Background
Thompson was born in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India to a British missionary family.
Thompson was born in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India to a British missionary family.
He attended board schools in Albuquerque and Fort Defiance, Arizona. He enlisted in the United States Marines on the day he graduated from high school, May 5, 1942.
Despite his affiliation, he did not support the party's policy of neutrality dictated by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and joined the British Army with service number 124039 as a volunteer training with the No. 122 Officer Cadet Training Regiment before being commissioned Second Lieutenant into the Royal Artillery on 2 March 1940. He served in England, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Sicily, Serbia and Bulgaria.
He was part of the Special Operations Executive. On 25 January 1944, along with three other commandos, Major was sent on a parachute landing mission to establish a link between the British staff and the Bulgarian partisans led by Slavcho Transki. He landed near Dobro Pole, Macedonia.
The commandos carried a radio to keep in contact with the staff in Cairo, Egypt and Bari, Italy, but it broke down. On 23 May, took part in the clash at the village of Batuliya between the Bulgarian Gendarmerie and the Second Sofia Brigade of National Liberation of the partisans. He was wounded by the gendarmerie forces, captured and executed by firing squad in the nearby village of Litakovo.
After the war and the establishment of a Communist government in Bulgaria, the nearby villages of Livage, Lipata, Tsarevi Stragi, Malak Babul, Babul and Zavoya were merged and renamed to in the British officer's honour. The second, Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, appeared in 1996.
His younger brother, E. P. Thompson, was the English historian, socialist and peace campaigner.
In 1939, while studying at the University of Oxford, he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain under the influence of his close friend Iris Murdoch.