by Dilys Powell
Once more in Herakleion, Cumberlege agreed with John on final arrangements for the Kasos raid. The two men had greatly taken to one another.
Both were men of vigorous speech and independent ideas, with great force of character and abundant humour; and both possessed that clear-headed audacity which undertakes the apparently more dangerous course after a detached study of the advantages and disadvantages. They possessed too a simplicity of motive in facing or inviting danger, something much more spontaneous and automatic than the ordinary man’s sense of duty, a rare quality which I only met once again during the war.
The two parties, sea-fighters and land-fighters, were forming a harmonious interdependent group. John had become ‘an honorary member’ of the Dolphin crew, and they in their turn were welcome at his headquarters, where Kronis in Cretan dress stood guard. A letter from a friendly observer gives an idea of the happy, unmilitary disorder of the office ‘with its two Lear watercolours and a somewhat rickety wardrobe filled with guns of all sorts, piles of paper money bundled in with every sort of other papers etc.’. The situation had the air of easy classless camaraderie which for the foreigner is the charm of rural and provincial Greece. The traffic policeman himself used to come down from his platform under an umbrella in the middle of the town to share a drink with the Englishmen. And when John gave a pre-raid dinner he insisted that the party should include a member of Dolphin’s crew, Saunders, who had served seventeen years on the lower deck and who as a regular seaman ‘was somewhat abashed but greatly delighted at dining in an officers’ mess’.
By the night of the dinner party German bombing raids had spread from the naval port at Souda Bay to Herakleion airfield and harbour. The attackers, usually thirty of them, came over at dawn and at dusk ‘and had shot down the three gallant Gladiators which went up to engage them whatever the odds’; as they flew low machine-gunning, Dolphin would reply from her quayside moorings. That evening John borrowed one of the caïque’s machine-guns; whether he used it one does not know. Presently the friends dined together; the menu included ‘fresh fish collected by the fishermen when bombs had concussed them’.
Excitement, the approach of the crisis for which all his life had been a preparation, and – for this is not a factor to be dismissed – the stimulus of simple Greek food and wine taken in good company: John was happy that night; it is good to think that he was happy. Before the party broke up the final details of the Kasos venture were settled. A new assignment – perhaps lucky, perhaps unlucky, who can say? – had necessitated postponing the raid. Cumberlege and his crew were ordered to Hierapetra on the south coast of East Crete. Today Hierapetra is a pleasant little seaside resort with a wide calm bay, tree-shaded cafés and a leafy corner with a ruined house where, people will tell you, Napoleon spent a night incognito. But in May 1941 the place was under bombing attack, and the Dolphin party were to see if it would be possible to salvage the cargo of guns and ammunition of a ship which had been sunk in the harbour. After that, Kasos. The date was fixed. It was to be the night of May 20.
The Dolphin party, then, set off – Mike Cumberlege and his cousin Cle, formerly a Major in the Royal Artillery but now in charge of the little ship’s guns; Nick Hammond himself; Saunders; a young South African private of the Black Watch named Jumbo Steele; and Kyriakos, a sponge-diver from Kalymnos who had escaped from the débâcle in Epirus and had been given permission by the Greek commander of Herakleion to join the expedition. They would return on the 19th to collect John and his guerillas.
Once again there was delay. The party had to wait for a message from Souda, and Hammond telephoned to John to say their meeting might have to be two days later. Still, Dolphin was soon on her way back. It meant a voyage up the east coast of Crete and round the extreme north-east tip which looks out towards Kasos. Cumberlege decided on one more reconnaissance trip. Since they were already so near they would cross to Kasos and back and check the timing. It was the night of May 20, the night originally fixed for the raid. They would sail an hour before dark.
And that evening the engine would not start.
While daylight held Jumbo Steele struggled with the motor: in vain. The waiting crew watched four seaplanes flying low down the strait which separates Crete from Kasos, but tucked in under the rocks as they were – Dolphin had moored by an offshore island – they were not themselves detected. Night fell. Presently they could hear gunfire in the Kasos strait; the darkness was noisy. But when at dawn next day, the engine having repented, they rounded the north-east point and reached the little port of Sitia all was calm. Nevertheless Mike Cumberlege had decided that ‘due to the extraordinary amount of air activity’ in the strait the raid would once more have to be postponed.
At Sitia, then, they landed to telephone to John. Inexplicably they could not get through to Herakleion. They sailed on westward. It was annoying to be fired on from the shore; but perhaps the Cretans had not been told about Dolphin. To be machine-gunned as the caïque came to Herakleion, however – that was different. Alerted, Cumberlege brought Dolphin in at the far end of the mole, and his cousin and Hammond went ashore ‘with a Mauser apiece’. And now in the soft May dusk they could see the swastika flying over the power station, they could see the bodies of British dead, they could hear the sound of battle from where Greek soldiers and civilians – the main body of the British and Commonwealth forces were holding Herakleion airfield – were fighting desperately in the streets.
At that last happy party with his friends John had suggested that after the raid Nick Hammond should stay on in Crete and, if it came to fighting, fight in the Resistance with him. Too late. In the gathering darkness Dolphin ‘put out to sea pursued by angry bullets’.
And now John vanishes – vanishes into history, into legend, into the heroic memories of Crete.
ix
It was early on May 20 that the German attack on Crete began. By the morning of May 21, when had the Cumberlege-Pendlebury raid kept to its original programme Dolphin might have been returning across the Kasos channel, thousands of parachutists had been dropped in the area of Canea, Souda and the Maleme airfield; at Herakleion; and at Rethymnon. Everywhere they met a hot reception. At Herakleion not only did the British and the Greeks fight a successful defence (a battalion of the Black Watch gave a particularly good account of themselves) but, as one historian reports, the invaders found themselves quickly disillusioned about the assurances of their Commander, General Student, that ‘the Cretans would prove friendly’ (The Struggle for Crete by I. McD. G. Stewart). Greek villages are rarely short of a fowling piece or two, and the islanders, though hardly equipped for so professional a battle, fought with what weapons they possessed and what they could take. They fought, a Cretan told me, with knives, with sticks if they had nothing better; they snatched arms from the dead and went on fighting.
By the afternoon of the 21st, however, when Nick and Cle Cumberlege had walked along the mole at Herakleion and seen the bodies of the dead, John, who according to one source had been fighting ‘rifle in hand’, seems to have decided that now was the time for him to join his guerillas in the Ida district. Of the next few hours no British witnesses, so far as is known, survive. Indeed the confusion which surrounded the Battle of Crete was such that for months after the fall of the island, after the struggling, tragic attempts at evacuation, after the individual escapes of British and New Zealand and Australian soldiers, it was impossible to discover what had happened to John Pendlebury. But the faithful Cretans kept the record, and it is from their stories – though these, perhaps, are sometimes coloured by fantasy and the lurid light of war – that the tale can be pieced together.
On the afternoon of May 21, then – Tom Dunbabin, like Nick a contributor to the Pendlebury memoir, would outline the story – John ‘left his office, seized a rifle and made for the Canea Gate with a few Cretan followers’. At the Gate, which leads westward out of Herakleion, he parted from Captain Satanas, one of his local leaders, but arranged to rejoin him later at Kr
ousonas, a guerilla centre on the slopes of Mount Ida. Then he went on by car, alone except for his driver. Less than a mile farther out of Herakleion he saw a fresh wave of parachutists dropping. Clearly he had no idea of turning back. He left the car and climbed the hill to the right.
A Greek company had been stationed above the road. That afternoon Stukas had attacked; after them, it was about half-past four, came the parachutists. Since they were outnumbered and ammunition was anyway running out – once again the inadequate equipment of the Cretans must be emphasised – the Greeks were ordered to withdraw to fresh positions. One of them, however – his name was Polybios Markatatos – did not retreat. Presumably he still had ammunition for his machine-gun; anyhow he says he went on fighting. ‘Suddenly’ – let us hear the statement he made after the war:
Suddenly I saw on the higher ground above me an officer whom I did not know by sight, and for a moment I was alarmed. Seeing that I was afraid he reassured me, telling me to have courage and keep cool; at the same time, standing upright, he fired at the parachutists with his revolver. Presently four parachutists appeared at close quarters and there was a hand-to-hand struggle in which the unknown officer killed three with his revolver and I the fourth. Immediately afterwards he told me to direct covering fire toward the road so that we could advance westward. He went first and kneeling at the corner of a cottage a little ahead he continued to fire at the Germans who appeared. In this position he was wounded in his right breast, and seeing this I ran to help him, but when I asked him what had happened he replied: ‘It is nothing, but give me some water.’ This I could not do because I myself had no water and it was impossible to find any because of the Germans all around. I asked him again what we should do, and he said: ‘Stick to your post, courage, and victory is ours.’ It was impossible to move the wounded man and we were in a desperate position, so I went on firing at the Germans until my ammunition was exhausted, when we were both taken prisoner.
‘Stick to your post, courage, and victory is ours’ – through the stilted official phrases into which the story has been translated the mad brave truth glitters. Polybios Markatatos was taken to a prison camp at Tsalikaki Metochi about three miles farther to the west. In the camp, he says, he was told that the unknown officer was the English captain John Pendlebury.
The English captain was not herded together with the Greek prisoners at Tsalikaki Metochi. The place where he lay wounded – it is called Kaminia – is today a straggle of buildings, a dusty suburb. Even then it was scarcely outside Herakleion; there were houses and farms bordering the road. In one of them the women of a family, living away from the town for, as it was supposed, safety, found themselves in the thick of the Stuka raids and the parachute-drops. The group included a mother and her daughters; two names, Aristea Drosoulakis and Theonymphe Manousakis, have survived from the obscure horrors of that day. They had all been told not to go out of doors; they sat waiting. Suddenly – I have this part of the story from Theonymphe – there was a knock on the door. Outside stood a group of Germans, armed. Somehow they made it clear that they wanted a blanket; then they pointed at her. Terrified, she went out with them. She could not imagine what the blanket was for; she thought she was going to be killed. At last she understood. A wounded man was being brought in; covered with blood he was carried into the house and laid on the bed. Then the Germans went off, leaving him in the care of the frightened women.
Frightened but brave. The account which Theonymphe gave me in an emotional encounter over twenty years after the event is more dramatic than the statement which together with her sister Aristea Drosoulakis she swore in 1947 and which like all sworn statements is drained in translation of its passion. Nevertheless the two stories confirm and complement one another. Theonymphe when I saw her told me that the wounded man repeated his name – ‘John, John’ – and that at last they recognised his surname, ‘Blebbery’, the nearest most Cretans can get to Pendlebury. The statement, which adds certain details – that the Germans searched the house before bringing him in and that two Greek villagers who had been taken prisoner helped to carry him – is naturally, since it was made so much nearer the experience, more precise. The women realised that they had an English officer in the house. He had, they saw, been hit in the right breast and the wound pierced through to his left shoulderblade. When the Germans had gone, Aristea – for though both women signed the statement she is the one who tells the story – went to the bed and asked his name and if he knew Captain Hamson and Captain Mitford, in whose confidential service her husband was employed.
When he heard the names of the two captains he was astonished and asked me who I was. I replied that I was the wife of George Drosoulakis and that I would gladly give him what help I could. He then told me that he was the English Captain John Pendlebury, which frightened me because from earlier conversations with my husband I knew about his activities. I asked him what had happened to my husband and he said that he was well and was taking a message to the village of Krousonas to the English Captain Hamson; then he asked for a doctor and for some water.
It was hardly to be expected that in the circumstances a doctor could be fetched, though Aristea says that she and her sister tried hard to find one. At about eight o’clock that evening, however, three Germans appeared; one of them was a doctor who treated the wounded man kindly and bandaged him. When this second party of Germans had gone Aristea and Theonymphe asked anxiously what had been said. John reassured them. The Germans themselves had brought him into the house; he had made this clear, he had insisted that the women must not be harmed; and now they had better do as the Germans had advised and show lights in the house so that it should not be fired on.
About 10.30 in the evening another German doctor came and gave the wounded man an injection and promised that though the wound did indeed go right through his body it was not very dangerous and that in the morning he would be taken to hospital for better treatment. And the behaviour of this German doctor, like that of the first, was excellent.
All that night Aristea and Theonymphe together with the two captured Greek villagers, who had now been released, sat up with the Englishman and looked after him as best they could. ‘He soothed us,’ says Aristea, ‘and thanked us again and again for what we were doing for him, and encouraged us, telling us to be calm and victory would be ours.’ Next morning he told them to send away the mother and remaining members of their family, and from this moment the other witnesses disappear from the story. Aristea and Theonymphe still stayed on to look after him.
But now there was a new danger. That morning a further wave of parachutists was dropped, and the two women saw a small field-gun being set up outside the house. At this John gathered his strength. He ordered them to leave him. He even wrote a note which they were to hand to the first English car they happened to meet; he guaranteed that they would be looked after. It was now May 22. Maleme airfield was still in Allied hands, the naval harbour of Souda Bay was still holding out, the British and the Greeks, the New Zealanders and the Australians were still fighting confidently, and at Herakleion the invaders were in fact being hard pressed. Nevertheless Crete would be lost. Naturally neither John nor the women trying to save him had any notion of the true state of affairs; but they too were holding out.
And from the tangle of legend which would cling to his name, what I believe to be the final truth emerges.
‘We refused’, Aristea’s statement goes on, ‘to abandon him, and waited for the Germans to take him to hospital.’ Meanwhile they tried to find the German doctor who was to take charge. And then the laconic, the resigned cadences of the story of pain remembered. ‘But while we were trying we were seized by the Germans, who took us by force to the camp at Tsalikaki.’
The darkness is closing in on John Pendlebury, lying wounded and alone in the empty house at Kaminia. But the tale is not quite ended. At all events there is one more witness. Aristea and Theonymphe were taken to Tsalikaki in company with about ten other women. Among them was
one Calliope Karatatsanos; and as they were being marched to the camp she told them what she had seen when near the house that morning. Six years later she too would make a sworn statement before the police, a statement which no official interpreter has reshaped. It is written in a sprawling and by now faded hand, ungrammatical, unpunctuated, Greek in that it does not translate the English words but writes them as they must have been heard, in Greek letters. I will not blur the naked lines of truth by dressing them. Here, then, is the last eye-witness’s story.
I declare that I know about the execution of the officer Pendlebury by the Germans at Kaminia that on Wednesday at eight o’clock in the morning when they put him outside the door of a house when they asked him where are the English forces he answered No No No they gave the order Attention and shot him in the chest and the head and he fell.
The obstinate romantic had won for himself the death he would have wished.
i
‘WORSHIPFUL MISTRESS’ the letter to Hilda begins. I have seen it in translation only; the original probably has one of the conventionally respectful forms of address, but perhaps the English phrase sets fairly enough the tone of what follows:
I tell you again that I am your brother because I regard you as a sister for we had sworn with your husband an oath of brotherhood and brothers we were. You should be proud that your husband was killed in Crete. Your husband lives, and will live, and his name will live for ever in the world and history will write much of him. I who know all his great deeds will make it my task to publish them when the time comes … I cannot write to you details, because when I remember him and his deeds my brain won’t work and I forget everything … I have lost my children and I do not know if they are alive or not. I am here alone with my wife. Kiss your children from me … Whatever else you seek from me it is yours, and my life too, and all that is left to me is yours.