Kidnap in Crete Read online

  In the early months of 1945, as the German occupation of Crete drew to a close, the use of destruction as a method of coercion came to know no bounds and was designed to implicate the entire occupying force in acts of terrorism. In his final report on the activities of SOE on the island, Tom Dunbabin, who is reported to have disapproved of the Kreipe operation, wrote that, in the end, the destruction was not limited to the Amari Valley, but ‘was spread over the whole of western and eastern Crete. This was the last act of German barbarity for most of Crete.’ He went on to analyse the German master plan as being to ‘cover the imminent withdrawal by neutralising the areas of guerrilla activity, and to commit the German soldier to terrorist acts so that they should know there would be no mercy for them if they surrendered or deserted.

  Seen in isolation, the abduction was exactly what Kreipe called it: ‘a Hussar stunt’ – dangerous, exhilarating and with elements of an undergraduate prank about it. But Kreipe’s capture was one in the eye for the oppressors and a great morale booster for the islanders. Whatever it cost in life and property, many saw it as worth it. Even so, it is impossible to argue that the kidnap caused no reprisals. Moss’s later action at Damasta Bridge made a difficult situation worse and left an uncomfortable legacy. Leigh Fermor and Ralph Stockbridge both regretted what Moss had done.

  In 1951 Billy Moss published his book Ill Met by Moonlight, based on the diary he kept during the operation and the photographs he took. The book was later made into a film of the same name. Kreipe took exception to both claiming, among other things, that in the car he had not given Leigh Fermor his word to cooperate and not resist. He successfully took out an injunction to have the book and the film banned in Germany on the grounds that they defamed his character. Of the two SOE men he said: ‘Paddy, I liked Paddy, but Moss, always with his pistol, it was childish’. He also claimed that, during the kidnap, Moss had hit him with a rifle butt. This is unlikely because Moss was on the opposite side of the car dealing with the driver and taking control of the vehicle, and he was not armed with a rifle.

  One German who did read the book was a Dr Ludwig Beutin, who had been a German officer on Crete. Beutin wrote to Moss who did not tell anyone about the letter. Sometime after Moss’s death, in 1965 at the young age of forty-four, Leigh Fermor came across the correspondence and wrote to Beutin. The doctor confirmed that the Germans knew about the resistance centres at Yerakari, Anogia and Asi Gonia, and that they had not found any secret radios. He explained that when Kreipe’s replacement arrived on 8 May, he ordered the search for the general, which had been going on for over two weeks, to be scaled down. Troops were left guarding the coast but withdrawn from the mountains. ‘The matter was closed to us,’ wrote Beutin.

  Leigh Fermor thought that this letter from Beutin proved that the massacres of August 1944 were nothing to do with the kidnap. Another account of the operation was written by Giorgios Harokopos, the young man who was taken on the boat with Kreipe, and to whose family Leigh Fermor had offered compensation. Harokopos’s book contains some passages that do not stick to the Leigh Fermor party line, and this upset the Englishman. Leigh Fermor thought that Dr Beutin’s evidence dealt with what he started calling the ‘Calumnies of Harokopos’. There were other critical voices from within the fold: in 2011, Kimonas Zografakis, who had helped shelter the abductors, wrote an article in which he described Leigh Fermor as ‘neither a great Philhellene nor a new Lord Byron . . . he was a classic agent who served the interests of Britain . . . anything else that the people of Greece attribute to him derives from either ignorance or Anglophilia, ignoring the terrible sufferings he caused our country at that time.’ Leigh Fermor never stopped looking for corroboration that the kidnap had caused no actual harm to Crete. He was haunted too by the accidental killing of his Cretan friend Yanni, and by the killing of Fenske, Kreipe’s driver.

  Kidnapping a German general was a decisive event in the lives of everyone who took part. Almost thirty years later Leigh Fermor, most of the kidnap party and General Kreipe himself were reunited, in jovial mood, on a Greek television show. Leigh Fermor wrote up the story of the kidnap in various forms for the rest of his life, first in long hand, then in typewritten copies and finally in a bound, word-processed document entitled ‘Abducting a General’.

  In peacetime Leigh Fermor returned to the itinerant life of a travel writer. By the end of his life he had nearly fifty passports, all of them crammed with customs stamps and many of them the double-decker type issued to people who travel a lot. His friend Xan Fielding wrote of him: ‘As delightful as his conversation, was the romantic attitude he adopted to his mission in Crete. Each of us I suppose . . . saw himself playing a role created only by his own imagination. I, for example, affected to regard myself as the Master Spy, the sinister figure behind the scenes controlling a vast network of minor agents who did all the dirty work. Paddy obviously scorned such an unobtrusive and unattractive part. He was the Man of Action, the gallant swashbuckler and giant slayer.’

  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 1942 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.

  Colonel Michail Filippakis (above, left) helped the straw-hatted mayor of Heraklion surrender. Then he made his way to his village near the south coast from where he carried on the fight living as a poor civilian (right). Filippakis was one of the first to make contact with the SOE in Cairo, sowing the seeds of the resistance.

  The resistance grew. People of all ages joined the fight. The Germans executed ten islanders for every soldier killed.

  Throughout the occupation civilians, including women and children, were used as poorly paid forced labour.

  Mrs Hariklia Dramoudanis’s husband was a guerrilla leader, a kapitan. He was captured and executed forcing her to flee with her family into hiding in the mountains.

  In the winter of 1943 British SOE agent Patrick Leigh Fermor came up with a plan to capture a German general and smuggle him off the island.

  Leigh Fermor chose a young Coldstream Guards officer, William ‘Billy’ Stanley Moss, as his second in command.

  In Cairo, Moss (right) and Leigh Fermor shared a house with other SOE agents and the glamorous Countess Sophie Tarnowska (left), who Moss was to marry. They nicknamed the house Tara and it became the unofficial headquarters for planning the kidnap.

  Guerrilla fighters, the andartes, were a vital part of the scheme. They were organised into bands led by kapitans. This photograph shows members of the Veisakis family under Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi. The father, Emmanouil ‘Manoussomanolis’, stands on the right and his three sons are (left to right) Dimitris, Costas and Manoussos.

  Two leaders who helped with the kidnap: Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi (left), in peacetime a successful businessman; and Kapitan Mihali Xylouris (right, seated left) who sheltered the abduction team at his secret hideout in the White Mountains.

  The twelve-man kidnap team was supported by a bodyguard of men under the command of Kapitan Boutzalis. On 21 May both units reached the final hiding place, about one mile from ‘Point A’, the kidnap junction.

  Three key kidnappers: Manolis Paterakis (right), Leigh Fermor’s right hand man; Giorgios Tyrakis (left), recruited from a parachute training course in Cairo; and Antonios Papaleonidas (centre), a stevedore from Heraklion.

  Micky Akoumianakis (right), head of SOE counter intelligence, took a disguised Leigh Fermor (left) to a safe house in Heraklion to plan the escape route.

  At the last minute Kapitan Boutzalis’s (left) men were stood down – their presence was arousing suspicion in the area.

  Two uniforms were stolen to disguise Leigh Fermor (right) and Moss as military policemen.

  A reconstruction of the moonlit kidnap staged by Leigh Fermor in 1947. On the back of the photograph he wrote: ‘The car is in the exact position of the General’s when the coup took place.’

  Moss drove the captured general into Heraklion, through twenty-two German control points and past the Kreiskommandantur, the German headquarters for the province.

  The heavily guarded West Gate was the last major obstacle out of the city; ahead lay the road to the mountains. This photograph was taken in 1942 before the barriers went up.

  When the soldiers on guard at the road blocks saw the pennants on the car’s wings they immediately waved it through. The kidnappers kept the flags as souvenirs.

  On the first leg of the escape route the kidnappers climbed high above the snowline. For the next twenty days the captured General Kreipe (second from front), dressed in the clothes he had chosen for a day in his office and an evening playing bridge, was forced to tackle some of the most gruelling terrain in Europe.

  Radio contact was restored with the help of British SOE agent Dennis Ciclitira who helped organise a boat and accompanied the team to Egypt.

  The General was flown to London for interrogation and then transferred to Canada to be interned with other high-ranking Nazis. He was released in 1947.

  The radio they had been counting on failed. SOE in Cairo had no idea that the kidnap had succeeded or even where the kidnappers were. Communication on the island was only possible through the heroic efforts of runners like Giorgios Psychoundakis.

  In 1945 peace returned to the island. Mrs Hariklia Dramoudanis, whose husband and son were murdered by the Germans and who fled into the mountains to protect her family, died many years after the war. She remains a symbol of the unbreakable Cretan spirit.

  Acknowledgements

  Luck played an important part in the capture of General Kreipe and luck has played its part in the writing of this book.

  It was luck that took me to the Historical Museum of Crete on my first day of research in Heraklion where by chance I met the Curator, Constantinos E. Mamalakis, an expert on the history of Crete in the Second World War. In addition to the collections in the museum, Mr Mamalakis has a large private archive of documents, letters and artefacts. To his compendious knowledge of the events he brings a sharp eye for the archaeology of the war on the island and has possibly the most intimate understanding of the kidnap and its aftermath of anybody alive. Mr Mamalakis shared all this with me and words cannot express the depth of my gratitude.

  Luck led me to the to the archive of Shaftesbury Young People where I met historian Simon Fenwick who had just finished some preliminary work on the Leigh Fermor papers. He too shared his knowledge with me and introduced me to David McClay, Senior Curator of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland. David and his team are making a magnificent job of curating Leigh Fermor’s papers. He allowed me unlimited access to the archive and was very generous with the facilities of the library, giving me all the help I could possibly ask for. I am indebted to David and his brilliant staff, and to Simon for making the introduction.

  The National Library of Scotland was only one of several great institutions that helped me. I am also grateful to the National Archive at Kew, the British Library, the London Library and the Imperial War Museum.

  Luigi di Dio at Getty Images was very helpful, as was the estate of William Stanley Moss who kindly gave permission to use some of the photographs Moss took during the abduction, and to quote from his books and diary. I owe thanks too to the Estate of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.

  I must thank Sofka Zinovieff and Manthos Lidakis for finding and introducing me to my two first research assistants, Irene Maris and Eirene Deritzaki. Among many other things, Irene and Eirene described the importance and depth of the godparent relationship. They introduced me to, and helped me to interview, many of the children and grandchildren of the kapitans and andartes, for which many thanks. Among the Cretans who talked to me I must thank Mr G. Kalogerakis, Mr C. Bandouvas, Mr N. Xylouris, M. G. Dramoudanis and Mr M. Lydakis. I list these kind people in the order in which I met them. Mr Dramoudanis, who is mayor of Anogia, laid on a delicious lunch of lamb barbequed on an open fire and a jeep to take us into the hills above the village. Thanks to Mr Dramoudanis, I visited the sheepfolds and saw the wild country that the kidnappers and General Kreipe travelled across in April and May 1944. The Cretans are a passionate people and their disputes can sometimes run for decades. It is not my intention to cause trouble and on a very few occasions in this book I have deliberately omitted a name or relationship. Wherever I went on the island I was greeted with wonderful ge
nerosity and hospitality.

  In England I talked to the children of several SOE agents and must especially thank Paul Ciclitira, son of Major Dennis Ciclitira, and Nick Woodhouse, son of Colonel Monty Woodhouse, DSO OBE, who was sent to Crete in the first desperate months after the German invasion.

  My friends have been encouraging and supportive and I must thank Victoria Hislop for her comradeship in the silence of the London Library; Kirsty Tait and Jeremy Hardie for their unflagging interest and friendship; Adrian and Victoria Bartlet for their tales of Patrick Leigh Fermor, John Houseman and Micky Akoumianakis; Candida Lycett Green for her memories of Leigh Fermor; Daphne Astor who confirmed some aspects of his character; and Scarlett Sabet for her interest and encouragement. On the medical front Dr Peter Shephard shared some very interesting thoughts about the psychology of SOE agents; it was kind of Dr Richard Staughton to spend time pondering a modern diagnosis for the strange illness that afflicted Leigh Fermor during the stress of the escape phase. I must also thank two friends who shared their military experience: the indefatigable Geoffrey Matthews, late Irish Guards, who, at a time when he was very busy, gave me tutorials on weapons training and arms drill and helped me translate the Horace ode quoted by Kreipe; and Warwick Woodhouse, late Royal Marines and Royal Air Force Regiment, who has a passionate interest in all things to do with paratroopers. Warwick talked me through Fallschirmjäger parachuting techniques and equipment. Another military man to thank is the late Johny Pumphrey who, years ago, described his experiences as a soldier caught up in the battle of Crete and his time as a prisoner of war.