Xan Fielding

Alexander Wallace Fielding DSO (26 November 1918 – 19 August 1991), known as Xan Fielding, was a British author, translator, journalist and traveller, who served as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent in Crete, France and East Asia during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe and Asia against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany.

Fielding was born in Ootacamund, India, where his father, Alexander James Lumsden Wallace, served in the Indian Army, as a major in the 52nd Sikhs (Frontier Force). Fielding's mother Mary Gertrude (née Feilmann) died soon after his birth, on 13 December 1918, and he was largely brought up in Nice, France, by his maternal grandparents who adopted the name Fielding. For the first eight years of his life, he thought his grandparents were his parents and his seven aunts and uncles were his older siblings. He was educated at Charterhouse School and then studied briefly at the Universities of Bonn, Munich and Freiburg in Germany. In the late 1930s, Fielding moved to Cyprus, where he worked as a sub-editor on The Cyprus Times and ran a bar.

The actress Vivien Leigh was his first cousin once removed, as her mother Gertrude was the youngest sister of Fielding's maternal grandmother. The actor Gerald Fielding was his uncle and took care of him after the death of his grandparents.^{[citation needed]}

Following the fall of France, Fielding joined the British Army, and was commissioned into the Cyprus Regiment as a second lieutenant on 1 September 1940. After the fall of Crete in May 1941, he joined the Special Operations Executive, and was eventually landed in Crete with a supply of weapons and explosives by the submarine Torbay, under Commander Anthony Miers. Fielding teamed up with Patrick Leigh Fermor, and built an intelligence gathering network which provided detailed information on the movement of Axis troops, shipping, and air transport.

He arranged for the transportation to Egypt of hundreds of Allied soldiers left behind after the evacuation, and now being hidden by the Cretans. After six months Fielding returned to Cairo, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order on 15 October 1942.

Fielding finally returned to Crete with Arthur Reade in November 1942. In November 1943 he successfully concluded a pact between the two rival groups of andartes, the communist-led EAM-ELAS and the EOK, the national organisation of Crete. He was then relieved by Dennis Ciclitira. In Cairo, he became a member of the Tara household created by Bill Stanley Moss.

In early 1944 Fielding volunteered to join the French section of SOE, and was parachuted into the south of France in mid-1944, where he was met by two other SOE agents: Francis Cammaerts (codename "Roger") and Christine Granville (codename "Pauline") of the "Jockey" network.

On 13 August 1944, two days before the Allied landings in southern France, Fielding, Cammaerts and French agent Christian Sorensen were stopped at a roadblock near Digne. An irregularity in Fielding's papers, plus the large amount of cash he and Cammaerts were carrying, aroused suspicion and they were arrested. Granville soon arrived at Digne prison posing as Cammaerts' wife and, using a mixture of bribery and threats, persuaded the Germans to release them. As a result, the men were led out of prison expecting to be shot, and were astonished to be met by Granville, waiting for them with a car.