by Wes Davis
By summer the island had come to feel oddly like home. If anything felt like home to him. Fielding was born at a eucalyptus-shaded hill station in the Nilgiri Hills—Prince Peter’s former stomping grounds in southern India—where his father was an officer in a Sikh regiment of the British Indian Army. His mother died giving birth to him, and Fielding grew up in France, where his grandparents lived. With his compact build, dark hair, and hooded eyes, he could still pass for a Frenchman. And before the war was over he would have to.
Now twenty-three, he still had a boyish look. But beyond the youthful demeanor Fielding was sturdy as iron. His arms, although thin, were corded with muscle. In the years before the war he had tramped his way across Europe, roughing it the whole way on almost no money. He slept in haylofts and ditches. When he was lucky, he spent the odd night in what was for him the height of luxury—on a park bench.
He settled in British-ruled Cyprus, where he found a job as an editor on a local newspaper, but he soon realized he did not fit the imperial mold. In an atmosphere of colonial snobbery he rubbed his countrymen the wrong way by refusing to refer to the Cypriots as “Cyps”—“an absurdly pejorative term,” he thought, “considering these people were members of a civilized society when we were still painting ourselves with woad.” It did not help that he wrote articles decrying the mistreatment of Cypriot villagers. But Fielding was unpopular for other reasons too. “I had little money,” he recalled, “and ‘poor whites’ are never welcome in British colonies.” Worse still, he actually spoke Greek with the islanders and he was eager to soak up more of the language. His attitude eventually got him fired. By the time Britain entered the war, he was making a rough-and-ready living tending bar.
When he heard the news, Fielding’s first thought was that the time had come to leave Cyprus. Not to enlist but to avoid being trapped on an island ruled by the same colonial mob that had ousted him from his newspaper job. “I might have made a decent escape by rushing home at once and joining up,” he reasoned; “but even if I had felt a romantic inclination to do so, I could not afford the fare back to England.” Instead he wound up on a minuscule island in the Bay of Khalkís—St. Nicholas—which was owned by an old friend of his, a frail Oxford-trained anthropologist who lived there alone, surviving on a diet of brandy and bread supplemented by a weekly dose of beef tea. Fielding recalled that this man had made a name for himself in 1925, when he discovered a fragment of Neanderthal cranium in a cave near the Sea of Galilee. But within a few years he had drifted away from anthropology, working for a while with a sexologist in Berlin before retreating to his island hermitage.
Fielding spent the first year of the war on the remote island. In the evenings the two men discussed the war news and Fielding wondered what to do about it. As BBC reports of Britain’s early disasters came crackling across the radio, he felt flickers of guilt. But only flickers; he had trouble putting a human face on suffering that was taking place on such a massive scale. It all felt impersonal and somehow unreal. Conscience never overcame the disinclination he felt toward joining up. “I was not afraid of fighting,” he maintained, “but I was appalled by the prospect of the army.” The idea of enlisting triggered his “anti-social instinct.” When Fielding’s feelings wavered, his friend was the voice of dispassionate reason, stammering out, “But what good do you think you could possibly be?”
Finally, in August 1940, Fielding learned that the British military attaché in Athens was recruiting Greek-speaking officers. Maybe he could be of use after all. Before the month was out Fielding had received a commission. Not long after, he was back in Cyprus to take up a post in the First Cyprus Battalion, which was based in what had once been an American copper-mining camp thirty miles west of Nicosia. It was there, the next spring, that he heard about the invasion of Crete.
At first the fighting on the island held for him only the same abstract interest as the war news he had listened to in the first years of the conflict, which told of nameless units clashing with other nameless units. But by the time survivors of the battle began turning up on Cyprus, Fielding had started to see things differently. “Now, for the first time,” he said, “I heard accounts of men fighting men and even, in several cases, of one man fighting another. This was a form of contest I could understand.” He could picture the battle—the struggle for the Galatas heights or the chaotic withdrawal to Sphakia—in a way he had never before been able to envision the war. Most of all he was captivated by what the Cretans themselves had done. “Bearded men wielding breach-loading muskets or shotguns, barefoot children behind them carrying the outdated ammunition, hooded women in support with kitchen knives and broom-handles—the image of these people kept recurring.”
Those images were still in his head a few weeks later when Fielding was offered an opportunity to work undercover in Crete. He leaped at the chance, partly to escape the claustrophobic life of the regular army but also to throw his lot in with those bearded men and hooded women who had come to inhabit his thoughts. By the middle of December, he found himself in Cairo, meeting with a man named Jack Smith-Hughes at the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive. Fielding had imagined the headquarters of an undercover operation would be hard to find, but it turned out that any taxi driver in Cairo could take you straight to what they had come to call “Secret House.”
Smith-Hughes was an enormous man with a smooth, round face. He had been in charge of a field bakery on Crete at the time of the battle and been taken prisoner by the Germans. He eventually escaped from the prison at Galatas and was picked up ten weeks later by a submarine off the south coast. When he reached Egypt, he volunteered to return to Crete to help organize the resistance movement he had seen forming during his weeks on the run. He had just returned from his first tour there and was now head of SOE’s Crete section. Fielding took all this in with interest as he sized up Smith-Hughes. With his thinning hair and sparse mustache he was not exactly dashing, but he had a quick-witted presence that Fielding attributed to his being a genuine secret agent, the first Fielding had ever met. He also had a notable ability to home in on the salient point, which may have come from studying law at Oxford before the war.
“Have you any personal objection to committing murder?” Smith-Hughes asked Fielding before the conversation had hardly begun.
If this unsettling question was meant to be a test, Fielding must have passed it. The next thing he knew, he was on his way to the Middle East Commando Depot for a course in sabotage. “For three days I was initiated into the mysteries of plastic high explosive, slow-burning fuses, detonators and primer-cord, and was given detailed instruction in the most effective method of blowing up a railway line,” he recalled. “The knowledge that no railway existed in Crete did not dampen my immediate ardour for demolition work, and each morning I happily destroyed an increasingly longer stretch of the metals laid out for us to practise on in the desert around camp.” Just after Christmas he was summoned back to Cairo, and less than a month later he was wading ashore on Crete.
Irregular warfare, Fielding discovered once he went into action, suited him just fine. If anything he found it too amusing. He rarely felt afraid in the field. But when he did, it was a giddy, almost manic sensation that washed over him. On one occasion, when an ill-planned nighttime landing shipwrecked him and two other men on an unfamiliar stretch of the island’s south coast, not more than a few hundred yards from a German outpost, he knew he ought to have been breathless with caution. “We were in enemy country,” he recalled, “and beyond that we had no idea of our whereabouts. But for fully two minutes we could not stop laughing. This mood of hysteria was only dispelled by the cold, which reminded us of the need for immediate action.”
At times, though, it seemed that the bloodiest struggle during the early months of the Resistance was waged against an insidious enemy that certainly outnumbered the Germans on the island—lice. When he first tangled with these vermin, Fielding was awed by their numbers. On one occasion he pulled more than two h
undred from his undershirt alone. After that, he recalled, “I lost count of them.”
The other enemy was monotony, a hazard that came with the territory, since the SOE agents were often holed up in caves or shepherds’ huts in the mountains for weeks on end. The only book in Fielding’s camp was a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets on which the code he used for wireless transmissions was based. And talk did not offer much in the way of distraction either. As much as Fielding liked and admired the Cretans who volunteered their services as guides and runners, he lamented the single-mindedness of their conversation. Now, he told himself, the journey to Gerakari to meet Dunbabin and this new officer promised an opportunity “to talk to people whose conversation was not limited to discussing the merits of one make of pistol compared with another or the advantages of rubber boot-soles over soles made of leather and other similar concerns.”
Gerakari lay some twenty miles to the east on the flank of the Amari Valley, an area so pro-British and so fertile that SOE agents referred to it as “Lotus Land.” When Fielding arrived there, he found that the cherry harvest was over—the region was known for its cherries—and the grapes were beginning to ripen. He made his way to the vintner’s hut where he was to meet Dunbabin. There he was finally able to solve the mystery of “Mr. Leverman.” Yianni had managed a reasonable approximation of the Englishman’s name. The new officer Dunbabin introduced to Fielding was Paddy Leigh Fermor.
“To say that we were old friends was an exaggeration,” Fielding realized, “though I had already met him once, for five minutes in a Bloomsbury café years before the war. Since then I had heard about him in various parts of the world.” Fielding knew that Leigh Fermor had followed a path similar to his own. Now the two former vagabonds felt an immediate kinship. For his part Fielding was struck by the panache evident even through Leigh Fermor’s disguise.
“Though we all wore patched breeches, tattered coats and down-at-heel boots, on him these looked as frivolous as fancy dress,” Fielding thought. “His fair hair, eyebrows and moustache were dyed black, which only added to his carnivalesque appearance, and his conversation was appropriately as gay and as witty as though we had just met each other, not in a sordid little Cretan shack, but at some splendid ball in Paris.” It was an effect Paddy cultivated.
In the vintner’s hut that evening it was decided that Leigh Fermor would take over Fielding’s area, allowing Fielding to return to Cairo for leave after more than six months on occupied Crete. Dunbabin would continue to monitor the Heraklion region. Fielding traveled straight back to his hideout to radio the plan to headquarters, and a few days later Leigh Fermor joined him there. He showed up carrying a liter of raki, so Fielding rounded up empty cigarette tins to serve as cups. After toasting the operation—“wishing success to the mission of the new arrival and fair winds for those about to depart”—Leigh Fermor and Fielding took the bottle to an outcropping and sat down in a pool of moonlight to work on the rest of the raki. Looking out over the valley, they talked about their travels and remembered mutual friends. For Fielding it was a relief to talk about something other than boots and pistols.
Nevertheless, it was also a good opportunity to exchange information about the mission. There was one audacious idea in particular that Fielding had been mulling over. What about kidnapping General Andrae and holding him hostage?
Waldemar Andrae was commandant of “Fortress Crete,” as the Germans called the island garrison. From his headquarters in Chania he oversaw a particularly harsh occupation. Among other things, the British believed he was responsible for the execution of fifty hostages in Heraklion on June 14, in reprisal for a commando raid on the nearby airfield. Among the dead were a former mayor of the city and the former governor of Crete. When General Andrae had made a tour of the rural southwestern corner of the island not long afterward, the notion had occurred to Fielding that it would be possible to hijack his staff car. With the general held hostage, the Germans would be hard pressed to carry out their usual round of reprisals. It was certainly a plan worth considering.
Leigh Fermor and Fielding talked through the night. As the moon moved across the sky, they inched along the outcrop to keep themselves in the moonlight. “By the time the raki was finished we had moved by successive stages almost the entire length of the shelving cliff,” Fielding recalled, “and as I fell asleep on my narrow ledge of twigs I could not be sure whether it was the strong spirit, Paddy’s company or the prospect of Egyptian fleshpots that was responsible for the happiest night I had so far spent in Crete.”
THE NEXT DAY Leigh Fermor pressed on to Vaphes, some twenty miles to the northwest, not far from Suda Bay, where he was to await an airdrop of supplies. He felt uneasy because he had expected to take over Tom Dunbabin’s area near Heraklion. Although it had been agreeable talking with Fielding about the Chania and Rethymnon area he was now to assume responsibility for, it was not a substitute for a full briefing. And Fielding’s zone was known to be the more difficult and dangerous of the two. Fortunately, he had the next month to acclimate himself during what he came to think of as “a holiday between Tom’s and Fielding’s areas.”
Leigh Fermor had sailed for Crete from Mersa Matruh on June 21, the same day, he would later learn, that Rommel’s forces overran the British garrison at Tobruk. It took him nearly forty hours to reach Crete, traveling aboard a motor launch commanded by John Campbell, the Hedgehog skipper, who with Mike Cumberlege, onetime commander of the Dolphin, now ran what amounted to the naval arm of SOE’s Crete operation. When they put ashore on the south coast, Leigh Fermor was astonished to see nearly two hundred andartes waiting on the beach. To the radio operator traveling with him the crowd appeared “a motley rabble.”
Once supplies from the launch were landed, the andartes led Leigh Fermor a mile or so inland to a cave that served as a staging area for landings. Here, over the next few days, he got to know some of the key figures in the Resistance. They included two of Pendlebury’s former henchmen, the andarte leaders Manoli Bandouvas and Giorgos Petrakogiorgos, along with members of their respective gangs. In SOE jargon the two kapetans now bore the code names “Bo-Peep” and “Selfridge”—the one because of his extensive sheep holdings, the other for his success as a merchant. Bandouvas, in particular, seemed to be thriving in the role of rebel leader. Fielding had described him aptly: “a dark burly man with sad ox-eyes and a correspondingly deep-throated voice in which he was fond of uttering cataclysmic aphorisms such as ‘The struggle needs blood, my lads.’ ”
When he had made arrangements for guides, Leigh Fermor struck out toward Mount Ida, where Tom Dunbabin was waiting. With a sturdy Cretan leading the way and carrying the new radio transmitter, it required four days of hard travel to reach the village of Platanos on the slopes of the mountain. The terrain itself made the going rough, and while traversing the exposed Mesara plain, the party crossed paths with a German motorcycle patrol, which they avoided by a hairbreadth. At last, on June 29, they arrived at Dunbabin’s shelter in the hills above the village.
Like John Pendlebury, Tom Dunbabin was an accomplished archaeologist. In 1936, at the age of twenty-five, he became the assistant director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens. When the war broke out, he was employed by the British legation. Born in Tasmania, he had spent the better part of four years studying in Greece and could speak, read, and write Greek fluently. And having lived for parts of two years in Italy and traveled in Germany on holidays, he had a working knowledge of Italian and German, both languages that would come in handy on an island occupied by Germany in the west and central regions and Italy in the east.
At first glance it might have appeared that there was little else to recommend Dunbabin as a secret agent. Although he was in good health, he did not claim to be a ready-made soldier. In the interview intended to assess his suitability for assignment to SOE, he explained, in answer to the standard list of questions, that he did not shoot, box, ski, or ride a bike, though he had done some mountaineering and he co
uld ride a horse. He professed no knowledge of wireless operation and could not transmit Morse. Nor could he yet drive a car, motorcycle, or truck, let alone sail a boat or fly an airplane. (There was no answer to whether there was “any coast you can ‘smell out’ in darkness with lights and buoys removed or altered.”)
Even in the final assessment of his performance at Beaulieu, the SOE “finishing school” in Hampshire, the commandant, clearly unsure what to make of an “academical type,” did not yet paint an altogether encouraging picture of a future spy. But he noted the quality that would in fact prove most important: “A very keen and penetrating mind.”
Dunbabin had completed the Beaulieu course in September 1941. And in October he sailed from Britain for the Middle East. By the end of the year he was at the SOE training camp near Haifa, where he was given parachute training. The next April he was infiltrated by boat into Crete.
Once he was in the field, the reports on his performance, now highlighting his intelligence and resourcefulness, began to show just how well suited to the job Dunbabin actually was. “He has an excellent knowledge of Greek and physically is able to pass as either a Cretan or Greek,” read one assessment. As the war progressed, his capability became still more evident. The man Leigh Fermor met was not the absentminded professor the officers at Beaulieu believed they had seen. He was certainly thoughtful but also cool and cheerful. The former academic had by now become the linchpin of SOE operations on Crete.
Leaving the radio operators behind to exchange information about their mission, Leigh Fermor and Dunbabin had made their way west to Gerakari, where they met Fielding on July 8. After those early encounters, Leigh Fermor was soon on his own. It was a hard life initially. “When I arrived the food situation was poor,” he reported to headquarters in Cairo, “though I cannot claim ever to have gone seriously hungry.” As the months went on, the situation improved. “In the summer one ate beans, lentils, tomatoes, potatoes, cheese and bread (sometimes scarce), meat sometimes, and oil. Now there is nearly everything one could wish, washed down by plenty of wine and reki, from a good vintage autumn.”