by Wes Davis
With no way of knowing where Zoidakis was or when he might arrive to guide them to their next hideout, there was no choice but to wait where they were. When a steady rain began to fall sometime after daybreak, Manoli and George scouted out a gully overhung by trees that offered at least the appearance of shelter, though as the men sat hunkered among the rocks that afternoon, they were soon soaked to the skin. It was a sodden and miserable crew that Zoidakis stumbled across as he made his reconnaissance of the area the following morning.
From what he had seen, it appeared that the Germans had some idea of where the general was being held, but for the moment moving was riskier than staying put. They would have to stick it out for another day in the miserable gully. Although Zoidakis proposed to bring them food that evening from his home village, which was nearby, the prospect of a delay at this point put a dreary cast on moods in the makeshift camp. It was not just the inclement weather or the living conditions that caused the trouble. The burst of adrenaline that had accompanied the ambush and the first days of the flight over the mountains had worn off. It was evident that the general, for one, was descending into a state of depression. And he was not alone in the gloom. “Paddy and I are feeling the anticlimax of this business acutely,” Moss wrote in his diary. “It seems that we now have everything to lose nothing whatsoever to gain, and the only sort of excitement left to us is of the unpleasant kind. Ah me!”
AT 9:15 ON the morning of May 1, Brian Coleman left Derna on the Libyan coast aboard ML 842, bound for Tobruk harbor, a hundred miles along the shore to the east, which he reached at 3:48 in the afternoon. The motor launch was hastily refueled, and Coleman placed his crew on standby while he awaited further instructions. He had received orders for an operation code-named “Bricklayer,” which called for one of two motor launches to extract Leigh Fermor’s band from the south coast on the night of May 3 or May 4. The skipper of ML 355, R. A. Logan, made the first attempt, leaving Tobruk on the morning of May 3.
The signal for Coleman to proceed came through the next day. At 8:15 on the morning of May 4, he set sail for Crete. A few minutes after noon he spotted ML 355 on its return voyage to Tobruk. Lieutenant Logan signaled that he had failed to make contact with the beach party the night before. Coleman thanked him for the information and sailed on. Almost half an hour later an aircraft was seen approaching the ship, coming in low, just a hundred feet off the water. It quickly closed to within two hundred yards. As the crew prepared to open fire, Coleman identified it as a Martin Baltimore, an American-built plane flown by the RAF. The pilot, apparently recognizing the motor launch to be friendly, veered off at the same time.
Without further incident the launch reached Paximadia Island, six or seven miles off Crete’s south coast, at 11:20 that night. A little before midnight they were two thousand yards off the rendezvous beach below the village of Saktouria. The sea was calm, but a heavy fog and rain made it difficult to see anything of the shoreline. For the next two hours Coleman slowly patrolled the shoreline, keeping a constant lookout for a signal from the beach party. Having seen nothing, he turned back for Tobruk at 2:15. A little after noon the following day, he made visual contact with ML 355, now bound once again for Crete. By 3:20, Coleman’s ship was anchored at Tobruk.
BETWEEN THE HIT-OR-MISS wireless transmissions and the need to use runners to get messages to and from Leigh Fermor, signals had gotten crossed. On May 2 Ralph Stockbridge, an old SOE hand who was known on the island as Mihali or Mike—since Ralph did not strike the Greeks as a proper name—received a message from Cairo saying that the boat would arrive the following night. The transmission also reported that the leaflets saying Kreipe was already in Cairo had been printed, but because of poor weather conditions the RAF had been unable to drop them. Boats would try the same beach on the four following nights. The Morse signal Leigh Fermor was to flash from the beach was “MK”—Monkey King. Headquarters attempted to transmit the same information to all the sets operating on Crete.
Stockbridge was not able to make contact again until the next day. Meanwhile, he attempted to warn Cairo of the problem—“Cannot, repeat, not warn Paddy in time for boat on May 3/4. Have sent runner who will reach Paddy tonight. Believe Paddy will be able to reach beach only in time for boat night May 5/6 as will have to make all movements at night.”
ON THE AFTERNOON of May 4, Moss came face to face with the eventuality he had dreaded since February, when he had watched Manoli and George suffer unalloyed boredom while they waited to be dropped into Crete. “I have completely run out of reading matter,” he lamented, “so spend my day like any Cretan, contemplating.” There was much to contemplate, and little of it was encouraging.
Although the rain had stopped and they were able to move to a more suitable camp, the weather appeared to be the only thing changing for the better. They had learned the day before that a force of some two hundred German soldiers had arrived at Saktouria, the village that lay just above the beach where they had hoped to meet the motor launch. Now they would have to find an alternate way out. Leigh Fermor had left with George just after dark that night to make his way quickly west into the Amari Valley and locate one of the wireless sets, so that he could better coordinate a new evacuation plan with Cairo. Meanwhile, Moss and the others would go to Gerakari, in the heart of the Amari’s Lotus Land, to await their next move.
Since his arrival on Crete, Moss had been fixated on a series of coincidences that seemed to draw a pattern across his diary of the mission. They had left Cairo on January 4. Paddy had parachuted in on February 4. He, Manoli, and George had come ashore on April 4. Moss had hoped, almost expected, to leave for home on the fourth of May. Now it was clear that this would not happen.
AS THEY TRUDGED along toward the northwest the next day, Leigh Fermor and George began to hear the rumble of bomb blasts in the distance. It was hard to tell where the explosions were occurring, but some seemed to be coming from an area disturbingly close to the region they had just come through. Pressing on through the afternoon, they finally reached the village of Pantanassa, five or six miles north of Gerakari. Here they found a veritable poste restante office waiting for them. There were days-old letters from Dick Barnes and Sandy Rendel. Rendel’s, which alerted them to the planned arrival of the boat at the beach now crawling with Germans, was not much help at this point. But the letter from Barnes gave Leigh Fermor the vital piece of information Ralph Stockbridge had been trying to relay to him: When they finally did make contact with a boat, the signal they were to use was the Morse letters “MK.” The motor launch skipper would be looking for the signal beginning at 9:00 p.m.
Leigh Fermor and George now turned west and made their way within a few hours to Geni, where Ralph Stockbridge’s letter finally caught up with them. In addition to the signal code, which they already knew, the letter told them that another SOE officer named Dennis Ciclitira had a wireless station set up in Asi Gonia, twenty-odd miles farther west. Ciclitira, who came from a British-Greek family and spoke the language fluently, had come ashore in December. He was scheduled to leave on a boat that was expected to land in a matter of days. Stockbridge thought Leigh Fermor and company might hitch a ride on the same boat. He said he would also relay their location to an SOE officer named Dick Barnes who was working farther to the west. Glad as he was to have this information, Leigh Fermor was almost equally pleased by a further development. Stockbridge had also sent him a map and a fresh supply of cigarettes.
DICK BARNES HAD in fact been trying since May 2 to make contact with Leigh Fermor. When Ralph Stockbridge’s message reached him, he sent George Psychoundakis, Xan Fielding’s longtime runner, to track Paddy down in Geni. Along the way, Psychoundakis recruited scouts to look for a new landing beach in the area directly to Paddy’s south. By the time he arrived in Geni, he had also engaged Jonny Katsias to serve as a guide. Katsias, who had come from Cairo on the launch with Moss, reportedly knew every inch of the mountains to the west. He was also a quick hand with a gun and knife—in
fact, he was accused of killing a number of men in various brawls and vendettas before the war—which could be useful if it came to a fight with the Germans. Leigh Fermor was reassured to have the services of Katsias, and he was still more pleased to see Psychoundakis, but the elfin runner was gone again almost as soon as he had arrived.
He returned the next day, May 7, accompanied by Barnes himself. The scouts he had recruited arrived not much later, bringing news that German troops had landed by sea just to the south. The beaches in that vicinity were now off the table as far as evacuation was concerned. But Barnes had another idea. The little village of Rodakino, twenty miles over the mountains to the southwest, was flanked by small beaches, and the Germans had been driven out by the locals some days earlier when they attempted to burn the village. It was worth a look. Leigh Fermor asked Jonny Katsias to scout out the beaches there.
Just when it looked like a plan was taking shape, another runner arrived with news from Barnes’s wireless operator. It seemed that the commandos who had carried out the raids on the Kastelli airfield the previous summer were planning to crash General Kreipe’s evacuation party. A raiding party of SAS troops was coming ashore on the ninth to find Leigh Fermor and his men and get them out. To Paddy and Barnes both, this sounded like a disastrous plan, given the size of the German force assembling on the beaches to the south. The SAS boys would be walking into a hornets’ nest. This was one landing that had to be called off, if it was not already too late.
Meanwhile, runners were being kept on the move. While Leigh Fermor and George were still at Geni, another exhausted man arrived with a letter from Moss, explaining how matters in his vicinity had taken a turn for the worse. Moss told Paddy about the large contingent of Germans that had come marching up the valley above Saktouria, where he and the others had been hiding with the general. They had been forced to depart at once. Leigh Fermor also learned that the explosions he and George had heard on the trail the day before had come from a ring of villages that had been destroyed by the Germans. Fortunately, no one had been killed in the raids, but Moss had felt the German noose closing around him.
He and his party had slipped through the German cordon and reached Gerakari ahead of schedule. They had now moved on and were waiting about a quarter of a mile outside the village of Patsos, which put them closer at hand than Paddy could have hoped, less than ten miles to his east. For all the anxiety the German advance had caused, he quickly saw that the precipitate forced march had in fact come as a stroke of luck.
After nightfall on May 8, Leigh Fermor and George left Geni, walking east. It was not much later than midnight when they located Moss’s hideout. It was in an ideal spot, a stone hut adjacent to a gurgling waterfall. Leigh Fermor found Moss sleeping and shook him awake. When his eyes came open, they had an alarmed look until Leigh Fermor cast the flashlight he was holding onto his own face and Moss recognized his tormentor. There was much to talk about, Paddy told him.
Moss stirred himself and produced a bottle of raki. For the next two hours they discussed the current situation and Moss filled Leigh Fermor in on developments in the camp. He and the general had suffered a falling-out when they exchanged heated words about the German destruction of the villages around Saktouria. A few prickly days had followed. But they were on speaking terms again now.
As Paddy told Moss about the SAS plan, he began to wonder if they should go down to the beach the following night with a band of andartes, so as to be on hand either to warn the raiding party off or to assist in the melee that would no doubt erupt if the SAS raiders came ashore. By the time they went to bed, he and Moss had concluded that this was indeed what they had to do. But then fate intervened. They had eaten breakfast the next morning and were preparing to break camp, when a runner arrived from Dick Barnes’s cave. The message Barnes had sent to Cairo had gone through in time. The commando mission had been postponed.
Now, instead of backtracking to the SAS beach, they could push on west. Leigh Fermor wanted to make it as far as Foteinos, which would mean three or four hours through the mountains. This would allow them to reach the village of Vilandredo the following night—putting them just a hard day’s march to the north of the beach below Rodakino. The men rested through the day, and when the moon was up that night, they helped the general onto a fresh mule and moved out.
They had not been on the march long when they passed through the ruins of one of the villages recently destroyed by the Germans. It was impossible not to be moved by this evidence of the war’s impact on civilians. “It was a strange and ghostly feeling, walking through those skeletons of houses,” Moss felt, “and there was something sickly about the smell which hung damply among the ruins.” Though he had no way of knowing at the time, this was a scene that would become all too familiar by the time the war was over.
Shortly after midnight, they were met by a gang of andartes who turned out to be sentries from the Foteinos band, whose security perimeter seemed to extend a good two hours beyond their village. Under the command of a kapetan who must have been in his eighties, they formed an escort to ferry the general on to Foteinos, which the party reached around three in the morning, after a short, tense delay when the andartes took up positions to ambush an oncoming German patrol that turned out to be a late-arriving contingent of their own band.
Leigh Fermor, Moss, and the others spent the next day resting in an olive grove outside the village. At three in the afternoon, they were visited by a party of four Russians who had escaped from a prison camp in Rethymnon the previous week. Word of General Kreipe’s abduction had already made it that far, and they were excited to see the man himself. When Moss had talked with the Russians, it was decided that one, an older man who was sick, would be evacuated to Cairo, while the other three, outfitted with Marlin guns and what clothing could be spared, would travel to Kastamonitsa with Grigori to join Ivan and Vassily. It seemed that Moss’s private Russian army was growing.
The escaped prisoners left in the afternoon, and when night came, Leigh Fermor’s group, now with the ailing Russian riding slumped atop a second mule, pressed on. As the party inched along the rugged mountain trail, the Russian swayed on his mule like a tree in a gale, looking as if any minute he would topple off. But it was in fact General Kreipe who took a fall. As his mule picked its way up a particularly steep pass, the general’s saddle strap gave way, sending him crashing onto the rocks below. He landed on his shoulder and immediately cried out in pain. When Leigh Fermor and Moss rushed to help him, it appeared it was not just his collarbone but also his patience that had snapped. He writhed on the ground, shouting a blistering stream of curses at them. When he had calmed down, they helped him back onto the mule and assigned Stratis the policeman the job of keeping him upright for the rest of the journey. As the night wore on, General Kreipe seemed to repent of his uncivil behavior and from time to time offered apologies as he lurched along on the mule.
Sometime after midnight, the elderly leader of the Foteinos andartes, who had so far accompanied them, called a halt near an outlying hamlet. He explained that they had reached the point where his men would turn back to their village, and he pointed Leigh Fermor toward a small house where he would find another guide waiting.
When Leigh Fermor and Moss entered the modest building, it was Jonny Katsias who rose to greet them. At his side stood a pair of hardened men who turned out to be sheep rustlers whom Katsias had recruited to help guide the party through the mountains ahead. They were a rough-looking threesome, but between Katsias’s innate ferocity and the sheep thieves’ professional familiarity with little-used goat paths and out-of-the-way hideouts, the general’s evacuation could not have been in better hands. “And so Jonny, a price upon his head, victor of numerous feuds and vendettas, killer of more than twenty men, who talks of his latest victim as though referring to a Last Duchess, is now responsible for our safe custody,” Moss noted, “and we feel nothing if not safe in his hands.”
Nearly four hours later Katsias brought the g
roup to a rendezvous point near Vilandredo, where they were met by a pair of men who guided them on a difficult hourlong climb to the cave where Dennis Ciclitira had established his headquarters. When they reached the cave, they found a man with a dark, bushy beard lying in a corner, snoring outrageously. It was Ciclitira. His wireless set was still operating at “Stubborn Corner,” he told them—that is, only an hour away at Asi Gonia. Communications with Cairo would at last be more fluid.
Ciclitira told Leigh Fermor and Moss that they had missed a scheduled landing at the beach below Rodakino several nights earlier, but he assured them that their late arrival was fortunate. He and his band had gone down to the beach with Dick Barnes on the appointed night and flashed the appropriate signal for some three hours. At last, around midnight, they heard an engine rumbling in the darkness offshore. As they prepared for the landing they thought was at hand, things went terribly wrong. The vessel they had heard closed on the beach and opened fire on them with heavy machine guns. It was a German caïque. They beat a quick retreat into the mountains and managed to get away with no casualties. But it had been a narrow escape. It was when he returned to his headquarters the following day that Ciclitira had received the message telling him Leigh Fermor’s group had been driven west by their pursuers and were headed into his territory.
After they had eaten and talked for a while, Ciclitira left for his wireless station, bearing messages for Cairo from Leigh Fermor. That night the men helped General Kreipe climb onto a rock ledge above the cave, where they all spent the evening eating and drinking wine provided by one of the villagers. After their long journey it was just the kind of banquet they had needed, and soon they were all singing. Leigh Fermor and Moss once again found themselves talking about literature—on this occasion the topic was the ne’er-do-well French poet François Villon—as they had in the days before the ambush. Even the general seemed restored and pleased that his ordeal, at least this part of it, would soon be over.