Kemp had been appalled at the bloodshed preceding the July 1936 outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, explaining to a friend he couldn’t stand by while leftist mobs murdered people ‘simply because they were priests or nuns’ or ‘because they had a little money or property’ While some 2,000 Englishmen volunteered for service with the communist-backed Republican army during the Spanish Civil War, Kemp was one of a handful of Britons who fought for the Nationalists. Kemp’s path to becoming one of Britain’s foremost World War II commandos began in Spain. A footnote in the complicated Allied diplomatic history of World War II, it was just another episode in the Englishman’s decade-long flirtation with strife and danger. Within a few hours the tension of his captivity melted away through diplomacy. To some degree an ignominious fate in a Soviet gulag may have seemed an understandable end.įortunately for Kemp the drive by Lubyanka was but a passing moment. After all, years before he had fought against some of the same communist soldiers who now held him prisoner. Yet for Kemp the unfortunate details that had led the Soviets to capture him and his team probably didn’t alleviate his fear. In fact, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) commando had worked alongside Soviet soldiers only weeks before to disrupt German operations in occupied Poland. The irony was that Kemp wasn’t, at least in any official sense, an enemy of the Soviet Union. After six weeks of dodging both German patrols and advancing Soviet armies in the confused battle for Poland, Kemp’s fate must have seemed both ironic and fitting. The grim facility wasn’t just the home of the Soviet secret police, it was the architectural incarnation of fear and control Kemp had been fighting from the outset of the year in the closing months of World War II. One can only imagine what was going through Peter Kemp’s mind as his Soviet captors drove him toward the imposing facade of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka Prison in February 1945.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |