Authors: Rick Stroud
While the scrambled to hide, Katsias moved his men to the cliff opposite the cave, where they could cover the entrance and drive off any German patrols. Then they waited for the onslaught, screwing up their eyes against the sun, peering into the hills. During the afternoon they heard automatic gunfire, the crump of grenades and saw more flares rising into the sky. The commotion came from the west, where Katsias had sent men to shoot up German trucks and create a diversion to draw the enemy away from the hideout.
At dusk a runner arrived. The patrols were moving north, heading for Asi Gonia, where Dennis Ciclitira was hiding and trying to transmit to Cairo. More soldiers were in Vilandredo, kicking in doors, terrorising the inhabitants and searching every house, trapping Stathis and his brother Stavros.
In Asi Gonia, Ciclitera struggled to take down a Morse signal from SOE Middle East. He could hear lorries revving, soldiers shouting and the spotter plane droning overhead. He turned off his set: it was too dangerous to go on transmitting.
At the cave, Katsias decided to move them further up the mountain. Kreipe declared that he was cold and would walk, but only in order to warm himself up. The move took about an hour, after which they waited for Stathis and Stavros. Several hours passed by and they did not appear. Night fell and Katsias told them they must move again, even higher up the mountain. The route was difficult. Trees cut out the moonlight, and the path was lined with bushes that hid a steep drop to a dried-up, rocky riverbed. They trekked slowly and in single file, each man straining to keep his eyes on the person in front, panting hard as they struggled with the climb. An hysterical, feminine cry broke the silence, then the noise of breaking branches and a heavy object sliding down the crumbling rock, followed by a sickening thump and the deep groans of a man in pain. Kreipe had stumbled, staggered against the bushes lining the path and fallen through, tumbling nearly twenty feet to the ravine below.
A torch flashed to reveal the German officer groaning, spread-eagled in a deep pile of dead leaves. Some of the men slid down the hill, gripping on to the vegetation growing out of the rocks. Kreipe hauled himself onto his hands and knees, his groans turning to a series of bad-tempered insults as he cursed his captors. He was scratched, bruised and shaken, but otherwise, not hurt; nothing was twisted or broken. After a short rest the group moved on, keeping close watch on the prisoner to prevent him stumbling again in the darkness. Kreipe stopped swearing and relapsed into a silence broken only by the occasional whimper.
It took until three in the morning to reach the new hideout. There they wrapped the general in all the blankets they could muster and he fell into a asleep. Leigh Fermor and Moss thought that the two falls, the strain of capture and the seventeen-day mule ride and route march under guard had shattered Kreipe’s nerves. They worried that he was not in a fit state to finish the journey. There was still no sign of Stathis and the promised provisions.
Without blankets the two agents found it impossible to sleep. The misty air was damp, the rock walls ran with slime, and the cold cut right through their battledress tops. Leigh Fermor talked obsessively about their comrades back at Tara who he compared to beasts gorging themselves on drink, the pleasures of the house and life in the nightclubs of Cairo. As the edge of the sky began to lighten they heard boots crashing on the rocks below. Everyone sprang into action, cocking their pistols, chambering rounds into the rifles and machine guns, then crouching in the undergrowth, waiting for the appearance of the dreaded field-grey uniforms. Stathis’s voice rang out, and he burst among them with his brother Stavros, carrying two bottles of raki and a basket with bread and cheese. The brothers explained that they had been trapped and that finding nothing in the village, the soldiers had headed south, circling round towards the beaches. Another unit of around a hundred Germans were looking for their missing general in and around Rodakino, about twenty miles to the south and overlooking the possible rendezvous spots.
In an attempt to warm themselves up, Leigh Fermor and Moss drank the raki very quickly and soon became ‘pretty tight’. The day passed with no message from Dennis Ciclitira. They decided to send a messenger to him, but the boy they chose refused to budge, saying that it was too dangerous and that the Germans would capture and torture him. A runner arrived with news from Ciclitira: he was safe, still in hiding, but for the moment unable to receive or transmit. The Germans had come very close but had not discovered him. Before the raid he had picked up a message from Cairo that a motor launch was scheduled to pick them up the following night, the time and place of disembarkation still to be confirmed. If he could get back on air and receive the coordinates and timings for the rendezvous he would try and make his way through the German lines to meet them in time to join them on the launch to Egypt.
The group could only guess at the possible beaches, which were all several miles due south across the mountains. They had to wait for the cover of darkness before moving, but until they knew where they were going they could not move at all. Once more they were marooned.
Leigh Fermor’s arm was getting worse and he was in a great deal of pain. The general sat in a depressed lump, complaining about his shoulder and leg but otherwise not talking, almost unaware of his surroundings. The Russian Peotr was managing to swallow liquids, though his sneering manner, his temper and his personal habits had not improved. The day dragged. The sun and the temperature rose while the kidnappers waited for news. In Cairo, the wireless communications room had been trying, with no luck, to raise Ciclitira and send him the rendezvous information. Jack Smith-Jones, the head of section, suggested they try Dick Barnes.
The sun set, the temperature dropped and still no word came to the kidnap group. They resigned themselves to another night in the damp and the cold. Stathis and Stavros agreed to go and fetch more food.
The men returned after dark. Somehow they had found warm clothing, blankets, food and wine, all of which was received with gratitude by the fugitives, especially the general. With still no news from Ciclitira, there was nothing to do but eat, sleep, and wait.
Their slumbers were interrupted an hour later by a man softly ordering them to wake up. It was Dick Barnes: ‘A boat is coming to pick you up from a beach near Rodakino at
2
2:
0
0 hours tomorrow night, 14/15 May. Here’s the map reference. You’d better get a move on if you want to get there in time.’
Leigh Fermor woke Kreipe: ‘
Wunderbar
,
Herr General
. We’re leaving!’
On the map it looked as though the beach was a full day’s trek away. Once more Leigh Fermor decided to split the group. He proposed to take Kreipe the long way round, through the Kryoneritis mountains, a bleak, empty area ringed by craters with deep crevices, no paths and no flat areas. Without a mule the general would have to walk, guided by Yannis Katsias and his men. Billy Moss and the others were to make a dash for it through much easier terrain, but more dangerous straight into the ‘forbidden zone’ and the German patrols that ringed the coastal beaches.
It was a bright clear night, and the moon nearly full. Yannis Katsias left at once, heading for Rodakino, to warn the guerrilla bands that the kidnap party was making its final approach. Moss and his group left soon after him. Finally Leigh Fermor, the general, Paterakis and Yannis’s guides headed for the mountains and some of the steepest and worst going on the island; but at least, once the sun rose, they could keep moving in broad daylight, safe from German eyes.
23
As they moved across the mountains, Leigh Fermor’s group was joined by more than twenty new andartes, all under the command of Kapitan Andreas Kotsifis. Most of the men had fair hair with black eyebrows, ‘like pen strokes with their light blue eyes, blazing out from beneath’. Their homes at Rodakino and Kali Sykia had been destroyed by the Germans, dynamited and dive-bombed. They had nothing to lose and everything to fight for, optimistic, reckless spirits moving round the forbidden zone with impunity, defying the invaders to come into the mountains and take them on.
Billy Moss made fast progress over the easier, though still vertiginous, route, running up and down the steep slopes like ‘a madman’s switchback’. They had no water with them, although Tyrakis had a bottle full of raki at which they all sipped when they stopped to get their breath back. They arrived at the rendezvous point above the beach just before dawn.
Five hours later the guerrillas led Kreipe and his captors to the same spot. The general’s epic journey had taken thirteen hours. Leigh Fermor was in a bad way. He was finding it hard to move, had terrible cramps, was walking stiffly, and complained that he did not know what was wrong with him.
The party sat overlooking the wide beaches stretching below them to the east and west. On the nearest was a German garrison. Through field glasses they could see soldiers bivouacking inside a barbed-wire enclosure, protected by heavy automatic weapons and mortars mounted, behind sandbags and piled high with boxes of ammunition. Kreipe asked if he could have a look. He peered through the binoculars at the men who, only a few weeks ago, had been part of his command. He watched them hanging out their washing, sunbathing, preparing the midday meal, even playing leapfrog. The garrison was oblivious to the presence of the kidnappers, their captured leader and a band which had grown to more than a hundred guerrillas. Kreipe handed back the field glasses, sighed and said: ‘You must be pleased. I sometimes wonder who is in charge of this island, us or you British.’
Less than a mile to the west there was another garrison with about forty more Germans and more guard posts at intervals all along the beaches, linked by telephone and all heavily armed. The party had no choice but to sit hidden in the heather above the cliffs and wait until it was time to get on to the pick-up point. From time to time they heard guerrillas in the hills blazing away with their Tommy guns in a defiant challenge to the oppressors. The group hoped that if they were spotted they would be mistaken for the same homeless, wild men and that the Germans would be too nervous to take them on.
At four in the afternoon they began to move surreptitiously along the cliffs, travelling in groups of two or three, the rocks concealing them from the soldiers on the beach. The journey took less time than they had anticipated and because it was still light they stopped about a quarter of a mile from the rendezvous spot to wait. They were in a tiny vegetable garden created by a shepherd, and which even had a fountain. Towards the end of the day the shepherd himself arrived to tend the plot. Unaware that a few yards from him sat the fugitive general, he offered the kidnappers onions and lettuces and water from the fountain. They sat eating what they hoped would be their last meal on the island while, to the west, the sun set, turning the glittering Libyan Sea a deep midnight blue.
At eight o’clock it was time to move down to the beach, ready to meet the motor launch. More andartes
arrived
to see them off. The beach was set in a cove sheltered by steep rocks and it began to turn into what Leigh Fermor described as a ‘sort of drawing room’: men smoked cigarettes, lounged and talked. Kreipe sat by himself on a rock at the water’s edge, his arm in a sling and the sea lapping softly at his boots, ruined by the rigours of the last nineteen days, their once-gleaming surface scraped bare.
At
21
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0
hours Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss decided it was time to start signalling. They climbed on to a rock and fished out a torch from Moss’s haversack. The codewords had been changed from Monkey King to Sugar Baker, ‘SB’; they realised that neither of them knew what that was in Morse code, and stared at each other in dazed silence. Then Leigh Fermor said that he knew how to do S.O.S. If they flashed two Ss, they would be fifty per cent correct and the commander of the motor launch, knowing they were not signallers, might make allowances for them. There was a clear problem with this plan: if the skipper thought it was Germans playing a trick, and trying to lure him on to the beach, he might just sail away.
They decided to risk it and flashed two lots of three dots, ‘. . .’ (S S), over and over.
The temperature dropped; a sea mist crept over the water and visibility fell to a few hundred yards. The two agents thought they could hear the deep throbbing of the motor launch’s powerful
650
bhp petrol engines. The noise got louder and they peered into the fog, hoping to hear the muffled clatter of the anchor chain or the paddle of oars in a rubber dinghy. The guerrillas too stared out to sea, straining to glimpse the vessel’s silhouette or hear the throb of its engines. Someone said: ‘She’s going away.’ The sound of the engines faded, the ocean lapped gently against the shore and the three men stood in the silence, defeated.
At that moment the huge figure of Dennis Ciclitira appeared, scrambling down towards the water line. With him were two captured German soldiers and a Gestapo agent who had given himself up. The prisoners were bundled out of sight: no one wanted them to catch a glimpse of the general. Ciclitira strode on to the beach calling out: ‘Paddy? Billy? What are you up to?’
Leigh Fermor and Moss, with one voice, shouted, ‘Do you know Morse?’
‘Bloody fools,’ replied Ciclitira. He grabbed the torch and began flashing ‘SB, SB’ – ‘Sugar Baker, Sugar Baker’, while berating them with the fact that had the boat been the enemy’s it might have opened fire.