A few weeks ago, I visited the National Library of Scotland to go through some of the documents in the Patrick Leigh Fermor archive. One of these is the memoir of Ralph Stockbridge (ACC. 13338/412), describing army life on Crete before the invasion, his interactions with civilians, an encounter with the famous archaeologist John Pendlebury, the battle of Crete and his desire to return and help liberate the “brave and wonderful” Cretan people.
Following the battle Stockbridge joined the Inter Services Liaison Department (a front organisation for MI6), trained as a radio operator and returned to Crete to set up an intelligence gathering network. Though not a member of the Special Operations Executive he worked closely alongside and became good friends with many of the SOE agents who were infiltrated onto Crete.
The following text is a direct transcription of his unpublished memoir including the capitalisation of surnames.
Ralph Stockbridge
Crete
December 1940 – May 1941
I came to Crete by accident. France was my first love, and I had joined the Field Security” Corps early in 1940 because someone had told me that, as I spoke fluent French, this was the best way of getting to France quickly. But, just as France was falling, I had found myself in one of the first Field Security Sections sent to the Middle East. Fate again intervened, this time in the shape of appendicitis, to prevent me joining the Section in Northern Greece and being involved in the subsequent retreat. Instead, I found myself in the Section sent to Crete at the end of December 1940.
My first impressions were unfavourable. We were under canvas in an olive-grove beside the main Chania Suda road, and it rained incessantly, our encampment became a morass, and we were wet and miserable Of the few weeks spent in Chania I remember curiously little, and the town has never had for me the attraction of Rethymnon and Heraklion. Three things from this period stick in my memory, however my instant liking of the Greek people, my first encounter with the Greek language; and the death of Metaxas. Our Field Security duties brought us into contact with Greek officials, in the harbour and elsewhere, and one met and drank coffee with Greek soldiers on their way to, or on leave from, Albania. Their friendliness and courtesy made a lasting impression on me. I have a photograph of some of them taken by the quayside at Chania, the names of four of them were loannis PALIDES, Michael KOUTROULES, LAMBAKES, and Spyros ORPHANOS, the latter with an address in Athens (108 Patission). The first words of Greek which I heard completely mystified me. They were of a peasant woman shouting at her small boy behind our tents, and she appeared to be saying “Come here at once, Adonis”. As the child was not particularly beautiful I thought this otherwise charming survival of a name from classical times somewhat inappropriate, and it took me some time to work out that his mother was really calling him Antoni (Tony in English) and even longer to learn that the accent is on the first syllable of the name Adonis in Greek.
The sudden death of the Prime Minister, General Metaxas, whose heroic rejection of the Italian ultimatum on 28 October 1940 brought Greece into the Second World War as Britain’s only ally at that time, caused consternation in Chania. I have never, before or since that date, seen people crying openly in the streets, and this was the more remarkable in of all places, Chania, the birthplace of Venizelos whose followers professed then, as their successors still do, hatred for the right wing in general and dictators in particular.
Early in March, two members of our Section, myself and David Bowe, he a well- informed and witty Fleet Street journalist before the war, now with the rank of Sergeant to my Lance-Corporal, were sent off on our motor-bikes to represent the Section in Heraklion. We passed through Rethymnon on March 8th and I contrived to be photographed in the company of the local Gendarmerie commander and a group of bystanders, one of whom was named Polydoros NIKOLOUDES. We rode on, through beautiful scenery, to Heraklion. I nearly coming to grief, and a premature end, on one of the dangerous comers near Yeni Kave (Drosia as it is known today) whose head-man, Mitsos KONTOGIANNES, was to play such a prominent part in resistance activities during the occupation.
Thus began one of the happiest periods of my life. Bowe and I had the free run of Heraklion. Our section commander was a hundred miles away in Chania, and what our duties were, in this farcical unit to which we belonged I, at least, never clearly understood. I interpreted mine as the identification of pro-Germans in the town. There were probably not more than a score of these and all of them, I suspect, harmless people with business or family connections with Germany. Their names and details I passed on to Chania, to what purpose I cannot imagine Germany had not yet invaded Greece, the British Army certainly had no authority to take any action against civilians, however pro- German, while the Greek security section of the local Gendarmerie presumably knew a great deal more about the problem than we did and were geared to take any necessary action.
Meanwhile we enjoyed Heraklion. My first friend there was George Migades, the leading tailor in the town, who invited me into his shop for a cup of coffee as I was passing by one day. In his fifties, and immensely pro-British, Migades was a mine of information about Heraklion. He was also extremely voluble: his words came pouring out in a torrent I have never heard equalled except, possibly, by Isaiah Berlin. The efforts I made during the following weeks to understand what he was saying were certainly responsible for the fact that, without any lessons, I was fluent in Greek by the time the battle began, though I knew no modern Greek by the time I arrived in Crete five months earlier. This is less strange than it may seem, I had taken my degree in Classics at Cambridge before the war, and modern Greek is only a very much simplified version of the language spoken in Greece two thousand years ago
Migades introduced me to his wife and their four delightful children, two girls and two boys aged between 22 and 16, Modi and Rena, Yanni and Siphi (short for Joseph). All survived the war, the two girls making successful marriages, Rena to Micky Akoumianakes who was to become the most important contact in Heraklion during the occupation of successive British officers conducting resistance and intelligence activities; Yanni is today one of Greece’s best-know artists and stage designers, while Siphi retired as a senior pilot of Olympic Airways. The Migades family house was in the old part of the city which lies behind and to the east of the main street leading from Morosini Square down to the Harbour, an area of narrow streets and old houses with inner courtyards immortalized by Kazantzakes in his great novel Kapetan Mikhales (Freedom or Death in its English translation), and a tale of insurrection against the Turks during the 19th Century.
During this period I met, many of them through Migades, a cross-section of Heraklion society. There was Eleutherios ALEXIOU, scholar and schoolmaster, with a good library, with whom I discussed French literature, talking always French, which was at that time the foreign language most readily spoken by educated people in Greece. There was the honorary British Vice-Consul, M.N. ELIADES, an elderly man who had written in English a history of Crete (CRETE PAST AND PRESENT, published by Heath Cranton Ltd, London, in 1933). After Crete fell, Eliades was arrested and spent the next four years in internment in Germany, where he was, by all accounts, well-treated, and survived the war. Edith and Harry NEWLANDS were particular friends of mine, she from Newport in Essex, he originally from Lithuania and of mixed German-Lithuanian parentage (his real name was NEULANDS-JAUNTZE). They had met and married in Athens before the war where he ran a dancing school. They were kind and gentle people. He spoke German, of course, and during the occupation was obliged, much against his will, to act as a translator and interpreter in Heraklion, for which he was regarded with some mistrust as a result by local people. Both survived the war and lived in Crete, dying there at an advanced age, he in his nineties.
There were many other friends too. Coffee-housing was then, as now, a favourite pastime, and Regginakis’ establishment in the main square, facing Morosini’s beautiful Venetian fountain, our favourite rendezvous. Here we would sit for hours discussing the war and politics and anything else which occurred to us. One day. I recall, an elderly and bibulous English resident, named Foster, who was the representative in Heraklion of the Eastern Telegraph Company, stuffed with oranges the mouth of the fountain lions in a sudden fit of enthusiasm. In the square itself was always to be seen Andreas, the village, or rather town, idiot, whose harmless antics were a constant source of amusement. Andreas, I am told, was the only person in Heraklion allowed by the Germans to ‘cheek them with impunity during the occupation, he was of course often put up to it by the locals, who told him what to say.
This pleasant life came to an abrupt end on May 20, 1941, a cloudless and warm day. Although for some weeks, since the Germans had occupied mainland Greece, we had been expecting an early invasion, it was still something of a surprise when it happened. Proceedings began during the afternoon with some heavy bombing of the airfield area (two to three miles East of the town), but also of the harbour. Then, around 5pm, we saw the troop carriers and the first parachutists. I was in the western part of the city and so saw only those who descended some distance beyond the western entrance to the city. known as the Chania Gate. But a total of some 2000 German troops were landed on this first day, of whom at least half were wiped out by the end of it. They had, it seems, expected to capture the town and the airfield at once and without difficulty, but their intelligence must have been very poor since Brigadier Chapple’s British force consisted of 4000 men and there were also quite a large number of Greek troops plus many armed civilians, from elderly to very young men, who fought most valiantly and effectively. The Germans failed to take the airfield that day, and never did take it until after the evacuation, they did occupy the Greek barracks immediately to the South of the airfield, and they forced their way through the town to the harbour. But from both these areas they were driven out in the next day or two.
Just prior to the battle, I had met John Pendlebury, then in uniform as a Captain. Pendlebury, although still a young man, aged 36, had been Curator and resident archaeologist at Knossos. He knew Crete far better than any other Englishman and during this period, when there were no roads to nine out of ten villages, nor any other modern amenities, he had walked all over the island’s 200-mile length and knew hundreds if not thousands of people. It was not surprising therefore that he had been asked by the War Office (though I did not know this at the time) to organise and lead resistance to the Germans in the event of Crete being captured. In addition to his unrivalled knowledge of the terrain of the Cretans, he spoke Greek and was young and fit enough to face the physical hardships likely to be involved. He was indeed an impressive man to meet, tall, handsome, athletic-looking (he had an Athletic Blue at Cambridge and twice won the High Jump against Oxford) and with an air of considerable authority. The distinction was added to by his having a glass eye (the result of a boyhood accident) and sporting a swordstick instead of a swagger-cane. Pendlebury had in fact made detailed plans for resistance, based initially on the villages round Mount Ida (Psilorites) and this explains why, on May 21, he decided to get out of Heraklion in order to activate his resistance organisation, possibly, while the battle was still in progress and its outcome undecided. What has never been explained, and I for one have never been able to understand, is why so intelligent a man chose to leave the town by the West, or Chania Gate, and by car. All of us had seen the parachutists landing in the area beyond the Gate the day before, and it could be safely assumed that they now controlled the main road Pendlebury and his driver ran straight into a pocket of parachutists, he was seriously wounded in the ensuing skirmish, and taken to a nearby house where his wounds were dressed by a German Army doctor, and he was left overnight. The following morning more Germans returned, and Pendlebury was taken outside and shot. The assumption is that he had been identified by the Germans as potentially their most dangerous opponent in Crete and that they decided to eliminate him there and then. To shoot a wounded and defenceless enemy in cold blood was of course a war-crime, but one which could not subsequently be pinned on any individual German. It is said that, some weeks after the event, Pendlebury’s body was exhumed in order that the Germans could satisfy themselves beyond any doubt, by examination of his glass eye, that it really was Pendlebury whom they had killed. His loss was a serious one to the Allies as it put back resistance and intelligence operations in Crete until autumn when the first British personnel, of whom I had the honour to be one, were infiltrated. His reputation however lived on in the villages, and future resistance personnel always found it a valuable introduction to villagers they did not know to say they were friends of John Pendlebury. But why did he not make his way out of Heraklion on foot and to the South of the city? It must have been safer.
My personal recollections of the battle are a kaleidoscope of confusion. Our Field Security unit had been reinforced, if that is the word, by the arrival just beforehand of some NCOS and the Section Commander, Captain BURR, from Chania. We were billeted now in a half-built house opposite the Prefecture (Nomarcheion). There was no lighting and no hand-guards to the concrete staircase, and Captain Burr shortly fell from the first floor landing and broke his thigh. He was taken to hospital but could not be moved when the evacuation took place and so became a prisoner of war. The unit, composed of linguists (anything except Greek, and so useless) was hopelessly non-combatant, being armed only with Smith & Wesson 38 revolvers. We were only a hindrance to the military proper, but did odd guard jobs, acted as messengers and anything else we were asked to do. It is really only isolated incidents I remember from these seven or eight days of the battle in Heraklion: a German aircraft coming in from the sea on which a Bofors gun scored a direct hit-it became a ball of flame as it came down into the water, finding transport for a community of French nuns so that they could attempt to get out of the beleaguered town (I never discovered whether they did), the bombing of the town, diving very fast and head-first into a ditch as a Messerschmidt machine-gunned the street where I was standing, seeing some German prisoners held near Brigade HQ in a cave somewhere near the airfield- they were very arrogant and confident about the outcome of the battle; hearing my name called out down at the harbour during an air raid, and discovering it was not me but someone else who was being addressed he turned out, from my hurried enquiry, to be from Royston, the town nearest to the village of Melbourn where my family have lived since church records were kept, but I have never discovered who he was and whether he survived the war. During this time I at least had not the slightest idea of how the battle was going. In fact, it was going well as far as Heraklion was concerned, but its fate was being decided elsewhere. The capture of Maleme airfield at Chania, and complete air control, meant that the Germans could now land as many troops as required in Crete and that the battle was to all intents and purposes over. So an evacuation was ordered, the Chania garrison began the slow and arduous retreat to the South coast at Sphakia, and the Navy prepared to lift off Brigadier Chapple’s 4000 men from Heraklion. There was no possibility of rescuing the 2000 mostly Australian troops in Rethymnon most of whom in the event had to surrender though some took refuge in the villages, and were fed and sheltered at enormous personal risk by the inhabitants, often for months and in some cases years. Of these most were eventually secretly evacuated by submarine or small boat once British officers had returned to Crete to organise such operations and co-ordinate resistance
At midnight on May 28th a Royal Navy force of two cruisers and six destroyers reached Heraklion. For three hours the destroyers ferried troops to the cruisers which lay outside harbour and themselves took on board the remainder. We were marched down to the harbour in batches and I shall never forget the silence and desolation of the shattered town I knew so well. I took a vow at this moment to return to Crete as soon as possible and to help liberate its brave and wonderful people.
We sailed about 3.30am. For six hours, from first light until noon, by which time we were out of range of the aircraft, we were dive-bombed continuously. The noise of the screaming planes and of the anti-aircraft guns was deafening. Both cruisers were hit, Orion losing her Captain and nearly a hundred men killed among her crew and troops aboard. Of the six destroyers, Imperial had her steering-gear hopelessly crippled, her crew and passengers were taken aboard other ships and she was sunk. Hereward was badly damaged and had to be run aground on the East coast of Crete, her crew and passengers became prisoners of war. On board Jackal, where I was, we were packed like sardines, but suffered only near misses and minor damage. Towards nightfall we reached Alexandria, where good ladies with tea and sandwiches greeted us on the quayside. Then it was off to Cairo, and the bug-infested Kasr-el-Nil Barracks.
Back in Egypt, my first act was to approach my Commanding Officer Lt Col WORDSWORTH and beg him to get me transferred to whatever unit was responsible for secret operations in Crete, I am eternally grateful to him for abetting such a request. especially from a junior NCO quite unknown to him. I was introduced in the right quarters, given three months training in the operation of a transmitting and receiving wireless set and in encoding messages, and was back in Crete at the beginning of October 1941, where I was to spend a further two and a half years with the Resistance.
While in Egypt I sat down one day and wrote the following poem (not included) [Link to my transcription here]. It is to be read as an allegory of the bonds which unite our two island races, each with a famous history. I always thought of Crete as the last bastion of those allegedly fair-haired invaders from the North who had peopled Greece in pre-classical times, in particular the Dorians. It was noticeable in Crete at that time how many people had fair hair and blue eves, and noteworthy that nearly all of these turned out to originate from those mountain fastnesses to the South and South East of the White Mountains, the area of Sphakia, into which, for hundreds of years, successive occupiers, Venetians, Turks and now Germans never penetrated except to make brief forays. And so the race remained pure, without intermarriage with foreigners. There were even unmistakable traces of the old Greek language of classical times, eg the word “pempo” (I send) was regularly used instead of the modern Greek ‘stelno’.
Note:
Ralph Stockbridge was made an Officer, awarded the Military Cross in 1942 and a Bar in 1944, in which year he also received the Honorary Citizenship of Rethymnon on its liberation from the Germans.