by Wes Davis
Moss and Leigh Fermor (seated, center front) and their team with Athanasios Bourdzalis and his andartes. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66051)
George Tyrakis, Antoni Papaleonidas (“Wallace Beery”), Manoli Paterakis. Photograph © The Estate of William Stanley Moss—reproduced by permission
The abduction team. Standing, left to right: Stratis Saviolakis, Manoli Paterakis, Antoni Papaleonidas (“Wallace Beery”), George Tyrakis, Nikos Komis. Seated: Grigori Chnarakis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Stanley Moss. Photograph © The Estate of William Stanley Moss—reproduced by permission
Moss (left) and Leigh Fermor disguised as German soldiers. Photograph © The Estate of William Stanley Moss—reproduced by permission
Moss and Leigh Fermor with their prisoner, General Heinrich Kreipe (center). Photograph © The Estate of William Stanley Moss—reproduced by permission
General Kreipe arrives in Cairo. Photograph © The Estate of William Stanley Moss—reproduced by permission
8
Moonstruck
BY FEBRUARY 4 the four men were airborne again. And this time it was the real thing. Around a quarter past nine that night, Paddy sat perched on the edge of the jump hole cut into the fuselage of a Halifax bomber. They had been in the air nearly four hours. In the cockpit, Warrant Officer Cyril J. Fortune, whose flying Leigh Fermor had admired when he dropped supplies to Bo-Peep and his men the previous fall, shifted the controls and banked the bomber into a sweeping turn above the Katharo plateau.
Despite heavy cloud cover that was rapidly closing in above the plateau, Fortune had homed in on the coordinates chosen for the drop—N 35°08′30″, E 25°33′56?—and managed to spot the ground crew’s signal fires. He warned Leigh Fermor that the weather would force him to make the drop from a dangerously low altitude. Now he was bringing the Halifax in for a jump run. Peering down through the hole, Paddy soon caught a glimpse of a triangle formed by pinpoints of light in the darkness below. Just at that moment, the bomb aimer signaled go. He lifted his weight off the metal floor of the fuselage and, without giving himself time to think, slipped through the opening.
Moss, who had been anticipating this moment in one way or another for weeks, was surprised at the jolt of feeling that shot through him when Leigh Fermor’s jumpsuited form disappeared into the blackness. Since leaving Cairo he had been telling himself that this was a good war. “Perhaps I have been lucky and had the best of it,” he had reflected. Now he felt the reality of war striking home in a new way. Seeing his friend sitting there and then … not sitting there … shocked Moss. What it reminded him of was an episode he had witnessed in Poland before the war, when he had heard buglers blowing a call for each hour. “And the call stopped right in the middle of a phrase, it seemed—right in the middle of a note,” he recalled.
The story he had heard about this strange practice said that when the Tatar army was advancing on Kraków in the thirteenth century, a bugler had climbed to a turret in order to sound a warning call. The poor fellow succeeded in alerting the townspeople, but his call was cut short by a Tatar arrow. The latter-day buglers kept his memory alive by halting their own calls “abruptly, just as the call had died on his lips those long years ago.” It was this story that stirred in Moss’s memory when Paddy slipped through the drop door of the Halifax. “It was as sudden as death,” he thought.
Moss felt the Halifax banking again, and he knew it would soon be his turn to take that same sudden leap into the darkness. But the moment never came. By the time Fortune brought the plane around again, the ground was completely concealed by clouds. The Halifax continued to circle for nearly half an hour. Then, at 9:46, Fortune gave up and turned toward the Greek mainland, where earlier in the evening he had attempted to drop supplies for an unrelated SOE operation.
Some two hours later the Halifax reached the mountainous area near the small village of Triklino, in northwestern Greece, where the drop was expected. But the weather here was no better than it had been on Crete. After quickly surveying the deteriorating conditions, Fortune dropped one wing and turned the plane for home. Quick as his decision had been, however, it came nearly too late.
Cruising at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet, the Halifax soon began to ice over. Fortune sacrificed altitude in an attempt to find warmer air, but rime continued to form on the wings, and soon the plane was losing altitude no matter what he did. It was not until they had descended to four thousand feet that the problem abated. But at this point a break in the clouds revealed a mountainside looming terrifyingly large in the Halifax’s windscreen. There was little time to react before the bomber and its passengers became a permanent part of the local landscape.
THE DIRE SITUATION was not unfamiliar to Fortune. Piloting another Halifax the previous December, he had wound up in a similar situation, midway through a flight so full of mishaps it was almost comical. The weather on that occasion had been as bad as it was now, and Fortune’s plane had “hit a colossal bump” while he was busy changing places with the second pilot. The blast of unexpected turbulence flipped the Halifax over on its back, hurling both men out of the cockpit. Fortune wound up lying on the “roof” with the rest of the crew. With the plane “turned turtle” like this, it began losing altitude at a gut-twisting rate. All of a sudden its load of incendiary bombs tumbled from the box they were held in and burst into flames, igniting the cargo and parts of the fuselage.
While other members of the crew struggled to put out the blaze, Fortune managed to get hold of the plane’s control column. Still standing on the roof, he heaved back on the yoke to slow the rate of descent. But since the Halifax was upside down, the controls were reversed and his attempt to maneuver the plane sent it screaming still faster toward the ground. The aircraft lost some five thousand feet of altitude before Fortune finally wrestled the ailerons into position to roll it right side up again. As he leveled the plane off at four thousand feet, however, he discovered that it had dropped into a valley surrounded by mountains that peaked out around eight thousand feet. There was nothing to do but give the Rolls-Royce engines full throttle, sending the Halifax roaring into a steep climb that just cleared the surrounding peaks. That wasn’t the end of Fortune’s trouble. When the plane finally touched down on the runway of the aerodrome, its tail caught a strong crosswind and swung hard to starboard. When Fortune gunned the portside engines to arrest the slide, he found there was not enough fuel remaining to supply the power he needed. The plane careened off the runway and slammed into a Spitfire fighter plane parked nearby. The Halifax, as if intent on finishing what it had started earlier, flipped over and burned out, taking the Spitfire with it. Fortune and the crew managed to get out safely, the only casualty a cut to the wireless operator’s face.
THIS TIME, AS Moss and the two Greeks held their breath, Fortune wrenched the bomber into a sickening climb that just barely carried them over the lip of the ridgeline. An hour later, they were touching down at Brindisi, where the mission had begun some eight hours earlier. In that brief window of time much had changed. Paddy was now on his own, somewhere in the mountains of Crete.
As Moss climbed down from the Halifax, he was left wondering what to do next. Since leaving Cairo, it had taken nearly a month to put one member of their party on the ground in Crete. He did not see how he, Manoli, and George would ever get there.
THE EVENING OF January 6, a month earlier, had found Leigh Fermor and Moss, fresh from Cairo, drinking and trading stories with an American commando in the officers’ mess at Tocra, a ramshackle RAF base in northeastern Libya. The flight from Cairo had been long and uneventful. There had been a hasty stop at an air base near Tobruk, where they had nipped off the plane and ordered coffee, only to be rushed back aboard before they had time to drink it. By lunchtime they had landed in rain at the Benina airfield outside Benghazi and were busy loading their baggage onto a truck for a slow, muddy drive forty-five miles back the way they had come to reach Tocra, which perched midway along the thumb Libya projected out into th
e Mediterranean, east of Benghazi. At last they stopped at a cluster of tents and temporary buildings that would be home until they dropped into Crete. And now here they were.
Outside, the mud-red sand and lowering black clouds made for dismal surroundings, and at first Moss had been equally depressed by the atmosphere at the mess bar, which felt like a parody of an English pub, with a darts match under way and a clientele inclined to tag “old boy” onto the end of every utterance. The American they talked with in the bar, however, turned out to be an interesting fellow who was waiting to be dropped into Greece. The three men talked and laughed happily until they ambled off to their tents at eleven o’clock. It was twelve hours later when Leigh Fermor and Moss finally stirred themselves awake. They passed the next evening in much the same way and fell asleep with their throats sore from singing.
Over the next several days they could occasionally hear aircraft taking off nearby, but the foul weather had suspended any operations involving passengers. With nothing to do but wait, the two men quickly established a routine. They persuaded an orderly—a one-pound inducement was all it took—to deliver their breakfasts to them in bed, where they usually stayed until lunchtime. Moss spent the time reading and writing in his diary. Leigh Fermor was knee deep in A Farewell to Arms, which Moss had read a few years earlier, and they laughed about Hemingway’s habit of focusing obsessively on the small, often unappealing details of the scenes he described. “Sometimes he finds something a little better, such as copulation in a sleeping bag, on which to harp,” Moss pointed out, “and that is more tolerable.” For a while they amused themselves by composing parodies of Hemingway’s style, but they soon gave it up as too easy.
One morning they went to the supply depot and drew what clothing and gear they lacked. Moss acquired a white duffle coat that made him impervious to Tocra’s damp, cold evenings. Later they sorted through the luggage they had brought from home, and both were surprised when a hard rubber ball belonging to Pixie rolled out. Even Leigh Fermor, not Pixie’s greatest admirer, was touched by this unexpected souvenir of life at Tara. They spent another enjoyable afternoon on the seashore, trying out the weapons they had brought. It was a pleasure to blast away at nothing. All the guns worked beautifully, and they were especially impressed with the Marlin submachine guns.
They were still in bed just before lunch on the ninth, when another conducting officer turned up at the tent and warned them that they should be ready to depart on a flight leaving that night. They hastily began packing their equipment into the cylindrical containers that had been provided for the drop. As they scrambled to fit everything in, they decided to add one item just for luck: Pixie’s rubber ball. Their packing had not made much headway when the officer returned an hour later to say that the flight was canceled due to bad weather.
The friendly American they had met in the bar did manage to take off on his way to Greece that evening, but he was back by morning. On the following day he went again. Moss and Leigh Fermor heard that this time he had made it into Greece. But he had been forced to jump blind through a layer of clouds that obscured the drop zone—or the supposed drop zone, since the pilot was unable to confirm their location—when the colonel he was going in with elected to risk it.
For the most part, however, none of the men waiting to hitch rides with the RAF made it off the airfield. By January 12 there had been no improvement in the weather. “It has rained a great deal during the past few days—it’s raining like hell now, and everything is muddy and horrible,” Moss wrote in his diary. “The weather in Crete must be absolute hell if this is anything to go by.” He was right. Cairo relayed a report from the field to the effect that conditions at the drop site were terrible. It was beginning to look as if the airdrop would be scrubbed entirely. Another message arrived two days later, but it settled nothing. The rain held day after day, and time continued to creep by. They drank in the tent most afternoons. In the evenings they drank liqueurs in the officers’ mess until the bar opened, and then they drank there. As the days wore on, they drifted from making fun of Hemingway to making fun of Graham Greene.
In fact, Moss changed his mind about Hemingway after rereading A Farewell to Arms. The sad last half of the book touched him deeply now, and he longed to go back to Switzerland, which he felt Hemingway had described so sweetly. On January 14, still feeling nostalgic and perhaps thinking of Sophie, he inscribed in his diary the sixteenth-century poem Hemingway’s hero recalls in the midst of a retreat, when he is trying to sleep under miserable conditions and suddenly pictures the woman he loves at home in her bed. “Western wind, when wilt thou blow / The small rain down can rain?” the poem went. “Christ, that my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!” It would be a while before Moss returned to his own bed or to Sophie’s arms. For now he was stuck with nothing but the rain.
Manoli and George often dropped in for a visit and sometimes whiled away a whole day in the tent talking with Leigh Fermor, who was the only other Greek speaker left in camp once the American departed for the mainland. Moss felt for them, since they had even less to keep them occupied during the interminable wait than he and Paddy did. They had no books to read and passed the time playing cards. Yet they were always cheerful, and Moss enjoyed their company, though he could not follow their conversation and relied on Leigh Fermor to pass along any interesting stories. One day Manoli arrived at the tent wearing a grin that looked to Moss “like a slice of water-melon.” Unable to conceal his pride, he coaxed them outside to look at the four cows he and George had rustled from the herd of a local tribesman. Paddy had mentioned some time earlier that Manoli came from a part of Crete where stealing livestock was the rule rather than the exception. In his world letting a perfectly good animal stray back to its owner was cause for shame. Here, on the hoof, was all the evidence Moss could ask for.
Another week went by. Leigh Fermor fell asleep reading a novel set in eighteenth-century Scotland and burned a hole in the cover. Moss read The Bridge of San Luis Rey and thought it “flawless.” By this time, the moon phase required for the drop had passed without any break in the weather, and the mission was once again postponed. They would have to wait for the right moon to come around again in February.
There were other complications too. The 148th Squadron, which flew missions to support SOE, was now moving its operations to an air base at Brindisi, in southeastern Italy. The Crete mission would depart from there when the time came. Meanwhile, a message had arrived summoning Leigh Fermor back to Cairo, and it looked as if Moss and the Greeks would have to travel to Italy by sea. But at the last minute they were able to hitch a ride with the RAF. By January 24 they were settled in Bari, a bustling port town north of the air base, where Leigh Fermor joined them a few days later.
Bari had suffered during the war years. Moss noticed that the inhabitants were almost universally tattered and unkempt. And the decline evidently went beyond appearances. Everywhere were posted warnings about venereal disease, which had become endemic. But even in its run-down state the town felt like paradise after Tocra. Although it was not especially beautiful, Bari offered a lot in the way of amusement. The cinema was still in operation, and whenever a new movie arrived Leigh Fermor and Moss went to see it. Wandering through the side streets they came across several restaurants that turned out to serve surprisingly good food. (At Tocra the only edible meal had been breakfast.) Here there was even an opera house, where they watched a performance of The Barber of Seville put on by the local troupe. Leigh Fermor thought the production “looked wonderfully buoyant and professional,” though he admitted his standard might have fallen after being deprived of such pleasures since the war began. It was also possible that the evening’s ebullient feelings had another source. “Paddy had a strange and most satisfactory adventure with a Yugoslav girl whom he met that night—at midnight,” Moss noted in his diary, “and this led to a buoyant lightness of heart on his part for the following 24 hours.”
Leigh Fermor’s spur-of-the-moment
rendezvous with his new Yugoslav friend was not the only engagement on his and Moss’s social calendar. Like Cairo on a smaller scale, Bari was turning into a busy crossroads for the British, as operations shifted from North Africa to Europe. In their first ten days in town, they ran into several old acquaintances. Sophie’s estranged husband, Andrew Tarnowski, of all people, turned up for an impromptu lunch on February 1.
On February 5 word came that it was at last time to go. Leigh Fermor and Moss once again packed their gear in preparation for the drop. That afternoon they piled into a car for the seventy-odd-mile drive along the coast to Brindisi. It pleased Leigh Fermor to see that their journey back to Crete was starting out along a pathway trodden by the ancients. The road they now motored along followed a stretch of the Appian Way, by which legions once marched to and fro between Rome and the ancient port city of Brundisium, near where the airfield now lay. As the car passed through the village of Alberobello, another relic of the past leaped into view. Along the road clustered whitewashed houses with beehive-shaped roofs. The locals built these trulli, as they were called, without mortar, wedging each small stone carefully into place until the whole structure held itself together. To the two Greeks the houses looked unexpectedly familiar. “They’re exactly like our cheese huts in the White Mountains,” Manoli told Paddy.
By six o’clock that evening they were airborne in Cyril Fortune’s Halifax. A little more than three hours later, Leigh Fermor’s parachute was floating to the ground in Crete, while Moss and the Greeks winged their way back to Italy.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Sandy Rendel stood waiting in a cave near Kritsa while his radio operator worked the knobs on his wireless set, trying to catch a signal from Cairo. Looking at the man hunched over the device with earphones on, Rendel was reminded of “an eastern priest bowing forward to conduct some mysterious ritual.” For a time it seemed fruitless, but at last the technician’s ministrations produced the desired effect. The receiver latched on to the coded signal from Cairo. When it was decoded, Rendel had the news he was waiting for. Leigh Fermor and his team were on their way. They would arrive tonight.