Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Paddy and the General arrived a few hours later, and considering the General’s exhaustion, Billy was amazed they had been able to make it so swiftly. But he had had the support of both Manoli and Paddy when he stumbled, and ‘he moved across the landscape in a sort of trance.’21 Billy was more worried about Paddy.‘[He] is walking very stiffly,’ wrote Billy, ‘and his cramp seems to be getting much worse.’22

  The team began its descent towards the beach in mid-afternoon, moving off in ones and twos at twenty-minute intervals. They lay up in a little vegetable garden among the rocks with a natural spring, about a quarter of a mile from the beach. An old man came to water it, but he asked no questions. They left him at dusk, tending his beans.

  At nine they reached the shore, and an hour later Billy got out the torch, to start flashing the code letters ‘S.B.’ They both knew the Morse code for ‘S’ – as in S.O.S. – from their schooldays, but then came the terrible realization that neither of them knew how to flash the letter ‘B’. The only hope was to flash a confident S, followed by a few ‘non-descript electrical blobs’. ‘It occurs to me now’, wrote Paddy, ‘that we ought to have asked the General. He must have been as eager to go now as we were. Did we not think of it, or was it shame at our amateur status?’23

  They heard the sounds of muffled engines approaching, and flashed their S’s and blobs in mute appeal, only to hear the engines gradually receding. At that moment Dennis Ciclitira appeared, with three German prisoners whom he wanted to send to Cairo. He seized the torch and began signalling ‘S.B.’ repeatedly. The engines approached again, and soon a dinghy was making its way to the beach. In it were a group of heavily armed members of the Raiding Forces led by Bob Bury, all eager for a fight and bitterly disappointed to discover that they were on one of the few beaches that were entirely free of Germans.

  Bob Bury had brought enough weapons and rations for a small campaign; and while he refused to give their weapons to the Cretan andartes on shore, he was willing to leave them his rations. All the Cretans who had taken part in the abduction accompanied the General to Egypt, except for Antoni Ziodakis, who decided to stay behind and continue the fight. Before embarking in the launch, those departing from Crete followed the practice of leaving behind their boots, jackets and weapons for those remaining. Soon they were on board in a state of wild euphoria, revelling in unlimited supplies of whisky, English cigarettes and lobster sandwiches, too exhilarated to sleep. The General was very quiet, and kept himself apart from the revelry. As the boat approached Egypt he went up on deck, and spent a long time gazing out to sea.fn3

  The launch drew into Mersa Matruh around midnight, and General Kreipe was greeted with a smart salute by Brigadier Barker-Benfield who spoke excellent German. The General was pleased by this reception, and over a dinner of pilchards and a prune, he and Barker-Benfield discussed this war and the last. Kreipe also gave a lively account of his kidnapping, but bewailed the loss of his Knight’s Cross. (The Brigadier looked suitably grave, and said he would issue a £5 reward for its return.) The General went on to say that Paddy and Billy had treated him ‘with chivalry and courtesy’.24

  Now that the whole operation was finally over, Paddy thought his symptoms might improve; but neither the joyous reunions at Tara nor the news of an immediate DSO could mask the fact that they were getting worse. The following night, at a dinner with the King of Greece, Prince Peter had to help Paddy cut up his food since his right arm was completely paralysed. By now he had a fever, and the joints in his arm were throbbing.

  On 19 May, he was admitted to the 15th (Scottish) General Hospital. His temperature was very high, and the symptoms in his arm were spreading to his legs. At first, the doctors thought he was developing polio; but as his wrists, shoulders and ankles became swollen and painful, they revised their diagnosis to polyarthritis. ‘With vigorous treatment’, wrote a doctor on his service record, ‘the condition of the joints gradually improved and muscle power in the limbs was restored.’25 Yet it took a long time: Paddy was in hospital for almost three months. During this time he was visited by General Paget, who pinned the Distinguished Service Order on to his battledress jacket, worn over pyjamas.

  Billy Moss, who had been awarded the Military Cross for his part in the operation, came to see Paddy in hospital full of plans for what to do next. Billy wanted to make use of the large number of Russian POWs on Crete; he would train them as guerrillas, and then unleash them in a series of coordinated raids on German fuel dumps. He also harboured another, secret plan to capture General Kreipe’s successor.

  Moss returned to Crete on 6 July. Basing himself with Mihali Xylouris in the mountains near Anoyeia, he put together a unit that included some members of Xylouris’s band and a few Russian POWs. Their most dramatic action was to ambush a German detachment at Damasta. The events leading up to this raid began on 7 August, when a German unit marched into Anoyeia demanding labourers. The unit was attacked by a band of ELAS fighters, who captured about ten Germans. They hoped to exchange their hostages for Cretan prisoners, but when that came to nothing, they shot their captives. Realizing that the Germans would soon return to destroy Anoyeia, the villagers fled.

  The following day, 8 August, Billy Moss and his unit of eight Greeks and six Russians took up ambush positions under a bridge at Damasta, on the Heraklion–Rethymno road north of Anoyeia. As the Germans drove over the bridge, Moss and his team disabled three 3-tonners and a small truck. These were followed by another truck carrying a detachment of German soldiers, escorted by an armoured car. Most of the soldiers were shot, while Moss himself destroyed the armoured car by approaching it single-handed, and lobbing a grenade into the turret.

  For this action, a bar was added to Moss’s MC, while at Damasta a monument beside the bridge commemorates the event. Initially, Paddy seems to have applauded the action. In a letter to Iain Moncreiffe he describes Billy as ‘green with fresh laurels and a bar to his MC in the air, having ambushed a Hun column, knocked out ten trucks, taken fifteen prisoners, killed fifty, and put an armoured car out of action by jumping on it and throwing Mills bombs down the turret until the cannon stopped firing. We had planned the op. together, but I was still too ill to take part.’26fn4

  In later years, however, Paddy took a more ambivalent view of the episode. ‘I wish the Damasta ambush hadn’t taken place!’ he wrote decades later to Ralph Stockbridge.27 In the margins of the letter, Ralph wrote, ‘So do I: this refers to Moss’s totally undesirable attack on the Germans at Damasta, which ambush must have contributed to the destruction of Anoyeia.’

  The village had already been abandoned by its inhabitants; but on 13 August the Germans returned and razed Anoyeia to the ground, along with a number of outlying villages. Damasta was also sacked, and thirty men were killed. This was the start of weeks of sustained violence that spread throughout Crete. From having been relatively passive, suddenly the occupiers were bent on doing the maximum possible damage to those villages they suspected of aiding the Allies.

  Between 22 and 30 August, the Germans poured into the Kedros side of the Amari valley and began the work of systematic destruction. On 25 August, as the shooting, burning, blowing-up, looting and beating was at its height, the German-controlled Greek newspaper Paratiritis made the following announcement.

  In the month of April 1944, the German General Kreipe was abducted by a British Commando force with the help of Greek bandits.

  The Commander of Fortress Crete had asked the whole population … to assist in questioning to discover the perpetrators. This invitation has however had no effect … It has been proven that the British Commando force was supported not only by Greek bandits but also by the population of the villages of Anoyeia, Yerakari, Gourgouthi, Vryses, Ano Meros, Kyra Vrysi and Saktouria near which he was concealed, making them equally guilty, being as they were fully aware of his concealment. These villages and their inhabitants have been visited with the threatened punishment.

  While this might seem conclusive, the fact that
the Germans used the Kreipe Operation as an excuse for their savagery was merely window-dressing. Their real motives were not of the kind that could be announced in Paratiritis, and the Amari villages were not the only ones under attack at this time. In the words of Tom Dunbabin, ‘the destruction was spread over the whole of western and eastern Crete. This was the last act of German barbarity for most of Crete. The object was to cover their imminent withdrawal by neutralizing the areas of guerrilla activity, and to commit the German soldiers to terrorist acts so that they should know that there would be no mercy for them if they surrendered or deserted.’28

  The Germans had indeed been worried about rising levels of desertion and surrender in their ranks, and turning every man into a looter and a killer guaranteed that no German deserter would be helped by the Cretans. At the same time, an organized withdrawal from occupied territory was bound to go more smoothly if the civilian population had been cowed and beaten into submission. At the end of August the violence stopped. In the first week of September, the Cretans watched as the Germans began pulling out of eastern and central Crete, blowing up roads and bridges behind them as they went.

  For all the violence of these reprisals, Paddy drew comfort from the words of Alexander Kokonas, the schoolmaster of Yerakari, who saw his village destroyed and suffered the loss of nine members of his family. As Paddy recalled in a letter to Ralph Stockbridge: ‘I have always been touched by the fact that he [Alexander Kokonas] wrote that, though he wasn’t in favour of General Kreipe being captured, not a single house less, nor a single inhabitant of the Amari would have been spared if the abduction had never happened.’29

  That summer, representatives of all the political parties in Greece gathered in Beirut. The idea was to bring together both sides, Communist and monarchist, left and right, which had polarized so dramatically during the German occupation. As EAM accused the non-Communists of collaboration and right-wing parties accused EAM of murder and theft, the tensions were all too clear. But for nine months they managed to have a government of national unity, headed by George Papandreou, in which six ministers were Communists. Paddy was also in Lebanon, convalescing. He spent that summer in the mountains as the guest of the writer Mary Borden, who was married to Major-General Sir Edward Spears, and was sent back to Crete in October.

  Given the political turmoil in mainland Greece Paddy was relieved to conclude, from the evidence he could gather, that the Communists were not in a very strong position in Crete. As for the Germans, they had retreated to the far west of the island where they held Maleme airport, Suda Bay and Chania. They were well supplied, and in no hurry to leave: their only imperative was that they would not surrender to the Cretans.

  Paddy’s arrival was the signal for jubilant reunions and endless feasts among his Cretan friends, but he was appalled by the destruction of the Amari villages. The only excitement came on 8 December, when the Germans launched an attack on his headquarters at Vaphes. They arrived with seven tanks and about four hundred infantry, but people emerged from all the neighbouring villages to attack them, ‘with such spirit that at about 1700 hours they were forced to retreat after having killed only four Cretans and destroyed only two houses. The German losses amounted to about thirty …’30 Paddy was also pleased that this feat had been accomplished by exclusively non-Communist bands.

  He had one other, difficult task to carry out before he left. He felt honour bound to travel to Photineou to visit Kanaki Tsangarakis, brother of Yanni, and explain the facts of Yanni’s death. The story that he had died in a German ambush had not lasted beyond the end of the war, and now Paddy felt he must see Kanaki face to face and tell him exactly what happened.

  Kanaki came down from his house to see Paddy, who was waiting for him by the old fountain. Without any preamble he said: ‘Mihali, is it true that you killed my brother?’ Paddy replied, ‘Yes, Kanaki, it was a terrible accident, it was me.’ – ‘That’s all I wanted to know,’ said Kanaki, who turned on his heel without shaking hands.31

  Paddy moved from Vaphes to Heraklion in mid-December, and left the island on the 23rd. He reached Alexandria on Christmas Eve, in time to take part in the last Christmas at Tara. There was a twilight feeling about Cairo, for all the action had moved to the Far East and many of his friends were headed in that direction. Billy Moss and David Smiley were parachuted into Siam, Billy Maclean spent over a year in Sinkiang.

  Xan Fielding had been parachuted into the south of France in the summer of 1944, and it was a miracle he was alive at all. He and Francis Cammaerts, one of the most experienced SOE officers in France, had been caught at a roadblock at Digne and thrown into prison. They were rescued by the legendary Christine Granville, who persuaded their gaolers that, since the Allies were on the Riviera, it would be foolish to kill these two suspected résistants. When Xan and Cammaerts were led out of their cells, they thought they were about to be shot, but at the prison gates they were welcomed by Christine, who drove them away to safety. Back in Cairo, Xan too applied for a posting in the Far East. He spent some months in Cambodia, and then on the border of Tibet.

  Paddy was eager to join this exodus to the Orient, and did his best to persuade SOE to send him east. To his great disappointment, they refused; perhaps they did not think he had fully regained his health. Having nothing better to do, Paddy enjoyed the last days of wartime Cairo; and, shortly after Christmas, he met a woman called Joan Rayner.

  11

  The British Institute, Athens

  Whether she was at a crowded party or relaxed among her closest friends, Joan Rayner seemed somehow detached, and in touch with a private inner self. Alan Pryce-Jones, to whom she was briefly engaged, described her as ‘very fair, with huge myopic blue eyes. Her voice had a delicious quaver – no not quite quaver, an undulation rather … her talk was unexpected, funny, clear-minded. She had no time for inessentials.’1 Her clothes were plain and well made, and when not having to look smart, she liked wearing men’s shirts and riding breeches. Three years older than Paddy, she was widely travelled, a tireless reader, and a very good photographer.

  Her mother, Sybil Eyres, had inherited a fortune in woollen manufacturing. On marriage, her husband Bolton Monsell added her name to his, becoming Bolton Eyres Monsell. He pursued a successful career in politics, holding the posts of Chief Whip for the Conservatives and First Lord of the Admiralty; he was created the 1st Viscount Monsell in 1935.

  Joan and her sisters, Diana and Patricia, had a conventional upbringing, but Joan was a natural intellectual like her elder brother Graham and gravitated towards his friends, among whom were writers and musicians such as John Betjeman, William Walton and Constant Lambert. In 1937, Joan married a journalist and typographer, John Rayner,fn1 who had been instrumental in creating the energy and style of the Daily Express in the 1930s. The marriage did not last. Despite a bad miscarriage, Joan was happy at first. But she had never committed herself exclusively to John, and he was hurt by her casual infidelities. She took a cypher training course at the Foreign Office, and worked in England until 1943. After postings to Algiers and Madrid she came to Cairo in early 1944, when Paddy was in Crete. Most of the cypherenes and secretaries whom the war had brought to Egypt tended to live in the capital’s westernized areas, but Joan preferred its medieval Arab heart. She lived with the writer Patrick Kinross and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, David Balfour and the painter Adrian Daintrey, in an old house attached to the Ibn Tulun mosque.

  Paddy was on Crete in early December when his attention was first drawn to her by a letter from Billy Moss. ‘A good thing turned up in the shape of Joan Rainer [sic],’ Billy wrote, ‘and we have seen quite a bit of her recently. She’s got a good brain and talks about bull-fights and Spanish poets. I think you would like her.’2 Joan was aware of Paddy’s existence too. ‘I kept hearing rather too much about him,’ she recalled. ‘Everyone was telling me how marvellous he was, how he’d captured a German General and all that … and I was rather determined not to be dazzled.’3 They met at a party given b
y Marie Riaz, at which Paddy was smitten almost immediately. Joan did her best to remain undazzled, but it was a losing battle.

  Joan had been offered a job at the Embassy in Athens, and Paddy was keen to return and explore the country further; but although the Greeks now had a government of national unity, the political divide was so acrimonious that there was talk of civil war. A massive demonstration called by the Communists on 1 December led to clashes with Greek police and army units, supported by British troops. This resulted in several casualties, and provoked the Dekemvriana – over a month of heavy fighting between the Communist forces and the Greek government, backed by British troops. In early 1945 a ceasefire was agreed, and a month later ELAS, the military wing of the Communist resistance, was demobilized. The threat of civil war had subsided, but not gone away.

  Paddy made the long journey back to England at the end of January 1945. During his two months’ home leave, spent between London and Weston with the Sitwells, he applied for permission to visit Rumania, but this was refused. At the end of March he was ordered to join the recently formed Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force, or SAARF, based at Sunningdale golf course. Now that the capitulation of Germany was inevitable, SAARF’s task was to rescue thousands of POWs who might be either marched off and slaughtered, or used as hostages and bargaining counters in the final days of the Reich.

  The plan was for a three-man team with a wireless set to be dropped near the target camp, dressed in tattered uniforms. Then, having quietly joined one of the work gangs, they would infiltrate the prison camp, contact the senior British POW, establish communications with the advancing Allied troops, arrange for air cover and an arms drop, and then overpower the garrison or strike a deal with the camp’s commandant.