by Wes Davis
THE TURBULENT SITUATION in the Aegean was making ripples at the highest levels of British command. In London, Winston Churchill made it known that British forces must “be ready to take advantage of any Italian landslide.” With respect to Crete this meant providing assistance “at the earliest moment” if the Italian garrison elected to rebel against German control of the island. It was less clear precisely what form this assistance might take. On August 2 the prime minister put his chief staff officer on alert. “This is no time for conventional establishments, but rather for using whatever fighting elements there are.”
At the moment it was Manoli Bandouvas—the Resistance leader known as Bo-Peep—who commanded the largest fighting element the British could possibly mobilize against the enemy forces on the island. By the estimate Tavana had made in passing, there were currently some forty-five thousand German troops on Crete, staring down thirty-two thousand Italians. Bandouvas claimed he could call up a force of several thousand men at short notice. At best, the andartes would be jumping into a lopsided fight if it came to that. Worse still, Bandouvas’s men were poorly armed in comparison with the Germans. Nonetheless, Bo-Peep had more will to fight than anyone else on the island, and his extravagant patriotism had captured the imagination of his countrymen. Cretans were unfailingly loyal to him, and to Leigh Fermor’s mind he had also earned whatever support the British could give him.
By the middle of August he was making ready for an operation that would significantly boost the firepower of Bandouvas’s band. In the days following their last meeting with Tavana, Leigh Fermor and Minoan Mike had been busy. Operating out of Mike’s house near the Villa Ariadne, they had held a secret meeting with the driver assigned to the German commander, General Müller. Applying a judicious mix of cajolery and out-and-out bribery, they had persuaded the man to drive Leigh Fermor, who was posing as a wealthy sheep merchant, to the area of Bandouvas’s mountain camp, where two of Leigh Fermor’s men were already waiting. The driver had agreed, and all seemed to be settled. On the morning of the twelfth, however, just as the party was preparing to depart, Müller himself arrived at the villa, and the erstwhile sheep merchant was relegated to travel by taxi.
That afternoon the taxi let Leigh Fermor and Manoli Paterakis out at a point below Bo-Peep’s camp where the terrain became impassible to vehicles. For two hours that evening they trudged up into the mountains. When nightfall came, they took shelter in a sheepfold. At first light they climbed on. Three hours later they were nearing the highest ridgeline of the Lasithi mountains. From here the view was endless. Leigh Fermor had paused to survey the province, which looked like a map laid out far below, when a dozen armed toughs appeared. For a moment there was confusion. Then it became clear that these were Bandouvas’s sentries.
Under the protection of this band of guerrillas, the men pushed on and soon reached a stony rise dotted with huts woven from branches and straw, much like the wigwams of the nomadic Sarakatsani shepherds Leigh Fermor had encountered on his trek across Europe in the 1930s. There was a great deal of activity, and as they drew closer, they saw what amounted to an entire makeshift village huddled around an outsized ilex tree. Bandouvas himself was ensconced beneath the tree like an old-time patriarch, sharing a meal with a band of men who numbered somewhere over a hundred. Leigh Fermor was struck by how many types were represented. He recognized a priest and a number of monks. By their uniforms he identified scores of policemen and soldiers. There were also boys still in student caps. Most were Cretan, but there were a handful of other nationalities: mainland Greek, Australian, New Zealander, even one enormous Russian who had escaped from a nearby prison camp. The weapons on display were equally varied, among them a few ancient shotguns and a muzzle loader that belonged in a museum.
A hut had been prepared specially for Leigh Fermor, and he quickly made himself at home. Over the next week he had a chance to observe the day-to-day operation of the encampment. Although Bandouvas was forced to rely on donations from his neighbors in the valley below to keep his men supplied with various staples, his improvised village was nonetheless remarkably self-sufficient. A baker turned out bread every morning. There was a tinker and a tailor. A cobbler and a carpenter were kept busy. The most striking thing was that life, even under these rough-and-ready conditions, simply went on. One day a pair of proud parents carried their baby to Bandouvas to be baptized. The kapetan and Leigh Fermor performed the rite together, making them, as Paddy put it, “godmothers.” The name the parents chose for the child was as unlikely as Bo-Peep’s makeshift village. “The poor thing was christened Anglia Epanastasis,” Paddy recalled. It meant “England Revolution.”
AS THE SUMMER wore on, Bandouvas grew preoccupied with eradicating traitors. Two men accused of collaborating with the enemy were put through summary trials and executed while Paddy was staying at the camp. Bandouvas had lost count of how many turncoats his men had put to death, but Paddy estimated that fifteen or so had been “liquidated” in Heraklion province that month. And that was not the last of it. “Three ‘rubbings out’ were pending in Babylon,” he reported to headquarters, using the code word for Heraklion. It was a brutal enterprise involving ambushes, stranglings, bodies dumped in ditches. Leigh Fermor’s radioman, Harry Brooke, had been forced to intervene on one occasion, when the sound of screaming led him to a macabre scene in which a group of Bandouvas’s men were torturing a man hanging by his legs from a tree. The accused traitor was taken down and later tried and executed in a more conventional manner.
While Bandouvas went about this gory war on collaborators, Leigh Fermor made ready for a parachute drop scheduled for August. Among other supplies it would contain equipment that would help give the andarte band a fighting chance against the Germans. An ideal location for a drop lay just a three-hour march away on a level stretch of the Lasithi plateau that had been given the unlikely code name “Sodom.” It was near enough to Bandouvas’s lair to permit his men to assist with the mission.
In the past Bandouvas had not always minded his manners under similar circumstances. Tom Dunbabin still had a bad taste in his mouth from an incident that had occurred after a supply drop he supervised in October 1942. The operation had been planned for the twenty-fourth, but, as often happened, it had been repeatedly delayed. After three disappointing nights waiting for a plane that never showed, everything had finally clicked on the twenty-seventh. Bandouvas and a number of his men had been present that night, ostensibly to provide security. But it soon became clear that he had another purpose in mind. Once the parachutes had settled to the ground, he became agitated, claiming that the entire stock of weapons was meant for his band. Dunbabin’s men, he alleged, were planning to steal the arms and sell them on the black market.
Words flew back and forth, and soon Bandouvas and Dunbabin were embroiled in a heated argument. For a while Dunbabin, whose flair for Greek invective never failed to impress his Cretan friends, held his own. But the disagreement escalated until finally Bandouvas brandished his rifle, leveled it on Dunbabin, and barked an order to his men to “take up positions.” The two groups remained locked in a standoff when Leigh Fermor arrived at the drop zone some time later. Fortunately he was able to defuse the situation with no shots fired. In the end, however, sixteen revolvers and a handful of other items were found to be missing from the stores included in the drop. These later turned up in a nearby village, where they had been sold. A number of local shepherds helped Dunbabin recover several of the missing items. It was clear that they were also growing wary of the unbridled sway Bandouvas had accrued. They offered Dunbabin a hundred rifles if he elected to march into the mountains and “clean up” Bo-Peep’s rebel band.
Leigh Fermor felt that Dunbabin’s trouble with Bandouvas had been brought about by the meddling of other Resistance leaders. During his stay at the village, he had talked with the old andarte at length about the responsibilities that came with leadership. Bandouvas, for all his independent spirit, was eager to have his band viewed as a unit
of the British army, and he seemed receptive to what this British officer had to say.
When the night of the scheduled drop rolled around on August 20, Leigh Fermor and Bandouvas set out from camp with Manoli Paterakis at the head of a large party of Bandouvas’s andartes. The patrol made its way toward the plateau on the south flank of Mount Dikti, above Kato Symi, some three hours away. The sun set around a quarter to nine that evening, and it was under cover of darkness that the men slipped onto the plateau.
Bandouvas had marshaled a force of some four hundred men for the occasion. And he now directed his troops to form a perimeter around the drop zone. Soon the scrubby terrain of the plateau bristled with rifles. Any German patrol stumbling into the area on this night would undoubtedly get more than it had bargained for. Inside the ring of sentries, Leigh Fermor and Manoli prepared brush for signal fires and settled in to wait for the arrival of the RAF. As usual on missions of this kind, the hours seemed to creep by. When an aircraft engine was at last heard overhead, a number of Bandouvas’s men squeezed off rounds of rifle fire in celebration, lending a carnival atmosphere to the proceedings.
From the coded transmission Harry Brooke had picked up earlier in the week, Leigh Fermor knew that the supply mission was being flown by Cyril Fortune, from the 148th Squadron operating out of the base at Tocra on the Libyan coast. Now he watched with admiration as the skilled pilot brought his modified Halifax bomber in as low as possible over the triangle of signal fires. Paddy motioned to Manoli, then watched as he “joyfully” launched a clutch of flares into the night sky. All of a sudden the Halifax banked over the plateau and the pilot rocked the plane’s wings in reply. Sergeant Fortune had seen them.
Soon the party on the ground could discern the outlines of parachutes drifting downward through the dome of light cast by the signal fires. Fortune was right on target. All of the containers settled to the ground within a circle not more than three hundred yards across. One chute failed to open, sending a container smashing to earth with enough force to demolish the rifles inside. But everything else was in perfect condition. Leigh Fermor first ordered the heavier crates unpacked on the spot. The contents of these he cataloged and had packed onto mules. Back at Bandouvas’s camp he unpacked the smaller containers and oversaw the distribution of the supplies they contained. Bandouvas’s ragtag gang was suddenly outfitted like an army. “Large numbers are now in bush shirts, with cap-comforters on their heads, belts and bayonets, and look very well,” Leigh Fermor noted. More was needed—in particular, cold-weather gear for the coming winter—but the drop marked a triumphant step forward. Everyone was elated. Harry Brooke heard someone call out, “Long live Paddy!” Shouts of “Long live England!” also rose from the rough-looking crowd surrounding Bandouvas. “It was like Bo-Peep’s birthday,” Leigh Fermor reported to headquarters; “the whole affair was the best bit of propaganda in Crete so far.”
Since his arrival on Crete, Leigh Fermor had watched supply drops go wrong time after time. More often than not, containers were damaged or lost, or they were pilfered long before the ground team could reach them. This time the combination of skilled pilot and well-chosen location had made for a tactical bonanza. “The memorial silver dagger with Sgt. Fortune’s name on has already been ordered,” he told Cairo.
The flawless parachute drop also planted an idea in his head that would soon prove momentous. “Sodom is an ideal dropping point for personnel,” he concluded. “I warmly recommend it in preference to any other area.”
IN THE LAST week of August, Leigh Fermor sent Minoan Mike back to Neapolis with two letters, one addressed to Tavana, the other to General Carta himself. His message to Carta went over much the same ground he and Tavana had covered in their meeting at the surgery clinic in Heraklion, but this one was cast in language gauged to appeal to the general in particular.
His conversations with Tavana had left Leigh Fermor with a clear sense of Carta as a man. The general was the product of an older Europe, the fading world of monarchy and aristocratic privilege that Paddy had come to know firsthand in the course of his travels before the war. Carta was a “palace man” on friendly terms with the royal family. He had never been seduced by the Fascist movement in Italy, and his view of Hitler’s Germany was a matter of dread and loathing. There was reason to think him vain. Plump and short, with grizzled hair, he was nonetheless something of a ladies’ man. He sported a monocle and had developed a reputation in Lasithi as a smooth operator. Lately he had taken up with a married woman from Corfu, and he frequently spent nights away from his billet in Neapolis.
He was no doubt vulnerable to flattery, which Leigh Fermor, a natural charmer, knew how to dole out when the circumstances called for it. His letter to Carta laid it on thick. “Mon general,” it began. “What an honor it is to communicate with your Excellence.” The letter went on to say that Leigh Fermor’s superiors in Cairo were grateful for the civility and restraint the general had shown in his command of the occupation force in Lasithi.
Minoan Mike carried the two letters to Neapolis, where Tavana put him up for the night in his own house. That evening the lieutenant went to dinner with Carta and delivered Leigh Fermor’s fawning letter to the general. When he returned home, he tuned the radio to a news broadcast from London. Then he and Mike listened to the radio and talked until morning. The next day Mike returned to Leigh Fermor’s lair with Tavana’s reply.
“My dear friend,” his letter began, in French. “Permit me to call you ‘friend.’ I very much wish to see and speak with you. Wherever you would like, and whenever you want. It’s preferable in the mountains.” He proposed Tzermiado, high on the Lasithi plateau, as a likely spot. Tavana then went on to warn that a bundle of Leigh Fermor’s letters to one of his agents had fallen into German hands.
Paddy knew the ones he meant. They must have been discovered among the effects of a man who had been shot in a recent skirmish near Psilorítis. It was a potential security breach. But the Germans already knew his name and the look of his handwriting. He had heard that they even possessed a photo of him, but since it had been taken in Cairo, he thought, it “is very unlike my present appearance, whiskered and lined from fourteen months of Crete.” He felt confident that the intercepted letters would reveal nothing useful.
More important, at the moment, was the letter he had sent to Carta. Tavana set his mind at ease about this. “He has acknowledged receipt of your letter,” he wrote. “He thanks you very much.” Leigh Fermor felt this marked the first solid step toward a meeting with Carta himself. Meanwhile, Tavana indicated that other developments were afoot. “I have many things to tell you personally,” he wrote.
In closing, the lieutenant offered to send cigars and anything else his British friend might need. He would be happy to be of use, he said. Leigh Fermor imagined that Tavana would eventually provide something more useful than cigars, but he took him up on the offer anyway. (“The cigars were excellent—Flor Fina,” he would later report to headquarters, asking in the same message that a box of Coronas be sent by way of the next boat. “It’s bad for any morale to rely entirely on the enemy for these comforts.”)
“Please excuse my scrawl,” Tavana’s letter concluded. “See you soon, without goodbye.”
IN THE FIRST week of September someone took potshots at a German staff car as it motored along the Viannos road. Soon after the incident, a fine of one million drachmas was levied against the five villages that lay nearby. Even in the drastically inflated currency this was a great deal of money. Two of the villages were unable to raise the sum. In each case a donkey was accepted as payment in kind.
Leigh Fermor, meanwhile, was laid up in a mountain sheepfold in a state of utter distress. His legs were covered with painful boils and other assorted lesions that made it difficult to walk at all and, for all practical purposes, impossible to travel in the mountains. If the boils were not enough to plague him, Bo-Peep was also back in his usual humor and making demands. Following the euphoria that had accompanied the
successful supply drop in August, Bandouvas had taken a critical look at the state of his equipment as a whole. Now he had come to the conclusion that his band needed better access to news broadcasts. He sent Leigh Fermor a letter pressing him to inform Cairo that the Resistance urgently required a dynamo to charge their wireless batteries. Bandouvas helpfully proposed that the device might be sent with Tom Dunbabin on the next boat. This suggestion introduced a new problem for Leigh Fermor to contend with, since Bandouvas should have had no knowledge of Dunbabin’s planned arrival.
Information about the comings and goings of SOE officers was generally kept from the andartes until the moment when they were called upon to assist with the actual landing. Bo-Peep’s remark was an unsettling sign of lax security somewhere along the line. Nonetheless, Leigh Fermor passed the request on to Cairo, along with a few appeals of his own. He asked for cash and arms. He was also running low on other vital war matériel: whiskey, cigarettes, cigars, and books.
By the end of the week he rallied himself sufficiently to join his radioman, Harry Brooke, at their newly established wireless station located above the Kastelli airfield, outside Heraklion, where a deluge was added to the ongoing plague of boils. In order to put the transmitter close to the unfolding action in Lasithi, as well as the boat landings on the south coast, Leigh Fermor had been forced to direct Brooke to a spot that offered almost no protection and little in the way of succor from the locals. It was a barren outcrop on the western slopes of the Lasithi mountains. No sooner had Leigh Fermor arrived there than the skies opened up and released a veritable torrent of rain. For thirty-six hours straight it beat down on them. Again and again Brooke powered up the transmitter and tried to make contact with Cairo. But there was nothing doing. It was hard enough just keeping the set from being destroyed by the rainwater that quickly penetrated everything in sight.