a car and make your way to the coast." So I went and bought a car, you did these kinds of things in those days, I went and bought a car, a rather nice old American type of car, and found two or three refugees, or would-be refugees as I by this time was, and we headed for the coast. And we went to the coast, we managed to get right down to that great lake on the coast, what's it called, can't remember. Magnificent lake, several miles across, near the coast, just inland from the coast, and there they could land flying boats, so they said "you go down there and wait and we've got a flying boat coming in." So the flying boat came, one of those splendid Sunderlands, you won't remember them but they were big flying boats, you could take forty or fifty passengers, no problem at all. And there were about eighty of us. So, and I was in that part of the eighty which didn't get into the flying boat, so we stayed until the Germans arrived. Or rather the Italians and there was a second stroke of luck that saved me, because the Germans decided, they knew all about who we were, why we were doing what we were doing, links to the SIS and all that, and they were waiting to interrogate. But fortunately the Italians got there first, on huge motorcycles which they're very nervous about riding, and they were very nervous to get there because it's very dangerous for them too. So they arrived and corralled all of us of whom there were about a dozen, who'd all been British agents either in Greece or in Yugoslavia or in Bulgaria, in the Balkans in short, and who got as far as that place, which is the name I can't remember, right on the coast, hoping to get sea transport to get to Greece, because we still held Greece, the army still held Greece, narrowly. But you knew that if you didn't get the sea transport in a few weeks' time you would have to find other ways of surviving. And some of us did that and some of us didn't, and those who went up into the hills mostly survived and formed a guerrilla resistance in the long term. And those who didn't do that but who didn't have the good fortune to know how to do it, including me, we were all put in the bank, put in the bag and taken to the coast at Durazzo, taken to the coast and there across the… put into planes and taken to internment in southern Italy.

Well, one sat on one's backside and thought well what the hell are we going to do now because there was nowhere to go. There was nowhere to escape to. So one sat, we sat, a dozen of us, all of whom had been in SOE and who were formally civilians but in fact were all military personnel with ranks, me I was a captain at that point. Or we can just see what would happen. And nothing happened of course until one day they said we'll take you all down to Albania and so they put into trucks and sent them down to Albania and at that point, a moment of light relief, Mussolini's daughter, Endotrana arrived to inspect the prisoners. It was us of course. And we didn't like that very much. But why they didn't, they didn't turn us over to, they didn't turn us into prisoners of war, they said "all right, you're here, you're neutral diplomats is that right?" "Well yes we are, we are neutral diplomats", of which we knew nothing of course. And stayed there for a few weeks waiting for them to decide what was going to happen to us. Not in prison but not free either, in what, under restraint if you like, virtually in prison. And they put us on to, they said we're going to send you in a locked train to Spain. They didn't know what to do. On the one hand they didn't want to persecute us because they were beginning to understand, this is 41, that the war was by no means ended and we had taken tens of thousands of Italian prisoners on the eastern front, and they were inclined therefore to be very kind to any prisoners they had got, and they had practically none, they took a few in the desert, not many, and then there was us, was about twenty or thirty young men.

So they treated us very well indeed, put us in the train, locked train at, in Marseilles, do I mean Marseilles, doesn't matter, in Italy and then we stayed in that train until the train finally got to the Spanish frontier and the Spanish at that time, were not sure what the right thing to do was. They had been entirely for the Germans, they had sent volunteers to fight on the eastern front, on the Russian front, but now we are after all in, we're in April 41, 42, April 41, yes, 42, do I mean 42 I can't remember, I'm not sure about dates. Must have been 41 I think. And so the upshot was that we were put in these locked trains, dozen or twenty of us, all those of us who thought we were for the high jump, and would have been for the high jump because those who were handed over to the Germans, the Germans came into the north, those didn't arrive. And we survived and got back to Spain. In Spain, the Spanish were no longer very sure who was going to win, they were neither on one side nor the other, they weren't going to do anything military to help the Nazis but on the other hand they were not going to be very beastly to the prisoners either, so there we were and put us eventually in a train to Lisbon. And then of course we got to Lisbon and the Portuguese, whose own government was a very foul kind of dictatorship, were even more worried because they had such a long coast and they knew that if they were going to take a hostile attitude to the British at this stage, somebody was going to pay for it later on. So they said all right, "you can go to Gibraltar, give you air transport to Gibraltar and from there we hope you will disappear", and that's what we did.

So we got back to England, okay fine, then in England they said "oh is that you, what are you doing here?" They said "well you can have ten days' leave, you can go and see your mother" who's lived in Bristol of course, my home town, "and after that you go back to, you'll go back to, you'll go back to the Middle East." So they sent us to the Middle East, that was another great stroke of luck because they sent us in slow transport, air transport but it wasn't very brilliant in those days, right across the continent. Imagine you were seeing Africa for the first time, and there you were, you had escaped what had seemed to be a likely long-term imprisonment if not worse, and there you were, free. And you were being sent to, across the whole of Africa from Lagos, we got planes that came to Lagos, flying boats from Southampton to Lagos, then transport, such transport as they'd got, small, small land-based craft I can't remember what they were in those days, and so I arrived in the Middle East and there we had an office, SIS had, or SOE it was called, Special Operations Europe, SOE, had an office there and they received us, said "Fine. Start again."

Start again. So the war went on. The war went on and of course in a different way because the war was very serious by now, it was no longer a joke, it was a killing business on both sides. And as far as I was concerned they said, "well we can't send you to the Balkans, that's impossible, the Balkans are closed, we're going to open guerrilla warfare as soon as we can and then you can go and join the forces that we will raise now", and this order came about, took some time, "and in the meantime go to Istanbul, sit in Istanbul and listen. Because people will come from this closed continent, and when they come we will make certain that they are directed towards you and you will speak as the, the long arm and see what these people are, what can be done, what use can be made of them." All question of propaganda was now forgotten, this is the fighting war. So that's really how it was for me and I sat around for a few months, two or three, waiting till we could get on, move on in the Balkans and then we started to support the guerrilla war in the Balkans which was just beginning because the Yugoslavs being invaded were a fighting people, they weren't going to sit down so they just waited until new leaders could come up and tell them what, how to do the next thing, which was to form their own partisan detachments which would fight.

And they were formally all communists in the sense that that was what survived. You know the history of that's what survived, the communists were the people who fought back, and so they all were formally speaking communists but in fact most, the vast majority of them (and I was then there for nearly two years in the forest) they were patriots, they wanted to fight back against these Germans who'd invaded their country and ravaged their country. So they did, and this was the partisan war which began then in a big way, late 42, and we, late 42, by this time the war has entered the phase of partisan warfare in Greece and in Yugoslavia, which meant turning their backs on their own legitimate old-fashioned monarchical leaders, all of it had collapsed, and who came up in their place was the Communist Party. And the Communist Party decided, all this is potted in the history, you know it, and they decided that the thing to do was to form detachments which would fight back and very weak to begin with, small detachments, their backs to the wall, but they would have the people on their side they would be very much patriotic people.

And that's just exactly what happened. That's what happened to me.

And we could get there by parachute, and that meant that we had to start by dropping in people blind, meaning they didn't have a reception party at the other end, and if you were dropped blind you had to be very bright and keep your wits about you and disappear. But once you have formed a nucleus at the base they can receive other parachutists who would come, and so you can start guerrilla warfare which would channel arms and ammunition and personnel to the new neutral, partisan detachments, then very weak and sensitive and how very competent they were, they didn't have, they didn't have very… they didn't have any logistic support, they had the support of the people, this was the thing. This was what… the Serbs almost to a man were on our side.

Yes the war went on in a very grey kind of way and the partisans who were the strongest anti-Nazi, strongest pro-British or pro and pro-Allied force in Europe, the finest armies that ever were, were there, they were very brave. And they were strong by this time, and all of them were strong young men, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 they were capable. And they were, and I myself found them in end of the war living in Belgrade, which was the capital, and they took the capital from the Russians. I was in Belgrade and Belgrade had been taken by the Russians from the Germans and that was the end, effectively of the war in that part of the world. It left behind a lot of German army elsewhere in the Balkans but for us it was the end of the war. And it was nothing for us to do, two or three of us, British, liaison officers with the partisans, by this time speaking fluent Serbocroat and therefore able to handle the situation reasonably well I hope, and we retreated and got found transport, air transport, flew to Belgrade, went to Belgrade, from Belgrade to Cairo. And there were… well there we were collected, the dozen or twenty of us and SOE from different units arrived there and they said, the army said to me, as a person, to each of us, "who are you, where d'you want to go, what can you do etc etc, what's useful", and I said "well I will continue with the war if you want me, I don't want to go to Asia, which you offered me, because I don't know anything about Asia, but I can speak good Italian and that's, the war was still going on in Italy." "Oh fine they said, we'll use you in that way." And so then I transferred to that section of SOE, of the service, which was dealing with Italy and continued with Italian partisans who were then quite strong, getting better, getting better all the time. Because partisans get better by doing it, and they were doing it and had, they were, at the beginning they didn't know how to do it but you learn. And they were… they were very fine young men, and young women too, both young men and young women, not so many young women of course in those days but still, there were. And continued with them through the rest, what remained of the Italian campaign until the Germans finally surrendered and I was then in the city of Genoa which was the capital of north-eastern, north-western, north-western Italy so far as the army was concerned. And that was the end of the war as far as I'm concerned.

And they said "well, we're very happy to see you, and we'll send you home by air", which was a tremendous privilege, which I didn't realise. You know the British army was there in tens of thousands, and they were all lining up waiting to go home by sea, well shortage of transport, and three of us, two of us, they said "well you two, you've ended this, we think quite well of you", extraordinary, I was amazed, they said "and you can go, we've got, you can go home by air tomorrow." My wife had already gone about several years before back to London, so I arrived in Northolt, got out of the plane at Northolt and this was one of those, one of those cold English mornings where you didn't know what was what, and woke up slowly to the fact that you were in fact free and the security personnel said, "you can go." So we walked out of the door a free man as it were, anyway not yet demobilised but heading for demobilisation, and found a taxi and I went to find my dear wife who was then living in digs in Earls Court. She also was in SOE so they looked after her and found her at 2 in the morning, no way of telling her I was coming at all, ring the bell in Warwick Road, Warwick Road's a long road, she had found digs there, so I said "it's me, can I come in?" And that was the end of the war as far as I'm concerned.