The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  4

  The Fishpond

  WHEN THE BOAT sailing for North Africa with Tom Dunbabin, the Vicar, and the Changebug aboard chuffed out of earshot before dawn on February 16, Leigh Fermor and his remaining men scurried up from the beach with their rifles held at the ready. Between the thrumming of the vessel’s engine, the flashing signal lights, and the boisterous voices of the Cretans, he felt certain the landing had been detected by the German coastal patrol. Reaching a cave in the hills above the coast just before dawn, the men settled in to wait out the daylight hours. They passed the time smoking Player’s cigarettes and watching an oblivious pair of German soldiers—“squareheads”—hunting hares on a nearby hillside with the help of a yapping terrier.

  Once the moon had risen that night, they struck out again. There was no one to be seen in the whole countryside other than one lone shepherd. Moving by night and holing up by day, the men made their way across the Messara plain and into the mountains beyond. Equipped as they were—“heavily armed as pirates,” Leigh Fermor remarked—it was feared their movements would provoke a flurry of rumors about a guerrilla band traveling through the territory. So Leigh Fermor devised a ruse. When they approached a village, the men, speaking in turn, were to shout German phrases (learned by rote) in order to mimic a careless enemy column on the march. Each player was assigned a set part, to be repeated at every village. “The result was perfect,” Leigh Fermor reflected. “Doors were closed, windows hastily shuttered, and lingerers in the street dashed for their houses, terrified of being caught out after curfew, then we clanked through unobserved.”

  It took several days, but the party finally reached Dunbabin’s former headquarters, where Leigh Fermor settled in and began exploring the area he had now inherited from Dunbabin. With his former runner Yianni Tzangarakis on his way to Cairo, he had also taken on a new assistant, a wiry thirty-year-old from the rugged southwestern corner of the island named Manoli Paterakis. He had been a corporal in the Royal Greek Gendarmerie before the war but had resigned once the police force fell under German command. The whole Paterakis family—Manoli had five brothers—soon started taking in British stragglers, giving them food and shelter and helping them escape from the German-held island. Manoli’s older brother Vasili had become the leader of a band of armed andartes who served as guards and sentries for Xan Fielding’s operations. And in the fall of 1942 Manoli had lent such vital help to Dunbabin during a submarine landing that he had been recruited into the SOE ranks on the spot. Since the middle of December he had been a member of Dunbabin’s staff, and he had proved himself quickly, working, as Dunbabin reported, “loyally and unwearyingly.” He was admired for his discretion and sense of responsibility. Just as important under the circumstances, he was utterly fearless.

  Leigh Fermor christened his new henchman “Manoli the Cop” or “Copper,” and the two quickly grew to like each other. “He is a grand chap and ready for anything,” Paddy decided. Before long he would come to think of Manoli as his “Man Friday.”

  Together they spent nearly a month exploring the new region. This Leigh Fermor found to his liking too. “Working in this area, after my former haunts,” he concluded, “is like settling down to a Jane Austen novel.” But to his mind the relaxed surroundings meant a greater scope for activity, not leisure. “Work in my present area is spying de luxe; and an atmosphere in which one can spread one’s wings and really get something done.”

  Sabotage was now at the top of his to-do list. Throughout the spring, he scrambled to come up with a workable plan for disrupting German shipping traffic. This time he focused his attention on Heraklion—“Babylon” in SOE code—but he knew the port there would be a tough nut to crack. Earlier in the year Dunbabin had investigated the options and turned up a list of obstacles. First, there was no practical spot from which to launch a boat along the rocky coast to the east and west of Heraklion, and if a band of Greek and British saboteurs did somehow reach the mouth of the harbor by sea, they would find their entry blocked by a boom. It was clear that a mission against the harbor would be forced to approach by land, but this posed its own difficulties.

  Dunbabin found that the harbor was accessible on foot at only one point, and even here the route down from the nearby town hall was nearly impassable. The first obstruction was a double-apron fence the Germans had thrown up to block the way. This tangle of razor wire and pickets was patrolled by sentries whose movements were coordinated to leave no part of the wire unobserved at any time. Dunbabin’s agent in the area had observed the guards closely enough to recognize that, while German morale had fallen to a low point and discipline was generally lax among the ten thousand enemy soldiers stationed in the Heraklion zone, security at the harbor itself was no slapdash operation. As Dunbabin told headquarters in February, “they do not meet and stop for a cigarette.”

  If a sabotage party managed to make its way past the sentries and through the German wire, there was still a four-hundred-yard swim to reach the main shipping facilities. All in all, there was not much to recommend such a mission, and the Resistance leader whom Dunbabin consulted flat-out refused to help for fear of German retaliation.

  “I think the chance of success is less than 50%,” Dunbabin concluded, “and if it were discovered that the job was being done from inside the enemy reprisals would be on a scale to discourage any further activity.”

  Still, the Heraklion mission was tempting. Leigh Fermor had learned that loaded ships remained in the harbor at night. “The larger vessels withdraw to the northern edge of the harbour, and the smaller ones and the armoured ships remain along-side the jetty. A searchlight plays all round the harbour, jetties and warehouses at fairly regular intervals,” he noted.

  In early March, he and Manoli ventured into the city to have a good look around. Paddy got himself up as a shepherd, with his eyebrows and mustache blackened with burned cork. He put on tall boots and a splendid cloak. It was a warm day, however, and he was disappointed when the rising temperature forced him to remove the cloak.

  Slipping in through a gate in the Venetian-era wall that surrounded the city, they found Heraklion thronged with visitors who had come in from the surrounding countryside for the Orthodox carnival, which was just ending. It occurred to Leigh Fermor that with the celebration under way he might have wandered through the city just as freely wearing a funny hat and a false nose.

  A Greek agent, code-named Tweedledee, led the two disguised spies through the labyrinth of streets, then turned down a lane that led to his house. “Once inside, we all heaved a sigh, shook hands and burst out laughing. It was a great moment,” Leigh Fermor later reported to headquarters. Exhausted, they slept until nightfall and then spent the evening eating and drinking with other members of SOE’s Heraklion network—“a huge spread was waiting, with gallons of wine.” Leigh Fermor stayed in Heraklion for eight days, often meeting with Resistance leaders during the day and sometimes long into the evening. He kept his ears open even in the relative safety of Tweedledee’s house. “There were Huns billeted in the houses on either side, drunk all the time, and you could hear nearly everything they said.” In the evenings he corked his mustache and strolled through the city, investigated German defenses, and walked down to look around the harbor.

  “When the time came to go,” he reported to Cairo, “I borrowed a raincoat and a wonderful velvet trilby and bicycled out of town with Tweedledum.” This was Tweedledee’s cousin, also an SOE collaborator. “I looked the image of a spy—just like the ones in the Careless Talk poster, I thought—but then, so do all Babylonians.” Peddling a bike festooned with a tin swastika, Leigh Fermor sped out through the Venetian gate. Another SOE agent posted near the gate to see that everything went smoothly shot him an exaggerated wink as he cycled past.

  Now that he had properly scouted the area, he decided that it might after all be feasible to enter the harbor undetected and attach limpet mines to the vessels anchored there. In April he wrote to Cairo describing his plan as if he wer
e mounting a fishing excursion. “I do not want to discuss this in too much detail for obvious reasons,” he began. “But after a personal recce of the fish pond there seems to be a sporting chance of landing a couple of fish. Access can be gained by a rope ladder tied to a telegraph pole on a bastion above the pond. There is a difficult open stretch after this, with two Nasties on piquet to be dodged, till the water is reached, and for this reason, a moonless night is essential.” The “Nasties” were the two sentries Dunbabin had noted. “The operation is made more difficult because the fish we are after have recently adopted the habit of swimming to the northern end of the pool at night, which means a swim of two kilometres for us, half of it with the limpets,” he continued. “But it seems worth trying, and I intend to try it.”

  Meanwhile there were endless negotiations to be carried out between the various guerrilla factions. One result was that Manoli Bandouvas had to be placated with an official title. Leigh Fermor, privately enjoying the aptness of the literal meaning of the military term for guerrilla fighters, bestowed on him the rank of “Chief of Francs-Tireurs” in the Heraklion region—“commander of the free shooters.” Bo-Peep, not entirely satisfied, expanded his new position to cover the whole of Crete.

  For all his courage and patriotism, Bandouvas—who was equally unpredictable and power hungry—had become a liability, in Tom Dunbabin’s view. Before he departed, Dunbabin had tried to lure the kapetan to Cairo, saying that his advice was sorely needed at headquarters. But Bandouvas, surrounded by his men and other andarte leaders, had refused to take the bait. “Crete must be set free from inside not only from outside,” he argued. “The battlefield is here. My place is here. Don’t you agree, gentlemen?”

  Unlike Dunbabin, Leigh Fermor viewed Bandouvas as an asset. “He is the most admired man in Crete, and the only name that is universally known,” he wrote to Cairo. “He is worth ten of Selfridge. He wants arms, and deserves them. I told him I would use my weight to obtain them, by drop.” Grenades, Sten guns, and pistols were on Bo-Peep’s wish list. Leigh Fermor urged Cairo to give the matter real consideration. Selfridge, meanwhile, had transferred his loyalty to the United States and had been putting it about that the Americans had promised him four tons of supplies.

  At the beginning of May, while he was still in the Heraklion area, a German patrol raided Leigh Fermor’s headquarters, which was now situated at the head of a ravine above Agios Ioannes, some forty-five miles south of Heraklion. They captured some radio parts and a battery, along with a jumble of domestic utensils. More compromising, they found two exercise books filled with writing. One contained figures for German troop distributions in the Heraklion district. In the other Paddy had been writing poetry, both his own, in English, and other pieces from memory, in Romanian, Greek, and German. There were also sketches—one “of an imaginary Cretan mountaineer, bristling with weapons”—and “comic drawings of British military life.”

  The raid presented a setback, but preparations for the harbor mission continued. Leigh Fermor bicycled back into Heraklion to make the final arrangements. While staying with friends of Manoli’s in an apartment above a café, he drew on various contacts to acquire the necessary fuses and he arranged for the limpet mines—awkward bowler-hat-shaped explosive devices he and Manoli would eventually have to swim across the harbor—to be smuggled into the city by donkey. To serve as a storage and staging area, he leased a house near the harbor. It appeared that everything was set for the mission.

  It was unclear, however, just when headquarters in Cairo wished to launch the operation. The signal Leigh Fermor received called for the fifth of July, but since such missions generally took place at night, it was customary to specify which night. “The fifth” might mean the night of either the fourth/fifth or the fifth/sixth. And since he had just learned that other operations were timed to coordinate with his, he knew the scheduling was crucial. At the last minute he got word to go on the night of the fourth, and he struck out toward the harbor with Manoli and Micky Akoumianakis, a Heraklion-based agent who was called Minoan Mike, a code name that pointed back to his childhood. Mike’s father had been Arthur Evans’s overseer at the Knossos excavations, where the ancient Minoan civilization had first come to light, and had become John Pendlebury’s right-hand man prior to the invasion. Mike had grown up literally next door to the palace of Minos. His father had been killed during the Battle of Crete, while Mike was himself fighting in Albania with the Cretan Division. Mike still remembered Pendlebury as a larger-than-life figure, who “could drink everyone under the table and then stride across three mountain ranges without turning a hair.” Leigh Fermor knew the older Akoumianakis’s reputation as Pendlebury’s most loyal ally, and Minoan Mike was already proving himself “a splendid chap.”

  The three men reached the harbor and penetrated the outer ring of German defenses. From here it was necessary to crawl the remaining distance to the quay. They had not made it far when they ran into an unexpected barrier formed by the rubble of destroyed aircraft. This proved to be a bigger problem than the razor wire; “over under or through there was no crawling without raising a terrific clatter of tin that set the sentries on the move.” At this point Minoan Mike was forced to withdraw, leaving Leigh Fermor and Manoli to carry out the mission on their own.

  “The cop and I spent the rest of the night trying to find a way through, creeping at a snail’s pace behind the sentries using what cover we could. But there was no way through from there without killing the two of them, which would have made our retreat impossible,” Leigh Fermor recalled. As the night wore on, the sentries passed closer and closer to their position. At one point there was a guard three yards to one side, while the other crossed ten yards to the other side. Both were playing their flashlights around. For two hours Leigh Fermor and Manoli remained frozen where they lay, waiting for an opportunity to dash into the sea. But it never came. With dawn coming, they were forced to pull back. “I’m sorry about this,” he wrote to Cairo, “but we had a damn good try.”

  The next morning the frustrated saboteurs found the household above the café in a panic, along with the rest of the town. The other operations scheduled for that night, which had been planned by Cairo without input from the officers on Crete, had already elicited German reprisals. Leigh Fermor and Manoli escaped from Heraklion just as the enemy began making arrests. In all, some fifty civilians were taken. “Shooting,” Leigh Fermor reported to Cairo, “started next day.”

  IN FACT, REPRISALS were under way all along the northern coast. Leigh Fermor’s sabotage mission had been timed to coincide with three raids carried out by a special-forces arm of the Royal Navy known as the Special Boat Section. The SBS commandos came ashore by motor launch on June 23 and fanned out in three parties, two making their way toward Heraklion and the airfield at nearby Kastelli, while a third sped toward the Tymbaki airfield, some forty miles away on the south coast. On the night of Leigh Fermor’s Heraklion harbor escapade, the commandos also struck their targets. At Kastelli an SBS lieutenant, posing as a German officer, had penetrated the security perimeter of the airfield and killed four German sentries while his men destroyed several of the aircraft based there.

  The most spectacular of these raids was led by a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant named Kenneth Lamonby. A good-humored, pipe-smoking Suffolk lad, Lamonby had been directed to sabotage the Heraklion airfield. But when he discussed his plan with the Cretan guide provided by SOE, he learned that the Germans no longer made much use of that facility, due mostly to damage inflicted by Allied raids the previous year. Lamonby then set his sights on the fuel depot at Peza, a village south of the city along the Archanes road.

  When Lamonby and his men reached Peza around eleven o’clock that night, they found a stockpile of around fifty sixty-gallon barrels. Lamonby sent one of his men into the dump along with a Greek guide. There they placed bombs under two of the barrels and set time pencils to detonate shortly after 1:00 a.m. When the two men climbed back up from the dump, Lamon
by attempted to breach the wire protecting a nearby bomb depot but found there was no practicable way through the barrier in the time they had remaining. Meanwhile, their guide had placed a Union Jack at the fuel dump to forestall reprisals against Cretan civilians.

  By one o’clock the unit had withdrawn from the area, and at 1:10 they heard the bombs explode, starting a fire that, it was later learned, destroyed several thousand gallons of aviation fuel. Lamonby and his unit spent that night in a bat-filled cave in the mountains above the dump and the next morning struck out on the thirty-mile march back to the beach where they were to be picked up by motor launch. Several days later Lamonby signaled the other SBS raiders, warning of enemy patrols along the coast. Then nothing from him. Finally, on the night before their withdrawal from Crete, he and his unit surfaced and rejoined the other raiding parties at a cave near the appointed beach.

  While waiting out the daylight hours the following day, Lamonby and the others drank sweet, milky tea and ate porridge and crackers with cheese. The talk was all about the mission they had nearly completed. Conversation gradually subsided and the men dozed through the afternoon. Around eight o’clock that evening a lookout spotted two Germans approaching up an adjacent gully. While Lamonby and his men held back their Cretan allies, who were all too eager for a fight, the other commandos quickly surrounded the two Germans and took them prisoner. Just then, someone spotted a second pair of enemy soldiers. This time the Cretans opened fire, and the Germans fled toward the beach with a dozen or so Cretans in hot pursuit. For more than half an hour small-arms fire echoed up the gully.