by Wes Davis
The Kreipe mission quickly assumed its place as an iconic episode in the centuries-long history of Crete’s struggle against outside rule. Today a memorial stands at the intersection of the Archanes and Heraklion roads where the abduction took place.
WILLIAM STANLEY MOSS returned to Crete in the summer of 1944 with the intention of creating a sequel to the earlier mission by capturing General Kreipe’s replacement. When circumstances made it impossible to carry out this plan, he considered mounting an outright attack on the headquarters at Archanes but decided instead to ambush German convoy traffic on the main road that ran along the north coast between Heraklion and Chania.
At three o’clock in the morning on August 8, he and George Tyrakis led a party of seven Greeks and six escaped Russian prisoners to a sharp bend in the road north of the village of Anogeia, where andartes had attacked an enemy column the previous day, leading him to expect the arrival of German reinforcements. Over the course of the next day, Moss and his men knocked out a half dozen German vehicles as they slowed for the turn, pushing each off a nearby precipice after it was destroyed in order not to alert the next that happened along. When an armored car arrived and opened fire on the party, Moss crept along a ditch, climbed onto the vehicle, and dropped a grenade down its turret. In total, the action killed thirty-five German soldiers and ten Italians and captured a dozen prisoners.
Once again Brian Coleman’s motor launch picked him up from a craggy beach on the south coast. It was the last time he would ever see Crete. That fall he was sent to Macedonia, again taking Pixie’s rubber ball along for luck. It was there that memories of the burned village he and Leigh Fermor had passed through during their escape from Crete came back to him, as he again encountered the “same nauseating smell” in one ruined town after another.
He returned to Cairo to find Sophie Tarnowska bedridden, with both legs in casts, following a serious automobile accident. Pixie had been seized by city authorities for “removing the trousers of a taxi boy who had been teasing him.” By Christmas, however, the household was again together and in good health. The following April, Moss and Sophie were married in a ceremony witnessed by Prince Peter of Greece. Moss spent the rest of the war serving in Siam.
After the war, Moss wrote an account of the Kreipe kidnapping, based on the diary he had kept at the time. The book, Ill Met by Moonlight, was turned into a movie in 1957. It starred David Oxley as Moss and Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor. Moss went on to write a string of books and mystery stories, including an inquiry into the disappearance of a substantial stockpile of gold during the collapse of the Third Reich.
Moss and Sophie Tarnowska split up in 1957, after which he traveled to New Zealand and Antarctica and sailed a small boat across the Pacific before finally settling in the West Indies. He was only forty-four when he died in 1965 in Kingston, Jamaica.
ALEXANDER RENDEL, David Smiley, and Julian Amery all published memoirs of their wartime exploits. Rendel donated the profits from his book to a Greek orphanage; he went on to become a respected diplomatic correspondent for The Times of London. Tom Dunbabin went back to archaeology and published books and articles on the ancient Mediterranean world. Rowland Winn, the Tara resident who had broken his ankle demonstrating parachute jumps, eventually received the transfer he wanted to SOE. He parachuted into Albania but landed hard in rugged mountain terrain and broke his ankle again. “His leg was set in a splint by a horse doctor,” his nephew would later recall, “and he rode through the mountains on a mule until he took part in something like a cavalry charge with the partisans and the mule fell on him and broke his leg a third time.” Brian Coleman, skipper of ML 842, received a commendation following the Bricklayer mission citing “great skill, endurance and pertinacity in carrying out landings and embarkations in enemy controlled Crete.” Cyril Fortune, the RAF pilot who dropped Leigh Fermor onto the Katharo plateau, later received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Whether he ever received the dagger Bandouvas had promised him is not recorded.
George Psychoundakis, the young man from Asi Gonia who served tirelessly as a runner for Xan Fielding and other British officers, wrote a memoir that was translated into English by Patrick Leigh Fermor and became one of the landmarks of World War II literature. Psychoundakis went on to translate Homer and Hesiod into the traditional Cretan form of epic verse.
Einer von der Heydte, who befriended Patrick Leigh Fermor in Vienna before the war and commanded a unit of German paratroopers during the invasion, was later named among the conspirators in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Heydte escaped arrest by the Gestapo because the papers implicating him misspelled his surname. Heydte too published an account of his experiences on Crete. Fritz, the young German Patrick Leigh Fermor befriended in 1935, was killed in fighting in Norway, perhaps in an engagement with a unit of Leigh Fermor’s own regiment.
Xan Fielding transferred to the French section of SOE in the spring of 1944. That August, with orders that amounted to “You’ll find out when you get there,” he parachuted into southern France. Posing as an electric-company clerk, he set out to assist the Resistance but was soon captured by the Gestapo. He was later rescued from a death cell by Christine Granville, a Polish countess-turned-spy who was later said to have inspired the string of seductive female agents in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. After publishing his wartime memoirs, Fielding went on to make a name for himself as a writer. He was best known for his English translations of works by the French novelist Pierre Boulle, which included The Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes.
DESPITE THE RISKS they continued to take after the Kreipe mission, George Tyrakis and Manoli Paterakis both survived the war. Both were recommended for Greek military honors. The final record sheet on Tyrakis summed up his service this way: “Brave, loyal, tireless, cheerful and enterprising. Cannot be praised too highly.”
A letter of commendation sent by SOE to the Greek war ministry called Manoli Paterakis “certainly one of the bravest men in Crete.” Successful as he had been as a soldier, Paterakis wished simply to return to the life he had known before the war. Many years later, he traveled to New York with Patrick Leigh Fermor at the invitation of the Cretan Union of America. When the two wartime friends rode to the top of the Empire State Building one evening to take in the panoramic view of the city, Leigh Fermor noticed that Paterakis had fallen silent. “I saw a pensive look on Manoli’s face, and asked him what he was thinking of,” Leigh Fermor wrote to a friend, “and he said ‘I’m just thinking that back in Crete it would be just about time to go up to the folds and feed the ewes.’ ” Paterakis remained true to his heritage to the end. He was in his seventies when he fell to his death while stalking agrimi—the native wild goat—high in the White Mountains of western Crete.
BY THE TIME Patrick Leigh Fermor reached Cairo in the wake of the successful mission, it was clear that he was seriously ill. He spent the following three months hospitalized with rheumatic fever. After another month of sick leave in Syria, still not fully recovered, he was again infiltrated into Crete on October 26, 1944.
On the morning of December 8, a German detachment of seven tanks and four hundred infantry attacked the headquarters he had established near Suda Bay on the western end of the island. As the tanks rolled onto their streets, villagers took up positions in the surrounding hills and fired on the Germans. “During the day contingents from all the neighboring villages arrived and attacked the Germans with such spirit that at 1700 hours they were forced to retreat after having killed only four Cretans and destroyed only two houses,” Leigh Fermor wrote in his final report to Cairo. German losses were far higher. “This was considered by everybody to be a signal triumph for Cretan arms and an illustration of the almost unvarying success of the guerilla tactics in guerilla country against vastly outnumbering forces.”
Finding little work left to do on the island, he departed on December 23 aboard the destroyer HMS Catterick, hoping to reach Cairo in time to be transferred to the Far East. He landed in Alexandria o
n Christmas Eve. In fact, the war was all but over for him.
Leigh Fermor went on to become the most important British travel writer of the next half century. His first book, about travels in the Caribbean, came out in 1950. Books about Greece followed, but it was not until 1977 that he finally published the first volume based on his epic trek across Europe in the 1930s. A second volume appeared in 1986, and readers are still waiting hopefully for the third, on which he was working in the last months of his life. Taken together, Leigh Fermor’s books created a literary genre that was distinctly his own—part memoir, part history, often lyrical, always precise. His writing was suffused with lightly carried erudition and infectious good humor. Having lived most of his life on the Mani peninsula in southern Greece, Patrick Leigh Fermor died in England in 2011 at the age of ninety-six.
IN 1972, Leigh Fermor was reunited in Athens with General Kreipe for a Greek television program. After the broadcast, the two men joined a group of Leigh Fermor’s old Cretan allies at a nearby taverna. As he described the evening in a letter to a friend, it might have been a reunion of schoolmates rather than former enemies: “Lots of Cretan songs and dances, a few German folk songs sung by the General and me, after much wine had flowed.” When local journalists heard what was going on, they crashed the party. “One asked the General how I had treated him when he was my prisoner in the mountains and the Gen said—wait for it!—most energetically: ‘Ritterlich! Wie ein Ritter!’ ”
Chivalrously. Like a knight.
Acknowledgments
The Ariadne Objective owes its inception to Geraldine Gesell and the Department of Classics at the University of Tennessee, who together made my first trips to Crete possible. In 1989 Dr. Gesell, then director of archaeological excavations at Kavousi, in eastern Crete, also drew my attention to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books in a dusty shop in Ierápetra, on the island’s south coast, and two years later pointed out the intersection near Knossos that had played a pivotal role in the author’s wartime adventures. Without those early introductions, the project would never have come about.
I am deeply grateful to my friend McKay Jenkins, who helped in innumerable ways to launch me on the path to this book, not least by introducing me to the ideal shepherd for the project in the person of my agent, Neil Olson.
Without the memoirs and field reports written by those who took part in the history recounted here, the book would simply not have been possible. I am indebted to the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor and William Stanley Moss, as well as Julian Amery, Harry Brooke, Thomas J. Dunbabin, Xan Fielding, Friedrich August Heydte, John Houseman, George Psychoundakis, and A. M. Rendel, among others. I owe a similar debt to the writers who have told parts of the story from different angles, in particular Antony Beevor, Imogen Grundon, Dylis Powell, and Andrew Tarnowski. Thanks to Tim Todd, author of a Web site devoted to the Kreipe abduction mission (illmetbymoonlight.info), who early on sent me tips on locating SOE-related holdings in the National Archives, and to Tom Sawford, whose blog (patrickleighfermor.wordpress.com) is a rich and constantly evolving resource on the subject. Artemis Cooper, whose biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor was published in the UK not long after I completed the manuscript, deserves special acknowledgment, both for her history of wartime Cairo, without which I could not have written the chapters set at Tara, and for graciously answering my questions about Leigh Fermor.
I am especially grateful to the families whose assistance brought the book’s subjects to life. Gabriella and Hugh Bullock were both kind and helpful beyond description, giving me access to photographs and diaries as they shared their memories of Gabriella’s parents, Billy Moss, and Sophie Tarnowska. Sandy Rendel’s son and granddaughter, Robert Rendel and Tamsin Rendel, were similarly welcoming and unfailingly generous with their archives and their memories. Talking and corresponding with them all was one of the deepest pleasures of writing the book.
I would like to thank the staff and librarians of the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Imperial War Museum, the Firestone Library of Princeton University, the Yale University Library, and the Sarah Lawrence College Library.
Many thanks are also due to editors Charles Conrad, who saw the manuscript through the revision process, Kevin Doughten, who carried it on to publication, and John Glusman, who first brought the book to Crown. Janice Benario, Miriam Chotiner-Gardner, Bill Deresiewicz, Ben Downing, Paul Dry, David Findlay, John Kulka, Alan Levenstein, C. E. Mamalakis, Claire Potter, Hilary Roberts, Pat Willis, and Ben Yagoda all provided important help along the way, as did my parents, who offered encouragement at every step.
Most of all, thanks to my wife, Jessica, who makes everything doable and, along with our daughters, Willa and Alice, worth doing.
Notes
PROLOGUE: WHIMSICAL
1 Its code name … was Whimsical: Details and dialogue from the parachute mission are derived from Cyril Fortune, “Sortie Report,” Feb. 4/5, 1944, AIR 23/1443, National Archives of the UK, and from records in AIR 27/996.
2 gold sovereigns: Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Afterword,” in W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (London: Folio Society, 2001), 204.
3 the Katharo plateau: Leigh Fermor and others have used the name Omalos to refer to the plateau in question. In the years following the war, maps showed both names, Omalos for the southwestern arm of the plateau, Katharo for the northeast. The coordinates given in archival material relating to the drop place are on the Katharo side of the plateau, and I have used that name to distinguish the area from both the so-called Little Omalos to the south and the larger and better known Omalos plateau on the western end of the island.
4 “if he wished to drop”: AIR 23/1443.
5 “There was some terrible finality”: W. Stanley Moss, unpublished diary, Documents.13338, Private Papers of Major I W S Moss MC, Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
6 “Captain found he was”: AIR 23/1443.
7 “Well,” he wrote, “here we are”: Patrick Leigh Fermor to Annette Crean, Feb. 9, 1944, Documents.6433, Private Papers of Mrs A Street, Imperial War Museum.
CHAPTER 1: SHANKS’S MARE
1 “Nice weather for young ducks”: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 22.
2 “I would travel on foot”: Ibid., 19.
3 “Hallelujah I’m a Bum”: The passport episode is recounted in A Time of Gifts at pages 20–21.
4 “a universal smell of rotting timber”: Ibid., 24.
5 “the Stadthouder was twanging”: Ibid.
6 “Leave thy home”: Ibid., 20.
7 “The kingdom had slid away”: Ibid., 25.
8 “an out-and-out naturalist”: Ibid., 10.
9 the elder Leigh Fermor’s work: H. Crookshank and J. B. Auden, “Lewis Leigh Fermor: 1880–1954,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 2 (November 1956): 101–16.
10 The snowflake discovery: Leigh Fermor also recalled that his father had once had a mineral named after him. Sadly, in 2010 fermorite was reclassified as a variety of another mineral and renamed Johnbaumite-M.
11 “Rose of Simla”: Charlotte Mosley, ed., In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor (London: John Murray, 2008), 149.
12 “simultaneously writing plays”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 9.
13 “navigable birdsnests in a gale-wind”: Ibid.
14 “I was left behind”: Ibid., 6.
15 “farmer’s child run wild”: Ibid.
16 “Those marvelously lawless years”: Ibid., 7.
17 “rise at 5 o’clock each morning”: Crookshank and Auden, “Lewis Leigh Fermor,” 101.
18 gardener’s “fearfully pretty” daughter: Mosley, In Tearing Haste, 250.
19 “a mixture of a rather dog-eared romanticism”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 87.
20 Bicycling a few miles: Alan Watts, In My Own Way (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 100.
21 “I knew that plants”: Ibid., 23.
&nb
sp; 22 shoot the tobacco out of a cigarette: Ibid., 19.
23 “in his black gown and mortarboard”: Ibid., 43.
24 “the only really interesting boy”: Ibid., 102.
25 “a fine poet, a born adventurer”: Ibid.
26 “like ectoplasm”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 12.
27 “When utterly oppressed”: Watts, In My Own Way, 10.2–3.
28 “swift and flexible sanctions”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 13.
29 “was constantly being flogged”: Watts, In My Own Way, 103.
30 “He is a dangerous mixture”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 13.
31 “a ravishing, sonnet-begetting beauty”: Ibid., 14.
32 “a comely brunette”: Watts, In My Own Way, 103.
33 “we were sitting in the back-shop”: Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 15.
34 “It was the formal start”: Ibid., 26.
35 “Thank God I had put”: Ibid., 30.
36 “thanks to an effortless mastery”: Ibid., 126.
37 “atrocity stories, farmhouses on fire”: Ibid., 45.
38 In the summer of 1919: In A Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor gives the date as June 18, but he makes it clear that the celebration marked Peace Day, which fell on July 19.