Noel Mason-MacFarlane

Frank Noel Mason was born on 23 October 1889, the son of a doctor. His father was convinced that war between Germany and Great Britain was inevitable and joined the Territorial Army to work as an army doctor. As a result, his father was frequently absent, and a major influence on him when growing up was a German governess hired by his father. Mason-MacFarlane was educated at Rugby School and, after attending the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Royal Artillery in 1909. Until February 1909, his surname was Mason, but he hyphened it that month to Mason-MacFarlane out of pride in his Scottish heritage as MacFarlane was the maiden name of his Scots mother. Mason-MacFarlane served in the First World War on the Western Front and in Mesopotamia. An intense individualist, Mason-MacFarlane's experience as a young artillery officer left him a reputation as an officer who was always ready to "look out for trouble" and who had a profound distrust of the higher command. A non-conformist, he was known for his love of amateur theatrical acting, sports and for writing sarcastic doggerel poems mocking the high command. In the winter of 1915–16, he served with the relief forces involved in the bloody fighting outside of Kut as the British sought to unsuccessfully rescue the Indian 6th Division besieged by the Ottomans inside Kut. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1916, a bar to the award in 1918 (gazetted in September) and a second Bar in the same year, awarded while he was attached to the Artillery Headquarters of the 41st Division, the most junior Kitchener's Army division. The citation for the second Bar was published in a supplement to the London Gazette on 2 December 1918, and reads: Mason-MacFarlane was also awarded the French Croix de guerre and mentioned in despatches during the First World War. ==Between the wars==

Between the wars, Mason-MacFarlane attended the Staff College, Quetta from 1919 to 1920. At Quetta, his evaluation upon graduation declared his ability as "above that of any of his fellow students", though his judgement was described as only "fairly good ... rather immature and lacking balance". Afterwards, he served on regimental duties, before attending the Imperial Defence College, a prestigious posting for the most promising officers, in 1935. In 1931, after spending most of the preceding ten years in British India, he was appointed military attaché to Hungary, Austria and Switzerland. The director of M3, the intelligence section of the War Office dealing with Central Europe wrote in an evaluation of Mason-MacFarlane: "He combines a first-class brain with a remarkable flair for intelligence work. He has a keen sense of humour and is an excellent linguist. Full of mental and physical energy and with great initiative...he should go far". A lover of fast cars, he was badly injured in a car crash in 1933 that left him with spinal pain for the rest of his life. In 1934, Mason-MacFarlane returned to Great Britain. Mason-MacFarlane served as Britain's military attaché to Berlin prior to the Second World War, under the ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson starting in January 1938. Additionally he served as military attaché to Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark. In his favourite Ford V-8 coupe, Mason-MacFarlane went out to personally observe the Anschluss after the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht denied to him that it was happening and to investigate the German-Czechoslovak border region during the May Crisis. His reports during the May Crisis that he found no evidence of an imminent German invasion of Czechoslovakia did much to cool down the heated atmosphere during the weekend of 20–22 May 1938. "Mason-Mac" as he was known to his colleagues in the embassy in Berlin was viewed as an eccentric with some like Sir Walford Selby, the ambassador in Vienna, praising him for his "consistently good advice" while others like Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, regarded him as reckless and too easily excited. The British historian D. C. Watt called Mason-MacFarlane a "courageous eccentric" who very much wanted to assassinate Hitler. On 27 July 1938, Mason-MacFarlane reported to Henderson that the Wehrmacht was preparing for a war against Czechoslovakia, stating in a report that the German Army generals were "seeing to it that if the emergency arises their preparations shall not be found wanting". Henderson passed on Mason-MacFarlane's report to London, but stated he did not believe that Hitler was preparing to invade Czechoslovakia. Halifax wanted Mason-MacFarlane to take back a personal message to Hitler, a course of action which he rejected as a "waste of time". Upon his report to Berlin, on 8 August 1938, Mason-MacFarlane met Victor von Koerber, a retired officer and Berlin correspondent of the Wiener Journal, who had excellent contacts with the German General Staff. For the first time, Mason-MacFarlane learned that Hitler planned to invade Czechoslovakia on 1 October 1938 and of his belief that neither Britain nor France would do anything in the event of the invasion. In late August, Mason-MacFarlane submitted a report to Henderson declaring that if Britain made an alliance with Czechoslovakia that this offered 'an outside possibility that we might avert or at any rate postpone catastrophe". On 23 September 1938, the outcome of the Chamberlain-Hitler summit at Bad Godesberg ended with Hitler rejecting the Anglo-French plan for the cession of the Sudetenland as taking too long and demanded the region "go home to the Reich" immediately, a demand that Chamberlain in turn rejected. In the tense atmosphere with Germany and Britain on the verge of war, Wilson was left behind by Chamberlain in Berlin to try to keep the lines of communication open. Mason-MacFarlane was sent by Henderson and Wilson to deliver a message to text of Hitler's Bad Godesberg ultimatum to Prague but the German-Czechoslovak border was closed, forcing him to cross the frontier by a forest path. While crossing the frontier, he was caught up in the barbed wire, and a nervous young Czechoslovak Army soldier helped untangle him instead of challenging him, an experience that left with the conviction that Czech morale was poor. During his journey through the Sudetenland, he had to dodge bullets as he witnessed fighting between the Nazi Sudetendeutsches Freikorps and the Czechoslovak police and army. Upon reaching Prague and after delivering the message to President Beneš, Mason-MacFarlane telegraphed a cable to London stating based upon what he had seen in the Sudetenland that the Czechoslovak Army was suffering from low morale and would swiftly collapse if Germany invaded. Colonel H.C.T Stronge, the British military attache in Prague very strongly disagreed with Mason-MacFarlane's assessment of the Czechoslovak Army. Wilson saw Mason-MacFarlane's report predicating that Czechoslovakia would last a few days against the Wehrmacht as a reason not to go to war with Germany and circulated it widely through the corridors of Whitehall. From Berlin, Wilson telegraphed Chamberlain: "Military attache has just returned from Czechoslovakia and is convinced that resistance will prove feeble. This must be known to the French too and to the Czech General Staff as it is clearly known here". When Wilson returned to London on 27 September 1938, he took Mason-MacFarlane with him, straight to a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street. Mason-MacFarlane told the cabinet: "It would be very rash to base any policy on the assumption that the Czechs would fight like tigers". Cadogan wrote in his diary about the impact of Mason-MacFarlane's presentation to the cabinet: "Unfortunately Mason-Macfarlane (MA in Berlin) also here and he painted a gloomy picture of Czech morale. What does he know about it? Also meeting with Chiefs of Staff who were called in. Not very reassuring...all this produced a glacial period in Ministerial feet". General Sir Henry Pownall, the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence wrote in his diary: "We were much influenced by the views of Mason-Macfarlane who flew over from Berlin that afternoon [27 September] – he has done noble work." On 30 September 1938, the Munich Agreement put an end to the crisis which had pushed Europe to the brink of war. After the Munich Agreement, Mason-MacFarlane served as part of the Anglo-German-French-Italian commission which had the duty of deciding how much of the Sudetenland would go to Germany. From October 1938 to February 1939, Henderson was in London being treated for the cancer which was to kill him in 1953. The chargé d'affaires, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, took over the British embassy in Berlin during this time. He, too, disagreed with Henderson's views of the Nazi regime, andallying with Mason-MacFarlane used his position to "educate" the British cabinet about Germany. On the night of 9 November 1938, Mason-MacFarlane witnessed the Kristallnacht ("night of broken glass") pogrom in Berlin, where the homes and businesses of Jews were looted and vandalised while Jews were beaten up and sometimes killed. Kristallnacht repulsed and disgusted him, adding to his dislike of the Nazi regime. Mason-MacFarlane stated the German economy was on "full throttle" for war and Hitler would probably invade an Eastern European state in 1939, through he also stated there was a strong possibility of Hitler attacking a Western European state. The possibility of Hitler attacking the Low Countries and/or France that Mason-MacFarlane had warned about had more impact on the British cabinet than did his warnings of aggression in Eastern Europe, and changed Britain's policies towards France. Henderson upon his return to the British Embassy on 13 February 1939 stated that henceforward all dispatches from Berlin had to conform to his views. Mason-MacFarlane added greatly to Colvin's credibility when he endorsed his reports, saying Colvin was a reliable source of information about Germany. In a letter to his sister, Chamberlain wrote that it was the "Colvin report" together with information from other sources that led him to agree to Lord Halifax's idea of the "guarantee" of Poland. Mason-MacFarlane proposed the assassination of Adolf Hitler, an offer turned down by his superiors. Mason-MacFarlane's plan was to shoot Hitler while he was on a stand reviewing the Wehrmacht for his 50th birthday celebrations on 20 April 1939; Mason-MacFarlane's apartment window was no more than 100 yards from the reviewing stand. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, said "We have not reached that stage... when we have to use assassination as a substitute for diplomacy." Hitler for his part regarded Mason-MacFarlane as a personal enemy. To try to resolve the Danzig crisis, in May 1939, Pope Pius XII sent the Papal Nunico to Germany, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, to meet the Führer at Berchtesgaden to discuss a possible peaceful resolution to the crisis. General Gerhard von Schwerin, seeing Mason-MacFarlane's remarks as a way to persuade Hitler not to launch a "premature" war in 1939, met him to ask if he was speaking on behalf of himself or the British government. However, Schwerin offended "Mason-Mac" with his question, which he regarded as questioning his honour as an officer, and the meeting ended badly. In late May 1939, Mason-MacFarlane was recalled from Berlin and promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General of Royal Artillery at Aldershot. By this time, he had ceased to be a source of information about Germany and more of an advocate of the particular policies he wanted Britain to follow, as he ventured into grand strategy, stating what policies he favoured as the best way of defeating Germany. The Canadian historian Wesley Wark wrote: " Mason-Macfarlane represents the extreme case of a military attache who abandoned the uses of ambiguity in favour of single-minded and reductive reporting that made no effort to balance the strengths and weaknesses inherent in a military situation, or the gains and losses implied by a British response...He was influential, as we have seen, in the British decision not to back Czechoslovakia at the height of the Munich Crisis. He was equally influential in the British decision to support Poland and create an Eastern Front on her borders in March 1939. An Eastern Front designed to deter Hitler, based on Czechoslovakia and with the possibility of Russian assistance, had some chance of success. Such a front based on Poland and without Russian participation had none whatsoever". ==Second World War==

Appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 1939 New Year Honours, Mason-MacFarlane was Director of Military Intelligence with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1939–40 and during the Battle of Dunkirk was operational commander of "Mac Force," an improvised formation covering the British right flank. For his services, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. From July 1940 to March 1941, during the Second World War, Mason-Macfarlane was second-in-command of Gibraltar City and Garrison. This position allowed him to head the Joint Intelligence Centre. He was the head of a joint group of British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel whose role it would be to support General Franco if Spain were to be invaded by Germany. They were to assist the Spanish defence and, if the Spanish did not resist, then they were to create maximum damage. Mason-MacFarlane briefly served as General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the 44th (Home Counties) Division, a Territorial Army (TA) formation, from April to June 1941, before being appointed Head of the British Military Mission in Moscow, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Appointed on 24 June 1941 and arriving in Moscow on 14 July 1941 to be greeted as a guest of honour by Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin, Mason-MacFarlane had great hopes of Anglo-Soviet cooperation, which were soon dashed as he learned that the xenophobic Soviet regime regarded him as a spy. Unlike the other British generals who expected the Soviet Union to collapse in the summer or autumn of 1941, Mason-MacFarlane had a higher opinion of the Red Army and consistently predicted that the Soviets would hold out. Mason-MacFarlane was Governor of Gibraltar from 31 May 1942 to 14 February 1944, and witnessed the air crash there on 4 July 1943, which took the life of his friend the Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski. Advanced to Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in August 1943, Mason-MacFarlane was appointed a Commander of the Legion of Merit by the United States government the same month and made a Grand Cross of the Polish Order of Polonia Restituta in October. Mason-MacFarlane served as Chief Commissioner of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) for Italy in 1944, effectively head of the interim post-war government. In response to the King's demand that he came back wearing the full ceremonial uniform of a British Army general, Mason-MacFarlane stated as a British Army general that he was not subject to the authority of Italy and would wear whatever clothing he liked. In January 1944, he recommend that the Allies force King Victor Emmanuel III, who was extremely unpopular with the Italian people, to abdicate in favour of his son Crown Prince Umberto. Both the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and even more so the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not wish to press too strongly for the King to abdicate on the grounds that he still commanded the loyalty of what was left of the Italian armed forces. In January 1944, the British psychologist I.G. Greenfield went to Bari to set up a radio station broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda into German-occupied Italy and during his time in Bari, attended the Congress of Bari organised by the six main Italian political parties despite the fact that, as a civilian, this was illegal. Attending the congress, Greenfield was struck by how the prospect of "liberation filled us with hope" and that the people attending the congress all felt the end of Fascism not just in Italy but all over the world "meant the beginning of a new and better world in which democratic values would reign triumphant". After Greenfield talked about the optimistic mood at the congress of Bari, Mason-MacFarlane smiled, said he "would had done the same thing", and told Greenfield that no charges would be pressed against him. From February 1944 onward, Mason-MacFarlane increasingly aligned himself with the American viewpoint on Italy, writing in his reports to London that Italy desperately needed social reforms and that the old Italian ruling class was too morally compromised with Fascism to provide the necessary leadership, advice that did not sit well with Churchill. The King very reluctantly agreed to allow Crown Prince Umberto to become the lieutenant general of the realm with all the powers of the King, but sought in exchange a promise that the ACC impose censorship of criticism of the House of Savoy, a demand that Mason-MacFarlane rejected outright. In June 1944, after the Allies liberated Rome, to prevent the emergence of a rival government in Italy, it was agreed that representatives of the National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale-CLN) should enter the cabinet of Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio, which proved to be a problem when the CLN demanded a new prime minister. By letting the CLN leaders meet in Rome, instead of keeping them out of the Eternal City as Churchill wanted, Mason-MacFarlane was quite consciously setting the crisis in motion. Churchill initially tried to restore Badoglio as prime minister, writing in a telegram to Stalin, seeking his support: "Since when have we admitted the right of Italians to form any government they please?" Roosevelt, who had long been uncomfortable with Badoglio as prime minister, backed Mason-MacFarlane with the president sending the prime minister a telegram on 15 June 1944 saying it would be a "grave mistake" for the Allies to try to reimpose Badoglio given the fact that the vast majority of Italians did not want him as their prime minister. In the "Draft Notes", Mason-MacFarlane wrote that virtually everything Badoglio wrote in his memoirs was a lie, and argued, contra Churchill, that Badoglio was such a discredited figure in Italy that any government headed by him was morally illegitimate to the Italian people. He argued that the best hope of establishing a democracy in Italy was to appoint as prime minister someone like Bonomi who was not associated with the Fascist regime. On the whole, he was very critical of Churchill's approach in seeing the Italian monarchy and the continuation of the traditional elites in Italy as the best way of stopping the Italian Communist Party from coming to power after the war, writing that institutions require moral legitimacy to be accepted by the people, and the way in which Victor Emmanuel had associated with Fascism deprived the Italian Crown of its legitimacy. ==Politics and later life==

At the 1945 general election, Mason-MacFarlane was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament for Paddington North, defeating Winston Churchill's close ally, Brendan Bracken. He left Parliament due to ill-health on 22 October 1946. It was reported in Time magazine on 24 August 1953 that "one of Britain's ablest soldier-administrators" had died of arthritis and complications from a broken leg. Mason-MacFarlane's papers and correspondence are archived in the Imperial War Museum's Department of Documents. ==In popular culture==

The 2016 novel Midnight in Berlin by James McManus features as its hero Colonel Noel Macrae, "a thinly disguised and heavily romanticized version" of ==References==