Kidnap in Crete Read online

  When he was not moving around the island, Pendlebury would hang around the cafés and restaurants of Heraklion’s Lion Square – a market area dominated by the Morosini Fountain, a series of huge white marble bowls supported by lions, and once home to the biggest slave market in the Eastern Mediterranean. Pendlebury would sit, eating sweet cakes and drinking coffee in the Patisserie Reginaki – known as ‘High Life’, or drinking wine at Maxim, a restaurant built into one of the Byzantine arches that surrounded the fountain. As he sat, he listened to the conversations going on around him. He became aware of a discreet net of Nazi sympa­thisers who were quietly gathering intelligence and names that would be useful after the German invasion.

  One, an Austrian woman called Frau Myro Bauritz, taught foreign languages and freelanced as a commercial ‘letter writer’ for the Greek companies with contracts in France. When not teaching, Frau Bauritz was hard at work making lists of German-speaking students in the city. Jan Knoch was a German tourist whose pleasure it was to wander about the island making drawings. He based himself in Pitsidia near the south coast in an area called the Mesara Plain. Knoch became quite well known to the locals and had a favourite spot on a hill, from which he would spend hours sketching the landscape. In front of him lay Timbaki, destined to turn into the biggest German airfield on the island. Knoch vanished just before the invasion, but reappeared in 1942 working as a Wehrmacht engineer with the rank of major. A third spy was Hans Kruger, who also disappeared immediately before the invasion. He taught languages at the exclusive Commercial School in Heraklion. After the war his name was found on orders discovered in the German Kommandantur.

  With the outbreak of war, Pendlebury, aged thirty-five, offered his services to British Naval Intelligence. ‘I know Crete and most of the Aegean Islands intimately,’ he wrote in his application; ‘I have many personal contacts all over the Aegean which should be a good source of information, since, particularly in Crete, I am known to a great part of the population.’ The interviewing officer concluded that he was ‘tough and generally desirable’. A month later, Pendlebury was an emergency intelligence officer, working in a dingy basement at the War Office in London as part of Military Intelligence (Research). His friend and fellow agent, Nick Hammond, recalls him ‘swooping onto the practical details of planning with unbounded energy and enthusiasm. He talked to me of swordsticks, daggers, pistols, maps; of Cretan klephtes from Lasithi and Sfakia, of hideouts in the mountains and of coves and caves on the south coast; of the power of personal contacts formed by years of travel, of the geography of Crete, its mules and caïques, and of the vulnerable points in its roads.’ (Klephtes were thieves living in the mountains. In hard times they would form gangs to raid the fertile lowlands and coastal areas.) When Hammond and Pendlebury talked on the phone they spoke in Greek – Pendlebury in Cretan dialect and Hammond in the argot of northern Greece. By June the following year, having undergone basic explosives training, Pendlebury was back on Crete, living once more at the Villa Ariadne, and masquerading – though not at all convincingly – as the British vice consul.

  The military situation in Greece and the Middle East soon deteriorated. In November 1940, Crete’s locally raised defenders, the 5th Cretan Division – regarded as being the best marksmen in the Greek army – were sent from Chania to fight on the Albanian front, where they were deployed in atrocious conditions of cold and wet. Though woefully equipped, the division fought heroically, most notably at Mount Trebesina in early 1941, pushing Mussolini’s forces back into Albanian territory. British and Commonwealth troops, including fifty Middle East Commando, were sent to Crete to fill the gap left by the division’s departure.

  Pendlebury feared that if the Axis powers captured Greece, his beloved Crete would be next to fall. His main priority, therefore – which he pursued with some urgency – was to organise a Cretan military force to replace the 5th Division. Pendlebury’s official role within British military intelligence required him to liaise between the Allied forces on Crete and the Greek authorities. This gave him the chance to see how the commandos worked and to form ideas about organising the resistance. The commandos did not know that Pendlebury was working for military intelligence, but they were clearly impressed by the Englishman: ‘From the first days of our landing, his knowledge of Crete and the Cretans was invaluable both from the point of view of the higher staff and our humbler pleasure in knowing where and how to buy the best wine and eggs . . . His good friends were everywhere and to go about with him was a rather Bacchanalian Progress of Cretan hospitality.’ His job was to identify whether the allegiances of influential Cretans lay with Great Britain, Germany or Italy. He headed for the upland plains, especially those above Omalos, Anogia and Nida, where he concluded that ‘Anglophily is rampant!’ Pendlebury knew that if the Germans occupied the island these plains, as in conflicts past, could once again become places of refuge and resistance.

  In the event of a German invasion, Pendlebury planned to make his hideout on the Nida plateau – 1,500 metres above sea level, forty miles south-west of Heraklion, and overlooked by the deep and forbidding cave among whose awesome stalagmites and stalactites legend had it that the Titan Rhea hid the infant Zeus. The plateau was inaccessible by road and could only be reached through the guerrilla strongholds of Anogia and Krousonas. Knowing that there was a chance that enemy aircraft might try to land on the plain, he organised for it to be strewn with massive boulders. He wrote home to his wife, Hilda: ‘We shall take our weapons and go into the high pastures!’ He knew the families who lived on the plains, the men who were to become the andartes, the resistance fighters, and he knew the leaders, the ‘kapitans’, of whom three were especially important.

  The first was Kapitan Antonis Grigorakis – nicknamed Satanas, and known to SOE as Kapitan Satanas. He had been badly wounded in an uprising on the island five years earlier. Pendlebury described him as ‘a very dignified old gentleman who looks like an Elizabethan Pirate. He got his nickname because it was thought that only Satan knew how many times he had been wounded or how many bullets were still inside him.’ The second key figure was Kapitan Georgios Petrakoyiorgi, a tall, hatchet-faced businessman who owned an olive oil factory; he was assessed as a natural leader who knew what he wanted and exuded calm and confidence; Petrakoyiorgi was given the codename ‘Selfridge’ and he armed his men at his own expense. The third and most unpredictable of the kapitans was Manolis Bandouvas, a sheep farmer and vast bear of a man with a curling moustache and a reputation for self-importance. With ‘his sad ox eyes and correspondingly deep-throated voice in which he was fond of uttering cataclysmic aphorisms such as “The struggle needs blood my lads”,’ Bandouvas could be very intimidating; he was given the codename ‘Bo-Peep’. He did not like taking orders from the British.

  The three kapitans formed the backbone of Pendlebury’s emer­ging network. Proud, independent, highly influential characters, they all required careful handling; where they led, others followed. They were striking figures, as were their mountain men followers, wearing dark blue baggy breeches, knee-high boots, embroidered waistcoats and black headscarves; and always with a dagger thrust into a purple silk sash, tied at the waist like a cummerbund. They carried weapons as a matter of course. After the invasion the Germans referred to them as Pendlebury’s thugs. Pendlebury’s chief concern was to supply these men with weapons, ammunition and equipment.

  Pendlebury dragooned other people to help him, many of whom never knew exactly what he was planning. One of these was bespectacled former Field Security officer, Lance Corporal Ralph Stockbridge, a quiet man with a dry sense of humour, whose speciality was intelligence gathering. He knew the value of small fragments of information, meaningless or unimportant in themselves, but which could be built up, like pieces of a jigsaw, into a bigger and more valuable picture.

  Throughout the early months of 1941, Pendlebury continued his reconnaissance of beaches and landing sites, seeking out potential members for the resistance, and haranguing the Briti
sh authorities at GHQ Cairo for weapons. He had secret hiding places in Heraklion and near Suda Bay where he stashed flares, rifles, ammunition, detonators and medical supplies. He trained men in the use of firearms and explosives and taught them about organisation. In the cities he recruited agents, gave them cover stories and found places to hide their radios. He worked out what installations should be destroyed before they fell into German hands, including the Cable and Wireless office, the harbour, the power station and the telephone exchange. He arranged for three radio sets to be sent into the mountains, one to Mount Ida, one to Mount Dikti and the third to East Crete. In spite of this, GHQ Cairo ignored what he was doing and made no provision for radio communication with the island once it had fallen to the Germans.

  See Notes to Chapter 1

  2

  Defenders of Crete

  On 6 April, the Wehrmacht rolled through Greece. On the 18th, as Athens was placed under martial law, the country’s new prime minister, Alexandros Koryzis, the former governor of the Bank of Greece, returned home from emergency meetings with the British and King George II of Greece and shot himself dead.

  The British Army reeled back from the German military onslaught, fell apart and retreated to Crete, leaving behind much of its heavy equipment. Soon, thousands of Greek, British and Commonwealth troops were disembarking at Heraklion with their weapons but little else: ‘Few of the men had overcoats. None had bedding. Most had lost their toilet kits. There were no mess facilities.’

  In Albania, the commander of the 5th Cretan Division, General Georgios Papastergiou, who actually came from northern Greece, abandoned his men and arranged to meet his family in the Cretan capital, Chania, before travelling on to the comparative safety of Egypt. The general’s desertion of his unit was met with fury on Crete, causing many to say: ‘He returned without his children’ – that is, the young men of the Cretan Division. Towards the end of April, Papastergiou turned up in Chania. He was met by riots and protests, during which he was murdered by an enraged citizen. (His name carries shame to this day, and attracts the Cretan condemnation: ‘May his bones be blackened by the tars of hell, may the earth of his grave sit heavy on him!’)

  By the end of April, Hitler’s intentions towards Crete were clear. The man tasked with organising the defence of the island (codenamed ‘Operation Scorcher’) was the commander of the New Zealander Division, Major General Bernard Freyberg VC. Freyberg was described by Wavell’s ADC, Peter Coats, as ‘a man of quickly changing moods, easily depressed and as easily elated’. Freyberg was fearless in battle and had been wounded almost as many times as Kapitan Satanas. ‘Tiny’ Freyberg was six-foot two, a qualified dentist, former prize-fighter, and a personal friend of Winston Churchill. The citation for his VC for actions on the Western front contained the sentence: ‘The personality, valour and utter contempt of danger on the part of this single Officer enabled the lodgement in the most advanced objective of the Corps to be permanently held.’

  Freyberg was part of the small, privileged circle of military and political leaders to be given access to Ultra intercepts. In 1941 this handed him the huge potential advantage of knowing beforehand German plans for an airborne invasion of Crete. He ignored them. Convinced – and possibly obsessed – with the idea that the main invasion would come from the sea, he deployed his forces accordingly, without realising that only one beach, in the north-west sector of the island, was suitable for assault ships and landing craft.

  Apart from around 30,000 fighting men under his command, ‘Creforce’ was augmented, unofficially, by andartes, who were not given uniforms, exposing them to execution by the Nazis as francs-tireurs (unlawful combatants). What Freyberg did not realise was the extent to which other ordinary Cretans – women, children, old men, boys, shepherds from the hills – were prepared to take up arms against the invaders. One islander, Giorgios Tzitzikas, who was twenty-three in 1941, remembers: ‘The population said, “Our sons are fighting in Albania”, we had to take their place, and take their place they did.’

  On the morning of 15 May 1941, German bombers appeared over the Cretan cities of Chania, Rethymnon and Heraklion. The bombing raids, softening-up attacks for the main assault, were repeated every morning from six o’clock for the next few days, and became known as the ‘morning hate’. On the 16th, Bernard Freyberg signalled to Churchill: ‘Have completed plans for the defence of Crete . . . everywhere all ranks are fit and morale is high . . . All defences have been extended, and positions wired as much as possible . . . I do not wish to appear over confident, but I feel that at least we will give an excellent account of ourselves. With the help of the Royal Navy I trust Crete will be held.’ Churchill’s response left no room for doubt as to the importance of Creforce’s mission: ‘Our success in “Scorcher” would of course affect whole world situation. May you have God’s blessing in this memorable and fateful operation, which will react in every theatre of the war.’

  In Suda Bay, a huge natural harbour, ship after ship was hit, disabled, or sunk. A gigantic pall of smoke hung over the port. The bombing of the island had a devastating effect on the Cretans, who watched as their towns were pounded to dust. But it also acted to rally them: ‘There was fear and fear brought anger,’ recalled resistance fighter Giorgios Tzitzikas: ‘Let me tell you the iron that was coming down and the fire made the Cretan heart harder than German steel and the Cretan spirit hotter than the German fire. When they came . . . we, the Cretan people, were ready for them.’

  See Notes to Chapter 2

  3

  Operation Merkur

  On the same day that Bernard Freyberg sent his confident signal to Churchill, a German paratrooper, Jäger Martin Pöppel, and his comrades in the signals platoon, 1st Battalion, 1st Fallschirmjäger (Parachute) Regiment, disembarked from lorries which had carried them from their bases in Europe to the olive groves of southern Greece. For the first part of the journey many of the vehicles and troops were loaded onto trains. The men travelled incognito and in secrecy: before they embarked the paratroopers were ordered to remove their insignia and not to carry any personal papers. Battalion identification symbols were stripped from their vehicles. Once aboard the trains they were told not to sing Fallschirmjäger songs. The airfields strung along the Aegean coastline which weeks earlier had been occupied by the RAF, now became crowded with Luftwaffe transport aircraft, spotter planes, bombers and fighters assembled ready for battle: Unternehmen Merkur (Operation Mercury), the conquest of Crete.

  Pöppel and the rest of his unit quickly established themselves in the captured British tents that were to be their homes for the next few days. Lorries arrived from Athens laden with German beer, which the men kept cool in holes in the ground. They passed the time relaxing under the hot, Greek sun – smoking, eating, drinking, writing home to their loved ones. The Fallschirmjäger had been formed in 1936 by Hermann Göring. Their commander, Luftwaffe commander Kurt Student, was anxious to see his young paratroopers prove themselves in major combat. Pöppel and most of his comrades had volunteered for the elite division at the age of eighteen; most were fanatical Nazis with an unswerving faith in their Führer. Drop-out rates were high: only the toughest made it through the harsh twelve-week training process, which aimed at hardening them mentally and physically. For the first few weeks they learnt weapons and demolition training, plus simple tactical deployments, and punctuated by gruelling sixteen-mile route marches carrying full kit. The next month was dedicated to parachute training: falling and rolling, leapfrogging, as well as work on trampolines, jumping from towers and from dummy transport aircraft; the route marches were extended to thirty-five miles. Finally: intensive parachute training, with the standard RZ20 Ruckenpackung Zwangauslösung (‘rucksack packed to open’), an awkward piece of equipment which was attached by a single line to the back of the body harness, forcing the paratrooper to launch himself from the aircraft in a spread-eagle dive. Clumsy as it was, the RZ20 parachute could open at just under two hundred feet, which meant the troops could
jump from low altitude and spend less time dangling defenceless in the air. The Fallschirmjäger landed in a forward roll, their limbs and joints protected from fractures by elbow and knee pads.

  Before being allowed to jump, the recruits were buckled into their parachutes and blown about on the ground by winds generated from howling, lorry-mounted aircraft engines. Once they had satisfied their instructors that they could land without injury and free themselves from the billowing canopies and entangling lines, they were ready to jump from an aircraft and earn the coveted ‘Storming Eagle’ jump badge (Fallschirmjäger Adler), an oval wreath of oak leaves, on which was mounted an eagle in symbolic attack mode, like a Stuka, its talons open, ready to grasp its unsuspecting prey.

  All airborne troops were issued with a copy of ‘The Parachutist’s Ten Commandments’, drafted by their spiritual leader and supreme commander general, Kurt Student, who would lead them in the invasion. One of the commandments exhorted: ‘For you, combat shall be fulfilment.’ Another: ‘Together with your comrades you will triumph or die.’ ‘Calm and caution, vigour and determination, valour and a fanatical offensive spirit will make you superior in the attack . . . Never surrender! Your honour lies in victory or death.’ In battle, this elite fighting unit would ‘reserve chivalry for the honest foe’; ‘armed irregulars’ would ‘deserve no quarter’.

  On 19 May, the paratroopers received their final orders for Operation Merkur. Because the island was so small (an area of about 160 miles by thirty), the soldiers were confident that victory would be easy. Highly inaccurate German intelligence reports were also encouraging, telling them: ‘There are no Greek troops in CRETE. The British troops are a permanent garrison. British troops which fled from the PELOPONNESE have been brought to ALEXANDRIA.’ The Fallschirmjäger spent the rest of the day cleaning their weapons and equipment. Morale was high; Greek shoe-shine boys polished the soldiers’ side-lacing jump boots, promising their customers an ‘extra top-class Stuka shine’.