Kidnap in Crete Page 21

  The rest of the journey passed without incident. Scouts moved ahead checking the villages ahead for German patrols. Moss found that, apart from the barking of dogs, everything had an eerie stillness. Just before dawn they reached Yerakari, and they were guided to the hut where they were to stay. They lit a fire and waited.

  Leigh Fermor, Tyrakis and Psychoundakis arrived at the village of Patsos, an hour or so from Yerakari, and met up with another patriot, Giorgios Harokopos, whose family had helped British soldiers to escape after the battle for Crete. The Germans had raided the Harokopos house several times, imprisoning two of his uncles, torturing his younger brother, and declaring the family ‘Not law-abiding’, after which they burnt the house down. Harokopos was now asked go to Yerakari on 7 May and lead the abduction team to a new, safer hideout where they could all reunite somewhere near Patsos. Leigh Fermor reminded the young resistance fighter of the seriousness of the task he was about to undertake. In return the British officer offered to give him safe passage on the motor launch to Cairo.

  That evening, the ISLD officer Ralph Stockbridge received Leigh Fermor’s message requesting his wireless set, and wrote a long reply:

  From Ralph Stockbridge 6.5.44.

  Dear Paddy,

  Have already sent you two urgent messages with answers to your previous letter with news and instructions. Neither presumably reached you they were sent to the address you gave me. The burning of Sachtomic [the village of Sahtouria] cancels their news. Whether the news of this reached Cairo in time to stop them sending boat there last night 5/6 I very much doubt also. Cairo say they broadcast capture of General and that he had reached Cairo on 30th and 1st and news also published in press. Leaflets printed at once, but not dropped because of bad flying weather. Presumably dropped by now.

  I regret I cannot come to meet you. Apart from the fact your messenger did not get here till midnight nearly, I am, as you know, my own operator, reluctant to leave the set particularly at the moment.

  Stockbridge knew that there was another SOE agent on the island, Major Dennis Ciclitira.

  What I suggest is this. Sachtomic and Rodakino are blown – Dick [Barnes] led a party there 8 days ago and his signals were answered by MG fire from the sea. Since when lots of Huns have snooped around there. But at ASI GONIA RPT ASI GONIA is Dennis and Dennis has a set and an operator with him and nothing to do, he is due to leave by the next boat which is due, I think in about a week’s time from the Preveli area. I suggest you send a runner along to Dennis saying you are coming to join him and in fact go over there and keep in touch with Cairo about boats. I will let Dick know also. This is better than runners chasing about all over the place with out-of-date news. I have told Cairo your situation – as far as half way through message about burning Sachtomic when all my batt[eries]s went flat suddenly . . . Will get this off have been up charging all night and will also send second telegraph saying you are out of Amari area and striking west. I will tell them to keep Dennis and Dick fully informed of both possibilities and to do their damnedest to get something in next week, even a destroyer if necessary.

  Signals use MK every 20 minutes from 21:00 GMT onwards.

  That at the moment is all I can tell you. Obviously you must have a set with you more or less to arrange about boat and Dennis is the obvious man. I personally am moving HQ tomorrow evening because these bloody people are scared stiff and kicking me out . . . If you prefer to stay where you are in any case contact Dennis. If anything urgent comes over my set for you I will send it to Dennis unless by tomorrow midday you let me know – you are staying where you are + Dick is to come and meet you at some given place at some given time. Though again there will be the communications difficulty + I consider preferable you join up with Dennis + I will let Dick know what you say. As I say if you want him with you send messenger (reliable please) tomorrow.

  Have already sent you two lots of cigarettes. Here are some more and compo. Sorry about all this business.

  Love from us all,

  Ralph

  MK – ‘Monkey King’ – was the recognition code to be flashed in Morse by torch from the beach of the rendezvous point to the rescue ship. If the captain of the pick-up vessel did not receive the signal, or if the signal was incorrect, he would cancel the rendezvous and head back across the sea to Egypt.

  The huge and deadly game of hide and seek went on: the German searches forced everybody to keep moving from hideout to hideout with no quick way of contacting each other. As Stockbridge’s tight-lipped and disapproving message pointed out, even when a runner did get through, the news he carried was usually out of date.

  Billy Moss and General Kreipe were still not speaking to each other. Moss had run out of things to read and passed the time delousing himself, sitting on a rock in the sun, stark naked, searched the seams of his clothes for parasites – much to the embarrassment of the guerrillas who found nudity shocking. Kreipe did the same thing though without completely disrobing. The hours passed slowly. An old man and his grandson appeared from the village with a scant meal of a few dried cherries and sour milk. Later the old man came back with a bottle of wine and spent the rest of the day staring at the group in total silence.

  With little to eat and nothing to do, the general relented and broke his silence towards Moss. He apologised, explaining that his poor knowledge of French had made his words seem harsher than he meant. The two men passed the rest of the day discussing the course of the war. Kreipe argued that the Allies would never be able to land in northern Europe and that the only way the war would end was with a negotiated settlement. Moss was surprised at how little the high-ranking officer seemed to know. Kreipe admitted that terrible things had gone on in the Ukraine. He thought that the Romanians were the best allies the Fatherland had, followed by the Italians, who he thought were ‘very good indeed’.

  In the afternoon, the young Giorgios Harokopos arrived, eager and ready to lead the abduction team and their prisoner on their journey to the next hideout at Harakas about a mile beyond the village of Patsos where, although they did not know it, Leigh Fermor was hiding. Harokopos was excited at the prospect of seeing the now legendary kidnap team and their captive general, but found the kidnappers looking tired and worried, their faces etched with the strain and uncertainty of the last two weeks. He shook hands with each of them and congratulated them on their brilliant achievement, hoping in his heart that he would not let down such a magnificent group of men. Then he said a polite ‘Good evening’ to General Kreipe and helped him mount the mule on which he was to travel.

  The route to Patsos took them past the village of Spili, where a German battalion was garrisoned. Paterakis and Harokopos scouted about a quarter of a mile ahead of the main party, checking for ambushes. If they fell into a trap the others would have a chance to get away and hide in places that had already been identified for use in an emergency. The weight of the burly Kreipe became too much for the mule and the general was forced to go on foot; the journey, which should have been completed in three hours, took nearly six.

  A string of messengers arrived for Leigh Fermor, all with bad news: the Germans were closing off beach after beach; hundreds of Cretans now knew the kidnappers were hiding in the area and, although most of them were determined to help the team, it was only a matter of time before a collaborator revealed where Kreipe was being kept, or one of the guerrillas was captured and broken under torture.

  Most alarming of all was news that Cairo was mounting a rescue attempt led by the commander of the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George (the Earl) Jellicoe, who was a maverick. In 1942 he led the commando raid on Heraklion airfield in which twenty enemy aircraft had been destroyed and for which he won the DSO, complemented the following year by the award of an MC for actions on Rhodes. Neither Jellicoe nor Cairo knew that the chosen landing beach at Sahtouria was guarded by nearly two hundred German soldiers. It was clear that Jellicoe’s party was on a suicide mission and likely to be massacr
ed. Leigh Fermor sent a runner back to Dick Barnes with a signal asking Cairo to cancel the operation. It was 7 May; Jellicoe was due to land on the 9th. Leigh Fermor hoped his signal would get through in time.

  Next he sent a runner with a message to Moss telling him about the raid. From the scribbled address Moss realised Leigh Fermor was very close by. He sent a reply asking his superior to rendezvous with him as soon as possible. Leigh Fermor and his group broke camp and set off to rejoin the others.

  On the way he and Tyrakis discussed what they would do if the raiding party appeared. Leigh Fermor thought they should send Kreipe to the village of Rodakino under an escort of guerrillas. Leaving the rest of the kidnappers to create a diversion, after which they could ‘hare over the mountain’. Tyrakis said that no one wanted to stay with the general and suggested they put Kreipe in a cave and roll a huge boulder over the mouth to imprison him. In the last resort they would have to kill him and fling his body into a deep hole where he would never be found, just as they had done with his driver.

  In the middle of the night of 9/10 May, Leigh Fermor and Tyrakis rejoined the others at Patsos. In the three days they had been away they had walked more than sixty miles. They arrived to find everyone asleep.

  Leigh Fermor shook Moss awake, shining his torch in the young man’s face and then into his own. They were delighted and relieved to see each other. The next two hours were spent drinking raki and smoking, going over and over the problem of Jellicoe’s raid. Leigh Fermor now wanted to take a ‘gang of twenty-five local thugs’ down to the beach at Sahtouria to cause havoc behind the German lines as they came under fire from Jellicoe and his commandos. Under cover of the fight, Moss and the others would have to break out to the west with the general. Finally, tipsy and exhausted, they all fell asleep.

  In the morning General Kreipe was surprised to see Leigh Fermor, and greeted him, saying, ‘Good Morning Major, we’ve missed you.’

  See Notes to Chapter 21

  22

  Men of Darkness

  Later in the morning Dick Barnes’s messenger, Kostas Koutelidakis, arrived to tell them that the Jellicoe raid had been postponed until the night of the 11/12th. Koutelidakis confirmed that the beach at Keramia was guarded by German patrols. There was nothing to do but go further west, which meant looping north-west towards the village of Fotinou, after which they had to face a stiff climb over another mountain before once more dropping down south to the coast.

  The Germans were hard on their heels: the group learned that they were raiding Yerakari, where the kidnappers had hidden only the day before. Other villages in the valley had also been raided. It was even more dangerous to move about in daylight. Yet again they were forced to wait until dark. Members of Giorgios Harokopos’s family arrived with food, including a lamb which they roasted on a spit. One was Giorgios’s uncle Eleftherios, a retired soldier and a member of the armed National Organisation of Crete, the EOK. Eleftherios had persuaded a friend in the village to lend the group a mule, one of the strongest around and capable of taking the general’s weight.

  At midday a wonderful lunch was laid out for the kidnappers. Kreipe was once more amazed at the generosity which the Cretans showed towards the British. A few days before he had seen an example of how thoroughly the occupying forces had been subverted: a member of the resistance had needed some false papers to travel to Heraklion; to the general’s amazement, not one, but three sets were immediately produced for him, all bearing the distinctive thin red line across the top. Kreipe requested Leigh Fermor to ask Harokopos’s sister why they were treating the British with such kindness and affection. ‘It is because the British are fighting for our freedom,’ she replied, ‘while you Germans have deprived us of it in a barbarous way.’ The SOE officers told Giorgios Harokopos’s father that they were planning to take his son to Cairo. In compensation for the loss of the boy the British offered the old man some of the gold pieces. With great dignity he refused to take anything even though he was very poor.

  Darkness fell, they heaved the general onto the mule and set off, leaving the nearby village of Patsos and the Harokopos family behind. By the end of that night’s march they needed to reach the village of Fotinou. They walked towards the rising moon, now bright and more than half full. In their propaganda the Germans called the resistance fighters ‘Men of Darkness’; young Giorgios pointed at the moon and said ‘Our sun is rising!’ They passed a spring whose freezing water was supposed to give the gift of immortality. They all drank, including the general, who asked for a second cup.

  The jolly mood brought on by the prospect of eternal life was soon spoiled. The caravan passed a village recently burned to the ground by the Germans. The ruins of the buildings stood like skeletons in the dark; dead animals and pet dogs scattered in the main street. At the next village, Karines, they were met by ‘Uncle’ Stavros Zourbakis, his wife Kiria Eleni and their daughter Popi. Kiria Eleni was a formidable woman and a crack shot with a rifle. She greeted them with a welcoming tray of raki, wine and dishes of peeled walnuts.

  They pushed on down a steep valley, the mule slipping and sliding; Kreipe swaying ‘like a bride’ on the animal’s back, and four guerrillas walking alongside to stop him falling. At the bottom of the valley ran the main north–south road, which connected the two enemy garrisons at Spili and Armeni. Even at night military traffic on the road was heavy, made worse by the troops searching for the kidnappers. Taking no chances, the party hid on the east side of the road checking that the coast was clear. Then they crossed two at a time, running crouched, covered by the guns of the others. Kreipe dismounted to be escorted over the obstacle. The mule followed, a guerrilla thrashing its hindquarters.

  On the approach to Fotinou, guerrilla fighters appeared at regular intervals. They could be heard whistling signals to each other, shepherding the caravan on its way. These men were under the command of an eighty-year-old, whose fighters were his sixteen sons and twenty-eight grandsons. The noise of the whistling changed, and became more urgent. A guerrilla scrambled down to the party, a German patrol was heading straight for them.

  The group fanned out behind a ridge, vanishing into the darkness, weapons cocked, ready for a fight. Kreipe was dragged off the mule and flung into the heather. Other men headed for higher ground, spreading out in an ambush. Everyone peered into the darkness, gently easing off their safety catches, trying to spot the bobbing steel helmets of the Wehrmacht soldiers.

  They heard the crunch of boots on the gritty track. A guerrilla clamped his hand over Kreipe’s mouth to stop him shouting. The noise of the boots got louder. Then a shrill whistle echoed round the moonlit hills, followed by another, then another, and finally a voice shouting in Greek followed by laughter. The German patrol was a party of guerrillas who had come to escort the group into the village. They were now under the guardianship of Kapitans Andreas and Sifis Perros, both members of the Tzsangarakis family.

  At last the tired band walked into Fotinou, where the villagers could not take their eyes of the high-ranking prisoner. Leigh Fermor thought it was as though the Sheriff of Nottingham was being led bound into Robin Hood’s lair in Sherwood Forest.

  They spent the next day in an olive grove, an idyllic but not very hidden setting, which they were assured was safe. Guerrillas flitted, shadow-like, between the trees, constantly vigilant. The quiet of the morning was broken by gunfire coming from the nearly village of Armeni, where there was a German fuel dump. Flares wobbled into the air, burning bright against the blue sky and trailing orange-grey smoke; nobody knew the reason for the commotion. Lunch was brought to them by a little man who was a shepherd. He and his wife had been forced to marry to resolve a long-standing feud that had its roots nearly a century in the past; Billy Moss renamed them Mr Montague and Mrs Capulet.

  In the afternoon, the group was joined by four Russian POWs. They were engineers who had broken out from a cage at Rethymnon barracks. They were in bad shape, starving, with ragged clothing and worn-out boots. One of them,
Peotr, was very ill with a stomach complaint. It was decided that Chnarakis would take most of them to Kastamonitsa, where they could join another small band of escaped Russians who Moss hoped would form a fighting force for future escapades. The Russians were given money, food and weapons and sent off with a distraught Chnarakis, who did not want to leave the main party and who had to be persuaded that his was a job of great importance. As they left the Russians raised the two fingered ‘V’ for victory sign. Peotr was left behind with the kidnappers. Too ill to walk, he lay on the ground writhing, groaning and retching. Now a second mule was found to carry him.

  The route then took them to a tiny remote village, Alones, where Kapitan Yannis Katsias waited to rejoin them. With him were wild young fighters, mountain men, who shared Katsias’s familiarity with every twist and turn of the tortured terrain. One of them was the son of the village priest, Father John, a brave supporter of the andartes and whose other son had been executed by the Germans. They were to guide the kidnappers to the village of Vilandredo. Yannis himself went ahead to warn of the group’s progress. The escort that had led them so safely from Fotinou shook hands and said their farewells; the work done, they returned to their villages.

  The mule clambered and lurched from perch to perch, jolting and jerking the German general. Suddenly the leather girth snapped and the saddle slid down the animal’s flanks, sending Kreipe tumbling into a ravine. A rock caught his arm, wrenching it back, making him scream in agony. He landed on his shoulder, bellowing in pain, and lay clutching his arm, crying out that he was dying. After a while he began to thrash about like a baby, rolling from his back onto his stomach and shouting blasphemies at his captors. Then he began to whimper: ‘I’ve had enough, why don’t you shoot me and get it done with.’ Eventually he stopped and allowed the guerrillas to help him to his feet. They pulled the heavy man back onto the path and improvised a sling for him, bodging a repair to the girth strap.