George (Rudolf Hanbury) Fielding DSO (3 July 1915 – 23 January 2005) was a Major in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. Early life Through his great, great, great-grandfather, Henry Fielding, the Novelist and Chief Magistrate of Westminster, George Fielding was a scion, through patrilineal descent, of the Earls of Denbigh and Desmond. Fielding was born in Twyford, Hampshire, three weeks before his father, Major George Hanbury Fielding of the Sherwood Foresters, was killed at Gallipoli. His mother, Evelyn Carlota (née Jewell), took him to live in Château d'Oex in Switzerland; she returned to England in 1939. Fielding was educated at Twyford School, Shrewsbury School and later at Freiburg University where he studied the German that was invaluable to his later military career. During the late 1930s he worked as a trapper on the Canadian Arctic Circle and then moved to the Argentine, first as assistant to a farm manager on an estancia and later as a cattle-buyer in Rosario for Swifts of Chicago. In 1938, anticipating the outbreak of the Second World War, Fielding returned to England, and was commissioned into the 3rd The King's Own Hussars. His squadron was posted to fight in the Battle of Crete, where he was wounded in the arm and then charged with marching his fellow walking-wounded overland to the coast for evacuation by the Royal Navy. He was mentioned in dispatches. He then served with 3rd Hussars in the North African campaign during which he answered the call for volunteers to join the Special Operations Executive. Austrian SOE mission, August 1944 In August 1944, with German forces retreating to the Gothic Line on the Italian mainland, Fielding was tasked to lead a three-strong SOE group into Austria's East Tyrol and Carinthia, to help and encourage sabotage on German communication lines. The group was parachuted behind enemy lines near Tramonti in North Eastern Italy on 12–13 August, hoping to gain support from Italian partisans. Although the communist Garibaldi partisans showed reluctance, the Osoppo partisans at Forni Avoltri, south of Austria, were willing to help and to hide them. He sent one of his group to reconnoitre within Carinthia but the report back showed that there was little willingness to take up resistance through fear of Gestapo reprisal. Despite lacking identity papers, Fielding decided to reconnoitre the upper Gail Valley and Carinthia personally and came to the same conclusion. The