by Wes Davis
Rendel and his men struck out at once for the Katharo plateau. When they reached the drop zone, they fanned out and began gathering wood for the fires that would mark out the location of the drop for the pilot of the transport plane. Before they could finish this work, however, one of the men spotted two Greeks lingering in a hut nearby. Members of Rendel’s party warned him that these two interlopers were known collaborators, and it took some effort on his part to keep his men from shooting them. He ordered them kept under watch in the hut for the time being. When the drop was completed, he would send them packing, once his most ferocious henchman had issued a bone-chilling warning to keep their mouths shut.
Some time later, with the firewood stacked in mounds and ready to light when the time came, Rendel settled in to wait. At twilight the sky had been clear, but now he noticed clouds rolling in. For the moment it was still only a scattering. At times a dark bank drifted across the moon, which was just beginning to rise. As the minutes ticked by, the cloud cover grew more and more dense. But there were still patches of open sky when Rendel heard the sound of an engine approaching. He checked his watch and saw that the plane was right on time. He called for the signal fires to be lit, and the flames soon illuminated the plateau. The plane could now be heard circling overhead, and suddenly it emerged from a bank of cloud that was backlit by the moon. It seemed suspended directly above the drop zone. Now Rendel felt sure the pilot would see the signal fires. But just at that moment a blinding light appeared in the sky, drifting downward. For some reason the crew on board the plane had released a Verey light, and now it was floating above the drop zone like a beacon for any German patrols in the area. The sight of it angered Rendel, since it put his men, in fact the whole mission, in danger. “How filthily artificial the little pink star looked as it flickered out in the middle of that dark wild scene,” he thought.
As the flare winked out, Rendel watched the plane circle the plateau. When it crossed the moon again, he saw what he thought was a puff of smoke issue from the underbelly. “The plane flew on and was lost to view,” he observed, “and then suddenly the puff of smoke had changed into a tiny marionette dancing beneath a billowing shred of fabric that blew out as we gazed at it, into the graceful circle of a parachute.” His first reaction surprised him. “It looked so frail and lonely against the night sky that I felt momentarily sorry for the human being dangling beneath, who was dropping swiftly into what must look to him like an infinite blackness.” But he reminded himself that Paddy Leigh Fermor, the swashbuckler about whom he had heard so much, was not the kind of man to be fazed by a simple parachute jump into the black hole of a mountain night on Crete.
Before the marionette reached the ground, Rendel’s Greek helpers charged toward the descending figure. Rendel heard an English voice call down asking if everything was in order. He tried to answer back that everything was fine but doubted he could be heard over the shouting Greek voices all around him. Suddenly, the man was on the ground and the Greeks were rushing to help him to his feet and shake his hand. “It’s Captain Livermore,” Rendel heard one of them call out.
Rendel had set eyes on Leigh Fermor only once before, when they had brushed past each other on the beach, as Rendel was coming ashore for the first time and Paddy was ushering Carta onto the boat that would carry him to Cairo. He had given some thought to how he would handle this second meeting. In his mind he pictured himself stepping cinematically toward Paddy with his hand outstretched, like Stanley greeting Livingstone on Tanganyika: “Mr. Leigh Fermor, I presume.” But in the heat of the moment formality went by the boards. All at once the two men were shaking hands like old friends, and Rendel asked Leigh Fermor if he was all right.
Overheard the roar of the airplane’s engines grew louder once again as it banked and came in low for another run. Rendel was aware that there were three men still to come. As he turned his attention from Leigh Fermor back to the sky, he saw that the clouds, which had been scattered before, were now rolling together in a dense tumult overhead. Soon the moon was completely obscured. Rendel worried that aborting the mission tonight would lead to more trouble. The Verey light would not have gone unnoticed by the enemy, and any subsequent attempts to repeat the drop at this location would incur much more risk as a result. The only hope, to his way of thinking, was to get Moss and the others on the ground tonight. It seemed the pilot was equally anxious to complete the mission. For nearly forty minutes the aircraft remained audible—“still low above us,” Rendel sensed, “snoring away like some lumbering blind monster.” But as the minutes went by, the heavy curtain of cloud only closed tighter over the plateau. Finally, around quarter to ten, the growl of the Halifax engines faded and did not return. That was it for tonight.
Leigh Fermor was thirsty after the lengthy flight and the excitement of the jump, but Rendel and his men had emptied their water bottles in anticipation of the heavier loads they would be carrying on the return trip to their camp. So with a dry throat he set out with them on the three-hour march back in the direction of Kritsa. Some distance short of the outlying village of Tapais, they arrived at the cave where Rendel had set up the radio. When he next made contact with Cairo, he included an urgent request that on future attempts air crews refrain from lighting up the area with flares.
The following morning, patrols poured out of the German garrison in nearby Kritsa, drawn by the peculiarity of an aircraft circling over the plateau and dropping flares. One detachment entered Tapais, putting Rendel on edge. He and his men had established a rapport with the villagers, and he numbered the mayor of Tapais among his strongest supporters. Any reprisals against the village would come as a personal blow as well as a threat to the mission. Rendel would later learn that the Germans had indeed swept through the village without doing much damage, but this proved not to be the end of the affair. Not long after the incident in Tapais, a hundred reinforcements were added to the garrison in Kritsa, tripling the enemy strength there. “As time went on our more rustic friends wildly inflated this figure till it grew in their accounts to three thousand,” Rendel noted.
The next week Leigh Fermor and Rendel ventured back to the plateau on two nights to wait for the plane, but without success. By the following week the moon had waned to a point that made the drop unfeasible, so they kept to the cave to await the next opportunity. They passed the time playing a word game called Consequence and talking about books, though with Paddy’s equipment cylinders still undelivered, they had nothing to actually read. Rendel was delighted with the company. “I could hardly have had a more cheerful companion than Paddy, or a better guide to all things Cretan,” he felt. “For all his literary tastes and background, he was clearly wrapped up in his war job, and his touch with the locals seemed to me absolutely perfect.” One minute Leigh Fermor would be embroiled with one of the Greeks “in an enthusiastic discussion about the different types of patch to put on the heel or toe or instep of a Cretan jackboot (a most technical and important subject),” and the next he and Rendel would find themselves debating the relative merits of various poets. Although he regretted putting the mission on hold, Paddy too was enjoying the camaraderie. “I have been a guest since my arrival in Sandy’s area,” he wrote to Cairo after he had been there awhile, “and a most patient and friendly host he has proved.”
Leigh Fermor’s singing was an especially welcome addition to the routine at Rendel’s cave. His repertoire included a huge number of folk songs in nearly as many languages. These new additions rounded out the English pub songs—“The Farmer’s Boy,” “The Lincolnshire Poacher”—that Rendel’s wireless operator liked to sing. Now the cave resounded with songs in Arabic and French. The andartes joined in when Paddy launched into a tune in Greek, and it sometimes surprised them to find that he knew more verses than they did. This was the case with a ballad he taught Rendel about a girl from Samos. “And in your boat golden sails will I set, and silver oars, Girl of Samos, to bring you home,” ran one verse. When Rendel had mastered a handful of verses,
the ballad became his trademark song. The analogous tune for Leigh Fermor was a song called “Philadem” that had been sung at the time of the Turkish occupation. Its title soon became an informal code name for him in the mountain villages.
Their hiatus from the Katharo plateau at this time turned out to be fortunate. The same brand of village gossip that had puffed up the strength estimate of the garrison at Kritsa was by now turning the activity on the plateau into a virtual invasion. Rumor had it that a force of more than fifty British commandos had been parachuted onto the plateau. Meanwhile, the Germans began to patrol the area in earnest. After monitoring Katharo for several nights running without encountering an invasion force, they eventually withdrew, but they were soon stirred up again. On the first attempt to stage a drop on the next moon in early March, the pilot once again issued a gilded invitation to the enemy in the form of a Verey light.
Rendel was incensed. But there was little he could do beyond calling off the attempt scheduled for the following night. Apparently, though, his message failed to reach Cairo. That night, under perfectly clear skies, he and Leigh Fermor sat at the cave, listening to the Halifax buzzing around the plateau in the distance. Spotting no signal fires, the pilot eventually gave up and turned for home. Paddy and Rendel, disappointed at missing what might have been their best opportunity yet, resolved to be ready the following night. But the next afternoon, as they were preparing to leave for the plateau in order to set up the necessary signal fires, a return message arrived from Cairo. Now the signal to postpone had gone through, and there would be no attempt that night.
At least the message had arrived in time to save them the two-hour climb up to the plateau. Although winter was beginning to loosen its grip on the mountains, the evening grew cold quickly as the sun went down. The men settled into the cave for the night. Someone had brought a flagon of wine up from the village down below, and they filled mugs with this and passed them around. Before long the cave was once again echoing with Leigh Fermor’s songs. Then they heard something that silenced everyone. Somewhere outside, and by the sound of it not very far away, a gun went off. They rushed to the mouth of the cave. As they stood listening, one shot turned into two, and soon bursts were being traded somewhere out in the darkness. “No Germans should have been there then,” Rendel believed, “but it was clearly more than the odd sheep thief firing surreptitiously with a captured pistol.”
The German presence in the area was steadily growing in response to the flights over the plateau. Kritsa by now housed three hundred soldiers, and another nearby base had grown to five hundred. With small-arms fire echoing through the night, it felt as if a net were beginning to close around the cave. There was little they could do under the circumstances. Rendel posted a sentry outside, prepared to sound an alarm if anyone was heard approaching; then he and the others went to bed.
A shepherd arrived at the cave first thing the following morning with astonishing news. The gunfire in the night had indeed come from a German patrol. Or rather two German patrols. It seemed that German command had somehow gotten wind of the route Leigh Fermor and Rendel followed from the cave to the drop zone on the Katharo plateau. Sometime after twilight, just when they would have been striking out to meet the plane had the drop not been canceled, a detachment from Kritsa made its way into the gully where the path they took from the cave met the mule track that led from Kritsa to the plateau. The detachment was all set up for an ambush when a party came trundling down the trail from the other direction. In the darkness the Kritsa unit opened fire. The other men blasted back and a chaotic gunfight erupted. In the heated exchange several men were wounded and two were killed. It was only when the dust had settled that it became clear that the men on both sides wore German uniforms. The other party, it turned out, was a column dispatched from the garrison on the far side of the plateau.
Later that day Leigh Fermor and Rendel watched from a copse of pines as the column marched back toward Kitsa carrying the men who had been killed or wounded in the night. With no effort on their part, German morale had suffered a blow. But they could hardly chalk the incident up as a victory. What it amounted to was a warning shot, very close at hand, and it did not bode well for further operations on the plateau. Paddy and Rendel had a long talk back at the cave and concluded that the drop had become impossible. As it turned out, they were not the only ones who saw the writing on the wall. Evidently it was visible as far away as Cairo. “We were contemplating a telegram that day to say that the party would have to come by sea after all,” Rendel recalled, “when we received one ourselves saying that the airdrop had been cancelled and that Moss and the others would be arriving on the next boat.”
WHEN THE CANCELLATION order reached Bari, Moss, Manoli, and George packed their bags and boarded a plane headed back to Cairo. The flight was broken in Malta, where Moss spent an evening with old friends in high style, drinking Möet & Chandon ’19, “which was partly flat but heartwarming to discover.” By the next evening he was back in his room at Tara. But he was disappointed to learn that Sophie was away. She had gone to visit Luxor with a party that included Xan Fielding. When she finally returned on the morning of March 24, it was a very happy reunion. “Unfortunately I was due to leave in 24 hours,” Moss recorded in his diary, “so we had to cram a lot into a short time—but this we did most successfully, and I must have resembled some moribund animal as I crept into a taxi next morning.”
With the airdrop off the table, Moss and the others were now bound for Tobruk, where a motor launch would be waiting to take them across to Crete. Reaching Alexandria late in the afternoon, Moss decided to stop for the night. Again he looked up some friends for dinner, which was followed by his second trip to the opera since the war began. He saw The Phantom of the Opera. The next morning they pressed on. But when they reached Tobruk at midday, they discovered that there was no boat to be had. They traveled a hundred miles farther west to Derna the following day but again found no boat. Still, this beat waiting in the rain at Bari. Derna was a pleasant town, Moss thought, and after a month of storms the weather had now turned fair. Manoli and George also helped to keep Moss’s spirits high—“they ‘acquired’ a couple sheep on the way here, which have since been killed and cooked, and eaten with relish. I can see that as long as I stay with that pair of toughs I shall never go in want of anything!”
Anything, that is, except a boat. Next they tried Bardiyah, which meant backtracking to Tobruk and then another hundred retrograde miles east along the coast road they had traveled from Alexandria. Here Moss again failed to turn up a motor launch prepared to make a run to Crete. “Of course there wasn’t a boat waiting for us,” he quipped; “no one had even heard of a boat. I think I must be Jonah!” But at Bardiyah he did meet a South African lieutenant who invited the three of them to stay at the villa where he and his men were boarding. It was situated on a lovely cove and had plenty of room, so Moss decided to stay on there and wait for a boat, rather than continue the wild-goose chase up and down the Libyan coast.
LEIGH FERMOR AND Sandy Rendel were experiencing difficulties of their own. They were now in the process of moving Rendel’s headquarters south, both to avoid the dangerous situation that was developing in the area of the Katharo plateau and to be on hand for Moss’s eventual landing on the south coast. But before they managed to leave, Leigh Fermor became entangled in a conference with three andarte kapetans, who sought his help in petitioning the British for more arms. Among them was a man named Bodias who had been in prison for murder at the time of the invasion. Word was that he had assaulted a village boy and when the lad’s father confronted him, Bodias killed them both with a hoe. In prison he underwent a transformation, educating himself in politics and restyling himself as a Communist. Despite the man’s violent past and political leanings, Leigh Fermor thought Bodias could prove useful to the Resistance. The other two leaders—“a bitter, sneering man” who commanded a band based half an hour above the plateau and a “plucky” Athenian who inspired Leig
h Fermor’s confidence—were both more predictable that Bodias. With some reservation, he would recommend arming the bands the men represented. But it turned out that they did the British a still bigger service in return. When Bodias and the other two men left the cave on the morning of the twenty-fifth, they stumbled into an ambush apparently set for Rendel, who was returning from a reconnaissance trip south of Katharo.
By the time Rendel reached the cave a little later that morning, the Germans had moved into the nearby village of Tapais. The scouts he and Leigh Fermor dispatched to look the situation over soon came gasping back into camp with the warning that a column was advancing up the ridge and would soon reach the intersection of trails below the cave. If they turned one way they would spill onto the plateau; the other way would bring them to the doorstep of Rendel’s cave.
With the Germans only a matter of minutes away, Rendel hurried through the list of things he had to do before evacuating the camp: “we had stowed the stores—half a dozen sacks of dehydrated food, clothes, bandages and such—under various convenient boulders with a special cranny for the wireless; and prepared for what Paddy described jauntily as ‘another Oak Apple day.’ ” Rendel had heard the story of Leigh Fermor’s earlier close call—when he had dodged a German patrol by disappearing into the crown of a cypress tree—and he did not relish the idea of climbing into one of the bristly Cretan holm oaks he had seen growing nearby.