The Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the ensuing downfall of the Fascist regime in Italy brought a marked increase in the scale and tempo of resistance in Crete. Until that summer there had been little more than isolated skirmishes and attacks on lone soldiers. From then on, actions resulting in the death of up to twenty Germans were not uncommon, and on a couple of occasions in the following year, up to forty were killed in battles involving a hundred or more andartes.
Preparations for the Sicilian landings, Operation Husky, had begun several months in advance with a major deception campaign to convince the Germans that the Allied invasion of southern Europe would come via Crete and Greece. A series of raids across Greece, including the destruction of another railway bridge, was launched under the code-name Animals.
A dummy fleet was assembled at Tobruk but a storm smashed it back into its constituent pieces of canvas and plywood. Perhaps the best-known ingredient of the campaign was that brilliant confidence trick Operation Mincemeat.
A Royal Navy submarine dropped a body dressed and identified as a British staff officer off the Spanish coast. Documents with him ‘revealed’ that Sardinia and Greece were the real objectives, and that the attack on Sicily (the first landings took place on 10 July) was simply a diversion. Berlin, largely thanks to Hitler’s obsession with the Balkan flank, swallowed the deception whole.* Two fighter groups, a bomber wing and the 1st Panzer Division were immediately ordered to Greece.
Four weeks before the Sicilian landings, another round of Special Boat Squadron raids took place against German airfields on Crete. They had a dual purpose: to destroy German aircraft in the region which might be used against the invasion fleet, and to keep up the impression that Crete and Greece were the main targets for invasion. At their training base in Palestine, Athlit Castle, the SBS teams had become bored with constant practice, so this new operation was eagerly accepted. David Sutherland, who had commanded one of the raiding parties the summer before, controlled three groups led by Lieutenants Lassen, Lamonby and Rowe.
Rowe, who arrived on 27 June, four days after the others, had the closest objective, Tymbaki airfield, but once again it was found to be out of use. Lamonby set off towards Heraklion, but the guide provided by Dunbabin warned him that the airfield there was hardly used any more. A much better target would be the fuel dump at Peza. This Lamonby destroyed with spectacular success.
The third group, under Andy Lassen, found Kastelli Pediados heavily guarded after the attack of the year before. The only solution was a diversionary attack to allow the bomb-placers the chance to flit from one group of aircraft to another under cover of the confusion. Lassen, a legendary Dane who won the Military Cross and two bars and later received a posthumous Victoria Cross, was known for his cry ‘Vork before Vomen!’ when weapons and kit needed cleaning on return to base.
They all reached Sutherland’s hideout in the coastal hills above Treis Ekklisies by 11 July, but so did a number of Cretans who also wanted to be taken off to avoid retribution. A small German patrol discovered the gorge in which they had hidden to wait until night had fallen before going down to the beach. Two of the Germans were captured without a shot, but the other two retreated rapidly when fired upon by the Cretans. Lamonby went after them alone, a brave but foolhardy course. The motor launch which picked up the rest of the party pulled in close to the shore near where he had last been sighted, but there was no sign of him. He had underestimated the two soldiers he tried to stalk. His body was discovered much later.
• • •
To coincide with the other attacks, Paddy Leigh Fermor had entered Heraklion with Manoli Paterakis. A donkey brought their load of limpet mines into the centre of the city, where they were hidden by Yanni Androulakis. They planned to attack shipping in the harbour, but having managed to get through the wire they were spotted and had to escape before the general alarm was raised.
At the end of July, staying in Yerakari with Alexandros Kokonas, Leigh Fermor received a message from Miki Akoumianakis which brought him back to Heraklion at speed. Mussolini had been overthrown, following the invasion of Sicily, and the Italian commander of the division occupying the east of the island, General Angelo Carta, wanted to speak to a British officer.
A very indirect approach had been made via Bandouvas at the beginning of the year to suggest that if the British invaded Crete, the Italians would surrender immediately, but nothing more had been heard. This time Lieutenant Franco Tavana, General Carta’s counter-espionage officer, offered to send a staff car and Italian uniform to bring Paddy Leigh Fermor to their headquarters.
Tavana, formerly a customs official on Lake Como and now an officer in the Alpini, had already proved himself unorthodox and brave. The year before, he had arrived at the house of the Communist leader Miltiades Porphyroyennis, the unusual passenger on the Kalanthe and later a member of the Party’s central committee on the mainland. Porphyroyennis, seeing the chief of counter-espionage, assumed the worst, but as an alternative to arrest and execution he was told to move to the area controlled by the Germans and stay there.
Stories of friction between the Axis allies were not new. There had been fights between Italian and German soldiers: on one occasion an Italian threw a grenade at a group of Germans killing one and wounding two others. The Italian military authorities had to arrest him, but then released him a few days later to the fury of the Germans. Cretans sentenced to death in the provinces of Lasithi and Siteia on German insistence were smuggled away, in some cases to the Dodecanese. Meanwhile executions were faked, and graves dug and then filled in again.
Every precaution for Leigh Fermor’s journey had to be taken. General Carta was very nervous. Schubert’s recruitment of informers had not slackened. But nor had Bandouvas’s squads. They had recently accounted for fourteen traitors. Their tactics were simple: a couple of men dressed in gendarmerie uniforms accompanied by a fair-haired Cretan in German uniform would ‘arrest’ their suspect, claiming he had been denounced as a member of the resistance. The man, if really working for the Germans, would then promptly show them proof, usually a piece of paper from the German authorities.
Mussolini’s fall prompted great jubilation in Italian barracks: black shirts were torn up and his portrait ripped down. But General Carta became uneasy. Leigh Fermor tried ‘a lot of flattery laid on with a trowel’, his letters beginning ‘Mon général, j’ai l’honneur de communiquer à votre Excellence . . . ’ Yet Carta continued to vacillate even after General Bräuer flew in from the other end of the island to reassure him that the Germans would not attack providing the Italians behaved.
The crucial question for the Italians was whether the British would invade and effectively decide the matter for them. In the wake of the Sicily landings and the cover-plan, great confusion still surrounded Allied plans. Rumours of an offensive in the eastern Mediterranean against islands ‘so long the object of strategic desire’ were not baseless.
On 2 August Churchill told General Ismay: ‘Should the Italian troops in Crete and Rhodes resist the Germans and a deadlock ensue, we must help the Italians at the earliest moment, engaging thereby also the support of the populations.’ But although Leigh Fermor was asked to provide Cairo with bombing targets in the event of Italian resistance – news of the request may have leaked out in resistance circles during the assembly of this information – Crete was soon dropped from contingency planning. Middle East Command then focused solely on the Dodecanese islands of Rhodes, Cos and Leros.
Churchill had a dangerously impractical vision of securing a route through the Dardanelles to Russia as an alternative to the Arctic convoys. ‘This is a time’, he signalled to General Wilson, ‘to think of Clive and Peterborough and of Rooke’s men taking Gibraltar.’ But the Germans occupied Rhodes with great speed and plans had to be scaled down drastically after a decision at the Quebec conference to divert available shipping from the eastern Mediterranean. Only one brigade, some very unsuitable craft and a handful of fighters remained for the operation. British troops landed on the islands of Cos and Leros on 14 September, but stood little chance against strong German counter-attacks, first against Cos, then Leros.
• • •
General Carta was a short, plump officer with a monocle and a mistress conveniently installed near his headquarters in Neapolis. A friend of the Italian royal family, he was ‘a Palace man’, not a Fascist, and his administration of the eastern part of Crete had been unusually humane. Carta’s lack of boldness during the month of August stemmed mainly from a desire to avoid useless bloodshed. Tavana, his counter-espionage officer, was a much more daring and more resolute man. He raised the prospect of Italian forces, in alliance with Cretan andartes, holding the eastern part of the island against the Germans.
Since Bandouvas, the only guerrilla leader with a large following, was encamped not far to the south-west at Psari Phoráda on the Viannos plateau, Leigh Fermor set off there on 12 August. He was accompanied by his wireless operator, Staff Sergeant Harry Brooke, and Niko Souris. Souris, Dunbabin’s right-hand man, was an Alexandrian of great intelligence and tact, and one of the very few Greeks from outside whom the Cretans really trusted.
Bandouvas’s highland lair was impressive. This plateau, well above the sheepfolds and far from any other trace of habitation, had views over the whole province. Sentries of wonderfully dramatic appearance accompanied Leigh Fermor up to their camp which had rows of huts made of woven branches. A baker, a tailor’s shop, a cobbler and an armourer helped to make them self-sufficient.
Most striking of all was the composition of Bandouvas’s force. Apart from shepherds and mountain villagers, there were students, army officers, two heavily armed monks, a priest, some policemen, a few stranded Greeks from the mainland, a huge Cossack called Piotr who had escaped from the camp for Russian prisoners at Ay Galini, an Australian and a New Zealander, both stragglers from the battle of over two years before, a group of Royalists led by Athanasios Bourdzalis, and lastly a handful of Communists, recruited mainly by Bandouvas’s secretary, Yanni Bodias. Bodias, a good-looking and intelligent young Greek from Asia Minor with a certain charm, had been in prison when the parachute invasion occurred. His crime was attempted murder: having indecently assaulted a boy, he had dropped him down a well. Now that Bodias’s influence over the Chief of Francs-Tireurs had waned, a split between them was perhaps bound to develop.
Volatile shifts of mood amongst such a heterogeneous group were inevitable. One day, when Leigh Fermor and Bandouvas were out of the camp, one of the anti-traitor squads brought in a suspect by the name of Loukakis. He was strung up by his ankles for torture, but Niko Souris, backed by Sergeant Harry Brooke, intervened, and when Bandouvas and Leigh Fermor returned, a brigand court martial assembled and he was shot. The following day, the traitor Syngelakis, who had betrayed the officers escaping by caique from the south-west, was captured. He too confessed and was shot.
Bandouvas’s curious but effective force was increasing every day as men arrived from near and far. Leigh Fermor estimated its strength at around 160 men, and Bandouvas, probably without much exaggeration, reckoned he could call to arms 2,000 more. On 20 August, a week after Leigh Fermor’s arrival, the eagerly anticipated arms drop took place. Everything worked perfectly. Sergeant Paddy Fortune, the pilot, flew in low, waggled his wing tips in greeting and the parachute containers came out in an impressive stream.
Everything was borne back to camp in triumphal procession with feux de joie. Apart from weapons and ammunition, the containers held cap comforters, bush shirts, web belts and bayonet frogs. Bandouvas wanted his men freshly kitted out so as to be accepted as a regular unit of the British Army. Yet although Leigh Fermor explained to Bandouvas in the clearest terms that the role of his band was to help the Italians, should they decide to resist the Germans, and take over their surplus arms to distribute to the Cretan resistance as a whole, the Chief of Francs-Tireurs was secretly convinced that something greater was afoot. The idea of a British invasion lingered long after a call by King George II to help Allied forces. This broadcast, which had preceded the Sicilian landings, referred to raiding rather than invading forces, but the ambiguity had been part of the overall deception plan.
With Bandouvas’s men equipped, Leigh Fermor left for Neapolis, where he stayed in Lieutenant Tavana’s house. Tavana supplied him with all the German defence plans for the island, confidential reports, orders and assessments of Cretan resistance organisations.
Hitler had ordered contingency plans to be drawn up two days after Mussolini’s fall from power. Measures which included the German occupation of Italy were gradually put into effect during the month of August. Hitler was correct in his suspicion that the new government of Marshal Badoglio would seek an armistice, and an operation code-named ACHSE to disarm Italian troops was prepared for the moment this happened.
On the morning of 9 September Leigh Fermor, suffering from a bad leg, was resting at a goatfold above Kastelli Pediados when Miki Akoumianakis arrived in great excitement with news of the Italian armistice announced the day before. About midday Tom Dunbabin appeared with Niko Souris, who had met him at the beach at Tsoutsouros the day before on his return from Egypt. Dunbabin finally confirmed that there was no hope of an Allied landing in Crete. ‘If there had been’, he joked to Leigh Fermor, ‘we’d have both become brigadiers.’
Very soon afterwards, a runner arrived from Bandouvas with a message so badly written that it was passed round. While Miki Akoumianakis was studying the scrawl, Dunbabin asked Leigh Fermor in English who this young man was and whether he could be trusted. When told, he could hardly believe it. There were great greetings and memories of Knossos in the days of Sir Arthur Evans. Eventually Akoumianakis returned to the note and, to their horror, deciphered the key phrase: ‘When are the English landing to help us fight the Germans?’
Bandouvas had ignored his instructions to prepare to help the Italians and await further orders. He had already moved to attack the Germans in the area of Viannos on the south coast. The runner was sent back with the strongest possible message telling him to stop immediately and withdraw. Leigh Fermor had to leave Dunbabin to cope with the Bandouvas problem as best he could, while he and Miki Akoumianakis left to confer with Tavana in response to the momentous news of the armistice. But their hopes of Italian resistance to the Germans soon evaporated.
When word of the armistice arrived, a large number of Italian soldiers had promptly drunk themselves into a stupor of celebration: they naïvely assumed that the war was over and they could go home. And the only two battalions of infantry who were prepared to fight, and had gone up into the mountains, came down again a couple of days later because the local population, in spite of its readiness to help, could not feed so many men.
General Bräuer ordered German troops into the province of Lasithi and the dispersal of Italian forces to new locations chosen for them. General Müller, the divisional commander, issued a ‘General Order to All Italian Troops in Crete’ which was in effect an ultimatum.
‘The Commander of the Fortress of Crete’, he began, ‘has charged me with the defence of the province of Lasithi.’ He then offered three choices. Italian soldiers could continue to fight under the command of the German armed forces, thereby adhering to Mussolini’s new government – the puppet show which became the Republic of Salo. Or they could assist the Germans in non-combatant duties on the island after having been disarmed – a euphemism for working in labour gangs. If they refused these two alternatives then they would be interned. ‘Whosoever’, he finished, ‘sells or destroys arms of the Italian forces, or whosoever deserts from his unit, will be considered a franc-tireur and as such shot.’
General Carta, resigned to the idea that resistance was impossible without a British landing, circulated Müller’s order to all Italian units with his own recommendation attached. ‘The above is a natural consequence of the situation resulting from the armistice. We are in a besieged fortress. It is therefore essential to follow the orders of the German command with a sense of realism.’ Tragically, the Italians who refused to work for the Germans were embarked in a ship which was then sunk by an Allied submarine.
Paddy Leigh Fermor made plans for General Carta’s escape to Egypt. The details were arranged by Miki Akoumianakis and the two brothers, Stelios and Roussos Koundouros. A signal was sent to Cairo to arrange a rendezvous for a motor launch on the beach near Treis Ekklisies. Meanwhile, to the despair of all British officers on the island, and contrary to all instructions, Bandouvas had allowed his men to attack German soldiers in the Viannos region. A group of them began on Friday, 10 September, by killing two privates who were collecting potatoes at Kato Simi. The bodies, wrapped in sacks, were dropped down a hole, but a Cretan ‘Gestapite’ ran off to warn the nearest garrison.
Still convinced that an Allied invasion was heading for this portion of the coast, Bandouvas, compounding his own rashness, sent runners northwards calling for a general mobilization in the whole province of Heraklion. The impetuous Colonel Beteinakis rushed to support it. Dunbabin could only issue furious countermands.
Two days after the attack at Kato Simi, a force nearly 2,000 strong reached the area. Bandouvas’s men stood little chance. They killed just under twenty soldiers (according to German figures) then scattered. One account from a reliable source says that they also took prisoner thirteen Germans. Local citizens, including an Archimandrite and the Mayor of Kalami, urged Bandouvas to release the prisoners. Added to similar advice from within his band, he agreed, but this had to be carried out secretly since others wanted them executed. The soldiers were freed on the evening of 19 September, but next morning they ran into another group of Bandouvas’s men who promptly killed them.
The German military authorities, already paranoid about the defection of Italy and the possibility of Carta’s troops fighting alongside the resistance, reacted with murderous resolution. General Müller gave orders for the immediate destruction of six villages in the Viannos area and about five hundred civilians were shot.*
Bandouvas and his band had to run from the nest of hornets they had provoked. The German retaliatory drive in the region forced them westwards. Bandouvas again demanded help from the kapitans around the Mount Ida range, and sent a peremptory request to Tom Dunbabin that he urgently organise their evacuation. Dunbabin’s temper was sorely tried.
Paddy Leigh Fermor, meanwhile, had smuggled General Carta and a few members of his staff out of their headquarters at Neapolis on 16 September, and across the Lasithi mountains. Fieseler Storch spotter planes flew overhead searching for them and dropped hurriedly printed leaflets offering a reward of thirty thousand drachma for General Carta’s capture. One of them fell virtually at Carta’s feet. He bent down, picked it up and waved it at Leigh Fermor. ‘Ah, ah, mon capitaine!’ he exclaimed. ‘Trente pièces d’argent! Un contrat de Judas!’
The small party managed to evade the German patrols and they reached the beach near Treis Ekklisies on 23 September. There Leigh Fermor found Dunbabin and the other British officers, all of whom had been dragged into the Viannos débâcle, and also Bandouvas who, with impermeable self-assurance, tried to shift the blame demanding that he and his men should be evacuated first. Despite everything, Leigh Fermor could not help feeling a certain pity at the almost total destruction of his band.
The Royal Navy motor launch which was coming to take off General Carta brought Sandy Rendel, his wireless operator and Father Skoulas, ‘the parachute priest’. They arrived to a scene of chaos on the beach that night. To make matters worse, the sea was choppy. Rendel’s attaché case and the charging engine for his wireless went over the side as the rubber dinghy was loaded.
Rendel only had time to catch a glimpse of an elderly man in a felt hat – General Carta – and Paddy Leigh Fermor, who had come aboard to hand over important German documents provided by Tavana to Bob Young, the commander of the launch, without Carta’s knowledge. But Young became concerned at the deterioration in the weather and turned his craft out to sea. Leigh Fermor with Manoli Paterakis thus made an unplanned exit from Crete. The next time he returned would not be by sea but by parachute.
On the beach, Tom Dunbabin had to exert all his authority to deal with Bandouvas’s demands that another boat be sent from Egypt immediately. The newly arrived Rendel was also deeply impressed by Dunbabin’s stream of Cretan curses when a young Greek officer – a nephew of the Prime Minister – chucked away an empty sardine tin with British markings.
• • •
The German troops still searching for Bandouvas and his band forced them and the British further westwards. A week later the fugitives were on the flank of a hill called Tsilívdika near the Rodakino beach which was used for clandestine landings.
There, in a bowl in the hills with a network of caves, the company, by now almost a hundred strong, settled to rest and wait. Sheep were taken from nearby flocks, slaughtered and roasted on blazing fires in the caves.
Sentries from Bandouvas’s band posted on surrounding hills kept watch, and Sandy Rendel later remembered gazing out over the Libyan Sea while bees hummed in the thyme all around them. But the British officers and their Cretan associates – Tom Dunbabin, Xan Fielding, Sandy Rendel, Ralph Stockbridge, John Stanley, George Psychoundakis, Niko Souris and various detachments from bands in the central region – felt ill at ease in the unnatural calm. Events seemed to have overtaken them. Bewildered and exasperated, they wondered whether a motor launch would ever arrive to solve the impasse.
Dunbabin’s runner returned from the wireless set on Mount Ida to relay the message from Cairo that no craft was available. In case Bandouvas might react unpleasantly to this news – it was hard to forget that he had threatened to seize parachute stores by force of arms the autumn before – Tom Dunbabin warned his officers to keep their revolvers to hand. But by then Bandouvas was preoccupied with another matter.
One of the local andartes happened to mention to him that a man from his region had recently turned up in their area. Bandouvas asked his name and, when told, declared that he was in league with the Germans. Men were sent off to seize him, and Bandouvas conducted a trial which lasted most of the night. British officers kept dropping off to sleep, then waking up again to this strange scene. The accused, one Georgiou Ergazakis, finally confessed. Polioudakis, the collaborationist police chief in Heraklion, had recruited him. He went on to give the names of other agents working for the Germans, but this did not save him.
At dawn – it was now 4 October – he was taken off to be shot. His body was then dropped down a pothole. Very soon afterwards firing broke out. A reconnaissance patrol of the Feldgendarmerie and Italian carabinieri was spotted by Bandouvas’s lookouts who, without waiting for them to come closer, blazed away at maximum range. After a confused and scattered skirmish, most of the enemy force were either killed or captured. Amongst the prisoners was a Cretan who claimed he had been forced into German uniform.
This Cretan was put under guard with what he thought was a captured German soldier. But ‘Gussie’, as the British and Cretans called him, was Ralph Stockbridge’s ‘tame German’ who had fled his Wehrmacht barracks. Gussie murmured to the Greek collaborator in German that they would both be shot.
The traitor whispered back, also in German, that he should not give up hope. He and the others had been the advance guard of a much larger force which had the whole area surrounded. He went on to boast of how long and successfully he had worked for the Germans. Once he had truly condemned himself, Gussie stood up and told the andartes all that he had said. A second traitor met his fate.
This successful ruse had also provided a warning of their dangerous position. But later towards evening, the weather changed. They were saved by a heavy mist covering the hills and coast. That night, splitting into small groups, the curious assembly at Mount Tsilívdika broke up. Bandouvas was directed further westwards along the coast; Dunbabin sent Niko Souris with him to provide sound advice.
Hoping for another boat, Bandouvas and his men hid near Kalo Lakko in the province of Sphakia. But the villagers in that area became worried by his presence, so he and his men were prevailed upon to return to the Mount Ida range. Eventually, he left Crete on the last day of October.
Dunbabin meanwhile had returned to the Amari having wasted nearly a month. The ISLD team of Ralph Stockbridge and John Stanley, after breaking through the German cordon round Tsilívdika, ended up completing a clockwise circuit of the western half of the island. Sandy Rendel went to the mountains of Lasithi to take over the wireless station there. Dunbabin told him to take Franco Tavana, General Carta’s counter-espionage officer. But Tavana’s intention to set up a resistance group of Italians and local Cretans petered out for lack of local support.
After the Viannos catastrophe the trail of misery ran to more than the six villages. Schubert’s newly formed battalion of Greek-speaking Italians from the Dodecanese began to terrorize the southern coast.* Rodakino, Kallikrati and Kali-Sykia close to Mount Tsilívdika were also destroyed. In Kali-Sykia, old women are said to have been burned alive in their houses and thirty villagers were shot in Kallikrati.
The remains of Bandouvas’s band split up on the departure of their leader. In his brother’s absence, Yanni Bandouvas assumed a very diminished mantle of leadership. Bodias, assisted by Niko Samaritis, left with the Communist group to operate with ELAS – Bodias in the province of Heraklion and Samaritis in Lasithi. In spite of Tavana’s failure to raise support, Lasithi was attractive to the Communists because of the quantities of Italian arms available there.
• • •
The Selino area in the south-west of the island also witnessed fighting and reprisals at this time. On 25 September, a German detachment surrounded the village of Koustoyérako, the home of the Paterakis family. They had presumably heard of the arms drop made only a week before to Kiwi Perkins and the Seliniot band.
Finding no men, the German patrol lined the women and children up in the square and demanded to know where they were hiding. Infuriated by the women’s silence they set up a machine gun for an execution. The menfolk, notably Costi Paterakis, had in fact crept on to a bluff above the village. Their rifles were trained on the German firing party. At a range of four hundred yards, Paterakis’s shot felled the machine gunner, and a fusillade from his fellow villagers brought down several others. The surviving Germans fled.
Since the fate of the village was clear, the women and children took their most treasured possessions and tramped up into the mountains to hide, while many of the men joined the Selino bands. The German reaction was as swift as they had expected. Between 30 September and 3 October German detachments burned the villages of Koustoyérako, Moni and Leivada. But the resistance was fierce. In the same period, twenty-four of their soldiers were killed.
Perkins by now had a very effective guerrilla force. They were well armed after three parachute drops, and strengthened by men from the destroyed villages: the Selino district became dangerous for the Germans that autumn. Skirmishes, following the ambush of patrols, continued into the second week of October. They culminated on 18 October with a battle at Akhlada.
Akhlada is a tiny plain in the mountains two hours above Koustoyérako. The shepherds from the village had cheese-making huts there, solidly built in stone and without windows. The place had been used for some of the parachute drops and so German patrols visited it frequently.
Kiwi Perkins had an inspired idea for an ambush. Having picked his ground with great care, he and the Seliniots waited in position for an approaching patrol to enter their trap. Antoni Paterakis manned the Bren gun, a weapon with which he achieved fame, and on Kiwi’s signal opened fire as the patrol of nineteen Germans and three Italians reached the cheese huts.
The immediate reaction of soldiers coming under fire is to seek cover first and fight back later. Since the cheese huts offered the only protection from the bursts of fire, they threw themselves inside, forgetting that these huts had no windows. Perkins, while the rest of the band took aim on the entrances, slipped from hut to hut rolling a grenade into each. He waited after pulling out each pin, so that the Germans inside would not have time to throw them back, and any who tried to escape were cut down by the Seliniots. Only two members of the band were wounded: Perkins, who had a bullet lodged beside a shoulder-blade, and another member of the band, Manolis Tzatzimakis, more seriously hurt.
The soldiers who surrendered fared no better than their dead comrades. They were taken to the band’s hideout. There was no chance of sending this batch of prisoners out by sea to Egypt: after such a large engagement the Seliniots expected the whole area to be sealed off. Next morning the band drew lots. It fell to Antoni Paterakis and one other to deal with them.
They took the prisoners further up the mountain to a pothole at a place called Tafkos. Antoni Paterakis steeled himself with memories of how ruthless the Germans had been to captured andartes. The prisoners tied together in a line realized what their fate was as they shuffled forward to the edge of the drop. Paterakis intended to shoot them there, then roll the bodies in afterwards, but the first German to be shot staggered backwards and fell into the hole. He dragged the next man with him, and so on until all had disappeared.
Although the hole was well over a hundred feet deep, some of the Germans survived the fall. Perkins, in spite of the wound received the day before, volunteered to go down to finish them off, but Antoni Paterakis insisted on doing it himself. He was lowered down on a rope improvised out of parachute tapes, but it broke and he too fell. Paterakis’s fate appalled all those at the top. His father broke into lamentations until it became clear that he was still alive, albeit with a damaged back. Trapped in this human snakepit of his own making, he heard one of the Germans whisper to him: ‘And now, Greco, we will die together.’
Perkins finally persuaded the others to lower him down. He reached the bottom safely, finished off the surviving Germans and, with Paterakis strapped across his own wounded back, had himself hauled to the surface. Afterwards the bullet was removed from Perkins’s back with a large Cretan knife. This act of rescue made him a national hero. From then on he was known as ‘the unforgettable Vasili’. Antoni Paterakis survived his injuries. He was evacuated by motor launch and treated in a Cairo hospital. But Manolis Tzatzimakis had to be smuggled into Canea for treatment where he was betrayed to the Germans and shot.*
• • •
During the course of the year the military hierarchy on Crete was formalized. Tom Dunbabin became a lieutenant colonel commanding the British Military Mission. Xan Fielding, responsible for the west of the island, was promoted to major at the age of 25. Not long afterwards, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who was in charge of eastern Crete, was also promoted to major; he was 28. This was part of Keble’s ambitious plan which created almost eighty SOE missions in the Balkans by October 1943.
The original SOE officers scattered around the Balkans thus found themselves reshuffled and upgraded. Their only consolation was rapid promotion. This rank inflation was intended mainly to give them weight in dealing with local guerrilla groups, and partly to increase the rank pyramid from below, thus raising Keble on the freshly crowned and pipped shoulders of others.
The over-rapid growth in British Military Missions had not been matched by a similar increase in the number of cypherenes. Only the Cretan section managed to cope because Jack Smith-Hughes and his officers took over the decoding work when the quantity of messages increased. For the Greek section, on the other hand, the situation became disastrous. Officers in the field were furious. They found it almost impossible to extract replies, and they suspected that any attempt to pass back information was a waste of time. The cypherenes, mainly South Africans renowned for their glamour – this was not just the fantasy of men too long in the field since staff officers in Cairo admitted that they were picked for their looks – bore the brunt of the outraged and often obscene messages.
Nobody with any experience of Keble could trust a distant headquarters run by such a man. Anyone who stood in his way or objected to his methods was either bullied into submission or, in one or two cases, such as Arthur Reade, subjected to a campaign of vilification. Eventually Bolo Keble picked on the wrong man. Furious that Churchill had appointed Fitzroy Maclean to head the British Military Mission to Tito without reporting to him, he resorted to a campaign of lies that Maclean was an untrustworthy, drunken homosexual. When news of this attempt to blacken Maclean’s character reached General Wilson, Keble’s extraordinary career with SOE came to an abrupt end.
The other contribution to that year’s annual upheaval was the political row building up with the Foreign Office over mainland Greece. This burst upon a remarkably ill-informed and unimaginative officialdom when Brigadier Myers, the leader of the British Military Mission in Greece, brought a delegation of andartes back to Cairo. EAM–ELAS and non-Communist representatives alike emphasized in blunt terms that King George II should not consider returning to Greece without a plebiscite on the future of the monarchy. The Foreign Office and the Greek government-in-exile were furious that such an embarrassing revelation should have been allowed to take place.
Myers was made the scapegoat for this contradiction between ossified assumptions and the political reality within Greece. The story on the mainland that the British had parachuted left-footed boots to the left-wing groups of ELAS and the right foot to EDES to cause trouble is appropriate, however apocryphal. British policy towards Greece was less a Machiavellian conspiracy than a sequence of blunders resulting from ignorance, arrogance, muddled thinking, lack of imagination and refusal to listen.
The head of SOE Cairo, Lord Glenconner, also suffered from the effects of Myers’s unwelcome honesty and Keble’s flagrant dishonesty, when General ‘Jumbo’ Wilson decided that SOE Cairo was ‘rotten to the core’. Keble was returned to ‘routine duties’ and after a short interregnum under Major General W.A.M. Stawell, Brigadier Karl Barker-Benfield took Keble’s place.
The new military director, a decent and guileless man with a quiet manner, could hardly have been more different from his predecessor. The Greek Communists on the mainland identified his character with hawk-like accuracy when he made a tour of inspection the following year and they played him accordingly. In Crete there was less of a political trap, so section officers regarded him more with amusement than exasperation.
Barker-Benfield, who had in Monty Woodhouse’s description ‘a shiny round head, almost completely bald, and a strangely Teutonic accent’, inspired in Jack Smith-Hughes the whim that his real name was Barcke von Bohnenfeld. This later developed into a running joke based on the notion that the German Colonel Barge (pronounced Barcke) who took command of Festungsdivision 133 in Canea was really the long-lost twin brother of Brigadier Karl Barker-Benfield, the commander of Force 133.
In Crete, British officers were determined to maintain a modus vivendi with EAM–ELAS which would prevent civil war. On the night of 7 November, Xan Fielding set up the first major meeting between representatives of EAM and EOK since the row at Karines in the spring. This took place in the hills behind Canea near Therisso, where Venizelos had set up his revolutionary headquarters in the rebellion of 1905. Fielding arrived escorted by his guide and valued counsellor, Pavlo Vernadakis. The Mayor of Canea, Nikolaos Skoulas, led the EOK delegation and General Mandakas and Miltiades Porphyroyennis were the EAM–ELAS representatives.
Fielding, having set the agenda, claims to have drifted off to sleep from exhaustion after the march across the mountains, but he has always played down his role in the non-aggression pact which was eventually reached. Skoulas, who had made a dramatic scene before the meeting demanding ‘What will history say if I sign an agreement with the Communists?’, then told the colonel of gendarmerie to sign on his behalf along with Constantinos Mitsotakis. The agreement, once signed, was generally kept, unlike on the mainland. And many Cretans believe that this first step helped save the island from the worst effects of civil war.
After fourteen months in the field Xan Fielding went back to Cairo. During his time in Egypt, he came to the conclusion that there would now never be an Allied invasion of Crete. Since he was bilingual in French, having been brought up in France, he would be of more use there.
Fielding’s replacement, Dennis Ciclitira, a captain in the South Staffords, arrived just before Christmas. Ciclitira had been Jack Smith-Hughes’s very competent staff officer on the Cretan desk since October 1942, but so far the nearest he had come to work in the field was as conducting officer on clandestine crossings from Derna. Tired of the sneers which Cairo-bound officers tended to receive from their operational counterparts, Ciclitira had volunteered to take over from Xan Fielding when he next came out for a rest. A short time after the handover, his appointment was made permanent by Fielding’s transfer.
Although his family was of Greek origin, Ciclitira played it down mainly because Cretans instinctively distrusted Greeks from outside. But Ciclitira did not warm to the Cretans, and his rather scathing tongue did little to conceal the fact.
The western area of Crete which he took over had two radio sets: one down in the Selino area with Kiwi Perkins, and the other at Asi Gonia, which was to be his base for the first few months. Ciclitira’s relationship with Perkins was not an easy one. He was amazed that the Cretans should regard the New Zealander as a hero, mainly as a result of his rescue of Antoni Paterakis from the pothole, and he found it difficult to accept that they should consider a sergeant as their natural leader.
A clash of wills followed. Ciclitira believed that Perkins was causing ‘more trouble than it was worth’ down in the south-west, and gave orders for his return to Cairo. Perkins, determined to fight on until the end with the Seliniots, refused to leave the island. The dispute was resolved in a tragic manner at the end of February 1944. Perkins, on his way to see Ciclitira near Asi Gonia, met his death in a German ambush.