Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  On his return to Athens, Paddy was told to take charge of the Aghia Varvara, a caique formerly converted into a yacht and now fitted with Lewis guns. Orders were to stand by and evacuate General Maitland Wilson and his entourage, together with Prince Peter or any other members of the Greek royal family who might need help. Prince Peter, a grandson of King George I, was an anthropologist who had made a study of Tibet, and he and Paddy had become friends in Athens.

  On 25 April, Paddy left Athens in a truck full of supplies which included a wireless set. Athens itself was a city on the edge of its nerves. Refugees from the north were bombarded with demands for the latest news: where were the Germans, when would they arrive? Panic buying had already stripped everything from the shops, and the banks were besieged with everyone desperate for news. Most of the roads going west towards Corinth and the Peloponnese were packed with army trucks, and cars and carts filled with people.

  Fewer people were heading east where the Aghia Varvara was moored at Sunium, dominated by the great temple to Poseidon. They set off just after dark in the yacht, skippered by Captain Mihali Mystos and about six crew. Their destination was Myli, on the other side of the Gulf of Nauplia, where they were to rendezvous with the General, Prince Peter, and Peter Smith-Dorrien. The constant threat of Stuka activity meant that they could move only under cover of night. In the darkness they could see ships burning in the harbours.

  They reached Myli after nightfall. Mile upon mile of army vehicles revealed a whole army in retreat. Paddy finally made contact with Smith-Dorrien, who had driven down from Athens with General Wilson and Prince Peter. They had crossed the bridge over the Corinth Canal just in time – the Germans seized it a few hours later. By now it was past midnight. With the German Stukas giving them no peace by day, they would not be able to leave till the following evening.

  As it turned out, the Aghia Varvara was not needed by Prince Peter, or by the General or his entourage. A flying boat came to collect the General at about 8.30 p.m., although all his luggage and one of his ADCs, Lieutenant Philip Scott, went on board the boat. By the time they had picked up a few more servicemen, the number of passengers had risen to fourteen. It was by now 1.30 a.m. on 27 April. Smith-Dorrien dug out some bottles of champagne he had managed to rescue, and he, Paddy and Philip Scott drank them as the Aghia Varvara weighed anchor.

  Their revised orders were to sail southward down the eastern edge of the Laconian peninsula, and help with the general retreat. The yacht reached Leonidion at dawn. It was a wild part of the coast, linked by a ravine to its village in the hills, and inhabited by the Tzakonians who spoke an ancient Doric dialect. Knowing they were in for several hours of unremitting assault from enemy planes, they unloaded the wireless set and the cases of money they were carrying, and concealed themselves among the rocks. The village of Leonidion endured a savage machine-gun attack and the little harbour was bombed. Rounds of tracer bullets put the radio set out of action, and in the early afternoon an aerial torpedo scored a direct hit on the boat. In the clear water, they could see the Aghia Varvara resting on the bottom of the sea.

  Despite the fact that the area was bombed and machine-gunned for the rest of the afternoon, there were no casualties. But Paddy was dismayed to find that he had left his Odes of Horace on board the sunken caique. Losing the little green leather-bound volume, given to him by Baron Liphart-Ratshoff eight years before in Munich, felt like losing a talisman.

  There now followed three days of profound frustration. The caique they managed to commandeer was missing a vital part; all they could find to replace it was a rowing boat, at which point the Greek crew thought it best to go home – though Captain Mystos stayed with the party, and Smith-Dorrien was grateful that he did: ‘without [his] help, I am quite convinced we should not be here today.’31

  They set off in the rowing boat just before midnight, and arrived at Kiparissi early on the morning of 29 April. Once again Smith-Dorrien and Paddy set off to the village to find a caique. The one they bought for an exorbitant sum also had engine trouble, and by the time it was repaired at Velanidion, they had been joined by eleven stranded New Zealanders, five Australians, and three Greeks determined to continue the fight from Crete.

  On the evening of 1 May they set sail again, and by the following day they were struggling in gale-force winds and a heavy swell. When the engine failed, they turned back to the island of Antikythera. Smith-Dorrien and Paddy walked to the village of Potamos, where they found a magnificent boat which had been taken at pistol-point by a Greek infantry captain. He already had about a hundred men on board, but he agreed to take their whole party – now over thirty strong – as far as Crete. There was little food or water to go round; but they managed to reach Kastelli Kissamo, on the north coast of the island, on 4 May.

  The following day, Smith-Dorrien drew up his report. ‘I should like specially to mention the excellent work done by Leigh Fermor and Scott in their respective spheres,’ he wrote, ‘and it would be difficult to imagine how we would have got on without the persuasive powers and linguistic ability of the former in obtaining both food and transport.’32

  Paddy made his way to the British Headquarters in a quarry outside Chania, which consisted of a tent containing Brigadier Brumskill and a skeleton staff. There was nothing for him to do, so he spent some idle days with Michael Forrester relaxing at Prince Peter’s villa in Galatas.

  Around mid-May, Paddy was posted to headquarters at Heraklion as a junior intelligence officer, Greek speaker and general dogsbody to Brigadier B. H. Chappel, of 14th Infantry Brigade. Heraklion HQ, sited between the town and the aerodrome to the east, was in a deep cave in a quarry, well concealed from enemy planes. Here Paddy was to meet some of the legendary figures of the war in the Mediterranean. Mike Cumberlege was the first man he had ever seen who sported a gold earring. Born amphibious, as he described himself, Cumberlege had trained in the navy and been recruited for secret operations. He was now captain of the caique Dolphin, which had been armed and refitted in Haifa for clandestine missions. Among his crew was a Greek scholar, Professor Nicholas Hammond, formerly a young don at Cambridge, an expert on Epirus and Albania. Recruited into military intelligence, Hammond now specialized in explosives.

  Cumberlege and Hammond had been working closely with another remarkable figure, John Pendlebury. Pendlebury was an archaeologist, who had been simultaneously Curator of Knossos in Crete, and Director of Excavations at Tel El Amarna in Egypt. At the outbreak of war he had joined Military Intelligence, and – with the rank of captain – he was laying the foundations of Cretan resistance, with the help of the most powerful clan chieftains of central Crete. These were Manoli Bandouvas, Petrakogeorgis, and Antonis Grigorakis, also known as Satanas. Speaking fluent Cretan, dressed in a shepherd’s cloak and armed with his swordstick, Pendlebury would stride into the mountains for days or weeks at a time. It was a delicate and difficult job, setting up chains of command and opening lines of communication among mountain men who had been feuding and rustling each other’s sheep for generations. Pendlebury won their respect and affection, and they liked the way he left his glass eye (the result of a childhood accident with a pen) prominently on his desk when he was not at home.

  Brigadier Chappel’s 14th Infantry Brigade consisted of 4,000 Australian, British and Greek troops, deployed to defend the Heraklion sector. The 3rd and 7th Greek regiments, three battalions strong but short of arms and ammunition, were concentrated in and around the west of the city. The airfield, five miles to the east, was guarded by the 2nd battalion of the Black Watch. The area in between these two positions was covered by the York and Lancaster regiment, an Australian battalion, and the 2nd battalion of Leicesters.

  For the Cretans, it was a tragedy that the battle for their island would be fought without the support of the 5th Cretan Division, which had gone to fight the Italians in November 1940 and many of whose units were still stranded on the Albanian front. Those who had tried to get back home were often frustrated by petty off
icialdom, which insisted that vessels commandeered by W Force were exclusively for the use of British and Dominion personnel.

  The German invasion, expected for weeks, finally came on the morning of 20 May. Its main objectives were the airfields of Maleme in the west, Rethymno and Heraklion. The Germans needed to secure at least one of them so that reinforcements could be flown in by Junkers 52 transport aircraft. Just after breakfast, the first waves of paratroopers and gliders were sighted just beyond Maleme and south-west of Chania. The sheer scale of the airborne invasion, the astonishing sight of thousands of paratroopers descending in wave after wave, took everyone by surprise. Despite sustaining huge casualties, the enemy succeeded in maintaining their hold on the airfield at Maleme.

  The news of the invasion at Maleme and south-west of Chania only reached Brigadier Chappel at two-thirty that afternoon, and at four there was an exceptionally heavy bombardment. An hour and a half later the alarm for a parachute attack was sounded. Paddy was stationed in the operations room, in a house only a few minutes away from their quarry-based headquarters. Here Group Captain Trumbull, armed with headphones and a cue, was moving more and more little model planes (which represented whole aircraft units) on a flat map of Crete. ‘We’ll probably be able to see them now,’ said Trumbull. He and Paddy went out on to the roof, and sure enough the sky was black and throbbing with the noise of Ju 52s. ‘Yes, here they are,’ said Trumbull calmly.33

  Pouring out of the planes, the paratroopers began their descent. The Allied troops had been ordered to aim at their feet as they came down, and many were shot before they even reached the ground. Some, dropping further inland, became entangled in olive trees and were shot or knifed there by Cretan civilians. The Germans, sticklers for the rules of engagement, were profoundly shocked to find their paratroops attacked by old men, women and children, armed with anything they could find. They had overlooked the island’s long tradition of resistance to the Turk, and in the face of such a dramatic invasion, the Cretans acted instinctively. The force landing on and around the airfield was virtually wiped out. But another battalion, dropping closer to the city walls of Heraklion, collected itself and prepared to attack the town next day. Its men were desperately thirsty, but Cretan irregulars had staked out almost all the likely water sources.

  On 21 May, the battalion of German paratroopers tasked to take the city divided into two groups. One was to attack the Chania Gate to the west, while the other was to tackle the northern gate and the seafront. The fighting round the Chania Gate was particularly intense, and among the defenders were John Pendlebury and Satanas. Any Germans who got through found themselves in fierce guerrilla combat in the narrow streets. Some managed to get as far as the quayside after dark. Nick Hammond and Mike Cumberlege sailed into Heraklion that evening on the Dolphin. When they came under fire and saw the swastika flying over the power station, they assumed the town was already in German hands. They slipped out quietly, thinking there was little more they could do in Heraklion.

  But the Germans were not yet in control. In the late afternoon, a shortage of ammunition had obliged them to fall back to the ridge they had occupied the night before. Soon after their retreat, Pendlebury decided the time had come to call the guerrilla bands – or andartes, as they were known in Greek – into action. He left Heraklion by the Chania Gate, in a car with a driver. They had not gone far when Pendlebury was seriously injured by enemy fire. At first he was brought to a house where a German doctor dressed his wounds; but the following morning he was taken outside, leaned against a wall and shot.

  Over the days that followed, Paddy said that going through Heraklion was ‘desperately sad’.34 He remembered an old man, lying dead on the ground as though he were resting. Beyond the city wall, dead bodies rotted among the flowers. Their stomachs had swollen in the warm weather, making it look as though they were on all fours. The wrecks of charred, shot-down planes scarred the olive groves. One day he walked out with some Greek soldiers, who came across three wounded Germans and shot them all. ‘We always do that,’ one of them said. ‘It’s the best thing for them.’35

  The German assaults on both Rethymno and Heraklion had been effectively contained, if not defeated; but in the west, General Kurt Student’s paratroopers had secured Maleme airfield, despite such initially heavy losses that the whole invasion had nearly been called off. With Maleme secured, Student was able to fly in the 5th Mountain Division. Major General Bernard Freyberg VC, commander of the Allied troops in Crete (known as ‘Creforce’), concluded that the battle was lost and decided to withdraw.

  On 25 May Heraklion suffered intense bombing, resulting in appalling destruction and loss of life. Yet as far as holding the sector was concerned, the Allied troops had grounds for optimism. They had captured a considerable amount of enemy supplies and felt there was every possibility of holding out till help arrived. Had they been in radio contact with Creforce Headquarters in the west, their morale might not have been so high, but they knew nothing of the disaster unfolding there.

  The order to evacuate was given on 27 May. In the western part of the island British, New Zealand and Australian troops, bitter and exhausted, began their long walk over the White Mountains to the south coast. To the east, news of the catastrophe finally came through on 28 May. As Brigadier Chappel broke the news to his officers early that morning, they could scarcely believe it.

  A squadron of the Royal Navy was going to take all Allied troops in the Heraklion sector off the island that night, leaving the Cretans to face their enemy alone. The Cretans took the news without complaint or recrimination. The andarte leader Satanas, who had fought with Pendlebury at the Chania Gate, came to see Brigadier Chappel that evening, as his staff were busy burning documents and preparing to leave. Paddy translated his words: ‘“My son,” he said, placing his hand on the Brigadier’s shoulder, “we know you are going away tonight. Never mind! You will come back when the right time comes. But leave us as many of your guns as you can, to carry on the fight till then.” Deeply moved, the Brigadier told us to hand over all the arms we could collect.’36

  The evacuation began just before midnight. Long queues of men lined up in silence along the mole, from where they were ferried by destroyers to two waiting cruisers, the Dido and the Orion. Paddy spotted one particularly diminutive soldier under a tin hat, who proved to be a woman escaping with her lover; he made no attempt to stop her. When the cruisers were loaded, the destroyers went back to pick up those who were left, including Chappel and his staff. By 2.45 a.m. on 29 May, almost three and a half thousand men had been safely embarked.

  Stepping aboard the destroyer was like stepping into another world. Paddy found himself dazzled by the crisp white uniforms, the soup and tea and sandwiches. But the illusion of being whisked away from the dirt and horror of war did not last long. One of the ships in the squadron broke down irreversibly, and it took a long time for the passengers and crew to be taken off and the ship scuttled. By then it was nearly daylight. The squadron was supposed to be out of range of German aircraft by dawn; the delay had made them sitting ducks.

  Waves of bombers attacked the squadron for six hours. The Orion received two direct hits that went through three levels of decks crowded with men. The damage was terrible: two hundred and sixty men were killed, and slightly more injured. Paddy was not in the part of the ship that was hit, and had been told to stay below. He went on deck anyway, just after a bomb had hit the front gun turret. Curious debris, including several boxing gloves and a banjo, were strewn about all over the place. There were also two dead sailors, one horribly mangled. Once out of enemy range and heading for Alexandria, a funeral service was held for the dead. The bodies were dropped into the sea, followed by what looked like a series of parcels: the remains of those who had been blown to bits.

  The evacuations of Allied personnel from Crete had been unable to round up all the servicemen on the island, and their number was increased by those who managed to escape from German POW camps. Over a thousand h
ungry, exhausted, leaderless men were wandering over the mountains, trying to survive and keep out of German hands. Their only hope was to make for the south coast, the most likely place for the navy to attempt further evacuations.

  The kindness and generosity with which the Cretans looked after Allied stragglers was remarkable, especially since they were putting their own lives at risk by doing so. And as they fed and sheltered these ragged men, passing them from one village to the next on their way south, so the networks of the future resistance movement were born, strengthened and tested. One of those evacuated at that time was a young barrister serving in the RASC, Jack Smith-Hughes. He had been taken prisoner, escaped, and while on the run he had encountered a Cretan officer. Colonel Papadakis told him that the Cretan resistance had been established and was in need of support.

  Once in Egypt, Smith-Hughes volunteered to return and help organize the resistance. He was sent back into Crete in October 1941, with a radio operator called Ralph Stockbridge from the Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD, a cover name for MI6). This was the first British mission to the Cretan resistance. Their orders were ‘to feel out the country and see who had influence’, and establish what might usefully be done.37

  Paddy spent a few days in barracks in Alexandria before moving to Cairo, where he found himself a room at the Continental Hotel. The Continental was neither as smart nor as expensive as Shepheard’s next door, but it was in the heart of the city. To those coming from a battle zone, life in wartime Cairo seemed unreal. As one observer put it, ‘You are right in the middle of the “Darling belt”. You arrive there from the material and emotional austerity of England’ (or Crete, for that matter), ‘and before you know where you are your two hundred most intimate friends are dining with you by candlelight at small tables in a garden.’38

  The small candle-lit tables might have been at the Auberge des Pyramides, one of the smartest restaurant-nightclubs in Cairo; or in the extensive grounds of the Gezira Club, the heart of British life, enclosed by its own racetrack. In the jasmine-scented garden of Groppi’s, pashas in tarbooshes and their Levantine mistresses sipped coffee and ate ices. After dinner in any number of restaurants, the nightclubs beckoned: the Kit Cat Club and the Deck Club were on boats moored at the riverside, while at Madame Badia’s one could enjoy a good band, the best belly-dancers, and a cabaret that included comic Nazis.