Bill Hudson

Colonel Duane Tyrell "Bill" Hudson, (11 August 1910 – 1 November 1995) was a British Special Operations Executive officer who worked as a liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans and Chetniks in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. Early life Duane Tyrell Hudson was born on 11 August 1910 in Bromley, Kent, of South African parents. He attended St. Andrew's College in Grahamstown, South Africa, then the Royal School of Mines of the Imperial College London. He was a noted athlete, excelling in boxing, rugby, swimming, riding, skiing, and wrestling. Hudson was described as a "handsome, swashbuckling man" who was said to have been one of the inspirations for James Bond. Having worked as a mining engineer in South Africa, in 1935 Hudson travelled to Yugoslavia where he was involved in mining and did some prospecting. The following year he married a White Russian ballerina, Ada Proskurnikova, living in Yugoslavia. She refused to live near the mine Hudson managed, and they soon divorced. By 1938, Hudson had become fluent in the Serbo-Croatian language. Hudson's mining activities included work as a consultant mining engineer in Belgrade, and as manager of an antimony mine in Zajača in the Mačva region, where he was working when World War II broke out. World War II In the autumn of 1939, Hudson was recruited into Section D of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the section responsible for conducting political covert actions and paramilitary operations in time of war, and was based in Zagreb. During this period, one of Hudsons' SIS colleagues was murdered, and pro-German Croats planted a bomb beneath his office which nearly killed him. He established a sabotage organisation to attack Axis ships in Yugoslav Adriatic ports using limpet mines. Section D was absorbed into the new Special Operations Executive in mid-1940, and SOE headquarters for special operations in the Balkans was established in Cairo. In February 1941, Hudson personally sank an Italian ship. After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Hudson was extracted from the country.