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Was
born on 19 August 1915 in Bombay, India, the younger son of Sir Norman
Wright Kemp and in 1940, he joined military intelligence (research) known
as MI(R) eventually Special
Operations Executive Kemp had a deep rooted hatred of communism with an equal hostility to Nazism He became a member of a small-scale raiding force, he took part in night raids on the German-held Channel Islands and continental coast. In August 1943 he was parachuted into occupied Albania, where he unusually spent many months working with communist and anti-communist guerrilla groups. While working in Albania he was in contact with Enver Hoxha, the communist guerrilla leader and future dictator of Albania. After his evacuation from Montenegro in February 1944, Kemp at the end of that year parachuted into occupied Poland, where he and his SOE mission "Freston", under the command of Colonel Bill. (‘Marko’) Hudson and Anton Poieszalski, Peter Solly-Flood, and Sergeant-Major Gilbrath were overrun and imprisoned by the advancing Red Army, to be released only several weeks later. |
He then
volunteered for service with Force 136, SOE's
Far East section, and in the last days of the war against Japan was
dropped into Thailand, where he ran arms across the border to the French
in Laos.
After the war in the far east had finished |SOE was finally wound up and Kemp transferred to SIS (Special Intelligence Service) He ended his service commanding the Japanese garrison in Bali before the Dutch authorities arrived. For his work with SOE he was awarded a DSO in 1945. "There may be braver men than Peter Kemp’" recalled Patrick Howarth, "but I am not certain that I have met any of them" Tuberculosis contracted in the Far East finally forced Kemp's retirement from the army and he subsequently embarked on an occasional career as an author and a journalist Taken from various sources, the TNA (PRO) HS 5/144 Major P M M Kemp 1943-1944 Nigel West SOE Secret War, and his obituary in news papers. |
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