Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (40 page)

Other subjects taught included unarmed combat and demolition — 'a subject', observed an officer destined for Crete, 'which anyone with an ounce of the schoolboy left in him is bound to enjoy'.

Blowing up steel girders to practise sabotaging railway lines may have been fun, but it was not very useful for those going to Crete where railway targets were rarer than the over-hunted ibex. Students also went down to the Crusader castle of Athlit, where the Special Boat Squadron later set up its headquarters, to practise marine sabotage: swimming out to caiques to attach limpet mines.

For those to be dropped into enemy territory, the parachute course took place at Ramat David. One of the Cretans to qualify was Father Ioannis Skoulas, the priest of Anoyia, who had been given permission by the Orthodox church to shave off his beard and cut his hair as a warrior for the duration.

The British called him Friar Tuck or the Parachute Priest.

Some students, especially those destined for intelligence gathering, would do another course afterwards on secret procedures — they included disguises, codes and dead-letter drops — at the American School of Archaeology in the valley of Megiddo.

In the summer and autumn of 1942 the instructors at Narkover began to return to enemy-occupied territory to practise what they had taught. After Crete, Monty Woodhouse parachuted into Greece for Operation Harling, the destruction of the Gorgopotamos bridge, which was probably SOE's greatest achievement in the war. Nick Hammond soon followed him as a British liaison officer with the Greek guerrillas; theirs was to be a thankless task coping more with political intrigue than with the enemy.

Paddy Leigh Fermor went back to Crete to work with Tom Dunbabin.

On his return to Cairo from Palestine, an SOE 'new boy' usually started by helping for a time on the Cretan desk, which was run for much of the war by Jack Smith-Hughes. His first foray would be as

'conducting officer' which meant he had responsibility for stores and personnel on a run into Crete by submarine, caique or Fairmile motor launch. He would help with the handover and landing and come out again with any Cretans evacuated for their own safety.

When the time came for a tour of duty on the island, preparation for departure was an elaborate and often lengthy procedure. A series of letters or cards to next-of-kin had to be written with anodyne news saying 'I'm fine' and dated for dispatch by headquarters staff at regular intervals. But this system was notoriously unreliable. One staff officer from Rustum Buildings acknowledged that 'the personnel people were rather accident prone'. The worst example of callous incompetence occurred after the great success at Gorgopotamos. 'Four months after the first party of British parachutists had been dropped in Greece, SOE Cairo could not even trace any record of their names.'

Kitting up in second-hand Greek clothes also took time, as did the preparation of identity documents which were forged by Professor Wace's department in ISLD for both services. Suicide pills, known as

'cough drops', encased in grey rubber were issued. Most people had them sewn into the points of collars, from where they could be bitten out in a hurry. 'This part of our farewell', wrote Sandy Rendel,

'seemed all too like a third-rate thriller and therefore faintly bogus.' But Rendel, who kept a couple of the pills in a pocket of his jacket, once allowed them to become mixed up with some raisins thrust into his hand by a peasant woman. When later he began absent-mindedly to eat the raisins he realized, with understandable alarm, that one in his mouth had rather a rubbery texture.

Finally, depending on the advances or retreats of the desert war, embarkation would take place at either Bardia, Derna, Mersa Matruh or Alexandria. In the early days — late 1941 until the spring of 1943 — infiltration and exfiltration was done by caique or submarine. The armed caiques
Escampador, Porcupine
and
Hedgehog
were captained by sailors of extraordinary skill and courage such as John Campbell or Mike Cumberlege of
Dolphin
fame who in late 1942 was captured in a raid on the Corinth Canal and shot at Flossenburg concentration camp in the last days of the war.

Royal Navy submarines were only used in the early days. After a disastrous episode at Antiparos, Admiral Cunningham withdrew them from special operations. By mid-1942 the Greek submarine
Papanikolis
and a flotilla of Fairmile motor launches operating from Derna took on responsibility for almost all runs. These Royal Navy vessels had young lieutenants in command — most of them with tanned faces and beards like the sailor on the pack of Player's cigarettes. Their achievements, particularly those of the Canadian Bob Young, were no less remarkable than those of the old salts.

British liaison officers or wireless operators who served on Crete never forgot their first arrival.

Shortly before sunset they might just distinguish Mount Ida or the White Mountains above the horizon. The motor launch would continue, all hands moving and talking more cautiously now that they had entered enemy waters. There was always the chance, albeit a very slim one, of an encounter with an armed caique manned by the Kriegsmarine. The night would be moonless, so only when quite close in could the island mass be distinguished. On summer nights, the smell of wild thyme would greet them several miles out to sea.

For the last stretch the launch would creep in on low throttle, the crew communicating in whispers as eyes strained ahead for the recognition signal of two letters in Morse. Everyone would exclaim at once in an excited whisper when it finally came. The launch would be brought to a stop some thirty yards offshore, then the landing party and stores would be ferried to the beach in rubber dinghies. A slight swell could cause serious upsets, with tommy guns, oilskin-covered maps and documents, and other equipment tumbling into the surf. The supplies landed were both bulky and heavy: a new wireless set with charging engine and batteries; a
sakouli
— an embroidered woollen knapsack —

laden with gold sovereigns; ammunition boxes; and sacks of food and of boots, which were probably the most highly prized commodity on the island. Anyone coming out on the launch would leave theirs behind on the beach for others to use.

Scenes on arrival were astonishing to the newcomer. Cretans, wearing their black
sariki
headcloths with tiny tassels and 'crap-catcher' breeches, greeted friends and cousins and god-brothers with shouts and embraces. Suddenly the most villainous-looking one would address the newcomer in an English public school accent. Rendel on first arrival could not help feeling that the whole thing was 'more like a practical joke played on the Germans in fancy dress'. Few seemed to notice when the motor launch turned about with a bubbling putter from its engine and the brief link with that outside world of normality and safety was broken. Ironically, it was more dangerous to leave on the boat than to stay.

If the Germans became aware of a landing, they could plot the launch's likely course back to Derna.

Next morning at dawn, one of the Arado seaplanes based at Canea would be out hunting.

From the beach, the party would often move to a typical smugglers' cave with a fire and grotesque shadow-figures cast on the walls. Then, shouldering heavy loads, Cretans and Britons would trudge upwards into the mountains so as to be off the coastal strip by dawn. At first the scent of wild thyme may have made their route seem 'like marching through a cloud of incense', but soon the strain on shoulder and leg muscles while trying to keep up left little room in the mind for poetic thoughts.

The Cretan guides, mostly shepherds used to leaping from rock to rock like goats, often had to pause and wait while their charges stumbled on behind, cursing impotently each time they barked their shins or twisted an ankle. British officers did not always make life easy for themselves. George Psychoundakis remembered how on one occasion 'Michali' — Paddy Leigh Fermor — leaped for the top of a dry-stone wall with great panache, then toppled over backwards, much to the amusement of the Cretans who had walked round it.

The British were often difficult to disguise because of their fair or ruddy colouring, but other little things gave them away, above all their gait, which the Cretans found most comical. They could easily betray themselves too by their ignorance of custom: Xan Fielding, well-disguised in Cretan costume, was dismayed at being spotted as an Englishman when he greeted an old woman approaching. She instantly blessed him with a prayer for a safe return home. George Psychoundakis, who was with him, explained that the person on the move must always greet the other first. And a British officer soon found that to offer to pay for food was regarded as insulting. Even out on high pastures a shepherd, however poor, would regard himself as the host, for the mountain was his home.

Food often consisted of little more than sour milk and cheese provided by shepherds, or snails collected after rain, and a chewy mountain grass known as
khorta
soaked in oil, perhaps with ground acorns or chestnuts. From time to time a sheep or goat would be bought and killed to roast the meat as kebabs on an open fire. There were no delicate lamb chops, but hunks off the bone, entrails, eyes, brains and all.

Whatever privations the Cretans underwent during the war,
tsikoudia —
the local raki — never seemed to be in short supply, nor was locally grown tobacco which helped to dull the pangs of hunger.

For the British, Cretan hospitality could be daunting in its alcoholic generosity. But in drinking contests SOE could often hold its own, and sometimes win. The legendary New Zealander, Sergeant Perkins, is said to have been able to consume three and a half tins of
tsikoudia
(large salmon tins from Cairo, or more often Player's cigarette tins, provided the British Military Mission's standard drinking vessels) without losing consciousness.

Outlaw life had its exhilarating and romantic moments, especially in retrospect, but life in the mountains was harsh and most uncomfortable. On the high ground men lived either in caves or in cheese huts, conical limestone constructions smelling of sheep and goat's milk, but snug.

Choosing the right cave was essential. Apart from tactical considerations, such as escape routes and a good view of the surrounding terrain, it had to be close to a spring. If the ceiling were too low the inhabitants would be suffocated by smoke, and if too high the cold could be numbing, especially if water -dripped or even ran down walls. Brush, covered with blankets or parachutes, served as bedding.

Often, to the surprise of the cave-dwellers, they would become attached to a place, and leaving was akin to moving home.

The mountain air was both invigorating and clean but the insect life proved formidable. John Pendlebury composed the following verse on the martial qualities of the Cretan flea (to be sung to the tune of the British Grenadiers):

Some talk of being bitten and some of being bit

By wasp or bee or hornet, or by the humble nit,

But of all the world's best biters you can commend to me

The best of all is what we call the homely little flea.

Perhaps even worse than the flea was the ubiquitous louse, whose colonies rapidly infested even the cleanest individual. When one ISLD newcomer enquired rather ingenuously what a louse looked like, the fastidious Leigh Fermor exclaimed: 'What, never seen a louse, old boy?' and reached inside his shirt. 'Here you are.'

Lice were the biggest curse for the wireless operators. Corporal Matthew White, who spent months cramped in a tiny cave known as 'Matthew's hermitage' on the western side of Mount Ida, took his revenge by collecting the largest specimens from his body and putting them in a Player's cigarette tin to starve.

The wireless operators had to put up with loneliness and appalling conditions — few of them spoke enough Greek to converse with their Cretan guards and they usually lived in rocky holes with a groundsheet over them to protect them against the drips. They also suffered the continual frustration of running radio sets off very unreliable batteries. These required a heavy charging engine, sometimes concealed in a wicker-covered demijohn with a detachable top which could be filled with wine or olive oil. This cumbersome gadget was designed for transport by mule or donkey, but in panic moves following the betrayal of a hideout human beasts of burden usually bore the load instead. Whenever a wireless went wrong — a depressingly frequent occurrence — and there was an urgent message to send to Cairo, a runner would have to travel for two or three days over mountainous terrain to reach another set.

The troglodyte existence could be boring for everyone. When Paddy Leigh Fermor was questioned whilst on leave by Lawrence Durrell about life on Crete, and the strain of living in enemy-occupied territory, he complained in jest that the conversation was probably about as limited as in the Guards'

Club: everyone seemed able to talk only about their guns and their boots.

Without diversion, nerves became frayed. The best distractions were story-telling and singing.

Cretans were taught English folk songs and they taught the British
mantinadas:
rhyming couplets with a sting in the tail. Fortunately, Cretan and British humour, especially a sense of the ridiculous, was entirely compatible. This important link helped get over any minor irritations and differences in national character.

In a moment of exasperation, one officer complained to Cairo about 'having to deal with some of the most un-team-spirited and undisciplined personnel in the world'. The British also joked that in Crete nobody had any sense of timing: even the nightingales used to sing during the day. And the compulsion of some Cretans to boast never failed to amaze, since nobody doubted their real courage.

Xan Fielding called it the
'pallikari-complex',
a
pallikari
being a heroic and chivalrous fighter.

Cretans are the first to tell stories against this vice. A member of the resistance recounted the following incident about the great battle celebrated by one village. Apparently, a German patrol in the mountains not far from this village set off a rock slide and three soldiers were killed. The local kapitan and all his followers promptly claimed throughout the region that they had wiped out the whole patrol in twelve hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting.