In 1942, my father was head of an outfit which equipped S.O.E. agents before they were infiltrated into the Balkans. You can think of him as Q in a Bond novel: Q stands for ‘quartermaster’. His unit was wound up in November 1942, so the last mission he equipped was his own, when he and Xan Fielding were to be landed on Crete by submarine.
You can’t take a great deal of kit on such a mission, but it seems that he included knives, coshes, ether pads to knock out sentries (very good for lighting fires) and two cameras. When his commanding officer Brigadier Keble saw the cameras on the inventory, he reportedly said “I don’t know what you want with those, but you can at least photograph each other.”
In late November, just as the German occupation of North Africa was crumbling, following the Battle of El Alamein, a small party on the Greek submarine the Papanikolis was brought to the southern Crete coast and put into small boats in which they rowed ashore.
Just as they were reaching dry land, my father and Xan Fielding’s boat split in half on a submerged rock and their belongings sank to the bottom, including, presumably, the cameras. The following day they came across two Australian stragglers (following the German invasion of Crete a very large number of Allied troops wandered the island depending on Cretan hospitality to survive) one of whom was a talented diver: in an official report my father was to write “Pte. John C. Simsoe – This man, a brilliant diver and underwater swimmer, helped us recover from the sea the bulk of the stores lost during our crash landing in November”. I am assuming the cameras were amongst the possessions salvaged!
A few years ago, with two friends, the British historian Chris White and Heraklion museum curator Costas Mamalakis, I went to try and find one cave where my father and others had hidden from the Germans. Chris White has successfully identified many of the hiding places, but one cave, used in January 1943, had eluded him! In a second day of searching we met an elderly gentleman in a café and he pointed to a distant hillside and said in Greek to Costas Mamalakis, “You see that tree and that rock, well the cave you are looking for is in front of them!” The vista at which he pointed was full of trees and rocks!
However we followed his instructions and eventually turned off the road onto a downhill narrow track and coming to a gate found ourselves facing another car coming uphill. I couldn’t follow the entire conversation with the other driver but it seemed friendly, and we were then led down to where he was feeding his sheep. On foot we followed our new guide Dimitri through an olive grove and then down a series of terraces until lo and behold we were in front of a cave. Dimitri announced “Here you are”. Chris pulled out his copies of war-time photographs, and we began to match the details of the rocks in front of us with the background of the photographs which showed Patrick Leigh Fermour, George Pyschoundakis, Xan Fielding, Yanni Tsangarakis and my father Arthur Reade. The men must have taken turns photographing eachother: George Pyschoundakis relates how he took a photo of Xan Fielding searching for lice with his trousers down!
We were soon joined by another man, Niko, who’d spotted unaccustomed activity around the mouth of the cave, and I took a number of photographs, loose re-creations of those images from January 1943, using those present as stand-ins for the characters from 75 years ago.
Our two new-found guides then kindly invited us back to drinks in both their homes. We were very glad to accept this hospitality. After drinks at Dimitri’s house we drove about 5 miles to the Niko’s home, and sat at a table out of doors with his elderly parents. We’d only been sat there five minutes when the old man Yeorgios said to me in a Greek so heavily accented that Costas had difficulty understanding him; “Was your father a lawyer and lived in Cyprus?” I was open-mouthed! We had barely arrived and he had correctly identified my father from almost no information. He went on to explain that during the war, as a small boy, he had carried food up to the fugitives in the cave, and that after the war my father had written from our home in Cyprus enclosing a photograph of his children. He added, pointing back at the house “I have that photograph and that letter still!”
Very moved by that encounter, we drove back to Heraklion.
For some time I’d been wondering what sort of camera these British agent would have carried. I’d thought about British cameras available during the war. And then I came across an account by Xan Fielding in which he referred to the cameras as Leicas. And it dawned on me that the best equipment would have been German: not only technically superior but also in the event of a discovery the cameras would have not given anything much away whereas a British bit of kit would have announced the presence of British agents.
So I have begun to look for pre-war Leicas, and suspect that my father’s department might have issued Leica II or Leica III. Some of them may have been captured from the retreating German army as the tide of the war turned in North Africa.
What would an agent carry today? Probably a smart phone!
Rufus Reade