Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (38 page)

Relations with local women constituted a disciplinary offence, and since official army brothels were provided for the garrison the penalties could be severe. A German sergeant in Canea who made a cleaning woman pregnant forced her to marry a drunken layabout in the port to avoid retribution.

Trade with the mainland did not cease entirely despite the confiscation of caiques to prevent escaped prisoners of war and stragglers leaving the island. Enough boats evaded the German roundup to take olive oil and assorted British, New Zealanders and Australians to the mainland, providing they could pay, and bring back cigarettes and members of the Cretan Division on the return journey. Myles Hildyard's family only knew that he was alive — he had been posted missing — when their bank in Newark rang up to enquire about a personal cheque he had written for £50 to pay his passage.

Some of the confiscated caiques were thought to have been put to a dreadful purpose. About two hundred Cretan Jews, mainly from Canea and Heraklion, were taken away in the night. 'One day they were there,' an old woman in Canea remembered of their neighbours, 'the next morning they were gone.' The exact fate of Cretan Jews is still unclear. A few Jews from Heraklion were amongst those shot in reprisal for a British raid in June 1942. Many more were held in Ayia prison before being shipped to the mainland and thence to the death camps of Northern Europe, but SOE Cairo heard that most of the Jews were put on a vessel sunk by an Allied submarine. This might explain why many Cretans think the majority were embarked in caiques which were then sunk, like the
noyades
of the French Revolution.

On 26 July, nearly two months after the conquest of Crete, the submarine HMS
Thrasher
put Commander Francis Pool RNR ashore on the south coast near the monastery of Preveli. 'Skipper' Pool, invariably described as 'a colourful character', knew Cretan waters well. Before the war he had run the Imperial Airways flying-boat station on the island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony.

In Turkish times messages had been rapidly transmitted by trumpet along the string of small forts built between Canea and Sphakia. News of Pool's arrival seemed to spread across the island even faster. Cretan optimism surged. The British had promised to return with weapons for them, they told each other. But Skipper Pool's mission was far less dramatic.

He had come, initially only for one trip, to organize the evacuation of the stragglers and escaped prisoners who had gravitated towards Preveli. It was a huge task, and one which the Cretans must have privately appreciated. Their compulsive generosity — housing and feeding those who had come to fight on their side — had developed into an immense burden during that famine-haunted year.

Cretans seldom complained even when a small minority of British and Dominion soldiers proved both a trial and a danger to those who risked execution by sheltering them. Drunken singing, both

'Tipperary' and 'Waltzing Matilda', could occasionally be heard from some distance outside villages, as khaki-clad figures lurched about drowning their sorrows. A year after the invasion there were still so many stragglers sheltered on the island that when Tom Dunbabin took over command of the SOE

mission and cautiously admitted to some villagers that he was English, the laconic reply was: 'Ah yes, we have plenty of those.'

Skipper Pool was taken to see the Abbot of Preveli, Father Agathängelos Langouvardos, a fearless and enchanting old man of enormous size who agreed to the monastery's use as a marshalling yard for escapees. Deciding to stay to round up more, Pool set out into the interior of the island to make contact with other groups. Rather optimistic news of a ferry service to Egypt even reached the badly guarded prison camp at Galatas and encouraged more to escape.

The dignified and discreet 'Uncle' Niko Vandoulakis at Vaphe sheltered so many on their way south-eastwards that he became known as the British Consul. One of the most important junctions of the overland network of escape routes was the large village of Asi Gonia, situated at the eastern end of the White Mountains where the island narrows. Like other villages which began by helping stragglers, it later proved itself among the most valiant centres of resistance in Crete under the leadership of its kapitan, Petro Petrakas. Petrakas, a friend and bodyguard of Venizelos, was given the code-name Beowulf because of his Nordic blue eyes and his fair hair and whiskers.

In the mountains above Asi Gonia, Lieutenant Colonel Papadakis, a reserve officer invalided out of the Greek army in 1922, also took escaped prisoners of war into his house. One of. them, an unusual subaltern in the Royal Army Service Corps called Jack Smith-Hughes, was to be the first officer sent to Crete by SOE to help organize resistance.

The open secret of submarines off Preveli could not be kept from the ears of 'bad Greeks' and from the Germans. In fact British officers later dubbed this rapid spread of supposedly secret information 'the Cretan wireless'. The Germans sent out spies in battledress posing as escaped British soldiers to discover the escape routes and the villages involved. Very few Cretans were fooled. When villagers discovered these imposters, they would 'thrash them like donkeys', all the while declaring their loyalty to the great German Reich, then drag them to the nearest garrison where the senior officer, no doubt with an acid smile, was obliged to thank them.

Because of the danger, the old Abbot of Preveli had to go into hiding before his eventual evacuation to Cairo. His disappearance enabled his equally helpful monks to transfer all the blame when the Germans surrounded the monastery one morning. No escapers were discovered, but the Germans, convinced that guilt was collective, stripped the monastery farm of livestock and supplies. Then, to ensure that no further submarine visits took place on that stretch of coast, they established a post nearby.

Skipper Pool, having rounded up another 130 men, left on 22 August aboard HMS
Torbay,
establishing a record for the number of people ever jammed into one submarine. The
Torbay
was famous for the eccentricity of its subsequently controversial captain, Commander 'Crap' Miers VC.

One of Miers's passengers, Major Ray Sandover, the Australian battalion commander from Rethymno, felt slightly self-conscious in his disintegrating uniform when invited to join the captain on the conning tower for their entry into Alexandria harbour. 'Usual drill, Number One,' ordered Miers, as the crew prepared to pay compliments. For the
Torbay,
compliments to the Vichy French ships interned in the harbour consisted of a row of bared bottoms.

The first British mission with the task of developing and assisting a local resistance movement landed in Crete on 9 October. It consisted of two men: Jack Smith-Hughes of SOE and Ralph Stockbridge of ISLD — Inter Services Liaison Department, the cover-name for MI6. Stockbridge, at that time a signals NCO not long down from Cambridge, knew little about wirelesses. He had transferred to ISLD from the Field Security Police, with whom he had served in Heraklion from December 1940

until the evacuation.

Of all the British officers who were to serve in Crete, Jack Smith-Hughes — a barrister with a brilliant mind and a strong sense of the ridiculous — was the most obviously English. A tall, pink-cheeked and rather portly young man, he looked conspicuously incongruous in Cretan dress.

Smith-Hughes and Stockbridge crossed from Egypt in the submarine HMS
Thunderbolt.

Smith-Hughes did not tell his companion that their vessel was really the old
Thetis
which had sunk with all hands and had later been recovered. (The change of name was no protection, for
Thunderbolt
was lost for good later in the war.) After landing in the south-west near Tsoutsouro, where they were feasted by the whole village, they set off for Colonel Papadakis's house at Vourvoure. Papadakis was the only Cretan officer whom Smith-Hughes had encountered during his escape from the prison camp, and his orders from Cairo — a model of imprecision — were 'to feel out the country to see who had influence'.

In this superannuated colonel he could hardly have stumbled upon a more unsuitable candidate.

Papadakis, a man of great egotism, wasted no time in proclaiming himself head of 'The Higher Committee of Cretan Freedom', much to the embarrassment and subsequent tribulation of British officers. Yet Papadakis, although impossible himself, had assembled a handful of remarkable men who were to make major contributions to the resistance later, especially in the field of intelligence.

Perhaps his greatest coup was to recruit George Halkiadakis, the chief of police in Rethymno. One lasting benefit to come out of this re-encounter was the appointment of George Psychoundakis (Smith-Hughes's guide during his earlier escape to Preveli) as their permanent runner.

Psychoundakis — a jester in the true sense of the term since his wit was based on a disconcerting honesty — proved one of the most outstanding characters to emerge during the Cretan resistance.

Although little more than a shepherd boy with the most rudimentary education, his juvenilia included precocious poems such as 'Ode to an Inkspot on a Schoolmistress's Skirt'. His natural talent finally achieved international fame with
The Cretan Runner,
an unrivalled account of the occupation years and the resistance. In 1988 he was feted by the Greek Academy for his translation of
The Odyssey
into the Cretan dialect.

Although Smith-Hughes and Stockbridge could do little to help resistance at such an early stage, some Cretans were already fighting back against the Germans. That sweep in the White Mountains during the first week of September had produced minor clashes in which four soldiers were killed.

The Germans offered an amnesty on 9 September and, though there were relatively few respondents, they regarded it as a success. But in the second week of November about seven soldiers were killed during another sweep.

On 23 November, Monty Woodhouse reached Crete on Mike Cumberlege's latest caique, the
Escampador,
and landed at Treis Ekklisies — Three Churches — to take over from Jack Smith-Hughes who returned to Cairo to run SOE's Cretan desk. Woodhouse came with four of his prize students from the SOE training school at Haifa, one of whom later turned traitor and was executed by Tom Dunbabin, the senior British officer.

Expecting a clandestine landing, Woodhouse found a reception committee of bewildering size. Apart from Jack Smith-Hughes, there were the three main guerrilla kapitans of central Crete: Manoli Bandouvas, his
frere ennemi
Petrakageorgis and Satanas, together with scores of British and Anzac soldiers clamouring for evacuation. A number had acquired Cretan girlfriends and wanted to take them to Egypt.

Jack Smith-Hughes left Crete a week before Christmas with three abbots, including the twenty-two-stone Abbot of Preveli, who before he died swore in the new Greek government-in-exile.

Woodhouse, then a 24-year-old captain, was left in sole charge. Woodhouse had trouble dealing with Bandouvas, whom Smith-Hughes had awarded the code-name of Bo-Peep because he owned so many sheep.

Bandouvas was a complex man. Illiterate, undeniably patriotic, crafty yet headstrong —

Smith-Hughes said that he had 'the restless, furtive eyes of the rich peasant' — he was a ruthless chieftain who was all too conscious of his considerable following in the villages of central Crete and disliked the idea of receiving instructions from a young Englishman, irrespective of their provenance.

He later demanded unsuccessfully that he should have his own wireless link with Cairo and control arms drops. German propaganda circulated the rumour that Woodhouse had tried to persuade Bandouvas to make Crete part of the British Empire, a fabrication which the Communists later disseminated as proven.*

* Bandouvas, as his long and very unreliable memoir dictated in old age shows, had great difficulty distinguishing any truth other than his own.

Petrakageorgis, on the other hand, received the code-name Selfridge because his olive-crushing enterprise was Crete's closest approximation to big business. Petrakageorgis was one of the most pro-British of the guerrilla kapitans, but even he could not conceal his disappointment that SOE in Cairo had nothing more to offer than a handful of Italian rifles from the booty captured in Cyrenaica.

Woodhouse was reinforced some seven weeks after his arrival. The submarine
Torbay
arrived off the beach at Tsoutsouros on the night of 11 January and put ashore two officers who could hardly have been more different. Xan Fielding was slim, energetic and not inclined to suffer fools gladly. His stinging signals on the subject of SOE Cairo's incompetence became famous. Sandy Rendel, a later member of the British Military Mission, described his reports as 'fruity, flippant and bloodthirsty'.

The Cretans took to Fielding's robust sense of humour immediately and respected both his bravery and his judgement.

His companion, whose selection for special operations was never satisfactorily explained, was the brave but lumbering Captain Guy Turrall, who if he was not Evelyn Waugh's model for the unfortunate Apthorpe certainly should have been. An old Africa hand from Abyssinia, he apparently said in all seriousness on the beach: 'Are the natives friendly?' Turrall refused to abandon his uniform for local dress, and had even brought his pyjamas and an enamel wash basin which amazed the Cretans. Only the thunder-box was missing.

The Cretan impression of English eccentricity was greatly increased as they saw more of him. Guy Turrall was a keen amateur geologist and botanist. His collection of wild-flower specimens — one plant was no different from any other in Cretan eyes — did not concern them. But a young Cretan who found himself having to carry Turrall's pack at one stage discovered it to be loaded with rock specimens. These he drastically reduced.

Fielding and Turrall followed Jack Smith-Hughes's tracks to Colonel Papadakis above Asi Gonia.

Xan Fielding quickly saw that little would be achieved with this self-proclaimed leader of the pan-Cretan resistance: nobody outside Papadakis's immediate circle acknowledged him. Competent and dedicated officers such as Major Tsiphakis, who had brought together an intelligence network round Rethymno, refused to take him seriously. Evenings with Papadakis were excruciating. The lugubrious conversation was not helped by Turrall's inability to speak Greek. He attempted to converse in French. 'I say,
mon colonel, vous ne m'avez pas mis dans le tableau',
was but one of his classics.