During his time as a British Army officer concerned with covert operations in Crete, Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote nine reports about his activities. All were written for the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive, the British organisation charged with encouraging resistance and carrying out sabotage in enemy-occupied territory. Original typed copies survive among Leigh Fermor’s personal papers, which are preserved today as a collection in his name in the archives of the National Library of Scotland.
The nine reports vary greatly in length, content and tone. Often they were rushed affairs, penned on the move and against the clock after news arrived of an imminent sortie to the coast by the Royal Navy. When it came to staying in touch with the outside world, a secret rendezvous with the Navy, when men and stores were perhaps being deposited on the shore and evacuees picked up, was a rare and precious event. Ordinarily, British officers on Crete kept in contact with SOE headquarters by clandestine wireless transmitters. SOE-trained operators, Greek and British, were responsible for handling these sets and maintaining that vital link, which was used to dispatch short reports, receive instructions, and call in supplies by air and sea. But it was a time-consuming job and messages were necessarily concise. The chance to send a written account out of the country, through the hands of the Royal Navy, offered an opportunity to say and explain much more.
Several themes are common to most of Leigh Fermor’s reports, such as Cretan morale, German morale, working conditions and plans. One consequence of the haste in which he wrote them is their rather irregular structure. Leigh Fermor was a trained and experienced intelligence officer, yet several reports, though they begin with neat passages under standard military headings (‘Enemy Morale’ ‘Propaganda’), rapidly descend into rushed summaries, heavy with anecdote, of recent doings and personal experiences. The striking informality with which they are written is explained by the fact that he knew his likely audience: namely, officers of the Cretan desk at SOE headquarters in Cairo, including colleagues who had themselves worked clandestinely on Crete.
The passages that follow represent about a third of Leigh Fermor’s original text. Ranging from colourful descriptions of conditions in which he was living and characters he was meeting, to accounts of daring forays, in disguise, into German-held towns, they have been selected for inclusion on the grounds that they illuminate his personal experiences on the island. They also include passages that underline the less romantic realities of behind-the-lines warfare: Leigh Fermor’s involvement in the execution of traitors, for example, and the terrible and tragic death of his friend, Yanni Tsangarakis.
Long lists of German dispositions, together with complex accounts of local politics and guerrilla machinations, comprise much of what has been omitted. Readers interested in those aspects of Leigh Fermor’s work can consult, by appointment, the original copies of his reports that are now held in Edinburgh, or read the less complete versions that survive at the National Archives in Kew, outside London, where, among SOE’s surviving files, reports by many of his colleagues can also be found.