A wartime diplomat in the Balkans
Denis Hills
OPERATION AUTONOMOUS by Ivor Porter Chatto & Windus, £18, pp.268 Ivor Porter went to Bucharest university as a British Council lecturer in March 1939. He describes his first whiff of the orient as a mixture of raw sheepskin, rough wool, herbs and sun-baked manure. After an initiatory shock — while he was out walk- ing in the suburbs of Bucharest a young woman leaning on a fence pointed her breast and squirted milk at him, and burst into a fit of laughter — Porter found himself immensely attracted to the warmth and easy morals of Romanian society. Numbered among his colleagues were Oli- via Manning and Reggie Smith (the Guy Pringle of The Balkan Trilogy). In Porter's opinion, the couple were ill-matched. Oli- via, he says, was unhappy, and her dislike for Romania reflected her vulnerability as a lonely young woman with a gregarious husband.
War, however, was soon to disrupt the trivialities of life in this 'Paris of the Balkans'. In response to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia (April 1939), Britain and France had guaranteed the frontiers of both Poland and Romania; and when hostilities commenced, a major British concern was to interrupt the flow of Romanian oil to Germany. Various schemes to sabotage it were attempted but they were flawed by amateurish incompe- tence and failed. Porter gave up his teaching job and joined the British Legion in Bucharest. In the meantime, between June and September 1940, Romania was brutally reduced in size by about one-third: Russia seized Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, Germany forced the Romanian government to cede northern Transylvania to Hungary, and Bulgarian troops took southern Dobrudja. On 23 November, Romania signed a tripartite pact with the Axis and entered the political sphere of Germany and Italy. When the British Legation closed (February 1941) Porter left for Cairo and joined SOE as a civilian. In June, Germany and Romania invaded
Russia and the disastrous story of heavy Romanian battle casualties on the eastern front (over 600,000 dead, wounded and missing) began to unfold.
Severe illness — diptheria or polio, Porter wasn't sure which, and military drugs were not available to civilians incapacitated him for many months and it was not until August 1943 that he was able to complete his SOE training and be commissioned. A few days before Christ- mas, under Operation Autonomous, a Liberator dropped him and his two com- panions (de Chastelain and Silviu) at a rendezvous 100 miles from Bucharest. Porter gives an almost light-hearted account of the experience. As he sat on a pile of propaganda leaflets — a previous despatcher had fallen out through the jumping hatch together with the parcels he glanced at his special SOE watch and found it had packed up. When he jumped he was blinded by cloud and mist.
I started to oscillate . . . the skyline sprang up at me, and I landed in a backward roll on a ploughed field . . . After two and a half years in the Middle East, the warm, damp earth of Europe smelled good.
Alas, their contact was not there; and they could not find their small sack of hard rations. Next morning, leaving a wood, the three trespassers were arrested by gen- darmes and driven to Bucharest to be interrogated. 'Goodbye, English,' a friend- ly villager shouted as they left.
Though they were detained as prisoners under guard, the mission's skills were soon put to positive use by their captors. Opera- tion Autonomous had been originally plan- ned as a sabotage exercise (disrupting German communications). But now that Germany's hopes of victory were receding and the Romanian army was bleeding to death, the mission's role changed into a predominantly political one. Using the direct radio link to Cairo which the mission was allowed to set up, negotiations were 'Piles playing you up again?' started to encourage Maniu, the Romanian resistance leader, to make an open break with the Germans and to persuade Marshal Antonescu, the pro-Axis Romanian dicta- tor, to abandon Hitler and accept Stalin's peace terms, which included unconditional surrender. Both moves would have en- tailed a coup. But despite intense diploma- tic pressure from Cairo and London, Man- iu stayed inactive and Antonescu refused to budge. The underlying truth was that, faced with a choice between the Germans or the predatory Russian bear, the Roma- nians for historical reasons preferred the Germans. It was at this juncture that King Michael stepped onto the scene.
In a dramatic confrontation the King invited Marshal Antonescu to the Royal Palace and, in the presence of the country's political leaders, ordered the marshal to conclude an armistice. Antonescu refused and was immediately arrested. When news of the armistice was broadcast the cheers of the people mingled with the roar of Ger- man bombers taking retaliatory action (the King's palace was specially targeted). But with the defection of the Romanian army, German military resistance was quickly crushed and on 31 August 1945 the Red Army marched into Bucharest. Porter noted in his diary that the Romanians greeted the Soviet troops with apathy. 'What struck them most was that many were Mongols, stripped to the waist, but wearing fur hats in the heat of August.'
For Ivor Porter it was a happy ending. When the British High Commissioner Air Vice-Marshal Stevenson arrived in Bucharest a fortnight later his first ques- tion to Porter was about bear-shooting possibilities in the Carpathians. He then reminded Porter that he had been prom- oted to major and awarded a military OBE, and advised him to order a decent uniform. This was his way of telling him that Operation Autonomous was over.
Porter's book is an exhilarating and original piece of diplomatic history. There is no doubt that the royal coup shortened the war and that Operation Autonomous played a significant part in the negotiations that led up to it. Yet the Russians treated the Romanians as conquered people; they looted the national resources and installed a communist-controlled government. The author pays tribute to the many brave individuals who took part in the Romanian resistance. He quotes the case of the liberal newspaper editor Farcasanu and his wife who made a daring escape by plane to Italy in 1946. I remember them, and the pilot. I arranged for them to stay out of sight in the loft of the officers' hotel in Riccione, where I drank wine with them. I have also learned from the author that an old ac- quaintance, the banker Chrissovoleni, who introduced rugby into Romania, survived the war. Fittingly, he ended up at Ham- bros. The admirable Ivor Porter himself went on to enjoy a notable diplomatic career.
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