Authors: Rick Stroud
Above the snow line the abduction team shivered in the hut. They had not eaten for twelve hours. Leigh Fermor and Moss foraged in the mist for the bitter, edible, mountain dandelions which everyone wolfed down, even though they had nothing with which to wash down the grey leaves.
They had been on the run for six days. Twice in the last twenty-four hours the BBC had broadcast the item stating that the general was being ‘taken off the island’. The leaflets that Leigh Fermor had asked to be dropped over the island’s main cities never materialised: flying conditions had made any such expedition too difficult.
Night fell. Selfridge’s guides peered into the darkness, straining for Antonis Zoidakis’s fires. Enemy patrols moved slowly up towards them. Nearly two thousand men had been trucked into the area with orders to throw a cordon round the south-west side of the mountain. The soldiers did not like leaving the safety of the tracks and the protection of each other, fearing that ambush and death lay waiting for them in the craggy, frightening corners of the steep landscape. To keep up their morale they fired flares into the air and their weapons into the undergrowth.
At last the mist cleared and a fire was spotted on a distant ridge; the time had come to move on. For the first two hours the descent was very steep, and the snow-covered ground treacherous. Once back below the snow line barren rock gave way to vegetation and cedars so exposed to the prevailing winds that they grew as streaks of wood almost parallel to the rocks. They made their way down slowly, not helped by whipping branches slapping them in the face, thorns ripping at their clothes and slashing into the skin on their hands. The andartes grew more and more hostile to the General, muttering threats of violence and death in a way that only a Cretan knows how. Leigh Fermor and Moss began to worry that they would lose control and be unable to guarantee Kreipe’s safety.
They went down hand over hand, trying to support Kreipe’s weight as they slithered and slipped down the steep ilex- and thorn-tangled rock faces. Before long they lost sight of the signal fire. They realised they were not going to reach Nithavri before daylight. The guides knew that somewhere nearby lived a shepherd, a trusted man, well known to the guerrilla band. They could hear the jangling of sheep bells and sometimes came across the animals themselves huddling in groups. Then at last they found the shepherd who greeted them like old friends. The peasant chatted away in Greek, telling them that it would be an honour to have them all in his hut, his only refuge and shelter in the long days tending the sheep on the hills.
It was three o’clock in the morning when the exhausted band reached the sheepfold. The shepherd ushered the freezing men into his hut and soon they sat around the fire trying to dry their clothes, their eyes running from the smoke. He offered them all he had: water, stale bread and hard cheese. At dawn, after a few hours’ sleep, the men filed out of the hut like zombies and followed the shepherd to their hiding place for the next day: a cave, the mouth of which was tiny and hidden by ilex trees. They fell to their knees and crawled through the branches to find themselves in a huge cavern. The shepherd told them that it had been used as a hideout in the war against the Turks and it had enough room to hide hundreds of men. The walls dripped with water. They dragged in logs and lit a fire which filled the air with more smoke than heat. Then they covered the entrance with branches and bracken and tried to sleep, one of the Yiorgis always awake, his gun ready in case the snoring Kreipe tried to escape.
Outside, a mountain storm raged. The thunder echoed inside the cave as though they had stirred the anger of the mountain gods. Paterakis, Tyrakis, Kreipe and the two British officers huddled together and slept as best they could while far below the general’s men prowled the foothills, moving inexorably towards the hideout.
The next day they gathered more wood and lit a second fire. Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss scrambled through an opening ‘no bigger than a coal hole’ and discovered a tunnel that led to a huge cathedral-like chamber dropping away from them for storey after storey. The bottom was strewn with rushes and animals’ skulls. This led to an even bigger chamber ‘thickly speared with stalactites and stalagmites [we] had the impression of standing at the end of some vast and colonnaded hall’. Moss wondered if this was the mythical cave where the Goddess Rhea hid her new-born son Zeus from the fury of his father Cronus.
They crawled back through the tunnels to find Kreipe shivering in the cold, despite wearing Stratis’s gendarme jacket and, now, Leigh Fermor’s coat. The English major joked to Kreipe that if they were captured they would both be shot for impersonating the enemy.
Inside the cave they could just hear the noise of the spotter plane droning overhead and the occasional sound of soldiers shouting to each other as they combed the mountainside. The abductors had no choice but to wait. They had been cut off from the outside world for a week. No message had reached them and they had no idea if GHQ Cairo even knew that they were holding the general prisoner. They ate their last ration of bread and cheese – they had run out of water. Leigh Fermor found the day very stressful, one of the worst he had experienced. Kreipe sat silent and depressed, lost in his own thoughts.
In the afternoon, a runner arrived with a message from Antonis Zoidakis. Paterakis unfolded the damp, thin paper and read out the barely legible Greek. Zoidakis reported that more and more lorries were pouring into the villages round the foothills, bringing reinforcements. The Germans were preparing to sweep the slopes en masse and would start a major search the following morning. They should leave the cave at once and head for the south. Paterakis read out the important words: ‘For God’s sake come tonight, a mule waits for you.’
Moss asked the general what he thought about another night march. Kreipe shrugged and said that physically he would be alright, but mentally he was feeling very down. Moss wrote in his diary that the general ‘smiled as he spoke – a hopeless sort of smile – in a way that made one feel a kind of sympathy for the mental anguish from which he was so obviously suffering’. The guerrillas were very worried about leaving the safety of the hideout; they were surrounded and knew that the soldiers in the cordon must hold all the key points on the descent. It would, they argued, be safer to wait for two or three days. In the end they bowed to Leigh Fermor’s insistence that they must get the general off the island as soon as possible. The Cretans worried that if they refused to go on, Leigh Fermor would think they were cowards.
They slipped out of the cave just before sunset and moved down the mountain, freezing rain water from the cedar trees dripping on them, soaking their heads and shoulders. They found Antonis Zoidakis waiting with a mule and a guide, another mountain man called Panagos. The animal had a comfortable padded saddle and coloured blankets and had been borrowed from Antonis’s mother. Round its neck it wore a string of blue beads from which was slung a bell that the guides muffled with cloth. Like most of the other mules used by the andartes,
the mule’s vocal cords had been cut to stop it braying and giving away their position.
They planned to head down the south side of Mount Ida in the direction of Nitharvi. Zoidakis would again go ahead to reconnoitre the route. On the way they came to a crossroads where the roads from four villages joined. The place was dangerous and Germans could be seen moving about the tents they had pitched in the area. The guide Panagos suddenly disappeared and the group became anxious. Leigh Fermor held a quick conference. He suggested they head for the village of Agia Paraskevi: ‘there’s a deep stream there covered with myrtles, we’ve hidden there before’. Skoutello was impressed by the Englishman’s firm leadership.
Agia Paraskevi was Zoidakis’s home village in the Amari valley. For centuries the valley had been a sanctuary from the armies that had invaded Crete. It was twenty miles long, with olive groves, vineyards and shady ravines lined with walnuts and figs. Drifts of poppies streaked the green patches of young wheat. Its gushing springs were studded with derelict mills, Turkish bridges and white-walled villages where the guerrillas came to hide from the enemy.
As they moved through the darkness they could see the glow of searchlights around the hugely expanded airfield at Timbaki. The lights were aimed out to sea and were working in conjunction with coastal probing batteries, placed to fire on any British ship that might try and approach the beaches at Agia Galini or Sahtouria. Every now and then the sky above them was lit by flares fired by the searching soldiers, and echoing German voices shouted, ‘Kreipe, Kreipe, speak up, don’t be afraid!’
Soon the ladder-sided steepness of the mountain gave way to the gentler slopes of the Amari valley and paths free from the treacherous scree. Progress was much faster than it had been the previous night; they marched for the first three hours non-stop, sloping past the high fastness of Nithavri and on towards Agia Paraskevi. At midnight, they reached the rendezvous, a tree, hollowed out for animals to drink from. There was no sign of Zoidakis. Leigh Fermor thought they must have mistaken the route or come to the wrong place. Paterakis and Tyrakis went to scour the area for other groves. For half an hour they searched, whistling and making owl hooting noises, but returned empty-handed. The team wondered if Zoidakis had been captured and had been forced to reveal where they were; perhaps the Germans were all around, waiting to pounce on them as soon as the sun rose. They decided to press on. It began to drizzle, a cold penetrating rain, which quickly turned into a downpour soaking through their already wet clothes. Paterakis muttered that the weather was good for the olives if not for the kidnappers. Eventually, somewhere near the village, they flopped down into a ditch, inches deep in water, sodden and forlorn.
Leigh Fermor had another look at the letter, holding it under his coat to hide the light of his torch. To his horror he realised that what the letter said was the reverse of what Paterakis had read out in the cave. Antonis had written: ‘For God’s sake DON’T come tonight.’ The letter had been heavily folded and was wet, the ‘DON’T’ had been obscured in one of the folds.
At dawn Tyrakis set off for the village in the hoping that he could track down Antonis. The others could do nothing but wait in the cover of the ditch as it slowly filled up with water. They felt abandoned. Kreipe was the most dejected of all, sitting with a blanket over his head, water running down his face.
The sun rose and at mid-morning Tyrakis arrived with Antonis Zoidakis carrying baskets of food. When he saw the bedraggled abductors Antonis exclaimed: ‘What are you doing boys, you ought to be dead! How did you get through? There are hundreds of Germans crawling all over the mountains, especially where you came down.’ He made the sign of the cross and said: ‘God exists and you ought all to build churches, – No! cathedrals! You are lucky to be here my children.’
In the dark, they had somehow slipped through the cordon. They were shaken by the narrow escape and the near-fatal blunder. German search parties were now high above them and the voices of the soldiers calling ‘
Kreipe, Kreipe, Generaloberst Kreipe!
’ still echoed round the mountains, bouncing from peak to peak.
Antonis distributed the food, and served Kreipe first with exaggerated deference. Then he passed the food round to the others, handing round the cheese fritters and announcing: ‘White flannel vests all round.’ After which he pulled a gallon jar of dark mulberry raki from the basket, saying: ‘Next, red overcoats for all!’ Even Kreipe was amused by Zoidakis’s antics, although as he ate he muttered in German: ‘I wish I had never come to this accursed land, it was supposed to be a nice change from the Russian Front.’
20
The following day more lorries rumbled down the primitive dusty roads that followed the broad sweep of the beaches below Sahtouria, dropping over two hundred soldiers along the route. The infantry set up defensive positions with mortars and heavy machine guns, while engineers ran out miles of telephone cable linking the positions, cutting off the approaches to the beaches from both the land and the sea, including the one that Cairo had designated for the rendezvous, Cape Melissa.
At the same time Ilias Athanassakis and Micky Akoumianakis clambered aboard an ancient bus in Heraklion, and travelled south to try and track down the abductors. They had much to report, especially the fact that so far there had been no reprisals. After nearly three hours bouncing south they left the bus and began to walk, heading for where they thought the abduction party would be. They were both wearing very light shoes, suitable for the city but not for the rough hill areas where they were headed. It was another hour before they arrived, with torn shoes and blistered feet, to be reunited with the kidnappers.
They found Kreipe sunk in a dazed torpor, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. When they told him that his ADC and the guards at the villa had been arrested by the Gestapo he perked up for a second and shrugged, saying that his ADC was a complete dunce whom he had been about to replace. He added that he felt sorry for the guards because it was not their fault. Then he shook his head and slumped back into silence.
Micky and Ilias reported to Moss and Leigh Fermor that the Germans were worried the kidnap might trigger an uprising on the island. Bräuer had strengthened the guard round his headquarters and would not move from it without an escort. Worse, there was a German detachment in the village of Krya Vryssi, which was only three miles away. There was a possibility that the garrisons at Rethymnon and Mesara would be mobilised to close the whole of the Amari valley, trapping them. The kidnappers still did not know whether their signals had got through to Cairo, and had no idea of the time or place of the rendezvous.