Stephen Hastings - Military Career

Military Career

On leaving school, his grandmother offered to pull strings to enable him to pursue a career either as a racehorse trainer or in the Scots Guards. He chose the latter. Commissioned from Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as the war started, Hastings saw action against the Italians and Germans in the Western Desert, and took part in Operation Crusader, which relieved Tobruk and threw Rommel out of Cyrenaica.

After disagreements with his company commander he joined the SAS, and before El Alamein participated in a successful operation against an airfield, and a disastrous one against Benghazi, earning a Mention in Dispatches.

Then, after being diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, he landed a job in Cairo as ADC to the Minister of State, Richard Casey. By mid-1943 Hastings was pronounced fit again, and joined SOE. His first assignment was to accompany the Franco-American landing in the south of France. He arrived in the newly-liberated Paris in August 1944, then was dropped with a wireless operator and interpreter behind enemy lines in the Apennines as chief liaison officer to the Italian partisans.

He found them demoralised and largely non-existent, but successfully trained and armed them, despite internal conflicts and frequent enemy attempts to capture him. By early April he had organised three divisions of about 4,000 partisans, which seized Piacenza and held a bridgehead over the River Po in a three-day operation. Hastings was constantly to the fore, coolly directing and encouraging his men while under constant machine-gun and mortar fire, according to the citation for his Military Cross.

After the capture of Piacenza, Hastings and a few companions journeyed through German-held territory, and coolly strode into the piazza of a seaside village on the Adriatic. Hastings thereupon convinced the German officer in charge that it would be in his best interest to provide them with a fine seaside villa and supplies of champagne for the weeks that it would take the Allies to arrive. At the end of April 1945, Hastings was in the Piazzale Loreto at Milan and saw the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, who along with other executed fascists, were hanging upside down. He noted that Clara Petacci's skirt had been pinned to her stockings to prevent her underwear from being revealed. Hastings considered this to be a perfect example of the often paradoxical delicacy of the Italian temperament.

The Piacenza operation was universally considered a major contribution to the Allied advance. He also found time to assemble a scratch pack - the Brindisi Vale Hounds - which hunted a reported, but probably non-existent, fox.

He was spared a posting to Nagasaki by a friend finding him a job in the economic division of the control commission in Austria, a post for which, he candidly admitted at his interview, he had no relevant qualifications. When the friend returned to England, Hastings remained in Austria, taking a staff job with the Army with the sole duty of looking after the polo ponies, and occasionally played himself.

He was then sent to a former Wehrmacht training centre, above the Judenburg in Styria, where he captained the British troops' ski-racing team but broke a leg during a competition against the French.