Authors: Rick Stroud
Life at Tara was high-octane and not for the faint-hearted. During the days the group could be found sleeping off hangovers, sunbathing on the roof, or ‘hustling things at the neighbours’. Moss wrote in his diary that the entertainments at Tara included mock bullfights in the ballroom, one of which ended with a sofa being set alight and thrown blazing through a window. (Leigh Fermor was notorious for falling asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand and waking up to find his surroundings on fire.) Another night a Polish officer was encouraged to shoot out the lights. For their first Christmas together in December 1943, Leigh Fermor cooked turkey stuffed with amphetamines (Benzedrine tablets). Sophie, who acted as hostess, remembered that in Poland they had made liqueurs by adding soft fruit to vodka. She tried to recreate this by adding prunes to raw alcohol in the bath. The result was not a success. After two days the mixture was tasted and found to be disgusting. The two agents who tried it passed out and Sophie complained that they should have left it for at least three weeks before trying it.
On the eve of an agent’s deployment, ‘there would be a big party and a car would call and those who were going to be dropped into enemy territory left just like that. Without a goodbye, without anything,’ recalled Sophie Tarnowska. ‘We never allowed ourselves to be anxious about them. We believed that to be anxious was to accept the possibility of something dreadful happening to them.’
It was men like these who were to dominate the work of SOE all over the Middle East, in the Balkans, Greece, and on the island of Crete.
9
For Colonel Michail Filippakis the fall of Crete was especially bitter. He had fought in the defence of Heraklion and at the end of the battle had been a member of the party escorting the mayor of the town to make his formal surrender to the Germans. The ceremony took place in Lion Square. After nine days of fighting the colonel was exhausted and needed a shave. In spite of this he wore an immaculate uniform, with a shining Sam Browne belt across his chest. Next to him stood the mayor, nervous but smart in a white blazer and straw hat. In front of them stood a German Fallschirmjäger officer wearing a gleaming new jump smock, and camouflaged helmet, his parachutist’s belt tight round his waist emphasising his athletic physique. Over the German’s shoulders Colonel Filippakis could see armed guards and the streets to the square blocked off by military vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns.
The colonel had not only lost his command, his home in the city had been destroyed in the bombing. After the surrender he had no choice but to head south to the mountains just above the south coast and the village where he had been born, Achendrias. The house he owned there was small and primitive; he was nearly penniless.
When he heard that a band of civilians were trying to escape on a boat that had lain abandoned for more than four years he warned them that they would die. Either the boat – which was little more than a wreck – would sink or it would be spotted and strafed by the Luftwaffe. The men ignored him. They cut down a telegraph pole to make a mast and tore open two mattresses to get at the cotton stuffing which they used to caulk the rotten wood of the hull.
Filippakis was impressed and thought they might possibly get through. He wrote a message to GHQ Middle East, put it in a bottle and gave it to the escapers. The message said that he was going to light a signal fire on a nearby beach at Maridaki. He proposed to do this in exactly one month’s time. The men and the bottle set off on a clear bright day, in the makeshift vessel which was named
Argos
.
A month later the colonel kept his word. He and his son went to the beach, collected firewood, and lit a fire. Most of the wood was damp and there was no flame, only a lot of choking smoke. With watering eyes father and son stared into the dark, and to their horror saw a red flashing light which they thought was coming from a German patrol boat. Trapped, they hid behind a few rocks.
The light vanished and they heard the sound of oars. Slowly a small rubber dinghy rowed by two men appeared off the beach. The sailors revealed themselves to be Royal Navy officers; the
Argos
had made it to Egypt; the fugitives had been picked up half dead by a destroyer patrolling ten miles off the Egyptian coast at Mersah Matruh. In the dinghy were stores, including aspirin, bandages, coffee and corned beef for the colonel’s village. Filippakis was told to expect some British officers to appear in another month’s time and to prepare a hiding place for them. Then the sailors pushed off, rowing the dinghy back to the submarine
Torbay
, from which it had come.
The next month, at night, Colonel Filippakis heard a knock on his door. When he opened it he found himself staring into the faces of two British SOE officers: Jack Smith-Hughes of SOE and Ralph Stockbridge of ISLD. They had brought with them a heavy portable radio, spare batteries and a charging machine. Filippakis welcomed them in. The Cretan arms of SOE and ISLD were in business.
After his escape to Egypt, Smith-Hughes had written a report describing his contact with Colonel Papadakis and the AEAK organisation. Smith-Hughes volunteered to return Crete and help forge links with the colonel and his associates. His offer was accepted, he was rapidly put through Force
1
33 training and sent with Stockbridge on the
Torbay
.
In addition to developing contacts with resistance leaders, Smith-Hughes’s orders were to send military intelligence back to GHQ, and to carry on rounding up British and Commonwealth stragglers. He was given the codename Yanni and dressed in Cretan baggy trousers, high boots, a black shirt and a black-fringed turban, though his bulky frame and pinkish complexion made it difficult for him to look like anything other than an Englishman. Eventually he was persuaded to wear long trousers, like a city dweller. Colonel Papadakis assigned Psychoundakis as Smith-Hughes’s runner. After ten weeks Smith-Hughes completed his mission and was recalled to Cairo in December, where he took over the running of SOE’s Crete desk.
A few weeks later another SOE officer, Xan Fielding, codename Aleko, disembarked from the
Torbay
. Other agents followed, including classicist Tom Dunbabin and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Dunbabin hailed from Tasmania and, like John Pendlebury, was a distinguished archaeologist. A fellow of All Souls College Oxford, and former deputy director of the British School in Athens, he could not drive, did not shoot, box, ski or even ride a bike. He was, though, very tough, One night Dunbabin was sleeping with some guerrilla fighters in the mountains, his head resting against a rock as a pillow. A young fighter, a boy of about fourteen, offered Dunbabin a pillow made from the soft packing used in parachute containers. Dunbabin turned down the offer, throwing the pillow away and declaring: ‘We are at war!’
Cairo put great store by Dunbabin, rarely acting without asking his opinion, sometimes bringing him back to the Egyptian capital to do so.
In May 1942 it was decided to send parties of commandos drawn from the Special Boat Service and the Special Air Service to attack the airfields on western Crete. Crete had become an important transit camp and supply point for North Africa. Rommel’s army and the Germans were winning the war in the desert; the Afrika Korps had routed the Allies and it seemed to be only a matter of time before Rommel took Cairo.
Tom Dunbabin provided the commando parties with local guides: Giorgios Psarakis, Kimonas Zografakis and Kostas Mavrantonakis. The raiders ran into considerable difficulties and with mixed outcomes: one group managed to destroy five aircraft and 200 tons of stores and fuel at Kasteli airfield, while another destroyed or badly damaged twenty Junkers 88 bombers; ten German soldiers were killed in the raids. In reprisals, fifty Cretan civilians – including Jews, a seventy-year-old priest, and a former governor general of the island – were rounded up and executed.
By the summer of 1942 the small group of SOE and ISLD officers on Crete were working closely with andartes, and strengthening the structure of the Cretan resistance. Manolis Paterakis, a slightly built man with a large nose and chin, who in profile looked like Mr Punch, became Patrick Leigh Fermor’s right-hand man. His job was to act as the Englishman’s guide and liaison officer. He was a brave fighter and former gendarme. Leigh Fermor described him as ‘a good egg, wiry as an Indian, crack shot, granite, with a sense of conviviality, irony, stoicism and humour’. Paterakis was the second-born of six boys and had fought against the Germans in the battle for Crete. After the German victory he fled to the mountains and joined a guerrilla group, becoming a senior member of the Cretan resistance.
Yerakari remained an important centre of the resistance, a staging post on the route across the mountains that the British came to call the ‘High Spy Route’. The Amari valley – Lotus Land – was a welcome place of refuge to many British agents. The people were so hospitable, wrote Dunbabin, that they ‘plucked you by the sleeve as you walked down the narrow street, to come in and drink a glass of wine with them’. John Houseman, who would soon join Tom Dunbabin in Amari, remembered: ‘It was rather tiring, to be continually rather afraid of traitors and German patrols, but always without fail, if I went to a village or town, I was offered food, drink and company fit for any “King of the Mountains” as we were so often called.’
Dunbabin succeeded in setting up an extremely efficient intelligence-gathering network. Like Stockbridge he believed in the power of good intelligence and thought it more important than sabotage or other forms of direct action. His radio was kept in a mountain hideout three hours’ walk away from another powerful resistance stronghold in Anogia. Messengers came from all over the island with information about Wehrmacht troop movements, shipping in the harbours and anything else that might help GHQ Middle East piece together what the Axis powers were up to. Dunbabin had spies everywhere, even in the Heraklion Kommandantur – where a female agent, Kyveli Sergiou, smuggled confidential military documents to the surgery of Dr Yiamalakis to be photographed and the negatives sent to Dunbabin to be passed on to Cairo.
‘Our work consisted chiefly of keeping our finger on the pulse by organising and using a most efficient spy service which covered the whole of the island,’ John Houseman wrote later. ‘Sabotage was virtually impossible, not because of the difficulty, but because of the small value and the disastrous atrocities which the Germans carried out after the act . . . The danger was not for us personally, for we could always run away, but the danger was with a few families who put us up and offered us their all, for they, if betrayed, had to suffer the loss of their lives and all their belongings and perhaps the burning of the whole village.’
As the resistance became more organised, Colonel Papadakis became more difficult to control. He began to refuse to cooperate with any Cretans who were not part of AEAK (Supreme Committee of Cretan Struggle). On
1
2 February 1942, in the presence of Xan Fielding, Papadakis and three others held a meeting of the committee of the AEAK. The members drew up a memorandum to be transmitted by Fielding to SOE Cairo. The committee argued that it was the only appropriate organisation for GHQ to deal with. They asked for more agents to be sent to the island, and demanded that they, the committee, should have complete freedom of action and ‘must enjoy the absolute trust from General Headquarters’. It also demanded that GHQ did not interfere with the internal workings of AEAK and that it should have the final say in choosing people to work with.
In Cairo, Jack Smith-Hughes wrote a response to Papadakis and sent it to Crete with two Greek SOE recruits: Second Lieutenant Evangelos Vandoulas (nickname Vangelis, codename ‘Rich’) and Private Apostolos Evangelou (nickname Manolis, codename ‘Poor’). The letter stated that it was the Allied intention to liberate Crete as soon as possible and apologised that the British had not already done so. It told him that Vangelis Vandoulas was to be the liaison officer between AEAK and Cairo and that ‘he is also authorised by our general to contact every person he judges he has to’.
After delivering the letter the Greek agents rendezvoused with Xan Fielding at the home of Vandoulas’s family in Vaphé. When they arrived in the village Vandoulas’s father and mother were ecstatic to see their son, who had been away in Egypt for nearly a year. Cousins, uncles and nephews arrived to see the returned hero and vast quantities of retsina and raki were consumed before Vandoulas was left alone with Fielding to talk about the letter and Papadakis. Vandoulas did not mince his words: ‘The man’s dangerous; I hadn’t been with him more than five minutes before he started ranting about his committee and telling me I was under his orders. I told him I was under orders from Cairo and he didn’t like that at all. Frankly I don’t see how we are going to work with him and his mad ideas.’
Fielding’s relationship with Papadakis deteriorated. He found the colonel high-handed: requisitioning supplies dropped by parachute and insisting that they were his to dispose of as he saw fit. He used his own men to collect the drops and would often claim that the supplies had been stolen. When runner Giorgios Psychoundakis complained to Papadakis that his clothes and footwear were so worn out that he was practically naked, Papadakis refused to help him and Fielding had to intervene. He argued with the colonel for two hours. Later he admitted to Psychoundakis that he too could not work with the man, even if he was the leader of the resistance on the island. Papadakis accused Dunbabin and Fielding of treachery, saying they were planning to give themselves up to the Germans, that they were going to do this because the Allies in North Africa were on the point of collapse and the Russians were about to surrender.