With SOE in Greece

The Wartime Experiences of Captain Pat Evans

Tom Evans

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526725141
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Seconda guerra mondiale

Pat Evans parachuted into German-occupied Northern Greece in September 1943. His mission as a SOE operative was to support the Greek resistance movement, carry out sabotage and commando operations and gather military intelligence.By this time Greece was not only a country ravaged by a brutal occupation but being torn apart by fending political factions on the edge of civil war. Evans had to walk a tight-rope between the Germans, the Communist directed ELAS, Macedonia irredentists and his own SOE masters in Cairo and Allied High Command.After the Nazis withdrew in late 1944, he was sent to Northern Greece to try and restore some form of normality amid the chaos of civil war. His success can be measured by the warmth in which the locals still remember him, over 70 years on.This book draws on a wide range of sources, including SOE and War Cabinet papers but it is Pat Evans unpublished letters and reports that give the reader an insight into the challenge that he faced, both operationally and politically.The result is a thrilling and informative book.

Chapter One

The Journey Out

Pat joined up in 1940 and became a tank driver. As he wrote to one of his former schoolmasters, he enjoyed working with tanks: ‘The driving entailed unlimited hard work and a good deal of fun too of a grubby but satisfying kind. Compass correction was ticklish but really thrilling – it is always fascinating to deal with, and adapt to your own ends, a force you can neither see, hear, smell or touch.’ In 1941 he refused the offer of a commission because, as Jill wrote to her best friend with some exasperation, ‘he believes in winning it on the field of battle.’ By March 1942, though, he had given in and was at an Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU), where he wrote that:

Life consists of polishing one’s boots to a fantastic brilliance and learning about a multitude of things. I have been in the army for over eighteen months and, except that I have been part of Britain’s garrison, I have contributed to the war effort exactly nil. I don’t feel I am a potential hero but I shall be very glad all the same to get into action. Uselessness is very galling.

From OCTU Pat was sent to the School of Military Intelligence for specialist training. The Intelligence Corps had been founded in 1940 to ‘provide for the efficient centralized administration in one corps of personnel employed on intelligence, cipher and censor duties.’ By the end of the war it had trained 1,700 officers and other ranks. On the last day of the course at Matlock in Derbyshire, in March 1943, Pat went to see the commanding officer to put forward his ideas about Greece in the hope of getting into Special Operations. They talked about the Greek campaign. ‘What about the road from X to Y?’ the colonel asked. ‘We didn’t have time to recce it and were never certain whether the Germans could bring an armoured division down it or not – until they did.’ From his memories of a walking trip in 1937 Pat gave him details of the road. ‘I wish we had known that at the time,’ the colonel said.1

Northern Greece was largely unknown territory to the English; apart from the occasional archaeologist, few Englishmen ventured that far from Athens. Pat went there more by accident than design. Having left Oxford without taking a degree, he had spent most of the 1930s knocking around as ‘tutor, journalist, publisher’s reader, reviewer, secretary, farm labourer’, while reading widely and writing poetry. In Paris he had made friends with Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. Miller was finishing Tropic of Capricorn, the sequel to Tropic of Cancer, which had already made him notorious; Durrell was at the outset of his literary career. The Durrell family was living on Corfu and the 11-year-old Gerald needed a tutor. Pat had arrived there to take up the job in 1936, ‘a tall, handsome young man fresh from Oxford.’2

A photograph from the period shows Pat as a slim figure in jodhpurs and hacking jacket, with a crest of wavy dark hair above a broad forehead and a strong, sharp chin. He is looking down to shade his steely, grey-blue eyes from the sun. Gerald’s 16-year-old sister Margo found Pat ‘very, very attractive’ and became infatuated, to the point where, after a year, Mrs Durrell decided he must leave. Pat made his way to the mainland and walked right across the mountains of Western Macedonia, from Ioannina in the Epirus to Veria in Central Macedonia, just 45 miles from Thessaloniki in the east, before making his way down to Athens.3 He never talked about Margo (Jill thought he had a bad conscience) but he sometimes told stories about walking in the mountains, where the shepherd dogs wore spiked collars and were almost as savage as the wolves.

After completing his course at Matlock, Pat was posted back to his regiment at Leyburn in Yorkshire, where the wind came sweeping over the moors, ‘bounding about the stone house and making it shake’. He was now an assistant Intelligence officer and increasingly frustrated by inaction. On 14 March 1943 he wrote to Jill that

a job which I want very badly indeed looks like materializing. I applied for it in great fear and trembling at Matlock, was received with open arms, and have lately been told to stand by for a Telegram From The War Office. Very Dennis Wheatley [a best-selling writer of spy stories, who was also a secret intelligence officer]. It’s exciting, but this endless waiting is a poor business. ‘Any day now’ said the last news I had and meanwhile I do a lot of little jobs here, trying to simulate an interest in it all and scan every mail and then wonder how long it will be to the next. Every time I hear footsteps coming along the passage I think, ‘Is that the telegram?’ and it isn’t.

Mugshots in Pat’s SOE personnel file show his eagerness and determination. Fortunately, his wanderings in Greece stood him in good stead: Stanley Casson, the CO at Matlock, ‘warmly recommended’ him to SOE, which was in ‘urgent need of Greek speakers and officers with a knowledge of Greece’.4 Behind the scenes, secret signals had been going back and forth between ‘M.O.4’ (SOE) in Cairo, SOE in London and the army to secure Pat’s release from the Royal Tank Regiment.

Eventually the telegram came summoning him to London, and on 5 May 1943 he was interviewed by Major Boxshall of SOE. Afterwards Pat took Jill for dinner at Rule’s in Covent Garden, and then to her flat in Eton Avenue between Chalk Farm and Swiss Cottage. He left at about 2.30 am and walked for an hour through the blackout, round the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, through the silent, empty streets of Marylebone to Park Lane, where he was staying.5 Later that day, a note was sent from SOE London to Cairo saying

due to fortunate and unforeseen developments we have been able to secure the services of 2nd Lieut. P. H. Evans, R.A.C., who was so warmly recommended by Colonel Stanley Casson. Evans was interviewed by us yesterday and found quite promising. Subject to the Security vetting being satisfactory we hope to despatch him to you in the course of this month.6

It had been a momentous twenty-four hours. Two evenings later, Pat took Jill for a final dinner before he was swallowed up by the shadowy world of the Special Forces. He could not say where he was going, but he took her to the best Greek restaurant in London, the White Tower in Percy Street. His diary records that they dined on ‘soupe karavisha, sole and vegetables for Jill, moussaka, loukmedes. A pleasant red wine, like burgundy, and French coffee.’ At the next table, a fat man with a baby face was entertaining. This was Cyril Connolly, a well-known critic who edited the literary magazine Horizon. ‘After dinner he called for cigars, then when the waiter brought the cigars he turned them down and his guests went without.’ At this stage of the war, it was still possible to eat, drink and smoke well in London.

The next day, Pat was back in Yorkshire, preparing for embarkation. Jill had gone to Scotland as a WRNS cipher officer. While they were in London, Pat had committed himself and proposed marriage. Jill had not answered either way, but he was confident and happy. On 13 May, Pat returned to London from Yorkshire to SOE’s offices, where he signed the Official Secrets Act. From this moment on, he was ‘specially employed’ and no longer paid by the army.

Six days later, on 19 May, Pat left the UK for Greece by way of Cairo. He set off like a warrior in romance, cloaked in secrecy, heart full of love for his lady. Strangely, his journey began by travelling directly away from his destination, on a ship that headed far out west into the North Atlantic. Only when safely out of range of patrolling U-boats and aircraft did the convoy turn south into the tropics and then east to the coast of Africa in a 5,000-mile arc that landed him twice as far from his destination as when he started. Pat’s letters to Jill, written on board, are undated. Some pages were removed, others mislaid, found and sent on later. Censorship prevented him from writing anything that might have military significance and inhibited him from writing anything very intimate. So he wrote to amuse and to reassure:

I think of you a great deal and look forward to the day we shall be reunited. If there are any trials and tribulations in front of me I know that I have, in the form of memories of you, a fund of comfort and strength to which I can turn whenever I feel gloomy or harassed… I don’t suppose it’s a breach of security to say that we can see the Southern Cross. A dainty little constellation. If the Bear is masculine then the Southern Cross is feminine.

Try to console yourself with the thought that the war won’t last for ever and that meanwhile you are marvellous – absolutely and wildly and completely impossibly marvellous.

I have lost count of time and don’t know the day or the date. We are fairly near the equator now and it is beautifully hot. A white, sticky heat, but I don’t mind it. At night the sea is full of sparks and the whole side of the ship, where it meets the water, is a long ribbon of milky phosphorescence. As our next-door-neighbour ship lifts to a wave you can see her stern all lit up from underneath. It’s a lovely sight. This afternoon the sea was swarming with flying fish which kept popping up and gliding gracefully a foot or two above the surface, dipping up and down, like swallows. There was some fish-of-prey, perhaps a small shark, chasing them in a lazy sort of way for some time. We must be getting near land again now, as we see birds again. The only one we have had since the second or third day out was a dainty little falcon, which had strayed hundreds of miles out to sea and stopped for a rest on our mizzenmast. Perhaps it was some southern species of kestrel; I wouldn’t know.

The company on board is quite amusing. Very mixed. Women in quite a minority and very much sought after, in spite of being a very unattractive bevy. People are behaving in a way that makes me think Somerset Maugham must be true after all.

The first week of the voyage was lousy. The sea was choppy and I felt extremely bilious and had a headache though I wasn’t sick; so did a lot of others (including some naval officers, which reassured me) and we all told each other we were feeling fine, thanks old chap, bit stuffy on board though wasn’t it – and went on eating our meals out of sheer vanity and in the utmost discomfort. But my stomach soon made friends with the ocean and then the weather got warm, and now life is idyllic.

There is an Irish girl aboard who apparently has been ‘misbehaving’ herself, whatever that may mean – heaven knows what adulteries on the boat deck. After all it’s the heat, what, don’t you know? I always say, old man, a fellow can’t be a plaster saint, what? (We have some Empire-builders on board.) So a posse of the male passengers, in a mixture of hilarity and a sort of uneasy morality, dash-it-the-girl-did-go-a-bit-toofar sort of thing – altogether most odd – decided one evening to tie her in her bunk to keep her out of mischief, ha-ha! (Lots of whatting and don’t-you-knowing at this point; whispered conferences in the saloon etc.) The girl got wind of it and instead of hiding herself in a lifeboat or taking sanctuary somewhere, she went down to her cabin, put on her best nightdress, overhauled her complexion with great care and lay on her bunk. And was duly tied to same.

My sweet/I think the waw/Is a baw/Because of security/I have to wrap all my movements in the darkest obscurity.

And it is a baw because I can now say that I have finally seen the tropics for the first time and they are very exciting. And I want to tell you all about it. They haven’t let me down a bit. They always seemed so wonderful in Conrad and other writers that I couldn’t quite believe it was true. Well it is. They are pestiferous but lovely.

At the risk of making you burst with envy let me tell you that I have been eating fruit. Pineapples running with juice, and little green bananas which are ripe although they don’t look it. I also have an avocado pear which I am going to eat in a few minutes. It is dark greeny-purple and shaped like a walnut with the rind on, and about the size of a cricket ball; its inside is filled with pale green shaving cream. I also have some oranges but I haven’t got round to eating them yet.

I have been talking to Empire-builders. Very cautiously. One has to stalk them with stealth and cunning and make sure of selecting the right one as some of them are crashing bores. By and large they are some of the oddest people I have ever met… but many of them are worth meeting – for their unusual angles on existence, for their accounts of the fantastic overheated places in which they live and rule or trade; and even when they are bores for their sheer oddness; good additions to one’s mind’s collection of human beings.

The censor objected to part of the next letter, which begins in mid-sentence:

…passengers, ranging from three little blackamoors (one couldn’t call them Negroes, they were too much like the picaninnies one used to see in storybooks in one’s childhood) to some moth-eaten but elevated Naval officers. A fair sprinkling of women – mostly rather mousey and some dreary to the nth. And one Freddy Ayer, a former philosophy don from Oxford who writes for Horizon and knows Stephen Spender and many others from the menagerie of our acquaintances and semi-acquaintances in that and similar circles. He is a witty and intelligent person with large eyes like a jerboa, a large triangular head and a small body. He is good fun and it is great luck to have bumped into him as an addition and companion for a voyage. John [Cook] is nice but sticky; an awful old woman sometimes. The objects of these descriptions are sitting in armchairs next to me, all unconscious, and I feel rather like a Judas. Freddy [Ayer] is reading The Amberley Papers7 which he says are fascinating and which I am going to read after him.

John Cook, who had been recruited along with Pat from the Intelligence course at Matlock by Colonel Casson, was a classical scholar and archaeologist who became Director of the British School at Athens after the war and then a professor at Bristol University. A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer was an agent for both SOE and MI6. The publication of Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936 had made his reputation as a philosopher and he went on to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. Stephen Spender was already established as a leading poet and essayist, and later became Poet Laureate.

The letter continued:

At the port John and I didn’t have to queue and fiddle around with the rest of the passengers; there was an Army officer waiting for us, who simply took us through all the controls in front of everyo...