He had a small allowance, barely enough to keep body and soul together, had to learn the native languages as he went and only had a rough idea of his route. A kind of unaffected English gentlemen who emerges unscathed from almost any situation while retaining a natural calm.įinishing education at the age of 18 and with no clear idea of his future, he conceived a desire to walk on his own from London to the then Istanbul/Constantinople in 1933 just as the Nazis were coming to power, taking him through the Netherlands, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe. Most of all he had a natural charm which won the friendship of foreigners of many nationalities. Patrick Leigh-Fermor was quite the most extraordinary man, from a privileged class but without much money, a wild and almost bohemian childhood farmed out to and successively expelled from one school to another from which he emerged barely educated but with a real love of the Classics, a desire to be a writer and an ear for foreign languages. By the way, if you want to read an excellent account of the mission, I’d recommend Wes Davis’ ‘The Ariadne Objective’ which recounts the full backstory and the aftermath as well as the incredible nature of the successful mission. The film is actually pretty faithful to the real story and the commander of the British unit was Patrick Leigh Fermor. Gabriella Bullock, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commonsįrequenters of Going Postal, being a generally knowledgeable lot, may well have heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor and, if not, will probably be familiar with the war film ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ (starring Dirk Bogarde) which is based on real events of wartime daring do in which a British commando unit kidnaps the commander of the German garrison of occupied Crete and smuggles him off the island to Egypt. The two British officers are in German uniform to r.): Georgios Tyrakis, Moss, Leigh Fermor, Emmanouil Paterakis, and Antonios Papaleonidas. Members of the Kreipe abduction team (from l.
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