Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Myers was relieved to discover that Barnes was unhurt and even more delighted when he learned that Barnes had picked up a signal from Len Wilmot. The two of them went off to look for him, while the Greeks went in search of the fourth member of Myers’s team, Denys Hamson, the only one who spoke Greek. At the pre-agreed midday rendezvous, the Greeks returned with Hamson, whom they had found in the forest, while Len Wilmot appeared soon after, having heard the sound of voices. The first of Myers’s three teams was miraculously intact.

  Chris ‘Monty’ Woodhouse and his group had jumped from the second Liberator and had fared rather better. Woodhouse himself had landed with scarcely a bump, ‘not harder than stepping off a table’,11 while the others had also dropped without mishap. There was a moment of panic when they were surrounded by Greek soldiers who suspected them of being Germans, but Woodhouse was quick to put them right. He called out: ‘I am a British officer.’ To which one of the Greeks replied: ‘I am a Greek officer.’ He then rushed towards Woodhouse ‘and kissed me on both cheeks’.

  Woodhouse’s most urgent task was to locate the other two teams, but first he and his men were led to a nearby mountain village. Here, they were alarmed to see that a group of children had found their supply canisters and taken out the plastic explosive. Assuming it was fudge, they were cramming it into their mouths. ‘This was disastrous for them,’ said Woodhouse, ‘but it was also disastrous for us, because it was reducing our essential explosives.’12 In fact, the explosive did no harm to the children other than to make them sick.

  One of the Greek villagers, known as Barba [Uncle] Niko, had lived in America and spoke broken English. He warned that the mountains were patrolled by Italian soldiers and suggested they should hide out in a concealed cave on the eastern slopes of Mount Giona. It was large enough to house all three teams, if and when the others were located, and was unknown to the Italians. Woodhouse agreed to be led there, hoping that the others would indeed be brought to the same cave.

  The hike was extremely arduous, involving a three-day march across bleak mountain passes, with a relentless icy blast knifing in from the north. Scuds of snow lay in the hollows, wind-blown and grey with dirt, and the men were cold and miserable. ‘Some of us had lice and some had fleas. The first rains had ended, but the snow-line was creeping down towards us.’

  Their misery was soon tempered by good news. Eddie Myers’s team arrived at the same cave just two days after Woodhouse and his men, having been led there by Greek shepherds. When Woodhouse thanked Uncle Niko for his support, he replied: ‘I heard that God had sent us Englishmen from heaven, so it was my duty to help them.’13

  And help them he did. When he learned that Italian troops were searching the vicinity, perhaps because they had heard the circling Liberator aircraft, he found an even more secure cave at the foot of a rocky escarpment. Now that they were safe, their priority was to locate the whereabouts of the third team.

  * * *

  Back in London, Colin Gubbins had no idea of the fate of the teams dropped into Greece. It had been the same with the Czech assassins. Once the men jumped from their planes, they were invariably out of contact. Myers’s wireless transmitter had broken on landing. The men were on their own.

  Yet Gubbins nevertheless continued to pull the strings of Operation Harling, albeit from a distance. His Partisan Leaders Handbook, widely distributed in Cairo, had been written with exactly such a mission in mind: a bold strike in rugged countryside with the active support of local guerrillas. Now, Eddie Myers followed this manual so closely that he was to adhere to all seven points of Gubbins’s guerrilla creed, including the use of stealth, nocturnal cover and the recruitment of local mountain experts.

  Gubbins had long believed that war against the Nazis would eventually reach a tipping point, the moment at which the local population would rise up against the occupying army. ‘As the war progresses and the enemy’s hold begins to weaken owing to successful sabotage,’ he said, ‘the conditions will become ripe for the formation of partisan bands.’ In Greece, and especially in the Roumeli Mountains, those conditions were already in place.

  Gubbins also said that operating in familiar terrain gave the local guerrilla the upper hand, for he was ‘fighting in his own country, among his own people, against a foreign foe who has invaded his land’. Unlike the enemy, he was not constrained by rules, command structures and centralized barracks. And although the occupying forces retained the use of the road and railway system, the mountain guerrilla always held the trump card in hit-and-run raids. ‘By the judicious selection of ground, and by moves in darkness to secure surprise, the guerrilla can enjoy relatively superior mobility for the period necessary for each operation.’14

  Uncle Niko warned Myers that a great swathe of the Roumeli wilderness had become the fiefdom of a local chieftain named Napoleon Zervas. He controlled a large band of partisans who roamed the Roumeli like lawless bandits, ambushing Italian sentries and dispensing summary justice: Zervas’s cooperation was essential for any sabotage operation. Myers agreed and asked Uncle Niko if he could lead Woodhouse to the chieftain’s mountain headquarters in an attempt to gain his support.

  The two of them hiked for more than a week, crossing snow-blasted ridges and forlorn valleys as they went in search of Zervas. At one point they were stopped by an elderly woman who asked Woodhouse what he was doing. ‘Boldly I told her I was a guerrilla.’ She was intrigued and said ‘she had never met one before’. She then asked where he was from. ‘For want of anything better, I named the neighbouring village which I had passed through twenty minutes earlier. The woman nodded knowingly. “Ah, I knew from your accent you were a foreigner.”’

  After a gruelling trudge over the mountains, they finally located the feared Napoleon Zervas. Woodhouse had been expecting an imperious braggart, lording it over his mountain fiefdom like some self-styled satrap. The truth was rather different. Zervas was short, comically rotund and perennially smiling. ‘He greeted me with a kiss on both cheeks, which was prickly for both of us. “Kalos ston Evangelon!” he said with quiet satisfaction. “Welcome to the Angel of Good Tidings!”’15

  Zervas was a godsend: efficient, cheerful and devoted to expelling the hated Italians from Greek soil. ‘When he laughed, as he so often did, his whole body vibrated, and the merry sparkle in his eyes belied the black, hairy fierceness of a heavily bearded face.’ His eyes were large and brown, his lips full and generous. He was dressed in an old khaki smock, without any insignia, with breeches and over-large riding boots. ‘An unpolished Sam-Browne belt around his ample waist supported a small automatic pistol and jewelled dagger whose sheath was liable to stick out from his stomach at a jaunty angle when he sat down.’16

  Zervas controlled a band of a hundred guerrillas, whose enthusiasm for action was rather more impressive than their equipment. ‘Few had any military uniform. Even fewer had boots: leather slippers, strips of goat-string tied around their ankles, slices of rubber tyre fastened with wire, in some cases nothing but threadbare socks.’17 They had one tommy gun, one machine gun and a few Mannlicher rifles dating from the First World War.

  Zervas agreed to help with the sabotage operation, but there was a problem. He was not the only chieftain in these mountains. There was a second band of guerrillas led by Aris Velouchiotis, a notoriously violent partisan with a penchant for summary justice. It was unthinkable for any attack to take place on the viaducts without Aris’s active involvement, but herein lay a problem. Aris’s men were Communists while Zervas’s were Republicans. The two leaders and their men were bitter rivals.

  When Woodhouse learned that Aris’s base was just a few hours’ march away, he used all his persuasive powers to induce Zervas to meet his Communist foe, arranging a rendezvous in the village of Viniani, in the holiday villa of a Greek-American expatriate.

  Aris cut a very different figure from the genial Zervas. Small and wiry, he had a long black beard and a Cossack cap of black fur that gave him a benign, monklike look. ‘But his
eyes were deep-set and, except when he smiled, there was much hardness in his features. Only when mellowed by alcohol did he ever relax.’18

  He conformed to the stereotype of a bandit chieftain, with ‘two bandoliers loaded with cartridges and a large knife in his belt’.19 The knife was often used to slit the throats of captured Italians, as well as against those in his own ranks who disobeyed his authority. ‘Silent and inclined to be dour, he always gave the impression of being on guard against someone or something.’

  His men displayed a rare professionalism and were ‘tougher and more determined than those of Zervas’.20 Woodhouse realized that Aris’s support would be crucial for their attack on the Gorgopotamos viaduct and was therefore delighted when he agreed to join forces.

  Aris had one piece of news that was both unexpected and welcome. He told Woodhouse that his men had rescued the third group of British saboteurs from the Italians. The men had misjudged their landing and dropped into the Karpenisi valley, close to an Italian garrison town. They would certainly have been captured had they not been plucked from danger by Aris. Woodhouse was now able to send a message to them, with instructions on how to join Eddie Myers and the rest of the men. After four weeks on the ground, the entire team was reunited.

  * * *

  Eddie Myers had not been slacking in Woodhouse’s absence. He had undertaken a reconnaissance of the three Roumeli viaducts, in order to be certain that Gorgopotamos was the best target. It was every bit as spectacular as in the photographs. The gorge itself resembled a yawning jaw, open to the sky and spanned by a single line of railway track. Most of the viaduct’s piers were built of masonry, but the two at the southern end were constructed from steel. Myers studied them through his field glasses and then made drawings of them. He decided that these steel girders presented his best hope of bringing down the structure, even though they would be extremely hard to destroy. In his pamphlet, How to Use High Explosives, Millis Jefferis had warned that girder structures like Gorgopotamos presented unique complications for the would-be saboteur. ‘Steel girders may be cut with explosives, but this is the most difficult kind of demolition to tackle and should not be attempted by men who have not had experience.’21

  Myers was aware of this. His powerful binoculars enabled him to make a detailed study of the steel piers. He concluded that the legs were L-shaped in cross-section, an important detail. It meant that his men could mould their 400 pounds of plastic explosive in advance, ‘pressing the separate sticks into a wooden mould, which we had made for our charges, to fit the believed cross section of the legs of the steel piers’.

  Myers returned to his hideout with a strategy already in place. He knew that it would be hard to destroy the viaduct without first killing the Italian sentries. This was unlikely to go unnoticed by the rest of the garrison, for the Italians had entrenched positions at either end of the viaduct. Both of these would also need to be attacked.

  The success or failure of the mission would ultimately depend on Tom Barnes’s demolition party, which would need to descend into the deep gorge and place charges on the girders. Myers reckoned this would take up to four hours, time enough for the Italians to call up reinforcements. But there were no other options. An assault on the Italian positions, followed by a spectacular sabotage operation, was the only viable one.

  Myers hoped to launch his assault on the night of 25 November, although he knew the exact timing would be dependent on the weather. He formed an advance party that set off on the afternoon of 23 November: they were to be joined by the rest of the men on the evening of the attack. It was a gruelling six-hour trudge through the snow to their forward position, a shepherd’s hut perched high on the wooded upper slopes of Mount Oiti. Once here, they were within striking distance of the viaduct. The ground was blanketed in soft snow – it was more than a foot deep – and the evening clouds were so low that the fir trees were enveloped in mist.

  Myers snatched a few hours’ sleep and awoke at dawn in order to crawl to his lookout position. But there was nothing to be seen except banks of mist. ‘A bird’s eye view of the approaches to the Gorgopotamos viaduct proved to be impossible.’ Later that morning, it began to rain and great clods of melting snow slid from the trees. But the mercury soon plummeted and the rain turned to snow. ‘As we lay in the bleak and draughty hut, with our eyes sore from the smoke of the fire that we kept going in the middle of its earth floor, we seemed strangely isolated from the rest of the world by the low-lying clouds.’ Darkness came early and Myers prepared for a second night without much sleep.

  When he awoke on the following morning, the clouds had lifted and the sky was bright. It was perfect reconnaissance weather. Accompanied by a couple of companions, he cautiously descended the mountain until they were less than a thousand yards from the railway. ‘There, crawling on our hands and knees from cover to cover, through gaps in the slowly moving clouds, we got some excellent glimpses of the viaduct. Several hundred feet below us, it looked like a toy bridge.’ He studied the vast structure through his field glasses, then watched the sentries as they scurried around like ants. He set the attack for that night.

  The main body of guerrillas arrived later that day, at about four in the afternoon, ‘silently winding its way in single file out of the clouds which now clung again to the sides of the mountain’. The men crouched down in the misty dampness of the forest and ate their last meal before the attack: cold meat, a hunk of bread and a flask of icy water cut with ouzo. They were about a mile from Gorgopotamos and some 4,000 feet above the viaduct. Myers divided his men into their respective teams and made sure that those who had watches synchronized them. Then, as dusk approached, he ordered the men to their feet. At shortly after six o’clock, the guerrillas began winding down through the wet snow in single file. The low cloud was once again clinging to the side of the mountain, enveloping everything in mist.

  The men split into their prearranged groups, with two of them heading north and south to cut the railway tracks. The rest were to be engaged in the attack. The most treacherous task of the night was to be undertaken by Tom Barnes and his saboteurs. In pitch darkness they had to clamber down the near-vertical gorge accompanied by eight mules carrying all the explosives. They then had to cross the raging torrent by way of a rickety plank bridge before unharnessing their mules and strapping the explosives to the girders.

  Each group said its farewells and the men headed their separate ways. Within less than a minute, they had been swallowed by the darkness. The four commanders – Eddie Myers, Chris ‘Monty’ Woodhouse, Napoleon Zervas and Aris Velouchiotis – went directly to their forward command post, crawling to within 150 yards of the viaduct where there was a hollow that afforded them protection from stray fire. Myers was pleased to note that ‘the mist was now thinner and the full moon, trying to get through, lit up the surrounding country sufficiently for our purpose. Conditions, in fact, were ideal.’22

  The four of them lay there in silence, glancing nervously at their watches. They had a long wait. At a few minutes before eleven, to everyone’s surprise, a train rumbled past. ‘That’ll be the last for a long time,’ whispered Woodhouse.23

  Myers once again checked his watch. The attack was set for eleven o’clock. Two minutes to go. He inched himself forward through the snow in order to get a better viewing position. ‘Through the light mist we could clearly see the viaduct ahead of us. It looked huge and gaunt.’

  Zero hour. It was eleven o’clock. Myers was anticipating the opening crackle of gunfire as his teams went into action at either end of the viaduct. But there was only silence. It was as if the mountains had gone to sleep.

  For fourteen agonizing minutes he waited at the edge of the ridge, trying to work out what might have gone awry. And then, ‘when we began to think that something had gone seriously wrong, that all the parties were late, or that in the darkness they had gone astray, pandemonium was let loose right in front of us around the north end of the viaduct.’24

  Rifle fire, automatic
fire and the staccato of machine guns rocked the silence of the night as the onslaught on the Gorgopotamos garrison began in earnest. The attackers at the southern end launched a particularly ferocious assault, starting with a deluge of hand grenades thrown into the pillboxes. The Italian sentries who survived the initial blasts now burst out, desperate to make their escape. ‘They just ran away and were shot by the guerrillas,’ said one. ‘It was just a sort of shambles of noise.’25

  The assault at the far end seemed to be going like clockwork. The Italian defenders soon gave up the fight and were looking to escape with their lives. ‘Nearly an hour after the battle had started, exceptionally loud cheering went up from the south end of the viaduct,’ said Myers. ‘It was followed almost immediately by a white Very light. The far end was in our hands.’26

  It was a very different story at the near end, just underneath Myers’s lookout position. As the gunfight intensified, one of Zervas’s breathless guerrillas ran up to the command post with the terrible news that they were being beaten back. The Italian defenders were too strong. At this critical juncture, Myers showed decisive leadership. He had withheld a small reserve force, to be used in emergency. Now, he sent them into action and they more than proved their mettle. A ferocious shoot-out was followed by sudden and complete silence. It was as if the battle had been switched off. A few seconds later, a second Very light could be seen winking in the darkness. The northern end of the viaduct had also been captured.

  Now that the guerrillas were in control, Tom Barnes and his saboteurs could get to work without risk of being fired on from above. They had spent the previous hour slithering their way down into the deep ravine, forcing their mules down treacherous slopes strewn with loose and muddy scree. They eventually reached the bottom, exhausted but unharmed. Now, they had to cross the plank bridge that traversed the torrent, with each man guiding his chosen mule. ‘It had to be the right muleteer which led each mule, because mules are mules and they wouldn’t go without a rival leader.’27