REVIEW: No Colours or Crest – Peter Kemp (1958; Mystery Grove Publishing, 2020)
When someone says, “England, World War Two, Europe,” the first things that come to mind are usually D-Day, Hitler, the Blitz, Stalingrad, the Air War, Russia, Poland, France, and Italy. Seldom would our first images be of coastal raids against occupied France by channel-hopping tugboats, much less internecine conflicts of regional dominance in the Balkans, where the war with the Germans was treated as something of an afterthought. And yet, this is precisely what No Colours or Crest is about, written by a man who wasn’t just an observer to these events, but an active participant: Peter Kemp.
Veteran, commando, raider, spy, prisoner—the experiences Kemp depicts in this installment of his adventures are, to say the least, larger than life. From the frozen barracks in northern England and the stony shores of France, to the treacherous mountains of Albania and the snowy tracts of Poland: No Colours or Crest details Kemp’s assignments as part-Commando, part-insurgent across the fields of some of World War II’s least-talked about regions.
While most of the book takes place in Albania, Kemp begins about where Mine Were of Trouble left off: at home in England just as the war with Germany starts. He recounts the several failed efforts to get a British Commando force off the ground, as well as their adventures (or misadventures) doing night raids against small coastal targets in the French countryside. Kemp’s depictions of combat are wedded to his detached scrutiny of incessant and ever-present danger, which heightens the tensions involved with covert operations and Spec-Ops warfare.
It isn’t until he gets to the Balkans, however, that the book really kicks into high gear. The second part of the book consists of a dizzying and, for those of us foreign to Albania, somewhat confusing romp through the region of Yugoslavia. Names of people and places fly past one another as quickly as the bullets sprung from ambushes that Kemp finds himself barely avoiding. Once the initial disorientation wears off, the Albanian stint can be recognized for what it is: a lot of marching, mostly on foot, across countryside, around mountains, and through towns who were largely hostile to English presence. The people of Albania were a people largely uninterested in the machinations of the global war. They recognized only what was relevant to the region: that there were communists to the left of them, and fascists to the right—and neither of them were good for Albania. Unless, of course, you were a communist yourself, as Kemp finds out when dealing with his so-called allies.
During his sojourn in Kosovo—a harrowing and brief escapade very much behind enemy lines—Kemp has this much to note about the strained and utter lack of correlation between national borders and ethnic demography of the region:
My principal task was to explore the chances of forming a resistance movement among Albanians in Kossovo. When I sounded him on the subject Hasan Beg warned me, as I had feared he would, that the majority of Kossovars preferred a German occupation to a Serb; the Axis Powers had at least united them with their fellow Albanians, whereas an Allied victory would, they feared, return them to Jugoslav rule. Therefore, although most believed that the Germans would eventually be beaten, few would risk their lives to help in the process without some combined declaration by the Allied governments, guaranteeing the Kossovars the right to decide their own future by plebiscite. I already knew from a previous interchange of a signals with Cairo that such a declaration was out of the question; instead, I had been advised to ‘tactfully avoid the subject of the future of Kossovo’—not a very practical suggestion, as it proved. In my talks with irredentists the future of Kossovo was invariably the first point they raised; nor could I hope to arouse their enthusiasm or allay their fears by a vague reference to the terms of the Atlantic Charter, which was as far as I might commit myself.1
The Germans and Italians were, of course, burning residences and summarily executing people in the streets, but they were at least a known threat as foreign enemy combatants. The Allies, at least to Albanian eyes, were simply additional arms of the communist menace to the east which had already infiltrated the Balkans under the guise of a contorted sense of Albanian nationalism. In reality, ideologically-poisoned tribal chiefs and rabble-rousers each used communism as a means to settle ancient blood debts and stake out territory for themselves; to the Allies, they presented as partisans against German aggression while they siphoned off Allied materials and maneuvered to battle familiar enemies. This is not to say they took communism unseriously, as quite the opposite was the case, but Kemp’s observations in Albania indicate that communism, wherever it spreads, is just a means of empowering those most susceptible to its propaganda: the psychological dregs of society.
Kemp makes this much clear with how the communists treated those who aided the English efforts in the region after he was reassigned:
I never returned to Albania. Within the year the Communist forces of the L.N.C. and Kosmet had overrun the country. Implacable in their hatred of the British who had nursed them they were determined to destroy all those whom they considered to be our friends. In he eyes of the new rulers of Albania collaboration with the British was a far greater crime than collaboration with the Germans. The fury of the new regime was directed especially against those Albanians who, as our allies, had submerged their political differences with the Communists in a united effort to win their country’s freedom. Such men were marked for destruction because their fighting record gave the lie to the Communist claim that the Communist Party alone represented the Albanian people in their fight for independence.2
While the book’s immediate relevance to today is not as obvious as the previous installment of Kemp’s wartime adventures, there is plenty to glean from his experiences and insights into dealing with a foreign war in a foreign country. The behavior of communists, specifically, is of crucial note; as Kemp reveals, they are suspicious of everyone who is not one of them, but they are also suspicious of their own. Moreover, if their suspicion is roused enough, they dispense a violence that is comparable to what they inflict on their enemies. This is true even when they are dealing with their own countrymen, their neighbors, their comrades, much less their ostensible but foreign allies.
Also of note is the frequency with which fascism was used as a dangerous pejorative among communist agents. Back then, of course, the communists openly identified themselves, and not so infrequently rounded up and had shot those they deemed “fascist”—Kemp and some of his traveling compatriots included, though he at least managed to escape the wrong end of an executioner’s carbine. Nowadays the discourse is hardly any different, except the stakes are somewhat lower, at least for the time being.
With this taken into account, what Mine Were of Trouble and No Colours or Crest bring into focus is how stagnant the dialogue has been for the last ninety years or so. Despite advances in technology, tactics, and creature comforts, the overall praxis of the revolutionary boot-lickers at ground level—of your Antifa fanatics, of BLM, of those countless media figures championing the abolition of the state—hasn’t changed. Define the enemy as those opposed to the revolution, call them fascists, and ostracize them from polite society, all while preying on the assumption of being granted the benefit of the doubt. In Albania, and likewise in Poland, where strong ties to regional locality, ethnicity, language, and religion made an ideological embrace of communist beliefs very difficult, the general populations bought none of the pretenses of communist propaganda. Even the communists of Albania tended to use it more as a vehicle for tribal or personal power rather than a genuine article of ideology to be followed. America, however, after more than half a century of social engineering to sever our ethnic, linguistic, and religious roots, in addition to inundating the entire population with a Dionysian spirit of sexual liberation, is witnessing a different reaction.
The final chapters of No Colours or Crest detail Kemp’s stay in Poland, tasked with assisting the efforts of Polish resistance movements against Germany after the Warsaw uprising. His stay is fairly brief, as the Russian advance is, at this point, already well underway. The attitude of the Poles regarding the Russians versus that of the Albanians is worth mentioning. As Kemp remarks, concerning the night before they hand themselves over to the Russian command:
However much these people hated the Germans—and there was not a man or woman in the room who had not lost at least one close relative fighting against them—they literally dreaded the Russians. Tonight they were saying good-bye to the world they had always known. The German occupation had brought unbelievable hardship and tragedy to their country and their class: Russian rule, they foresaw, meant extinction for both.3
The takeover of Yugoslavia by the communists consisted largely of natives donning communist ideology, gaining assistance from Moscow, and continuing their own wars in their own countries until the Iron Curtain fell. Poland, on the other hand, was conquered—and more humiliatingly, without a shot, as it was under the guise of defeating Germany. Where the Allies had failed to choose good alliances in the Balkans, they had straight up sold Poland to the Soviets at Yalta, and Kemp was there to watch it all happen.
In what can in retrospect be considered an expected turn of events, Kemp and his companions are given orders from the brass to report to Soviet command after their front moves through—only for them to be detained and treated as prisoners. The brutality dispensed upon the British rivaled that dispensed upon the Germans, though most Germans did not have the benefit of ever leaving.
Although it all gets cleared up and Kemp is again able to return to London, the final chapters of the book are ones of extreme tragedy. Writing in the mid-1950s, and aware, first-hand and multiple times, of both communist and Russian hospitality, Kemp’s account paints the distinct picture of a great mistake on the part of English and Allied command. It can scarcely be argued that the Allies would ever have backed the Reich had the War broken out differently, but after decades of the Cold War and the geopolitical disasters it caused, it can likewise scarcely be argued that backing Stalin was at all preferable. Kemp’s depiction of what events were like on the ground at this crucial turning point in history only vindicate such a belief.
Like Mine Were of Trouble, Kemp’s follow-up serves as a piece of both war memoir and cross-section of political history. He does his best to outline the larger events that caused him and his fellow operatives to be involved in the affairs they were injected into. This grants No Colours or Crest a particular relevancy as a piece of history, not just because of the exacting detail with which Kemp recounted names, locations, and geography, but because he was able to grant a context to these events that brings them out of the realm of pure adventure and into real life. For this, Kemp deserves recognition not only for his outstanding record as something of a super-soldier, but also as a chronicler.
Highly recommended.
1Kemp, Peter, No Colours or Crest (Mystery Grove, 2020), 164.
2Ibid, 201.
3Ibid, 242.
