Authors: Rick Stroud
SOE Cairo needed to take control and get Papadakis out of Crete. After many attempts to persuade him, he eventually agreed to be evacuated off the island in order to get his family to safety. When, on
5
August, the submarine to transport them to Alexandria did not turn up, Papadakis suspected a trap; he threatened to kill Fielding if the submarine did not appear. While the British and the Cretans were arguing on the beach, the Royal Hellenic Navy submarine
Papanikolis
was sailing up and down the coast trying to locate the rendezvous beach. On its first attempt it surfaced close to a fishing boat and almost sank it, causing further delays. The party waited on the beach for three more days; all the while Papadakis’s henchmen watched Fielding and kept their Marlin sub-machine guns trained on him. After several frustrating nights the rendezvous point was located and the submarine surfaced off Rodakino beach. On board was Smith-Hughes, who had come along to mollify Papadakis. At last, the colonel who had proved so troublesome to the British was taken off Crete. In Heraklion, Andreas Polentas, took over Papadakis’s command.
The SOE and ISLD did not have many radios on the island, but a river of information flowed from them transmitted in Morse code. Spies who had been innocent civilians before the arrival of the Germans collected valuable intelligence about the comings and goings of ships in the harbour, of aircraft from the airfields, troop movements and map references for the position of German military supplies. One SOE agent wrote: ‘The information coming out of Crete at that time was of the utmost importance . . . because the Germans were using the island as their main base for the supplies of their forces in North Africa and information concerning their movements was used prior to the Battle of Alamein.’
Agents came and went, delivered by motor launch or submarine. Ralph Stockbridge was taken off the island shortly before Colonel Papadakis. He took with him a young Greek, Lefteris Kalitsounakis, Papadakis’s nephew, who had been forced to work for the colonel as almost a slave. Kalitsounakis was persuaded to join ISLD and the men returned to Crete a few weeks later, with Kalitsounakis as Stockbridge’s assistant. With them was a third ISLD agent, John Stanley. Their submarine was to be met on the north coast by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Unfortunately Leigh Fermor had drunk a great deal of wine and raki that day and was nowhere to be found. The three men made it by dinghy to what they thought was the right beach. Kalitsounakis went ahead and immediately ran into a barbed-wire fence. They were in a minefield. Kalitsounakis’s training in Cairo had included a course on explosives. He knew that a recently exploded mine leaves a smell like almonds, and he could smell almonds. He guessed that some of the minefield must have been detonated by wandering sheep. Very carefully he retraced his path, found the others and told them to walk only in his footsteps. This they did, and managed to unload the supplies from the dinghy. Sometime later they found Leigh Fermor in a deep, raki-induced sleep.
There were other dangers. No one was aware that the Germans had managed to insert a double agent into their midst, a man called Giorgios Komnas, who was a clerk in the Kommandantur at Heraklion. He had provided SOE with some very detailed information about Wehrmacht forces, which he claimed had been taken from ration returns. SOE intelligence officers in Cairo found that some things did not tally. In one report Komnas described in detail an SS battalion based at Prama, commanded by Major von Teitzen. There were no SS battalions on the island.
Cairo sent a signal expressing its concerns to Leigh Fermor, who sent a letter by runner to Andreas Polentas, the man who had taken over from Papadakis. It read:
Headquarters have a strong base to believe that the numbers concerning troops etc., incoming and outgoing with planes or ships, i.e.: The information we have sent recently, are heavily exaggerated. This, if true, can be attributed to two reasons:
a) the agent who sent this information had made a big mistake or
b) had taken these figures from somebody who had deliberately given an exaggerated idea of the forces the enemy has sent to Libya.
Headquarters has asked us to clear this up as soon as possible.
Polentas refused to believe that Komnas was a double agent. He knew that the Germans used certain tactics to fool Allied intelligence and spies. One ploy was to move troops on to air transports off ships in the day and disembark them at night, then take them by lorry to another part of the island. Polentas put the discrepancy in numbers down to ruses such as this. He then did a very rash thing. He was due to meet Vangelis Vandoulas in a cafe in Chania. He took Komnas with him and introduced him to the agent saying, ‘My dear Vangelis, it is my pleasure to introduce you to my friend Giorgios Komnas. Dear Giorgios this is my cousin Vangelis Vandoulas. I have already spoken to you about him when he arrived from down there.’
Vandoulas was horrified, ‘down there’ meant from Egypt. This was a very serious breach of security. Vandoulas stood up shook hands with Komnas, bought him a drink and then apologised and left saying that he had an urgent appointment. He went back to his hotel, found his radio operator, Apostolos, and together they left the city, heading for his home village of Vaphé where he met Leigh Fermor.
Vandoulas told Leigh Fermor what had happened. As they talked a messenger came from Polentas with a warning from Komnas that the
Geheime Feldpolizei
chief in Chania had heard that the RAF had recently made a big supply drop in the area and was ordering a large-scale search. Leigh Fermor immediately moved his headquarters. Vandoulas and his radio operator stayed on in the village.
Early on the morning of
1
4 November 1942, Vandoulas and Apostolos were having breakfast and getting ready for the
0
8:00 hours transmission to SOE Cairo when they heard a prolonged whistle: the villagers’ signal that German soldiers were in the area. Vandoulas ran out of the house to be confronted by the sight of a German patrol about fifty metres away, talking to a villager, demanding that he identify Vandoulas’s house. They stopped Vandoulas and asked him the same question, without realising who they were talking to. Vandoulas said that he thought the man they were looking for was the villager they could see running down the road. Vandoulas then bolted and managed to disappear into the hills.
His radio operator was less fortunate. Apostolos was stuffing signal papers into his pockets and heading for the back door where he was arrested by Germans who had now surrounded the building. Meanwhile Vandoulas’s sister Elpida, managed to hide the radio set and other equipment in the attic. Apostolos was marched off for interrogation to Chania. Once the soldiers had gone Elpida took the radio, batteries, signal books and a sub-machine gun to a hiding place in the mountains.
From the moment that Komnas had been introduced to Vandoulas in the cafe in Chania the whole thing had been a plot. Once he knew who Vandoulas was, Komnas had reported this information to the secret police. The messenger sent to Polentas with the warning of the raid was a trick to win the trust of Vandoulas and the others in the resistance. The trick worked, Andreas Polentas, one of the most senior men in the resistance, was arrested and taken to Agyia jail with Apostolos.
At first the prisoners pretended that they did not know each other. They were interrogated for hours and deprived of food. Apostolos’s cover story was that he was a black-marketeer going about his business and that Vaphé was one of his regular business haunts. After a few days Polentas and Apostolos were tortured, stripped and kept in unlit cells. The forms of torture became progressively more savage, but neither man broke. In the end they were shot. Apostolos had been a schoolmaster before the war, Polentas a lawyer.
A ‘National Revolutionary Court Martial of Crete’ was convened in secret to try Komnas, in absentia, for his treachery. One of the witnesses, Gregory Morakis, testified that: ‘When I was first summoned to watch Giorgios Komnas I was not the least sure about his treacherous actions, since up to that time he appeared to be an Anglophile. During the course of time I was able to discover that he was working for the German occupation forces and in more particular for the German counter-espionage unit. He thought I was pro-German and thus unveiled to me his secrets, giving orders and information concerning the discovery of the radio and cooperating with the British Intelligence Service.’ In his testimony Morakis says that he tried to warn Polentas of the danger and had also warned Leigh Fermor, but nobody would believe him. The court found Komnas guilty and, in ‘Verdict No.
1
of the National Revolutionary Court Martial of Crete’ ordered that he be captured and executed, and that if possible he should first be interrogated. The verdict was transmitted to Xan Fielding, who asked that Komnas be delivered to his organisation.
In the event Komnas stayed in Chania under the protection of the Germans. He was moved to a safe house surrounded by German billets. Nonetheless, an andartes operation was mounted to execute him. On the night of
2
2/23 September three men entered the building, one to carry out the sentence and the others to act as bodyguards. The executioner was armed with a knife and had vowed to scrawl the words ‘Traitor!’ on the walls in Komnas’s blood. In the frenzy of the attack he stabbed his victim over and over again. Blood pumped from the writhing body, covering the floor and the bed he was lying on. The executioner had not expected this, or the smell it caused, and began to retch, unable to carry out his promise. He tried to scrub the sticky red blood off his hands with whatever he could find and then fled with his comrades. The Germans found Komnas’s body the next day. Almost every piece of cloth in the room, the bedclothes, the curtains, even the tablecloth, was smeared with his blood. He had been stabbed seventeen times, Cretan justice had been done.
10
In November 1942, General Bruno Bräuer took over from General Andrae as commander of Fortress Crete. He was forty-nine years old, short, with a slight stammer, and famous among his men for his gleaming gold cigarette case. As a young major he had commanded the elite General Göring Regiment, and on 11 June 1938 became the first German paratrooper to jump from a plane. At the start of the war he was commander of the 1st Fallschirmjäger Regiment and had been part of the forces that stormed through Poland, France and the Low Countries. In Holland he captured Dordrecht Bridge in very heavy fighting and acquired a reputation for extreme bravery.
Had Operation
Seelöwe
(Sealion), the invasion of England, happened Bräuer and his men would have been in the vanguard. His orders were to parachute into Kent, near the village of Paddlesworth, and take the seaside town of Sandgate. But
Seelöwe
was cancelled and on 20 May 1941 Bräuer jumped with elements of 1st and 2nd Fallschirmjäger over the area east of Heraklion with orders to take the airfield. He and his men fought for eight days and achieved nothing. When the Allies in Heraklion heard that German forces from Maleme airport were heading for the town they withdrew to the harbour to await evacuation, thereby handing Bräuer his objective.
Bräuer’s initial approach to the command of Crete differed to that of his predecessors, Student and Andrae. He made little of the stories of mutilation that had so enraged Kurt Student and tried to educate his officers about the ‘warrior spirit of the Cretans’. Bräuer wrote a report explaining why, in his view, the people had risen up with such ferocity. It was called the ‘Memorandum by the German High Command concerning the attitude of the civilian population in Crete towards the German armed forces and the reaction of these’. In it he concluded that many of the reports of atrocities were caused by the general chaos and excitement accompanying the invasion and that it was even possible that some of the reports were imaginary. He pointed out that legitimate troops had been forced to fight in civilian clothes because the speed of the mobilisation had meant that proper uniforms had not been issued. Bräuer explained that the Cretans had spent hundreds of years fighting invaders – Arabs, Venetians, Turks – and had a tradition that every islander is a soldier. Bräuer also concluded that some of the blame could be assigned to ‘Captain John Pendlebury, who, disguised as a vice consul appealed to the population to fight’, and in whose house were found arms and maps.
Bräuer went to some lengths to try to woo the people under his dominion. He opened the forbidden zone south of Mesara, and sent his ADC on a tour of the Mesara Plain with the unenviable task of making speeches, explaining that the new
Festungskommmandant
was a passionate lover of all things Greek and that his dearest wish was to help and succour the island population.
Leigh Fermor suggested that SOE counter Bräuer’s advances and designed a leaflet showing a steel-helmeted German covered in blood and wading among corpses in Cretan dress, against a background of mountains of commandeered wheat and oil jars. The soldier can see that an Allied invasion is coming over the horizon and holds his hands out saying: ‘You know I love CRETE and the CRETAN people. Please don’t kill me when the bloodthirsty English come!’
Bräuer was under no misapprehension about the loyalty of his subjects: ‘Nearly the whole population remains hostile towards the forces of occupation and is still pro-British,’ stated one Wehrmacht report. The same report revealed the poor quality of German information regarding British agents on Crete: ‘A reconquest of the island by the British is expected in the near future. Account must be taken of the assistance which the civilian population is giving to the two British organisations whose activity on the island has been ascertained, i.e. The espionage organisation of Captain Huse [he meant Hughes-Smith] and the sabotage organisation of Captain Jellicoe.’ German intelligence was working in a fog.