Author(s): Xan Fielding

Biography & Memoir

In January 1942, Xan Fielding landed on German-occupied Crete with orders to disrupt the resupply of Rommel's Afrika Korps and establish an intelligence network in co-operation with the Cretan resistance movement. Working with bands of Cretan partisans, he succeeded magnificently. In this memoir of his wartime exploits, Fielding presents a portrait of the quintessential English operative -- amateur, gifted, daring, and charming. From the new foreword by Robert Messenger: "Hide and Seek is a classic of British war literature, an understated account of a man's coming-of-age thanks to the sudden shouldering of great responsibility. Fielding is deprecating about the dangers and his own achievements. It is typical of the quiet and reticent man who preferred to live outside the limelight and wrote matter-of-factly about the war rather than with a gloss of adventure or heroism. There's a scene, late in 1943, when Fielding and a group of partisans study the German's list of 'wanted' men.
He notes 'with regrettable but only human pride that the entry under my local pseudonym, which outlined in detail my physical characteristics, aliases and activities for a period of eighteen months, took no less than three-quarters of an octavo page in closely-set small-point type.' The Germans had surely measured his worth".