Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (4 page)

one suspects an almost desperate effort to conjure a virtue out of necessity — was based on the ill-founded assumption that either the Jugoslavs would stay neutral, or they would resist as fiercely and effectively as in the First World War.

Once the decision to send an expeditionary force had been taken late in the afternoon, Eden, Dill and Wavell left Athens. They paid little attention to developments in Greece for the next ten days: Eden and Dill went to Ankara pursuing the quest for an alliance, and Wavell was fully preoccupied by the problem of stretching already over-stretched resources still further. A frequent remark of his at the time was Wolfe's aphorism: 'War is an option of difficulties.' Meanwhile, De Guingand, in the guise of a journalist, toured the proposed Aliakmon line wearing a borrowed suit in a rather loud check.

On Saturday, 1 March, Bulgaria publicly joined the Tripartite Pact, and on Sunday morning the German Twelfth Army began to cross the Danube from Roumania over three pontoon bridges rapidly assembled by army engineers. Eden and Dill reached Athens a few hours later. General Heywood met them with even worse news. General Papagos had not given the orders for withdrawal to the Aliakmon line. He claimed that without transport there was not time, and that he had in any case been waiting for the response from the Jugoslavs about the security of the line's left flank.

How much Heywood was responsible for this breakdown in communications is hard to tell, but he cannot have been entirely blameless. He was not the person to provide the objective advice which Wavell so badly needed on the exhausted state of the Greek army and, above all, on Papagos's
ides
fixes:
his refusal to withdraw from the Bulgarian border, and his refusal to consider the transfer of divisions from Albania, however grave the threat from the north-east.

Over the next two days, British exasperation and injured Greek pride grew in a series of fruitless meetings, which continually returned to the question of who had said what on 22 and 23 February.

(General Heywood, in an astonishing oversight, had not kept minutes of the meeting for signature by both sides.) The Greek divisions in Eastern Macedonia were utterly exposed, yet Papagos still refused to move them back. His army possessed no transport and, he asserted, the British Military Mission knew that perfectly well. In any case he had been waiting for the British to inform him of the Jugoslav government's intentions, as he claimed had been agreed. Yet his obstinacy almost certainly owed more to a fear of abandoning Thrace to Bulgar cupidity; and without the port of Salonika, there was little hope of persuading the Jugoslavs to join the Greek army in his cherished project of a pincer attack on the Italians in Albania.

Whatever Papagos's reasons and whatever the cause of the original misunderstanding, the joint staff plan had fallen apart. A poor compromise over the Aliakmon line was reached — Eden compared their discussions to 'the haggling of an Oriental Bazaar' — mainly because the first troopships were leaving Egypt. Colonel Jasper Blunt described the scene in his diary: Our representatives sat in the drawing-room of the Legation; the secretaries came and went with telegrams; Sir Michael Palairet played host, the harrassed King, the serious face of General Papagos, the deathly pallor of the Greek Premier, the suspense as the King and his advisers conferred behind the closed doors of the Minister's study. The minutes passed and I watched the scenes as a completely unconsulted onlooker. I was a spectator with a seat in the front row of the stalls at a drama as intense as any played on the classical Greek stage with the added interest that I knew the plot, the author and the players.

Blunt had guessed the outcome from the beginning, but out of loyalty to his ambassador and out of respect for the chain of command, he had not revealed his misgivings to Wavell's staff. Palairet only discovered his strength of feeling when they bade farewell to Eden and Dill at Phaleron. Blunt's quiet prediction of a debacle shocked him deeply.

The commander designate of the British and Dominion forces, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, had already arrived in Athens. He had supposedly come incognito — a virtual impossibility for this huge, jolly general. Bald, moustached and round-faced, he had the Edwardian air of a favourite great-uncle.

Wilson and his senior officers felt that Sir Michael Palairet was over-influenced by the Greek King's Anglophilia, and that he still ignored the bleak military reality. After a fighting speech from Palairet

'full of Foreign Office optimism', Wilson was heard to say to his staff, 'Well, I don't know about that.

I've already ordered my maps of the Peloponnese.'

The harbours and beaches of the south, as he rightly surmised, would soon become their evacuation points. Yet on board the troopships leaving Alexandria, officers of the expeditionary force, made up mainly of Australian and New Zealand troops, eagerly rolled out maps to study invasion routes up through Jugoslavia towards Vienna.

They were disabused of such optimism on arrival, but not even Wilson, with all his cheerful pessimism, knew that the Joint Planning Staff at Headquarters Middle East had started work in secret on evacuation details — a precaution to which Wavell acceded with reluctance and distaste.

In Cairo, the final decision on intervention was taken when Field Marshal Smuts arrived on 7 March.

At an evening conference orchestrated by Eden, Smuts's firm line was that to pull out at such a late stage was unthinkable: although hardly reassuring in military terms, it proved conclusive on political grounds. Eden was clearly relieved to have his support, for Smuts's opinion carried great weight with Churchill.

The following night, when the reply finally arrived from the Jugoslav government — evasiveness permeated every phrase — Anthony Eden turned up with his retinue at the Commander-in-Chiefs house overlooking Gezira racecourse. Wavell and Dill were woken on his orders. They came down and, sitting side by side on the sofa in their dressing-gowns, had to listen as Eden paced up and down composing his telegram to Churchill.

Air Vice Marshal Longmore then arrived, also in answer to a summons, and saw 'the two weary soldiers, looking like a couple of teddy-bears, trying to give the Foreign Secretary's eloquence the attention it demanded. They both went quietly to sleep, and when Eden paused for comment only their regular breathing broke the silence.'

The next morning, after his early ride and swim in the pool at Gezira, Wavell spent a couple of hours at his desk. He then went into Longmore's office and laid the following verses in front of him without a word.

MOST SECRET AND VERY PERSONAL

The Jug

(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)

In Cairo where the Gypsies are,

I sing this song to my guitar.

('Only I'm not going to sing it really,' explained

Anthony kindly.

'Thank you very much indeed,' said Jacqueline.)*

In Athens, when I've met the Greek,

I'll tell you what it is I seek.

('It'll be nice to know,' said Jacqueline.)

I sent a message to the Jug, I told him not to be a mug.

I said he must be badly cracked

To think of joining Hitler's pact.

The Jug replied, 'But don't you see

How difficult it is for me.'

('It's difficult for me too,' said Jacqueline sadly.

'It doesn't get any easier further on,' said Anthony.)

I took a pencil large and new,

I wrote a telegram or two.

Then someone came to me and said

The Generals have gone to bed.

I said it loud, I said it plain,

'Then you must wake them up again.'

And I was very firm with them,

I kept them up till 2 a.m.

('Wasn't that rather unkind?' said Jacqueline.

'Not at all,' said Anthony firmly. 'We want Generals,

not dormice. But don't keep interrupting.')

* Lady Lampson, wife of the British Ambassador to Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, later Lord Killearn.

3

Secret Missions

Irregular warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean held a strong appeal for vigorous young Britons. A cynic might easily dismiss the phenomenon as a sort of adult version of
Swallows and Amazons,
messing about in boats and treating the region as an immense adventure playground. Although many of them exulted in this new life because it provided an ideal escape from peacetime routine or frustrations, the diversity of their characters should be a warning against too simple an analysis. They ranged from Philhellenic dons to well-connected thugs, with many variations in between including a handful of good regular soldiers, romantics, writers, scholar gypsies and the odd
louche
adventurer.

The vast majority belonged to SOE, Special Operations Executive, created from the amalgamation in July 1940 of Section D and MI(R). (See Appendix A.)

A process of selection, unusual in wartime, led to a preponderance of archaeologists and dons. Paddy Leigh Fermor later wrote of himself and other 'improvised cave-dwellers' that 'it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the army had realized that the Ancient tongue, however imperfectly mastered, was a short-cut to the modern: hence the sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags.'

Those recruited into special operations seem to have sensed that these war years would be the most intense of their life. 'What a lot of material for autobiographies is being provided,' a friend said to the traveller and writer Peter Fleming, who had been recruited by MI(R) shortly before war broke out. He should also have mentioned fiction. Another early member remarked that the same people kept cropping up in unlikely places round the Mediterranean: 'The whole thing was just like an Anthony Powell novel.'

Regular soldiers provided the original basis of MI(R). One of them, a sapper officer called George Young, was held at readiness in Cairo with a field company of Royal Engineers to move into Roumania to blow up the Ploesti oilfields. They were to be guided to their targets by Geoffrey Household, the author of
Rogue Male
and a more recent MI(R) recruit. Household travelled there with 'businessman' written in his passport, not author, because 'Compton Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham [both secret agents in their time] had destroyed our reputation as unworldly innocents for ever'.

The fear of forcing the Roumanians into Axis arms eventually led to the indefinite postponement of Young's mission. Soon afterwards when MI(R) in Cairo was reorganized into SOE's embryo form, Young formed a commando in the Middle East. This was eventually incorporated into Layforce, and he took part in its rearguard action in Crete described in
Officers and Gentlemen
by Evelyn Waugh, the brigade intelligence officer. In Waugh's crisis of disillusionment triggered by this retreat, Young was one of the few to retain his respect.

The most maverick enterprise of this, or perhaps any other stage of the war, was Peter Fleming's private army known as Yak Mission. Fleming, brother of Ian, traveller and author of books such as
Brazilian Adventure
and reserve officer in the Grenadier Guards, was already the veteran of one expeditionary fiasco, the Norwegian campaign. By shameless string-pulling — his father had been a great friend of Churchill — Fleming formed a party to reconnoitre Namsos by Sunderland flying-boat.

Then, when the Allied forces landed, he attached himself to General Carton de Wiart who, with 'only one eye, only one arm, and — rather more surprisingly — only one Victoria Cross', was one of the inspirations for Evelyn Waugh's character Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook.*

* The main ingredient for Ritchie-Hook in the
Men at Arms
trilogy was Brigadier St Clair Morford. There was also a dash of Admiral Sir Walter Cowan.

During the invasion scare following Dunkirk, Fleming received orders to organize stay-behind groups known as Auxiliary Units in Southern England. Then, in the autumn of 1940, when the number of Italians taken prisoner by Wavell's forces in the Middle East began to rise, Churchill had the idea of forming a 'Garibaldi Legion' from

the anti-Fascists amongst them.

Fleming recruited half a dozen friends including Norman Johnstone, a fellow Grenadier, and Mark Norman, a subaltern in the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, who 'didn't have a clue what it was about'.

Taking their batmen with them like characters out of Dornford Yates, they went off on an intensive course in explosives and close-quarter combat at the Lochailort commando-training centre in the Western Highlands.

Their codename, 'Yak Mission', was inspired by Fleming's book,
News from Tartary.
Issued with a ton of plastic explosive, £40,000 in notes and sovereigns, and Italian pocket dictionaries (since only one of them spoke Italian), they proceeded to Cairo 'with extraordinary priority'.

Failing to obtain a single volunteer from the prison camps, Yak Mission would have been disbanded had it not been for the German threat to the Balkans. Towards the end of March, Peter Fleming persuaded George Pollock, the head of SOE Cairo, to allow them to go to Jugoslavia 'to stiffen Prince Paul's resolve'. Events forced Fleming to modify the plan. Yak Mission would instead make its way to Northern Greece to train resistance groups, and Fleming managed to find room for his men and their equipment on the next troopship sailing from Alexandria. In Athens they made contact with Harold Caccia whose wife, Nancy, was the sister of Oliver Barstow, another of Fleming's guerrilla knights.

Yak Mission, 'bristling with Tommy guns and pistols', made its way north, having bought their own transport out of the war-chest. And at the end of the first week of April, on a mountainside next to the Jugoslav border, amidst breathtaking scenery, the soldier servants pitched the tents and set up the camp-beds 'as if we were on safari'. Peter Fleming could not resist sending a signal to SOE in London

— AM HOLDING MONASTIR GAP. He did not know that the Adolf Hitler Liebstandarte, the SS

Division commanded by Sepp Dietrich, was heading straight for the site of their glorious picnic.