Authors: Rick Stroud
At just after five in the afternoon the Fieseler-Storch arrived. Through the bracken Billy Moss could see the plane circling slowly, scarcely a hundred feet above him, the observer clearly visible. Then the plane flew over the village itself, releasing hundreds of leaflets that rained down like confetti. The black print read:
TO ALL CRETANS
Last night General Kreipe was abducted by bandits. He is now being concealed in the Cretan mountains, and his whereabouts cannot be unknown to the populace. If the general is not returned within three days all rebel villages in the HERAKLION DISTRICT will be razed to the ground and the severest measures of reprisal will be brought to bear on the civilian population.
The frightened villagers retreated to their homes. The soldiers peered over their gunsights at empty streets. Overhead the spotter plane flew up and down for three hours, searching for the kidnapped leader. Eventually it headed back to Heraklion; the soldiers clambered into their lorries and drove off. It was six o’clock in the evening; the sun was sinking towards the west.
The drone of the spotter plane died away, the light faded and the men in the cave decided it was safe to leave their cramped quarters. They heaved the general down the steep slope to the bank of the stream. Paterakis recalled the time when he had been caught by a reprisal squad in his family village of Koustogerako, south-west of Chania. German soldiers had arrived, cordoned off the area and rounded everyone up, men, women, boys and girls. They were led to the church and lined up against a wall. Paterakis remembered the fear, the children crying, the anxious muttering of the adults, the soldiers shouting in German and the noise of the machine gun as they set it up in the back of a lorry: the clinking of the long chain of brass rounds being taken from the ammunition box and fed into the firing mechanism; the click as the rounds were locked into place; the final sawing clunk of the weapon being cocked and the silence that followed.
The children stopped sobbing, staring at the soldier behind the gun, who squinted back through his sights, waiting for the order to fire. Paterakis held his breath, wondering whether his death would be quick and easy or slow and painful. He braced himself for the impact of the bullets and closed his eyes. A shot cracked through the afternoon air. The lieutenant in charge tumbled backwards, hitting the ground. Another shot and the soldier behind the machine gun slumped forward, a hole drilled between his eyes.
Pandemonium broke out, the villagers fled from the square, running crouched to dodge the bullets. The soldiers panicked, dragging the body of the officer onto the machine-gun truck which sped off in clouds of dust, the soldiers firing wild, unaimed rounds at the hillside.
Unhurt and amazed, Paterakis opened his eyes to see his brothers and cousins running down the hill towards the village, waving their rifles over their heads. These men were lethal marksmen, as good as any military-trained sniper, with a lifetime’s experience of shooting wild goats at long distance on the hills. The Paterakis brothers embraced, weeping with joy, while the villagers clapped their saviours on the back, laughing and shouting. Within the hour the people collected whatever they could carry and fled to the safety of the mountains.
In Anogia the villagers came out of their houses, peering around, picking up the leaflets and reading them, wondering who had organised the kidnap and how such an audacious plan had been pulled off. Someone shouted: ‘The horn wearers, they came for wool, we’ll send them back shorn.’ An old man said: ‘Mark my words, they will burn down our houses for this, but then so what? My house has already been burnt down four times by the Turks, the Germans can burn it down a fifth. They have already killed scores of my family and my child, yet here I am. We are at war and war is terrible, but you can’t have a wedding feast without killing the sheep for the meat.’
In Heraklion, Micky Akoumianakis rallied his men. Graffiti appeared on walls declaring ‘
Kreipe befiehl wir folgen
’ a parody of the Nazi phrase, ‘
Führer befiehl wir folgen
’ (‘Führer lead we will follow’). It implied that Kreipe, like General Carta, had allowed himself to be captured so that he could escape to Cairo and get out of the war, which he knew Hitler was losing. The graffiti were written in heavy gothic script as though painted by German soldiers wanting to desert and follow their general. The Cretans
did not know that this black script was banned in Germany, having been condemned as Jewish.
In the mountains, Paterakis went into Anogia to find Tyrakis and Leigh Fermor and lead them to the gulley. At the rendezvous Kreipe asked about his driver. Leigh Fermor told him the driver was fine and would join them in a few days.
They ate a meal of boiled eggs, cheese and bread. Kreipe was given the codename Theophilos, so that he would not know when they were talking about him, and loaded on to a mule, which had been hired in the village. Then they set off, heading for the lair of the Kapitan Mihali Xylouris where they hoped to find Dunbabin and the radio with which they were going to contact SOE Cairo and organise the Royal Navy motor launch to pick them up. The journey would take all night and was made slower because the heavily laden mule had to be led along meandering goat tracks.
By two in the morning, a long way short of their destination, they blundered into a sheepfold where the owner, an old shepherd, invited them to rest in his hut, a primitive conical, stone structure. Crawling through the tiny entrance they entered a small smoky room hung with cobwebs and bags of dripping whey; round the walls were wooden shelves on which lay cheeses, and beneath the shelves were stone seats. A bracken fire burnt in the middle. The shepherd offered them cheese and rock-hard bread, which they soaked in rough wine. Kreipe fell asleep, overcome by the heat of the fire and the food and drink. The others asked the shepherd to wake them in two hours, then they too fell into an exhausted slumber. The rest of the route would take them over the Ida Mountain, a ‘forbidden zone’. It was a place where many shepherds preferred to live, risking death by putting their knowledge of the caves, tracks and hiding places at the disposal of the guerrillas. After the short rest they pushed on.
By dawn they could see the Lasithi mountains, the general on his mule silhouetted against them. Kreipe jolting along surrounded by the rag-tag andartes reminded Moss of the Emperor Napoleon leading the remains of the Grand Army back to France across the freezing wastes of the Russian steppe. The group’s progress was monitored and guarded by guerrillas hidden in the hills; they could be heard whistling to each other, signalling the band’s progress as they approached Kapitan Xylouris’s hideout. A lookout bounded down the hill, a beautiful young man with wild green eyes, who embraced them all, smiling and laughing and chattering in excitement. He was soon joined by others, more embraces, kisses and laughter. Kreipe was astonished at the affection the Cretans showed to the British officers – something he and his men had never experienced.
They were led along a gulley to a cave concealed halfway up a rock face. In the entrance stood Kapitan Xylouris himself, a striking white-haired man with sparkling eyes and a lavish moustache. He was famed for his bravery and courage, and Leigh Fermor regarded him as ‘one of the best and most reliable leaders in Crete’. The kapitan embraced the two British agents and solemnly saluted Kreipe, who returned the salute with military dignity, trying not to look nervous, surrounded as he was by armed men dedicated to the overthrow of the Nazi regime. The hideout was crowded with many representatives of Anogian families; they had all come to see the prisoner.
More English agents appeared from the darkness of the cave, including John Houseman, a former cavalry officer turned SOE man, who looked every inch the long-haired Cretan peasant; next to him stood a handsome man with a thick beard, long black boots, a dagger in his belt, which held up a pair of filthy breeches. His name was John Lewis, a British Army corporal under the command of Dunbabin. A third Englishman appeared, a wireless operator who had also been working with Dunbabin. The kidnappers were told about Dunbabin’s illness and that he had temporarily gone into hiding, though no one quite knew where he was.
Then the situation got worse. The runner that Moss had sent off with the signal for Dunbabin appeared with the news that he had not got through: the British authorities had no idea that Kreipe had been captured and the BBC had not been instructed to broadcast that the general was off the island and on his way to Cairo. Moss became more and more angry that the RAF had failed to drop any pamphlets about the capture. He was baffled and confused by Tom Dunbabin’s disappearance and unexplained silence.
Dunbabin’s wireless, which was at the cave, was faulty. Leigh-Fermor scribbled a new signal to be sent at once. The operator set to work but the radio started cutting out, then stopped working altogether. Unscrewing the cover plates to reveal the guts, they found that one of the valves was broken. The nearest replacement was in Cairo. The SOE had only two other transmitters on the island: Sandy Rendel’s and a set operated by another agent, Dick Barnes. Two more runners were immediately sent off with messages for Barnes and Rendel. The return trip to either radio would take nearly four days, and that made no allowance for the time Cairo took to reply. The man heading for Rendel would have to scale two mountain peaks.
The runners vanished into the hills and a little while later the party who had been escorting the driver, Fenske, appeared: Nikos Komis, Chnarakis, Antonis Zoidakis and Antonios Papaleonidas. They had narrowly escaped capture and been delayed by German search parties, which were becoming more and more frequent. It was the machine guns of these patrols that Moss’s group had heard firing earlier in the day; the soldiers had fired at random into wooded areas. When he was asked what had happened to Fenske, Antonis Zoidakis became sheepish, unable to look anyone in the eye. He explained that the driver was too badly injured to make the journey and that he had been disposed of: he mimed whipping out his knife, slashing at a man’s throat and wiping his knife quickly on his trousers; he shrugged and asked what else could they do? He did not mention the head. Leigh Fermor told Kreipe that the driver was unharmed but, for his own safety, had been left in the hands of some guerrilla fighters in the hills, where he would stay until he had recovered from his injuries. Kreipe seemed satisfied.
Later that afternoon,
2
9 April, the reconnaissance aircraft crept across the sky, dropping leaflets with another message from General Bruno Bräuer:
NOTIFICATION
Paid bandits under British leadership abducted a senior German officer on the night of 26th to 27th April. Without the support of a section of the urban population, which, as I have observed for some time, collaborates with the bandits and the traitors to the people, his abduction would never have been possible.
For the past weeks the bandits have been brutally murdering, on the orders of their British and communist paymasters, Greek patriots who, for the good of the Cretan people and peace, security and future of Crete were working for greater Greece.
I will from now on, with the utmost severity and the intervention of German arms, ruthlessly strike the guilty parties and exterminate them.
This decision in no way alters the fact that I will also further attempt, in the spirit of the political pacification, peace and security of the population I have announced, to achieve a friendly co-existence of the Armed German forces and Cretans.
The Commander of Fortress Crete
General BRÄUER.
That afternoon more lorries sped through the West Gate of Heraklion, heading into the White Mountains where the kidnappers were hiding. The spotter plane was now a permanent feature in the sky. The abductors waited, desperate for news of what was happening and what beach they were to head for.
John Houseman spent some time trying to persuade Kreipe to allow himself to be photographed. Eventually he agreed, but said that Houseman must promise that the pictures would not be used by the press. The SOE man snapped away while the general set his jaw in grim defiance, adopting the pose of a conquered hero. Later they watched the guerrillas playing a game called ‘buzz buzz’, in which participants repeatedly slapped each other on the face; the point of the game was to see who could take the hardest knocks.
As darkness fell, Kreipe, Leigh Fermor and Moss talked quietly, drawing on cigarettes. The cold was intense but they could not light a fire in case it drew German patrols. From the mouth of the cave they could see the snow on the peak of Mount Ida. Kreipe stared at it for some time and then began to recite quietly to himself an ode by Horace, beginning: ‘
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte
. . . (Lo Mount Soracte glitters deep in snow . . .).’ Leigh Fermor, who knew the ode by heart, joined in and completed the next five stanzas. He remembered that: the ‘general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top and when I’d finished, after a long silence he said “
Ach so Herr Major
” it was very strange. “
Ja Herr General
”. As though for a moment the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.’
Eventually they tried to rest, Kreipe, Leigh Fermor and Moss huddled together under the only blanket they had, with ticks, fleas and vermin as companions. General Kreipe could not settle. Lewis gave him his own bedding and plied him with shots of raki; in the end the general nodded off, snoring heavily and still thrashing about. Two hours later Kreipe woke up and complained bitterly that the kidnappers had interrupted his sleep by kicking him.