MAJOR FRANK THOMPSON: MAN, MYTH, MEMORY

On 25 January 1944 a paratrooper landed in a part of Serbia occupied by the Bulgarians. He was 23 years old, a British officer with orders to make contact with the Bulgarian pro-Communist resistance. His name was Frank Thompson. Within five months he would be dead, shot in a ditch outside a village most Bulgarians had never heard of.

Thompson was one of a generation of young Britons of all walks of life who, during the Second World War, joined the Special Operations Executive, a secret unit of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare. They were trained and then dropped clandestinely far behind the frontline, from France to Crete, to spy, sabotage and liaise with local anti-German resistance groups.

Frank Thompson was responsible for Bulgaria, a Nazi Germany ally.

On the surface, his upbringing gave no hint of the adventurer to come. He was born in India in 1920 to Edward James Thompson, a Methodist missionary and writer who became a recognised authority on Indian affairs, and Theodosia Jessup, born in Syria to a family of American Presbyterian missionaries. The family settled in Oxford when Frank was three, in a household where politics and literature mixed freely. Robert Graves and Sir Arthur Evans lived next door. Nehru and Gandhi were guests at the dinner table. Frank's younger brother, EP Thompson, would grow up to become one of the most influential social historians of the 20th century.

Frank Thompson became interested in leftist politics as a teenager. At 18, after meeting Iris Murdoch at Oxford, whose politics were more passionate than his own, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Frank Thompson was just 23 when he was executed by the Bulgarian pro-Nazi police © Paramount Photo

On 1 September 1939, two days before Britain declared war on Germany, Frank volunteered to join the army, against the wishes of his parents and of Murdoch herself. The war took him through the Royal Artillery to Cairo, then to Syria after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, then to the Western Desert, Iraq and Persia. He wrote constantly to his parents, his brother and Murdoch, leaving behind letters and diaries that trace his growing frustration with the Allies for delaying a second front while the Soviets bled. He took part in the Sicilian landings in 1943 and watched many of the men around him die.

In April 1943 he heard of the Special Operations Executive, which sent British liaison officers to work alongside resistance movements in the Balkans. Tito's partizans in Yugoslavia were already a serious force. In Bulgaria the picture was murkier, a handful of disorganised Communist guerrilla groups sabotaging railway lines and Nazi supply routes to Greece, their numbers and reliability largely unknown. Thompson, who spoke Russian and had taught himself Bulgarian, was the natural choice to find out more and, the British hoped, to turn scattered resistance into something larger.

What followed was a mission undone by geography, weather and bad luck. Supply drops failed to arrive. The Bulgarian gendarmerie burned the houses of anyone suspected of feeding or sheltering partizani. The interior ministry put a hefty price on every partizanin head, dead or alive. This was enough to turn some villagers into hunters. By May 1944 Thompson was camped safely with Serbian partizani near the border when an order arrived from Moscow sending the Bulgarian brigades towards Plovdiv. The Serb commander called it suicide. Thompson tried to radio London for new instructions and got no answer. He went anyway.

The march that followed broke the unit. Marching for close to two weeks without proper food, the partizani were reduced to eating grass and raw snails. On 31 May, exhausted, they stopped to sleep in a clearing near the village of Batuliya. They were surrounded before dawn. Several were shot on the spot. Thompson and others were taken prisoner and held at Litakovo, where he was interrogated and tortured for weeks while, elsewhere, the Allies landed at Normandy and the Red Army pushed west. As a uniformed officer he was entitled, under the Geneva Convention, to be treated as a prisoner of war. He was not.

On 10 June, Thompson and eleven other prisoners were told they were being moved to another village. Outside Litakovo the gendarmes forced the prisoners into a ditch and executed them.

Monument to Bulgarian partizani and foreign resistance fighters near Litakovo village

A couple of months later, in September, a Communist coup flipped Bulgaria's politics on its head. The executioners of Frank Thompson were tried by the People's Court, found guilty and executed in their turn. In 1946 the Communist government awarded Frank Thompson two posthumous medals for bravery. The following year his mother and brother visited Bulgaria following an invitation by Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria's Stalinist leader, himself. The group of British youngsters who joined the voluntary movement for the construction of the Pass of the Republic, in the Stara Planina, was called "Frank Thompson."

Two years later the tables turned again. At the height of the internal Communist strife and purges, orchestrated in Stalinist fashion, Frank Thompson's name became toxic. He was accused of being a British spy responsible for the failure of the partizani unit. His old comrades from the unit were arrested and pressed to admit that Thompson had recruited them for British intelligence.

The dust settled after the collapse of Stalinist politics in Bulgaria in the mid-1950s. Thompson became a hero again. A cluster of villages near Batuliya was merged in 1960 into a single settlement named Tompsan (sic) after him, the Bulgarian rendering of Thompson.

Frank Thompson's remains were later moved to a hillside above Litakovo, where he now lies with 72 other members of the resistance, including some foreigners. The stone reads simply Captain Frank Thompson, Englishman, because he had been posthumously promoted to Major. Above the grave stands an obelisk to the dead of the anti-fascist struggle.

Post-Communist Bulgaria has kept the memory of Major Thompson. In 2007 the British Embassy paid for a new monument in front of the Tompsan village council. In 2013 Roger Waters of the Pink Floyd travelled to Litakovo to visit the grave, and for a while young people who had never opened a history book knew the name Frank Thompson, if only as a footnote to a rock star's pilgrimage.

The Thompson case says something about how selectively Bulgaria has chosen to remember its Second World War past. Many of the men who fought and died alongside him have since been dismissed by the new generation as little more than leftist terrorists, their villages renamed, their monuments neglected. Tompsan village has never been renamed. Perhaps a foreign name and a foreign grave are easier to honour than the complicated, homegrown politics of the men who fought beside him.