Authors: Rick Stroud
In the Opel everyone was cheering, singing, shouting and lighting cigarettes. For the first time since his capture, the general was allowed to sit up and made as comfortable as possible. Leigh Fermor turned and knelt on his seat, leaning down towards Kreipe, saying in German, ‘
Herr General
, I am a British major and beside me is a British captain. The other men in this car are Greek patriots; they are good men. I am in command of this unit and you are an honourable prisoner of war. We are taking you away from Crete to Egypt. I am sorry we had to be so rough. Do everything I say and all will be well.’ Then he returned the general’s hat.
‘
Ja
,
Danke Herr Major
,’ said Kreipe. ‘
Sagen Sie einmal Herr Major,
was für ein zweck hat dieser Husarestück
?’ (‘Tell me Herr Major what is the point of this Hussar stunt?’)
Leigh Fermor said all would be clear in the morning and then joined in the singing.
From the back of the car Moss was handed a cigarette made from fiery peasant-grown tobacco rolled on rough paper. He drew the smoke into his lungs and thought that he had never known better. The group gabbled on about what sort of celebration they would have when they got to Cairo. Moss put his foot hard down on the throttle; the car sped on towards the mountains, filled with smoke and singing men. Far to the north lay the makeshift grave of John Pendlebury and overhead a new moon bathed the landscape in pale light.
An hour or so later, they came to the track near Yeni Gave, where Moss and the others would have to get out and make their way on foot to Anogia, while Leigh Fermor took the vehicle the last mile and a half to abandon it just above a cove which had been used for submarine landings. They hoped that the position of the car, plus a broadcast from the BBC telling the world that General Kreipe was already off the island and on his way to Cairo, would fool the Germans into giving up their search for him.
Ahead of them a familiar figure stepped into the road, illuminated by the headlights, waving his arms, indicating that they should stop; it was Nikos Stavrakakis from Anogia, a member of the resistance. Moss brought the car to a halt, and the general was hauled out, his handcuffs unlocked and the rope round his legs untied. Kreipe looked frightened. Leigh Fermor gave the general a formal salute and once more told him that he was a British prisoner of war. Then Moss saluted, as did the Cretans. Kreipe looked relieved at this show of respect towards his rank. With a final reassurance to the general that he would not be harmed, Leigh Fermor, who had not driven for over five years, got in the car with Tyrakis and set off. The car shuddered forward in kangaroo hops then stalled. The gears crunched and for an instant it rolled backwards. Leigh Fermor struggled with the big heavy vehicle until, at last, the engine revving hard, the clutch slipping and the car in low gear, he zigzagged up the road. The others watched the tail lights vanish from sight. Then they set off up the steep hill to Anogia.
A few miles later, Leigh Fermor reached the track leading down to the submarine cove and stopped. He and Tyrakis threw cigarette ends onto the floor of the car and left an overcoat and a torn copy of an Agatha Christie paperback on the rear seat. A Cadbury’s milk chocolate wrapper added to the sense that British commandos had hijacked the vehicle. Finally they pinned the letter of explanation to the front passenger seat and left the staff car with one of its doors open. Before abandoning it they ripped off the pennants that had helped them pass through the checkpoints; Tyrakis danced about waving them in the air shouting ‘Captured standards! Captured standards!’ A hundred yards down the track they left a green commando beret and an empty tin of Player’s cigarettes. Then they headed for Anogia, guided by the white peak of Mount Ida towering in the distance.
Moss’s party made slow progress into the mountains: Kreipe had hurt his leg when they dragged him out of the car and he was limping badly. Stratis walked in front, followed by the general and then Moss, holding his revolver pointing at Kreipe’s back. Manolis brought up the rear. Scrambling up steep, crumbling rocks, then down into small streams and heavy undergrowth was hard for the prisoner. Moss decided that having his gun in his hand was pointless. He searched the general for any concealed weapons and, finding none, put his automatic away, freeing his arms to help the older and much less fit man across the many streams that crossed their path. Stratis, the policeman, who had earlier assured them that he knew the route, kept getting lost.
The party became very thirsty and regretted not drinking the water they had so carefully helped the general to cross. The ice-cold, crystal-clear water courses had given way to trickles in deep ravines that were impossible to reach. In desperation they used an emergency ration tin as a scoop, lowering it down on a string, a laborious process which produced about a quarter of an inch of water each time. Kreipe complained that he was hungry and had not eaten since lunch. Moss gave him a few raisins which he had in his pocket. They drank the muddy water from the tins and trudged on towards Anogia. Kreipe asked his captors if they were regular soldiers and kept wanting to know what they hoped to achieve by the ‘Hussar stunt’. He warned Moss that it was unlikely they could get him off the island, that his men were going to rescue him.
On the final stretch of the trek Kreipe became more and more morose. He told Moss that he had fourteen brothers and sisters and that he was the thirteenth child. His father was a pastor with no money and as his own pay as a major general was very good he had become the one that the family looked to as the breadwinner. He was soon to be promoted lieutenant general and had already put on the badges of his new rank. Outside the village they reached a dried river bed, where they had been told to hide until dawn. Stratis noticed that the general was shivering with the cold, and gave him his police overcoat. Kreipe talked about his premonition that something bad was going to happen on his road home. He thought the T-junction was a dangerous place, where he could be assassinated; the possibility of kidnap had not occurred to him.
Tyrakis and Leigh Fermor, still in his German police disguise, made their way in the dim light over the hills to the rendezvous point. They did not have far to go, five or six miles, but the lack of light, and the rough going, clambering up the steep mountainside cut about with rocky precipitous gorges, ravines and streams, made the distance feel much longer. They lost their way and came across two boys, hunting for eels with flaming torches made of pine. The boys gave them directions, obviously frightened and wondering what a German corporal and a Cretan shepherd were doing on a lonely hillside in the middle of the night. The two men walked on, the silence of the night broken by the tinkling of goat bells, the soft croak of frogs and the song of the nightingales. They felt low, overcome by tiredness and feelings of anticlimax. At last the village loomed ahead of them, white houses spreading like a fortress on a tail of rock, a natural gateway to the snow-capped peak of Mount Ida, glittering far above them in the moonlight, silent and brooding.
With the dawn Moss saw that Kreipe had what he thought of as ‘typical Teutonic looks’, a fixed bullish expression, thin lips, short-cropped hair, shaved and greying at the temples, and pale blue eyes. Moss estimated him to be anything from forty-five to fifty-five. Kreipe sat silent and quiet, a melancholy look on his face.
Moss scribbled two urgent signals, one to Tom Dunbabin, higher up in the mountains, asking him to radio Cairo telling them that Kreipe was a prisoner and requesting that the BBC World Service broadcast news of the general’s capture. The BBC should make it clear that Kreipe was already off the island and en route to Egypt. Finally he asked for leaflets to be dropped on Crete telling the islanders the same thing. The second letter was to Sandy Rendel, telling him about the kidnap. Moss gave the two messages to Stratis who folded them into tiny squares and hid them in his turban before setting off for Anogia to find two runners. He promised to bring food and wine back to the group, who had not eaten for nearly twenty-four hours.
Suddenly Kreipe began to fuss, shouting and scrabbling at his tunic, then searching in the folds of his coat, which he had taken off to sleep under. He was upset because his Knight’s Cross which he wore on a ribbon around his neck, had disappeared. Moss told him that it must have come off in the struggle round the car and that there was no possibility of going back to look for it. Eventually, tiredness overcame the general and he lay down to sleep, his fitful snores drifting across the floor of the gulley.
In the early morning Leigh Fermor and Tyrakis reached Anogia. Smoke from wood fires floated between the buildings, backlit by the low sun, throwing beams of light and shade across the narrow streets. The villagers setting off for work treated the two men with contempt. They turned their backs, fell silent and spat on the ground, slamming their doors shut as the two men passed. Leigh Fermor knew these people well and was used to being welcomed and treated like one of their own. He heard a woman wailing ‘The black cattle have strayed into the sheep.’ Then more mysteriously, ‘Our in-laws have come.’ At last the penny dropped: he was still in disguise and looked like a German soldier.
He approached a woman he knew, the wife of the priest, who he was sure would recognise him: ‘It’s me Pappadia, Mihali.’ Mihali was the name that the Cretans had given him. The woman would not look at him, keeping her gaze on the ground. The priest, Papa Yanni Skoulas, appeared accompanied by Leigh Fermor’s godbrother Giorgios Dramoudanis. The priest, a brave man and an early member of the resistance, assured the villagers that all was well and that the strange German was indeed Mihali.
Stratis arrived and found two runners to take the messages to Dunbabin and Rendel. He confirmed that Moss and the others, plus General Kreipe, were safe in a gulley about two miles away and that it would be better to wait until night before joining them.
Baskets of food and wine reached the hungry kidnappers in the afternoon. As they ate Kreipe explained that he had commanded troops in the Khuban in Russia, where the fighting had been very heavy and drawn out; with sadness in his voice he told Moss that his main diet in those days had been caviar. As he spoke, Kreipe ‘tucked into the meal like a schoolboy’. The lost medal was still on his mind.
While the general moaned about his loss, the others enjoyed themselves eating and drinking in the hot sunshine. Then they fell asleep, guarded by armed guerrillas, the first of many who would risk their lives guarding the crew on its passage to the south coast and safety.
18
Tom Dunbabin lay low at Fourfouras, still ill. He only had a few men with him, one of whom was Giorgios Frangoulitakis, whose Cretan nickname was ‘
Skoutello
’
(a type of bowl). Unsurprisingly, SOE called him Scuttlegeorge. Dunbabin had left his radio set back at the hideout of Kapitan Mihali Xylouris near Anogia. As it got lighter Dunbabin told Skoutello to go to Anogia and make contact with Xylouris: ‘Take this note. Go to the Mytheria area where the wireless transmitter is and you’ll find Captain
Livermore
there, perhaps he’ll want you to help him – he’ll tell you all about it. Nothing else.’ Dunbabin looked worried and depressed. Skoutello asked him if he was ill; Dunbabin claimed to be fine. The Cretan set off at once.
In Heraklion lorries full of troops lumbered through the West Gate, heading for the mountains, taking the same route as the kidnappers in the Opel, the soldiers scanning the roadsides for signs of an ambush. At the heavily guarded docks down by the port, a lorry protected by military outriders swept along the quays heading for the German-controlled press which was churning out leaflets threatening harsh reprisals for the kidnap.
At dawn the soldiers who had been on duty in the night, including the men on guard at the Villa Ariadne, were arrested and asked why they had let a car full of guerrillas drive straight past them. Among those in the cells was the general’s bridge-playing ADC, under suspicion of collaborating with the andartes. All over the island the occupying forces were on edge, unnerved that a senior officer, their second in command, had been abducted from outside his heavily guarded home.
In the afternoon the first German patrol drove into Anogia: three lorries bounced to a halt and disgorged nearly fifty nervous men, carrying rifles, sub-machine guns and heavy weapons. Some formed up in the square while others fanned out to cordon off the village. The people waited. Nothing happened. A runner slipped into the fields, crouching low, running to alert the men in the gulley. Leigh Fermor and Tyrakis were still in the village, trapped in the priest’s house.
The lorry with the leaflets drove across Heraklion airfield towards a Fieseler-Storch spotter plane, engine running, red dust billowing everywhere. The Cretans had nicknamed the plane ‘The Cockroach’ or ‘the Germans’ only daughter’, because it was the only Fieseler-Storch on the island and had been scrounged from another part of Europe. The parcels were loaded and the small insect-like aircraft took off, climbing slowly into the sky; in the back of the plane sat an observer with a powerful set of field glasses. The Storch banked west, towards Anogia, where the search parties were loitering in the square, or sitting about in cafés making no effort to search the village. Heavy machine-gun fire and explosions could be heard in the distance.
At the gulley the runner arrived with the news that a large number of soldiers were in the area. Paterakis shook the sleeping Moss by the shoulder, shouting: ‘Germans coming. Plenty of Germans in village.’ They all scrambled to their feet and stuffed their kit into rucksacks. Even the general lost no time, lacing up his boots. A guide led them along the bank of the stream to a more remote hiding place. Kreipe was limping, complaining about the pain in his leg, which he said had got worse. The guide led them across a stream and up a near-vertical bank which the general found impossible to tackle on his own. The group hauled him up, struggling from foothold to foothold, to the mouth of a very small cave, scarcely large enough to hold more than two men. Kreipe, followed by Paterakis, Moss and Stratis, squeezed in, then the abductors covered the entrance with bracken. Through the fronds they watched for the approach of patrols. The general sat with his knees pulled as close in to his body as his stomach would allow, and fell asleep, his snores filling the cave.