Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII

by Damien Lewis

  It was Fermor’s agents that Jellicoe’s raiders intended to rely upon to help them navigate their way towards their targets, and to avoid contact with the enemy en route. As would become a common refrain with such operations, they would prove largely impossible without the succour and aid of the locals – and winning their hearts and minds would become a number one priority.

  *

  In among the calm and the thick, inky darkness, a pair of rubber-hulled boats nosed into the rocky shore. They bumped silently against the beach, Lassen leaping out from the one, Lamonby from the other. A voice called out softly from the shadows. It was Gregorius Hnarakis, one of Leigh Fermor’s top men on Crete. Gregorius looked as broad as he was tall, and he was clearly hugely strong. The smile he flashed was almost as wide as the breadth of his shoulders, and the hand he extended to Lassen offered a bone-crunching greeting.

  Boats unloaded and hidden, Gregorius led the raiders some two miles inland, their route taking the course of a narrow, boulder-strewn riverbed. It being June it was dry underfoot, but it remained tough going in the clinging darkness. The Greek never once complained. Quite the contrary – Gregorius had become renowned among Fermor and his men for laughing when he was happy, and laughing even more when faced with hardship or danger.

  Lassen for one found himself drawn to the man – a citizen of a nation, like his native Denmark, suffering under Nazi occupation.

  ‘Gregorius, we will go into that aerodrome, and I am certain we will come out again,’ Lassen assured him, as the two men led the way through the darkened valley.

  Gregorius gave a throaty laugh. One the descendant of Danish Vikings, the other of the Ancient Greeks – the two men shared the instinctive, easy bond of natural-born warriors.

  They reached their lying-up point – a series of caves to either side of the dry valley – and rendezvoused with Leigh Fermor. This was where Sutherland plus the radio operators would remain hidden for the duration of the mission, together with extra supplies of ammunition and provisions. All being well, the raiding parties would rendezvous with their commander here at mission’s end, to be lifted off the beach by similar means as in their arrival.

  The following day the trek inland began. At first Lassen was struck by the sweet scent of strawberries and thyme that lingered in the valleys, southern Crete being a fertile region rich in agriculture. But the terrain soon steepened as the route wound inland climbing the Kokinoxos Ridge, tilled fields giving way to rough forest and dry thorn scrub which ripped clothing and tore at exposed skin. In the heat it proved painfully slow and brutal going.

  At first Lassen and Lamonby’s patrols marched together, for the two airbases lay no more than a dozen miles apart just inland from the island’s northern coast. The men were kitted out with Italian Army rucksacks – favoured because they were large enough to carry the kit that was required, yet light and durable at the same time. Devoid of the iron frame that most large backpacks then had, a ground sheet was stuffed between the carrier’s back and the pack, to cushion the load and prevent chafing.

  The first casualty – a victim of the punishing terrain – wasn’t long in coming. One of the men on Lamonby’s patrol suffered a twisted ankle. There was no option but for his massive pack to be carried in turn by the others. The strapping Dick Holmes – feet clad in huge Canadian parachute boots – was the first to take the burden. Jack Nicholson from Lassen’s patrol volunteered next, the lithe Scotsman demonstrating a strength and stamina that belied his wiry frame.

  The terrain proved to be crawling with enemy forces. Some four days into the climb the patrols entered a V-shaped gully, the rock walls on either side throwing back the heat like a furnace. Towards the end of that feature lay Apoini village and the parting of the ways – Lamonby’s patrol continuing due north towards Heraklion aerodrome. Lassen’s patrol would swing north-east, heading across the rugged terrain of the Viannos, in the western foothills of the snow-capped Mount Dikti, each footfall taking them closer to their target – Kastelli Airbase.

  Until now both patrols had had radio operators attached to them, but they had driven themselves to exhaustion carrying their 100lb loads of wireless kit and batteries. In fact communications for the patrols had proved nightmarish, as Lassen’s last message to Sutherland at his coastal base and to Cairo Raider Force Headquarters, reflects.

  B and C sigs together as two sets much too heavy to carry. Sigs are being left behind … Impossible come up during day because of enemy. Will come up 2100 hours. Only one call for both sigs due to lack of time. Unable to establish com first time as hiding underground.

  The message paints a picture of patrols so harried by the enemy – hiding during daylight hours; secreting themselves underground – that they are hard pushed to find any time to establish radio communications.

  ‘We had to send all messages in Morse; never in voice,’ Jack Mann explained. Radio operators like him were specialists attached to whichever patrol needed them most. ‘With those messages being doubly encoded, this took real time and effort to get right. All codes can be broken, of course, but the theory was that by the time the Germans had cracked a doubly-encoded cipher message sent in Morse, we would be long gone.’

  Lassen’s message also reflects how impossible it was to carry heavy radio sets and batteries across such punishing terrain. The patrol’s radiomen were to be left at Apoini, where they would act as a relay station to both Sutherland at the coastal base, and Raider Force HQ. If the raids went to plan, a ‘SUCCESS’ signal was to be sent from there, so triggering the information campaign to be orchestrated from London.

  At Apoini Gregorius also had to part company with the raiders, and Lassen’s patrol was passed on to another guide, Vasilis Konios, who was more familiar with the terrain that lay ahead. Thanks to his contacts with the nearby villages Vasilis was able to supplement the raiders’ fast-dwindling food stocks – largely oatmeal, raisins and tins of corned beef, augmented by a smattering of scavenged US Army K rations. With Lassen and his men camped out in the high valleys, Vasilis dropped down into the villages, returning with hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, fresh baked bread and, of course, local Cretan wine.

  But he also returned with worrying news. The Germans had patrols out scouting all the Cretan settlements. The enemy was well aware of Leigh Fermor’s activities and those of his Cretan agents, and they were searching in the villages for any sign of a British presence. Lassen’s patrol would have to exercise extreme caution now. They would have to camp out where the enemy least expected them – sheltering under borrowed blankets on ice-cold, wind-whipped rocky ledges, or in frozen caves dank with fettered shadows.

  They knew if they were caught they were prime candidates for Hitler’s Sonderbehandlung, his Commando Order: to be annihilated to the last man.

  Chapter Thirteen

  From Vasilis they were passed to another guide, Cheritoc Karfopoulos. Cheritoc Karfopoulos rapidly earned the nicknamed ‘Harris’ due to the impossible contortions required to speak his Greek name. Harris was young, slim, with wide dark eyes and glittering white teeth, and he was supposed to double as their interpreter for the remainder of their journey.

  That evening, Harris took them into one of the many vineyards of the warmer, lower slopes, so the exhausted raiders could indulge in a proper night’s rest. Leaving them wrapped in their blankets, Harris headed up the valley to fetch some food from what was his home village. Upon arrival, he stumbled into a German patrol.

  Somehow, the enemy soldiers – hailing from the 22 Luftlande Infanterie-Division – had become convinced that the hated ‘Tommies’ and their ‘Banditen’ comrades were in the village. Harris was lined up together with his elderly parents, and the rest of the villagers – people who hated the German occupiers with a vengeance. He watched with a growing sense of awe and pride as his mother stared a German soldier in the face, and swore blind that there were no British anywhere around.

  But despite such denials, the German soldiers were determined to smoke out
Lassen and his men. As they went about their house-to-house search, Harris managed to slip away, taking with him a bundle of typical villagers’ clothing. He hurried back to the vineyard, woke Lassen and his men, and they did their best to struggle into the odd assortment of garments. Disguised as local Cretans they moved out, seeking to put as much distance between themselves and the German patrol as possible.

  But after a long, hard march Harris could find nowhere obvious for Lassen and his men to hide up. They were forced to seek help from one of his contacts, a Cretan family who were avid supporters of the resistance, and whose two teenage daughters proved to be stunningly beautiful. Lassen and his men were fed a warm and hearty meal, shown to some stone beds with branches forming a makeshift mattress, and invited to get some much-needed sleep.

  Shortly afterwards the 22 Luftlande Infanterie-Division patrol arrived in the village. The family woke Lassen and his men and bundled them into a tiny, under-floor cellar-cum-cubbyhole at the back of the house. The four men almost suffocated in there, but the ruse proved successful. As the house was searched from end to end, Lassen, Nicholson, Jones and Greaves remained utterly quiet and unmoving in the claustrophobic darkness, and finally the Germans moved on to the neighbours.

  By now the raiders’ food supplies were utterly exhausted, as were their cigarettes – essential for calming frayed nerves. Lassen gave Harris some of the Greek money that they’d been issued with prior to setting out, and he set off to replenish their stock of smokes. He returned with a bulging bag and handed them back all of their money. The villagers had provided all the cigarettes the raiders could wish for, and they had refused to accept any payment in return.

  But the drama of that long night was far from over. Their search complete, the German patrol made themselves well at home. They turfed some local families out of their homes and took up temporary residence. Lassen knew they had to get out of there. The longer they stayed, the higher the risk of discovery.

  The village lay in a narrow, steep-sided ravine, and their onward journey would take them close by the German positions. They waited until well after midnight, before creeping past. Thankfully, the village dogs – often their worst enemy – chose not to bark and to give away their presence. They were able to melt into the enveloping darkness at the far end of the gorge – whereupon another night’s march, one most likely devoid of rest, beckoned.

  By the time they reached the outskirts of Kastelli Airfield, Lassen’s party was on the brink of collapse. It was only the Benzedrine tabs that they kept popping that were keeping their bruised and battered bodies going. The amphetamines would prove indispensible to those charged with such gruelling behind-enemy-lines missions, but in time Lassen for one would become virtually addicted to them.

  Guided by a new resistance fighter, Nereanos Georgios, Lassen and his men crawled through a narrow opening into a tiny cave overlooking the airbase. The planned night of the attack was two days hence. In the interim, they would need to keep a close watch and to get a sense of the airfield’s defences. The main road running to and from the aerodrome lay below the cave entrance, with German army vehicles buzzing to and fro. They would have to be extremely careful not to be spotted.

  Whenever the coast was clear Lassen studied the airbase with his field glasses. It appeared to be about a half a mile wide, and it was set into the side of a steep hill. The raiders could see the targets in the distance: lined up alongside the runway were the feared Stuka dive-bombers and Junkers-88 Schnellbombers, the prized German twin-engined fighter-bomber. There were also a few Messerschmitt fighter escorts, plus various older reconnaissance aircraft.

  They could clearly make out the fuel and ammunition dumps used to refuel and rearm the warplanes. Those had to be the other key target that they would aim for. At night they could see the searchlights stabbing the darkness all around the airbase perimeter. There didn’t seem to be any guard dogs, which was a relief, but they couldn’t be sure whether the fence encircling the airbase was electrified, and what kind of sweep and range the searchlights might have.

  Without establishing those factors they would be going in blind, and the odds were hugely stacked against them as it was. They were also hearing worrying reports from the locals. Georgios hailed from a nearby hamlet, and the word from the villagers wasn’t encouraging. Apparently, the Germans had placed permanent guards on the landing strips, with tents pitched on the grass below each aircraft, so they could maintain a permanent close watch. The locals reckoned it would be impossible for Lassen and his men to hit most, if not all of the warplanes.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ Lassen admonished his fighters. ‘This I consider to be a stupid exaggeration.’

  Lassen was painfully aware that neither Greaves, Jones nor Nicholson had any experience of behind-enemy-lines raiding operations. They were novices at such work, and the last thing he needed right now was the locals undermining the morale of his men. Lassen the experienced raider felt especially driven to lead by example, and to show not the slightest hesitation or doubt.

  But it wasn’t easy. The garrison at Kastelli Airbase was reportedly 100-strong, even before the aircrew, ground crew and auxiliaries – firefighters, air traffic controllers and the like – were counted. Up against those sorts of numbers, Lassen’s four-man raiding force was outnumbered some thirty-to-one and would be heavily outgunned.

  Moreover, Lassen knew from pre-mission briefings that the villagers might well be right. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring, the overall German commander in the Mediterranean, was reported to have issued the following orders to his airbases on Crete: ‘1. Guard of one man per aircraft with relief sleeping near by; 2. Guard to move continuously around aicraft at never more than 2 yards distance; 3. During air raids guard not to take cover but to lie down if bombs actually falling near and even then to keep aircraft under observation.’

  Lassen decided they needed to do a close target recce, to get a better sense of which aspects of what the locals were telling them might be accurate. He volunteered to lead it, and the only person it made sense to take with him was Georgios, their Cretan guide.

  Leaving the rest of his patrol to get some much-needed sleep, and to start making their Lewes bombs, Lassen and Georgios slipped away for their close encounter with the Kastelli Airbase defenders.

  A dozen-odd miles northwest of Lassen’s position, Lamonby’s unit – B Patrol – was facing its own problems. After a similarly arduous trek they’d made it to the village of Ano Arkhani, just south of Heraklion Airbase, but the area was crawling with the enemy. Hiding out in the rocky high ground, they could see 200 German soldiers drilling in the village square below.

  Their guide was a young Cretan called Janni. He’d set off to recce the airfield, only to return with the most dispiriting news: Heraklion Airbase appeared to be devoid of any aircraft. In fact, it seemed as if the Germans must have closed down Heraklion, as they shifted their warplanes to other bases across the island – most notably Kastelli, which was Lassen’s target.

  But Janni did have one item of potentially cheering news. A couple of miles to the west of where Lamonby’s men were laid up there was a massive fuel and ammunition dump, one containing thousands of drums of precious aviation fuel, plus bombs. Deprived of fuel and munitions, no German warplanes could fly: that, Lamonby decided, would have to be their target.

  *

  Disguised as local shepherds, Lassen and Georgios made their way through the vineyards that lay to one side of the airbase. Driving their flock of goats before them they managed to approach the fence line. It consisted of an outer barrier of vertical wire supported by posts, plus an inner barrier of coils of Dannert wire. Lassen and Georgios drove ‘their’ flock right against the outermost wire. It didn’t appear to be electrified, and as far as Lassen was concerned that meant that they were on for cutting their way into that airbase.

  Lassen also got a close look at the base facilities, mapping out in his mind exactly where the key targets and the defences were situated. Tho
se defences were intimidating enough, not to mention the reinforcements that lay close by. To the north of the airfield, some 3,000 German troops were stationed at the village of Kastelli Pediata. To the south, some 300 mixed German and Italian troops were billeted in Mouktari village.

  Georgios, Lassen’s Greek guide, was daunted by what lay before them. ‘There is little cover and the Germans are everywhere,’ he protested. ‘Attacking this – I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’

  ‘With so many juicy targets I didn’t even notice the Germans,’ Lassen replied, his ice-blue eyes levelled at Georgios. ‘Time to get busy.’

  ‘But entering that aerodrome – Spiro, it will be like jumping into the fire.’

  Lassen flashed a smile. ‘Jump quickly, and we won’t get burned. Let’s get back to the others.’

  ‘Spiro’ was the nickname the local Cretan resistance fighters had bestowed on the Dane. Someone among their number had decided that Lassen looked and acted like the dashing medieval knight Ipotis, mentioned in many an ancient English manuscript. Somehow, Ipotis had morphed into Spiro – a common Cretan name, and perhaps the nearest Greek bastardization of Ipotis anyone could think of.

  But having observed Spiro-Ipotis at close quarters, Georgios was fearful. He worried that Lassen was so driven by the mission that he was blind to the dangers before him.

  Back at their cave base, Lassen sketched out the key features of the target: the ranks of warplanes, the aircraft hangars, the fuel and ammunition dumps, the taxiways, plus the barracks that housed the guard force. Bearing in mind how closely the Stukas and Schnellbombers were guarded, Lassen split his force into two. One group – Nicholson leading Greaves – would attack from the eastern side of the airbase, hitting the fuel and ammo dumps, plus any warplanes they could reach. Lassen and Jones, meanwhile, would attack from the west to cause a ‘diversion’ that would enable the others to go about their work undetected. That way, at least Nicholson and Greaves would get the chance to liberally sow their Lewes bombs.