by Wes Davis
Finally, on September 7, Brooke picked up a signal from Cairo warning that a major development was pending in the Italian situation. The next morning a follow-up message crackled across the sodden airwaves. The Italian government had officially declared an armistice. Shortly after the arrival of the message, a shepherd appeared at the shelter with local news. The man, who looked agitated, said the Germans had stormed a nearby Italian post at dawn and stripped the Italians of their weapons. Leigh Fermor could only assume that the same thing was taking place throughout Lasithi. That or the Italians had begun fighting back. He knew that any chance of the Italians handing over their arms to the andartes was fading quickly. There was no time to waste.
Leigh Fermor immediately dispatched a runner to Tavana’s house and another to Bandouvas’s mountaintop headquarters. He would have to speak with Tavana right away. Meanwhile, it was crucial to put a damper on any aggressive plans Bandouvas might be hatching … at least for now.
That night Minoan Mike turned up at the hideout accompanied by an exhausted Italian soldier. At Tavana’s request, the two of them had lugged a consignment of weapons up the mountainside. Mike also brought word that Tavana had arranged for a car to be left for Leigh Fermor on the plain below. The next day, while Harry Brooke combed the radio dial for instructions from headquarters, Tom Dunbabin arrived at the hideout with one of his men, following a strenuous march up from Tsoutsouros, on the south coast, where Dunbabin’s boat had landed. Close on their heels came a letter from Bandouvas that had obviously been scrawled in haste. Unable to decipher Bandouvas’s handwriting, Leigh Fermor handed the message to Mike to see if he could make it out. At this point, Dunbabin, worried that the matter might be sensitive, asked quietly whether the young man could be trusted. He was delighted to learn that Mike was the son of Arthur Evans’s former overseer, Pendlebury’s own right-hand man.
As Minoan Mike read the message aloud, it became clear to everyone present that Bandouvas believed the British were preparing an all-out invasion of the island. Dunbabin’s face fell when he heard this. Fresh from Cairo, he understood more clearly than anyone else present what trouble might be in store. In the months leading up to the armistice, headquarters had led Paddy to believe that an Allied invasion of the island was a possibility, particularly in the event of an Italian uprising. But now, with the invasion of Sicily under way, Crete was a low-priority front. If Bandouvas and his men set off a new Battle of Crete, there would be no proverbial cavalry riding to the rescue.
Leigh Fermor and Minoan Mike hurriedly scrambled down the mountain and located the car Tavana had sent. As they motored toward Neapolis, they met Tavana coming the other direction in Carta’s staff car. He was frantic with worry that something had gone wrong. Leigh Fermor, accustomed as he was to seeing the lieutenant in civilian clothes, noted the striking uniform his friend had donned in the wake of the armistice announcement—“He was dressed in a most dashing Alpine uniform with spurs and plumes and a phenomenal number of medal ribbons.” Tavana wheeled his car around and Paddy jumped in. They reached Neapolis in time for dinner.
NEWS OF THE Italian surrender affected Tavana like a shot of adrenaline. Over a dinner of excellent food and free-flowing Chianti, the Italian rattled off plans for resisting the German attack he now believed to be imminent. He had already burned his security files, so there would be no records on hand that might assist a German takeover of the region. When this was done, he had made contact with a number of his fellow officers and urged them to resist any attempt on the part of the Germans to disarm the Italian garrison. One friend, a colonel who commanded the artillery installation at Kritsa, in the hills above the Bay of Mirabello on the north coast, was especially receptive and planned to sabotage his battery’s guns, rather than relinquish them to the Germans. Like Bandouvas, Tavana assumed that British help was on the way, and this was the selling point of his persuasive campaign. Listening to the Italian’s excited scheming, Leigh Fermor felt a wave of guilt wash over him. “This was the result of my former line of talk,” he believed, “and I felt like several different kinds of swine for having led them up the garden path.”
The situation, he tried to explain, had changed. With Allied forces now committed in Sicily, an invasion of Crete was not on the immediate horizon. Tavana was savvy enough to recognize what this meant. There was no way the Italians could hold out indefinitely against the larger German force. Leigh Fermor now suggested that the best course was a measured transfer of small arms from the Italian garrison to the andartes. Tavana slowly absorbed the news before speaking. An out-and-out handover of weapons would be impossible, he said at last, but he remained determined to do what he could to help his British friend, in secret if necessary.
Later that evening, Tavana slipped out and made his way past the Gestapo patrols that now roamed the town. He went to General Carta’s house and there persuaded his commander to meet with Leigh Fermor in person. Back at Tavana’s house, Paddy was finally introduced to Ravioli, who looked exactly as his conversations with Tavana had led him to expect. “He is plump, rosy, urbane and very agreeable,” he thought.
That evening Leigh Fermor gathered a clearer sense of how the Germans were reacting to the armistice. Carta revealed that General Müller had visited him again the previous day and demanded the handover of all Italian arms. When Carta refused, Müller had continued to badger him, first insisting on complete disarmament, then proposing to break up Carta’s Siena Division and disperse his soldiers across the island’s other three regional districts. These negotiations went on for eight tense hours but reached no conclusion. In the wake of this meeting, Müller had begun disarming key Italian units and papering the Lasithi region with leaflets urging Italian soldiers to honor “their old comradeship of arms.” But the German commander had so far stopped short of using force.
This might well change, Leigh Fermor believed, if the Italians were found to be transferring their arms to the Cretans, especially after Carta had insisted so adamantly on retaining them. They would have to play for time. It was agreed that Carta should meet with Müller again, this time taking the same line as the German’s own leaflet campaign. The Italians would pledge to stand by their former allies, provided Müller allowed them to retain their arms, including artillery and other heavy weapons, as a show of his good faith.
After the general left, Leigh Fermor and Tavana continued to mull the situation over. By daybreak they had come up with a plan to smuggle surplus arms out of the Italian munitions dumps by car. Since German soldiers now guarded the majority of the depots, this would be a delicate operation.
GENERAL CARTA MET with his German counterpart the next day. His new proposal, however, hit a stone wall. Over the intervening days, Müller had hardened his stance, and he now demanded disarmament. Carta attempted to negotiate, asking on what authority Müller had recently disarmed Italian units at Ierápetra and elsewhere. An excuse was offered, but there was no question that the German was now running short of patience, and he cared little to justify his actions. This time Müller departed without a handshake.
On September 12 Müller issued an order that made it clear he had no intention of allowing Carta to maintain control of the artillery batteries in Lasithi. It offered Italian soldiers three choices—they could pledge loyalty to the displaced Fascist regime and retain only their personal weapons, they could be assigned to work camps, or they could be imprisoned. It soon became evident that the order was merely a formality, in any case. Müller’s soldiers had already begun seizing Italian arms throughout Lasithi. At Sitia on the eastern tip of the island, they ran into resistance, and the garrison there had disappeared into the mountains. The colonel in command of the battery at Kritsa, Tavana’s friend, had gone through with his threat and spiked the battery’s guns before the Germans could reach them. He had already been imprisoned and could expect still worse treatment. In the end it was only the last point of Müller’s order that mattered: Anyone caught destroying or trafficking in Italian weapons w
ould be shot. The same went for Italians who chose to desert their units.
Although Müller’s reaction was disappointing, Carta’s second round of negotiation had bought a few crucial days. Working at night, with the help of one trusted orderly, Tavana had managed in this time to smuggle some two hundred rifles from the munitions dumps. He had also trucked out a good deal of ammunition and grenades, as well as a number of machine guns and two mortars.
Neapolis was now crawling with German soldiers and units of the secret police. Leigh Fermor was more or less confined to Tavana’s house, where he had taken up residence. He had Manoli Paterakis making regular trips to the hardscrabble wireless station in the mountains above the Kastelli airfield, where a forlorn Harry Brooke was kept constantly busy signaling the latest developments back and forth between Crete and Cairo.
In the second week of September, Leigh Fermor was alone at Tavana’s house when a German detachment came looking for the lieutenant. He slipped under the bed without being seen but spent “an uncomfortable half hour” in hiding, “clutching my revolver, and swallowing pounds of fluff and cobwebs.”
By the fourteenth, Neapolis had become too hot for him to stay put there. He hitched a ride out of town and holed up at a safe house on the road to the Lasithi plain. There he met up with Tom Dunbabin, and together they decided that there was little to be done beyond arranging an evacuation plan for General Carta and key members of his staff. Leigh Fermor sent yet another urgent letter to Tavana explaining the situation and imploring him to gather whatever intelligence he could find about defenses in the Lasithi area.
The next morning Minoan Mike woke him with the news that Tavana was waiting just outside the village. Rising quickly, Leigh Fermor hurried out to meet him. “I found him beaming under a plane tree with a whole satchelful of documents,” he told Cairo. Tavana, it seemed, had gotten his hands on documents that laid out the entire defensive organization of the province. There was even a map pinpointing the areas most vulnerable to Allied attack.
Among the most fascinating items was a German account of the Battle of Crete and the early days of the occupation. This revealed that the enemy had formed only a haphazard, almost comical, picture of SOE activities on the island. It mentioned that on one occasion “arms had been landed by parachute” and that four British agents who came ashore the previous winter “have not yet been captured.” The document also included a string of reports on “punitive” operations conducted by the German occupation force. These might well amount to a confession of war crimes, Leigh Fermor had reason to suspect. In their defense, the Germans leveled allegations against the populace, claiming that wounded German soldiers had been systematically “assassinated,” that bodies had been mutilated, and that in one horrific case in Heraklion a German soldier had been left crucified to a door. Altogether the leather satchel Tavana handed over contained so much critical information that Leigh Fermor was almost wary of handling it. “I took it back to the village feeling it might go off bang on the way.”
The days following the armistice had been full of “fuss and anxiety,” he felt, but the trove of documents would prove well worth the effort. This aspect of the affair had gone so well that he felt entitled to claim a souvenir of the occasion. “I wish to make it formally known that the satchel itself is my particular bit of Cretan plunder,” he wrote at the end of his report to Cairo; “please hang on to it for me.” He also cautioned headquarters against opening the satchel in General Carta’s presence. Lieutenant Tavana had been much freer with the Italian garrison’s secrets than his commander realized.
WHILE LEIGH FERMOR and Tavana nervously watched the developments in Neapolis, the feared clash with the Germans was already getting under way in the mountains to the southwest. Bo-Peep, it seemed, had started his own little war. Before Leigh Fermor was summoned to Neapolis, he had instructed Bandouvas to be prepared to take charge of Italian arms on short notice. The kapetan had then mobilized a force of two hundred men and put another hundred on alert, all the while scheming to draw a much larger force when the shooting started. Not long after word of the armistice reached him, he decided that his hour had come.
Charging down from his mountaintop hideout, he first pounced on a small detachment of German soldiers who were out gathering potatoes. Two of these were killed and their bodies dumped in a ravine. Bandouvas then rampaged though the Viannos district, attacking the German garrison at Ano Viannos, the county seat, and wiping it out before doing the same at a nearby installation on the south coast. His men next swept through villages to the east, eventually making their way to Males, a dozen miles from Ierápetra, where they disarmed the Italian outpost.
At this point Tom Dunbabin got wind of what was happening and issued immediate orders to stand down and await further instructions. Before the message reached him, however, Bandouvas struck again.
Two German companies had been sent out to look for him. At Ano Viannos the patrol split into three columns. One of these was in nearby Kato Symi on the twelfth, when Bandouvas passed back that way. His men engaged the German column and drove it into a gully, where, as Dunbabin heard it, they killed or captured every last man.
When word of the clash reached Leigh Fermor, he knew there would be trouble. And he was right. On the thirteenth General Müller issued retaliation orders, and his threats came thundering home on September 15, when a force of two thousand German soldiers swept from various directions into the counties of Viannos and Ierápetra, destroying everything in their path. More than a dozen villages were raided and at least seven were burned, including Kato Symi, which had been abandoned by residents who knew Bandouvas’s ambush there would draw reprisals. Taken all together, it looked as if somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred villagers had been murdered. The dead, it was reported, included men, women, and children, ranging in age from two to eighty. In one village all but seven inhabitants had been killed. On top of the casualties, another 850 civilians had been taken hostage. That would not be the end of it, either. The Germans had driven off the villagers’ livestock and burned their fodder, which meant there would be more devastation from hunger as winter came on.
WITH DETAILS FROM Viannos still trickling in, Leigh Fermor saw that time had run out for Carta and Tavana. He now presented the general with just two remaining options. The Italians could elect to fight, or Carta and a handful of his officers could flee with him into the mountains, and from there to the south coast and, eventually, Cairo. The general, it turned out, was ready to go.
On the afternoon of the sixteenth, Carta and Tavana left Neapolis by car, bound, they put it about, for Sitia, on the far eastern tip of the island. They were accompanied by Carta’s operations officer, one Captain Grossi, and his aide-de-camp, a captain named Ludovici. Tavana had also arranged for a final truckload of arms to follow. At Leigh Fermor’s suggestion, he had recruited a number of friends who were remaining behind to serve as a spy network. Once clear of Neapolis, Carta’s party got out of the car and turned on foot across the Lasithi plain toward the mountains. The driver then took the car on to Sitia, where, with the general’s identification pennant clearly visible, it was abandoned, a red herring for Germans who might be in pursuit. Leigh Fermor and Manoli Paterakis met the general and his party at a village in the foothills just west of the Lasithi border.
From there they made for Mount Dikti. Near the village of Magoulas, some twenty-five miles southwest of Neapolis, they entered a pass that would carry them farther southwest across the mountain range toward Tsoutsouros, on the south coast. Although the going was hard, morale remained high. Whenever the party stopped, Carta produced a water bottle filled with triple sec and handed it around. The general was in an ebullient mood. While the men rested, he “regaled” his British guide “with lively anecdotes about the high life in Rome and Paris.” Carta also possessed a rich repertoire of gossip about the German generals who had been his allies. Leigh Fermor was impressed by the little man’s verve and swagger. “He went with a great sw
ing everywhere,” he thought.
They spent the next day ducking German reconnaissance aircraft. The unwieldy Fieseler Storch planes circled low over the mountains searching for signs of the general’s party. On one pass a plane dropped a bundle of leaflets. “They landed right at our feet,” Leigh Fermor recalled. The freshly printed flyers bore a message reproduced in German, Greek, and Italian: “The Italian General Carta, together with some of his officers, has fled to the mountains, probably with the intention of escaping from the island. For his capture, dead or alive, is offered a reward of THIRTY MILLION DRACHMA. Those who take part in his capture or give any assistance thereto will further receive a full pardon for any crime they may have committed.” Even in the wildly inflated Greek currency it was a staggering sum. “Carta,” Paddy noticed, “was very amused.”
On the twenty-first, German detachments entered a string of villages lying between Magoulas and nearby Agios Georgios. Somehow they had picked up the right trail and were closing in on the area where the fugitives had disappeared into the Dikti range. But they were too late. By the twenty-third, General Carta’s group had reached the cave above Tsoutsouros, where they would await the arrival of the motor launch. There they were joined by Tom Dunbabin and, to Leigh Fermor’s astonishment, Bandouvas, with twenty-one of his men in tow.