ABSTRACT
On the night of 8/9 January 1943, when Tribune had just resumed her offensive patrolling on the south-east coast of France, HM S/m P228, subsequently renamed Splendid, under command of Lt Ian McGeoch, RN, carried out a first infiltration of agents for the Italian Section of SOE’s MASSINGHAM mission in Algiers.1 The operation, code-named CONVERSE, involved landing two men, Adler and Pisani (alias ‘Serra’), on the east coast of Sardinia and it was destined to have a direct effect on events in Corsica.2 It had been planned in conjunction with Emilio Lussu, a brave and brilliant anti-Fascist leader from the days of Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome. Lussu, who combined left-wing politics with the cause of Sardinian separatism, had made a spectacular escape from the prison camp on the Lipari Islands in 1939. SOE had told Jack Beevor, their man in Lisbon, to arrange for Lussu to be brought out of France, where he was living under a false name, but Lussu and his wife turned up in Lisbon in 1941 without any action on Beevor’s part. Beevor sent them on to London, but they were returned to France in June 1942 by felucca.3
