For those exhausted evacuees from Greece heading towards Crete, the White Mountains just above the horizon provided a first sight of the island. The vast majority of vessels with troops on board sailed into Suda Bay, a natural harbour eight kilometres long guarded on the north by the rocky hump of a large peninsula, the Akrotiri, and on the south by the great Malaxa escarpment.
At the mouth of the bay stood the ruins of a Venetian castle, but the evacuees’ attention was more likely to focus on the hulk of a small steamship, bombed by the Luftwaffe. This was merely a foretaste of the scene within – the funnels and masts of sunken vessels, always one or two ships burning steadily after an air raid, and damaged superstructures on most of the rest. The cruiser HMS York lay beached, stern awash, after a daring attack by the Italian navy using six small motor boats loaded with explosive. The quay-front village of Suda, a row of low houses, bombed and abandoned, was not an encouraging sight.
Four battalions of the 2nd New Zealand Division arrived at Suda Bay on 25 April: Anzac Day twenty-six years on. The memory of British planning at Gallipoli could not have been encouraging for Dominion troops. They had come from Porto Rafti on HMS Glengyle, a combined operations troopship, and the cruisers Calcutta and Perth.
Activity on the quay had a nervous air since bombers were likely to return at any moment. A British staff officer on a launch came out to their ships yelling instructions that all weapons apart from rifles and sidearms were to be piled on the jetty. Brigadier James Hargest, the commander of the 5th New Zealand Brigade, knew very well that they would never again see all this equipment which they had brought with such difficulty out of Greece, and refused point-blank. The staff officer screamed back that he was in charge of this base area and insisted on his orders being obeyed. ‘I am not surprised’, retorted Hargest, ‘that you are in charge of a base area if this is the way you go on. I tell you my men will retain their weapons.’ In spite of Hargest’s refusal, a detachment of British Military Police on the jetty still managed to relieve many companies of their heavy weapons. The New Zealanders were not alone. Nearly all units, British and Dominion, disembarking at Suda were greeted with this memorable lesson to soldiers that to care for their weapons during a withdrawal was not worth the effort.
Companies were formed up on the quayside, then marched off, but after starting in ‘fairly good order’, the attempt at smartness collapsed. Men still exhausted from Greece fell out and took off their boots at the side of the road. Inland towards Canea, away from the harbour area and the smell of burning oil, the troops found trestle tables set up where British troops already on the island doled out bars of chocolate, tea and packets of biscuits.
The sight of the smartly turned-out regulars of the Welch Regiment, part of the garrison based on the 14th Infantry Brigade, had a heartening effect on many of these dispirited survivors. Those who trudged away from Suda along Tobruk Avenue, as the British had renamed it, were unshaven, dirty, dishevelled and tired. Many were bare-headed because they had thrown away their steel helmets in the retreat, and their battledress was unbuttoned in the warm sun. Cretan boys selling ice-creams at two drachma each did good business.
To disperse this unwieldy assembly – 27,000 men in the course of less than a week – troops were marched out behind Suda and Canea and settled along the stretch of coast between the foothills of the White Mountains and the sea. They spread themselves in the olive groves – the designated camps were no clearer than mining claims on a map – and settled themselves as best they could. The warm spring days could be deceptive: nights were cold for those who had dumped their greatcoats during the retreat.
Once units had a recognizable dispersal area, the ‘Annie Lorry’ came round dropping off rations: tins of bully beef, and cans of jam to go with the hard-tack biscuits which otherwise turned to plaster of Paris in the mouth. Bread was scarce because of the shortage of field bakeries, but when the Greek army offered Italian bakers out of their pool of prisoners of war, the British officer in charge refused: ‘But we couldn’t allow that. They might poison our chaps.’ The Greeks, with admirable tolerance, then offered their own bakers, saying that they would use the Italians.
The bully beef or ‘corned dog’ had to be gouged out with a clasp-knife and eaten off the blade. Oranges generously given by the Cretans followed, but the sudden consumption of large quantities of fruit had its effect. The olive groves quickly became fouled and the Army ritual of latrine-digging was not made easy by the lack of entrenching tools.
The best drinking vessels were the round tins of fifty Player’s Navy Cut, but most had to use empty bully beef tins instead for brew-ups, and also for drinking raki and wine. Short rations on tea and sugar – delivered in a sandbag per company – combined with Cretan hospitality greatly increased the consumption of the local red wine. The Greek word krassi – as in ‘got krassied up’ – lingered in regimental slang for a long time after Crete.
The overcrowding round Canea became acute. There were also several thousand civilian refugees mixed in with both formed troops and the ‘odds and sods’: RAF personnel without aircraft, fitters without tools, drivers without vehicles, pioneers without picks, and stragglers from every regiment, corps and minor unit imaginable.
The appearance of a reconnaissance aircraft – known as the shufti-plane – would send the new arrivals diving pell-mell into slit trenches. A couple of RAF pilots found themselves piled on top of a very attractive young woman. As they extricated themselves on the all-clear, they recognized Nicki from the Argentina night-club. ‘Good afternoon, Nicki,’ one of them said with a grin. ‘Mrs Pirie, please!’ she answered rather haughtily to emphasize her new status.
For most civilians, Crete was no more than a resting place on their flight into Egypt. They often had even less reason for trusting in authority than the soldiers. When General Wilson’s force retreated to the Thermopylae line, Lawrence Durrell in Kalamata telegraphed his British Council boss in Athens asking for instructions. He received the reply: ‘Carry on! Rule Britannia!’, only to discover later that the author of this flippant message had then slipped away on his own.
Durrell, his wife Nancy and baby daughter Penelope escaped from the military chaos in Kalamata only because a former Merchant Navy man with a caique, an acquaintance from Corfu, took them on board. After disembarking in the old Venetian port in Canea, Nancy Durrell mentioned to some Australian soldiers that she had no milk for the baby. With cheerful vandalism, they smashed open the dingy green shutters of nearby shops using their rifle butts, and presented her with enough tins of condensed milk to last for six months. The Durrells’ troubles were not entirely finished. After ten days in Canea, they left for Egypt, where civilians unable to prove their identity were kept in a wired compound. Durrell, unable to send a cable to England to tell his mother of their escape, spotted a reporter from the Daily Mail through the wire of the cage. He called him over and gave him the story of their adventures.
Grander refugees, especially the Greek royal family, encountered none of these difficulties. On reaching Heraklion by flying-boat, the King stayed first at the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, where he was welcomed by the curator, R.W. Hutchinson, always known as ‘the Squire’. This Edwardian villa, with shaded gardens of palm trees and plumbago, was built by Sir Arthur Evans after the King’s uncle, Prince George, had in 1900 secured his right to buy the freehold of the main Minoan site. As Evans took a less active part, he turned it into a base for British archaeology in Crete. From 1930 to 1934, in the years following Evans’s retirement, John Pendlebury had lived there as curator, his wife’s presence breaking the monastic tradition.
King George was joined at Knossos by Princess Katherine, Mrs Britten-Jones and the Prime Minister, Tsouderos. But after a few days at Knossos, the King and his advisers decided that they should move to the other end of the island, since Canea was now officially the seat of the Greek government.
Princess Katherine, although reluctant to leave her brother, was persuaded to depart for Cairo in a flying-boat. Crown Prince Paul and Princess Frederica with their children, Constantine and Sophia (both suffering from the onslaught of Cretan bedbugs), and Mrs Britten-Jones in her ever-discreet guise of lady-in-waiting flew to Alexandria, then on to Cairo on 2 May in the same Sunderland flying-boat as General Wilson.
The King and Tsouderos were joined in Canea by Maniadakis, still the Minister of National Security, who had arrived in Crete with a large number of his hated secret police. This was regarded as so provocative by the Cretans that the former British Vice-Consul in Athens and his counterpart in Canea approached Tsouderos and the King to warn them. Maniadakis was sent on to Egypt where his fifty secret policemen soon sowed hatred and fear amongst the largely pro-Venizelist Greek community there. The two British Vice-Consuls believed that the King and his government lost much prestige during their short time on the island. On the whole, British diplomats tended to be blind to the dislike the King aroused, presumably because he felt able to unbend in their company in a way he could seldom manage with his own countrymen. He once remarked to Charles Mott-Radclyffe with engaging simplicity that ‘the most essential piece of equipment for any King of Greece was a Revelation suitcase’.
The King’s presence in such a republican stronghold as Crete, loyal to the liberal memory of its most famous son, Venizelos, was unpropitious. Tsouderos, as a Cretan and a monarchist, was a relatively rare bird, but as a banker and a politician, he had in Cretan eyes virtually become an Athenian by profession.
The Cretans, more than any other Greeks, never forgave King George for having granted a dubious legitimacy to the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas on 4 August 1936. Traditional Venizelist sympathies were affronted, and on the second anniversary of the August Decree, the Cretans had risen in revolt. Afterwards, their weapons – both the agent and the symbol of resistance to foreign oppression – were confiscated. That aroused more than disgust when the Cretan population then found itself practically unarmed in the face of the German invasion. After the war, in the plebiscite on the monarchy of 5 September 1946, Crete returned an absolute majority against the King. And yet the Communists in Crete, unlike their comrades on the mainland, never stood a chance of gaining power.
The Cretan character – warlike, proud, compulsively generous to a friend or stranger in need, ferociously unforgiving to an enemy or traitor, frugal day-by-day but prodigal in celebration – was, of course, strongly influenced by the landscape of dramatic contrasts in which the islanders lived. Rich coastal strips on the north coast, endless olive groves on the foothills, fertile valleys and odd little plains hidden in the highlands, all were overshadowed by the island’s spinal mass of limestone cordilleras – the White Mountains, the Kedros range, the Mount Ida or Psiloriti range, and finally the Lasithi or Dikti mountains in the east. From sub-tropical vegetation with banana trees, carobs and orange groves, a mountain village, only fifteen kilometres away as the crow flew, but probably sixty on foot, seemed to exist in a different world and a different climate.
Mountain villages in the sheep-rearing (and sheep-stealing) regions of the centre consisted of little more than a cluster of white-washed houses round a simple Orthodox church. Often they had only a floor of beaten earth and a few pieces of home-made furniture, including a large dowry chest of clothes and sheets. The diet of sheep’s and goat’s cheese, potatoes and erratically cooked meat was as hard and monotonous as the life, but the air was invigorating and so clean that wounds healed with astonishing rapidity.*
In the highlands a man was known by the number of sheep he owned, in the lowlands by the number of his olive trees, of which Crete was reputed to have twenty million. Villages in the valleys and lowlands had pollarded mulberry trees down each side of the street, their trunks lime-washed against insects. The houses had plants and flowerpots, cherry trees behind and vine-covered arbours. Life was less harsh, but the people were no less generous. Only in the large cities of Heraklion and Canea were the inhabitants likely to have lost some of those Cretan qualities which had survived, even thrived, over the centuries of foreign occupation with its cycle of repression and revolt.
For Canea to become the new capital of Greece struck the Cretans as a rather unconvincing idea. They maintained an air of normality as the rent for villas shot to previously unimaginable figures. This money did not seem to make its way down to the understocked little shops with dingy shutters. And Cretan men did not forsake their café routine of newspapers and cups of Turkish coffee.
The men, mostly middle-aged since the young ones had been trapped with the Cretan Division in Epirus, presented a curious contrast to the newcomer. Those from the town wore shapeless suits, while those from the hills wore moustaches of cultivated ferocity and traditional Cretan costume consisting of a black bobbled head-cloth – a sariki – embroidered jacket and waistcoat, a mulberry-coloured cummerbund over dark, capacious breeches – British soldiers called them ‘crap-catchers’ – and high boots which completed an impression that was half pirate, half irregular cavalry.
The Cretans welcomed the British soldiers as distant relatives who had arrived unexpectedly from another country. Stephanides saw a group of Cretans dancing the Pentozali – a highly energetic dance – stop to invite soldiers to join them. The self-conscious British, uncomfortable in their prickly battledress, tried to learn the movements and were soon laughing with the dancers at their own clumsiness.
For those who had escaped from the fighting in Greece, the island of Crete was a glorious haven – a place of great beauty and of great friendliness where glasses were perpetually lifted to the common cause. Cretans, although robust drinkers themselves, were astonished at the Anglo-Saxon compulsion to get drunk. According to the degree of their inebriation, drunken soldiers wandered round bawling out ribald songs or mawkish ones. If the BBC was playing popular songs, such as ‘The Banks of Loch Lomond’ or ‘There is a Tavern in the Town’, homesick troops would crowd round a radio immediately.
The effects of drink were also likely to bring out some of the underlying tension between Dominion troops and British symbols of authority, whether military policemen or officers. The New Zealanders and Australians in Crete were neither regulars nor conscripts, but volunteers for the duration, and their lack of reverence – almost a point of Antipodean honour – made British officers steer clear of them whenever possible. On arrival in Egypt, one New Zealander had greeted a rather languid British officer carrying a fly-whisk with: ‘Hey! What’ve you done with the rest of the horse?’ The New Zealanders certainly had their share of ‘wife-dodgers’ and ‘one-jumpers’ (volunteers one jump ahead of the police) but, unlike Australian soldiers, they did not strike fear into British officers.
A yeomanry captain, who had already encountered Australians in Greece, remarked only half in jest of the 6th Australian Division: ‘I think they must have been recruited from the prisons.’ In Canea, a British officer, seeing an Australian filling his pockets with fruit from an old woman’s stall and refusing to pay, remonstrated with him, only to find the muzzle of a looted German pistol thrust into his face. And a Cretan recounted how when a British colonel (probably Jasper Blunt) accompanying the King of Greece had gone to quieten a disturbance outside the window where they were talking, the Australian responsible for the row promptly seized him by the throat and nearly strangled him.
At night, Australian air-raid precautions consisted of shooting at any light they saw, whether a match struck for a cigarette or the correctly dimmed headlamps of a vehicle. Harold Caccia remembered a drive past one of their areas at night as ‘one of the most anxious moments of my life’. Soon afterwards, this ill-disciplined rabble fought the German paratroopers at Rethymno with savage exuberance.
• • •
A rather more orderly regime was soon established in the Canea area. Bell tents and EPIP (European Personnel, Indian Pattern) were erected under the olive trees for the rear echelon. Most of the stragglers from Greece were transported on to Egypt, while formed units were moved out to their designated defence positions. They had been given little chance to sample the delights of Canea’s thirty-seven brothels – ‘thirty-six of them owner-driven’ according to the New Zealand Division Provost-Marshal.
The bulk of the Australian troops were moved eastwards to Georgioupolis, Rethymno and Heraklion. The New Zealanders, on the other hand, marched westwards to take up positions along the coast between Canea and the airfield of Maleme, where the Blenheims of 30 Squadron were now based to fly shipping patrols over the Aegean to chase off Stukas.
The Maori battalion set a cracking pace which some officers found hard to follow. In the village of Platanias the mayor and his daughters welcomed them with tables set out offering bread and white goat’s cheese and red wine. A young woman holding a child began to weep when she saw the soldiers. A New Zealand subaltern asked a Cretan why she cried. Her husband and brothers had been with the Cretan 5th Division in Epirus.
• • •
Few of those marching out to their positions had been impressed by the preparations they had seen from the moment they landed. The dockside at Suda was a shambles. Only two small ships could be unloaded at the same time, so the rest had to wait at anchor in the bay, easy targets for air attack as the half-sunken wrecks testified. Churchill’s call the previous November to turn Suda Bay into a ‘second Scapa’ had not been taken seriously by GHQ Middle East at a time of more urgent demands on other fronts.
Churchill’s phrase had not been a mere figure of speech. He believed strongly in the importance of turning Suda into ‘the amphibious citadel of which all Crete is the fortress’ and had not forgotten the task during the winter. But the emphasis on Suda allowed Wavell to believe that, with all his other commitments, he could get away with reinforcing only the port area.
The most recent commander of the island, Major General E.C. Weston, had arrived in Crete at the end of March. His command, part of a Royal Marine formation known as the Mobile Naval Base Defence Organisation, consisted mainly of anti-aircraft and searchlight batteries. Before the German invasion of Greece, the raids were carried out by Italian torpedo bombers. Almost every gun on every ship in harbour banged away at them, the civilian gunners on merchantmen and Royal Fleet Auxiliaries perhaps even more enthusiastically than the Royal Navy. But the scream of Stukas, once the Luftwaffe took over from the Italians, announced a far more frequent and less sporting event.
The Palestinian Pioneers and a misnamed Dock Operating Company which consisted of shipping clerks in uniform, not stevedores, had the worst job, unloading ammunition and fuel from the ships in Suda Bay under one air attack after another. The red warning flag hoisted over naval headquarters on the quayside could not be seen from the hold of a ship, so often there was no warning of a raid until the Bofors guns opened up. The lack of warning made dockyard parties nervous, which did not help productivity. And the officer in charge of unloading foolishly refused to allow them to take cover, saying that they must consider themselves front-line soldiers. Not surprisingly, a very high proportion began to report sick.
• • •
Harold Caccia, having arrived at Heraklion with the other survivors from the Kalanthe, moved to join a skeleton version of the British Legation transposed to Halepa, next to Canea. On the way he saw what appeared to be one group of soldiers repainting a bridge and another preparing to demolish it. For him this typified the appalling lack of preparation. ‘We’d been there for six months. What had we been doing?’ The strength of his feeling stemmed from the failure of the British to honour their assurance that they would look after Crete which he had delivered to the Greek government when the Cretan Division was sent to the mainland.
While the old city of Canea consisted of narrow streets and tall Venetian houses each topped with a Turkish hayáti (a wooden extension with shuttered windows), Halepa, extending on its east side towards the Akrotiri, had spacious villas with gardens of palm trees, Persian lilac, bougainvillea and oleander. The British Legation was installed not far from the former residence of Prince Peter’s father when he had been Governor-General. And alongside the residence stood the house of the Venizelos family.
Caccia, whose clothes had gone down with the Kalanthe, received some replacements when Peter Wilkinson of SOE arrived on Crete. Wilkinson, mainly responsible for Poland and Czechoslovakia, had come to see if an ‘underground railway’ into Central Europe was still possible up through the Balkans. He was also on the island to watch the parachute invasion, whose imminence had been confirmed by Ultra, and report back to Colonel Colin Gubbins at SOE’s Baker Street headquarters. SOE at that stage was examining the wild idea of parachuting large formations of Pole and Czech forces back into their countries without any hope of being able to support them.
From Suda Bay, Wilkinson hitched a lift to Canea and searched for the British Legation. To his surprise, he found Harold Caccia clipping the hedge. Even more surprising was his attire: patent leather shoes with rubber soles, striped morning-coat trousers, a black cycling jacket and a Panama hat with the ribbon of the Eton Ramblers. They went off for lunch at a good restaurant, then Caccia proposed a walk to Venizelos’s birthplace – a respectable distance. They soon found themselves passing ‘some extremely bolshie Australian troops’. Wilkinson, in uniform, was a little uneasy about the reception that ‘this fairly improbable Englishman’ beside him might receive, but Caccia was unruffled by the barracking, and they strolled rather than ran the verbal gauntlet.
As well as trousers for Harold Caccia, Wilkinson had also brought a wireless set for Ian Pirie, the less respectable face of British diplomacy. Pirie and Barbrook had established themselves in another, even grander, villa not far away in a street lined with Persian lilacs then flowering luxuriantly. Pirie, as Nicholas Hammond observed, was ‘a great chap for getting good accommodation.’ This centre for secret operations, dubbed Fernleaf House, was filled with wireless sets, the German uniforms brought over from Athens in the caique and crates of machine guns humped about by Greeks in and out of uniform. Pirie’s and Barbrook’s piratical crew included a former rum-runner and a warrant officer with waxed moustache, a Mauser pistol in his belt and a Browning in a shoulder holster. The thoroughly irregular set-up was completed by the blonde Nicki, who although newly married and stand-offish with RAF pilots in slit trenches, had not lost any of her unselfconscious sexuality. It left the local Cretan women, young and old alike, ‘speechless with amazement’.
They were joined at Fernleaf House first by Wilkinson and then by Geoffrey Cox, a foreign correspondent turned subaltern in the New Zealand Division, who had been told to establish a daily newspaper for the troops called Crete News. Wilkinson’s interest in the underground route into the Balkans soon dwindled when it became clear that Pirie’s fleet of clandestine caiques organised by a shadowy figure called Black Michael owed more to imaginative optimism than reality. So while waiting to study the parachute invasion at first hand, Wilkinson decided that the most useful and entertaining employment open to him was to sit on the terrace with a selection of rifles from the armoury which littered the house and, comfortably installed with a loader, take pot shots at the Stukas as they climbed, belly exposed, from their dive-bombing attacks on Suda Bay just over the hill. Wilkinson’s running commentary on his shooting – ‘made that blighter turn’ – was on one occasion accompanied by a rather wistful sigh from the fearless Nicki on the balcony above as she watched the unopposed bombing. ‘No good RAF. Come along Hurricanos.’
• • •
Nick Hammond, having left Ian Pirie and Bill Barbrook in Canea, had signed on with a character whose exploits soon became legendary in the eastern Mediterranean, Mike Cumberlege. Cumberlege, a bearded naval officer with a gold ring in one ear, commanded a caique from Haifa renamed HMS Dolphin and fitted with a two-pounder gun and a pair of Oerlikons for defence against aircraft. The rest of the crew consisted of Cumberlege’s cousin, Cle, a major in the Royal Artillery, who had demoted himself to gun-layer on this extraordinary vessel, a South African private in the Black Watch called Jumbo Steele, and Able Seaman Saunders. The Dolphin sailed to Heraklion, where Hammond met up with John Pendlebury for the first time since their separation in Athens the previous summer.
He found Pendlebury in his element. Apart from his swordstick, he had learned a form of stave-fighting in Egypt at the archaeological dig at Tell el-Amarna. He half-pictured himself as a sort of Cretan Lawrence of Arabia, but lacked Lawrence’s disturbing tenacity.
After the Italian invasion, and with British troops welcomed on Crete by the government in Athens, Pendlebury no longer had to play the part of Vice-Consul. He took out his captain’s uniform, and became liaison officer between the British forces and the Greek military authorities. His real interest was the creation of a force to replace the Cretan 5th Division sent to the Albanian front. At that time there were fewer than four thousand Greek soldiers left on the island, and fewer than one in five of them was armed.* Pendlebury therefore requested 10,000 rifles in November 1940 from GHQ Middle East in Cairo. He did not seem to realize that he was echoing the Prime Minister.
Churchill had recently told the CIGS: ‘Every effort should be made to rush arms and equipment to enable a reserve division to be formed in Crete. Rifles and machine guns are quite sufficient in this case. To keep a Greek division out of the battle on the Epirus front would be very bad, and to lose Crete because we had not sufficient bulk of forces there would be a crime.’ This order was not ignored, nor did it sink in the bureaucratic morass of GHQ Middle East, as many seemed to think. Although the Metaxas regime, with the Cretan revolt of 1938 in mind, can hardly have been keen to rearm a population from whom it had recently confiscated all arms, it appears to have accepted the idea. ‘The Greek General Staff’, wrote Colonel Salisbury-Jones in his subsequent report on the Battle of Crete, ‘agreed to raise a reserve division, requesting us to provide the equipment. The provision of complete equipment was, of course, impossible but it was agreed that 10,000 rifles should be provided.’ Only 3,500 American carbines arrived because German air raids on the Midlands had destroyed small arms factories, and production did not recover until late in 1941. Such practical considerations did little to moderate Pendlebury’s righteous enthusiasm.
Pendlebury had not confined his activities to Crete. He had worked closely with 50 Middle East Commando, sent to the island in December to bolster the garrison after the departure of the Cretan Division and to carry out raids on Italian-held islands in the Dodecanese, first Kasos and then Castelorizzo. Early in the year, SOE Cairo sent two younger officers to help him: Terence Bruce-Mitford and Jack Hamson who, by a curious coincidence, had a glass eye like Pendlebury’s. Bruce-Mitford, a lecturer in classics at the University of St Andrews, with an academic air and thinning sandy red hair, was austere and very tough. His idea of fun in Cairo was to go out into the desert and spend the night in the sand dunes. Hamson, who later became Professor of Comparative Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, was very different if only because of his exotic background. He came from a Levantine English family, jewellers in Constantinople who lived in princely style on the island of Prinkipo. Their well-connected Catholicism even brought Hamson a beautiful new pair of boots after his capture in Crete: his mother managed to send them via Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.
Both took part in one of the raids on the Dodecanese. Hamson described the scene of embarkation on a moonlit night: ‘past the Venetian fort and down to the water . . . as we went in silence with equipment and rifles and bombs and knives through the ruins of other wars: a scene in a boy’s story-book.’ But then he went on to blast the ‘confusion, incompetence, ineptitude and mess’. The débâcle was not entirely the fault of 50 Middle East Commando, but they were soon withdrawn to Egypt.
Pendlebury’s life of relished contrasts continued. Having organised an Old Wykehamist dinner in Heraklion, Pendlebury, accompanied by his faithful muleteer and bodyguard Kronis Vardakis, set off into the mountains wearing a black patch, having left that glass eye on the table in his room to warn friends who dropped by that he was away on guerrilla work.
The room itself was truly chaotic: rifles, not brooms, fell out of cupboards, and secret papers spilled on to the floor. After his execution by paratroopers, a German report – which insisted on calling him ‘Pendleburg’ – stated: ‘In his house in Heraklion documents concerning his organisation were found, the financing and the arming, as well as the names of his assistants. Arms, munitions and explosives were found there in a considerable quantity.’ But John Pendlebury had accepted his death in advance: not in any way as a suicide, but with his heart set on an exultant finale of self-sacrifice. On 17 March, over three weeks before the German invasion of Greece, and two months before the invasion of Crete, he had written his last words to his wife: ‘love and adieu’.