"Wes Davis' fast-paced tale of wartime sabotage reads more like an Ian Fleming thriller than a mere retelling of events." ―Wall Street Journal "The story unfolds with the rich characterization and perfectly calibrated suspense of a great novel. It can be hard at points to remember the book is actually a work of nonfiction." ―Christian Science Monitor The Ariadne Objective is the extraordinary story of the Nazi occupation of Crete told from the perspective of an eccentric band of British gentleman spies. These amateur soldiers―writers, scholars, archaeologists―included Patrick Leigh Fermor, a future travel-writing luminary; John Pendlebury, a pioneering archaeologist whose walking stick concealed a sword; Xan Fielding, who would later translate books like Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes into English; Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter; and W. Stanley Moss, who would write up his account of their exploits in Ill Met By Moonlight (Paul Dry Books, Inc.). Alongside Cretan partisans, these British intelligence officers carried out a daring plan to sabotage Nazi maneuvers, culminating in a high-risk plot to abduct the island’s German commander. Wes Davis presents the scintillating story of these legends in the making and their adventures in one of the war’s most exotic locales. Includes 17 black and white photographs.

The incredible true story of the World War II spies, including Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Pendlebury, who fought to save Crete and block Hitler's march to the East. In the bleakest years of World War II, when it appeared that nothing could slow the German army, Hitler set his sights on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the ideal staging ground for German domination of the Middle East. But German command had not counted on the eccentric band of British intelligence officers who would stand in their way, conducting audacious sabotage operations in the very shadow of the Nazi occupation force. The Ariadne Objective tells the remarkable story of the secret war on Crete from the perspective of these amateur soldiers – scholars, archaeologists, writers – who found themselves serving as spies in Crete because, as one of them put it, they had made “the obsolete choice of Greek at school”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Byronic figure and future travel-writing luminary who as a teenager had walked across Europe in the midst of Hitler's rise to power; John Pendlebury, a swashbuckling archaeologist with a glass eye and a swordstick, who had been legendary archeologist Arthur Evans's assistant at Knossos before the war; Xan Fielding, a writer who would later produce the English translations of books like Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes; and Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter, who prided himself on a disguise that left him looking more ragged and fierce than the Cretan mountaineers he fought alongside. Infiltrated into occupied Crete, these British gentleman spies teamed with Cretan partisans to carry out a cunning plan to disrupt Nazi maneuvers, culminating in a daring, high-risk plot to abduct the island’s German commander. In this thrilling untold story of World War II, Wes Davis offers a brilliant portrait of a group of legends in the making, against the backdrop of one of the war’s most exotic locales.

The Ariadne Objective tells the remarkable story of the secret war on Crete from the perspective of these amateur soldiers who found themselves serving because, as one of them put it, they had made 'the obsolete choice of Greek at school'. John Pendlebury, a swashbuckling archaeologist with a glass eye and a swordstick; Xan Fielding, a writer who would later produce the English translations of books like Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes; Sandy Rendel, a future Times reporter, who prided himself on a disguise that left him looking more ragged and fierce than the Cretans he fought alongside; and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the future travel-writing luminary who, as a teenager in the early 1930s, walked across Europe, a continent already beginning to feel the effects of Hitler's rise to power. Having infiltrated occupied Crete, these British gentleman spies teamed with Cretan partisans to carry out a cunning plan to disrupt Nazi manoeuvres, culminating in a daring, high-risk plot to abduct the island's German commander.-- Publisher details.

"Wes Davis' fast-paced tale of wartime sabotage reads more like an Ian Fleming thriller than a mere retelling of events." ―Wall Street Journal "The story unfolds with the rich characterization and perfectly calibrated suspense of a great novel. It can be hard at points to remember the book is actually a work of nonfiction." ―Christian Science Monitor The Ariadne Objective is the extraordinary story of the Nazi occupation of Crete told from the perspective of an eccentric band of British gentleman spies. These amateur soldiers―writers, scholars, archaeologists―included Patrick Leigh Fermor, a future travel-writing luminary; John Pendlebury, a pioneering archaeologist whose walking stick concealed a sword; Xan Fielding, who would later translate books like Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes into English; Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter; and W. Stanley Moss, who would write up his account of their exploits in Ill Met By Moonlight (Paul Dry Books, Inc.). Alongside Cretan partisans, these British intelligence officers carried out a daring plan to sabotage Nazi maneuvers, culminating in a high-risk plot to abduct the island’s German commander. Wes Davis presents the scintillating story of these legends in the making and their adventures in one of the war’s most exotic locales. Includes 17 black and white photographs.

New Yorker • Best Books of 2022 “This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. So much romantic twaddle is still published . . . it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.” —Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (UK) Resistance is the first book of its kind: a monumental history that finally integrates the many resistance movements against Nazi hegemony in Europe into a single, sweeping narrative of defiance. “To resist, therefore. But how, when and where? There were no laws, no guidelines, no precedents to show the way . . .” —Dutch resister Herman Friedhoff In every country that fell to the Third Reich during the Second World War, from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, a resistance movement against Nazi domination emerged. And every country that endured occupation created its own fiercely nationalist account of the role of homegrown resistance in its eventual liberation. Halik Kochanski’s panoramic, prodigiously researched work is a monumental achievement: the first book to strip these disparate national histories of myth and nostalgia and to integrate them into a definitive chronicle of the underground war against the Nazis. Bringing to light many powerful and often little-known stories, Resistance shows how small bands of individuals took actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the liquidation of their families and their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were not supermen and superwomen, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life who would not have been expected—least of all by themselves—to become heroes of any kind. Kochanski also covers the sheer variety of resistance activities, from the clandestine press, assistance to Allied servicemen evading capture, and the provision of intelligence to the Allies to the more violent manifestations of resistance through sabotage and armed insurrection. For many people, resistance was not an occupation or an identity, but an activity: a person would deliver a cache of stolen documents to armed partisans and then seamlessly return to their normal life. For Jews under Nazi rule, meanwhile, the stakes at every point were life and death; resistance was less about national restoration than about mere survival. Why resist at all? Who is the real enemy? What kind of future are we risking our lives for? These and other questions animated those who resisted. With penetrating insight, Kochanski reveals that the single quality that defined resistance across borders was resilience: despite the constant arrests and executions, resistance movements rebuilt themselves time and time again. A landmark history that will endure for decades to come, Resistance forces every reader to ask themselves yet another question, this distinct to our own times: “What would I have done?”

The Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police) was the political police force of the German Army during World War II. Its members were drawn from both the regular German police, including detectives, and various Nazi security organizations. The goals of the GFP were numerous and included protecting important political and military leaders; investigating black market activities as well as acts of sabotage and espionage; locating deserters; examining anti-German activists and hunting down partisans. While performing these duties, GFP members immersed themselves in criminal activities. This book focuses on the function of the GFP in Greece compared to that of the GFP elsewhere in Europe.

The oeuvre of Bauhaus artist Alexander "Xanti" Schawinsky (1904-79) encompasses a range of social and political investigations. Schawinsky spent a lifetime relocating--from Switzerland to Germany to Italy to the United States--and in the process developed his central themes, which include the responsibility of the individual and the repercussions of machine warfare. His Bauhaus training is manifested in his work's complex interpretation of the interrelationship between art, craft and design, and his practice traversed avant-garde theater, experimental photography, the Bauhaus jazz band, mechanical music and dance, and graphic design. This publication focuses on Schawinsky's work on paper from the 1940s, particularly the Head Drawings and Faces of War. Schawinsky's 1940s series reveal the existential struggle of an artist informed by Bauhaus idealism coping with the devastation of war.

The extraordinary story of the kidnapping of a Nazi general in World War II by Patrick Leigh Fermor and the SOE, and its consequences for the inhabitants of Crete, by the author of The Phantom Army of Alamein.

At the intersection of archaeology, history, museum, military and social studies, the volume offers strongly multidisciplinary essays on European cultural heritage in the historical context of World War II, assessing twelve case studies on Finland, France, Greece and Italy.

Jeffrey Meyers’ Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he writes in the preface, "The chapters in this book represent in miniature my career as a life-writer. My biographies have always been driven by fascination with the source of artistic creativity, with people who wrote or painted and with the worlds they inhabited." Ian Watt, who taught Meyers at Berkeley, struggled with the legacy of his ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war, and with its depiction in the film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. The story of Paul Theroux’s feud with Sir Vidia Naipaul is well known, but Meyers finds greater meaning in their quarrel through the lens of his own long friendship with Theroux. While James Salter, fighter pilot and brilliant stylist, epitomizes Meyers’ heroic ideal, the fiction writer also responds with an epistolary friendship, punctuated by visits, and Meyers is delighted by Salter’s great reputation late in life. Anthony Blunt, art historian and communist spy, fascinates the biographer for a darker reason: the depth of his capacity for intellectual and personal deceit. The feckless, lesser-known Hugh Gordon Porteus, told Meyers many revealing and amusing stories about his friends Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In the process of writing these profiles, Meyers discovers a common thread relating to himself: not only do these subjects provoke a kind of personal testing, they also represent his search for the ideal father in his vivid intellectual and imaginative inquiry.