WOODHOUSE, Col Hon Christopher Montague (b 1917)

Papers relating to Woodhouse's service with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), as Second in Command, and later Commander, of the British (later Allied) Military Mission to the Greek guerillas in German occupied Greece, 1942-1945, including telegrams, operation orders, notes, minutes, reports and memoranda, Sep 1942-Jan 1945; typescript intelligence report by Woodhouse, dated Jul 1944, on the situation in Greece between Jan and May 1944, with copy from US records of memorandum by G F Reinhardt on a conversation with Woodhouse on Greece, Jul 1944; typescript nominal rolls of officers and other ranks, with list of Greek interpreters, Force 133, Greece, Aug 1944; typescript report by Woodhouse entitled 'History of the Allied Military Mission in Greece, Sep 1942-Dec 1944', with printed maps of Greece [1945]; article by Brig Edmund Charles Wolf Myers entitled 'The crisis in Greece', [Feb] 1945; typescript 'Report on SOE activities in Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea', 27 Jun 1945; typescript account by US Maj Gerald K Wines, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) entitled 'A lesson in Greek', 1948; typescript article by Woodhouse entitled 'Personal reminiscences of the guerilla war in Greece, 1942-1944', published in Acropolis, 1965; copies of staff lists, British Mission to Greece, 1945-1950, and BBC Monitoring Service records, 1948-1952, with extracts from radio monitoring records, and letter to Woodhouse from Edward Eric Orchard, Director of Research, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1972; correspondence between Richard Ralph Mowbray Clogg and Maj Bickham Aldred Cowan Sweet-Escott relating to Brig Cleveland Mervyn Keble, 1973; edition of British Official History of World War Two entitled The Mediterranean and the Middle East by Maj Gen Ian Stanley Ord Playfair (HMSO, London, 1956).

Born 1917; educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford; Gray's Inn, 1939; enlisted in the Royal Artillery, 1939; served in World War Two, 1939-1945; commissioned, 1940; service with the British Mission, Athens, Greece, 1940-1941; served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Greece, 1941-1945; service on clandestine mission in German occupied Crete, 1941-1942; Maj [1942]; Second in Command to Col Edmund Charles Wolf Myers, Head of British Military Mission to Greek guerillas in German occupied Greece, 1942-1943; participated in operation to demolish the Gorgopotamos viaduct, Greece, Nov 1942; awarded DSO, 1943; Col [1943]; commanded British (later Allied) Military Mission to Greek guerillas in German occupied Greece, 1943-1945; awarded OBE, 1944; served as Second Secretary, HM Embassy, Athens, Greece, 1945; Secretary General, Allied Mission for Observing Greek Elections (AMFOGE), 1946; worked in industry, 1946-1948; Master of Arts, Oxford, 1947; Assistant Secretary, Nuffield Foundation, 1948-1950; Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1950; served in HM Embassy, Teheran, Iran, 1951-1952; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1951; Foreign Office, 1952; Director General, Royal Institute of International Affairs, and Director of Studies, 1955-1959; Visiting Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1956; Conservative MP for Oxford, 1959-1966 and 1970-1974; Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Aviation, 1961-1962; Joint Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1962-1964; Director, Education and Training, Confederation of British Industry, 1966-1970; President, Classical Association, 1968; Chairman, Council, Royal Society of Literature, 1977-1986; Visiting Professor of Modern Greek History, King's College London, 1978; Special Member, Academy of Athens, 1980. Publications: A translation of Pope's Sappho to Phaon (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1938); Apple of discord. A survey of recent Greek politics in their international setting (Hutchinson, London, 1948); One omen (Hutchinson, London, 1950); Dostoievsky (Arthur Barker, London, 1951); The Greek War of Independence. Its historical setting (Hutchinson, London, 1952); translation of The buried people. A study of the Etruscan world by Sibylle von Cles-Reden (Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1955); translation of The last sortie. The story of the Cauldron by Herbert Zand (Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1955); translation of Child of the revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard (Collins, London, 1957); Britain and the Middle East (Librairie Minard, Paris, France, 1959); British Foreign Policy since the Second World War (Hutchinson, London, 1961); Rhodes, with John Gilbert Lockhart (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1963); The new concert of nations (Bodley Head, London, 1964); The Battle of Navarino (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1965); A short history of Greece from early times to 1964, with Walter Abel Heurtley, Henry Clifford Darby, and Charles William Crawley (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965); El Neuvo concierto de las naciones (Mexico, 1965); Post war Britain (Bodley Head, London, 1966); The story of modern Greece (Faber and Faber, London, 1968); The Philhellenes (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969); The modern environment of classical studies: presidential address delivered to the Classical Association at Royal Holloway College, 9 April 1969 (Murray, London, 1969); Capodistria: the founder of Greek independence (Oxford University Press, London, 1973); The struggle for Greece, 1941-1949 (Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, London, 1976); Modern Greece, a short history (Faber, London, 1977); Something ventured (Granada, London, 1982); Karamanlis: the restorer of Greek democracy (Clarendon, Oxford, 1982); British reports on Greece, 1943-1944, with Col Sir John Melior Stevens and David John Wallace, edited by Lars Baerentzen (Museum Tusculanum, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1982); The rise and fall of the Greek Colonels (Granada, London, 1985); George Gemistos Plethon: the last of the Hellenes (Clarendon, Oxford, 1986); Rhigas Velestinlis [1995].

The papers are arranged in the following sections: Special Operations Executive (SOE) documents, 1942-1944; Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Greece Official Reports and Reports of BBC Monitoring Service, 1948-1950; Personal accounts by US Maj Gerald K Wines and Woodhouse, 1948-1965.

Open, subject to signature of reader's undertaking form.

Placed in the Centre by Woodhouse in 1976, 1981 and 1989.

Summary guide entry on-line at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/archives/cats/, and detailed catalogue available in hard copy in the Centre's reading room.

Woodhouse's letters to the Manchester Guardian, 1948-1949, are held by John Rylands Library, Manchester University (Ref: Guardian archives). Woodhouse's correspondence with William Clark, 1949-1956, is at the Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Ref: MSS William Clark).

Copies, subject to the condition of the original, may be provided for research use only. Requests to publish original material should be submitted to the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, attention of the Director of Archive Services.

The papers of Capt Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart include two articles by Woodhouse, 'Prolegomena to a study of resistance' from The Nineteenth Century and After, Nov 1948 (Ref: LH 15/5/145), and 'How vital was Churchill?' from The National and English Review, Mar 1957 (Ref: LH 15/4/491). The papers of AVM Stewart William Blackner Menaul include correspondence with Woodhouse, 1978 (Ref: Menaul 11/255/1). Papers relating to Special Operations Executive (SOE) operations in Greece and the Balkans, 1942-1945, and to Woodhouse's service with the Allied Military Mission to the Greek guerillas in German occupied Greece, 1942-1945, can be found in the papers of Brig Edmund Charles Wolf Myers (Ref: Myers); Brig Godfrey Pennington Hobbs (Ref: Hobbs); Lt Col Count Julian A Dobrski (Ref: Dobrski); Maj Ronald R Prentice and Capt H Arthur Wickstead (Ref: Prentice/Wickstead); Maj Philip Frederick Nind (Ref: Nind); Capt Patrick Hutchinson Evans (Ref: Evans).

Greek entanglement by Brig Edmund Charles Wolf Myers (Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1955); Guerrilla and counterguerrilla warfare in Greece, 1941-1945 by Hugh H Gardner (Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington DC, USA, 1962); British policy towards wartime resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece, edited by Phyllis Auty and Richard Ralph Mowbray Clogg (Macmillan, in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, London, 1975); SOE: an outline history of the Special Operations Executive, 1940-1946 by Michael Richard Daniell Foot (BBC, London, 1984); A Greek experience by Nigel Clive (Michael Russell, Salisbury, Wiltshire, 1985); Guerrilla warfare and espionage in Greece, 1940-1944 by Andr Gerolymatos (Pella, New York, USA, 1992); The Allied Military Mission and the resistance in West Macedonia by Professor Lt Col Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprire Hammond (Institute for Balkan Studies, Thessaloniki, Greece, 1993).