Irregular warfare in the eastern Mediterranean held a strong appeal for vigorous young Britons. A cynic might easily dismiss the phenomenon as a sort of adult version of Swallows and Amazons, messing about in boats and treating the region as an immense adventure playground. Although many of them exulted in this new life because it provided an ideal escape from peacetime routine or frustrations, the diversity of their characters should be a warning against too simple an analysis. They ranged from Philhellenic dons to well-connected thugs, with many variations in between including a handful of good regular soldiers, romantics, writers, scholar gypsies and the odd louche adventurer. The vast majority belonged to SOE, Special Operations Executive, created from the amalgamation in July 1940 of Section D and MI(R). (See Appendix A.)
A process of selection, unusual in wartime, led to a preponderance of archaeologists and dons. Paddy Leigh Fermor later wrote of himself and other ‘improvised cave-dwellers’ that ‘it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the army had realized that the Ancient tongue, however imperfectly mastered, was a short-cut to the modern: hence the sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags.’
Those recruited into special operations seem to have sensed that these war years would be the most intense of their life. ‘What a lot of material for autobiographies is being provided,’ a friend said to the traveller and writer Peter Fleming, who had been recruited by MI(R) shortly before war broke out. He should also have mentioned fiction. Another early member remarked that the same people kept cropping up in unlikely places round the Mediterranean: ‘The whole thing was just like an Anthony Powell novel.’
Regular soldiers provided the original basis of MI(R). One of them, a sapper officer called George Young, was held at readiness in Cairo with a field company of Royal Engineers to move into Roumania to blow up the Ploesti oilfields. They were to be guided to their targets by Geoffrey Household, the author of Rogue Male and a more recent MI(R) recruit. Household travelled there with ‘businessman’ written in his passport, not author, because ‘Compton Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham [both secret agents in their time] had destroyed our reputation as unworldly innocents for ever’.
The fear of forcing the Roumanians into Axis arms eventually led to the indefinite postponement of Young’s mission. Soon afterwards when MI(R) in Cairo was reorganised into SOE’s embryo form, Young formed a commando in the Middle East. This was eventually incorporated into Layforce, and he took part in its rearguard action in Crete described in Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh, the brigade intelligence officer. In Waugh’s crisis of disillusionment triggered by this retreat, Young was one of the few to retain his respect.
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The most maverick enterprise of this, or perhaps any other stage of the war, was Peter Fleming’s private army known as Yak Mission. Fleming, brother of Ian, traveller and author of books such as Brazilian Adventure and reserve officer in the Grenadier Guards, was already the veteran of one expeditionary fiasco, the Norwegian campaign. By shameless string-pulling – his father had been a great friend of Churchill – Fleming formed a party to reconnoitre Namsos by Sunderland flying-boat. Then, when the Allied forces landed, he attached himself to General Carton de Wiart who, with ‘only one eye, only one arm, and – rather more surprisingly – only one Victoria Cross’, was one of the inspirations for Evelyn Waugh’s character Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook.*
During the invasion scare following Dunkirk, Fleming received orders to organise stay-behind groups known as Auxiliary Units in Southern England. Then, in the autumn of 1940, when the number of Italians taken prisoner by Wavell’s forces in the Middle East began to rise, Churchill had the idea of forming a ‘Garibaldi Legion’ from the anti-Fascists amongst them. Fleming recruited half a dozen friends including Norman Johnstone, a fellow Grenadier, and Mark Norman, a subaltern in the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, who ‘didn’t have a clue what it was about’. Taking their batmen with them like characters out of Dornford Yates, they went off on an intensive course in explosives and close-quarter combat at the Lochailort commando-training centre in the Western Highlands.
Their code-name, ‘Yak Mission’, was inspired by Fleming’s book News from Tartary. Issued with a ton of plastic explosive, £40,000 in notes and sovereigns, and Italian pocket dictionaries (since only one of them spoke Italian), they proceeded to Cairo ‘with extraordinary priority’.
Failing to obtain a single volunteer from the prison camps, Yak Mission would have been disbanded had it not been for the German threat to the Balkans. Towards the end of March, Peter Fleming persuaded George Pollock, the head of SOE Cairo, to allow them to go to Yugoslavia ‘to stiffen Prince Paul’s resolve’. Events forced Fleming to modify the plan. Yak Mission would instead make its way to Northern Greece to train resistance groups, and Fleming managed to find room for his men and their equipment on the next troopship sailing from Alexandria. In Athens they made contact with Harold Caccia whose wife, Nancy, was the sister of Oliver Barstow, another of Fleming’s guerrilla knights.
Yak Mission, ‘bristling with Tommy guns and pistols’, made its way north, having bought their own transport out of the war-chest. And at the end of the first week of April, on a mountainside next to the Yugoslav border, amidst breathtaking scenery, the soldier servants pitched the tents and set up the camp-beds ‘as if we were on safari’. Peter Fleming could not resist sending a signal to SOE in London – AM HOLDING MONASTIR GAP. He did not know that the Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte, the SS Division commanded by Sepp Dietrich, was heading straight for the site of their glorious picnic.
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John Pendlebury, the archaeologist, was always certain that the Germans would invade Greece and then his beloved Crete. He had not been idle since he had split up with Nick Hammond and the others after their flying-boat journey from Poole harbour. Based at first back at the Villa Ariadne which he knew so well from his time as curator at Knossos, and then in Heraklion, he compiled lists of pro-British and pro-Axis citizens. At that stage, before the Italian invasion and while the Metaxas government assiduously held to its neutrality, he had to act the part of ‘the most bogus Vice-Consul in the world’. But Pendlebury, like the Cretans with whom he identified so strongly, despised the discretion needed for secret operations. He was far too famous for his work. The Cretans speculated about him, endlessly intrigued by this Englishman with the glass eye and swordstick who strode about their island.
Pendlebury’s directness, sense of humour and joie de vivre appealed enormously to them: for a Wykehamist of that generation, he was remarkably uninhibited and he seemed to relish contradictions. Pendlebury was a convivial loner with an innocent swagger, and the war – far more anarchic than dictatorial in his case – provided the perfect opportunity to throw himself into the role of a distinctly irregular soldier with irregular weapons.
After the Italian invasion, and with British troops welcomed on Crete by the government in Athens, Pendlebury took out his cavalry captain’s uniform and became liaison officer between the British forces and the Greek military authorities. His real interest, however, was the creation of a Cretan force to replace in part the locally raised division sent to the Albanian front.
Pendlebury was quick to sense a slight, and his handling of superiors was not always diplomatic. ‘My best rebuke’, he wrote, ‘was for using the word “bastard” in a wire to a Minister. In reply I pointed out that as it was in the code book the word was obviously meant to be used, that the Minister was old enough to know the facts of life, and that it was the only word that fitted the individual it referred to.’
Official rebuffs did not deter him. At Christmas in 1940, he described the Cretans’ war-like spirit: ‘I have been carried shoulder high round five towns and villages and have been blessed by two bishops and have made a number of inflammatory speeches from balconies. The spirit is amazing.’ And he returned from a barnstorming tour into the White Mountains and round Mount Ida, claiming ‘Anglophily is rampant!’ Pendlebury had a passion for maps. He prided himself that he knew ‘the island better than anyone in the world’ and its mountains ‘stone by stone’. Given the weapons, he had not the slightest doubt that the Cretans could defeat a German invasion virtually on their own. And that invasion would come as soon as Greece fell.
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Pendlebury’s friend and colleague, Nick Hammond, was offered work more in line with his expertise after a month in Alexandria with the Welch Regiment and their Sunday cocktail parties. A.W. Lawrence, a professor of classical archaeology and the half-brother of Lawrence of Arabia, arrived from England, sent by Churchill to train Jews in Palestine for sabotage missions. Arnold Lawrence, Hammond and a gun-runner named Barnes established their school in a kibbutz outside Haifa. Secrecy was essential since their activities constituted a clear breach of the League of Nations Mandate. One of their first pupils was Moshe Dayan who lost his eye training there. But the project did not prosper, mainly due to Churchill’s eccentric choice of leader, for A.W. Lawrence proved to be almost as ardent an Arabist as his half-brother.
For his next appointment, Hammond had to move only a few miles down the road when, in October 1940, SOE Cairo’s main training-centre for agents was set up. (This camp outside Haifa, later known as ME 102, was a place which he and most SOE officers came to know well over the next four years.) In the early spring of 1941, Hammond was summoned to Athens. He arrived there on 15 March, shortly before Peter Fleming’s Yak Mission. Fleming, who lacked an explosives expert, tried to poach him, but with the Wehrmacht’s Twelfth Army already in Bulgaria, Hammond felt it was far too late to start training stay-behind groups, and he was already working with the two SOE men inside the Legation. Bill Barbrook was a former regular officer recalled for service because of his Albanian experience, while his companion, Ian Pirie, had been in Greece since before the war, when he was recruited by Section D.
Pirie, an Old Harrovian once described as ‘not unlike a grown-up Cupid in well-cut clothes’, had a colourful business career behind him which apparently included ill-fated attempts to start a dog cemetery and then a racecourse near Athens. He evidently enjoyed life in the capital with his girl-friend Nicki Demertzi, the devastating blonde at the Argentina night-club, whom he believed to be related to the former prime minister of that name.*
Pirie’s man-of-the-world act could on occasions be exasperating. One of his more famous remarks concerned the Greek royal family: ‘How on earth can one take a dynasty seriously which isn’t as old as one’s wine merchant?’ A number of Ian Pirie’s undercover operations strongly suggested a compulsive levity. Apparently in all seriousness, he proposed to Harold Caccia, the First Secretary, that to boost morale in the wake of a German take-over, they should import musical lavatory-roll holders which played the Greek national anthem when the paper was pulled.
One operation, which was slightly more professional at least in theory, targeted a German wireless transmitter operated from a private apartment. It broadcast messages to Berlin at regular times, so Pirie arranged to create a sudden surge of the electric current supplied to the building, hoping this would make the circuits explode. Instead, the escapade produced an explosion of protests from other occupants, including the American Minister and a dentist who was drilling a patient’s tooth at the time. The Germans merely switched to a generator and carried on.
Pirie’s main mission to create a resistance network in advance was unsuccessful, although this may not have been entirely his fault. With unusual frankness, since diplomats generally preferred to remain ignorant of SOE activities, he warned Harold Caccia, a contemporary from Trinity College, Oxford, about his secret work. The Metaxas government was strongly opposed to any covert activity which might upset the Germans, so Pirie felt he could not attempt to recruit anybody associated with the regime – they would denounce him to the agents of the Minister of National Security, Maniadakis. This left only the opposition groups, mainly of the non-Communist left – strict Communist Party members still had to regard Nazi Germany as the ally of ‘socialism’s motherland’.*
As British military assistance to Greece increased slowly in the winter of 1940 and then greatly in the early spring of 1941, so too did the involvement of all the rival intelligence organisations. David Hunt, the archaeology don attached to the Welch Regiment in Alexandria, had arrived in Athens in November 1940, accompanied by Geoffrey Household, now in a new role of field security officer. They joined the RAF intelligence staff headed by Wing Commander Viscount Forbes, who had been Air Attaché in the Bucharest Legation at the time of Household’s fruitless wait for George Young’s sappers.
While Household liaised with Greek security officers, Hunt, as a staff captain in intelligence, processed the signals intercepts, both Ultra and the lower-grade but more immediate material. Conventional military intelligence and the under-cover organisations (mainly in the form of the assistant military attachés dotted around in Balkan capitals) were seldom the best of friends. The rivalries then became further exacerbated, because General Wilson, dissatisfied with Stanley Casson of the British Military Mission, brought in Colonel Quilliam from GHQ Middle East as his own intelligence chief. When the Yugoslav army collapsed without warning in April, accusations of incompetence flew back and forth between departments with great vehemence.