Crete: The Battle and the Resistance

Crete

The Battle and the Resistance

Anthony Beevor

John Murray

During my research, I soon learned that one should not be dismayed when people warn you that they have little of interest to offer. Sometimes a lapse of memory would be blamed — what Paddy Leigh Fermor calls 'a shot across the bows from Admiral Alzheimer' — yet those who promised little were always the ones who, often surprising themselves as much as their listener, suddenly recalled, with great clarity, incidents and individuals from half a century ago. Without their stories and insights, this book would have been very flat.

I am above all grateful to: Miki Akoumianakis, the late Lord Caccia, Dennis Ciclitira, Sir Geoffrey Cox, Xan Fielding, Ron Fletcher, Major General Michael Forrester, Hugh Fräser, Professor Nicholas Hammond, Professor Freiherr von der Heydte, Myles Hildyard, Brigadier R.W. Hobson, Lord Hollenden, Sir David Hunt, Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob, Manolis Kougoumtzakis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Manoussos Manoussakis, Colonel Guy May, Sir Charles Mott-Radclyffe, Mark Norman, George Psychoundakis, John Pumphrey, Brigadier Ray Sandover, Jack Smith-Hughes, John Stanley, Ralph Stockbridge, Dr R.E.S. Tanner, the Rt. Rev. Stephen Verney, Michael Ward, Sir Peter Wilkinson, Gerry de Winton and the Hon. CM. Woodhouse.

Many thanks are also due to Vincent Williams, President of the UK Crete Veterans Association, and to UKCVA members and those of allied associations who contributed their memories: Tom Barratt, Tom Bevan, R.B. Brown, J.W. Clayton, Horace Cowley, Alexander Dow, Lieutenant Commander T.J. Gibbons, Alfred Gotts, Lieutenant Commander F.M. Hutton, Clifford Pass, Kenneth Stalder and Norman Swift; and to Vassilios Fourakis and Eleutheris Tsinakis.

I would also like to thank those who have helped in other ways, whether generously sharing their own research, contributing items from unexpected sources or providing useful ideas for further delving: Joan Bright Astley, Evangelos Christou, Antony Contomichaelos, Michael Davie, M.R.D. Foot, Imogen Grundon, Edward Hodgkin, Penelope Hope, Charles Messenger, Bernard Redshaw, Hugo Vickers and Christopher Woods.

I owe a great debt to those who aided my research in Greece and made it so enjoyable: John Craxton in Canea; Marion Tzanakis, the British Consul in Heraklion; Captain Richard Evans RN, the Naval and Air Attache at the British Embassy in Athens; HE Richard Woods, New Zealand Ambassador to Greece; and Admiral Evangelos Sakellariou and Lieutenant Colonel Mountakis and their staff at the War Museum in Athens.

I am also very grateful to all those who have lent me letters, diaries, photographs and especially unpublished reports, a number of which have proved not just helpful, but vital. Hugh Fräser, a member of the British Military Mission in Crete, has been extremely generous with his time in devilling and translating useful documents and accounts of the resistance. Dr Detlef Vogel of the Military History Research Institute in Freiburg has kindly sent me copies of relevant German documents and passed on points arising from his own work on the subject.

Those with first-hand or expert knowledge who read and criticized chapters not only saved me from error, but in many cases added further illumination. I am particularly grateful to Commander Edward Thomas for examining all the Ultra-related sections, to Major General Michael Forrester, to Lord Jellicoe for looking at all the passages about SAS and SBS raids, and to all those members of the British Military Mission in Crete and Manoussos Manoussakis who also read Part Three, in some cases several times, and rang round their network of resistance colleagues in Greece double-checking incidents described in the text. Any mistakes which remain are, of course, entirely my responsibility.

My greatest thanks are reserved for my wife, Artemis. Without her help, I would never have managed this book.

1

Military Missions

On the night after the last British troops left the beaches of Dunkirk, a tall man with a glass eye said goodbye to his wife on the steps of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. It was the eve of his departure by flying-boat for Greece. They never saw each other again. A year later, badly wounded in the battle for Crete, he was propped against a wall by German paratroopers and shot.

Although an archaeologist, and an Old Wykehamist of conventional background, John Pendlebury was a vigorous romantic. He carried a swordstick which he claimed was the perfect weapon against parachutists. In Crete it became an even more famous trademark than the glass eye which he used to leave on his desk to indicate his absence from Heraklion whenever he left for the mountains to confer with guerrilla kapitans.

Like many dons and archaeologists, he had been canvassed in 1938 by a special department in the War Office known as MI(R) — Military Intelligence (Research) — a forerunner of Special Operations Executive. With an intimate knowledge of Crete from his time as curator at Knossos in the mid-1930s, Pendlebury was an obvious candidate for special operations. Yet no summons had arrived on the outbreak of war, and he had returned to England for a commission in a cavalry regiment.

The call had finally come in May 1940 as the German attack on the Low Countries and France began.

The increasing possibility of Italy's entry into the war, and German interest in the Balkans, particularly the oilfields of Roumania, suggested that the Eastern Mediterranean would be the next region of operations. Another Greek-speaking archaeologist called to the camouflaged colours of MI(R) in May 1940 was Nicholas Hammond, a don from Cambridge. He and Pendlebury were sent off on a rushed course in explosives, which became Hammond's speciality: an unlikely qualification for a future headmaster of Clifton and professor of Greek. Hammond was an expert on Epirus and Albania. In London, before their departure, Pendlebury insisted — more in playfulness than paranoia

— that as a security measure they should always converse on the telephone in Greek: Hammond in Epirotic dialect and Pendlebury in Cretan.

Although older than the majority of those volunteering for sabotage and stay-behind groups, Pendlebury was one of the fittest. A well-known athlete from Cambridge, both as a runner and a high-jumper, and a member of the Achilles Club, he had been a friend of Harold Abrahams and Lord Burleigh. In one pre-war season based at Knossos, he had walked over a thousand miles across Crete's mountainous terrain.

At little more than a day's notice, the four members of MI(R) destined for Greece and Albania were summoned to the War Office. They numbered Pendlebury, Hammond, a businessman from Zagreb, and another archaeologist, David Hunt, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who became a diplomat after the war. On 4 June, they were escorted to Victoria Station by an officer of Foot Guards in full service dress, riding breeches, gleaming boots and No.l Dress cap. In the midst of the stream of exhausted Dunkirk evacuees his immaculate presence provided one of those surreal touches at which the British establishment inadvertently excels.

They boarded a flying-boat in Poole harbour and took off uncertain of their route. The German columns advancing deep into France forced the pilot to take a circuitous line, landing to refuel at Arcachon just south of Bordeaux, Sete, Bizerta, Malta and Corfu. At Athens, all except Pendlebury were refused entry because their covers of 'businessman' and 'civil servant' were thought suspicious.

During that period preceding the Italian invasion, the Greek government was on guard against any British action which might compromise its neutrality.

Pendlebury, as a former curator at Knossos, was allowed to enter the country. He soon crossed over to Crete where he began to contact friends made during his immense marches and prepare groups to resist the invasion of such a strategically important island.

Hammond and Hunt, barred from entering Greece, had no option but to carry on to Egypt. There, they were attached to the 1st Battalion of the Welch Regiment in Alexandria. This regular battalion later demonstrated its military mettle in Crete, but for someone who had volunteered as an irregular the peacetime routine was suffocating. 'Every Sunday the officers gave a cocktail party lasting from 12 to 3 (champagne cocktails only) to the youth and beauty of Alexandria. At 3 o'clock, we all sat down to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, although the temperature was fairly steady in the 90s.' Since Italy declared war on 10 June, two days after Hammond and Hunt reached Alexandria, this curious existence did not go on for very long.

That summer, while Britain prepared for invasion, and the first skirmishes took place in the Western Desert, the regime of the Greek dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, acutely aware of the threat from the Italian army which had occupied Albania in April 1939, made every effort to avoid confrontation.

The government in Athens even overlooked the sinking by an Italian submarine of their cruiser
Helle
which was acting as ceremonial guardship during religious celebrations on the island of Tinos. Such exceptional moderation did them little good.

Few military campaigns have been undertaken so carelessly as the Italian invasion of Greece, launched on 28 October 1940. Mussolini originally wanted to invade Jugoslavia, but Hitler vetoed the proposal firmly. Jugoslav raw materials were almost as important to Germany's war effort as Roumania's oil. In some ways it is surprising that Hitler did not also veto the invasion of Greece. He had plenty of warning of what the Italians were up to, and Mussolini almost certainly cleared it with him during a private moment at the Brenner meeting of 4 October.

The Duce presented his prospective campaign as part of a double attack on Britain's position in the Eastern Mediterranean — supposedly the capture of Mersa Matruh followed by Italian domination of the Aegean. At the time, this accorded with Germany's 'peripheral strategy' of attacking Britain other than by a direct assault across the Channel, but Hitler had not fully appreciated the Italian regime's talent for disaster.

Emanuele Grazzi, the Italian minister in Athens, woke General Metaxas at 3 a.m. to deliver an ultimatum, without even knowing the detail of its conditions. The diplomatic charade added insult to injury since Italian troops had already crossed the Albanian frontier. General Papagos, the Greek Chief of Staff, rang Colonel Jasper Blunt, the British Military Attache, less than half an hour later.

Blunt went straight to the offices of the General Staff where he found a sang-froid that was most impressive in the circumstances.

The popular demonstrations next day showed that the country had united instinctively. Metaxas's

'No!' to Grazzi is still commemorated each year on 28 October with the national holiday known as

'Ohi
Day'. In the patriotic emotion, both Venizelist anti-monarchist liberals and the left temporarily forgot that Metaxas's royalist dictatorship had violated the constitution and suppressed all opposition.

Metaxas, with the authority of the recently restored King George II, had put an end to party politics with his decree of 4 August 1936. His rule was enforced by the police and secret police of his loyal supporter, Constantinos Maniadakis, Minister of National Security.

The endless preoccupation of Greek royalists and liberals with the constitution had long been little more than a surrogate battle enabling them to ignore the real problem of the country — the division between a self-absorbed capital and the woefully neglected countryside and islands. This failure of the two main parties, followed by the Metaxist dictatorship, which was known as the 'Fourth of August Regime', later gave the Communists their opportunity on the mainland.

Parallels with Spain were striking. The difference in the pattern of events leading to their respective civil wars lay mainly in timing. In Spain, Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in the 1920s bottled up the explosion for the late 1930s. In Greece, Metaxas's similar attempt to impose military order on civilian chaos was followed by the Albanian campaign and German occupation. This meant that the explosion was delayed until the end of the Second World War, soon after British troops arrived in Athens.