High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond CBE, DSO (15 November 1907 24 March 2001) was a British scholar of ancient Greece of great accomplishment and an operative for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied Greece during World War II. Hammond studied classics at Fettes College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He excelled in his exams and also spent vacations exploring Greece and Albania on foot, acquiring unrivalled knowledge of the topography and terrain, as well as fluency in Albanian. These abilities led him to be recruited by the SOE during World War Two in 1940. His activities included many dangerous sabotage missions in Greece (especially on the Greek island of Crete) as well as Albania. As an officer, in 1944 he was in command of the Allied military mission to the Greek resistance in Thessaly and Macedonia regions of Greece. There he came to know those regions thoroughly. He published a memoir of his war service - Venture into Greece in 1983; he was awarded the order of the DSO and the Greek Order of the Phoenix.