Kidnap in Crete Read online

  In the towns and cities the regime began to establish itself with increasing efficiency. In Heraklion, on the first day of peace, engineers retrieved a huge electric motor that had been used in the harbour and used it to pump the town’s water supplies. The streets were cleared of barricades, and the detritus of battle was gathered up. Hundreds of parachutes were retrieved and piled into the water of the Morozoni Fountain in Lion Square where they were washed by local women for reuse. Frau Bauritz presented herself to the German intelligence service and gave them her lists of German-speaking students. These young people were rounded up and pressed into service as translators. Frau Bauritz herself was recruited as a translator at the Kreiskommandantur, the German headquarters in the centre of the town.

  While control of the towns and more accessible villages was comparatively simple, the wild mountains, populated by warriors whose ancestors had fought invaders for over three hundred years, were another matter. It was here that the resistance was born and operated. If the Cretans themselves found the mountains dangerous, even the toughest Axis paratroopers and Alpine soldiers would find them terrifying. For many months after the German invasion they avoided going near them, and when eventually they had to take the fight to the guerrillas, lodged in mountain eyries, they went in force, finding safety in numbers, brute force and firepower.

  Although most of the Allied troops left behind became prisoners of war, about a thousand remained in hiding after the German victory. Most lived in the mountain areas and were looked after by the Cretans, despite the risks: anyone caught harbouring fugitives could expect the destruction of their houses and execution. In the high villages, it was possible for stranded Allied soldiers to move about, in uniform, carrying weapons. British soldiers could be seen sitting in cafés, smoking cigarettes and chatting up the girls, while their Cretan hosts plotted the overthrow of the Nazis. Acts of defiance surfaced at all levels: when the Germans issued new ID cards to the Cretan population, ‘the village policeman provided blank passes to British soldiers on the run, and even affixed their signature too’.

  General Andrae, Commander of Crete, ordered leaflets to be dropped over the mountains proclaiming:

  Escaping soldiers tried to make their way south where they hoped to find some sort of vessel to take them to Egypt. Many were led back across the mountains by Cretan guides to the region on the south coast by the Monastery of St John the Theologian at Preveli, where the men were hidden and, at night, flashed torch signals from the beach, hoping they might be spotted by Allied craft patrolling the coast. After a few weeks, with no sign of a submar­ine or motor launch, the Cretans decided it was too risky to go on using the monastery and sent the men back into the protection of the surrounding villages.

  An engineer from Rethymnon, Dimitri Bernidakis, devised a new signalling system for the stranded soldiers: a red light to flash the message in Morse and a green light as a reference point. Both lights were set up in an open-fronted hut where they could be seen from the sea but not from the land. The signal the troops flashed was: ‘SOS we are British. Don’t answer. We are on the beach waiting for you. Take the green light as a guide. German coastguards 1000 metres either side.’ For nearly two months the message winked into the darkness, with no success. In the meantime some soldiers and Greek civilians managed to escape – in caïques, fishing boats, small abandoned naval craft – anything that seemed seaworthy. The lucky ones who made it to Egypt were sent to be debriefed by British intelligence officers at GHQ in Cairo, where it was decided to send a reconnaissance party to Crete to explore the possibility of rescuing more Allied soldiers. Former merchant seaman Commander Francis Pool, RNR, was sent to the island in command of HM Submarine Thrasher. Before the war ‘Skipper’ Pool had been in charge of the Imperial Airways flying-boat operation based at the former leper colony on the island of Spinalonga in north-eastern Crete, and the re-fuelling station at Elunda Bay; he knew the waters around Crete and spoke fluent Greek.

  For fifteen nights Thrasher patrolled the south coast looking for any signs of life. At 22:00 hours on 26 July 1941, off the beach at Preveli, the crew spotted the green light and flashing red Morse signal. Pool was put ashore with his Cretan guide, Stratis Liparakis. Hours later the submarine commander was face to face with the abbot of Preveli monastery, Agathangelos Lagouvardos, an immense, heavily bearded, twenty-five-stone man in long black robes. They discussed how many soldiers there were in hiding, and how many Pool could take back with him. Just before dawn the next morning, Thrasher touched bottom off a small harbour at Limni. With the help of two commandos and a couple of naval officers, 78 Allied soldiers were guided down the beach and put on board the submarine, crammed in alongside the crew.

  Thrasher departed for Alexandria and Pool stayed behind on the island to continue gathering information. It became clear that the number of Allied soldiers requiring rescue was greater than anyone had thought. In the forests near St Apostoli Amariou, Pool and Lagouvardos established temporary headquarters. The two men set about meeting influential Cretans, including the kapitans who had been working with archaeologist John Pendlebury, and a key figure in the andartes, Colonel Andreas Papadakis. Papadakis had appointed himself head of AEAK, ‘the Supreme Committee of Cretan Struggle’, which he and six other patriots had formed in the ruins of Chania two weeks after the German invasion. AEAK’s aims were to organise an intelligence network and carry out acts of sabotage against the occupying forces. They counted among their number the chief of police in Rethymnon.

  Colonel Papadakis was one of the many Cretans who offered sanctuary to stranded Allied soldiers. Among those sheltering in the colonel’s grand house, above the village of Kali Sykia, was an escapee from Galatas POW camp named Jack Smith-Hughes. Smith-Hughes a rotund, Greek-speaking British Army subaltern, had been a barrister before the war and was in charge of the Royal Army Service Corps field bakery in Chania. After making his way across the White Mountains in May, he became one of the thousands left behind on the beaches at Sfakia.

  Smith-Hughes suggested that Papadakis accompany them to Egypt, to liaise with SOE Cairo about how the resistance on Crete should be organised and encouraged. On 9 August, Smith-Hughes, Pool, Abbot Lagouvardos and Colonel Papadakis met to discuss the possibilities. A translator, Manolis Vassilakis, minuted the meeting.

  Papadakis asked Commander Pool if he had come to do more than rescue marooned British soldiers. Pool said that the main purpose of his expedition was to look at organising the Cretan resistance; he hoped Papadakis would accompany him to Cairo. Papadakis, who could be difficult, said he was not sure and would have to talk to his comrades. Then Pool asked if Papadakis had ever met Kapitan Satanas and if the kapitan could supply a radio to communicate with Cairo. Finally Pool asked who was going to be in overall charge of the resistance; he wondered about Nikolaos Plastiras, the much-admired war hero and republican who was living in exile in France.

  The men talked on in the shade of an oak tree. When they finished, Commander Pool and Colonel Papadakis signed and approved the minutes. The men split up, having agreed to meet again on 19 August when the next British vessel was due to arrive and take Pool back to Alexandria. The link between Crete and the free world, broken on 20 May, had been restored, although weak and uncertain.

  News of the Allied submarine rescues spread amongst the people of Crete and the work of gathering up the remaining stragglers began, fuelled by the rumour that the British might be back in a few months to liberate the island. The Cretan guerrilla leaders set about devising techniques for leading bands of soldiers across the mountains and the use of wireless sets to coordinate operations.

  Soon runners became an important link in the chain, both for the resistance cells and future SOE operations. One of these, a young man called Giorgios Psychoundakis, became a part of the escape network, leading soldiers along routes from his village of Asi Gonia, handing them on in relays to other guerrillas who protected them and saw them safely on their way. Psychoundakis had a lively sense of hum
our and a winning personality. A former shepherd boy, he had an intimate knowledge of the west part of the island and of travelling across mountains and open ground by night. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who came to know him well, recalled: ‘When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki, a fierce and addictive clear spirit tasting of aniseed down his throat with the words, “Another drop of petrol for the engine,” and loped towards the gap in the bushes with the furtiveness of a stage Mohican or Groucho Marx. He turned round when he was on all fours at the exit, rolled his eyes, raised a forefinger portentously, whispered, “the Intelligence Service”, and scuttled through like a rabbit. A few minutes later we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey.’

  Psychoundakis’s description of a journey from Vourvouré to the village of Platanos in the Amari valley gives some idea of the physical demands of the work. The outward journey took four nights. On the third night an exhausted Psychoundakis arrived at the house of Niko Souris, a Greek from Alexandria who was working for the British, rounding up stragglers. They talked for a bit and then Psychoundakis went to bed, ‘Tired to my bones’. The next day the two men set off at dawn and a strange thing happened, Giorgios could not recognise Niko as the man he had talked to the night before: ‘I gazed and gazed at him all the way but utterly failed to find even the faintest similarity . . . I understood that my great weariness the night before must have made me see him otherwise, and today, when I had recovered a little, I saw him as he really was.’ When he finally reached his destination he sat down to rest but when it came to setting off on the return leg, ‘We found walking afterwards all the harder . . . Finding two bits of wood we broke them and used them as walking sticks to hobble along . . . This was my first long march and it was a more exhausting one than any other I made. It was not really so long compared with others I undertook . . . but I was not used to it yet.’

  It was not long before the Wehrmacht tried to penetrate the escape network. Hauptmann Paul Schmidt, head of counter-espionage, devised a ruse which he hoped would lure the locals into revealing the points on the coast from where the rescuers were operating. He sent officers disguised as British soldiers into the hills asking to be taken to the submarines. Most of the mountain people realised what was happening and pretended not to know anything about the wandering British or the rescue missions; one or two unfortunates fell for the trick and were arrested and shot. In the region of Asi Gonia, a key safe haven, the German spies appeared, dressed in British uniforms, and were immediately rumbled, villagers and andartes shouting and threatening them; some were thrashed ‘like donkeys’ and led off, bound with ropes, to be handed in to the island authorities as ‘escaping POWs’.

  The behaviour of the villagers and appearance of andartes in Asi Gonia attracted the attention of the Germans, as had Colonel Papadakis’s expeditions in broad daylight to Preveli monastery, which some had warned were foolhardy. On 25 August 1941, German troops arrived in force and surrounded the monastery, which they plundered and wrecked. They took away all foodstuffs, including livestock, and set up strongpoints in the area and at the nearby harbour of Limni. Preveli became redundant as a hiding place, and the British no longer had a safe harbour from which to retrieve their soldiers.

  The Cretans set about devising new rendezvous points on the south-west coast. The rallying point in the mountains was the beautiful village of Yerakari in the Amari valley, situated in the foothills of Mount Kedros and Mount Ida, a place where the inhabitants were loyal to the resistance cause. Escaping soldiers were led from village to village, all converging on Yerakari. The Germans eventually declared the south coast of the island a forbidden zone. In another attempt to stop the British troops escaping, the authorities confiscated fishing boats; even so a small trickle of caïques made it to mainland Greece carrying soldiers and olive oil; they returned with cigarettes and Cretan 5th Division soldiers who had been marooned after the Greek surrender.

  The summer of 1941 had been particularly hot and dry, and was followed by a long hard winter. Conditions for ordinary Cretans deteriorated very quickly. Giorgios Psychoundakis returned home from shepherding Allied soldiers to discover that his father’s entire flock of sixty sheep had been stolen: a terrible blow. A flock of sheep could mean life and death to a family, especially when the occupying forces were requisitioning foodstuffs. There was nothing Psychoundakis could do: under the Germans the Cretan state, always prone to lawlessness, had ceased to exist. The philosophical Giorgios left his revenge in God’s hands.

  By the winter of 1941/42, food was becoming scarce all over Crete and even basic supplies, such as shoe leather, ran out. Soon old car tyres were being cut up for footwear: a skilled man could get a dozen pairs out of a single tyre. In the mountain areas, the people fell back on subsistence living – grass soup, wild herbs, snails. In the towns, the population was on the verge of starvation. On the Greek mainland the situation was worse: it was estimated that in Athens, by Christmas 1941, a thousand civilians a day were dying of starvation. The Greeks call this period ‘The Great Famine’. In February 1942, Hermann Göring wrote in his diary: ‘The inhabitants of occupied areas have their fill of material worries. Hunger and cold are the order of the day. People who have been this hard hit by fate, generally speaking, do not make revolutions.’

  See Notes to Chapter 7

  8

  Ungentlemanly Warfare

  British wartime policy in Crete was dominated by political as well as military objectives. In 1943, John Melior Stevens, in charge of the Greek desk at SOE Cairo, stated in a report: ‘As I understand it, the aims of the British Government in Greece are twofold: first to obtain the greatest military effort in the fight the Axis, and, second, to have in post-war Greece a stable government friendly to Great Britain, if possible a constitutional Monarchy.’ Stevens was right, Churchill wanted Greece to remain a monarchy and did not want the communists to gain political power. The resistance movement on Crete, therefore, needed to be directed by the British. Special Operations Executive officers were briefed to prevent any communist-inspired groups from getting a foothold on the island and to disrupt the use of Crete as a staging post in the supply chain to the Axis armies in North Africa.

  SOE was a shadowy affair. Few of the officers working in the field can have had a clear idea of the structure of the organisation in which they served, and neither were they meant to. The organisation had its roots in the pre-war intelligence services. In July 1939, Neville Chamberlain signed a document that was to become SOE’s founding charter. ‘A new organisation shall be established forthwith to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas,’ the paper stated. ‘This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive . . . It will be important that the general plan for irregular offensive operations should be in step with the general strategic conduct of the war.’ A Foreign Office paper defined the methods of SOE as including ‘Industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist attacks against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots . . . We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities and complete political reliability’. Churchill described the organisation as being ‘The ministry of ungentlemanly warfare’.

  In the early years of the war in the Middle East SOE was still finding its way. Agents going into the field were largely untrained amateurs, making things up as they went along. One Agent remembered that the course placed emphasis on unarmed combat and the use of explosives for sabotage, which one officer said ‘anyone with an ounce of schoolboy left in him is bound to enjoy’.

  Another said that in his training, ‘I was initiated into the mysteries of plastic light explosive, slow burning fuses, deton­ators and primer cord, and was given detailed instruction in the most effective method of blowing up a railway line. The know­ledge that no ra
ilway existed on Crete did not dampen my immediate ardour and each morning I happily destroyed an increasingly longer stretch of the metals laid for us to practise on in the desert round our camp. These daily explosions in the sand represented all the training I received before being recalled to Cairo.’

  SOE’s Cairo headquarters and SOE’s main headquarters, at Baker Street, London, retained separate identities (until they were forced together in the autumn of 1942, and even then Cairo was seen as enjoying far too much freedom). Eventually SOE Cairo set up schools in Egypt, with a parachute school at Kabrit north of Suez, and operations in Albania, Greece, Crete and Yugoslavia were handled by a section known as Force 133.

  In Cairo there were two clandestine intelligence forces: SOE and the Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD), a cover name for MI6. Both were based in a large, grey, pillared block called Rustom Buildings (known to local taxi drivers as ‘the secret building’). ISLD was concerned with intelligence gathering; there would always be a certain wariness at what was seen as the gung-ho approach of many of their colleagues in Force 133 SOE. The two organisations sometimes acted in unison and sometimes in competition. ‘Nobody who did not experience it,’ wrote one British colonel, ‘can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue which embittered the relations between secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during the summer of 1941, or for that matter for the next two years . . .’ Ralph Stockbridge wrote that SOE was ‘basically a bunch of adventurers, while ISLD was a very mixed bag. SOE personnel were always treated as officers and gentlemen, not as agents.’