Authors: Rick Stroud
At times German troops passed very close to the hideout, sometimes no further than a few hundred metres. When one patrol came especially close, stretching the nerves of the kidnappers, Kreipe said to Leigh Fermor: ‘Perhaps you and your company will soon be my prisoners.’ The Englishman snapped back, ‘Don’t dream of shouting for you can never escape these men. I warn you, they will despatch you on the spot.’
Leigh Fermor had to find a radio set. He was fairly certain that Dick Barnes was only a day’s walk away. If he could find him his problems would be over. He decided to set off in search at dusk, taking Giorgios Tyrakis with him.
The same day, 3 May, Dick Barnes, who had no idea what was happening along the coast, picked up a message confirming that a launch would be off Cape Melissa in the evening and, if the party failed to make the rendezvous, would return for a second try the following night. Giorgios Psychoundakis was with Barnes and offered to take the message to Leigh Fermor. He had to leave immediately to have any chance of getting the message through in time and he did not know precisely where the kidnap party had got to. He set off for Yerakari, in the Amari valley, where he hoped to find someone who could help.
While Leigh Fermor was trying to track down a radio, the Germans set up a field headquarters in the schoolhouse at Apodoulou, close to the main hideout, cordoning off the village and not allowing anyone in or out. The villagers were very frightened; they knew that there was a stack of arms in the roof of the schoolhouse and thought it was only a matter of time before it was discovered.
In the late afternoon, Leigh Fermor and Giorgios, disguised as peasants, set off, heading north towards the last known position of Barnes and his radio set. Soon afterwards it began to rain. Billy Moss and the general settled down for the night under the same blanket. Before he slept Kreipe drank an enormous slug of raki, pulled most of the covers over himself and fell into a deep sleep. Moss could not sleep: he lay under part of the sodden blanket, huge drops of water hitting him in the face, kept awake by the deep droning snores of his prisoner. Around him the guerrillas, equally cold and miserable, took it in turn to keep guard.
On the south coast, off the beach at Cape Melissa, a motor launch skippered by Commander Francis Pool, hove to in the darkness. On the bridge, Pool, a lookout and a radio operator, scanned the shoreline with their field glasses, looking for the blinking of a signal torch. Armed men stood by on the deck, ready to launch a rubber dinghy and paddle for the shore. The motor launch waited for a long time in the darkness, wallowing in the slight swell. After several hours Pool decided he had pushed his luck far enough. He ordered the coxswain to start the engines. An electric motor hauled the anchor back on board, its chain clattering against the metal of the hull. The coxswain reversed from the beach then went full ahead, swinging the bow in a wide curve heading for Egypt, its wake boiling behind in a huge white ribbon.
Leigh Fermor and Giorgios made good progress in their night march along the Amari valley, and broke their journey at Fourfouras, where Giorgios’s family lived. On the next day, 4 May, they decided to risk moving in daylight across the foothills of Mount Kedros. The walk was idyllic, and the spring weather fine. They crossed woods and streams and marched through fields of poppies, anemones and asphodels. Birdsong accompanied them and to the east Mount Ida loomed above them. On the Mesara Plain, several miles to the south-east of the kidnappers, German engineers arrived in the villages of Lochria, Kamares and Magarikari and started unloading boxes of high explosives. Infantrymen rounded up the villagers and marched them into the fields. The engineers began to pack charges in the foundations of the houses
During that day messengers at last arrived at Moss’s hideout. One was from Dick Barnes with the news that a motor launch had appeared the night before, had seen no signals from the beach and had left without sending a landing party. He told them the boat would return every night for the next four nights. Moss knew that with hundreds of troops now guarding the beach there was no possibility of making contact with the launch. In his diary he fumed: ‘How infuriating it is to know that all this is happening at a beach that is no more than a few hours walk from here and we can do absolutely nothing about it.’ Moss decided it would be safer to leave the area and head further west.
On
5
May, Tyrakis and Leigh Fermor walked through a cypress grove into the village of Pantanasa, looking for Dick Barnes. Neither man had visited the village before. They had a contact, the Hieronymakis family, but had never met them and there was no one in the village to vouch that they were genuinely part of the resistance movement. The villagers had to know who they were dealing with and asked: ‘You say you are Mihali, Mihali who? And who are Siphis and Pavlos [Stockbridge and Barnes’s codenames].’
In the end, and after two hours of haggling, Tyrakis’s uncle Stavropol appeared and vouched for the two men. Runners were sent off to Barnes and Stockbridge asking them to come to the village with their radio sets. Leigh Fermor and Giorgios then set off for the village of Yenni, heading for Pantanasa. At Yenni they found out that things had got worse. Both Barnes and Stockbridge had been forced to move their sets and they were each about fifteen miles further away, across difficult Cretan terrain. The chess pieces in Leigh Fermor’s game were moving and he was playing blindfolded. He no longer knew where the radios were, he did not know that troops were in the Amari valley and that Moss was about to move camp. Three sets of messengers had been sent to Dick Barnes but none of them had got through. To add to the confusion Giorgios Psychoundakis still had no idea where Leigh Fermor was. Communications had become a nightmare.
Eventually Psychoundakis tracked Leigh Fermor down at Yenni, at the western end of the Amari valley, with news of the motor launch that had been waiting for them the night before. The Englishman was phlegmatic: ‘Never mind, we couldn’t have gone there because the Germans moved in there yesterday morning.’ He wanted Psychoundakis to go back to Dick Barnes and get him to bring his wireless set.
Psychoundakis did not think that such a plan was possible. Moving a wireless station was a difficult task. The heavy charging engine and batteries and all the other paraphernalia required at least six men carrying the gear on their backs, and would have to be moved at night, in pitch black, avoiding the tracks and navigating the steep slopes.
Then they talked about which beaches might still be open for a rendezvous. Leigh Fermor wondered whether the beach at Preveli was a possibility; it was the place from which hundreds of Allied stragglers had been rescued; or maybe the beach at Keramia?
‘Not at Preveli,’ Psychoundakis replied. ‘There is a permanent German guard post there. I don’t know the Keramia beach, but we’ve got a man from that district. He’ll tell us all we want to know. He’s in Rethymnon. But I’ll go and get him without losing a minute. But I think, Mr Michali [another nickname for Leigh Fermor], that the only place you’ll be able to leave is from our beach at Rodakino. That’s where it will be in the end.’
With alarming speed the beaches were being sealed off. Soon, it seemed, there would be no beaches available at all. Leigh Fermor told Psychoundakis to return to Dick Barnes as fast as possible. Another runner was sent to retrieve some Cretan clothes Leigh Fermor had left in the village of Agyroupolis, and which he said he needed, and a third runner went to Rethymnon to find the expert on the beaches.
Leigh Fermor spent the next three nights marooned in Yenni, ‘smoking and staring at the moon’. During the day he sat in the warm sun listening to the sound of the nearby waterfall, trying to work out how he was to lead his band off the island. For once the sky was empty of spotter planes and the landscape silent. The enormous pressure that he was under began to tell. He was exhausted and in a constant state of stress; his left arm had become stiff and difficult to move. The situation was changing hourly; escape options were closing one after the other and no one knew what to do.
Psychoundakis returned the next day, accompanied by Dick Barnes, resplendent in black jackboots, a shaggy, stinking, goatskin cape and a handkerchief round his neck. With them was Kapitan Yannis Katsias, loping along like a fearsome wolf, ‘heavily armed, carrying his rifle at the point of balance, looking like a twig in his massive hands. Katsias was a man you wanted as a friend not a foe.’ Katsias was a tough, free-booting giant of a man with great good looks. There was no better person to lead them along the old rustling tracks, hidden and safe.
Barnes told Leigh Fermor that it was impossible for him to bring his set any closer and that it would be best to carry on using the runners. He agreed with Psychoundakis that the beaches below Rodakino would be the best place to organise a rendezvous, although several days earlier there had been trouble there: a German patrol had marched into the village and started to burn it down; the locals had ambushed the soldiers, opening fire and killing some of them, and two Germans had been taken prisoner. Nevertheless they decided to keep moving west towards the village.
That evening,
5
May, Leigh Fermor, Psychoundakis, Barnes and Yannis sat round a fire drinking wine and eating an enormous hare cooked by Yannis in oil and onions. They sang mountain songs to the tune of the Pentozali dance. Leigh Fermor made up his own verse:
Ah, God-brother, the night was dark for the lamb and goat and dam sir
But when we saw the branding mark, we only stole the ram sir.
This was a comic improvisation on a song about a sheep rustler who, realising that he is about to steal his god-brother’s flock, has a fit of conscience and only steals thirty instead of the whole flock; in Leigh Fermor’s rendition he only steals the ram, the head of the flock: a reference to the general.
The next morning, Lefteris Papayannakis, the reconnaissance man from Rethymnon, hid in the rocks above the beach at Keramia. German boats were beaching from the sea, landing more troops, while from inland he could see dust clouds thrown up by lorries full of troops arriving at the garrison already guarding the beach at Preveli. Keramia too was a non-starter.
At Cairo the SOE Crete desk was becoming increasingly worried about the situation. The motor launch sent to wait off the beach at Cape Melissa had seen nothing but the odd meaningless flash of a signalling torch, and the first time the crew had tried to make contact they had been fired on and forced to make for the safety of the open sea. A message was sent from GHQ to London:
5 ATTEMPTS HAVE BEEN MADE. NONE SUCCESSFUL. SIGNAL BEING MADE SHORTLY. OP REGARDED AS OF FIRST IMPORTANCE. DIFFICULTIES CONSIDERABLE. PARTY IS ON RUN AND COMMUNICATION INTERMITTENT.
To confuse things further the powers at GHQ decided to take matters into their own hands. Without the benefit of up-to-date intelligence on German positions, they ordered a Special Boat Service raiding party to land below Rodakino, somewhere near Sahtouria beach, make contact with the kidnap group and help them fight their way off the island. The raid was planned for the night of 9/10 May.
21
Antonis Zoidakis reached Moss with the information that more soldiers had been deployed to reinforce the cordon to the south-west of the mountain, cutting them off from the beaches there; the Germans were organising another sweep of the hillside and the beach at Keramia was closed off. Moss ordered Zoidakis to go back and get an exact idea of how many Germans were in the area and whether it was possible to find a track leading through the cordon. With no path to follow it was too dangerous to leave the hideout. Moss postponed his plan, hoping to set off the next night, knowing that the longer they remained where they were, the more likely they were to be discovered.
Next, one of Sandy Rendel’s runners arrived with a copy of Rendel’s first and now hopelessly out-of-date message about the rendezvous. With it was a personal letter from Rendel to Moss.
Dear Billy,
All my rosiest and sincerest compliments and congratulations on presenting everyone with quite the best war story yet . . . I shall look forward immensely, needless to say, to hear the full details later. I am glad the old man is a charmer – so much nicer than if he was grumpy. Bless you – and once more I raise an aged battered, almost historic but very respectful hat and all the best for the rest of the journey.
SANDY
Moss spent a tense day, unable to move, with nothing to do and forced to listen to the complaints of the general, who claimed that he could not sleep at night (though he slept whenever he could during the day) and that he had stomach ache as well as severe pains in his leg. After a great deal of trouble Moss had got hold of a copy of
1001
Nacht
(
The Arabian Nights
), a book which the German said he wanted to read, and which Moss now presented to him. He took it from his captor’s hands, looked at it and handed it back, saying it was too old-fashioned for him. Moss wrote in his diary: ‘I could have killed him.’
At midday the distant boom of detonating explosives echoed from the hills. The engineers had done their work: the villages of Lochria, Kamares and Margarikari, complete with furniture, cooking utensils, clothes, children’s toys, farm tools, and all the other objects of simple country life, were reduced to piles of flaming rubble. Some of the villagers were caught in the cordon and arrested, others who had tried to escape were murdered. A messenger arrived at Moss’s hideout with news of the destruction. When Kreipe heard this he began to laugh, gloating that it was a simple thing for his men to exact retribution for anything that the British did or incited the guerrillas to do. ‘If Bräuer continues the cordon and the search like this,’ he said, repeating his taunt, ‘soon I won’t be your captive but you will be mine.’ This was the last straw for Moss; he rounded on the general and warned him that if he did not shut up he would start treating him as a prisoner of war rather than as a sort of distinguished guest.