Kidnap in Crete (34 page)

Leigh Fermor died aged ninety-six on
10
June 2011, and was buried next to his wife, Joan. The legend of Leigh Fermor lives on in Greece.

The real heroes of the operation were the Cretans themselves. Ralph Stockbridge said of the islanders: ‘Without their help as guides, informants, suppliers of food and so on, not a single one of us would have lasted twenty-four hours.’ Some Axis soldiers based on the island came to see their army’s actions for what they were: a German intelligence officer, Leutnant Albert Kirchen, wrote: ‘From
1
942 to the day of our departure from Crete the island was bathed in blood. Hundreds of Greek patriots were stood against a wall before our firing squads. It was a horror few other countries experienced . . . I remember that the
Geheime Feldpolizei
caught one Manolis Lambrakis . . . the torments that man underwent for about a month were truly horrific . . . yet hours before his execution he stood with his head held high and looked each of us in the eye as if challenging us.’

Of all the Cretans, Giorgios Psychoundakis achieved the greatest fame with his autobiography, published in 1955,
The Cretan Runner
, with an introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor. After the war, Psychoundakis became the victim of an administrative blunder and was arrested and imprisoned as a deserter from the Greek army. On his release he was made to fight against the communists in northern Greece. After his return to Crete he scraped a living as a charcoal burner, and laboured on the new roads being built across the mountains, over which he had carried so many messages, so many miles. In spite of the success of his memoirs he was so poor that he could not afford pen and paper. When his friend and literary collaborator, the American social anthropologist Dr Barrie Machin, died, he left Giorgios a huge stack of cards and some pens. Psychoundakis immediately set about translating
The Iliad
into Cretan dialect, a task which took him three years and for which he was honoured by the Academy of Athens.

Psychoundakis, together with Leigh Fermor’s ‘right-hand-man’ Manolis Paterakis, spent their last years employed as gardeners tending the German military cemetery outside the airfield at Maleme, where the Allies lost the battle for Crete and from where, as two young men, they had helped kick-start the island’s resistance movement. The stories of these individuals symbolise the indomitable spirit of the Cretan guerrillas, the andartes.

See Notes to Chapter 26

The Kidnap Team
26 May 1944

Micky Akoumianakis

Ilias Athanassakis

Grigorios Chnarakis

Nikos Komis

Patrick Leigh Fermor  (British SOE)

Antonios Papaleonidas

Manolis Paterakis

Stratis Saviolakis

William Stanley Moss (British SOE)

Giorgios Tyrakis

Mitsos Tzatzas

Antonis Zoidakis

Pavlos Zografistos (last-minute addition)

On 20 May 1941 the Germans invaded Crete with the largest airborne force in history. They behaved with a ferocity not seen since they marched into Poland in 1939.

After the first day the Germans took control of the battlefield.

Civilians quickly joined in the fighting. Many paratroopers met death still tangled in their harnesses.

The British withdrawal rapidly turned to chaos. The Commonwealth troops left behind to become prisoners of war numbered close to 17,000.

After the battle the Germans took revenge, hunting down the civilian men, women and even children who had fought against them.

Kandanos and Kondomari were the first places to suffer reprisals. The villagers were rounded up.

The men were separated from their families and shot. As the people buried their dead, engineers moved in and destroyed the villages with high explosives.

The Cretans and their island were badly battered in the fighting. Some people lost everything.