ABSTRACT
The ‘highly irregular sailing’ which led to the abolition of the ‘private navies’ was a piece of ill-judged private enterprise by John Newton, the erstwhile small-time smuggler from Guernsey. Readers of the beginning of this story will have encountered him as the man whose help Lord Portsea and the Channel Islands Emergency Committee sought when faced with imminent German occupation in June 1940. Ian Fleming, personal assistant to Admiral Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, introduced him to Holdsworth and he was the first recruit for SOE’s Helford Flotilla. His intimate knowledge of the Casquets Lighthouse enabled Gus March-Phillips to capture the German lighthouse crew without firing a shot: Newton had been promoted Skipper-Lt and decorated. He had been a star performer in BALACLAVA’s shore parties, though Croft quite rightly saw him as someone who needed firm control. That control lapsed when Croft was parachuted into France and MASSINGHAM failed to provide the required supervision when Newton was sent to take over a schooner in western Sicily that they wanted for their move forward after the DRAGOON landings in Provence. The schooner, the Marietta Madre, was carrying a cargo of Marsala wine and Newton sailed for Algiers with at least part of that cargo aboard. He compounded this picaresque misdemeanour by trying to sell arms to the Communists when he reached France: he was sent home and discharged from the Service. But Christopher Woods, the official historian of SOE in Italy, points out that ACF(A)’s triumph was of little practical consequence, as MARYLAND’s sea operations in the Adriatic, like those on the west coast of Italy, had died a natural death during the summer of 1944. As far as concerned the proper main purposes of SOE sea operations, the last actual ‘body’ operation was AINTREE in mid-March and stores operations by sea to Italy, though planned and actually attempted, were never successful: the idea was abandoned altogether in favour of air supply by the end of April 1944.
