‘SOE’, wrote Monty Woodhouse in his memoirs, ‘was a strange organisation, whose only consistent feature was that it was drastically purged every August.’ The purge which began this phenomenon took place in the summer of 1941.
In the heady days of amateurism just before the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, this world of schoolboy heroics was upset from an unexpected quarter. On 24 March 1941, Hermione Ranfurly, the rather grand secretary of George Pollock, then head of SOE in Cairo, decided to take matters into her own hands. Her husband, the Earl of Ranfurly, had just been captured in the desert, and she felt so strongly about the war effort that she did not flinch from going behind her chief’s back.
Peter Fleming happened to be sitting on the veranda at the British Embassy after lunch with Sir Miles Lampson and Anthony Eden when a message was brought to say that Lady Ranfurly was extremely anxious to see Eden on ‘a matter of importance to do with the war’. ‘This rather surprised us,’ Lampson wrote in his diary, ‘and Peter Fleming let out that she is working in the same secret organisation as he is. This as it subsequently transpired was rather awkward. She arrived in due course and insisted on seeing AE alone. To him she imparted her feeling that the whole of this hush-hush organisation is not only in a state of chaos, but that any amount of public money is being wasted thereon. This, in point of fact, only confirmed what AE (as he subsequently told me) had already long suspected.’
George Pollock, beleaguered by conventional military distrust of his organisation spiced with large measures of jealousy, eventually fell victim to this first purge after repeated calls from GHQ Middle East to Dr Hugh Dalton, the minister responsible for SOE in London. A committee of enquiry found little evidence of wrong-doing, but the demand that heads should roll overcame any question of natural justice. The organisation was re-formed under Colonel Terence Maxwell, a banker with Glyn Mills before the war, and moved to a large and cheerless block of flats on Sharia Kasr-el-Aini called Rustum Buildings. Notwithstanding elaborate, yet rather obvious, security precautions, Cairene taxi drivers soon knew it as ‘secret building’. In spite of the summer setback, SOE Cairo was about to embark on an extraordinary growth by sending military missions to the Balkans.*
The Greek section, B6, and the Cretan section, B5, were separated administratively and physically: Jack Smith-Hughes and his assistants operated from an ‘outhouse over the road’. This illogicality, which made Crete as different from Greece in bureaucratic terms as it was from Albania or Yugoslavia, turned out to be extremely fortunate since it helped the Cretan section distance itself from the minefield of mainland politics.
A far greater divide existed between the Cretan sections of SOE and ISLD (Inter Services Liaison Department), a military branch of the Secret Intelligence Service. The Earl of Selborne, who in February 1942 replaced Dr Hugh Dalton as Minister of Economic Warfare and thus political master of SOE, later wrote: ‘SOE and SIS were separated by War Cabinet decision in June 1940. In my opinion their functions are quite distinct and as SOE work inevitably comes more into the limelight (e.g. Greece and Yugoslavia), the desirability of keeping the organisations separate increases.’
In Cairo, ISLD was run by Captain Bowlby RN (known as ‘the beautiful Bowlby’), Colonel Teague and Wing Commander Smith-Rose based in the GHQ complex. The two headquarters loathed each other with fanatical suspicion, but fortunately in Crete the personnel in the field co-operated amicably. ‘SOE’, said Ralph Stockbridge, ‘was basically a bunch of adventurers while ISLD was a very mixed bag. SOE personnel were always treated as officers and gentlemen, not as agents.’ This even seemed to extend to a bizarre disparity in the field. SOE officers, who later received sovereigns in generous quantities from their cashier, Lieutenant Shread RNVR (inevitably known as ‘Golden Shred’ after the marmalade), sometimes had to help out their poor relations. In the early days, however, Xan Fielding landed with a wad of drachma banknotes which turned out to be worth only £16, so great was the rate of inflation.
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After the battle for Crete had been lost, Monty Woodhouse and Paddy Leigh Fermor landed at Alexandria like thousands of other evacuees. A few days later they moved to Cairo where they were ‘held in a kind of limbo against the possibility of further operations in Crete or Greece, but months passed without anything happening.’ Woodhouse, recruited into SOE by Bill Barbrook, went into the field first. He returned to Crete in late November 1941 to take over from Jack Smith-Hughes and was replaced in turn by Tom Dunbabin less than five months later.
For Paddy Leigh Fermor, transfer to SOE brought a life of virtually enforced pleasure in Cairo while the organisation sorted itself out following the summer purge. Officers without an apartment in the city lived in a mess at Heliopolis, known to some as Hangover Hall. Leigh Fermor decided to move instead into the Continental Hotel. Two years later an even better solution presented itself as a base when on leave from Crete. He and a few friends also engaged in special operations set up house in a rambling Zamalek mansion discovered by Billy Moss of the Coldstream Guards, with whom he abducted General Kreipe in the spring of 1944. The others included Billy Maclean of the Greys, David Smiley of the Blues, and Rowland Winn (later Lord St Oswald) of the 8th Hussars; and Countess Sophie Tarnowska, Moss’s future wife. Tara, as the house was called after the legendary castle of the Kings of Ireland and the even more mythical home of Scarlett O’Hara, had a ballroom and soon became the centre for the best and wildest parties in Cairo when its occupants were on leave.
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Motives for volunteering for special operations varied enormously. Curiosity or boredom with routine could play as large a part as a yearning for adventure. Apart from the thrill of escaping military predictability, one of the more satisfying by-products of special operations was the opportunity to break rules, often with the help of influential friends, and outrage stuffy ‘dug-outs’ or regulars. Xan Fielding, who was to become Paddy Leigh Fermor’s great companion-in-arms, had an instinctive loathing for the institutional claustrophobia of normal army life and both had a deep-rooted passion for Greece.
Volunteers seldom forgot their initial interview, a formula of circumlocution which made its way into cinematic cliché. ‘I can’t tell you what you’ve come here for’, said Colonel Guy Tamplin to one captain, ‘except to say that it’s very secret and it involves a good deal of danger and isolation. If on reflection you have second thoughts, nobody will think the worse of you, and you can go back to your regiment as if nothing had happened.’
In theory, as soon as an officer had been accepted, he was sent off to SOE’s own training school in Palestine for a course in ‘resistance warfare’. The camp, based on Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa, also trained Greeks, Yugoslavs and Albanians for infiltration into their own countries. Although the official designation of this establishment was ME 102, it became known both in conversation and in signals as ‘Narkover’ after J.B. Morton’s louche public school in the Beachcomber column.* Various individuals received corresponding nicknames, such as Dr Smart-Allick and Captain Foulenough. The engagingly eccentric commandant of Narkover was Colonel Harry Cator of the Royal Scots Greys, a relative of the Queen by marriage and a hero of the First World War.
Monty Woodhouse and Paddy Leigh Fermor were thrown straight in as uninstructed instructors, the former in charge of map-reading and the latter in charge of weapon-training – British, German and Italian models – even though his knowledge was limited to the Bren gun from Guards Depot lessons. The young Cretans needed little guidance. Stripping Spandaus, blindfold if necessary, they showed the natural aptitude of a race proud of its relationship with firearms. They were also the most zealous students. A place on a Narkover course became highly prized. Manoussos Manoussakis, who played an important part in the Canea intelligence network, remarked that for a Cretan to be sent to ME 102 had the sort of cachet that graduating from Harvard Business School has today.
The third main member of the training staff in the spring of 1942 was Nick Hammond, whose reputation for demolition work had already been well established in the field. Hammond grew an outsize moustache and acquired the nickname of Captain Vamvakopyrites – Captain Guncotton.
One day King George of the Hellenes visited the camp to see groups of Greek commandos in training. A big demonstration was prepared in which the climax was an attack on a blockhouse using live ammunition. A German flag was fixed to the wall, and after all the commotion and shooting was over, the flag, its swastika heart shot out, was dramatically presented to the King who was most impressed by the marksmanship displayed. Only later did Paddy Leigh Fermor admit to Nick Hammond that he had shot it out himself the day before. (Perhaps the most effective demonstration of a guerrilla operation was put on by non-students, when young Jews raided the camp to strip the armoury for the benefit of the Haganah.)
Other subjects taught included unarmed combat and demolition – ‘a subject’, observed an officer destined for Crete, ‘which anyone with an ounce of the schoolboy left in him is bound to enjoy’. Blowing up steel girders to practise sabotaging railway lines may have been fun, but it was not very useful for those going to Crete where railway targets were rarer than the over-hunted ibex. Students also went down to the Crusader castle of Athlit, where the Special Boat Squadron later set up its headquarters, to practise marine sabotage: swimming out to caiques to attach limpet mines.
For those to be dropped into enemy territory, the parachute course took place at Ramat David. One of the Cretans to qualify was Father Ioannis Skoulas, the priest of Anoyia, who had been given permission by the Orthodox church to shave off his beard and cut his hair as a warrior for the duration. The British called him Friar Tuck or the Parachute Priest.
Some students, especially those destined for intelligence gathering, would do another course afterwards on secret procedures – they included disguises, codes and dead-letter drops – at the American School of Archaeology in the valley of Megiddo.
In the summer and autumn of 1942 the instructors at Narkover began to return to enemy-occupied territory to practise what they had taught. After Crete, Monty Woodhouse parachuted into Greece for Operation Harling, the destruction of the Gorgopotamos bridge, which was probably SOE’s greatest achievement in the war. Nick Hammond soon followed him as a British liaison officer with the Greek guerrillas; theirs was to be a thankless task coping more with political intrigue than with the enemy. Paddy Leigh Fermor went back to Crete to work with Tom Dunbabin.
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On his return to Cairo from Palestine, an SOE ‘new boy’ usually started by helping for a time on the Cretan desk, which was run for much of the war by Jack Smith-Hughes. His first foray would be as ‘conducting officer’ which meant he had responsibility for stores and personnel on a run into Crete by submarine, caique or Fairmile motor launch. He would help with the handover and landing and come out again with any Cretans evacuated for their own safety.
When the time came for a tour of duty on the island, preparation for departure was an elaborate and often lengthy procedure. A series of letters or cards to next-of-kin had to be written with anodyne news saying ‘I’m fine’ and dated for dispatch by headquarters staff at regular intervals. But this system was notoriously unreliable. One staff officer from Rustum Buildings acknowledged that ‘the personnel people were rather accident prone’. The worst example of callous incompetence occurred after the great success at Gorgopotamos. ‘Four months after the first party of British parachutists had been dropped in Greece, SOE Cairo could not even trace any record of their names.’
Kitting up in second-hand Greek clothes also took time, as did the preparation of identity documents which were forged by Professor Wace’s department in ISLD for both services. Suicide pills, known as ‘cough drops’, encased in grey rubber were issued. Most people had them sewn into the points of collars, from where they could be bitten out in a hurry. ‘This part of our farewell’, wrote Sandy Rendel, ‘seemed all too like a third-rate thriller and therefore faintly bogus.’ But Rendel, who kept a couple of the pills in a pocket of his jacket, once allowed them to become mixed up with some raisins thrust into his hand by a peasant woman. When later he began absent-mindedly to eat the raisins he realized, with understandable alarm, that one in his mouth had rather a rubbery texture.
Finally, depending on the advances or retreats of the desert war, embarkation would take place at either Bardia, Derna, Mersa Matruh or Alexandria. In the early days – late 1941 until the spring of 1943 – infiltration and exfiltration was done by caique or submarine. The armed caiques Escampador, Porcupine and Hedgehog were captained by sailors of extraordinary skill and courage such as John Campbell or Mike Cumberlege of Dolphin fame who in late 1942 was captured in a raid on the Corinth Canal and shot at Flossenburg concentration camp in the last days of the war.
Royal Navy submarines were only used in the early days. After a disastrous episode at Antiparos, Admiral Cunningham withdrew them from special operations. By mid-1942 the Greek submarine Papanikolis and a flotilla of Fairmile motor launches operating from Derna took on responsibility for almost all runs. These Royal Navy vessels had young lieutenants in command – most of them with tanned faces and beards like the sailor on the pack of Player’s cigarettes. Their achievements, particularly those of the Canadian Bob Young, were no less remarkable than those of the old salts.
British liaison officers or wireless operators who served on Crete never forgot their first arrival. Shortly before sunset they might just distinguish Mount Ida or the White Mountains above the horizon. The motor launch would continue, all hands moving and talking more cautiously now that they had entered enemy waters. There was always the chance, albeit a very slim one, of an encounter with an armed caique manned by the Kriegsmarine. The night would be moonless, so only when quite close in could the island mass be distinguished. On summer nights, the smell of wild thyme would greet them several miles out to sea.
For the last stretch the launch would creep in on low throttle, the crew communicating in whispers as eyes strained ahead for the recognition signal of two letters in Morse. Everyone would exclaim at once in an excited whisper when it finally came. The launch would be brought to a stop some thirty yards offshore, then the landing party and stores would be ferried to the beach in rubber dinghies. A slight swell could cause serious upsets, with tommy guns, oilskin-covered maps and documents, and other equipment tumbling into the surf. The supplies landed were both bulky and heavy: a new wireless set with charging engine and batteries; a sakouli – an embroidered woollen knapsack – laden with gold sovereigns; ammunition boxes; and sacks of food and of boots, which were probably the most highly prized commodity on the island. Anyone coming out on the launch would leave theirs behind on the beach for others to use.
Scenes on arrival were astonishing to the newcomer. Cretans, wearing their black sariki headcloths with tiny tassels and ‘crap-catcher’ breeches, greeted friends and cousins and god-brothers with shouts and embraces. Suddenly the most villainous-looking one would address the newcomer in an English public school accent. Rendel on first arrival could not help feeling that the whole thing was ‘more like a practical joke played on the Germans in fancy dress’. Few seemed to notice when the motor launch turned about with a bubbling putter from its engine and the brief link with that outside world of normality and safety was broken. Ironically, it was more dangerous to leave on the boat than to stay. If the Germans became aware of a landing, they could plot the launch’s likely course back to Derna. Next morning at dawn, one of the Arado seaplanes based at Canea would be out hunting.
From the beach, the party would often move to a typical smugglers’ cave with a fire and grotesque shadow-figures cast on the walls. Then, shouldering heavy loads, Cretans and Britons would trudge upwards into the mountains so as to be off the coastal strip by dawn. At first the scent of wild thyme may have made their route seem ‘like marching through a cloud of incense’, but soon the strain on shoulder and leg muscles while trying to keep up left little room in the mind for poetic thoughts.
The Cretan guides, mostly shepherds used to leaping from rock to rock like goats, often had to pause and wait while their charges stumbled on behind, cursing impotently each time they barked their shins or twisted an ankle. British officers did not always make life easy for themselves. George Psychoundakis remembered how on one occasion ‘Michali’ – Paddy Leigh Fermor – leaped for the top of a dry-stone wall with great panache, then toppled over backwards, much to the amusement of the Cretans who had walked round it.
The British were often difficult to disguise because of their fair or ruddy colouring, but other little things gave them away, above all their gait, which the Cretans found most comical. They could easily betray themselves too by their ignorance of custom: Xan Fielding, well-disguised in Cretan costume, was dismayed at being spotted as an Englishman when he greeted an old woman approaching. She instantly blessed him with a prayer for a safe return home. George Psychoundakis, who was with him, explained that the person on the move must always greet the other first. And a British officer soon found that to offer to pay for food was regarded as insulting. Even out on high pastures a shepherd, however poor, would regard himself as the host, for the mountain was his home.
Food often consisted of little more than sour milk and cheese provided by shepherds, or snails collected after rain, and a chewy mountain grass known as khorta soaked in oil, perhaps with ground acorns or chestnuts. From time to time a sheep or goat would be bought and killed to roast the meat as kebabs on an open fire. There were no delicate lamb chops, but hunks off the bone, entrails, eyes, brains and all.
Whatever privations the Cretans underwent during the war, tsikoudia – the local raki – never seemed to be in short supply, nor was locally grown tobacco which helped to dull the pangs of hunger. For the British, Cretan hospitality could be daunting in its alcoholic generosity. But in drinking contests SOE could often hold its own, and sometimes win. The legendary New Zealander, Sergeant Perkins, is said to have been able to consume three and a half tins of tsikoudia (large salmon tins from Cairo, or more often Player’s cigarette tins, provided the British Military Mission’s standard drinking vessels) without losing consciousness.
Outlaw life had its exhilarating and romantic moments, especially in retrospect, but life in the mountains was harsh and most uncomfortable. On the high ground men lived either in caves or in cheese huts, conical limestone constructions smelling of sheep and goat’s milk, but snug.
Choosing the right cave was essential. Apart from tactical considerations, such as escape routes and a good view of the surrounding terrain, it had to be close to a spring. If the ceiling were too low the inhabitants would be suffocated by smoke, and if too high the cold could be numbing, especially if water dripped or even ran down walls. Brush, covered with blankets or parachutes, served as bedding. Often, to the surprise of the cave-dwellers, they would become attached to a place, and leaving was akin to moving home.
The mountain air was both invigorating and clean but the insect life proved formidable. John Pendlebury composed the following verse on the martial qualities of the Cretan flea (to be sung to the tune of the British Grenadiers):
Some talk of being bitten and some of being bit
By wasp or bee or hornet, or by the humble nit,
But of all the world’s best biters you can commend to me
The best of all is what we call the homely little flea.
Perhaps even worse than the flea was the ubiquitous louse, whose colonies rapidly infested even the cleanest individual. When one ISLD newcomer enquired rather ingenuously what a louse looked like, the fastidious Leigh Fermor exclaimed: ‘What, never seen a louse, old boy?’ and reached inside his shirt. ‘Here you are.’
Lice were the biggest curse for the wireless operators. Corporal Matthew White, who spent months cramped in a tiny cave known as ‘Matthew’s hermitage’ on the western side of Mount Ida, took his revenge by collecting the largest specimens from his body and putting them in a Player’s cigarette tin to starve.
The wireless operators had to put up with loneliness and appalling conditions – few of them spoke enough Greek to converse with their Cretan guards and they usually lived in rocky holes with a groundsheet over them to protect them against the drips. They also suffered the continual frustration of running radio sets off very unreliable batteries. These required a heavy charging engine, sometimes concealed in a wicker-covered demijohn with a detachable top which could be filled with wine or olive oil. This cumbersome gadget was designed for transport by mule or donkey, but in panic moves following the betrayal of a hideout human beasts of burden usually bore the load instead. Whenever a wireless went wrong – a depressingly frequent occurrence – and there was an urgent message to send to Cairo, a runner would have to travel for two or three days over mountainous terrain to reach another set.
The troglodyte existence could be boring for everyone. When Paddy Leigh Fermor was questioned whilst on leave by Lawrence Durrell about life on Crete, and the strain of living in enemy-occupied territory, he complained in jest that the conversation was probably about as limited as in the Guards’ Club: everyone seemed able to talk only about their guns and their boots.
Without diversion, nerves became frayed. The best distractions were story-telling and singing. Cretans were taught English folk songs and they taught the British mantinadas: rhyming couplets with a sting in the tail. Fortunately, Cretan and British humour, especially a sense of the ridiculous, was entirely compatible. This important link helped get over any minor irritations and differences in national character.
In a moment of exasperation, one officer complained to Cairo about ‘having to deal with some of the most un-team-spirited and undisciplined personnel in the world’. The British also joked that in Crete nobody had any sense of timing: even the nightingales used to sing during the day. And the compulsion of some Cretans to boast never failed to amaze, since nobody doubted their real courage. Xan Fielding called it the ‘pallikari-complex’, a pallikari being a heroic and chivalrous fighter.
Cretans are the first to tell stories against this vice. A member of the resistance recounted the following incident about the great battle celebrated by one village. Apparently, a German patrol in the mountains not far from this village set off a rock slide and three soldiers were killed. The local kapitan and all his followers promptly claimed throughout the region that they had wiped out the whole patrol in twelve hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting.
Since caution and reticence were alien to the Cretan character, good security did not come naturally to many. Some, however, displayed remarkable discretion. And the women were often outstanding. A number played a dangerous double game, working as interpreters or secretaries for the Germans and all the time passing on to the resistance details of those denounced by traitors. Women left at home showed no less resourcefulness. Wives and sisters, with an inspired presence of mind, often managed to conceal incriminating papers during a German search.
While the battle against the paratroopers had shown the true degree of Cretan courage, their warlike style had an engaging element of theatre. Old men, unflinching under fire, fiddled with their ancient ‘gra’ muskets in the tradition of the Cretan joke: ‘Stand still Turk while I reload.’ It also had a roguish quality. In Crete the outlaw had a historic nobility, rather as the contrabandista in Andalucia was seen as a heroic knight-errant figure ready to slay a local tyrant. Even sheep-stealing had acquired a patriotic tinge since that was the way the resistance fighters against the Turks had survived. They were called the klephts: a name synonymous with robber. And Theodore Stephanides recorded how he had met a Cretan in the First World War who proudly put down his profession as brigand. When asked what the dividing line was between thief and brigand, the man had replied that a thief finding a wallet full of money on the ground would take it. A brigand would first return it to the owner, then take it from him face to face.
The Cretan senses of honour and justice were firmly interwoven. Those who offended village society found themselves effectively banished. Such outcasts were the ones most likely to become traitors, a tiny minority. The Germans offered them their liberty on condition that they infiltrated communities suspected of aiding the British. They would pretend to have fled a German round-up in their own neighbourhood and, Cretan generosity being what it was, they would be taken in and fed. The only risk arose when someone who knew them of old passed through the area.
Almost all the British liaison officers sent to Crete adapted themselves to this strange existence with enthusiasm. When they first arrived, the idea of enemy-occupied territory conjured up visions of German sentries every few hundred yards. Yet most of Crete, especially its mountainous regions, saw little of the occupying power in the early days. German troops were reluctant to venture into the mountain ranges, and moved only in daylight.
The two principal dangers in the hills were either betrayal or bumping into a German patrol quite by chance. A sudden dawn cordon and search was seldom a threat since, although the British often had an evening meal with friends in a village, they would always spend the night well outside. And on most occasions news of troop movements would be brought by a boy running from the next village to warn them.
After living in the mountains almost as if the Germans did not exist, to enter a town in disguise and pass among the enemy quite naturally produced a curious sensation. The first time was always the worst. ‘Your knees began knocking as soon as you met your first German,’ said Stephen Verney, who was based in Canea from August 1944. ‘You assumed he knew immediately that you were an English officer.’ On one occasion, Tom Dunbabin had to brush past a German officer he recognized, an archaeologist like himself from prewar days. The German looked straight at him, but Dunbabin’s disguise proved sufficient protection in such an improbable encounter.
A narrow escape, whether from a patrol in the countryside or from accidental discovery in a town, produced a surge of fearful excitement later followed by what Paddy Leigh Fermor described as ‘a sort of post-coitum-triste feeling’.
British officers with the Cretan resistance have left an impression of a rather dashing and eccentric amateurism – what might be expected from a mixture of romantics and archaeologists. Yet in spite of the occasional unmilitary image in intelligence reports, such as ‘mines cylindrically the size of a jeroboam of champagne’, the information collected and collated was most impressive in its detail. It covered: telephone systems; the state of every gun position, whether machine-gun nest, flak battery or heavy coastal artillery; satellite airfields; military roads; and the grid reference and defence details of each garrison and guard post with their strengths and armaments. Every aircraft in and out of the main airfields was logged with its direction of departure. Every ship or caique, loading and unloading in the harbours of Heraklion, Rethymno and Canea, was noted with its cargo. Landing beaches and dropping zones were reconnoitred.
Most of the credit, of course, must go to the Cretans who assembled so much of this information for the Allied cause knowing it was of little immediate use to themselves. Almost from the beginning their information networks, especially those in the main towns of the north coast, worked ceaselessly at great risk. Often the information would take a long time to filter in through the arteries – the work usually had to be carried out and delivered on foot – but the bank of intelligence built up comprised the most comprehensive survey of enemy dispositions and communications in any part of Europe. If Allied Forces Headquarters had decided to invade Crete rather than Sicily in 1943, they could not have had a better basis for planning, nor a more willing resistance organisation to attack and disrupt the German communication system behind the lines. The main danger on Crete was of premature attacks caused by overeagerness.
In theory, intelligence work was the responsibility not of SOE, but of ISLD, and in 1943 Ralph Stockbridge and another officer returned to help with this task and with the running of the networks. SOE field officers had more than enough to do already. They had to travel constantly from village to village to develop their contacts and help the preparation of resistance groups while persuading them not to act on sudden impulse, a very difficult balance to achieve. They also had to organise the evacuation of those identified by the Germans, or candidates for training at ‘Narkover’. Lists of their nominees were signalled back to Cairo well in advance of each trip by motor launch.
Parachute drops were time-consuming and often frustrating, both in preparation and waiting. To attract attention to one’s movements could be disastrous. Half the population of the valley, perhaps tipped off by the cousin of one member of the group, would assemble for the spectacle or the pickings. Brushwood to make the signal fires had to be gathered with great discretion, otherwise local shepherds might light their own fires to see what came drifting down for them.
On several occasions, officers had to hang around at some bleak spot in the mountains for anything up to sixteen consecutive nights. And once the drop was made successfully, the collection of canisters and parachutes before German search parties reached the scene often became a nightmare, especially if shepherds made off with several containers. Such appropriations could be dangerous. Xan Fielding came across one group smashing a tin containing an anti-personnel grenade: they thought they were about to feast on pineapple chunks.
The yellow silk parachutes were also in great demand. SOE personnel and their Cretan helpers used them as sleeping bags, or as a commodity for barter. By the end of the war when almost half the women of the central massifs must have had yellow silk underwear, courtesy of the British government, parachute drops had lost their novelty. But in 1942, when Rommel’s advance on Egypt threatened the whole of the Middle East, they had a semi-miraculous quality.