Guest
Christopher Lee (27 May 1922 - 7 June 2015) Thanks to the Belgian television archive! Christopher Lee first enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in decoding German ciphers. He was then posted to North Africa where he was based with the precursor of the SAS, the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). While leapfrogging from Egypt across Tobruk to Benghazi, Lee moved behind enemy lines from base to base sabotaging Luftwaffe planes and airfields along the way. After the Axis surrender in 1943, Lee was seconded to the Army during an officer swap scheme, where he officiated the Gurkhas of the 8th Indian Infantry Division during The Battle of Monte Cassino. After working with the LRDG, Lee was assigned to the Special Operations Executive, conducting espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers. For the final few months of his service, Lee, fluent in several languages including French and German, was tasked with tracking down Nazi war criminals alongside the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Of his time within the organisation, Lee said “We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority.“ Lee then retired from the RAF in 1946 with the rank of Flight Lieutenant. Although his service records remain classified and Lee himself was reluctant to discuss anything about his service, after his retirement he'd been individually decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslav, British, and Polish governments. He was also on personal terms with Josip Broz Tito, presumably after their mutual involvement with the Partisan resistence movement (widely cited as the most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe).
