Hide and Seek - Xan Fielding

 Xan Fielding was a Special Operations Executive agent sent to occupied Crete in 1942 to organise resistance groups.   He was later joined by Paddy Leigh Fermor but they only worked together briefly because they were in charge of separate halves of the island.   Fielding had no active part in Paddy and Billy Moss's 1944 kidnap of the German commander (see below, Ill Met by Moonlight) save that the idea was originally his.

Fielding's account is different in tone to the gung-ho adventure of Billy and the selfdepracating narrative of Paddy.   Fieldings believes that his mission to Crete was a failure and British Command let the Cretans down by not invading.   Command also forced him to lie to his Cretan followers, which causes him profound shame.

Billy's account of the war in Crete is based on his diaries of the time.   Paddy's was not written until the others were dead.   Hide and Seek was written in 1954 after Fielding had revisited the island post-war.   It is therefore a travel book as much as a war book.   It was probably always how Fielding, the lifelong traveller, viewed it.   Born in India, he was brought up in France by his French grandparents and - like Paddy Leigh Fermor, but separately, he walked across Europe from West to East as a pre-war teenager.   When war broke out he was living and working in Cyprus.   It was only the Cretans' vigorous response to the invasion-by-air (history's first) that persuaded him he might have a role to play.

One advantage Xan Fielding has over Billy Moss is that he is a much better writer, better even than Paddy Leigh Fermor who was, eventually, persuaded to accept a knigthood for his literary work.   Paddy is fluent and imaginative, but seems always to be holding back, afraid to impose himself on his own narrative.   That is the key to his friend Xan's superiority.   He gets the balance exactly right.

Xan, who died in 1991, was in later life a translator from the French.   He was the man who translated Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai.

Albanian Assignment - David Smiley

 Smiley, whom some suggest may have provided le Carre with the name, was a career cavalry officer who spent most of World War II with the Special Operations Executive.   He was a regular resident of the house in Cairo known as Tara.   Thus he knew Paddy Leigh Fermor and thus, inevitably, this book includes an introduction by Paddy.   Other than partying, Smiley and Paddy did not serve together.   Paddy was a Cretan specialist, Smiley served with Billy McLean, in Albania, twice.

The Albanian situation in the second half of the war was even more complicated than the Cretan.   The Italians had annexed the country and only really when Italy surrendered did the Nazis get involved.   At this stage the Albanian resistance, which had always been divided between supporters of King Zog and Communists, turned active against once another.   Smiley and McLean's first mission had been to unite them and get them fighting the enemy, their second was to try and salvage what they could.   Their situation was further complicated, according to Smiley, by Communist moles within SOE Command at Cairo and later Bari.   Smiley and McLean, in the field, were allied with the Zogists but Command ignored their reports and supported the Communists of Enver Hoxha.   Hoxha, meanwhile, contributed to the deaths of serving British SOE officers - again, according to Smiley.

Smiley, like all right-wingers, claims to be uninterested in politics.   He is not involved with negotiations (left to McLean and Julian Amery, who arrived slightly later, both of whom, of course, later became Conservative MPs).  Smiley prefers blowing things up.   He is generous to those who served with him, whatever their nationalities or beliefs.   He really likes Albania.   The fairly slender text is packed with fascinating military details.   It should be noted that Smiley only wrote after he retired from a lifetime military career.   Along the way he had worked with MI6 and served all over Europe and the Middle East.   Before the war he had served in Abyssinia and Palestine.   His tone sometimes jangles the modern liberal ear, but he certainly knew what he was talking about.   As for his personal conduct, he held the Military Cross and bar.   In other words, he won it twice.  That's quite an achievement.

SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940-46 - M R D Foot

You have to remember that this work was originally published in 1984 and updated in 1990.   The SOE story was still subject to the Official Secrets Acr and many people still did not know that such an organisation had ever existed.

What Foot provides, therefore, is a comprehensive overview of the background of SOE and a much more general summary of their activity.   Given that they operated in every theatre of war, there were limits to what Foot could say in 1984, given that the Cold War was still raging and many of the countries who had hosted SOE operatives were behind the Iron Curtain.   I guess that the 1990 update was because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino effect on Balkan and Baltic nations.

This book is therefore a solid account for the generalist.   If you want specialist detail, you will need to go elsewhere.

The Ariadne Objective - Wes Davis

 This is the story of the SOE in Crete.  It syntheses the personal accounts of Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss (see various posts on this blog over the last couple of months) with the 'universal' approach of pure military historians like Antony Beevor.   It works well and is probably the best introduction to the subject.  What Davis brings to the party is deeper research than Fermor or Moss could ever have achieved.  Davis, for example, gives us the names of the crew of the bomber that dropped Fermor but was unable to drop Moss onto the Cretan massif in February 1944.   Where Davis differs from other accounts - for example, the type of bomber it was that carried Fermor and Moss - I tend to side with Davis.  In this instance, for example, why would a British crew fly an American bomber?

Davis is particularly could on John Pendlebury, the eccentric British academic who carried out the groundwork for Fermor and Moss (and Xan Fielding, come to that) and who died the ultimate hero's death during the Fall of Crete in 1941.  Pendlebury gets a chapter to himself - richly deserved.   Davis slightly plays down the abduction of General Kreipe in April '44, which reflects its importance with historical retrospect but does not reflect the fervour it raised at the time.

Obviously I am now quite familiar with the central story but Davis adds a lot of fresh detail and has a 100% engaging style.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Ariadne Objective.  I recommend it to generalist and specialist alike.

Cairo in the War - Artemis Cooper

 Artemis Cooper might be defined as heritage writer.  The books she writes are connected with her heritage as the granddaughter of Duff Cooper, politician, diplomat and military historian, and the aristocrat actress Lady Diana; daughter of aristocrat and writer John Julius Norwich, and wife to military historian Antony Beevor.   Her themes are perfectly encapsulated here, the scandalous story of the cultural broth that made Cairo infamous during World War II.

Cairo was then a British protectorate - not quite part of the Empire but effectively ruled from London.  The British expats, and the first wave of military commanders stationed there, were either Raj, posh or risque, sometimes all three.   This is not really the story of the ordinary infantryman, a long way from home in an alien climate, though they are mentioned.

We have the highly dubious royal family, led by the notorious King Farouk, initially in his youthful pomp, latterly at the start of his long debauched decline.  In public the royals are devout Muslims, behind closed doors they are boozing and copulating with the everyone else.

The war becomes a reality with Rommel's advance through the desert.  Cairo survives.  Then the war-story turns to the Special Operations Executive, with Cairo the base for operations supporting resistance movements in Greece, Crete and the Balkans.

It is incredibly well done.  The characters are expertly summarised and Cooper somehow makes it easy for her reader to keep track of the various cliques and conspiracies.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Ill Met By Moonlight - W Stanley Moss

 The wartime classic, Ill Met By Moonlight is built around the contemoraneous diary of Moss while he and the far better known Patrick Leigh Fermor went to Crete in 1944 to abduct the Nazi commanding the island, General Kreipe.

The reasons for the abduction are confused - Moss and Fermor have different memories of the plan's conception (during a high-spirited leave in Cairo).   Moss was an SOE newbie whereas Fermor had been leading the resistance on Crete for a couple of years.   The main point, in fact, was the sheer bravado of the exploit, guaranteed to dominate headlines around the world.   Personally, I suspect the Allied Command was delighted to stage a massive distraction in the Eastern Mediterranean while they prepared to land in Normandy two months later.

It is more like two weeks before D-Day when the raiders manage to get off the island with their captive (obviously they succeed; no one was going to publish a book about a wartime failure in 1950).  In the six or so weeks since Moss landed he and Fermor and their motley band of Cretans and Russians have survived many scapes and setbacks.   For the modern reader what stands out is the bravery of all parties, especially the locals who have most to lose and will have to face brutal reprisals.   Moss writes really well and this new edition is well put together, with extra material from Fermor, who wrote several books about his service on Crete.   Highly recommended.