by Wes Davis
“Last night was beautiful, the sky filled with stars and the Milky Way looking like a scarf of sequins,” Moss wrote in his diary the next day. “Good wine, Villon, that host of stars … and the war seemed a very long way off.” But then, at five in the afternoon, the war caught up with them. One of the villagers who had been keeping the men provisioned since their arrival in the area burst into the cave looking distraught. Seven German transport trucks filled with troops—probably two hundred men altogether—had rolled into the nearby village of Argyroupoli, where the road stopped. By foot they were only an hour to the north.
Leigh Fermor and Moss posted lookouts and hurried everyone else into the cave, where they remained until dusk. Then, around seven o’clock, a runner brought them word that the Germans had moved west out of Argyroupoli, not south. They were making for Asi Gonia, where Ciclitira’s wireless set was located. This was bad news for Ciclitira, who would have to dodge them, but it brought sighs of relief from the men in the cave.
That night Jonny Katsias’s rustlers led the party to a safer location an hour farther south. When they reached the foot of the precipice where the new hideout was located, General Kreipe dismounted and started the climb on foot, perhaps fearing another mishap like the one that had injured his shoulder. A few minutes later, a terrifying noise split the night. Moss heard “a sudden hysterical shriek, followed by the sound of snapping branches and twigs and the thud of something falling.” The general had lost his footing and pitched down the cliff face. Again Leigh Fermor and Moss scrambled down to help and found to their relief that he had landed on what might have been the only soft patch of ground for miles around. Miraculously, it was only his pride that was injured.
Around three in the morning they finally reached the opening in the cliff face where they intended to camp. It was a good hiding place but a wretched spot to sleep in. A spring that trickled through the cave made it uniformly cold and wet. The only thing to do was wait out the night and hope for good news after daybreak. “Think of those beasts back at Tara, dying of drink and happiness,” Paddy whispered to Moss as they lay shivering on the damp rock.
First thing the next morning, they learned that their quick evacuation of their previous hideout, and the miserable night that followed, had been worth it. The Germans had come to the village after all and had made a thorough search of the vicinity. Leigh Fermor’s men were much better off here. The messenger who brought the news had also carried food and raki up from the village. The latter made it possible, once the bottles had been emptied, to sleep in spite of the cold, wet ground that passed for beds.
When he awoke later in the day, Leigh Fermor found that some stiffness in his right shoulder, which had bothered him as he strained to help the general up the last pitch the night before, had grown worse. Sleeping on the damp rock had certainly not helped. A letter from Ciclitira soon put the discomfort out of his mind, however. In all likelihood a boat would arrive the following night, May 14. Ciclitira would be in touch again as soon as confirmation came from Cairo.
AN AMENDMENT TO Brian Coleman’s orders was issued on May 13, and the revised Bricklayer plan, designating the new landing beach near Rodakino, caught up with the skipper in Bardiyah, the harbor east of Tobruk where he had picked up Moss, Manoli, and George more than a month earlier. At 6:15 on the morning of the fourteenth, he sailed from Bardiyah on a course for Gavdos Island, off Crete’s southwest coast. There was a light breeze stirring up only a slight swell, and visibility was good.
By ten o’clock that evening, Coleman was passing Gavdos, and he noted a light flashing from a peninsula on the north side of the island, facing Crete. This got his attention. A few weeks earlier he had spotted flashing lights, flares, and other shore activity while attempting to make a landing nearby and had later seen tracer shells being fired onto shore, from either an enemy vessel or a battery on Gavdos. Tonight, though, no further disturbance was evident. “Although a good lookout was kept, no answering flashes were seen on Crete,” he noted in his log.
THE AFTERNOON OF the thirteenth passed with no word from Dennis Ciclitira. Sometime around nine o’clock, Leigh Fermor and the others resigned themselves to another night in their dripping rock shelter and put themselves to bed. An hour or so later another man came stumbling into the pitch-black cave and woke them all up. For a moment there was confusion, until Paddy recognized the stranger’s voice. It was Dick Barnes.
Barnes told them that the boat was indeed coming to meet them. He showed them on a map where to find the beach and gave them the Morse signal, which had now been changed from “MK” to “SB.” He also had some warnings to offer about the area around the beach. The Germans had been patrolling there more regularly since a small detachment had been ambushed in Rodakino on April 29. Armed caïques had also become a problem along the shore, as he knew from experience, having been on the beach with Ciclitira the night he was fired upon. The most pressing enemy at the moment, Barnes added, was the clock. There was barely time to reach a hideout above the beach before daylight. It was decided that Moss should go by the most direct route with most of the men accompanying him. Jonny Katsias’s rustlers would lead the way. Meanwhile, Leigh Fermor and Manoli would take the general by a more roundabout but safer path.
Moss and the others left immediately, and it was not until they had worn themselves ragged on the steeply undulating trail that they realized they had not paused to fill their water bottles. The only thing they had to drink was raki, which George had brought along. Nevertheless they were able to move at an unbelievably rapid clip, thanks in large part to Katsias’s rustlers. “They knew every track and short-cut, and never wasted a single moment in selecting the best and quickest route,” Moss noted. “I found no difficulty in appreciating the reasons for their having gone uncaptured while practicing their nefarious profession.” By dawn Moss and his men were perched on a rock outcrop overlooking the beach.
TAKING THE LONG way around, Leigh Fermor, Manoli, and the general marched through the night and into the next day. The trail they followed ran over such steep terrain that General Kreipe was again traveling on foot. At several points he required help from Manoli, who was by now watching over the general like an old friend. Some hours into the march, Leigh Fermor again became aware of the trouble with his right arm; “there was no pain, but I could neither straighten it nor raise it above my shoulder.”
Shortly after ten o’clock, they began the final climb up to the outcrop where they would rendezvous with Moss. As they came out onto the promontory, the south coast opened up below them. In the distance they could see a German outpost. It was evident through binoculars that the garrison had no idea they were being watched at such close range. Or else they did not mind being seen playing leapfrog while their general was being carried away by the enemy.
At eleven o’clock the two groups were back together again. A few hours later they pooled the food they had carried through the night and made a meager lunch. Then, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, they began to move in small, scattered groups down to the beach.
Leigh Fermor and Moss went first, accompanied by Jonny Katsias. Twenty minutes later, when no disturbance had been heard, Manoli and George made their way down with General Kreipe. The others followed at similar intervals.
When the group reassembled, they found themselves in a small, well-cultivated garden. This was a surprise, since the Germans had designated this area by the coast a forbidden zone. There was a fountain burbling out cool water, which they drank happily. Before long, a stooped old man came along and, barely taking note of the ragged band of visitors, went to work tending the plot. It seemed to Moss that the old gardener’s quiet resolve reflected a way of life that would continue, in places like Crete, while wars and strife and conquering armies came and went, like the tides lapping at the adjacent beach. “He was still there, working on a row of beans, when at dusk we went on our way.”
AS ML 842 slipped past Gavdos Island, Coleman laid a course for the
rendezvous beach, which lay thirty or so nautical miles to the north-northeast. At 11:45 he spotted a Morse signal coming from shore, at first flashing erratically, then eventually resolving itself into the “SB” he expected. By now a rising mist was making visibility difficult, but with the beach pinpointed, all that was left to do was to get close enough to send in the dinghies.
But as he began to close the distance to the beach, Coleman found that the ship’s echo-ranging set, which had been giving him difficulties on previous attempts to reach Crete, would not function. When the launch was a thousand yards off the beach, he sent a man onto the bow to take soundings the old-fashioned way, and ML 842 eased her way slowly forward. Ten minutes after midnight, they were a hundred yards offshore in two fathoms of water. Coleman gave the go-ahead, and rubber dinghies were lowered into the water. A detachment of commandos sent to provide security for the evacuation quickly slipped over the side of the launch and scrambled aboard the dinghies.
ON SHORE Leigh Fermor and Moss had run into difficulty. At nine o’clock, when they were to begin flashing the Morse signal out to sea, they realized that neither of them actually knew the entire Morse alphabet. After a few minutes of debate, they figured out that the SOS signal, which every schoolboy knew, would give them half the code they needed. That was the S. For the B they would improvise. They hoped that Brian Coleman, knowing who he was dealing with, would give them the benefit of the doubt.
When they finally heard engines rumbling offshore, they thought their plan had worked. But then the vessel seemed to be moving away again. They were scrambling to make themselves seen when Dennis Ciclitira came panting out onto the beach. Abandoning his besieged headquarters at Asi Gonia, he had marched through the day to reach the rendezvous. When Leigh Fermor and Moss confessed their problem, he took over the flashlight, snapped out the appropriate Morse letters, and quickly had Coleman’s attention.
Leigh Fermor heard the sound of engines closing in again, “faint at first but gradually louder.” And finally the ship came into view. “There was a slight coil of mist over the sea so it was not until she was quite close that we saw her,” Paddy noted. “The chains rattled as the anchor went down and two boats were lowered.”
The men stood watching on the beach as figures clambered into the boats. As they drew nearer, it was possible to make out the shapes of commandos clutching machine guns as the boats rocked their way ashore. When the boats at last crunched up onto the beach, the commandos leaped out and ran toward Leigh Fermor’s group. He recognized their commander and quickly realized that they had expected to fend off Germans while the evacuation was under way.
Leigh Fermor assured them, to their disappointment, that there was no one to shoot at just now. But they could be helpful in another way. While his own party sat removing their boots, which were always left behind for the men who remained on the island, he persuaded the commando leader to donate the stores his detachment had brought with them. Soon they were emptying their rucksacks onto the beach.
Then began a round of good-byes, which lasted until a sailor told Leigh Fermor it was time to go. Minoan Mike and his student friend Elias had already departed, along with the Cretan Wallace Beery and Stratis the policeman. While Jonny Katsias, his two rustlers, and Antoni Zoidakis, who were staying behind, stood waving, Leigh Fermor and the others climbed into the remaining dinghy and steadied themselves as they were rowed away from the beach.
Looking back toward the shore, Leigh Fermor marveled at how quickly his comrades and the beach were lost against the looming silhouette of the island itself. Soon the dinghy came alongside the motor launch, and he watched as sailors leaned over the side to help the general up the swinging rope ladder that hung from the side of the vessel. Leigh Fermor, Moss, Manoli, and George followed, and soon they were all safely aboard. Brian Coleman came down from the bridge to greet them. “Then we were taken down to the wardroom, where we found English cigarettes, some rum, bunks with white sheets, and—a Coleman specialty—lobster sandwiches. It was wonderful,” Moss thought.
When the boats had been hauled up, Coleman returned to the helm and wheeled ML 842 around. Easing the engines into gear, he motored slowly away from the beach in order to avoid throwing sparks from the exhaust that would give away their position. An hour later, wanting to be out of range of German aircraft by sunrise, he brought the speed up to sixteen knots. He hoped the weather, which had grown continually worse throughout the night, would keep the Stukas grounded in any case.
The morning of May 15 dawned over rough seas, and ML 842 wallowed her way south throughout the day. At nine thirty that evening, Coleman steered into the harbor at Mersa Matruh, west of Alexandria. The next day Leigh Fermor and Moss flew with General Kreipe, his arm now in a clean white sling, courtesy of an RAF doctor, to the airfield outside Cairo. There they told the general good-bye and gave him a final salute as he disappeared into a waiting staff car.
“He smiled at us with a rueful though kindly expression, and then he was gone,” Moss noted. “Close at hand there was another car waiting for Paddy and me, so quickly we jumped into it. ‘Tara!’ we called to the driver, and he treated us to an enormous grin of understanding.”
EPILOGUE
Ritterlich!
WHEN HE WAS questioned in Cairo on May 23, 1944, Heinrich Kreipe told British interrogators that the German garrison of Crete would fight “to the last cartridge” to hold the island. But he also confided that he believed General Bräuer, the commander of Fortress Crete, to be “a blockhead.” Bräuer’s critical mistake, as Kreipe saw it, lay in “regarding a quite substantial Partisan movement as nothing more than a few gangs of cattle thieves.”
In the actual course of events, German troops withdrew from Heraklion in October, taking refuge in the area around Chania. Tom Dunbabin and a force of Cretan andartes occupied the Villa Ariadne, where John Pendlebury had once lived, the very house that General Kreipe had been trying to reach on the night of his abduction. It was here at the villa that the Germans, after a protracted stalemate, finally signed a surrender agreement in May 1945.
Following his interrogation, General Kreipe was sent to England. He was interned at a prison in Sheffield before being transferred to a camp in Canada. He remained in British custody until 1947. His countrymen who had overseen the occupation of Crete, Generals Bruno Bräuer and Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, were both convicted by the Special War Crimes Tribunal in Athens in 1945. Both were executed by firing squad on May 20, 1947, the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Crete. General Kreipe himself was never charged with any crime. To the end of his life he had mixed feelings about his wartime experience. Moss, who had taken on more of the day-to-day work of guarding the general, bore the brunt of his resentment. “I liked Paddy,” Kreipe told an interviewer a few years before his death in 1976. “But Moss, always with his pistol,” he said, pantomiming his prodding captor, “it was childish.”
AMONG THE LIST of atrocities levied against Müller, who returned to Crete to replace Bräuer as commandant after Kreipe’s abduction, was a string of brutal raids carried out in August 1944. German troops attacked more than a dozen villages, burning many to the ground. Hundreds of civilians were killed and the entire village of Anogeia was razed. The foremost historian of the war in Crete, Antony Beevor, concluded that the reprisals carried out that summer were unrelated to the Kreipe affair. He based this view on careful study of documents and evidence drawn from every level of British, German, and Greek command, and his judgment is persuasive.
Appearances on Crete at the time initially led Tom Dunbabin to consider a different conclusion. His field reports note that he saw no obvious cause to which the reprisals could be attributed. “No incident had taken place in this area,” he wrote, “nor were there guerillas in the neighborhood.” The reason offered by German command in a statement published in a local newspaper “was that Kreipe had passed through” the villages that were attacked “and was fed and concealed by the population.” There was even a rumor a
foot that said Kreipe had escaped from his captors and was himself taking revenge for the abduction.
In the end, however, Dunbabin concluded that while it was easy to point to the Kreipe abduction as a motive for the attacks, the truth was more complicated. He believed the reprisals were the result of mounting German fear of the Resistance movement in general and a panicked effort on the part of enemy commanders to combat defeatism in their own ranks. In the report he sent to Cairo at the end of August, he quoted a German soldier who put the matter in plain terms: “The war will end in two months’ time and we shall all be ruined, but we mean to ruin you first.”
As Leigh Fermor had hoped, the abduction of General Kreipe “hit the enemy hard on a different level,” striking a blow at German morale. Stories that came trickling in through Dunbabin’s intelligence network suggested that the impunity of the abduction raid had startled German commanders and led some to fear, only weeks before the Normandy invasion, that Crete was the target of the Allied offensive everyone had come to expect.
Even more important, Moss and Leigh Fermor’s “hussar stunt” galvanized the already strong will of the Cretans. Buoyed by the success of the daring raid, the morale of the populace remained high even in the wake of subsequent German atrocities. After three years of occupation, the Cretans were again demanding arms so they could finish off the enemy they now perceived as weak. The Germans, for their part, showed no more inclination to fight “to the last cartridge.”
The galvanizing effect of the mission could still be felt in the tense months that followed the end of the war. As the rest of Greece plunged into civil unrest—pitting factions of Communist partisans against each other and against various stripes of nationalists—Crete remained relatively calm. In large part this was due to the people’s admiration for swashbuckling figures like John Pendlebury and Leigh Fermor, whose exploits lent credibility to the diplomatic campaign Tom Dunbabin waged throughout the war to foster cooperation among rival factions on Crete. Leigh Fermor and Dunbabin were both made honorary citizens of Heraklion in 1948, at a time when mainland Greece remained torn by civil war.