In the late spring of 1942, Cretan airfields became important staging posts for reinforcing the Afrika Korps’ advance on the Nile Delta. Three teams from the Special Boat Squadron and one from the Special Air Service were sent to the island in an attempt to disrupt this traffic.
Tom Dunbabin met the SBS advance party on 23 May and provided guides. The SAS seaborne group included four members of the Free French squadron under Commandant Bergé, a very tough Gascon, with Captain the Earl Jellicoe as British liaison officer and Lieutenant Petrakis, a Cretan, from the Royal Hellenic Army. The SAS had allocated itself the prize target of Heraklion aerodrome while the three SBS teams planned to attack the airfields at Maleme, Kastelli Pediados and Tymbaki.
David Sutherland of the Black Watch, who led the Tymbaki team, was exasperated to find on arrival that the airfield had been temporarily abandoned. Tymbaki on the south coast was the most vulnerable to air raids from Egypt. The Maleme group met with a different sort of frustration. Their target, with its recently installed electrified fences, was too strongly guarded to penetrate.
Kastelli Pediados airfield on the other hand offered a textbook sabotage operation. Five aircraft together with nearly 200 tons of aviation fuel and other stores were destroyed on 9 June with delayed action bombs.
The Heraklion operation ran into difficulties at the start and at the end. Landing in dinghies from the Greek submarine Triton then crossing the terrain to the target took much longer than expected. They arrived too late on 12 June to mount an effective operation, but the delay proved an unexpected blessing: many aircraft had been away on a night raid. The attack took place the next night, 13 June. Bergé’s group, having cut their way through the wire, managed to fix explosive charges to twenty Junkers 88 bombers, most of which were severely damaged or destroyed. In the confusion, the group got away and set off across the island towards the south coast, jubilant at their success.
Next day, the Germans executed fifty Cretan hostages including Tito Georgiadis (a former Governor-General), a 70-year-old priest, and a number of Jews still held in prison. The initial euphoria aroused by the raids rapidly turned to anger, some of it directed against the British even though Cretan groups never ceased to demand arms to attack the Germans. Morale, as one might expect under the occupation, could be very mercurial.
The French SAS group was horrified when Lieutenant Petrakis brought back news of the reprisals from a foraging expedition to a nearby village. At one point near the end of the march to the south coast, Jellicoe and Petrakis left the four Frenchmen to cook and rest while they went on to make arrangements for the evacuation. On returning to collect them, Jellicoe learned that a Cretan had betrayed their hiding place to the nearest German garrison. One French chasseur had been killed, and Bergé and the two others captured when their ammunition ran out. The three Frenchmen apparently escaped execution because Bergé convinced their captors that if they were shot, German officers held prisoner in Cairo would share a similar fate. Bergé ended up in Colditz Castle with David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, captured in the desert.
The attacks on Kastelli Pediados and Heraklion accounted for twenty-six aircraft, a number of vehicles and considerable quantities of stores. Altogether ten Germans died as a result of these raids. They did not, as one account claims, cause ‘the deaths of over 100 enemy soldiers’. The survivors of the raiding force left from the beach near Trypiti on the caique Porcupine, together with Satanas, seriously ill and soon to die of cancer in Alexandria, and other Cretan evacuees. They reached Mersa Matruh only just in time. A few hours later the town fell to Rommel’s advance.
• • •
The Porcupine, on its outward journey, had brought Paddy Leigh Fermor for his first clandestine tour of duty. On that evening of 23 June, he had arrived with his wireless operator, Sergeant Matthew White, to a scene of dismay. German troops were closing in on the area, having just lost four men in clashes near Vassilika Anoyia, and there had not been enough room on the caique for the two other kapitans, Bandouvas and Petrakageorgis, waiting on the beach with their families. News of the retreat in Egypt, which threatened to sever the sea link completely, did not improve their mood.
This was the most difficult time for all British officers in Crete. Xan Fielding, whose wireless set was broken, had no contact with Cairo and did not know whether the British defence of the Nile Delta had collapsed. For all he knew Alexandria might have fallen to the Afrika Korps. ‘To be out of wireless communication, as I had been for the last fortnight and more,’ he later wrote, ‘always produced a sense of panic and loss, as though God had ceased to exist. For the invisible and distant Headquarters which were responsible for my fate had assumed in my eyes a quasi-divine power.’
Even those with a set that worked managed to extract little information from headquarters. This was the time of the ‘Great Flap’ in Cairo, which reached its crescendo on ‘Ash Wednesday’, when the city was overcast by the smoke from bonfires of documents. All secret organisations had been evacuated, and the submarine base moved to Beirut. As a result all the intelligence gathered on Crete about the concentration of troop-carriers ferrying reinforcements to Rommel was never received.
To make matters worse, mischievous rumours that the British liaison officers on Crete were about to flee or even surrender to the Germans caused great confusion and alarm amongst the resistance groups and outrage amongst the officers themselves when they heard.
The Germans, perhaps guessing at the decline of morale in resistance circles, stepped up offensive sweeps in the Heraklion area. On 9 July Petrakageorgis’s group, attacked near Temeneli, managed to kill seven of the enemy. A more insidious, and therefore more alarming development, was the German attempt to recruit more traitors. Six, most of whom were German-appointed mayors, had been assassinated in May by Cretan loyalists, and an attempt was made on Polioudakis, the hated police chief in Heraklion.
The officer in charge of ‘counter-espionage’ at this time was called Hartmann. Levantine by blood, Hartmann had been adopted by a German family in Salonika and, with the rise of Nazism, had tried to become more German than the Germans. His superiors clearly regarded him as ideal for such an unpleasant job. Hartmann first used amnestied criminals as spies, then in the summer of 1942 he managed to recruit a number of the Tsouliadakis clan in Kroussonas by exploiting a family feud and an inter-village feud. The Tsouliadakis clan, to whom one of the assassinated mayors had belonged, loathed the young relatives of Satanas as well as the strongly pro-British inhabitants of the rival town of Anoyia.
• • •
Xan Fielding’s troubles with Colonel Andreas Papadakis came to a head soon afterwards. Not content with proclaiming himself the head of all Cretan resistance, Papadakis began to behave like a South American dictator. He regarded all parachute drops as his private property and hoarded urgently needed supplies such as boots when George Psychoundakis, running between Xan Fielding at Vaphé and the Colonel above Asi Gonia, was virtually barefoot. After a stormy meeting with Papadakis, Fielding decided that there was no other course but to evacuate the Colonel at the first opportunity.
Handing over his responsibilities for western Crete to Paddy Leigh Fermor in July, he escorted Papadakis and his family to the south coast. The atmosphere of suspicion and injured amour propre did not improve. After confusion and delay over the arrival of the boat, Papadakis’s paranoia was even further aroused and Fielding could not help visualizing the muzzles of his henchmen’s guns pointed at his back. Eventually, on the night of 5 August, the Royal Hellenic Navy submarine Papanikolis arrived to take them all to Beirut. Colonel Papadakis later became commandant of the Greek forces in the Jerusalem garrison.
The havoc caused by Papadakis’s delusions did not end with his departure. The worst legacy was his rash enrolment of a traitor by the name of Komnas. Komnas produced what appeared to be very accurate figures – supposedly taken from ration returns made by a clerk in the German headquarters. His figures, impressive both in detail and in size, were finally questioned by GHQ Cairo’s intelligence branch, much to SOE’s exasperation at the time: some of the units identified did not tally with any other information.*
Even the Colonel’s dedicated chief of staff, Andreas Polentas, who had finally come to see through Papadakis, never suspected Komnas. He and the wireless operator Apostolos Evangelou, a schoolmaster and poet from the Dodecanese, were arrested on 18 November.
Polentas’s mistake cost them appalling tortures and eventually their lives in Ayia prison. But they did not go unavenged for long. Although Komnas was moved for his own protection into a house in Canea surrounded by German billets, his body was discovered in the kitchen one afternoon with seventeen stab wounds, the blood still uncongealed. Nobody had heard a sound. The deed was carried out by Polentas’s cousin Pavlo aided by an execution squad run by George Alevizakis of Argyroupolis.
• • •
Paddy Leigh Fermor, responsible for the western end of the island during Xan Fielding’s absence in Egypt, got to know the main characters in the Canea region. His first task was to sabotage shipping in Suda Bay. He and his guide, Yanni Tsangarakis, helped by the Vandoulakis family and the Karkanis clan at Askiphou, received a parachute drop in the White Mountains on the night of 8 September. The limpet mines – commonly known as ‘toys’ – were all present, but the dispatchers in Egypt had omitted to include wire cutters.
Leigh Fermor and Tsangarakis hurried down with their loads, only to find that the petrol tanker, the chief target, had left, and that the Suda wire defences and sentry system were too formidable to penetrate. Tsangarakis crossed round through Canea to reconnoitre from the Akrotiri side, but any attack from that direction would have required a three-mile swim. Apart from Leigh Fermor, who in much later life swam the Hellespont in emulation of Lord Byron, there were no strong swimmers available at that moment.
• • •
Xan Fielding had often complained about the cancellations and inaccuracies of parachute drops. Now on leave in Cairo, he was challenged by the RAF to accompany one of their flights and see for himself. After a long and cold round trip, he had to confess he had no idea how anyone could distinguish any given spot in the mountains.
His time in Cairo coincided with news of the spectacular success of Operation Harling, the destruction of the Gorgopotamos railway bridge led by Eddie Myers and Monty Woodhouse. This gave him his first glimpse of the new SOE following the purge of August 1942, after which Lord Glenconner replaced Colonel Maxwell. Glenconner, frequently absent due to other responsibilities, was known simply as ‘God’.
Glenconner’s absences provided a good opportunity for the officer in charge of military operations, Brigadier Mervyn Keble. Keble, who at one stage in his career had commanded a prison in Palestine, came from GHQ’s intelligence department, where Enoch Powell did all the work for which he claimed credit. Monty Woodhouse remembered him from the intelligence school at Swanage as ‘a dynamic tubby little major whose eyes almost popped out of his head with lust for killing’. He first learned of Keble’s transfer to SOE on seeing, with astonishment, his name at the bottom of a set of orders for the Gorgopotamos operation. This document, phrased in all the right jargon, was clearly designed more to impress his superiors than to guide the men sent on the mission.
Keble, although a regular officer from the most regular of county regiments – the Wiltshires – proved himself a formidable bureaucratic in-fighter, both shameless and ruthless. The success of Operation Harling, which he promptly appropriated for himself, provided the springboard for an ambition which could only have stemmed from a deep resentment.
Keble may well have had a complex about his unattractive appearance which he felt curiously compelled to flaunt. Although known in the Army as Bolo (apparently to signify bolshiness) he was called the Panda in SOE – his girlfriends were called Panderenes – because he was so uncuddly. His tubby figure was often clad in no more than a singlet and a pair of shorts, and his wiry hair was cut en brosse.
Rustum Buildings was not a happy place. ‘Nobody who did not experience it’, wrote Bickham Sweet-Escott, ‘can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue which embittered the relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo.’ Almost all the stories of tapping colleagues’ telephones, poison pen letters and anonymous telephone calls, libellous verses, even suspicion of murder have been well chronicled both in historical accounts and lightly-veiled fiction.*
The Cretan section was unusually fortunate. There were no serious disagreements as to which groups on the island to back, so Cretan resistance, unlike its mainland equivalent, never became a political morass in which the logical military strategy was anathema to Whitehall. And Jack Smith-Hughes, who ran the Cretan desk, was both clever and robust enough to defend his patch. He was of course helped by Keble’s relative lack of interest in the island. Crete, with its small population and relatively small German garrison, could not at that stage justify a British Military Mission large enough to be commanded by a Brigadier, and Keble’s strategy of self-advancement was to create a swelling pyramid of stars and crowns to bear him aloft to the rank of major general.
There was one man whom neither Jack Smith-Hughes nor any of the officers in the field were able to protect. Keble had conceived a venomous dislike for Captain Arthur Reade, a lawyer of great gentleness and goodness with a love for Crete based on his passionate admiration of Venizelos. Tall and much older than his colleagues, he presented a slightly eccentric figure. According to Paddy Leigh Fermor, ‘The reddish beard and moustache he grew made him look exactly like Henri IV with a dash of Verdi.’
Reade, who had longed to be sent to the island, was granted his wish but with a sting in the tail. He would go in on the same run as Xan Fielding in November, but after that, with only the most rudimentary training, he was expected to blow up HMS York, the cruiser partially submerged in Suda Bay, to prevent the Germans refloating her. Friends warned Reade, but he was determined to go ahead.
Reade landed from the submarine Papanikolis on 27 November with Fielding and an ISLD mission led by Lieutenant Stelio Papaderos who were to set up a radio station in the southern part of the White Mountains.
As Reade’s colleagues had predicted, the operation against the cruiser proved impossible. He would have thrown away his life for nothing. Arthur Reade was based at Kyriakosellia in the foothills above the exit to Suda Bay. He acted as liaison officer with the resistance organisation, an ideal post since all Cretans took to him immediately. But Keble, determined to destroy him, ordered his return a few months later. Reade was heart-broken at leaving, and this gave Keble the chance to concoct a report that he was too unstable for special operations.
For Xan Fielding, the arrival by submarine had begun with catastrophe when almost all his equipment went into the sea after a rubber dinghy capsized. But three Australian soldiers who turned up in hope of a passage to Egypt dived and dived again in the icy waters until almost everything was saved. These Australians were to prove very useful a few months later.
On his way north across the White Mountains to his old base at Vaphé, Fielding had another chance encounter on 3 December, this time with the left-wing leader General Mandakas.
Mandakas, a native of Lakkoi just to the north of the Omalo plain where they met, was clearly frustrated that his personal support was limited at that time to the western part of the island and that his band of followers was small: in George Psychoundakis’s words, ‘Mandakas wanted to be a great leader, but few joined.’ A shortage of men did not restrain his demands that he should control arms drops and have his own wireless link with Cairo.
Xan Fielding also heard from Mandakas for the first time about the German offensive against groups linked to the British, and the arrests on 18 November of Polentas and Evangelou at Vaphé. It was an unpleasant shock, not softened by Mandakas’s brutal manner of announcement.
His last encounter of the journey took place on arrival in Vaphé where he ran into Paddy Leigh Fermor, who had not heard of his return to the island. Fielding was at last able to hear the full story of the arrests and discuss the future. Jo Bradley, an RAF sergeant shot down during a raid on Kastelli airfield early in September, became the new wireless operator. In the language of military bureaucracy, he was thus defined as ‘locally recruited’. Bradley, a Welshman with a beautiful singing voice, thought this a curious euphemism in the circumstances.
• • •
That November also saw a change in the German command: General Bruno Bräuer succeeded General Andrae as commander of the Fortress of Crete. Bräuer, the commander of the 1st Parachute Regiment in the invasion, was the officer brave enough to belittle the mutilation stories. He also proved the most humane German general on the island during the war. He tried to make his officers understand the Cretan attitude towards the occupying power, and why they had fought as francs-tireurs in the battle. On the other hand, he made it clear that he would not tolerate resistance activities or collaboration with the British.
A curious incident a year and a half later showed how, unusually for a soldier, he looked forward to the post-war world. In honour of the Greek national day, 25 March, he released from prison a hundred Cretan prisoners. They included Constantinos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece from 1990 to 1993, who was then a lieutenant in the Royal Hellenic Army and, more importantly, a member of the intelligence network known as the Quins. Not long after his release, Mitsotakis was walking through the fashionable suburb of Halepa with his friend Manoussos Manoussakis, when Manoussakis, spotting Bräuer, suggested that he should thank the General personally. Bräuer invited them into his official residence, the Venizelos house, for coffee. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘I released you because from what I have heard, you will one day play an important part in your country’s affairs. Keep out of trouble.’
Bräuer had no illusions about the Cretans supposedly under his command. Addressing officer reservists who had to report to the authorities once a week in an attempt to keep them from resistance activity, he acknowledged that Britain was Greece’s ally, but added: ‘Why don’t you keep your bravery in reserve?’ ‘Nearly the whole population remains hostile towards the forces of occupation, and is still pro-British’ stated a report he commissioned. ‘In fact a reconquest of the island by the British is expected in the near future. Account must also be taken of the assistance which the civilian population is giving to the two British organisations whose activity on the island has been ascertained, i.e. the espionage organisation of Captain Huse [Jack Smith-Hughes] and the sabotage organisation of Captain Jellicoe.’ The inaccuracies are significant, considering the efforts to which the Germans had gone to infiltrate resistance groups connected with the British.
By Christmas the news from North Africa and Stalingrad warranted a double celebration. Paddy Leigh Fermor and Xan Fielding joined Tom Dunbabin and their friends at the Kokonas house in Yerakari. But elsewhere during the celebrations to see in the New Year of 1943, minor scuffles between those who cried ‘Long Live Britain!’ and those who replied ‘Long Live Russia!’ pointed to other difficulties to come.
Apart from odd encounters with General Mandakas, the British liaison officers operating out in the generally more conservative mountain regions had had little contact with left-wing groups. As on the mainland, the Greek Communist Party had set up a resistance coalition called EAM (Ethnikon Apeleftherotikon Metopon) or the National Liberation Front which they controlled from behind the scenes. On the mainland, but very rarely on Crete, the political right was tainted by passive and active collaboration with the enemy, and many distinguished men of liberal ideals joined EAM, unaware of Communist machinations. EAM, the political wing, had set up ELAS (Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos) or the National Popular Liberation Army as its guerrilla army, and the two together were known as EAM–ELAS. (See Appendix D for a glossary of the main Greek political movements.)
Although EAM–ELAS enjoyed nothing like the following it achieved on the mainland, as much through coercion as conviction, on Crete it grew surreptitiously in the larger towns and in several isolated and impoverished areas of the countryside. Crete would be spared the worst ravages of the Greek civil war largely because EOK (the National Organization of Crete), which Xan Fielding had encouraged Nikolaos Skoulas and others to set up, succeeded in bringing together the various non-Communist resistance groups into a surprisingly effective alliance. On Crete, the Communists never managed to employ ‘the salami tactic’ of slicing off one rival after another.