Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (5 page)

John Pendlebury, the archaeologist, was always certain that the Germans would invade Greece and then his beloved Crete. He had not been idle since he had split up with Nick Hammond and the others after their flying-boat journey from Poole harbour. Based at first back at the Villa Ariadne which he knew so well from his time as curator of Knossos, and then in Heraklion, he compiled lists of pro-British and pro-Axis citizens. At that stage, before the Italian invasion and while the Metaxas government assiduously held to its neutrality, he had to act the part of 'the most bogus Vice-Consul in the world'. But Pendlebury, like the Cretans with whom he identified so strongly, despised the discretion needed for secret operations. He was far too famous for his work. The Cretans speculated about him, endlessly intrigued by this Englishman with the glass eye and swordstick who strode about their island.

Pendlebury's directness, sense of humour and
joie de vivre
appealed enormously to them: for a Wykehamist of that generation, he was remarkably uninhibited and he seemed to relish contradictions.

Pendlebury was a convivial loner with an innocent swagger, and the war — far more anarchic than dictatorial in his case — provided the perfect opportunity to throw himself into the role of a distinctly irregular soldier with irregular weapons.

After the Italian invasion, and with British troops welcomed on Crete by the government in Athens, Pendlebury took out his cavalry captain's uniform and became liaison officer between the British forces and the Greek military authorities. His real interest, however, was the creation of a Cretan force to replace in part the locally raised division sent to the Albanian front.

Pendlebury was quick to sense a slight, and his handling of superiors was not always diplomatic. 'My best rebuke', he wrote, 'was for using the word "bastard" in a wire to a Minister. In reply I pointed out that as it was in the code book the word was obviously meant to be used, that the Minister was old enough to know the facts of life, and that it was the only word that fitted the individual it referred to.'

Official rebuffs did not deter him. At Christmas in 1940, he described the Cretans' war-like spirit: 'I have been carried shoulder high round five towns and villages and have been blessed by two bishops and have made a number of inflammatory speeches from balconies. The spirit is amazing.' And he returned from a barnstorming tour into the White Mountains and round Mount Ida, claiming

'Anglophily is rampant!' Pendlebury had a passion for maps. He prided himself that he knew 'the island better than anyone in the world' and its mountains 'stone by stone'. Given the weapons, he had not the slightest doubt that the Cretans could defeat a German invasion virtually on their own. And that invasion would come as soon as Greece fell.

Pendlebury's friend and colleague, Nick Hammond, was offered work more in line with his expertise after a month in Alexandria with the Welch Regiment and their Sunday cocktail parties. A.W.

Lawrence, a professor of classical archaeology and the half-brother of Lawrence of Arabia, arrived from England, sent by Churchill to train Jews in Palestine for sabotage missions. Arnold Lawrence, Hammond and a gun-runner named Barnes established their school in a kibbutz outside Haifa.

Secrecy was essential since their activities constituted a clear breach of the League of Nations Mandate. One of their first pupils was Moshe Dayan who lost his eye training there. But the project did not prosper, mainly due to Churchill's eccentric choice of leader, for A.W. Lawrence proved to be almost as ardent an Arabist as his half-brother.

For his next appointment, Hammond had to move only a few miles down the road when, in October 1940, SOE Cairo's main training-centre for agents was set up. (This camp outside Haifa, later known as ME 102, was a place which he and most SOE officers came to know well over the next four years.) In the early spring of 1941, Hammond was summoned to Athens. He arrived there on 15 March, shortly before Peter Fleming's Yak Mission. Fleming, who lacked an explosives expert, tried to poach him, but with the Wehrmacht's Twelfth Army already in Bulgaria, Hammond felt it was far too late to start training stay-behind groups, and he was already working with the two SOE men inside the Legation. Bill Barbrook was a former regular officer recalled for service because of his Albanian experience, while his companion, Ian Pirie, had been in Greece since before the war, when he was recruited by Section D.

Pirie, an Old Harrovian once described as 'not unlike a grown-up Cupid in well-cut clothes', had a colourful business career behind him which apparently included ill-fated attempts to start a dog cemetery and then a racecourse near Athens. He evidently enjoyed life in the capital with his girl-friend Nicki Demertzi, the devastating blonde at the Argentina night-club, whom he believed to be related to the former prime minister of that name.*

Pirie's man-of-the-world act could on occasions be exasperating. One of his more famous remarks concerned the Greek royal family: 'How on earth can one take a dynasty seriously which isn't as old as one's wine merchant?' A number of his undercover operations strongly suggested a compulsive levity.

Apparently in all seriousness, he proposed to Harold Caccia, the First Secretary, that to boost morale in the wake of a German take-over, they should import musical lavatory-roll holders which played the Greek national anthem when the paper was pulled.

* The Argentina's other great attraction was a dancer called La Bella Asmaro who later fell for Captain Mark Chapman-Walker of the Rifle Brigade, General Jumbo Wilson's good-looking ADC.

One operation, which was slightly more professional at least in theory, targeted a German wireless transmitter operated from a private apartment. It broadcast messages to Berlin at regular times, so Pirie arranged to create a sudden surge of the electric current supplied to the building, hoping this would make the circuits explode. Instead, the escapade produced an explosion of protests from other occupants, including the American Minister and a dentist who was drilling a patient's tooth at the time.

The Germans merely switched to a generator and carried on.

Pirie's main mission to create a resistance network in advance was unsuccessful, although this may not have been entirely his fault. With unusual frankness, since diplomats generally preferred to remain ignorant of SOE activities, he warned Harold Caccia, a contemporary from Trinity College, Oxford, about his secret work. The Metaxas government was strongly opposed to any covert activity which might upset the Germans, so Pirie felt he could not attempt to recruit anybody associated with the regime — they would denounce him to the agents of the Minister of National Security, Maniadakis. This left only the opposition groups, mainly of the non-Communist left — strict Communist Party members still had to regard Nazi Germany as the ally of 'socialism's motherland'.*

As British military assistance to Greece increased slowly in the winter of 1940 and then greatly in the early spring of 1941, so too did the involvement of all the rival intelligence organizations. David Hunt, the archaeology don attached to the Welch Regiment in Alexandria, had arrived in Athens in November 1940, accompanied by Geoffrey Household, now in a new role of field security officer.

They joined the RAF intelligence staff headed by Wing Commander Viscount Forbes, who had been Air Attache in the Bucharest Legation at the time of Household's fruitless wait for George Young's sappers.

* As an early example of the sort of political contradictions in which SOE would become involved in the region, Pirie, while recruiting left-wingers in Athens, was also sending supplies to General Mihailovic in Serbia in anticipation of Prince Paul succumbing to pressure from Hitler to sign the Tripartite Pact.

While Household liaised with Greek security officers, Hunt, as a staff captain intelligence, processed the signals intercepts, both Ultra and the lower-grade but more immediate material. Conventional military intelligence and the under-cover organizations (mainly in the form of the assistant military attaches dotted around in Balkan capitals) were seldom the best of friends. The rivalries then became further exacerbated, because General Wilson, dissatisfied with Stanley Casson of the British Military Mission, brought in Colonel Quilliam from GHQ Middle East as his own intelligence chief. When the Jugoslav army collapsed without warning in April, accusations of incompetence flew back and forth between departments with great vehemence.

4

The Double Invasion

In a vain attempt at security, the men of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force sent to Greece were not told their destination in advance. They had been issued with pith helmets, marched on to troopships, and then suffered four days of storms. 'Half the time the propellers were out of the water', they used the pith helmets as 'spew-baskets', and arrived 'sick as dogs'.

The combative optimism of those officers who rolled out maps to study invasion routes up to Austria fared little better. At the harbour of Piraeus, they found the German Military Attache's staff on the quayside making detailed notes of their strength and equipment.* In Athens, the swastika flag flew opposite the British headquarters on the side of Mount Lycabettus. And commanding officers summoned to a briefing at the Acropole Palace Hotel heard that the whole plan of defence of the Aliakmon line had been compromised.

Yet there was little anger as units camped in the attractive hillside pinewoods ringing the north of Athens. The British and Dominion troops liked and admired the Greeks for their resistance to the Italian invasion, and in any case, CMFUs (Complete Military Fuck-Ups) were regarded as par for the course. A traditional Army fatalism took over: 'We're here, because we're here, because we're here'

ran the song. Some of the Australian and New Zealand troops, on the other hand, began to wonder why they made up the majority of a doomed expeditionary force sent to honour a British obligation.

* The German Military Attach6 was apparently half Scottish by birth. His English was good enough to fool some unwary officers who chatted to him quite freely.

Wavell, once the disastrous misunderstanding over the Aliakmon line had come to light, had approached the Australian corps commander, Lieutenant General Thomas Blarney, and the New Zealand commander, Major General Bernard Freyberg. Although an embarrassing refusal was unlikely, Wavell and the Chiefs of Staff in London were greatly relieved when they and their prime ministers separately accepted the 'additional risks involved'. But the two Dominion governments later felt they had not been fully informed, and both Blarney and Freyberg were to be criticized for not having passed on their private doubts at the time.

Jumbo Wilson's command in Greece, known as W Force, consisted of the New Zealand Division on the right of the Aliakmon line holding the Servia Pass near Mount Olympus, the British 1st Armoured Brigade pushed forward to the north and north-east as a screen, and the 6th Australian Division on the left. At the last moment, Wavell retained the 7th Australian Division and the Polish Independent Brigade in North Africa when the strength of Rommel's attack along the coast made itself felt. This might be described as a fortunate piece of bad timing, since these formations would have made little difference to the outcome in Greece, and their absence reduced the scale of the evacuation later.

Although cold in the mountains, the days before the battle began are remembered as idyllic. The beauty of the weather, the scenery and the wild flowers left almost as deep an impression as the warmth of the welcome in the villages. One officer wrote: 'I felt more like a bridegroom than a soldier with my truck decorated with sprigs of peach blossom and my buttonhole with violets.' While British officers tried to communicate with their Greek counterparts in ancient Greek ill-remembered from the schoolroom, their soldiers, surmounting the language barrier in their own inimitable fashion, established a thriving market to supplement rations, with empty petrol cans fetching four eggs apiece.

Lamb and wine for the officers' mess were bought locally, while delicacies had to be fetched from Salonika. On Sundays, Church Parade would be held in the village church at the invitation of the priest.

On 2 April, Anthony Eden and General Sir John Dill, on their way to confer with the Jugoslav government on the border, turned up at the officers' mess of the Northumberland Hussars unannounced. Dick Hobson, the 12th Lancer brigade major who accompanied the visitors, later wrote:

'They were on the way to parley with the Jugoslavs, who were wavering as to which side to back. Mr.

Eden had a special letter for the Duke [of Northumberland], then a captain in the regiment. (It transpired that this important missive was in fact his huntsman's report on the doings of the Percy Hounds!) At that time the cherry and other fruit trees on the plain had all been sprayed with copper sulphate and the trunks were all green. I remarked "I'm longing to see the blossom come out on the tops of those trees; what a sight that will be." Eden and Dill exchanged glances and said "I fear you won't be here long enough for that." '

On 25 March, Prince Paul, the Regent of Jugoslavia, had signed the Tripartite Pact in Vienna, after intense pressure from Hitler who wanted to use the Jugoslav railway system in his invasion of Greece.

Two days later a
coup d'&at
in Belgrade deposed him. Popular demonstrations of defiance followed in which a crowd insulted the German Ambassador, spitting and thumping on his car.

The news of this spectacular rebuff arrived in Berlin during the visit of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka. Hitler, 'gasping for revenge' in the words of his official interpreter, gave immediate orders for invasion. Ribbentrop was called out from his meeting with Matsuoka — he had just suggested that the Japanese take Singapore from the British — and General Haider was immediately summoned to the Chancellery. The German General Staff, the OKH, stood by to work through the night drafting operational orders on the basis of a planning exercise carried out by Haider the previous October.