by Wes Davis
As the four of them talked over their options that night in the farmhouse, they all agreed that a small but utterly dependable force was preferable. (One of George’s customary sayings made the point: “Too many cooks blow nobody any good!”) With Bourdzalis out of the picture, they would still have, in addition to themselves, Stratis the policeman and the young guide who was familiar with the mountains above Anogeia. And for muscle they could rely on the seasoned old veteran Grigori Chnarakis and Wallace Beery, also an experienced guerrilla fighter.
There was also the nattily dressed Zahari to consider. Another gun or two would be comforting when the kidnappers fled toward the south coast, no doubt with German search parties nipping at their heels. But Zahari had not exactly impressed anyone on the march from Kastamonitsa. Moss recalled that the eager but inexperienced young man had twice mislaid his Marlin submachine gun, leaving the weapon behind when the party moved out after stopping for water breaks. The first instance had brought such a volley of derision down on him that he had been afraid to mention the blunder when it happened again. By the time he had finally spoken up, the whole band had been forced to stop for half an hour while he scurried back to retrieve the gun. In contrast, Ivan and Vassily had won everyone’s admiration. Moss, whose grasp of their language brought him closest to the two Russians, not only liked them but had also come to rely on their discipline and sturdiness. But they had work to do on Crete, setting up an underground network for escaping Russian prisoners, and if they fled over the mountains with Moss and Leigh Fermor, there would be no one to guide them back to the cave that would be their headquarters. In the end, it seemed best to send them back to Kastamonitsa. And it was agreed that Zahari would make a capable guide for their return trip.
Around midnight, Leigh Fermor and Moss walked out to the grape press and broke the news to Bourdzalis. The kapetan himself took it hard, as they expected, but Moss noticed to his astonishment that a good number of Bourdzalis’s men looked relieved. As the andartes rounded up their gear, Leigh Fermor handed each man a gold sovereign to thank them and smooth any ruffled feathers. Then he and Moss said good-bye to Zahari and the two affable Russians and watched as the whole band moved off down the trail that had brought them there two days earlier.
Soon after they returned to the farmhouse, Leigh Fermor sent off a letter to a man named Antoni Zoidakis, who Mike had learned was staying nearby. A policeman like Stratis by trade, Zoidakis was a hardened Resistance fighter from the Amari region. George Tyrakis told Moss that the man’s “favourite recreation was throat slitting, and at this he appears to have had much practice.” Later that night, Zoidakis arrived to join the team, along with two other reinforcements—Nikos Komis, a stocky, bearded young man from Thrapsano, and a dependable-looking fellow from Episkope named Mitsos Tzatzas—who had agreed to assist with the ambush.
Sometime before dawn, the freshly constituted ambush party slipped out of the farmhouse and made their way to a rock shelter at the head of a gully that lay not far away. Here they spent the next day and night, from time to time receiving updates from Minoan Mike that did nothing to reassure them. On the twenty-fifth Kreipe had remained at the Villa Ariadne all day. There was no way of knowing if this meant the Germans were onto their plan. One thing was certain, the local arm of the island’s Communist resistance group had gotten wind of it, and they did not like what they heard. That afternoon the group’s leaders sent a runner to the farmhouse with a letter, which the owner, Pavlos, carried to Leigh Fermor in the gully once the man had left. It threatened to expose the operation and hand Paddy’s unit over to the Germans if they did not call it off and leave at once.
There was nothing to do but play for time. If the operation could be carried out the following evening, Leigh Fermor’s men would disappear into the mountains with the general while the Communists still sat waiting for a decision. Leigh Fermor drafted an ambiguous reply and sent Pavlos back with it. That night, uneasy that they might be surrounded by Germans before daylight, the men rolled themselves in blankets and slept under a star-filled sky. When morning came, they were happy to find themselves still alone in the gully. Moss and Leigh Fermor spent the morning reading from the books they had carried from Cairo, trading passages from Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, and Saki as the sky darkened with storm clouds. Eventually the talk turned to Kreipe, and both men wondered what the general would be like. Moss captured the atmosphere in his diary: “Minotaurs, bull-men, nymphs of Ariadne, kings of Minos, and German generals—a splendid cocktail!” By the afternoon they were dodging snail hunters brought out by the rain that had begun to fall.
Though Leigh Fermor and Moss made the best of it, the waiting had begun to take its toll on some of the men. By the twenty-sixth the young guide from Anogeia had suffered all the uncertainty he could handle. “This morning, under the trees, he suddenly started frothing at the mouth and staring and gibbering,” Moss recorded in his diary. As the day wore on, the young man’s condition only declined. He refused help and would not even allow himself to be moved. In the end the others were forced to abandon him.
As it turned out, the anxious young man’s wait would have ended soon enough, had he held on. By six o’clock the rain had stopped, and it was not much later when Elias, the student from Heraklion, came gasping up the gully with the news they had all been waiting for. Elias had been watching from a promontory above the Archanes road. That afternoon he had seen Kreipe’s car motor past, traveling from the Villa Ariadne to his headquarters, where he would be putting in his usual late-day round of work. It appeared that the general had clicked back into the groove of his usual routine. Elias immediately left to take up his watch again. The others ate a quick dinner, and then Moss and Leigh Fermor put on their German uniforms. When they were ready, the two lance corporals stood looking at each other for a moment. This was it.
IT WAS JUST before eight o’clock when the men reached the intersection, and they found themselves scrambling to take up their positions. Minoan Mike was on one end of the wire watching for a signal from Elias. The near end stretched to a point high on the bank flanking the intersection, where Mitsos, the young man from Episkope, waited with a flashlight. When Mitsos heard the buzzer, he would signal Leigh Fermor and Moss, who had taken cover at the far end of the eastern side of the road, with Manoli and the two veteran guerrillas, Wallace Beery and Grigori, nearby. George and the others crouched along the west side. Near the headquarters at Archanes, Elias was watching with his bicycle standing ready. When the general’s car pulled out, he would pedal furiously to where Mike waited to activate the buzzer.
Waiting at the intersection, Leigh Fermor and Moss noticed more traffic on the narrow Archanes road than they had anticipated at this time of evening. A Volkswagen passed, then another. By nine o’clock they had watched a motorcycle and sidecar sputter by, as well as two large trucks. The general would ordinarily have been here by now. It was impossible not to wonder whether the Germans were wise to the ambush. Perhaps the vehicles going by were looking for Paddy’s men.
Moss began to grow concerned. He fingered his sleeve back from his watch and checked the time. It was nine thirty on the dot. When he looked up again, a flash caught his eye. It was Mitsos’s flashlight. It blinked three times. The signal meant that Kreipe’s car was approaching, and there was no escort to worry about. In no time they heard the engine, and then the big Opel could be seen ticking slowly around the corner. Leigh Fermor and Moss stepped out onto the roadway. Leigh Fermor waved a flashlight equipped with a red filter as Moss held up a German traffic paddle bearing a red circle that signaled “stop.” At the same time, Leigh Fermor called out, “Halt!”
As the Opel rumbled to a stop, he walked toward the passenger side. Through the window he saw an officer wearing the Knight’s Cross on his uniform. He saluted and asked politely to see his papers, adding a polite “bitte schön.” When Kreipe, with a look of condescension, reached into his jacket, Leigh Fermor wrenched the door open. Moss did the same on his s
ide, and their two flashlights illuminated the interior of the car, which suddenly shone like a flare on the dark road, calling the others into action.
Leigh Fermor wrestled Kreipe from the car, shouting “Hände hoch!”—“hands up.” The muzzle of his pistol was now digging into the general’s chest. On the other side of the car the driver went for his sidearm, and Moss swung hard with a blackjack, striking the man in the back of the head, leaving him slumped against the steering wheel. At this point George grabbed hold of the man and heaved him out onto the roadway, allowing Moss to slip behind the wheel. Manoli and Stratis shoved Kreipe, struggling, into the backseat. George slid in alongside them from the driver’s side. As Mike came running up to see them off, Paddy climbed into the passenger seat and put on the general’s hat. The engine was still humming, and the entire operation had taken little more than a minute.
Wallace Beery, Grigori, and Zoidakis were by now pulling the unconscious driver from the road. They were to take him overland, eventually meeting the others in the mountains. Elias and Mike would steal back into Heraklion the following day and “leak” the information that Kreipe had voluntarily defected to the British, as the Italian General Carta had done the year before.
With Manoli and Stratis poking their Marlin guns out the rear windows and George holding the general to the floor, Moss put the Opel in gear, edged out onto the Heraklion road, and tore off in the direction of the Villa Ariadne. They were hardly under way when a convoy of transport trucks filled with German soldiers motored by in the other direction. The sight of so many gray uniforms tempered the men’s jubilant moods. Leigh Fermor turned and spoke to the general over his shoulder. “I am a British major,” he explained, “and you are being taken as a prisoner of war to Egypt.”
MINUTES LATER MOSS spotted a red signal light waving and dipping just up the road. “Checkpoint ahead,” he said. A sentry called out for the car to halt. Moss downshifted and the Opel slowed. But when the car drew close enough for the sentries to make out the staff pennants that fluttered from stays on the front fenders, they stepped back and presented arms. Leigh Fermor tossed the men a salute. Moss gunned the engine and the Opel surged past the checkpoint, quickly picking up speed again. “This is marvelous,” he said.
A mile or two farther on, another checkpoint appeared. Now was the time to worry. If anything had looked amiss as they swept through the first outpost, the sentries would have notified the next one by telephone. But once again, Moss slowed and the German soldiers came to attention. Not much later, as the car approached the Villa Ariadne, Leigh Fermor and the others noticed the barriers that guarded the main gate being trundled open to receive the general’s car, which Kreipe’s sentries had no doubt been expecting for some time. Moss gave a few blasts from the horn and continued at speed in the direction of Heraklion.
At each checkpoint the Opel breezed by without incident, until they reached the eastern gate of the city itself. Here a roadblock barred the way. Moss again slowed and held his breath, letting it out as the bar swung up to let them pass. They were now within the Venetian walls of Heraklion itself, and the streets were clogged with German soldiers. The car was forced to inch along, while Moss tapped the horn to clear a path. Leigh Fermor remembered something Mike had warned him of—this was movie night for the German garrison. Paddy spoke softly to calm the others, reminding them that if they should be recognized, they were to abandon the general and use grenades and the Marlin guns to create a diversion that would allow them to escape into the labyrinth of side streets. But the German soldiers making their way to the cinema stepped aside as the Opel glided along, and soon they were out of the crowd and speeding toward the market square at the center of town, which they found completely empty. At the north end of the square Moss turned left onto a wide road leading to the Chania gate.
It was clear sailing until they reached the checkpoint at the gate itself. Here, where the road narrowed to barely a car’s width, they encountered a sentry blocking the way. Moss slowed to give him time to see the staff pennants, but the soldier standing in the roadway with a red signal light did not move. As the car came to a stop, Leigh Fermor could see that there were a number of soldiers flanking the gate. A sentry walked toward the passenger side. Leigh Fermor heard clicks as Manoli and Stratis unlocked the safety catches on their Marlin guns. He rolled down the window and called out in as gruff a tone as possible, “Generals Wagen!”
To his relief, the sentry ahead immediately dropped his signal light and leaped to attention. The roadway was cleared and Moss gunned the engine. Leigh Fermor saluted and shouted, “Gute Nacht!” The Opel roared past the Venetian wall and motored into the night. Moss lit a cigarette, “which I thought was the best I had ever smoked in my life.”
Seeing that German intervention was for the moment unlikely, Kreipe asked Leigh Fermor what he hoped to accomplish with “this hussar stunt,” as he deemed it. He appeared especially distraught at having been duped by amateur soldiers. Leigh Fermor promised to explain their purpose tomorrow.
They drove on toward the west for more than an hour, climbing all the while into the foothills of Mount Ida. Around eleven o’clock Leigh Fermor and Stratis began to keep a lookout for a goat track that led south toward Anogeia. Fifteen minutes later Moss pulled the Opel off the road. It was not quite two hours since the buzzer had sounded on the Archanes road. In all they had passed twenty-two checkpoints. At five of these they had been forced to wait for a barrier to be raised.
Moss and Leigh Fermor got out to confer on the next step. Left alone in the backseat with George, Manoli, and Stratis, General Kreipe called out to the two British officers, begging them not to abandon him. Leigh Fermor told him to get out, then offered him a salute. Again he assured the general that he would be treated properly as a prisoner of war. He asked only Kreipe’s cooperation in return. He explained that Captain Moss would lead the party escorting the general into the mountains, where he would himself join them soon.
GEORGE TYRAKIS SLID into the passenger seat, and Moss watched as Leigh Fermor, who had very little experience with automobiles, settled himself behind the wheel. There was a knocking sound as he struggled with the hand brake, apparently mistaking it for the gearshift lever, and then came a blast that made them all flinch. Paddy had attempted to start the Opel by depressing the horn. Eventually he got the car started, and Moss heard the transmission grind into gear.
With a few lurching jolts Leigh Fermor steered the Opel back onto the road and drove on in the direction of Rethymnon, to the west. When they had covered almost a mile, he slowed the car. He and George watched the terrain sliding past the headlights on the northern shoulder. The darkness under a new moon made it hard to see beyond the roadside, but Leigh Fermor knew that somewhere along this stretch was a goat track that meandered three or four miles down through a ravine and eventually reached the sea at a peninsula called Peristeri, which was separated by a narrow channel from a small island called Ketavati. A smaller island, which shared the name Peristeri, lay farther offshore.
The previous spring he had given himself a working vacation in the area. He had spent a few days swimming and getting to know the lay of the land. Before he left he had drawn a detailed map on a piece of silk cloth, showing that deep water stretched right up to the beaches that lay on either side of the promontory. His report to Cairo pointed out that the beach on the eastern side of the peninsula “is an ideal place for submarines or small craft.” Not long after that, an SOE agent had in fact been put ashore here, and German intelligence had gotten wind of the fact that a submarine landing had taken place. Any German patrol that came across the general’s car here might well assume the raiding party had made its escape by sea.
When the goat trail at last came into view in the sweep of the headlights, Leigh Fermor brought the Opel to a stop, leaving it on the road where it was sure to be discovered. They would have to work quickly. From his earlier reconnaissance he also knew that there was a German outpost at Almirou Potamou, which ove
rlooked the goat trail and the beaches below from a vantage point high on the mountainside to the east. He added the stub he was smoking to a scattering of Player’s cigarette butts that already littered the car’s floorboards and tossed a British beret onto the seat. To ensure there was no mistaking the nationality of the kidnappers, he left behind a paperback Agatha Christie mystery as he and George climbed out. Then he pinned the letter he and Moss had composed a few days earlier to the driver’s seat.
TO THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES IN CRETE
APRIL 23, 1944
GENTLEMEN,
Your Divisional Commander, General KREIPE, was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH raiding force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to CAIRO.
We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans, and the only guides used were serving soldiers of HIS HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us.
Your General is an honorable prisoner of war, and will be treated with all the consideration owing to his rank.
Any reprisals against the local population will be wholly unwarranted and unjust.
The letter closed with a farewell in German and a postscript: “We are very sorry to have to leave this motor-car behind.”
Leigh Fermor and George walked a hundred yards or so down the goat path in the direction of the beaches, dropping a few more clues to tempt German pursuers in that direction. These included a British cigarette tin and a wrapper from a Cadbury chocolate bar. The chocolate itself was too valuable to waste. Then they scrambled back to the car, where George paused to seize a souvenir of the operation. He pulled the general’s pennants from the fenders and smiled. “Captured standards!” he said.