Authors: Rick Stroud
It was not long before the Wehrmacht tried to penetrate the escape network. Hauptmann Paul Schmidt, head of counter-espionage, devised a ruse which he hoped would lure the locals into revealing the points on the coast from where the rescuers were operating. He sent officers disguised as British soldiers into the hills asking to be taken to the submarines. Most of the mountain people realised what was happening and pretended not to know anything about the wandering British or the rescue missions; one or two unfortunates fell for the trick and were arrested and shot. In the region of Asi Gonia, a key safe haven, the German spies appeared, dressed in British uniforms, and were immediately rumbled, villagers and andartes shouting and threatening them; some were thrashed ‘like donkeys’ and led off, bound with ropes, to be handed in to the island authorities as ‘escaping POWs’.
The behaviour of the villagers and appearance of andartes in Asi Gonia attracted the attention of the Germans, as had Colonel Papadakis’s expeditions in broad daylight to Preveli monastery, which some had warned were foolhardy. On
2
5 August
1
941, German
troops arrived in force and surrounded the monastery, which they plundered and wrecked. They took away all foodstuffs, including livestock, and set up strongpoints in the area and at the nearby harbour of Limni. Preveli became redundant as a hiding place, and the British no longer had a safe harbour from which to retrieve their soldiers.
The Cretans set about devising new rendezvous points on the south-west coast. The rallying point in the mountains was the beautiful village of Yerakari in the Amari valley, situated in the foothills of Mount Kedros and Mount Ida, a place where the inhabitants were loyal to the resistance cause. Escaping soldiers were led from village to village, all converging on Yerakari. The Germans eventually declared the south coast of the island a forbidden zone. In another attempt to stop the British troops escaping, the authorities confiscated fishing boats; even so a small trickle of caïques made it to mainland Greece carrying soldiers and olive oil; they returned with cigarettes and Cretan
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th Division soldiers who had been marooned after the Greek surrender.
The summer of
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941 had been particularly hot and dry, and was followed by a long hard winter. Conditions for ordinary Cretans deteriorated very quickly. Giorgios Psychoundakis returned home from shepherding Allied soldiers to discover that his father’s entire flock of sixty sheep had been stolen: a terrible blow. A flock of sheep could mean life and death to a family, especially when the occupying forces were requisitioning foodstuffs. There was nothing Psychoundakis could do: under the Germans the Cretan state, always prone to lawlessness, had ceased to exist. The philosophical Giorgios left his revenge in God’s hands.
By the winter of
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941/42, food was becoming scarce all over Crete and even basic supplies, such as shoe leather, ran out. Soon old car tyres were being cut up for footwear: a skilled man could get a dozen pairs out of a single tyre. In the mountain areas, the people fell back on subsistence living – grass soup, wild herbs, snails. In the towns, the population was on the verge of starvation. On the Greek mainland the situation was worse: it was estimated that in Athens, by Christmas 1941, a thousand civilians a day were dying of starvation. The Greeks call this period ‘The Great Famine’. In February 1942, Hermann Göring wrote in his diary: ‘The inhabitants of occupied areas have their fill of material worries. Hunger and cold are the order of the day. People who have been this hard hit by fate, generally speaking, do not make revolutions.’
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British wartime policy in Crete was dominated by political as well as military objectives. In 1943, John Melior Stevens, in charge of the Greek desk at SOE Cairo, stated in a report: ‘As I understand it, the aims of the British Government in Greece are twofold: first to obtain the greatest military effort in the fight the Axis, and, second, to have in post-war Greece a stable government friendly to Great Britain, if possible a constitutional Monarchy.’ Stevens was right, Churchill wanted Greece to remain a monarchy and did not want the communists to gain political power. The resistance movement on Crete, therefore, needed to be directed by the British. Special Operations Executive officers were briefed to prevent any communist-inspired groups from getting a foothold on the island and to disrupt the use of Crete as a staging post in the supply chain to the Axis armies in North Africa.
SOE was a shadowy affair. Few of the officers working in the field can have had a clear idea of the structure of the organisation in which they served, and neither were they meant to. The organisation had its roots in the pre-war intelligence services. In July 1939, Neville Chamberlain signed a document that was to become SOE’s founding charter. ‘A new organisation shall be established forthwith to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas,’ the paper stated. ‘This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive . . . It will be important that the general plan for irregular offensive operations should be in step with the general strategic conduct of the war.’ A Foreign Office paper defined the methods of SOE as including ‘Industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist attacks against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots . . . We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities and complete political reliability’. Churchill described the organisation as being ‘The ministry of ungentlemanly warfare’.
In the early years of the war in the Middle East SOE was still finding its way. Agents going into the field were largely untrained amateurs, making things up as they went along. One Agent remembered that the course placed emphasis on unarmed combat and the use of explosives for sabotage, which one officer said ‘anyone with an ounce of schoolboy left in him is bound to enjoy’.
Another said that in his training, ‘I was initiated into the mysteries of plastic light explosive, slow burning fuses, detonators and primer cord, and was given detailed instruction in the most effective method of blowing up a railway line. The knowledge that no railway existed on Crete did not dampen my immediate ardour and each morning I happily destroyed an increasingly longer stretch of the metals laid for us to practise on in the desert round our camp. These daily explosions in the sand represented all the training I received before being recalled to Cairo.’
SOE’s Cairo headquarters and SOE’s main headquarters, at Baker Street, London, retained separate identities (until they were forced together in the autumn of
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942, and even then Cairo was seen as enjoying far too much freedom). Eventually SOE Cairo set up schools in Egypt, with a parachute school at Kabrit north of Suez, and operations in Albania, Greece, Crete and Yugoslavia were handled by a section known as Force 133.
In Cairo there were two clandestine intelligence forces: SOE and the Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD), a cover name for MI6. Both were based in a large, grey, pillared block called Rustom Buildings (known to local taxi drivers as ‘the secret building’). ISLD was concerned with intelligence gathering; there would always be a certain wariness at what was seen as the gung-ho approach of many of their colleagues in Force 133 SOE. The two organisations sometimes acted in unison and sometimes in competition. ‘Nobody who did not experience it,’ wrote one British colonel, ‘can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue which embittered the relations between secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during the summer of 1941, or for that matter for the next two years . . .’ Ralph Stockbridge wrote that SOE was ‘basically a bunch of adventurers, while ISLD was a very mixed bag. SOE personnel were always treated as officers and gentlemen, not as agents.’
In Zamalek, an expensive and glamorous part of Cairo, close to the exclusive Algezira Sporting Club, a group of SOE agents congregated in a house they named Tara, after the legendary seat of the High Kings of Ireland.
Tara was first acquired by a young SOE recruit, Billy Moss, who thought it would be more fun to live there than in the official SOE hostel at Heliopolis, known as ‘Hangover Hall’. Moss was recruited to Force 133 SOE in September 1943 at the age of twenty-three. He was born in Japan to a Russian émigrée mother and her wealthy English businessman husband. He had the sort of ‘exotic’ background that appealed to some SOE Cairo recruiters; a certain worldliness, a strong sense of adventure, and very useful linguistic skills. Moss was a tall, handsome, ‘devilishly languid man. An adventurer with a literary bent and an attractive air of unaffected self deprecation.’ At the outbreak of war he joined the Coldstream Guards as an ensign and saw action fighting with Montgomery’s 8th Army in North Africa.
‘I found Tara, a whole villa, by chance,’ Moss recalled; I ‘was very careful who to have in it’. The house was grand, and came with its own cook and several other servants, including a butler called Abbas. At its centre was a vast ballroom, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a sprung parquet dancefloor over which hung two huge crystal chandeliers. Moss moved in with Pixie, his Alsatian puppy, and began to look for kindred spirits within Force
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33 to join him.
An early housemate was the Polish Countess Zofia Roza Maria Jadwiga Elzbieta Katarzyna Aniela Tarnowska, or Sophie, and soon nicknamed by Moss ‘Kitten’; they would marry in
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945. The countess was reckless and headstrong. When her mother sent her to a convent she rebelled, stood on a pudding to prove it was inedible and ran away, refusing to return. She and her first husband, Andrew Tarnowski, had a son who died, aged two, in July 1939, the same day that she gave birth to their second son, Jan. When war broke out Sophie declared that she would never abandon Poland and burnt her passport; but when the German army flooded across the Polish frontier she fled with her son and husband, leaving behind an aristocratic world of riches and privilege. The journey was the start of a series of adventures that two years later took them to Cairo. On the way, Sophie’s son died and her marriage to Andrew broke down. She used her connections with the British governor in Cairo to help her found the Polish branch of the International Red Cross and spent her days nursing badly injured soldiers and airmen and her nights with Cairo’s high society. When Moss met Sophie, he realised she was perfect for Tara and persuaded her to move in. Sophie arrived equipped with a swimming costume, a uniform, an evening dress and two mongooses (both named Kurka) which shared her bed. Sophie’s initial impressions of her future husband were: ‘extremely good looking, he danced well, he was amusing. He was a very good companion.’ Sophie’s reputation was protected by a fictitious chaperone, Madame Khayatt, who suffered from ‘distressingly poor health’ and was never seen.
Another recruit to the household was Xan (Alexander Wallace) Fielding, an athletic, boyish-looking young man. Like Moss, Fielding was ex-Charterhouse. Like many Force
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33 SOE agents, he was also a classicist and a linguist.
They soon welcomed the handsome name-dropping buccaneer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, fresh from his exploits with Cretan andartes. Since his earliest years, Leigh Fermor had seemed ‘impervious to all forms of external discipline’: he had even been expelled from his school in Cambridge as a young boy on the grounds that he was too dangerous a mixture of ‘sophistication and recklessness’. There is a legend about him at school that he used to creep into the gym, climb up the exercise ropes and walk backwards and forwards, like an acrobat, along the narrow beam from which they hung.
In 1933, two months after his eighteenth birthday, and the year in which Hitler proclaimed the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, Leigh Fermor took off across Europe, intent on walking to Constantinople. With him he carried the
Oxford Book of English Verse
and a copy of Horace’s
Odes
. Leigh Fermor’s considerable charm and resourcefulness attracted invitations from members of the European establishment and aristocracy: his itinerary was studded with châteaux, palazzi and Schlösser where he was a welcome and entertaining guest. In 1935 he reached Greece and became involved in a campaign by Royalist forces in Macedonia to stop a Republican revolution.
Other Tara habitués included two Force 133 agents operating in Albania: Lieutenant Colonel ‘Billy’ McLean was a doyen of White’s and had fought as a guerrilla leader with Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force in Abyssinia; by the time he was twenty-four he been promoted lieutenant colonel. The other was David Crespigny Smiley, whose father was a baronet and whose mother was the daughter of Sir Claude Champignon de Crespigny, a balloonist, sportsman and adventurer. After the war Smiley came to hold the record for most falls in the Cresta Run. He described the days spent at Tara as the happiest time of his life. ‘I loved it. I really loved it. We were all such good friends. I don’t ever remember an angry or a cross word. We all got on frightfully well.’
Tara became the hottest social spot in Cairo, its guests including diplomats, writers, war correspondents and royalty; King Farouk of Egypt turned up at the house one night with a case of champagne. The inhabitants of Tara awarded each other nicknames and had a bronze plaque made which they screwed to the front door of the villa. It declared that the house was lived in by, amongst others, Princess Dnieper-Petrovsk (Sophie Tarnowska); Sir Eustace Rapier (McLean); the Marquis of Whipstock (Smiley); the Hon. Rupert Sabretache (Rowland Winn); Lord Hugh Devildrive (Xan Fielding); Lord Rakehell (Leigh Fermor) and Mr Jack Jargon (Moss).