Bellasis - School for Secret Agents on Box Hill 
By Paul McCue 

Requisitioned by the War Office from early 1941 until May 1945, Bellasis was one of six initial Special Training Schools (STS) for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret organisation created in July 1940 to ‘coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’.

In the first half of 1941 Bellasis provided paramilitary training for SOE staff and Italian/Italian-American anti-fascist would-be agents. Later trainees came from Denmark and the Netherlands. By November of the same year Bellasis had become the Holding School for Czechoslovak agents, giving initial and refresher training for agents waiting to progress through the training syllabus, or to depart on missions in enemy-occupied Czechoslovakia.

The SOE agents for whom Bellasis is chiefly remembered were the two members of OPERATION ANTHROPOID, the mission to assassinate SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the combined security services of Nazi Germany and acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. Bellasis also offered training for what were termed coup de main missions – commando-style raids on the continent.

From June 1944,  prisoners of war from the German forces who claimed to be anti-Nazi, including Austrians, Poles and Russians as well as Germans, were interrogated at Bellasis to determine whether they might be suitable for training to be inserted as agents, code-named BONZOs, behind German lines and in Germany itself.