by Wes Davis
When he finally reported for work with the British mission a week later, he joined the mission staff at General Headquarters in Athens, which was housed in the luxurious Hotel Grand Bretagne, off Syntagma Square. The Greek king had a private office in the building. And his young cousin, Prince Peter, served as liaison to the British mission. Leigh Fermor and the other officers took a liking to Peter, an anthropologist who had traveled in Tibet and studied the Toda herdsmen in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. On top of his ethnographic interests, Peter had collected what one of the officers called “an astonishing repertoire of bawdy songs.” Peter’s good humor aside, though, Leigh Fermor found the atmosphere at the Grand Bretagne stifling. Whenever an opportunity arose, he took to the field.
One assignment sent him into Albania, Nick Hammond’s old stomping grounds. Leigh Fermor remembered what Gibbon had said about this isolated stretch of the Balkan peninsula in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was “a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America.” A lot of water had trickled under the bridge since Gibbon’s time, Leigh Fermor knew. But in some ways little had changed. Albania had been “flung open” after the last war, but few outsiders had ventured in even then. When he got there himself, he discovered a rugged country that he would be reminded of many times in the coming years. “It was a fierce mountain state,” as he saw it. And the Albanians themselves struck him as “hardy and courageously independent.”
As he trekked along the Albanian front, he noticed that some of the foreign soldiers had adapted surprisingly well to the harsh terrain. They did not seem to mind the bone-chilling mountain weather and they moved over the upland crags with little effort, carrying their rifles across their shoulders like shepherds’ staffs. This, it turned out, was the Fifth Cretan Division. In January a single regiment of these fierce Cretan fighters routed an entire enemy division in the Trebeshina Mountains in southern Albania.
BUT IN THE end, even the tenacity of the Cretan Division could not stop the Axis advance across the Balkans. It was not long before word came to evacuate the Greek mainland, and Leigh Fermor and the others in the Athens mission set about destroying the mission’s documents and equipment. On April 22 a group of them climbed aboard a truck and drove southeast out of the city toward Cape Sounion, southeast of the city. The truck came to a stop not far from the ruined temple of Poseidon, where you could still see Lord Byron’s name cut into the base of one of the columns. The men clambered out and began pushing the truck toward the cliffs that dropped off into the Aegean. Legend had it that King Aegeus had leaped to his death from here when he saw his son Theseus’s ship returning from Crete with a black sail—the signal that his son was dead. Theseus had defeated the Minotaur in his own lair and had even managed to escape from the labyrinth that held the monstrous bull-man, following the thread Ariadne had given him to trace the way out. But then one moment of thoughtlessness had cost him a terrible price. When Leigh Fermor and the others got the truck to the edge, they gave one final push and watched it tumble toward the sea.
They then boarded the armed caïque Ayia Varvara and set out for the Gulf of Argos. Four days later they put in at Myli on the northwestern shore of the gulf. Abandoned British vehicles could be seen lining the roadways. After picking up a few British stragglers and some vital supplies—including several bottles of champagne—the Ayia Varvara put back out to sea. The next day, forty miles to the south, near the mouth of the gulf, the caïque was sunk by German bombers. Everyone on board managed to escape the wreckage. Leigh Fermor and the other men soon bought another vessel and made it past the island of Antikýthéra, nearly halfway to their destination, before the engine gave out. They limped back to the island and transferred to a schooner that carried them, exhausted but in relatively good condition, to Crete at last.
The schooner landed at Kastelli Kissamou, a sleepy town with a Venetian harbor, twenty-five miles west of Chania. There Leigh Fermor bumped into Prince Peter and another member of the British mission, and together they traveled to Galatas, in the hills outside Chania, where Prince Peter had a house. After a few days of rest there, Leigh Fermor was attached to the Fourteenth Infantry Brigade as an intelligence officer. At the end of April the unit moved to Heraklion and the commander, Brigadier Chappel, set up his headquarters in a deep cave set back in a rocky hillside between the town and the airport to the east.
ON MAY 18 Leigh Fermor went into town for a drink with another officer from the British mission. Two days later the invasion began. The Junkers transport planes that dropped German paratroopers in the west had returned to the mainland to reload and refuel twice since the morning. Heraklion was hit by the third wave. It was nearly four thirty in the afternoon when the attack there began. First came an hour of the most destructive bombing the city had yet suffered.
Soon after the bombing subsided, Leigh Fermor again heard the drone of aircraft and looked up to see the near horizon dotted with transport planes from which parachutes were already emerging by the dozen. Because Brigadier Chappel had ordered the crews of the antiaircraft guns to stand down during the initial bombardment, the emplacements had gone unnoticed by German bombers during the initial attack. Now they opened fire on the lumbering transport planes. “When the roar of our guns broke out,” Leigh Fermor saw, “many invaders were caught in the olive branches and many were killed as they fell; others dropped so close to headquarters that they were picked off at once.”
It was not long after the attack began that a British soldier rushed a captured German document to Brigadier Chappel’s command center. Because Leigh Fermor had picked up some German in his travels, he was called on to translate. What he discovered as he read was the entire German order of battle. It laid out the distribution of German units and included their troop strengths and the names of the unit commanders.
One item in particular stopped him cold—“the spearhead of the attack,” he noticed, “was under the command of a Captain von der Heydte.” It hit him immediately that this must be Einer Heydte, the young baron who had befriended him in Vienna. At home Heydte had confronted Nazis, and now he had been swept up in their war. Reading on, Leigh Fermor gathered that his friend’s battalion had dropped by parachute near Galatas at the western end of the island. He was astonished to think that the spot indicated, which lay between Chania and the airfield at Maleme, was close to where he had enjoyed the hospitality of Prince Peter just days earlier.
That evening, when the brigade’s Black Watch piper let loose a twilight blast from his bagpipe, Leigh Fermor was still ruminating on Einer Heydte’s unexpected reappearance. “The short May night was illuminated by destroyed planes burning fitfully among the olive trees and during these hours of respite, I couldn’t stop thinking of this strange coincidence.” He felt a wave of nostalgia for the era when opposing warriors who had moved in the same social circles might exchange a greeting during a lull in the fighting. But he knew that times had changed. In the chaos of the battle raging on Crete, such antique gallantries were impossible. He was thankful that he and his friend, now fighting in far-flung reaches of the island, were unlikely to run into each other.
Still, his memories of the carefree days in Vienna flooded back. The death and destruction all around him now gave the recollection a new poignancy.
LEIGH FERMOR WAS occupied at Chappel’s headquarters the next afternoon when suddenly there was someone at the mouth of the cave. When he looked up, he saw a tall man stooping as he descended the stairs at the entrance. “He had a Cretan guerilla with him, festooned with bandoliers,” Leigh Fermor noticed. Unlike the other officers, who carried only service revolvers, the tall man had a rifle slung across his back. And he carried a sword stick. As soon as he saw him, Leigh Fermor felt “enormously impressed by that splendid great figure.” When the man introduced himself as John Pendlebury, Leigh Fermor realized that this was someone he had heard about already. “He had a great reputation for knowing Crete and the Cretans backwards, being an indest
ructible force in the steepest mountains.”
Seeing the man for himself, Leigh Fermor thought “Pendlebury made a wonderfully buccaneerish and rakish impression, which may have been partly due to the glass eye.” The man’s jaunty demeanor was enough to buoy the others, despite the grave circumstances. It was not long before the “dismal cave was suddenly full of noise and laughter.”
Pendlebury had come to ask Brigadier Chappel where he and his guerrillas would be most useful in the fighting. After some consideration, the two men focused their attention on the Chania Gate, to the southwest of the city center. There was a freshwater spring just outside the gate, where intelligence gleaned from a captured German map suggested the paratroopers would gather. Chappel then agreed to supply Satanas’s men with a few rifles.
As Pendlebury rose to leave, one of the officers asked, perhaps in jest, to see his sword stick. Neither the gravity of the moment nor the hint of mockery in the officer’s request fazed Pendlebury. Leigh Fermor watched as he “smiled obligingly, drew it with comic drama and flashed it round with a twist of the wrist. Then he slotted it back and climbed up into the sunlight with a cheery wave.”
NEAR GALATAS, Leigh Fermor’s old friend Einer Heydte had begun to feel that the tide of the battle was turning the German army’s way. Paratroopers had taken control of the Maleme airfield outside Chania, allowing transport planes to land reinforcements and supplies, despite the continuing barrage of antiaircraft fire from British guns in the surrounding hills. But it was not yet decided. There was no word from Rethymnon, and reports from Heraklion, which had briefly been in German hands, told of British and Greek fighters driving German units from the city
In the afternoon on Friday, the twenty-third, a soldier dressed in a German uniform dashed out from behind the British line and scrambled across a stretch of open ground to reach Heydte’s position. Heydte at first feared a trick, but once he had established that the man was not an impostor, the bedraggled soldier was allowed to tell his story. His platoon had landed by caïque near Chania with orders to attack the antiaircraft emplacements on the Akroteri heights overlooking Suda Bay. After a rough landing that knocked a number of men out of action, the remainder had tried to fight their way through the New Zealand forces that defended the Akroteri peninsula. In the end the entire German unit had been killed or captured, except for this man, who was forced to make his way alone to the German lines. Heydte had him escorted to the relative safety of his headquarters, where the soldier broke down and wept. Later that day the man learned that his two brothers, who were also paratroopers, had been killed soon after the invasion began.
On Sunday afternoon, the twenty-fifth, Heydte received orders for what he expected to be the final attack on Chania and the surrounding highlands. He gathered his company commanders and told his young orderly that he was taking them up to a stretch of high ground called Great Castle Hill, which commanded a view of the entire Chania plain below. From there he would be able to point out landmarks as he gave them their orders for the coming attack. In order to keep the number of men moving together small enough to avoid attracting attention, the orderly was to follow later.
The sun was setting when Heydte finished laying out the plans for the attack, and his orderly had not yet appeared. As the battalion’s officers started back for headquarters in small groups, only a sliver of light still brightened the western horizon. He waited for a while near the ruins that had given the hill its name, listening to the sound of fighting in the nearby Galatas heights. Something must have held up the usually dependable orderly, Heydte concluded at last, and started back toward his headquarters.
When he reached the camp he found it strangely quiet. One of his men, the unit’s adjutant, explained why. Heydte’s orderly, the young man he had grown closest to in the months leading up to the invasion, had been seriously wounded three hours earlier on his way to Great Castle Hill. A bullet that might have been a stray round or might have come from a sniper’s rifle had struck him in the chest and pierced his lung. The boy would not survive. “I could not see the adjutant’s face in the darkness,” Heydte remembered, “and I was glad he could not see mine, with tears welling into my eyes.”
That night, as he settled into the trench he had shared with his young orderly since the battle began, Heydte was unable to sleep. “What was the point of ordering my soldiers to kill human beings whom they did not know and who had not done anything to them,” he wondered, “and what was the point in allowing those same human beings to kill us, who meant nothing to them?” With the star-dotted Cretan sky looming above his trench, Heydte felt very small and alone. On the warm wind, known as the meltemi, that was blowing up through the gorge, he could detect the odor of corpses.
EVELYN WAUGH WAS the intelligence officer in Number Eight Commando, a secret raiding force commanded by his friend Robert Laycock. Already a successful writer with a well-deserved reputation for biting satire, Waugh had joined the Royal Marines in December 1939 but had seen little action. In November 1940, when a friend told him, “You ought to be with Bob Laycock’s tough boys,” he wasted no time requesting a transfer to the new unit.
Near the end of May, the unit now known as Layforce was in Cairo. When the invasion began, Waugh sailed with Laycock from Alexandria bound for Crete on the destroyer Isis. Rough seas made the crossing difficult, and when the Isis made landfall on the southwestern end of the island, it was impossible to land troops. After an hour the ship returned to Alexandria. The next evening the commandos sailed on the cruiser Abdiel, and they landed at Suda Bay, near Chania, at eleven o’clock the following night.
Laycock and Waugh had been led to believe that British forces were getting the upper hand in the fighting on Crete. Their job would be to launch raids against German strongholds. But soon after the Abdiel dropped anchor, they saw evidence that this was untrue. While Waugh stood waiting in the captain’s cabin for the arrival of landing barges that would carry the unit’s men and gear ashore, a shell-shocked naval commander burst into the room. “He was wearing shorts and a greatcoat,” Waugh noted, “and could not speak.”
“My God, it’s hell,” the man exclaimed. “We’re pulling out. Look at me, no gear. O My God it’s hell. Bombs all the time. Left all my gear behind.” His best friend had just been killed, he said, and the army was in full retreat. “Crete is being evacuated!”
The brigade major in Waugh’s unit told the man that they were going ashore and asked him the password of the day, but he could not recall it. Once on dry land, Waugh learned that German troops had entered Chania. The New Zealand brigade that had been defending the airfield at Maleme had been forced to retreat. Australian, British, and Greek units were also pulling out. All Laycock’s commandos could do was provide cover for the evacuation.
The next morning Waugh began to make his way inland against a steady stream of bedraggled men headed in the other direction. Around eight o’clock he noticed that German dive-bombers had begun crisscrossing the sky, but their attacks were focused to his west. Later in the day, he saw their fury at closer range. “Just below us was a very prominent circular cornfield in a hollow and they used this as their pivot so that they were always directly overhead flying quite low, then they climbed as they swung right, dived and let their bombs go about a mile away.” Waugh assumed that the target was the headquarters of the British commander, General Freyberg, just off the nearby Suda-Heraklion road. Whatever the target, the dive-bombers attacked it savagely. “At first it was impressive,” Waugh thought, “but after an hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German—overdone.”
By the following day the Allied forces were in a chaotic rush toward Sphakia, on the southwestern coast, where the evacuation effort was now under way. With the help of a Maori unit, the commandos managed a brief counterattack. But the situation now looked hopeless. Soon Laycock ordered his men to Sphakia, where they boarded one of the last departing ships.
WHEN EINER HEYDTE’S battalion of the Third Parachute Regiment
entered Chania on the morning of May 27, the city might have been a ghost town. During the preceding days of Luftwaffe bombardment, the Greek population of the town had fled into the countryside, and now the British garrison had withdrawn to the western end of the city. A party of wounded Germans left behind when the British pulled out appeared to be the town’s sole residents.
Much of the city was in ruins, its buildings gutted and the cobbled streets sloping down toward the waterfront strewn with rubble. Heydte and his men were in little better condition. His own uniform was in tatters. The legs of his trousers had been hacked off at the knees, and in place of a cap, he now wore a sweat-soaked handkerchief with its corners tied in knots. He had not shaved since the night before the invasion began. When a perspiring bald man in glasses presented himself as the mayor and asked to speak with a German officer, Heydte had a difficult time convincing him that the disheveled figure standing before him was the battalion commander. He led the man into the nearby hospital, and there the mayor eventually explained “that he wished to surrender the town and, in the name of the Greek authorities, to ask for clemency and, if possible, help for the civilian population.” Heydte accepted the terms and offered the mayor a tin cup filled with wine. When he walked outside again, he saw that the German flag was being raised on one of the town’s minarets—the Islamic architecture of the building itself a reminder that the Turks had once taken over the city in similar fashion.