Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (41 page)

Since caution and reticence were alien to the Cretan character, good security did not come naturally to many. Some, however, displayed remarkable discretion. And the women were often outstanding. A number played a dangerous double game, working as interpreters or secretaries for the Germans and all the time passing on to the resistance details of those denounced by traitors. Women left at home showed no less resourcefulness. Wives and sisters, with an inspired presence of mind, often managed to conceal incriminating papers during a German search.

While the battle against the paratroopers had shown the true degree of Cretan courage, their warlike style had an engaging element of theatre. Old men, unflinching under fire, fiddled with their ancient

'gra' muskets in the tradition of the Cretan joke: 'Stand still Turk while I reload.' It also had a roguish quality. In Crete the outlaw had a historic nobility, rather as the
contrabandista
in Andalucia was seen as a heroic knight-errant figure ready to slay a local tyrant. Even sheep-stealing had acquired a patriotic tinge since that was the way the resistance fighters against the Turks had survived. They were called the klephts: a name synonymous with robber. And Theodore Stephanides recorded how he had met a Cretan in the First World War who proudly put down his profession as brigand. When asked what the dividing line was between thief and brigand, the man had replied that a thief finding a wallet full of money on the ground would take it. A brigand would first return it to the owner, then take it from him face to face.

The Cretan senses of honour and justice were firmly interwoven. Those who offended village society found themselves effectively banished. Such outcasts were the ones most likely to become traitors, a tiny minority. The Germans offered them their liberty on condition that they infiltrated communities suspected of aiding the British. They would pretend to have fled a German round-up in their own neighbourhood and, Cretan generosity being what it was, they would be taken in and fed. The only risk arose when someone who knew them of old passed through the area.

Almost all the British liaison officers sent to Crete adapted themselves to this strange existence with enthusiasm. When they first arrived, the idea of enemy-occupied territory conjured up visions of German sentries every few hundred yards. Yet most of Crete, especially its mountainous regions, saw little of the occupying power in the early days. German troops were reluctant to venture into the mountain ranges, and moved only in daylight.

The two principal dangers in the hills were either betrayal or bumping into a German patrol quite by chance. A sudden dawn cordon and search was seldom a threat since, although the British often had an evening meal with friends in a village, they would always spend the night well outside. And on most occasions news of troop movements would be brought by a boy running from the next village to warn them.

After living in the mountains almost as if the Germans did not exist, to enter a town in disguise and pass among the enemy quite naturally produced a curious sensation. The first time was always the worst. 'Your knees began knocking as soon as you met your first German,' said Stephen Verney, who was based in Canea from August 1944. 'You assumed he knew immediately that you were an English officer.' On one occasion, Tom Dunbabin had to brush past a German officer he recognized, an archaeologist like himself from prewar days. The German looked straight at him, but Dunbabin's disguise proved sufficient protection in such an improbable encounter.

A narrow escape, whether from a patrol in the countryside or from accidental discovery in a town, produced a surge of fearful excitement later followed by what Paddy Leigh Fermor described as 'a sort of post-coitum-triste feeling'.

British officers with the Cretan resistance have left an impression of a rather dashing and eccentric amateurism — what might be expected from a mixture of romantics and archaeologists. Yet in spite of the occasional unmilitary image in intelligence reports, such as 'mines cylindrically the size of a jeroboam of champagne', the information collected and collated was most impressive in its detail. It covered: telephone systems; the state of every gun position, whether machine-gun nest, flak battery or heavy coastal artillery; satellite airfields; military roads; and the grid reference and defence details of each garrison and guard post with their strengths and armaments. Every aircraft in and out of the main airfields was logged with its direction of departure. Every ship or caique, loading and unloading in the harbours of Heraklion, Rethymno and Canea, was noted with its cargo. Landing beaches and dropping zones were reconnoitred.

Most of the credit, of course, must go to the Cretans who assembled so much of this information for the Allied cause knowing it was of little immediate use to themselves. Almost from the beginning their information networks, especially those in the main towns of the north coast, worked ceaselessly at great risk. Often the information would take a long time to filter in through the arteries — the work usually had to be carried out and delivered on foot — but the bank of intelligence built up comprised the most comprehensive survey of enemy dispositions and communications in any part of Europe. If Allied Forces Headquarters had decided to invade Crete rather than Sicily in 1943, they could not have had a better basis for planning, nor a more willing resistance organization to attack and disrupt the German communication system behind the lines. The main danger on Crete was of premature attacks caused by overeagerness.

In theory, intelligence work was the responsibility not of SOE, but of ISLD, and in 1943 Ralph Stockbridge and another officer returned to help with this task and with the running of the networks.

SOE field officers had more than enough to do already. They had to travel constantly from village to village to develop their contacts and help the preparation of resistance groups while persuading them not to act on sudden impulse, a very difficult balance to achieve. They also had to organize the evacuation of those identified by the Germans, or candidates for training at 'Narkover'. Lists of their nominees were signalled back to Cairo well in advance of each trip by motor launch.

Parachute drops were time-consuming and often frustrating, both in preparation and waiting. To attract attention to one's movements could be disastrous. Half the population of the valley, perhaps tipped off by the cousin of one member of the group, would assemble for the spectacle or the pickings.

Brushwood to make the signal fires had to be gathered with great discretion, otherwise local shepherds might light their own fires to see what came drifting down for them.

On several occasions, officers had to hang around at some bleak spot in the mountains for anything up to sixteen consecutive nights. And once the drop was made successfully, the collection of canisters and parachutes before German search parties reached the scene often become a nightmare, especially if shepherds made off with several containers. Such appropriations could be dangerous. Xan Fielding came across one group smashing a tin containing an anti-personnel grenade: they thought they were about to feast on pineapple chunks.

The yellow silk parachutes were also in great demand. SOE personnel and their Cretan helpers used them as sleeping bags, or as a commodity for barter. By the end of the war when almost half the women of the central massifs must have had yellow silk underwear, courtesy of the British government, parachute drops had lost their novelty. But in 1942, when Rommel's advance on Egypt threatened the whole of the Middle East, they had a semi-miraculous quality.

23

The Peak of German Power

In the late spring of 1942, Cretan airfields became important staging posts for reinforcing the Afrika Korps' advance on the Nile Delta. Three teams from the Special Boat Squadron and one from the Special Air Service were sent to the island in an attempt to disrupt this traffic.

Tom Dunbabin met the SBS advance party on 23 May and provided guides. The SAS seaborne group included four members of the Free French squadron under Commandant Berge, a very tough Gascon, with Captain the Earl Jellicoe as British liaison officer and Lieutenant Petrakis, a Cretan, from the Royal Hellenic Army. The SAS had allocated itself the prize target of Heraklion aerodrome while the three SBS teams planned to attack the airfields at Maleme, Kastelli Pediados and Tymbaki.

David Sutherland of the Black Watch, who led the Tymbaki team, was exasperated to find on arrival that the airfield had been temporarily abandoned. Tymbaki on the south coast was the most vulnerable to air raids from Egypt. The Maleme group met with a different sort of frustration. Their target, with its recently installed electrified fences, was too strongly guarded to penetrate.

Kastelli Pediados airfield on the other hand offered a textbook sabotage operation. Five aircraft together with nearly 200 tons of aviation fuel and other stores were destroyed on 9 June with delayed action bombs.

The Heraklion operation ran into difficulties at the start and at the end. Landing in dinghies from the Greek submarine
Triton
then crossing the terrain to the target took much longer than expected. They arrived too late on 12 June to mount an effective operation, but the delay proved an unexpected blessing: many aircraft had been away on a night raid. The attack took place the next night, 13 June.

Berge's group, having cut their way through the wire, managed to fix explosive charges to twenty Junkers 88 bombers, most of which were severely damaged or destroyed. In the confusion, the group got away and set off across the island towards the south coast, jubilant at their success.

Next day, the Germans executed fifty Cretan hostages including Tito Georgiadis (a former Governor-General), a 70-year-old priest, and a number of Jews still held in prison. The initial euphoria aroused by the raids rapidly turned to anger, some of it directed against the British even though Cretan groups never ceased to demand arms to attack the Germans. Morale, as one might expect under the occupation, could be very mercurial.

The French SAS group was horrified when Lieutenant Petrakis brought back news of the reprisals from a foraging expedition to a nearby village. At one point near the end of the march to the south coast, Jellicoe and Petrakis left the four Frenchmen to cook and rest while they went on to make arrangements for the evacuation. On returning to collect them, Jellicoe learned that a Cretan had betrayed their hiding place to the nearest German garrison. One French chasseur had been killed, and Berge and the two others captured when their ammunition ran out. The three Frenchmen apparently escaped execution because Berge convinced their captors that if they were shot, German officers held prisoner in Cairo would share a similar fate. Berge ended up in Colditz Castle with David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, captured in the desert.

The attacks on Kastelli Pediados and Heraklion accounted for twenty-six aircraft, a number of vehicles and considerable quantities of stores. Altogether ten Germans died as a result of these raids.

They did not, as one account claims, cause 'the deaths of over 100 enemy soldiers'. The survivors of the raiding force left from the beach near Trypiti on the caique
Porcupine,
together with Satanas, seriously ill and soon to die of cancer in Alexandria, and other Cretan evacuees. They reached Mersa Matruh only just in time. A few hours later the town fell to Rommel's advance.

The
Porcupine,
on its outward journey, had brought Paddy Leigh Fermor for his first clandestine tour of duty. On that evening of 23 June, he had arrived with his wireless operator, Sergeant Matthew White, to a scene of dismay. German troops were closing in on the area, having just lost four men in clashes near Vassilika Anoyia, and there had not been enough room on the caique for the two other kapitans, Bandouvas and Petrakageorgis, waiting on the beach with their families. News of the retreat in Egypt, which threatened to sever the sea link completely, did not improve their mood.

This was the most difficult time for all British officers in Crete. Xan Fielding, whose wireless set was broken, had no contact with Cairo and did not know whether the British defence of the Nile Delta had collapsed. For all he knew Alexandria might have fallen to the Afrika Korps. 'To be out of wireless communication, as I had been for the last fortnight and more,' he later wrote, 'always produced a sense of panic and loss, as though God had ceased to exist. For the invisible and distant Headquarters which were responsible for my fate had assumed in my eyes a quasi-divine power.'

Even those with a set that worked managed to extract little information from headquarters. This was the time of the 'Great Flap' in Cairo, which reached its crescendo on 'Ash Wednesday', when the city was overcast by the smoke from bonfires of documents. All secret organizations had been evacuated, and the submarine base moved to Beirut. As a result all the intelligence gathered on Crete about the concentration of troop-carriers ferrying reinforcements to Rommel was never received.

To make matters worse, mischievous rumours that the British liaison officers on Crete were about to flee or even surrender to the Germans caused great confusion and alarm amongst the resistance groups and outrage amongst the officers themselves when they heard.

The Germans, perhaps guessing at the decline of morale in resistance circles, stepped up offensive sweeps in the Heraklion area. On 9 July Petrakageorgis's group, attacked near Temeneli, managed to kill seven of the enemy. A more insidious, and therefore more alarming development, was the German attempt to recruit more traitors. Six, most of whom were German-appointed mayors, had been assassinated in May by Cretan loyalists, and an attempt was made on Polioudakis, the hated police chief in Heraklion.

The officer in charge of 'counter-espionage' at this time was called Hartmann. Levantine by blood, Hartmann had been adopted by a German family in Salonika and, with the rise of Nazism, had tried to become more German than the Germans. His superiors clearly regarded him as ideal for such an unpleasant job. Hartmann first used amnestied criminals as spies, then in the summer of 1942 he managed to recruit a number of the Tsouliadakis clan in Kroussonas by exploiting a family feud and an inter-village feud. The Tsouliadakis clan, to whom one of the assassinated mayors had belonged, loathed the young relatives of Satanas as well as the strongly pro-British inhabitants of the rival town of Anoyia.