by Wes Davis
They went on to discuss a plan Elias had devised to deal with the problem of identifying Kreipe’s car. The student from Heraklion proposed rigging up a buzzer system that would let an observer perched some distance up the road, where he would have a clear view of approaching vehicles, transmit a signal back to the ambush party waiting at the intersection. Elias himself would study Kreipe’s staff car in advance of the operation. He would have no trouble committing its distinguishing features to memory—not just the make and model but also the shape of its headlights and the way the light played out of the blackout hoods, even the particular note of its exhaust rumble. If some other car happened along, the ambush team would know to sit tight and let it pass. Then, when they heard the signal designating General Kreipe’s car, they would be ready to spring into action. It sounded like a workable plan, though it would require them to come up with several hundred yards of wire, a battery, and a few other electrical components.
Once the ambush was under way, the signal would be of little use. So there was still the problem of disposing of unwanted guests. Leigh Fermor had an idea for that too. He would enlist Athanasios Bourdzalis, the barrel-chested kapetan from Bo-Peep’s network he had met with at the safe house on the march up from the coast after Moss’s arrival. Bourdzalis commanded a band of andartes with enough firepower among them to deal, for a few minutes at least, with any force likely to be out and about at that time of night. Once Leigh Fermor’s team slipped away with the general, the andartes would break off the fight and disappear into the hills. Moss and Manoli agreed that Paddy should send a message summoning Bourdzalis.
That left the one perennial worry. Once the Germans discovered what had happened, reprisals became a certainty. The only way around that, Leigh Fermor believed, was to convince the German authorities that the raid had been carried out entirely by British forces that had been infiltrated for the specific purpose. Ironically, the airdrop fiasco on the Katharo plateau could prove useful in this regard. Rumor already had it that dozens of men had parachuted onto the island during those nights Moss and the others had spent buzzing around the plateau and dropping flares. Sixty, by an estimate that made the rounds in February. Forty, according to a more recent flurry of gossip. What Leigh Fermor needed was a way to encourage that line of thought. The scene of the crime, so to speak, had to be stamped with an imprint so British in character there would be no doubt about who had been there.
MEANWHILE, NEWS COMING out of Tom Dunbabin’s intelligence network was beginning to suggest that the Germans might be losing their taste for the occupation. Reprisals were still commonplace, but they lacked some of their former ferocity. Dunbabin reported that a recent German raid in the Amari region had “dissolved amid the derisive laughter of the Amariots.” Elsewhere raids were falling apart through sheer ineptitude. On April 1 another detachment of fifteen German soldiers marched into Gerakari—the center of SOE activity in the Lotus Land of the Amari—and entered a house where weapons had been found. “They attempted to blow up the house but the charge exploded in the face of one of the men, who left in disorder,” or so Dunbabin had heard.
Everywhere there were reports of irresolute behavior on the part of the enemy. Hostages were being released or held briefly on merely trivial charges. Dunbabin had also spotted German soldiers reading propaganda flyers put out by SOE and had even heard fragments of his own misinformation repeated in conversations between Germans. If the enemy’s resolve was beginning to waver, he believed, now was the time to strike. He envisioned a string of small-scale raids that would harass the enemy and limit their mobility on the island. “We want not so much to kill Germans as to terrify and bamboozle them,” he recommended. It was clear that he had Leigh Fermor’s mission in mind as a part of this overall strategy.
To the east in the Lasithi district, Sandy Rendel was making preparations that could provide for submarine support of the raids Dunbabin called for. In the company of a local guide, Rendel slipped onto the island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony in the Bay of Mirabello, east of Áyios Nikólaos on Lasithi’s north coast, and spent an afternoon in the shade of a carob tree, drawing a detailed map of the harbor and its defenses, which included a gun emplacement, a minefield, and sentries.
The RAF was doing its part too. Around noon on April 19, Leigh Fermor’s band was treated to a spectacular show that spurred their morale as surely as it would dampen German spirits. From an outcrop above the cave, they watched as a flight of more than a dozen British bombers walloped the Kastelli airfield.
The next morning Kapetan Bourdzalis, wearing a spectacular pair of burgundy boots, arrived at the cave with his band of andartes. Even after an all-night march, the men entered the camp looking fierce, if poorly armed. Leigh Fermor noted that their weapons were of the same astonishing antiquity he had encountered again and again since the invasion. There were shotguns that must certainly have been fired in anger at the Turks. Bourdzalis admitted that until the previous day, a good part of his munitions had lain buried in out-of-the-way groves. This, he said, accounted for the fact that weapons were “a tiny bit rusty.”
Over a lunch of potatoes and eggs, Leigh Fermor described the mission he wished Bourdzalis to support. By now it had become a kind of recitation that, like a Homeric poem, gained in detail each time it was told; the ambush would take place at the intersection of the Archanes and Heraklion roads, where the general’s car would be flagged down as it slowed for the turn. Leigh Fermor’s men would subdue the driver and take control of the car. The andartes’ role at this point would be strictly defensive. Leigh Fermor wanted them positioned on each of the three stretches of road leading to the intersection, where they could intercept any approaching traffic and give Paddy’s team time to carry out the operation and make their escape with the general in tow. The plan was to drive north past the Villa Ariadne and into Heraklion, where they would make their way through the center of town and back out by way of the Chania gate and along the coast road in the direction of Rethymnon, eventually abandoning the car on a stretch of road near the sea and continuing southward over the mountains on foot. Bourdzalis and his andartes would later rendezvous with Leigh Fermor’s company to help guide them over the mountains to a landing beach on the south coast.
As Leigh Fermor talked, Bourdzalis sat cleaning his nails with a dagger. But the casual pose did little to conceal his eagerness as the mission took shape before his eyes. Paddy had hardly finished when the kapetan leaped up and accepted the job. His men were ready, he said. They could set out as soon as darkness came. Leigh Fermor’s men began packing their equipment and stores for the march to the village of Skalani, near Knossos, which would be their base for the operation. So long a kind of fantasy, the mission was now beginning in earnest.
Just after sundown, Leigh Fermor’s team, which now included the two Russian escapees, filed down the goat path from their cave in the company of Bourdzalis and his men. They marched through the moonless night, crossing difficult terrain in utter darkness. “This sort of walking in Crete is really unpleasant,” Moss felt, “like for ever going up or down a rickety staircase on which every third or fourth step gives way; and the staircase is as narrow as the slime-track of a snail, but it has no visible edges, and everything around you is black. You can’t even see your feet.” But they pressed on. Near daybreak they were approaching the village of Kharaso, still thirty hard miles from their destination. It was decided to send a scout into the village to arrange a place to sleep and wait out the daylight hours. While the rest of the party stayed at a nearby house, Leigh Fermor, Moss, and half the men took shelter in a storage loft filled with olives and beans. They also discovered barrels of resinous wine, which were a little emptier by the time they left.
At ten o’clock the following night, after a dinner of mutton, greens, and snails provided by their hosts, the group struck out again, traveling roughly west toward Skalani. There they hoped to make contact with a man named Pavlos Zographistos, who had been recruited by Minoan Mike.
It was his farm that would become their headquarters. Before they reached Skalani, however, their route took them through a number of slumbering villages, where the passage of such a large group of men would certainly be noticed. The danger, as Leigh Fermor knew, was that the villagers’ curious talk about these goings-on in the night could alert the Germans. Remembering the trick he had used on the march the year before, Paddy soon had the men whistling “Lili Marlene” and barking German—or German-sounding—commands whenever they approached a village.
As the night wore on, Bourdzalis’s men, who had been on the march for three nights in a row, began to show signs of exhaustion and their numbers gradually dwindled. By two o’clock the diminished party was drawing close to Skalani, and Leigh Fermor kept a lookout for a disused building near a dry riverbed where Mike had said the andartes could sleep. They soon found the place, which had once been a grape press, and Bourdzalis settled his men in for the night, while Leigh Fermor, Moss, Manoli, and George walked another half mile to the main house.
Pavlos, by the looks of him a successful young farmer in his early thirties, was waiting for them when they arrived. He gave the four tired men a warm welcome and escorted them into a remarkably tidy farmhouse, where he introduced them to his sister. The young woman did not appear to share her brother’s enthusiasm for sheltering guerrillas in their house. “She is a strange person, attractively unattractive,” was Moss’s impression; “her looks depend upon which way the light catches her face.” Even by lamplight she was clearly high-strung. It was hard not to worry about her reliability in the event of a mishap before the mission could be completed. But there was little to be done now. When they had finished the introductions, Pavlos showed the men through the ground-floor room, which served as a kitchen. A ladder led up to the second-story room where they would sleep.
Minoan Mike and his student friend Elias arrived the next morning from Heraklion. They brought with them chocolate and coffee to help restore the travelers after the long march from Kastamonitsa. More important, they had also smuggled two German military-police uniforms out of the city. Mike had acquired these from a member of his network whose brother was a tailor. Moss and Leigh Fermor would wear them when they flagged down the general’s car. Elias had also done his homework on the car itself. Kreipe rode around in a fine new Opel, he said, and he now felt he could pick it out “among a thousand by day and recognize it by its headlights at night.”
The German uniforms tipped Pavlos off to the fact that he was playing host to an operation with a bigger objective than just reconnaissance. When Mike and Leigh Fermor took him up to the loft and explained exactly what their mission entailed, the young man’s enthusiasm drained away with the color in his face. Suddenly he looked as panicked as his sister. This was asking for trouble, he thought. Reprisals would surely come raining down on everyone living in the vicinity. Paddy calmed him down and assured him that it would be clear to the Germans that the British had staged the operation from outside Crete. Pavlos remained uncertain and said that he would like to speak with his father before he consented to let his house remain the headquarters for such an undertaking.
He was in the downstairs room preparing to leave while in the loft Leigh Fermor and Moss tried on the uniforms and Pavlos’s sister sat stitching on insignia that would make them more convincing. Suddenly Pavlos appeared at the ladder hole with a look of terror on his face. Soldiers were approaching the house. “Germans, hide!” the sister cried.
But there was nowhere to hide. All three of them looked at Pavlos, whose head turned with a jerk as a clatter arose at the door downstairs. As the young farmer clambered down the ladder, Leigh Fermor and Moss waited above, holding their breath and fingering their Marlin guns. Pavlos asked who it was and stalled as long as he could before opening the door. By the time he let the men in, he had figured out that they were foraging for food. But he was still worried, since foraging was sometimes a cover that let a raiding party get a foot in the door without going to any trouble. Pavlos offered the men a drink but claimed there was no food in the house. For ten minutes Leigh Fermor and Moss listened as Pavlos and a German voice argued back and forth. At last they heard the door close. When their host reappeared, he looked edgier than before. As soon as he thought the coast was clear, he scurried off to meet with his father in a village half an hour’s walk to the south.
On his way out Pavlos alerted Bourdzalis and his men to the presence of the German detachment, and the andartes posted lookouts to prevent another surprise visit. While their host was out of the house, Leigh Fermor and Moss sat down to compose a letter they intended to leave behind at the scene of the ambush in the hope of forestalling the reprisals Pavlos rightly feared. When they had finished, they added the date, April 23, signed their names—their actual names and ranks—and sealed the letter, pressing the signet rings they both wore into the wax for added effect. Moss’s crest—with the griffin’s head, sprigs of moss rose, and motto reading Pro patria semper—seemed especially apt. Most important, the crests marked the letter as incontrovertibly British.
In no time Pavlos returned, looking composed once again. The talk with his father had persuaded him to go on with his part in the operation. Although Pavlos’s sister remained unconvinced, Leigh Fermor and Moss were free to go on with their preparations. Talking later that night to George and Manoli, with whom he had grown friendly, Pavlos was more candid. His father had been shocked to hear of his son’s hesitation. The old man made no bones about it: if Pavlos did not do everything he could to help the Resistance, “he was not a man.”
Soon after Pavlos’s return, two men were spotted approaching the house, one of them wearing a police uniform. It turned out, to everyone’s relief—Pavlos’s sister had nearly collapsed—that they had been sent by Minoan Mike. The policeman was named Stratis Saviolakis. Mike, recognizing that the police uniform gave Stratis a freedom of movement the others did not have, had sent him out to the intersection to go over the terrain in the daylight. Stratis had mapped out the hummocks and bends that would best hide the andartes and the ambush team. He had even picked out an almond tree that would conceal Elias’s buzzer switch. The second man was a young villager from Anogeia and would be a useful guide when the fleeing kidnappers passed through the mountains there, provided they made it that far.
Now it looked as if everything was in place. The following evening, just after sundown, Leigh Fermor and his men would be waiting in ambush on the Archanes road. Everyone in Pavlos’s house went to bed that night with the knowledge that the next twenty-four hours could change their lives, or perhaps end them.
The next afternoon, April 24, Leigh Fermor and Moss put on their German uniforms and went outside to have a photograph taken. They both wore daggers on the belts that girded their tunics. Paddy tucked his trousers into the high Cretan boots he favored, while Moss made do with puttees. There was no question that Leigh Fermor looked the part. He had shaved his mustache and wore the corporal’s uniform with a convincing swagger. But the handsome Moss had more trouble vanishing into the German disguise. To Paddy he looked like an Englishman rigged up in German costume for a fancy-dress party at a London hotel.
Moss lit a cigarette and the two men waited for word from Minoan Mike. At the grape press, Bourdzalis and the rest of the party were preparing to take up their defensive positions as soon as darkness permitted them to move through the countryside unseen. Around five o’clock Minoan Mike arrived at the farmhouse. He, Elias, and Stratis the policeman had been monitoring General Kreipe throughout the day. So far he had followed his usual schedule to the letter. If the pattern held, he would be leaving his headquarters as early as eight o’clock. By that time everyone would have to be in position. Elias was already at his lookout post and the buzzer wire lay strung and ready to operate. It was a good fifteen-minute march to the intersection, and the sun would set around quarter to eight, so there would not be a minute to spare once they got moving.
Pavlos and his sister had worked through
the afternoon to put together a hearty dinner for their departing guests, who now sat down to eat. They washed the meal down with glasses of mellow white wine, which Mike had procured for them on the black market. It was after seven o’clock, with dusk coming on, when Mike reappeared at the farmhouse with Stratis. This time it was evident from the Heraklion agent’s face that something had gone wrong. Kreipe had altered his routine, he said. No one knew why. As Mike explained that the general had left headquarters early and by now had already reached the Villa Ariadne, the pallid face of Pavlos’s sister reflected the worry on everyone’s mind. The Germans must know! She told her brother that she thought the soldiers who had come under the pretense of looking for food had in fact been investigating rumors that must have been spawned by the movement of so many men to and from the farm. Pavlos had been thinking the same thing.
There was more, Mike said, turning to Stratis. The policeman informed them that a number of Bourdzalis’s men had been careless about security—moving around in broad daylight—and he feared that they had been seen, if not by Germans then by villagers working in the fields. There would certainly be talk. And with the mission now delayed by Kreipe’s unexpected change of habit, the andartes would quickly become even more of a liability. By the time Stratis finished talking, Pavlos’s sister looked as if she expected to hear jackboots crunching up to the door at any minute.
Leigh Fermor and Moss knew they must act quickly, whatever course they took. It did not take them long to decide that they should proceed without Bourdzalis’s band, risky as that might seem. The protection the andartes might have provided came at too great a cost. Manoli and George not only agreed but were also relieved. From the start neither of the two right-hand men had liked the look of Bourdzalis’s men, who struck them as “an ill-assorted crew.”