by Wes Davis
Instead they slipped off about twenty yards above the cave and crouched among the rocks to see what would happen. When the German column reached the fork in the trail, it split ranks, one detachment continuing to the plateau while the other marched in single file up the trail leading to the cave. The enemy soldiers were so exposed at this point that Rendel worried his men might be unable to resist taking a potshot, setting off a battle that could only end badly. Almost as soon as the thought crossed his mind, he noticed that one of the Cretans “had begun to advise the party in a tremendous stage whisper how best to ambush and massacre the foe—until he began clambering about to illustrate his strategy, and was told forcefully to shut up.”
To Rendel it looked as if the German soldiers were also putting on a show of their own. “When they had climbed level with the cave,” he saw, “they stopped and made a tremendous noise crashing about the trees, shouting to each other, and giving us no excuse whatever to clash with them unwittingly.” He and Leigh Fermor could only hold their breath and wait while the patrol settled down near the cave, where they stayed for the next hour. Finally they set off a series of smoke grenades, presumably as a signal to the other half of the column that they were now advancing in their direction. Then they withdrew and went clanging off up the trail to the plateau.
Just before dusk that evening, Rendel and his men loaded up the wireless set and their stores and set off toward the new headquarters he had scouted out to the southwest, above the village of Males. Nearing the plateau, they happened upon the returning German patrol, but they had the luck to be hidden by the same Katharo fog that had foiled the airdrop. They crossed the open area in darkness and continued on their way. The next morning Leigh Fermor and a pair of guides struck out to reconnoiter the south coast.
BY MARCH 30 Leigh Fermor had once again linked up with Rendel and the two of them were holed up at the small, rustic Monastery of the Twelve Apostles near Kastelliana, in the hills west of Ano Viannos. The abbot, “a young, spectacled, alert, courageous and amusing man, with a whispy beard, bun tucked under his stovepipe hat, and a gold pectoral cross,” as Leigh Fermor described him, was a longtime friend of the Resistance.
Rendel arrived at the monastery with a horrifying new story to tell. Shortly before his rendezvous with Leigh Fermor, he had been eating raisins one night at his hideout to the east when he noticed that one of them had a peculiar rubbery texture. The other men were asleep and he was eating without any light, so rather than spit it out to look at it, he kept chewing. Or trying to chew, since the resilient morsel was resisting all his efforts. As he rolled it around his mouth, it suddenly hit him that he had somehow gotten hold of one of the chewable caches of cyanide that Jasper Maskelyne, the former stage magician turned SOE conjurer, handed out as a last resort in the event of capture. The slightest puncture in the rubber skin of this death capsule could kill him almost instantly. In a panic, he leaped up and managed to spit the thing out, but he woke up the entire camp with the frenzy of mouth rinsing and sputtering that followed.
Though he did not know it, Rendel was now on a collision course with another close call. On the morning of the thirty-first, he and Leigh Fermor and their Greek guides were lounging about in the small bedroom the abbot had given them at the monastery when a young monk, the abbot’s only acolyte besides one nun, rushed in to say he had spotted a detachment of seven German soldiers approaching the front door. There was no time to escape without being noticed, and Leigh Fermor and the others were at a loss for what to do. But the abbot calmly pushed back the bed Paddy had slept on the night before, lifted a trapdoor, and motioned them into the cellar. The whole party, slowed only by Leigh Fermor, who fumbled with his boots for a nerve-racking eon, disappeared down the hole just as the Germans entered at the front door. For the next two hours they hunched in silence just beneath the floor while the abbot entertained his unexpected guests. “We could see them through the chinks in the floor boards,” Leigh Fermor wrote to Cairo later that day.
The abbot handled the incident with remarkable composure. Listening in the dark down below, Rendel was struck by the urbane welcome he extended to the Germans. “If they would have the great goodness just to sit down for a few minutes, he would be honoured to have a dish of the monastery’s eggs prepared. It was a simple abode, and they must excuse it, but they were good fresh eggs and he had plenty of potatoes. Meanwhile they would naturally take a glass of raki, and his boy would just run out to the cellar to fetch a flask of the monastery’s own wine. It was not, perhaps, as well known as the best wine of Arkhanes, but he hoped and believed they would like it.”
The savvy young abbot laid it on with a trowel, and the well-feted Germans seemed not to suspect a thing. Paddy and the others started momentarily when the boy pulled open the door and entered the cellar from outside, but he had only come to draw the wine. In a hushed voice he assured them that everything was going smoothly, then ducked back out and closed the door, plunging them again into darkness. The boy’s assessment was accurate. Once the soldiers had their fill of the abbot’s exaggerated hospitality, they trooped out without looking back, and the moles in the cellar soon filed back upstairs.
When the excitement was over, Leigh Fermor withdrew to a quiet corner to write up his first field report since returning to Crete in February. By now he was convinced that Moss and the others would arrive by sea any minute, and he took the opportunity to reflect on the failed airdrop on the Katharo plateau. The weather was not the only problem, he believed. And although he did not fault the aircrews, he did blame faulty scheduling that failed to take into account the time of moonrise and the security requirements of the ground team, which needed time after nightfall to move onto the plateau. “The actual pilot, W/O Fortune, did the most painstaking job of work, and my own drop was as near perfection as it could be, although the weather conditions were the worst of any night we were told to wait except one,” he wrote. If subsequent sorties had been planned to reach the drop zone within the same window of opportunity, Moss might have arrived on time and Müller would be cooling his heels in a Cairo prison by now. Leigh Fermor also grumbled at headquarters for failing to pass along the message of gratitude he had sent to Fortune after his on-target drop of arms for Bandouvas the year before. Fortune had heard nothing of the engraved knife Bo-Peep and his men had promised him. These things make a difference, Paddy emphasized.
But his report quickly moved on to more pressing matters. He had some surprising news to deliver. The “original quarry has left,” he reported. Word of this change had come from Minoan Mike, Leigh Fermor’s agent in Heraklion. General Müller, the author of the massacres in Viannos and the target of the entire kidnapping mission, had been removed from the district. On the face of it, this changed everything. But Leigh Fermor saw no reason to give up on his objective. In fact, he felt that once Moss and the others arrived, they need not miss another beat. Müller had already been replaced, he went on to say, and he had every intention of capturing the new general.
Because so much of his time since February had been absorbed by marches to and from the drop zone on Katharo or twiddling his thumbs at Rendel’s former hideout at the cave while waiting for conformation of a drop on one night or another, he had not been able to investigate the new situation “in the snatch area” as much as he would have liked. But he was confident the plan, in broad strokes, remained sound. He warned headquarters not to expect immediate results. “I am going to try and pull it off as quickly as possible, however,” he concluded.
Expecting Moss’s boat to arrive that night, Leigh Fermor rounded off his report quickly, so that he could send it back on the boat’s return trip. Three days later, still waiting, he appended a friendly note to Jack Smith-Hughes that gave vent to his frustration. “Hope Billy and the lads arrive tonight,” he wrote; “it has been a very trying wait.” For good measure, when he added the report to the bundle he had prepared for the landing, he threw in a bottle of tsikoudia, the local grappa, for Smith-Hughes and
Xan Fielding, who was now back in Cairo.
MOSS’S DECISION TO await the motor launch at the villa in Bardiyah turned out to be a wise choice. He and Manoli and George feasted on three meals a day of bacon and eggs. For the most part they had the cove to themselves, and on March 30 they took the opportunity to give their weapons another round of testing. The next day Moss was contemplating a little demolition training. “Might go fishing with explosives this evening,” he wrote in his diary. “Shark for dinner would be fun—and a change!”
Just as the blasting was about to begin that evening, however, the motor launch they had been waiting for, ML-842, came gliding into the cove. The sight of it after all this time sent Moss and the Greeks scurrying to pack their gear. At five o’clock the next morning they clambered aboard and the boat slipped out of the cove, bound for Crete. Not five hours later, they were back at the villa, in time for a late breakfast. The choppy seas had been too rough for the launch to manage. They were hardly out to sea when the roller-coaster motion of the boat had Moss thinking wistfully of Cyril Fortune’s storm-tossed Halifax, which now seemed like the smoother ride. He was conveniently forgetting that one of the flights had encountered such severe turbulence that the bombardier had joined Manoli and George in vomiting through the jump door in the floor of the plane. In fact, a jump door would have come in handy for just that purpose aboard ML-842. By the time the launch turned back some two hours later, seasick passengers sprawled all across the deck.
The skipper of the motor launch was a blue-eyed naval reserve lieutenant from Sussex named Brian Coleman, whose full-bearded face reminded Moss of the seaman on Player’s cigarette posters. Coleman had received orders to complete the mission to Crete, code-named “Moonstruck,” “as soon as possible after 25/26 March,” but he had run into delays in outfitting the boat and reaching the embarkation point designated in the orders. The mission had first been scheduled to depart from Tobruk, but when Coleman got there he found that because of special operations under way there, the harbor had been placed “Out of Bounds.” When the order came through on the twenty-fourth, rerouting the mission through Bardiyah, it meant that Moss and the others could sit back and wait for the boat to come to them. Now Coleman regretted giving in to further weather delays, but they would try again the following day.
The motor launch put to sea once more on the morning of April 2 and wallowed for nearly four hours through churning seas before again turning back. They were anchored in the cove at Bardiyah again by midafternoon. Moss summed up the day in his diary: “the sea rougher than before, the Greeks greener, and myself a corpse on the wardroom settee. God, what torture!” April 3 proved much the same, though the aborted voyage was mercifully briefer. That evening Moss wondered in his diary how Paddy and the others on Crete were holding up against the string of delays. At least they were on dry land. He had watched the daily battle with seasickness knock the stuffing out of Manoli and George. Fortunately, once ashore they quickly returned to normal. “As I write I can smell the cooking of meat,” Moss recorded, “and I think it’s a safe bet that yet another Arab shepherd, when next he counts his flock, will find it down in numbers!”
The following morning, April 4, dawned clear and calm at Bardiyah. With the entire company now in a more jovial mood, Coleman angled the launch out of the cove across a long, slow-running swell that held throughout the day. The passengers felt much more comfortable than on the previous attempts, and Moss, Manoli, and George for once had stomachs fit for the bacon sandwiches and coffee Coleman’s steward brought up from the galley. Around midday they caught sight of a convoy in the distance. Moss and the others dozed through the late afternoon and went below at dusk to organize their gear for the landing, which at last seemed likely. Around 10:00 p.m. a sailor came down to tell them they were drawing close to their destination.
On the bridge they found Brian Coleman trying to make out the landmarks that would steer him to Dermatos Beach, east of the village of Tsoutsouros, where the landing party should be waiting. In the background the Cretans on board mounted a chorus of geographical advice, which the skipper finally silenced.
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Rendel and a handful of his Cretan helpers heard the first rumble of an engine offshore. As the rising sound began to echo off the cliffs that backed the cove, Rendel flashed his light into the darkness and waited anxiously. Dah-dah. Dah-di-dah-dit. It had been agreed that he would flash the Morse letters M and C every ten minutes. But to avoid alerting German observers onshore, the ship would not signal back. Intelligence reports from Cairo noted patrol boats operating in the area, and Rendel had no way of knowing whether the vessel now entering the harbor was a friendly landing craft or a German patrol boat dispatched from one of the coastal guard stations that lay just a mile east and three-quarters of a mile west of their position. Each of these outposts had a garrison of seventeen men, and the one to the east was connected by phone to the garrison at Viannos, from which a more substantial force could be summoned.
A short distance up from the beach, Leigh Fermor had his hands full dealing with a few dozen andartes who had turned up days earlier asking to be evacuated to Cairo. Sending them packing might lead to security risks, so he was doing his best to accommodate them. There were also four German deserters to put aboard and a few evacuees sent by Tom Dunbabin, along with an Italian and two wounded men, including a Resistance fighter whose daughter was Leigh Fermor’s godchild. In all, forty-five people would be boarding the launch for the return trip. Meanwhile, Rendel was supervising preparations on the beach, where he and his men had been waiting for more than an hour.
Thus far luck had been with them. When the party had reached the appointed landing area earlier in the day, they had seen how the fierce wind that came howling across Crete from Africa every spring had thrown sand dunes over the barbed wire German soldiers had left strung along the shoreline. More important, the land mines that had once ringed the cove had also been cleared, their triggers accidentally tripped by the flocks of sheep that sometimes strayed onto the island’s beaches. Bad luck for the sheep was a break for the mission, but Rendel knew that luck like this was unlikely to hold.
When the throb of the boat’s engine fell silent, the unit fanned out along the edge of the surf. All eyes peered into the mist, but there was little to be seen. Rendel and the men could only wait, the passing minutes ticked off by the sound of waves lapping at the sand. Then, at last, they heard the rhythmic stroking of oars. Before long a dinghy materialized out of the fog. When the dinghy drew close enough for Rendel to see that the man being rowed ashore was a British naval officer, he could finally breathe again.
Having spotted the Morse pattern Rendel was flashing out to sea, Brian Coleman had called his wireless operator up from below to confirm that these were the expected letters, then piloted his motor launch to a spot some fifty yards offshore and dispatched a dinghy under the command of his third mate, whose job it was to ferry a tow rope across the harbor. Now this line stretched from the stern of the dinghy out into the darkness, pointing the way to comrades and desperately needed supplies. The sailor flashed an all-clear signal back to Coleman as the Greeks clustered around the towline, some of them wading into the sea. The night was suddenly filled with voices as they began to haul away. Within minutes a second dinghy, heavily laden and sitting low in the water, materialized out of the darkness.
Riding astride a pile of gear and weapons, Moss watched as the shoreline grew nearer and nearer with each heave of the towline. Soon he could make out the bustling activity on the beach. “Some of the men stood waist-deep in water, while others lent no more than verbal encouragement from the wings,” he saw. “Then, in a moment, I was among them, right in the middle of them, being pulled up out of the surf, and a score of hands were grabbing at the containers and kitbags and heaving them out of the dinghy away on to the dry sand. My first impressions were of dark faces, heavy moustaches, turbaned heads, black and shabby clothes, tall boots or bare feet, a score of voices d
oing their utmost to find hearing, and, above all, the strange nauseating smell of unwashed bodies and dirty clothing which hung upon the scene like some oppressive blanket.”
As Moss stood gaping at the strange tableau on the beach, a man with a week’s growth of beard, perhaps the shabbiest of the figures scurrying around on the sand, approached him and extended his hand. He wore a frayed coat and a rag turban; his pants and black puttees were filthy. It was only when the man said hello in perfect English that Moss realized it must be Sandy Rendel. Rendel explained that Leigh Fermor was on his way, then rushed back into the surf where another dinghy was coming ashore. Moss was left standing with a more distinguished-looking Cretan in a sports jacket who lifted the Marlin gun from Moss’s shoulder as he grinned with admiration and said, “You friend Paddy? Me friend Paddy too.” Like a child with a new toy, he fumbled with Moss’s gun for a moment, then gestured up the beach and added, “Here come Paddy now.”
Moss turned to see his friend striding down the beach with the dashing style of a pirate. Unlike Rendel, Paddy looked rugged but faultlessly groomed. His skin was tanned by the sun and he appeared more fit than Moss had ever seen him. “He wore a smart moustache,” Moss noticed, “and sported a fine Cretan waistcoat, a long wine-colored cummerbund into which was thrust an ivory handled revolver and a large dagger; a pair of riding breeches and tall black boots.” Even more striking than his clothing was the air of authority he now had about him. Manoli and George rushed to him and kissed him on both cheeks. As other Cretans who had shared the voyage with Moss came ashore from the launch, they did the same or slapped him on the back. All the newcomers looked pleased to see him.
Leigh Fermor’s first concern was whiskey, followed by cigarettes. Moss assured him he had brought along plenty of both. As the two of them talked in the darkness, they were joined by another British officer named John Houseman, a fellow passenger on the motor launch who was on his way to work with Tom Dunbabin. “We sat, chatted and smoked on the beach until the stores were loaded onto the waiting donkeys,” Houseman later wrote to Cairo. Leigh Fermor seemed not to have a care in the world. All the while, Houseman felt himself growing more and more anxious. “I could imagine,” he confided, “that there were Germans round the corner.”