OBITUARY : Jean Howard

The Times
July 9, 2007

OBITUARY : Jean Howard
----------------------

Intelligence officer who deplored the British Government's wartime
decision to support Tito not Mihailovic in Yugoslavia

The death of Jean Howard, née Alington, revives interest in two rathe
different wartime controversies.

The first concerns the portrayal of the career and personality of the
self-styled "Count" László Almássy in the film The English Patient,
which came out in 1996. The second surrounds the myth that the Allied
decision to support Tito's Partisans in wartime Yugoslavia, in preference
to the Serbian Chetniks led by the royalist General Mihailovic, was the
result of manipulation by British staff officers in the Mediterranean
headquarters of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who had communist
leanings..../snip/

...She volunteered as a VAD nurse at the outbreak of war, and treated
badly burnt sailors at Grimsby, but subsequently contracted scarlet fever
and had to be invalided out. While looking for alternative work of some
usefulness to the war effort, she answered an advertisement for German and
Italian interpreters, and after passing a translation test was sent to the
cipher decoding centre at Bletchley Park.

There she translated German messages decoded using the British-held Enigma
encoding machine.

Her association with Almássy began when she was required to translate his
decoded signals traffic in the Western Desert while he was serving as a
spy-master for General Erwin Rommel commanding the German Afrika Korps.  
The Austro-Hungarian-born Almássy had made a number of desert exploration
expeditions during the 1930s, some with the cartographer Lá-zló Kádár.
He offered his desert experience first to the British military
authorities, then the Italians and finally to Germany after being called
up as a reserve officer in the Austrian Air Force, a commitment dating
from service in the First World War.

Almássy carried out desert reconnaissance missions for Rommel and is
credited with attempts to insert and receive reports from German agents in
Egypt. His cipher messages to Rommel’s headquarters and to these agents
were intercepted, decoded by the Enigma machine and translated by Howard.  
Consequently, she was able to follow his activities throughout the desert
campaign, including his proposal to incite an antiBritish uprising in
Egypt - which was not adopted..../snip/

...No evidence so far made public provides a direct link between the work
she did in Hut 3 at Bletchley Park, where she eventually rose to the
position of senior administrative officer, with the SOE missions in
Yugoslavia both to the Chetniks led by Milhailovic or the communist
Partisans led by Tito. Her strongly held view that Tito faced only a few
low category German divisions and did not deserve the level of British
support he received, and that Mihailovic was betrayed, may have been
acquired from Major Archie Jack, an SOE officer she knew who had served in
the SOE mission to Mihailovic.

In common with some others, Howard attributed the decision to drop
Mihailovic in favour of Tito to communist-minded British officers in the
SOE's regional headquarters in Bari, southern Italy, from where operations
in Yugoslavia were directed. Such accusations have lost force in recent
years through a study of the SOE and secret intelligence archives. These,
and copies of German radio traffic intercepted at the time, indicate that
British decision-making reflected a much more accurate assessment of the
wartime situation in Yugoslavia than that of Howard and others who
supported the communist conspiracy theory.

Nevertheless, for the rest of her life she remained in demand for advice
on books and reports on her work at Bletchley Park. She appeared on TV and
was consulted by a cavalcade of historians and writers for her views,
while striving to complete her own work on Almássy and the German
generals, receiving everyone with her customary vigour and good humour.  
Skilled in sea navigation from her youth, she also took every opportunity
to sail well into old age.

She married Major Roger Howard in 1944, who predeceased her. She is
survived by her three daughters.

Jean Howard, wartime intelligence officer, was born on August 23, 1917. 
She died on May 30, 2007, aged 89

 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2045081.ece
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