Alfred Searls on Hugh Dormer: formed at Ampleforth and killed in the Second World War.
Eighty years ago, a young officer in the Irish Guards was about to undergo an extraordinary test of faith as he parachuted, one moonlit night, into the heart of darkness that was Nazi-occupied Europe, on a secret mission to sabotage a vital enemy installation. Then again, Captain Hugh Dormer was an extraordinary young man.
Born in 1919, Dormer came from one of Britain’s most distinguished recusant families; he was educated at Ampleforth and Christ Church, Oxford. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he suspended his studies and volunteered for the army. He was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1940, later becoming a tank commander in the Guards Armoured Division.
By 1942, Dormer was keen to take a more active part in the war. He joined the inter-services liaison scheme, which allowed officers to be seconded to other parts of the armed forces. In October 1942, this infantry officer turned tank commander got his first taste of battle: on a Royal Navy destroyer, successfully sinking the German auxiliary cruiser Komet.
“I remembered always seeing that night from the bridge,” Dormer recalled, “how the dark outline of the coast of France lay against the moonlight on the sea and I wondered what went on behind that impenetrable wall, as mysterious and remote as that of another planet.” It was an unusual start, but things were about to take an even more unconventional turn; Dormer would soon experience first-hand just what was going on behind that wall.
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was established in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance operations in occupied Europe. A month after Dormer’s exploits in the English Channel, SOE invited him for an interview. He was accepted for training soon afterwards.
By 1943, SOE had agents working right across the continent, but men were needed for work more akin to commando raids than cloak-and-dagger spying work. Dormer did speak French, but, as he admitted, with an “atrocious English accent”.
His instructors quickly marked this sensitive, idealistic young man out as ideally suited for the task. In April 1943, he led his first mission, to destroy the shale oil mine and distillery at Les Télots, which was considered to be SOE’s most important target in France.
For days, he and his team lived in the woods under incessant rain, while they reconnoitred the plant, only to have to call the mission off at the last minute when police suddenly flooded the area, forcing them to go on the run.
The return journey across occupied France was a tense, dangerous affair, and the trek across the mountains into neutral Spain a nightmare. “Hell on Earth is the crossing of the Pyrenees by night,” he wrote later.
In August 1943, Dormer led a second, successful mission to destroy Les Télots, leaving the oil installation burning for a week. This time, the journey home was even worse, with the police and the SS, equipped with baying bloodhounds, pursuing them. Back in England, he was awarded the DSO and offered a promotion and another important mission.
Although Dormer often saw parallels between the sacrifices of the members of the French Resistance and the Allied agents with those of the English Martyrs, he always had doubts, freely confessed in his diary, about serving with the SOE. He struggled to reconcile himself with the difficult moral choices needed in the SOE’s unconventional war, and in January 1944, after much soul-searching, he returned to his beloved Irish Guards.
Dormer’s Catholic faith was his guiding light and his armour against the fear and doubt engendered by the war. According to Cardinal Basil Hume, a former Abbot of Ampleforth, “His faith enabled him to see things more clearly than many others of his generation.”
Abbot Patrick Barry, Dormer’s contemporary at Ampleforth, wrote: “It was not particular isolated gifts that were impressive in him, but a roundness and depth of personality in which his mindset, or rather soulset, was radically Catholic. Catholicism was not an addition to his other personal gifts; it was of the essence of his personality; it made him what he became.”
Shortly before D-Day, Dormer wrote of his decision to return to his regiment, which he clearly regarded as his true home: “I told them in the end that I had decided that I was a Guardsman. Pray God that it was the right decision and that He will give me the courage to go through with it to the end.” He was killed in action only a few weeks later, aged just 25.
Alfred Searls writes about books, music and architecture.
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