Fortune favours the brave
John Jolliffe
his book of memoirs is as remarkable for the initiative, the powers of leadership and the sheer physical endurance of its author as it is for the eccentricity of its structure. Michael Woodbine Parish was a Young territorial officer in the Sherwood Rangers in 1939, and managed to escape from his German captors after the fiasco in Crete, familiar to all readers of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour, in June 1941. Having suffered on the spot, he is particu- larly fierce in his criticism of General Freyberg for failing to make the Maleme air-strip unusable by the invading Ger- mans, who he believes could easily have been defeated if their parachute division had not been supported by the equipment that was landed there.
. He then led the escape of a small party In a caique, through storms and other privations that make St Paul's voyages in those waters seem like a picnic in compari- son. Landing on the island of Milos the author was badly injured: a cracked skull, a broken wrist and the loss of the use of an eye and an ear. Eventually they reached the safety of Turkey, and the author recov- ered to some extent in hospital in Alexan- dria, but curtailed his convalescence in order to mount a rescue operation of other groups of beleaguered Allied soldiers. Later, he launched further operations from MI9 in Smyrna to save other escaping troops. He also formed a fleet of indepen- dent caiques, with which he persuaded the Italians to surrender the islands of Samos and Leros, and he remains convinced that had General Wilson in Cairo enabled them to take Rhodes as well, Turkey would have entered the war on the allies' side, and Churchill's dream of an invasion through Bulgaria and Romania would have made the terrible slog up through Italy unneces- sary. As the author points out, it finally came to a dead end at the Alps, with hideous casualties en route. The Germans would then have been defeated before the end of 1943, and Eastern Europe would have been saved from half a century of Soviet enslavement.
Military historians have drawn attention to a wide range of ifs and buts attendant on this theory, but the author, perhaps rather high-handedly, ignores them. (He over- looks, for example, the fact that Hitler's ambassador in Turkey, von Papen, made it abundantly clear to the Turks that there were two squadrons of German bombers based at Plovdiv, in Bulgaria, and that if the Turks gave Hitler any trouble, Smyrna and Istanbul, much of which was built of wood, would be burned to the ground by incendiary raids.) The author was later seriously wounded on Samos when the Ital- ians heard of the rescue of Mussolini by Colonel Skorzeni, and the Axis was for a time reformed. After innumerable opera- tions to remove a bullet from his pelvis, he was taken first to a prison camp in Czechoslovakia, and then to Oflag 7B at Brunswick, before being eventually repatri- ated through an exchange arrangement for severely wounded prisoners.
As a result of his long months in hospi- tals and prison camps, his own records of these thrilling adventures are inevitably patchy, and sandwiched between them are 70 pages from the diary of Myles Hildyard, a brother officer who escaped with him from Crete, and like him was decorated for bravery. After the war, Parish built up two investment companies with the same ener- gy and enterprise that he had shown against the Germans, and the value of their shares has multiplied to date by a factor of 50. It is not unkind to mention that proper editing could have made the whole of this truly remarkable story a great deal more coherent. But, as it is, peppered with ran- dom, undeveloped references to numerous friends and peacetime activities (in which fast cars, beautiful women and wonderful holidays feature regularly), its refreshing, old-fashioned informality gives added flavour to the author's quite extraordinary achievements in war and peace. Tribute is also paid to these by Patrick Leigh Fermor and General Sir John Hackett.
'Now that's what I call an enigmatic smile.'
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