Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (10 page)

The sight of the smartly turned-out regulars of the Welch Regiment, part of the garrison based on the 14th Infantry Brigade, had a heartening effect on many of these dispirited survivors. Those who trudged away from Suda along Tobruk Avenue, as the British had renamed it, were unshaven, dirty, dishevelled and tired. Many were bare-headed because they had thrown away their steel helmets in the retreat, and their battledress was unbuttoned in the warm sun. Cretan boys selling ice-creams at two drachma each did good business.

To disperse this unwieldy assembly — 27,000 men in the course of less than a week — troops were marched out behind Suda and Canea and settled along the stretch of coast between the foothills of the White Mountains and the sea. They spread themselves in the olive groves — the designated camps were no clearer than mining claims on a map — and settled themselves as best they could. The warm spring days could be deceptive: nights were cold for those who had dumped their greatcoats during the retreat.

Once units had a recognizable dispersal area, the 'Annie Lorry' came round dropping off rations: tins of bully beef, and cans of jam to go with the hard-tack biscuits which otherwise turned to plaster of Paris in the mouth. Bread was scarce because of the shortage of field bakeries, but when the Greek army offered Italian bakers out of their pool of prisoners of war, the British officer in charge refused:

'But we couldn't allow that. They might poison our chaps.' The Greeks, with admirable tolerance, then offered their own bakers, saying that they would use the Italians.

The bully beef or 'corned dog' had to be gouged out with a clasp-knife and eaten off the blade.

Oranges generously given by the Cretans followed, but the sudden consumption of large quantities of fruit had its effect. The olive groves quickly became fouled and the Army ritual of latrine-digging was not made easy by the lack of entrenching tools.

The best drinking vessels were the round tins of fifty Player's Navy Cut, but most had to use empty bully beef tins instead for brew-ups, and also for drinking raki and wine. Short rations on tea and sugar — delivered in a sandbag per company — combined with Cretan hospitality greatly increased the consumption of the local red wine. The Greek word
krassi —
as in 'got krassied up' — lingered in regimental slang for a long time after Crete.

The overcrowding round Canea became acute. There were also several thousand civilian refugees mixed in with both formed troops and the 'odds and sods': RAF personnel without aircraft, fitters without tools, drivers without vehicles, pioneers without picks, and stragglers from every regiment, corps and minor unit imaginable.

The appearance of a reconnaissance aircraft — known as the shufti-plane — would send the new arrivals diving pell-mell into slit trenches. A couple of RAF pilots found themselves piled on top of a very attractive young woman. As they extricated themselves on the all-clear, they recognized Nicki from the Argentina night-club. 'Good afternoon, Nicki,' one of them said with a grin. 'Mrs Pirie, please!' she answered rather haughtily to emphasize her new status.

For most civilians, Crete was no more than a resting place on their flight into Egypt. They often had even less reason for trusting in authority than the soldiers. When General Wilson's force retreated to the Thermopylae line, Lawrence Durrell in Kalamata telegraphed his British Council boss in Athens asking for instructions. He received the reply: 'Carry on! Rule Britannia!', only to discover later that the author of this flippant message had then slipped away on his own.

Durrell, his wife Nancy and baby daughter Penelope escaped from the military chaos in Kalamata only because a former Merchant Navy man with a caique, an acquaintance from Corfu, took them on board. After disembarking in the old Venetian port in Canea, Nancy Durrell mentioned to some Australian soldiers that she had no milk for the baby. With cheerful vandalism, they smashed open the dingy green shutters of nearby shops using their rifle butts, and presented her with enough tins of condensed milk to last for six months. The Durrells' troubles were not entirely finished. After ten days in Canea, they left for Egypt, where civilians unable to prove their identity were kept in a wired compound. Durrell, unable to send a cable to England to tell his mother of their escape, spotted a reporter from the
Daily Mail
through the wire of the cage. He called him over and gave him the story of their adventures.

Grander refugees, especially the Greek royal family, encountered none of these difficulties. On reaching Heraklion by flying-boat, the King stayed first at the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, where he was welcomed by the curator, R.W. Hutchinson, always known as 'the Squire'. This Edwardian villa, with shaded gardens of palm trees and plumbago, was built by Sir Arthur Evans after the King's uncle, Prince George, had in 1900 secured his right to buy the freehold of the main Minoan site. As Evans took a less active part, he turned it into a base for British archaeology in Crete. From 1930 to 1934, in the years following Evans's retirement, John Pendlebury had lived there as curator, his wife's presence breaking the monastic tradition.

King George was joined at Knossos by Princess Katherine, Mrs Britten-Jones and the Prime Minister, Tsouderos. But after a few days at Knossos, the King and his advisers decided that they should move to the other end of the island, since Canea was now officially the seat of the Greek government.

Princess Katherine, although reluctant to leave her brother, was persuaded to depart for Cairo in a flying-boat. Crown Prince Paul and Princess Frederica with their children, Constantine and Sophia (both suffering from the onslaught of Cretan bedbugs), and Mrs Britten-Jones in her ever-discreet guise of lady-in-waiting flew to Alexandria, then on to Cairo on 2 May in the same Sunderland flying-boat as General Wilson.

The King and Tsouderos were joined in Canea by Maniadakis, still the Minister of National Security, who had arrived in Crete with a large number of his hated secret police. This was regarded as so provocative by the Cretans that the former British Vice-Consul in Athens and his counterpart in Canea approached Tsouderos and the King to warn them. Maniadakis was sent on to Egypt where his fifty secret policemen soon sowed hatred and fear amongst the largely pro-Venizelist Greek community there. The two British Vice-Consuls believed that the King and his government lost much prestige during their short time on the island. On the whole, British diplomats tended to be blind to the dislike the King aroused, presumably because he felt able to unbend in their company in a way he could seldom manage with his own countrymen. He once remarked to Charles Mott-Radclyffe with engaging simplicity that 'the most essential piece of equipment for any King of Greece was a Revelation suitcase'.

The King's presence in such a republican stronghold as Crete, loyal to the liberal memory of its most famous son, Venizelos, was unpropitious. Tsouderos, as a Cretan and a monarchist, was a relatively rare bird, but as a banker and a politician, he had in Cretan eyes virtually become an Athenian by profession.

The Cretans, more than any other Greeks, never forgave King George for having granted a dubious legitimacy to the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas on 4 August 1936. Traditional Venizelist sympathies were affronted, and on the second anniversary of the August Decree, the Cretans had risen in revolt. Afterwards, their weapons — both the agent and the symbol of resistance to foreign oppression — were confiscated. That aroused more than disgust when the Cretan population then found itself practically unarmed in the face of the German invasion. After the war, in the plebiscite on the monarchy of 5 September 1946, Crete returned an absolute majority against the King. And yet the Communists in Crete, unlike their comrades on the mainland, never stood a chance of gaining power.

The Cretan character — warlike, proud, compulsively generous to a friend or stranger in need, ferociously unforgiving to an enemy or traitor, frugal day-by-day but prodigal in celebration — was, of course, strongly influenced by the landscape of dramatic contrasts in which the islanders lived.

Rich coastal strips on the north coast, endless olive groves on the foothills, fertile valleys and odd little plains hidden in the highlands, all were overshadowed by the island's spinal mass of limestone Cordilleras — the White Mountains, the Kedros range, the Mount Ida or Psiloriti range, and finally the Lasithi or Dikti mountains in the east. From sub-tropical vegetation with banana trees, carobs and orange groves, a mountain village, only fifteen kilometres away as the crow flew, but probably sixty on foot, seemed to exist in a different world and a different climate.

Mountain villages in the sheep-rearing (and sheep-stealing) regions of the centre consisted of little more than a cluster of white-washed houses round a simple Orthodox church. Often they had only a floor of beaten earth and a few pieces of home-made furniture, including a large dowry chest of clothes and sheets. The diet of sheep's and goat's cheese, potatoes and erratically cooked meat was as hard and monotonous as the life, but the air was invigorating and so clean that wounds healed with astonishing rapidity.*

In the highlands a man was known by the number of sheep he owned, in the lowlands by the number of his olive trees, of which Crete was reputed to have twenty million. Villages in the valleys and lowlands had pollarded mulberry trees down each side of the street, their trunks lime-washed against insects. The houses had plants and flowerpots, cherry trees behind and vine-covered arbours. Life was less harsh, but the people were no less generous. Only in the large cities of Heraklion and Canea were the inhabitants likely to have lost some of those Cretan qualities which had survived, even thrived, over the centuries of foreign occupation with its cycle of repression and revolt.

* Even on the coast at Rethymno, a German paratrooper who received a bullet sideways through the nostrils during the battle found he could blow his nose normally a week later.

For Canea to become the new capital of Greece struck the Cretans as a rather unconvincing idea. They maintained an air of normality as the rent for villas shot to previously unimaginable figures. This money did not seem to make its way down to the understocked little shops with dingy shutters. And Cretan men did not forsake their cafe routine of newspapers and cups of Turkish coffee.

The men, mostly middle-aged since the young ones had been trapped with the Cretan Division in Epirus, presented a curious contrast to the newcomer. Those from the town wore shapeless suits, while those from the hills wore moustaches of cultivated ferocity and traditional Cretan costume consisting of a black bobbled head-cloth — a
sariki
— embroidered jacket and waistcoat, a mulberry-coloured cummerbund over dark, capacious breeches — British soldiers called them

'crap-catchers' — and high boots which completed an impression that was half pirate, half irregular cavalry.

The Cretans welcomed the British soldiers as distant relatives who had arrived unexpectedly from another country. Stephanides saw a group of Cretans dancing the Pentozali — a highly energetic dance — stop to invite soldiers to join them. The self-conscious British, uncomfortable in their prickly battledress, tried to learn the movements and were soon laughing with the dancers at their own clumsiness.

For those who had escaped from the fighting in Greece, the island of Crete was a glorious haven — a place of great beauty and of great friendliness where glasses were perpetually lifted to the common cause. Cretans, although robust drinkers themselves, were astonished at the Anglo-Saxon compulsion to get drunk. According to the degree of their inebriation, drunken soldiers wandered round bawling out ribald songs or mawkish ones. If the BBC was playing popular songs, such as 'The Banks of Loch Lomond' or 'There is a Tavern in the Town', homesick troops would crowd round a radio immediately.

The effects of drink were also likely to bring out some of the underlying tension between Dominion troops and British symbols of authority, whether military policemen or officers. The New Zealanders and Australians in Crete were neither regulars nor conscripts, but volunteers for the duration, and their lack of reverence — almost a point of Antipodean honour — made British officers steer clear of them whenever possible. On arrival in Egypt, one New Zealander had greeted a rather languid British officer carrying a fly-whisk with: 'Hey! What've you done with the rest of the horse?' The New Zealanders certainly had their share of 'wife-dodgers' and 'one-jumpers' (volunteers one jump ahead of the police) but, unlike Australian soldiers, they did not strike fear into British officers.

A yeomanry captain, who had already encountered Australians in Greece, remarked only half in jest of the 6th Australian Division: 'I think they must have been recruited from the prisons.' In Canea, a British officer, seeing an Australian filling his pockets with fruit from an old woman's stall and refusing to pay, remonstrated with him, only to find the muzzle of a looted German pistol thrust into his face. And a Cretan recounted how when a British colonel (probably Jasper Blunt) accompanying the King of Greece had gone to quieten a disturbance outside the window where they were talking, the Australian responsible for the row promptly seized him by the throat and nearly strangled him.

At night, Australian air-raid precautions consisted of shooting at any light they saw, whether a match struck for a cigarette or the correctly dimmed headlamps of a vehicle. Harold Caccia remembered a drive past one of their areas at night as 'one of the most anxious moments of my life'. Soon afterwards, this ill-disciplined rabble fought the German paratroopers at Rethymno with savage exuberance.

A rather more orderly regime was soon established in the Canea area. Bell tents and EPIP (European Personnel, Indian Pattern) were erected under the olive trees for the rear echelon. Most of the stragglers from Greece were transported on to Egypt, while formed units were moved out to their designated defence positions. They had been given little chance to sample the delights of Canea's thirty-seven brothels — 'thirty-six of them owner-driven' according to the New Zealand Division Provost-Marshal.