Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (39 page)

Fielding soon moved closer to Canea and Suda Bay. He based himself at Vaphe with the 'British Consul', Niko Vandoulakis, and began to transmit intelligence on air and sea movements to Cairo with the help of a small group of exceptionally able and courageous young men known as 'the Quins', led by Marko Spanoudakis.

British and Cretans alike were thinking of the future, and the need for an organization, both political and military, to co-ordinate activities. On 1 April, Fielding slipped into the centre of Canea to the town hall. He entered the Mayor's office, brushing past some German officers on their way out. The Mayor, Nikolaos Skoulas, an elderly, patriarchal figure, was at first appalled, then roared with laughter. During this meeting they discussed the establishment of what became EOK, the Cretan nationalist resistance movement.

Turrall meanwhile had set off in search of the Communist leader, General Mandakas. He stumped about the island in his British uniform, a row of medal ribbons on his chest, asking villagers in English if they knew where he was. Such an improbable secret agent was lucky not to have been handed over to the Germans in the belief that he was one of their spies. Turrall never made contact so alas we will never know how Mandakas would have reacted to his stock request for enlightenment: to be
'mis dans le tableau'.
When Monty Woodhouse was recalled in April, Guy Turrall left with him.

Woodhouse's replacement, Tom Dunbabin — 'O Tom' the Cretans called him — arrived on 15 April 1942. There was only time, he recorded later, for 'a few hasty words with Monty, who left in the ship which brought me, and I was left in my new kingdom'.

Dunbabin, a Tasmanian and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, was a distinguished archaeologist and the author of
The Western Greeks.
He had enjoyed a friendly Oxford—Cambridge rivalry with John Pendlebury. At odd moments over the next three years, Dunbabin returned to the search for undiscovered Minoan sites, but found few. 'It is ill-gleaning after Pendlebury,' he wrote.

Dunbabin had a strong-featured face with a straggling moustache which he would absent-mindedly twirl round a finger. Engagingly paradoxical in several ways, Dunbabin was a shy man yet possessed a very determined character. He was large, and could be ferocious when necessary, yet had a voice whose pitch rose at unexpected moments. Junior officers sent out later were a little in awe of his exploits which included spending a whole day in a tree overlooking the airfield at Tymbaki. One described him as 'immensely brave and immensely modest'. Yet he had moral as well as physical courage, a rare combination. Paddy Leigh Fermor wrote: 'One of Tom's most valuable qualities, like pre-Borodino Koutouzow in
War and Peace,
was never to hinder anything helpful, always to bar anything harmful, a sort of traffic policeman to the flow of events.'

Dunbabin based himself just above the Amari valley, with his main hideout on the western flank of Mount Ida. The Amari valley, especially the village of Yerakari, soon became known to British officers as 'Lotus Land' because of its abundance of food and drink and welcome. 'The villagers were so hospitable', Dunbabin wrote after the war, 'that they plucked you by the sleeve as you walked down the narrow street, to come in and drink a glass of wine with them.' There they enjoyed vine-covered arbours and cherry orchards and the cheeses of Ida and Kedros, and watched 'the last rays fade on the bare summit of Ida which rose immediately opposite'.

Yerakari lay on the 'high spy route' across the western and central Cordilleras — the White Mountains, the Kedros range and the Mount Ida range — with villages organized like post-houses to help with the transport of wirelesses, the distribution of arms and the concealment of fugitives. The village also became the focal point for the Amari valley resistance movement. The Germans obliterated it in 1944

and shot many of those who had plucked at Dunbabin's sleeve.

Cretan resistance, starting with isolated acts of revenge and minor skirmishes (twenty Germans were killed during December 1941 and January 1942), gradually became more coherent. Cretans welcomed British officers, certain that another Allied army would return to help throw out the German occupiers. 'Everything depended throughout on their magnificent loyalty,' wrote Ralph Stockbridge. 'Without their help as guides, informants, suppliers of food and so on, not a single one of us would have lasted twenty-four hours.'

22

Into the Field

'SOE', wrote Monty Woodhouse in his memoirs, 'was a strange organization, whose only consistent feature was that it was drastically purged every August.' The purge which began'this phenomenon took place in the summer of 1941.

In the heady days of amateurism just before the German invasion of Jugoslavia and Greece, this world of schoolboy heroics was upset from an unexpected quarter. On 24 March 1941, Hermione Ranfurly, the rather grand secretary of George Pollock, then head of SOE in Cairo, decided to take matters into her own hands. Her husband the Earl of Ranfurly had just been captured in the desert, and she felt so strongly about the war effort that she did not flinch from going behind her chiefs back.

Peter Fleming happened to be sitting on the veranda at the British Embassy after lunch with Sir Miles Lampson and Anthony Eden when a message was brought to say that Lady Ranfurly was extremely anxious to see Eden on 'a matter of importance to do with the war'. 'This rather surprised us,' Lampson wrote in his diary, 'and Peter Fleming let out that she is working in the same secret organisation as he is. This as it subsequently transpired was rather awkward. She arrived in due course and insisted on seeing AE alone. To him she imparted her feeling that the whole of this hush-hush organisation is not only in a state of chaos, but that any amount of public money is being wasted thereon. This, in point of fact, only confirmed what AE (as he subsequently told me) had already long suspected.'

George Pollock, beleaguered by conventional military distrust of his organization spiced with large measures of jealousy, eventually fell victim to this first purge after repeated calls from GHQ Middle East to Dr Hugh Dalton, the minister responsible for SOE in London. A committee of enquiry found little evidence of wrong-doing, but the demand that heads should roll overcame any question of natural justice. The organization was reformed under Colonel Terence Maxwell, a banker with Glyn Mills before the war, and moved to a large and cheerless block of flats on Sharia Kasr-el-Aini called Rustum Buildings. Notwithstanding elaborate, yet rather obvious, security precautions, Cairene taxi drivers soon knew it as 'secret building'. In spite of the summer setback, SOE Cairo was about to embark on an extraordinary growth by sending military missions to the Balkans.*

* Special Operations Executive had a variety of cover names, allegedly to confuse its rivals as much as the enemy. From its early origins as MI(R) and Section D, the para-military branch became known as SO(2) — SO(1) was black propaganda under the Political Warfare Executive — then MOl(SP) which prompted the nickname Muddled Operations in Secret Places, then MO4, its denomination within GHQ Middle East; and finally Force 133. For the sake of simplicity, it will always be referred to as SOE.

The Greek section, B6, and the Cretan section, B5, were separated administratively and physically: Jack Smith-Hughes and his assistants operated from an 'outhouse over the road'. This illogicality, which made Crete as different from Greece in bureaucratic terms as it was from Albania or Jugoslavia, turned out to be extremely fortunate since it helped the Cretan section distance itself from the minefield of mainland politics.

A far greater divide existed between the Cretan sections of SOE and ISLD (Inter Services Liaison Department), a military branch of the Secret Intelligence Service. The Earl of Selborne, who in February 1942 replaced Dr Hugh Dalton as Minister of Economic Warfare and thus political master of SOE, later wrote: 'SOE and SIS were separated by War Cabinet decision in June 1940. In my opinion their functions are quite distinct and as SOE work inevitably comes more into the limelight (e.g. Greece and Jugoslavia), the desirability of keeping the organisations separate increases.'

In Cairo, ISLD was run by Captain Bowlby RN (known as 'the beautiful Bowlby'), Colonel Teague and Wing Commander Smith-Rose based in the GHQ complex. The two headquarters loathed each other with fanatical suspicion, but fortunately in Crete the personnel in the field co-operated amicably.

'SOE', said Ralph Stockbridge, 'was basically a bunch of adventurers while ISLD was a very mixed bag.

SOE personnel were always treated as officers and gentlemen, not as agents.' This even seemed to extend to a bizarre disparity in the field. SOE officers, who later received sovereigns in generous quantities from their cashier, Lieutenant Shread RNVR (inevitably known as 'Golden Shred' after the marmalade), sometimes had to help out their poor relations. In the early days, however, Xan Fielding landed with a wad of drachma banknotes which turned out to be worth only £16, so great was the rate of inflation.

After the battle for Crete had been lost, Monty Woodhouse and Paddy Leigh Fermor landed at Alexandria like thousands of other evacuees. A few days later they moved to Cairo where they were

'held in a kind of limbo against the possibility of further operations in Crete or Greece, but months passed without anything happening.' Woodhouse, recruited into SOE by Bill Barbrook, went into the field first. He returned to Crete in late November 1941 to take over from Jack Smith-Hughes and was replaced in turn by Tom Dunbabin less than five months later.

For Paddy Leigh Fermor, transfer to SOE brought a life of virtually enforced pleasure in Cairo while the organization sorted itself out following the summer purge. Officers without an apartment in the city lived in a mess at Heliopolis, known to some as Hangover Hall. Leigh Fermor decided to move instead into the Continental Hotel. Two years later an even better solution presented itself as a base when on leave from Crete. He and a few friends also engaged in special operations set up house in a rambling Zamalek mansion discovered by Billy Moss of the Coldstream Guards, with whom he abducted General Kreipe in the spring of 1944. The others included Billy Maclean of the Greys, David Smiley of the Blues, and Rowland Winn (later Lord St Oswald) of the 8th Hussars; and Countess Sophie Tarnowska, Moss's future wife. Tara, as the house was called after the legendary castle of the Kings of Ireland and the even more mythical home of Scarlett O'Hara, had a ballroom and soon became the centre for the best and wildest parties in Cairo when its occupants were on leave.

Motives for volunteering for special operations varied enormously. Curiosity or boredom with routine could play as large a part as a yearning for adventure. Apart from the thrill of escaping military predictability, one of the more satisfying by-products of special operations was the opportunity to break rules, often with the help of influential friends, and outrage stuffy 'dug-outs' or regulars. Xan Fielding, who was to become Paddy Leigh Fermor's great companion-in-arms, had an instinctive loathing for the institutional claustrophobia of normal army life and both had a deep-rooted passion for Greece.

Volunteers seldom forgot their initial interview, a formula of circumlocution which made its way into cinematic cliche. 'I can't tell you what you've come here for', said Colonel Guy Tamplin to one captain,

'except to say that it's very secret and it involves a good deal of danger and isolation. If on reflection you have second thoughts, nobody will think the worse of you, and you can go back to your regiment as if nothing had happened.'

In theory, as soon as an officer had been accepted, he was sent off to SOE's own training school in Palestine for a course in 'resistance warfare'. The camp, based on Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa, also trained Greeks, Jugoslavs and Albanians for infiltration into their own countries. Although the official designation of this establishment was ME 102, it became known both in conversation and in signals as 'Narkover' after J.B. Morton's
louche
public school in the Beachcomber column.* Various individuals received corresponding nicknames, such as Dr Smart-Allick and Captain Foulenough.

The engagingly eccentric commandant of Narkover was Colonel Harry Cator of the Royal Scots Greys, a relative of the Queen by marriage and a hero of the First World War.

* Examples of other SOE nicknames include Bakerstrasse for SOE headquarters in London, Jugland for Jugoslavia, and Never-Never Land for Crete.

Monty Woodhouse and Paddy Leigh Fermor were thrown straight in as uninstructed instructors, the former in charge of map-reading and the latter in charge of weapon-training — British, German and Italian models — even though his knowledge was limited to the Bren gun from Guards Depot lessons.

The young Cretans needed little guidance. Stripping Spandaus, blindfold if necessary, they showed the natural aptitude of a race proud of its relationship with firearms. They were also the most zealous students. A place on a Narkover course became highly prized. Manoussos Manoussakis, who played an important part in the Canea intelligence network, remarked that for a Cretan to be sent to ME 102

had the sort of cachet that graduating from Harvard Business School has today.

The third main member of the training staff in the spring of 1942 was Nick Hammond, whose reputation for demolition work had already been well established in the field. Hammond grew an outsize moustache and acquired the nickname of Captain Vamvakopyrites — Captain Guncotton.

One day King George of the Hellenes visited the camp to see groups of Greek commandos in training.

A big demonstration was prepared in which the climax was an attack on a blockhouse using live ammunition. A German flag was fixed to the wall, and after all the commotion and shooting was over the flag, its swastika heart shot out, was dramatically presented to the King who was most impressed by the marksmanship displayed. Only later did Paddy Leigh Fermor admit to Nick Hammond that he had shot it out himself the day before. (Perhaps the most effective demonstration of a guerrilla operation was put on by non-students, when young Jews raided the camp to strip the armoury for the benefit of the Haganah.)