by Wes Davis
The most troubling difficulty they encountered was with the engine on George’s caïque, which had come from a Leyland truck and still growled as if it were hauling freight up a mountain road. The racket made the boat a liability when it came to covert operations. But Pendlebury soon came up with a solution. He told the Old Krone to collect metal scouring pads from wherever he could find them, and when he had gathered enough, Pendlebury packed them into an empty oil drum. He then piped the engine’s exhaust through the improvised device, turning it into an effective muffler. “It worked quite well,” the corporal thought, “except that it ‘sooted up’ easily and every now and then it blew a pan-scrubber out of the pipe.”
One thing Captain Pendlebury could not improvise was a way to arm the Cretan bands he had recruited. Bandouvas and the others had been forced to relinquish their weapons in the wake of the Venizelist rebellion in 1935. Pendlebury knew they would soon face a very well-armed foe. Again and again he put in requests to Middle East Command in Cairo asking for as many as ten thousand rifles. He had still received no reply.
Pendlebury’s confidence in the Cretans themselves, however, remained high. When he read that Benito Mussolini had been heard complaining about the savage ferocity of Cretan troops who were mobilized against the Italians on the Albanian front, he had to laugh. In the Christmas letter he sent home to Hilda he ventured that the Cretan fighters the Italians had met with so far were “nothing to the savages that can be sent.”
EARLY IN THE new year Pendlebury took part in an unsuccessful commando raid on the island of Kasos to the northeast of Crete. That the naval commander in charge of the operation brought along Italian maps no one involved could read was only one of the slipups that ensured the mission’s failure. Pendlebury’s assistant found himself mixed up in a similar fiasco on Kastellórizon late in February. As a result of the two failures, the commando unit to which the corporal was still attached was sent back to Cairo in March. The young commando was reluctant to leave. “The Uncrowned King of Crete,” as he thought of Pendlebury, “proved that, soldier or not, he was a leader, and real leaders are rare, especially among soldiers.” On March 7 Pendlebury wrote a letter to Hilda reporting that all was well, for the moment. “At present we seem as safe as you, though by the time this gets to you we may not be so!” In a cable sent ten days later he sounded a more ominous note. “Love,” the message concluded, “and adieu.”
NEAR THE END of March 1941, Pendlebury struck out on foot for the eastern end of the island, coincidentally retracing the route of a trek he had made more than a decade earlier. This time, instead of surveying the ruins of the island’s Minoan past, as he had done on that occasion, he inspected observation posts and set up communications networks that would one day be used to relay information about enemy movements. From Heraklion he headed east along the coast to Áyios Nikólaos; then, turning south, he climbed up to the hill town of Kritsa and continued over the mountains to the southeast, making for the port town of Ierápetra on the southern coast. From there he traveled north across the narrowest part of the island to Kavousi, which looked down on the beautiful blue water of the Bay of Mirabello. Above the town were the ruins of an Iron Age stronghold where the ancient Cretans had once fled to escape raiders from the sea. It might make a good radio outpost, he noted before continuing east along the north coast to Sitea, at the island’s eastern tip. From Sitea he looped south and west back through Ierápetra and continued westward along the south coast, as far as Tsoutsouros, where there was a beach that could be used for landings. From there it was a strenuous climb over the mountains to return to Heraklion. Though Pendlebury had no way of knowing, it was a journey that ranged across the same territory Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss would disappear into some three years later.
Everywhere along the route Pendlebury met Cretans who were determined to fight for the freedom of the island—“Keen as mustard,” he thought. Nevertheless he was discouraged by much of what he saw. In his notebook he observed that the beaches were patrolled by a makeshift group of policemen, youths, and older former soldiers. And the ex-soldiers were mostly aging veterans of Crete’s struggle to drive out the Turks. At the very least this ragtag defense force would have to be supplied with arms. If weapons were stockpiled at the police stations, Pendlebury believed, they could be distributed when the time came. “May be against rules of war but otherwise there will be a massacre, since men, women and children will fight without arms.”
While Pendlebury was still making these rounds, news came that Germany had invaded Greece on April 6. He rushed back to Heraklion. On April 9 German tanks captured Thessaloníki, and the British soon pulled back to the Thermopylae Line, a defensive position stretched along the line where the Greeks had fought the Persians in 480 BC. Newspapers reported on the eighteenth that the Greek prime minister, Alexandros Koryzis, had died of heart failure, but everyone suspected suicide. (It came out later that he had in fact shot himself.) Two days later the commander in chief in the Middle East gave the order to evacuate British forces from the mainland. On the twenty-third the Greek government, along with King George II and the royal family, fled Athens for Crete.
Already German dive-bombers were staging daily attacks against the island’s harbors. Suda Bay near Chania was “under more or less perpetual air attack during daylight hours.” On the twenty-fourth two tankers were hit near the mouth of the bay; one was still burning a week later. Entering the harbor under these conditions was so terrifying that men being landed by troop transports ferrying them from the mainland were said to have leaped overboard and attempted to swim ashore rather than brave the ferocious attacks leveled against the ships. Corpses floating in the water may have dissuaded some from taking this approach.
ON MAY 14 Nick Hammond found his way to Pendlebury’s office in Heraklion. Since leaving London along with his friend almost a year earlier, Hammond had been riding a wartime whirlwind. His original mission was to enter Albania through Greece and help organize resistance against the Italian occupation. But when the Sunderland flying boat he and Pendlebury traveled aboard touched down in Athens, Nick—who lacked even the feeble cover Pendlebury’s bogus vice-consulship provided—was refused entry into the country. He spent a dispiriting month in Alexandria, attached to a regular-army regiment whose most hazardous engagements at the time involved a string of cocktail parties. Soon he moved on to Haifa, where he helped T. E. Lawrence’s younger brother Arnold Lawrence set up a covert training camp for Jewish guerrillas. One of his students was a twenty-five-year-old named Moshe Dayan. By October 1940 Hammond was training covert agents at a nearby camp. His specialty was demolitions, which earned him the nickname “Captain Guncotton.”
The organization that employed Hammond, the Special Operations Executive, “SOE” for short, had been formed earlier that summer. Combining a number of earlier intelligence units, SOE was charged with conducting espionage and sabotage operations in occupied Europe. Some referred to the group as “Churchill’s Secret Army,” because SOE worked under a direct injunction from the prime minister to “set Europe ablaze.” In the coming years the unit would play a crucial role in the Greek Resistance.
When the situation in Greece began to fall apart that spring, Hammond rushed to Athens. There was no time left to organize a full-scale resistance network, but with the German army advancing down the Greek peninsula throughout the month of April, he busied himself blowing up equipment and facilities that might prove beneficial to the enemy war effort—creating what a fellow intelligence agent called “havoc of a spectacular and enjoyable kind.” On the twenty-sixth he managed to destroy a warehouse full of cotton at Haliartus, a spot northwest of Athens where the armies of Sparta and Thebes had once tangled. In Athens the next morning, just after daybreak, Hammond gathered his remaining stock of explosives and escaped to the Peloponnese aboard a vessel sailing from the yacht harbor. From there he intended to make his way to Crete. Athens fell that same day.
After months of working in secrecy
, Pendlebury was eager to show Hammond the highlights of the resistance network he had prepared. He introduced his old friend to a handful of his andartes, as Greek guerrilla fighters were termed. Hammond was especially struck by one “bald-headed giant with a ferocious moustache and a large family of sons.” If this man was typical of Pendlebury’s allies, the Germans were in for a fight. “He breathed blood and slaughter and garlic in the best Cretan style,” Hammond thought.
Hammond’s arrival gave Pendlebury a chance to solicit advice about demolitions. He had already made arrangements for destroying the telegraph office and planned to do the same at the power station. Key roads and bridges would have to be demolished. Pendlebury drove Hammond into the mountains along the main road linking the north and south coasts, to show him where hairpin turns and narrow gorges created vulnerabilities. “He had already driven some bore-holes for camouflet charges,” Hammond observed, “and he had trained men in the neighbouring villages.”
There was also some concern that the Germans might land aircraft on the Nidha plateau, a great alpine plain that sat nearly five thousand feet high in the Ida range. Pendlebury knew the area well. He had spent a night there in 1932 while on an expedition to the summit of Mount Ida that included a stop at the Idaean Cave, where Zeus was said to have been raised. Ringed by limestone crags that hid it entirely from the lowlands below, the plateau would make a nearly impregnable stronghold for any force that occupied it with sufficient numbers and supplies. It was a spot writer Lawrence Durrell would later visit; it seemed to him “like the roof of the world.” Pendlebury had his men strew massive boulders across flat stretches where an airplane might be able to land.
Hammond had his own plans under way too. Since arriving in Crete, he had been teamed up with another SOE operative named Mike Cumberlege, a bright, well-informed man who wore a gold earring in one ear. When Paddy Leigh Fermor met him later, he thought him “an amazing buccaneerish figure.” Cumberlege skippered the HMS Dolphin, a caïque that had been refit in Haifa with a forty-millimeter “pom-pom” cannon and two twenty-millimeter antiaircraft guns. Middle East Command had sent Hammond on a mission aboard the Dolphin to blow up the Corinth Canal, and he took an immediate liking to Cumberlege. When the Dolphin sailed from Chania for Heraklion, Hammond was on board. Now the two were plotting further raids in the nearby Dodecanese islands. Not long after Hammond introduced Cumberlege to Pendlebury, the three men hatched a plan to attack the Italian garrison on Kasos, where Pendlebury had watched the commando raid fall apart earlier in the year. They hoped to launch the mission on May 19, but the navy unexpectedly sent the Dolphin to Ierápetra, on the south coast, where an operation was under way to salvage munitions from a sunken transport vessel. Kasos would have to wait until the twentieth. “It was going to be a terrific party,” Cumberlege thought.
Around dusk on the evening of May 18, Pendlebury went down to Heraklion harbor and climbed aboard the Dolphin. He wanted to get in some practice on the ship’s machine gun before dinner. When the usual evening air raid came, Pendlebury opened fire on the low-flying Stukas from the deck of the little ship. Although he failed to bring one down, the gesture impressed a party of Greeks who were watching the fireworks while waiting to gather fish that would be blasted to the surface by the German bombs. That evening Pendlebury took the crew of the Dolphin to dinner at the officers’ club near the harbor. They drank wine and ate fish provided by the Stukas. His mood was buoyant. “Pendlebury was confident,” Hammond felt, “that if Crete were lost his Cretans could be depended upon to carry on guerrilla warfare in the hills.”
ON THE MORNING of the twentieth, the attack Pendlebury had been waiting for came at last. And it was bigger than he could possibly have imagined. Starting near the Maleme airfield in the west, German paratroopers began to plummet from the sky in extraordinary numbers, their color-coded parachutes blossoming across the horizon, with still more troops and matériel landing by glider. What Pendlebury, his Cretans, and the Allied forces on the island now faced was the first full-scale airborne invasion in history.
HIGH ON THE eastern slopes of the White Mountains, still far from the fighting, a young Cretan shepherd named George Psychoundakis was standing watch over his family’s meager flock when he heard the thrum of aircraft engines in the distance. He wondered whether the Germans were making another of the bombing runs that had come almost daily in the last weeks.
At twenty-one, Psychoundakis was the eldest of four children, but he might easily have been mistaken for a boy—his youthfulness a matter of character as much as appearance. He had a small, slender build and he moved over the craggy terrain as nimbly as a sprite. His delicate face, shadowed by coal black hair and the beginnings of a mustache, looked sad, until he grew animated in conversation, when it sparkled with equal parts intelligence and mischief.
He lived just down the hill in Asi Gonia, a mountain village hemmed in on three sides by soaring outcrops of the Lefka range. His family occupied a dirt-floored one-room house near the village spring; the place where water was drawn and clothes were washed, it amounted to the town center. Unusually for a student in a remote village school, he had learned to read, and he borrowed what books he could from the village doctor and the priest.
Word soon reached Asi Gonia that the planes Psychoundakis had heard that morning were not just bombers but transports. German parachutists were dropping around Chania in the west. Men from the village hurried to dig up weapons buried years earlier, and Psychoundakis left his sheep and followed them to a nearby village where a larger contingent was forming. From there they could see the German planes streaming overhead, coming and going, he thought, “like bees in a bee-garden, each time bringing more bombs and more troops.”
When the men reached the main road that ran along the north coast from Chania to Rethymnon, young Psychoundakis asked anyone traveling from the west for news about the fighting. It stirred him to hear the invariable reply—“We’ve eaten them up!”
But when he looked around at the Greek fighters who had assembled in the village, it was hard to imagine them fending off airplanes and soldiers armed with machine guns. Few of them were armed, and those who were carried weapons that might have come from a museum. “For the villagers had kept them hidden for many years in holes and caves,” he knew, “and now, all eaten up with rust, they were really almost archaeological specimens.” On one occasion when the men fired on a damaged German plane that had landed nearby, he watched one of them struggling with an old Martini rifle. Each time the man fired, he had to open the breech and force the spent casing out with a ramrod. An old saying from his grandfather’s day flashed through Psychoundakis’s mind—“Stand still, Turk, while I re-load.”
ALL OVER THE island civilians turned out bearing whatever weapons they could lay their hands on. One New Zealand soldier noticed a Greek bearing “a shot-gun with a serrated edge bread knife tied on like a bayonet.” Most were older men and boys, because the men of fighting age had joined the Cretan Division of the Greek army and been sent to fight on the mainland. Their absence gave the fighting a bitter edge. “You cuckolds!” Psychoundakis and his friends yelled at the German planes overhead. “If only we had our aeroplanes and our troops here. If only the Division were here.”
In at least one village, the women took to the fields carrying sticks and the sickles ordinarily used to harvest their crops. They would not have known that the goddess figures archaeologist Arthur Evans had discovered at Knossos carried the same primitive weapon. Elsewhere armed women in Greek uniforms were reportedly captured by the Germans. At Rethymnon, where the police force was equipped with rifles, the invaders encountered fierce resistance, just as Pendlebury had predicted.
A young Greek surgeon who had recently made his way home from the Albanian front, where the Cretan Division was still tied up, witnessed the attack on the morning of May 20 from his village twenty-five miles south of Chania. His sixty-year-old father walked into the family garden and dug up a Mannlicher rifle that had be
en buried there for nearly a decade. “He too wanted to go and fight,” the surgeon saw. “It was only when I told him that I too had to enlist, even without a weapon, that he gave it to me. Clutching both my doctor’s kit and the gun in one hand, I put 20–25 bullets in my jacket pocket. I was not even sure they were unused.” As the surgeon made his way toward the fighting, he fell in with a group of some forty others, and together they surrounded a party of paratroopers and wiped them out. When the shooting stopped, the young man quickly resumed his role as a surgeon. He had the wounded from both sides taken to a schoolhouse nearby, where he and another pair of doctors gave them what medical care they could manage under the circumstances. “Unfortunately I didn’t have many bandages on hand,” he recalled later. “The first German I bandaged, I myself had shot.”
PADDY LEIGH FERMOR suffered his first wound on Crete before the fighting even began. Near the end of October, the previous autumn, Middle East Command had received orders from London to organize a military mission to Greece. The prime minister wanted to know what was going on there, and he recommended sending officers from Cairo to observe the action firsthand. As Churchill’s cable put it, “Let them go and see the fighting and give us some close-up information about the relative merits of the two armies. I expect to have a good wire every day or so, telling us exactly what is happening, so far as the Greeks will allow it.”
Soon after the telegram arrived, Leigh Fermor found himself among the handpicked group of officers who sailed from Alexandria for Athens on the HMS Ajax. When the cruiser made a stop at Suda Bay, on the northwest coast of Crete, he and a companion slipped ashore for the evening. After drinking their fill in nearby Chania, they hitched a lift back to the docks on a ration truck driven by a soldier from the Black Watch, the famous Highland regiment that had distinguished itself in wars stretching back two hundred years. As they rounded a bend along the rocky coastal road, the driver, who turned out to be no more sober than his passengers, managed to flip the truck into a ditch. Paddy was still in the hospital with a head injury when the Ajax sailed for Athens.