Authors: Rick Stroud
Kreipe revealed little more, other than a useful piece of gossip: Hitler’s future brother-in-law Waffen-SS General Hermann Fegelein, was now one of the most hated men in the Führer’s entourage. Kreipe’s interrogator was disappointed when the prisoner claimed to know next to nothing about the so-called ‘secret weapon’ that Hitler had mentioned in speeches. He thought that whatever it was, it was very accurate and being developed in Peenemünde. The interrogating officer summed up his report:
My general impression of Kreipe is that he is rather unimportant and unimaginative. Anti-Nazi, possibly because events are trending that way. Might drift into the Thoma group if Thoma took any interest in him, which is perhaps doubtful.
(Von Thoma was Rommel’s second in command, an anti-Nazi who had been captured towards the end of the Battle of Alamein.)
For Kreipe, SOE’s ‘Hussar stunt’ wrecked what remained of his military career and left him humiliated, a figure of fun, something from which he would never properly recover.
A long time after the war a member of Kreipe’s staff in Crete confided to former SOE agent Bickham Sweet-Escott that when the officers in the mess at Ano Archanes heard that their general had been captured, there was at first a shocked silence, broken by an officer saying, ‘Well gentlemen, I think this calls for champagne all round.’
After his interrogation Kreipe was flown to Calgary in Canada, where he joined other high-ranking Nazi generals. He was released in
1
947 and died aged eighty-one in Lower Saxony. The kidnap may have saved Heinrich Kreipe’s life. On 2
0
May 1947, the anniversary of Operation
Merkur
, General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, the island’s most violent and vicious commander, together with the notorious Bräuer, were tried for war crimes on Crete. They were found guilty and executed by firing squad. Kreipe might easily have died with them.
Before his execution in Athens, Bräuer was debriefed by a member of the Swedish Red Cross; the German general summed up the consequences of Kreipe’s kidnapping for the Wehrmacht by saying: ‘Oh we’ve got boxes of generals in Germany: it’s when you lose your master baker you start worrying.’ During his imprisonment in Athens, General Müller, SOE’s original target, met Patrick Leigh Fermor; when he was told this was the Englishman behind the kidnap of Heinrich Kreipe, the German officer laughed and said: ‘
Ach Herr Major
.
Mich hätten Sie nicht so leicht geschnappt
.’ (My dear major, you would not have taken me so easily.)
25
Moss and the Battle of Damastas Bridge
In Cairo, Leigh Fermor’s physical condition deteriorated: the stiffness in his arm spread to his legs and joints and became so serious that he could not cut up his own food. He said that he was ‘as stiff as a board’. He was admitted to hospital suffering from a high temperature, and swollen joints, and was given a provisional diagnosis of polio, later changed to polyarthritis. (A modern doctor might have diagnosed him as having a severe post-infection arthritis, sometimes known as ‘reactive arthritis’.) Leigh Fermor took three months to recover his strength. He was visited by the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, General Sir Bernard Paget, who gave him the DSO for the kidnap operation. He received the medal in his pyjamas, still lying in bed, his battledress top round his shoulders, on to which Paget pinned the medal. Billy Moss received the Military Cross.
For six weeks Moss kicked his heels in Cairo, visiting Leigh Fermor in hospital, smoking with him, drinking champagne and trying to come up with a new adventure. Leigh Fermor’s limbs grew thin while his joints became more swollen and red. Moss met comrades who had been badly wounded and heard the sad news of dead friends. He swapped his peasant costume for evening clothes, drinking and flirting with Sophie. In the end even the delights of the undergraduate hooliganism at Tara began to pall.
Moss put an idea to Brigadier Barker-Benfield: he wanted to return to Crete to organise the band of escaped Russian POWs into a guerrilla force. The fact that Moss spoke perfect Russian made the plan plausible. What Moss really wanted to do was either repeat the kidnap operation and abduct Kreipe’s newly installed successor, General Helmut Friebe, or lead a raid on the German headquarters at Archanes and kill as many officers and men as he could. Moss shared these thoughts only with Leigh Fermor.
Moss set off for Crete on
6
July in a motor launch, accompanied by Giorgios Tyrakis. On the island several members of the old team agreed to join him, including Antonis Zoidakis and Ilias Athanassakis. Ilias agreed to recce the Ano Archanes German military headquarters, and draw a map showing where the soldiers worked, ate and slept. Moss heard from Micky Akoumianakis, the head of intelligence in Heraklion, that he did not want to be part of another kidnap operation.
From the start Ilias Athanassakis thought that the new kidnap plan was ‘utter madness’, but kept his thoughts to himself. Instead, he went about his task slowly, telling Moss that, for security reasons, the Germans were changing the structure of their headquarters. In this way he hoped that the plans would be dropped. In the end Moss received a letter purporting to be from the communists threatening to betray him if he went ahead with the kidnapping. The reality was that the letter came from local nationalists and was written by Ilias himself, who feared he might be held personally responsible for the reprisals and deaths that the plan would cause.
Undaunted, Moss dropped the idea and left the Anogia area and moved his headquarters to Embriski to the east of Crete, where he planned to muster his band of former Russian POWs. There a message arrived from Sandy Rendel telling him that the escaped prisoners had all been evacuated on the orders of GHQ Cairo. Rather than cut his losses and ask to be sent back to Cairo, this high-spirited, twenty-three-year-old Coldstream Guards officer and freelance adventurer set off on another escapade. He returned to his ‘mountain lair’ on Mount Ida above Anogia, the headquarters of the white-haired Kapitan Mihali Xylouris, where he was joined by six freshly escaped Russian POWs. They were all young men and claimed the Germans had told them that whatever happened, no Russian would leave the island alive.
On
7
August
1
944, a German NCO, Feldwebel Josef Olenhauer, entered the village of Anogia with an eight-man patrol. Olenhauer was a strange man who could be at once very strict and very lenient. He was not unpopular everywhere, and yet the inhabitants of some villages found him tyrannical and overbearing, an impression heightened by the fact that he was often accompanied by his Alsatian dog and carried a whip. Olenhauer had links with German counter-intelligence; other people thought that he also had links with SOE. A boy who regularly took food and supplies to Ralph Stockbridge thought that Olenhauer knew what Stockbridge was up to and turned a blind eye to his activities.
On that hot August morning, Olenhauer and his men were in Anogia looking for Cretans to press into forced labour. He stood in the village square waving a whip, his dog straining at its leash, Olenhauer demanding that volunteers step forward. There were none. The soldiers began to round up any men, women and children they could find. On the outskirts some of the villagers slipped into the safety of the fields. Others hid in the darkness of their houses, hoping to escape. Olenhauer marched fifty hostages off on the long road leading to Rethymnon. On the way they were ambushed by local armed men who fired their weapons in the air, warning the hostages to lie on the ground; then they opened fire on the soldiers, many of whom fell dead on to the ground. Olenhauer and the remainder of his patron were captured and, after a brief trial, shot, as was the dog.
When news of the executions reached the headquarters of
Festung Kreta
in Chania, reprisals were inevitable. The remaining inhabitants of Anogia fled into the safety of the mountains, carrying what possessions they could on their backs, or piled onto mules and driving their sheep and goats ahead of them. The first refugees to reach the safety of Mihali Xylouris’s headquarters told the kapitan what had happened.
At the same time, under the cover of darkness, Billy Moss led a party of fifteen men, a mixture of Cretan andartes and Russians, down the mountain, through the deserted village of Anogia, heading for the Heraklion–Rethymnon road to set an ambush.
At three in the morning they reached Damastas, marked by a bridge at a bend on the main road. The group carried Hawkins anti-tank grenades, small square objects which held a pound of TNT and a chemical igniter. When a vehicle passed over the mine, the box containing the igniter cracked and acid poured onto the explosives, detonating it. Moss planned to mine the bridge with the grenades, which could be easily hidden in the worn, split, tarmac. By five in the morning everything was in place, with the guerrillas crouching in the ditches that lined the road.
Moss could not resist indulging his passion for photography. He carried a camera which he thought could be set to take pictures automatically. He balanced it on a rock, assuming it would snap away on its own. It did not survive.
A whistle warned Moss’s gang of approaching vehicles; the men shouldered their weapons, waiting for the fight. Round the bend came not lorries full of men but two boys and a flock of sheep, enough weight to detonate the mines. The guerrillas rushed forward and hustled the lads into a small valley a few hundred yards away. The boys were on their way to a market, others were following them and for the next two hours, unwary market-goers, plus their sheep, goats, and mules carrying produce, were waylaid and taken away to the safety of the same valley.
Silence descended, and the ambushers waited for another whistle. It came just after seven in the morning. The ambush party heard the low rumble of a vehicle. Into view came a three-ton truck: two Germans sat in the front, and a mixed group of Cretan and Italian labourers in the back. Moss’s group opened fire, and the truck blew apart on the hidden mines. Bits of twisted metal rained down, clanging against the road and rocks. The truck was reduced to a buckled, smoking wreck, trapping the bodies of the dead labourers. The driver lay crumpled and dead behind the wheel; his companion lay in the road, his skull smashed. The surviving labourers were taken prisoner. Another truck appeared and was destroyed, then a Jeep-like Kübelwagen drove into the trap, where it too was turned into scrap, and its occupants killed. The wreckage blocked the road, the Kübelwagen burning in a position where it could be seen by oncoming vehicles. The ambushers moved on to a fresh, less well-protected section of the road.
It was now
8
.
30
a.m. The morning was still and clear, the noise of cicadas mingled with the tinkle of the goat bells. Another whistle pierced the air, followed by the noise of a troop carrier, its thirty-five occupants sitting stiff and upright in the back; sunlight glinting from their helmets. Fifteen guerrilla Sten and Marlin guns opened up: within seconds, 400 rounds of 9mm ammunition had lashed the bodies of the soldiers in the vehicles. Most of them died where they sat, a few managed to jump on to the road or scrabble for the cover of a low stone wall.
Silence returned, punctuated by the hiss of steam escaping from the broken radiator. Blood seeped through the floorboards of the vehicle, mingling with the black oil that leaked from the ruined engine. The smell of petrol and burned rubber drifted through the air. Suddenly a shell landed in the middle of the guerrillas, exploding with colossal force; shockwaves blasting across the scrub. An armoured car appeared, weighing nearly four tons and carrying a
20
-millimetre cannon firing high explosive shells. In the turret stood the commander, muttering directions to the driver, ignoring the rounds ricocheting off his vehicle. Grenades exploded against the armour plating, showering rock and hot metal, throwing up clouds of dust which hid the vehicle. The armoured car rumbled on. One guerrilla, Manolis Spithoukis, who stood directly in its path, firing from an ancient, single-shot rifle, was hit in the chest and severely wounded. The Germans behind the wall opened up and some of the guerrillas began to withdraw.
The armoured car was nearly on top of them. Moss tried to get behind it, rushing across ten yards of open ground then flinging himself behind the safety of some rocks; with him was Vanya, one of the Russians. Unflustered, the vehicle commander drew his pistol and fired aimed shots, hitting Vanya in the head and sending him sprawling dead to the ground. The guerrillas tried to give covering fire but were running out of ammunition.
Moss remained behind the rocks, waiting for the vehicle to draw level with him. When the commander bobbed down to reload his Luger, Moss threw a grenade into the turret. The armoured car blew apart. The agonised screams of the men inside died down, the blast turned the vehicle into a blazing mess. The surviving Germans fled under the cover of the thick black smoke drifting everywhere, leaving behind equipment and ammunition which was quickly scavenged by the guerrillas before they made their way back to the hideout. The battle of Damastas Bridge was over.
That night Moss and Tyrakis discussed the casualties. They reckoned that one of the Russians, Vanya, had been killed. The Germans had lost forty or fifty men killed and a few taken prisoner; several labourers had also been killed. When Moss asked Tyrakis what had happened to the prisoners he replied that they had already been taken care of, making a slash with his hand across his throat.