The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  Heydte set up his battalion headquarters in a villa near the sea, not far from the British consulate where John Pendlebury had his office. Then he and his staff officers stripped off their uniforms and took the opportunity to wash themselves with fresh water drawn from a well in the garden alongside the villa. As the cold water sluiced away the week’s accumulation of dirt and grime, the men’s spirits rose, as if the tension of the past days had been washed away too. While they were cavorting like schoolboys, a British soldier suddenly appeared and gaped at them. In an instant he was gone. Heydte later learned that the villa had been a British command post, and he surmised that the soldier had come carrying a message for headquarters, not realizing that the city had been captured. “He was the last British soldier I saw in the battle for Chania,” Heydte would later remember.

  But the next day an incident occurred that, in hindsight, offered a warning that the fight for Crete had hardly begun. Heydte’s commanding officer ordered him to investigate reports that a nearby monastery was sheltering an armed band of partisans. It was a job that called for the strength of one of his companies, but because a similar report had proved to be a red herring, Heydte decided to look into the allegation on his own. He and one other soldier sped out to the Akroteri peninsula above Suda Bay—where the monastery was located—on a pair of captured British motorcycles. When they arrived, they found the site abandoned. But as they roamed from room to room, opening and closing doors, a Greek boy appeared and led them to a cell where a white-bearded monk seemed to be waiting for them. When the man greeted him in French, Heydte, feeling embarrassed at making the accusation, asked if there were any armed men in the monastery.

  “In a monastery one should seek God, not human beings,” the monk replied. “Here there can be no soldiers.” Heydte, still as devout a man as when he defended the Catholic Church against a Nazi’s insult in Vienna, had felt a surge of religious sentiment when he first walked into the sanctuary. Now he wanted to believe what the monk said.

  The old man raised his arm as if to offer a blessing and muttered, “May the saints protect you.” Heydte decided to take him at his word. The two Germans remounted their motorcycles and rode back to Chania through the growing dusk. “Only a few days later did we learn that over a hundred heavily-armed Greek soldiers and partisans had been hiding in the monastery while we had searched it. The very thought sent a shiver down my spine,” Heydte admitted. He wondered whether the old monk had lied to protect the partisans or to save the pair of foolhardy German soldiers. Either way, the struggle was clearly far from over. In Crete, he realized, “we had encountered for the first time an enemy that was prepared to fight to the bitter end.”

  IN THE FIGHTING around Heraklion, eighty or ninety miles east of Heydte’s area, the British felt they had the upper hand. On the morning of the twenty-eighth—the day after the withdrawal through Sphakia began on the western end of the island—Brigadier Chappel delivered the evacuation orders to a stunned group of officers. A company commander in one of Chappel’s most storied regiments had proclaimed some days earlier that “the Black Watch leaves Crete when snow leaves Mount Ida.” Unaware as they were of the heavy losses in the west, the officers felt betrayed by the decision to pull out.

  That evening Leigh Fermor was busy at the cave, where the brigadier’s staff officers were engaged in burning documents. Outside, soldiers worked hurriedly to bury some equipment and destroy the rest to prevent its falling into enemy hands. Line soldiers had not yet been informed of the planned withdrawal. Neither had the Greeks. But it was not hard to see that the British were pulling out.

  “All at once,” Leigh Fermor observed, “an old Cretan materialized out of the shadows. He was a short, resolute man, obviously a distinguished kapetan, with a clear and cheerful glance, a white beard clipped under the chin like a Minoan and a rifle butt embossed with wrought-silver plaques.” It was Pendlebury’s friend Satanas, who had come to speak with Brigadier Chappel.

  Leigh Fermor watched as the man approached Chappel and took the much taller English commander by the shoulder. “My child,” the old andarte leader said in Greek, “we know you are leaving tonight; but you will soon be back.” A hush fell over the cave as he continued. “We will carry on the fight till you return. But we have only a few guns. Leave us all you can spare.”

  Chappel was visibly stirred by the veteran fighter’s request. He turned to Leigh Fermor and the other officers and directed them to gather what weapons they could find.

  At eight o’clock orders to withdraw went out to the men. There was a final flurry of sabotage. Stores of food were distributed and the surplus was destroyed. One regimental commander threw an impromptu party as a way of using up supplies. Men opened the oil reservoirs on their trucks and filled them with sand, then raced the engines until they rattled to a halt. Other equipment was rigged to explode if anyone tampered with it.

  Then the units began making their way toward the harbor. Marching along the empty streets of Heraklion was like passing through a wasteland. Familiar buildings lay in ruins and there were signs of destruction everywhere. One Australian soldier was struck by the “stench of decomposing dead, debris from destroyed dwelling places, roads were wet and running from burst water pipes, hungry dogs were scavenging among the dead. There was a stench of sulphur, smouldering fires and pollution of broken sewers.”

  At the harbor the men boarded Royal Navy destroyers, which ferried them out to larger cruisers—Dido and Orion—waiting offshore. Leigh Fermor and the rest of the headquarters staff went aboard last. By a quarter to three in the morning, the two destroyers carrying them had slipped beyond the submarine net at the mouth of the harbor. So far the operation had run like clockwork.

  But then everything began to go wrong. The steering mechanism on the destroyer HMS Imperial, which had suffered damage from a Stuka attack the day before, now malfunctioned. Another vessel, HMS Hotspur, pulled alongside to allow the passengers from the Imperial to leap aboard. Then torpedoes were fired into the battered ship, sending her to the bottom, along with a party of Australian soldiers who had been too drunk to rouse. Now, with Hotspur limping along under an extraordinary weight of passengers, the hours of darkness were quickly slipping away. When the sun rose the next morning it caught the British convoy still in range of Stukas based at Kárpathos, the island lying between Crete and Rhodes. Soon after 6:00 a.m. the ships were attacked by more than a hundred aircraft. Within half an hour the destroyer Hereward was so badly damaged it had to turn back toward Crete. When the ship finally sank in shallow water, two Stukas closed in to attack the lifeboats but were kept off by an Italian Red Cross seaplane.

  By the time the surviving vessels reached Alexandria at eight o’clock that evening, hundreds of men had been killed, including the captain of the Orion and 260 of her passengers. Nearly half of the Black Watch soldiers who had sailed aboard the Dido were dead. The overcrowded conditions pushed the casualty count higher than it might have been otherwise, with men dying not just from bomb explosions and gunfire but also from fire and drowning when they could not escape from damaged compartments. Altogether more than a fifth of the troops who had fought to what seemed like a victory in the Heraklion area had now been lost. Leigh Fermor was among those who arrived safely in Alexandria.

  NOT MUCH LATER, on a bright morning in June, Einer Heydte also left Crete. As the transport plane carrying him to Athens climbed into a sunlit Mediterranean sky, he reflected that he was now soaring away from this storied island “just as Daedalus had done so many centuries ago.” If he recalled his old schoolmaster’s argument that the myth of the Minotaur presented a tale of human triumph, the notion must have seemed more wrongheaded than ever. What mattered in the end was not Theseus’s victory in the land of the Minotaur but that Daedalus was forced to carry on his famous flight alone, after the death of his beloved son Icarus. Such a lesson was not lost on Heydte as his plane winged its way farther and farther from the spot where his young orderly had lost his life. />
  JOHN PENDLEBURY, Leigh Fermor later learned, had also remained behind on the island he loved. After leaving Brigadier Chappel’s command center in the cave outside Heraklion, he and Satanas led a group of men toward the Chania Gate, at the western edge of the city. There they joined another group of Cretan recruits and a Greek army unit that had taken up positions along the massive Venetian wall that formed the gate. From their fortified position this ragtag band fought off a battalion of paratroopers from the German First Parachute Regiment. The German commander was surprised to find that “the western edge of the town was magnificently defended.”

  The next day the Cretans still had control of the Chania Gate. The German unit had retreated over a quarter of a mile west. Pendlebury sent Satanas to his home village of Krousonas, fifteen miles southwest of Heraklion, where he was to mobilize his men and distribute the weapons contributed by Chappel’s unit. Pendlebury then made his way back to his office. From there he dispatched another runner to the village of Skalani, south of Knossos, with orders for the andartes based there to hold the high ground overlooking the airfield and the main road leading south out of Heraklion. He then took another gun from the cabinet in his office—he now had a pistol on each hip and a rifle slung across his back—and drove with one of his men through the Chania Gate and up into the hills southwest of the city.

  Meanwhile, Nick Hammond, on the return voyage from Ierápetra aboard the Dolphin, put in at Sitia on the eastern tip of the island and from there tried to phone Pendlebury at his office. Hammond knew nothing yet of the attack and was surprised to find the phone lines out of commission. The Dolphin motored on toward the west and reached Heraklion around dusk.

  As the caïque approached the city, it began drawing fire, so skipper Mike Cumberlege put Hammond ashore on the breakwater near the mouth of the harbor. Armed with a pistol and accompanied by one of Cumberlege’s men, Hammond made his way into the city to assess the situation. He had not advanced far when the scene stopped him in his tracks. Nearby were the bodies of dead British soldiers. “We saw that machine-guns were covering us from the embrasures. To our right we could see nothing, being bounded by a high sea wall: then we saw the Nazi swastika flying on the electric power station not far off.” Had he waited, Hammond would have seen the swastika flag torn down again. But at the moment the state of affairs seemed clear. Pendlebury, if he was alive, would by now be in the hills with his andartes. Hammond slipped back aboard the Dolphin, and Cumberlege turned the little ship out to sea.

  Over the next several days Hammond and Cumberlege looked for Pendlebury along the coast, hoping to establish a communication link that would keep him and his andartes supplied once the British pulled out. At last they joined the evacuation convoy steaming out of Heraklion harbor. When the steering gear on the destroyer Imperial went haywire in the predawn hours on the twenty-ninth, the Dolphin narrowly escaped being rammed by the larger vessel.

  Cumberlege later heard that Pendlebury had abandoned his car outside the city and continued on foot with one of his men. His plan was to make contact with guerrillas on the Nidha plateau, high in the Ida range, where he had once feared German planes might land, and then join Satanas at his home in Krousonas. But as they made their way along the Chania road, the two men walked into a firefight between a Greek unit and German parachutists who had taken shelter in a farmhouse. Pendlebury volunteered to lead an attack on the farmhouse. In the battle that followed he was severely wounded. It was said that he killed several Germans before being struck in the chest. Whether he was hit by rifle fire or a round fired by one of the Stukas providing air support to the besieged parachutists was unclear.

  Reports of what happened next were jumbled. But Pendlebury appeared to have been captured by the parachutists and taken to the house of a Greek woman, who happened to be the wife of one of his andartes. Some said a German doctor treated his wounds. The next day a German unit arrived and arrested the woman for harboring an enemy soldier. Some accounts maintained that Pendlebury wore his British uniform, others that he had changed into a Greek shirt. It was thought that his uniform might have become soaked with blood.

  According to one eyewitness, the Germans then propped Pendlebury against a wall and barked a question at him. He answered, “No.” The same question was put to him again and then a third time. Each time the answer was the same, “No.” Something else was then spoken in German, and Pendlebury responded by lifting himself to attention. Then shots rang out. He was struck in the head and chest and slumped to the ground.

  The story of his death that began to circulate on Crete maintained that Pendlebury had led his final charge brandishing his famous sword stick in the face of the much-better-armed enemy. It was a gesture that rang true to everyone who had known him.

  Even in their brief encounter in the cave outside Heraklion, Leigh Fermor had been impressed by the heroic vigor Pendlebury radiated. “The great thing was that his presence filled everyone with life and optimism and a feeling of fun,” he remembered. “Everyone felt this, and it hung in the air long after his death.”

  The legend of John Pendlebury would not die. At the end of August—some three months after he was killed—the chief of military intelligence in Cairo sent a confused message to command in London which read: “We also tried to drop a wireless set by parachute to Pendlebury, who at the moment is largely controlling the guerilla activities in the Crete hills.”

  It would be a hard job to fill the knee-high Cretan boots Pendlebury had once favored. Leigh Fermor could not know for the moment that he would be one of the men sent to try.

  3

  Oak Apple Day

  AROUND THE BEGINNING of July 1942, a little more than a year after the fall of Crete, a runner turned up at the camp in the hills above Alones, southwest of Rethymnon, where a fresh-faced young SOE officer named Xan Fielding had established his headquarters. As Fielding watched the man approaching along a jagged goat trail from the valley below, he recognized the nimble figure of a villager named Yianni Tzangarakis, “a silent sad-eyed man of about forty, tireless on the road and expert at rolling cigarettes.” He came carrying a message from Tom Dunbabin, the SOE officer who was Fielding’s counterpart in the Heraklion area, to the east. Together with their wireless operators and a cadre of Cretan allies, Fielding and Dunbabin had assumed the role John Pendlebury had always imagined would be his. It was now their job to collect intelligence about the German occupation force and to coordinate the activities of Resistance groups across the island. Dunbabin’s letter was the first communication Fielding had received from the outside world in weeks. It reported that a new radio transmitter had been smuggled onto the island, along with a third SOE officer, and it asked Fielding to come to Dunbabin’s hideout at Gerakari above the Amari Valley as soon as he could, in order to meet his new colleague.

  When Fielding finished reading the message, he noticed the sad-eyed messenger standing nearby with an uncharacteristic grin on his face. Fielding sensed that the ordinarily somber villager had something to say. There was one thing more, the runner admitted, clearly pleased to hold information not disclosed in Captain Dunbabin’s letter. With a little prompting, Yianni revealed that the third British officer now waiting to meet him at Gerakari was in fact an old friend of Fielding’s. His name, Yianni said, was Mr. Leverman. Fielding scanned his memory, but he had no clue whom the man might be referring to.

  Captain Fielding had been on the island since the beginning of the year. In the hours before dawn on January 12, with the sea running high and wind screaming in the rigging, he had paddled away from the submarine Torbay in a rubber dinghy and slipped ashore at Tsoutsouros on the south coast. It was his second attempt to reach Crete. The first try, on New Year’s Day aboard a small armed caïque called Hedgehog, had introduced him to the explosive weather that often cut Crete off from SOE headquarters in North Africa. When the Hedgehog left Alexandria, the sea was completely calm, but by the time the vessel reached Crete, a gale-driven swell forced the skipper to
jettison all the gear stowed on deck and limp back to port. On the night the Torbay surfaced near Tsoutsouros, again in a gale, pounding waves smashed the folding canoe Fielding had intended to employ and prevented him from landing all of his equipment. He came ashore in an unwieldy dinghy with only his personal gear: “an electric torch, a small automatic pistol, a map of Crete printed on linen for discreet portability but of so small a scale as to be virtually useless, and a sum of money in currency so inflated that I found my total assets on landing amounted to little more than £16.”

  In place of his British uniform he wore a black suit, with a white sweater, and hobnailed leather boots. Paddling in from the Torbay, he experienced a moment of regret that he had not stayed in uniform for the landing itself, since there was no telling who might be waiting onshore and a British officer caught out of uniform by the Germans would be shot as a spy. Fielding had been told at SOE headquarters in Cairo that few Cretan men went about clean shaven, so he had tried to cultivate a mustache. But when he looked at himself in the mirror he thought the fringe that had appeared above his lip, combined with the threadbare clothing, “only succeeded in making me look like an unemployed Soho waiter.”

  Landing not just in winter but in the first winter of the occupation, when the Cretans’ own resources were strained to the breaking point, Fielding received an abrupt initiation in the hardships of a spy’s life on the island. In those early months he got used to living on next to nothing. Raisins, when he could get them, snails, and a kind of bread made from carob beans were his mainstays. Soon he learned to eat and sleep whenever there was an opportunity. You never knew when the next chance would come, though the Cretans were as hospitable as their own poverty would permit.