Frank Thompson (SOE officer)

For other people named William Thompson, see William Thompson (disambiguation).
Frank Thompson
Major William Frank Thompson of SOE
Birth nameWilliam Frank Thompson
Born(1920-08-17)17 August 1920
Darjeeling, British India
Died10 June 1944(1944-06-10) (aged 23)
Litakovo, Kingdom of Bulgaria
Buried
Sofia War Cemetery
Allegiance United Kingdom
Service / branchBritish Army
Years of service1939–1944
RankMajor
UnitSpecial Operations Executive
Battles / warsSecond World War  †
RelationsE. P. Thompson (brother)

Major William Frank Thompson (17 August 1920 – 10 June 1944) was a British officer who acted as a liaison between the British Army and the Bulgarian communist partisans during the Second World War.

Early life, family and education

Thompson was born in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India to a British missionary family. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford.[1] Freeman Dyson, a fellow pupil at Winchester, has described Thompson's extraordinary facility with diverse languages and that "Frank was the largest, the loudest, the most uninhibited and the most brilliant." Dyson "learned from him more than I learned from anybody else at the school".[2]

His younger brother, E.P. Thompson, was an English historian, socialist and peace campaigner.[3]

Second World War

In 1939, while studying at the University of Oxford, he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain under the influence of his close friend Iris Murdoch. Despite his affiliation, he did not support the party's policy of neutrality dictated by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and joined the British Army with service number 124039 as a volunteer training with the No. 122 Officer Cadet Training Regiment before being commissioned Second Lieutenant into the Royal Artillery on 2 March 1940.[4] He served in England, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Sicily, Serbia and Bulgaria. He was part of the Special Operations Executive.[5]

On 25 January 1944, along with three other commandos, Major Thompson was sent on a parachute landing mission to establish a link between the British staff and the Bulgarian partisans led by Slavcho Transki [bg]; he landed near Dobro Pole, Macedonia. The commandos carried a radio to keep in contact with the staff in Cairo, Egypt and Bari, Italy, but it broke down. On 23 May, Thompson took part in the clash at the village of Batulia between the Bulgarian Gendarmerie and the Second Sofia Brigade of National Liberation of the partisans. He was wounded by the gendarmerie forces, captured and, after a defiant speech in Bulgarian at his show trial, was executed by firing squad in the nearby village of Litakovo (Bulgarian: bg: Литаково).[6][2]

Post War

After the war and the establishment of a Communist government in Bulgaria, the nearby villages of Livage, Lipata, Tsarevi Stragi, Malak Babul, Babul and Zavoya were merged and renamed to Thompson (Томпсън) in the British officer's honour. Similarly, the railway station at Prokopnik, the site of a fierce battle, became "Major Thompson Station".[2] Thompson Hill in Antarctica is also named after Frank Thompson.

Biographies

E.P. Thompson wrote two books about his brother, the first with his mother, There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson. This 1947 out of print publication was re-released in 2024 by Brittunculi Records & Books. The second, Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, appeared in 1996.[3][7][8]

References

Footnotes
  1. ^ Simms, Brendan (7 July 1997). "A major, a martyr, a train station". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  2. ^ a b c Dyson, Freeman J. (1979). Disturbing the universe (1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row. pp. 34–39. ISBN 0465016774.
  3. ^ a b Rattenbury, A., 1997. Convenient Death of a Hero. Review of Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 by Thompson, E. P. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 19 no. 9 pp. 12–13. Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n09/arnold-rattenbury/convenient-death-of-a-hero [Retrieved 2 March 2011].
  4. ^ "No. 34806". The London Gazette (Supplement). 5 March 1940. p. 1367.
  5. ^ Kristen Ghodsee, The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015 ISBN 978-0-8223-5835-0
  6. ^ Frank Thompson's grave in Litakovo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEHtLqB_tM4
  7. ^ Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 by E. P. Thompson. Merlin/Stanford, 120 pp, £12.95, December 1996, ISBN 0-85036-457-4
  8. ^ Brisby, Liliana (29 March 1997). "The ups and downs of Major Thompson". The Spectator.
Bibliography

Further reading