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W. Stanley Moss

William Stanley Moss
W. Stanley Moss crop.jpg
in Crete (1944)
Born (1921-06-15)15 June 1921
Yokohama, Japan
Died 9 August 1965(1965-08-09) (aged 44)
Kingston, Jamaica
Nickname Billy
Occupation Soldier, writer and traveller
Nationality British
Notable works

Ill Met by Moonlight

A War of Shadows
Notable awards Military Cross
Spouse Zofia Tarnowska

Ill Met by Moonlight

Ivan William Stanley "Billy" Moss MC (15 June 1921 – 9 August 1965), was a British army officer in World War II, and later a successful writer, broadcaster, journalist and traveller. He served with the Coldstream Guards and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and is best known for the Kidnap of General Kreipe. He was a best-selling author in the 1950s, based both on his novels and books about his wartime service. His SOE years are featured in Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe, (also adapted as a British film released under the main title) and A War of Shadows. Moss travelled around the world and went to Antarctica to meet the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

A short biography, Billy Moss: Soldier, Writer, Traveller - A Brief Life by Alan Ogden, was published in 2014 as an Afterword to A War of Shadows.

Ivan William Stanley Moss, (called Bill or Billy) was born in Yokohama, Japan. His mother, Natalie Galitch (born in Nikolayevsk Usuriski), was a White Russian émigrée, and his father, William Stanley Moss, an English businessman and steel merchant in Japan. They married on 22 September 1916. The family survived the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. Moss attended Charterhouse in England (1934–39).

His uncle, Sir George Sinclair Moss (1882-1959), a British diplomat in China, also served the Special Operations Executive as adviser on Chinese affairs during the Second World War.

In the autumn of 1939, Moss, aged 18, had just left Charterhouse and was living in a log cabin on the Latvian coast. By the outbreak of war, he reached , and succeeded in crossing the North Sea to England in a yacht. After full training at Caterham, he was commissioned as an ensign into the Coldstream Guards in July 1941. He served on King’s Guard at the Court of St. James's punctuated by bouts of Churchillian duty at Chequers.


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