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Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944. By E.P. Thompson. Woodbridge: Merlin Press and Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 111.
Traveling north by train from Sofia, one comes upon a station with the unusual name "Major Frank Thompson." Prior to 1948 at least, people in the area would have needed no reminding why it was so designated, and today, after decades of neglect and disinformation, their memories have been refreshed. This brave and exceptionally talented young British officer paid with his life for his efforts to aid the Bulgarian partisan movement. Here, in June 1944, he was betrayed, captured by Royalist gendarmes, and executed in crass contravention of the laws of war.
Thompson's younger brother Edward, who was then also in the armed forces, went on to become a social historian of international renown. Invited to deliver the Camp Lectures at Stanford in 1981, he chose this painful episode as his topic. Beforehand he went to Bulgaria and talked to surviving partisans, but came up against the highly misleading, mythologized view of the events of 1944 propagated at that time by the Communist regime. Back in London his inquiries met with embarrassed silence from those who knew more than they could say. Many of the documents pertaining to the wartime activities of SOE (Special Operations Executive) had been "weeded" out of official files. Despite these obstacles E.P. Thompson managed to reconstruct the tragic story of "Claridges"-- as this two-man mission was jocularly code-named-and to use it as a peg for some reflections on the way the historical record is so often abused for political ends. This little book is in part a moving personal tribute, in part a detective story, and in part a thought-provoking indictment of human folly and wickedness. Sadly, the author did not live to see the publication of his lectures, the text of which survived among his papers and has been capably edited with a foreword...