by Dilys Powell
Luckily for the mission this difficult period coincided with the good weather. At least they could sleep out of doors; Tom speaks gratefully of a threshing-floor near the village of St John. And they had plenty of grapes to eat. The admirable schoolmaster Kokonas, for instance, made over the fruit of a vine luxuriant enough to climb over the branches of three plane trees. Nevertheless it was a time of hardship, ‘a season of skulking about’. Tom’s breeches were out at knees and seat. And there was the question of Tom’s boots.
The last boat to come in before the sea-link with North Africa and Cairo was cut brought in Patrick (or as he is familiarly called Paddy) Leigh Fermor, who ‘landed characteristically among a crowd of bewhiskered Cretan patriots foiled in the attempt to leave the perils of Crete to serve their country in the Middle East’. Tom adds that the first few days of the new arrival ‘were worthy of the best spy story’. Certainly anybody who travels in Crete will hear tales of the exploits of Paddy Leigh Fermor; and the name, always surrounded with the aura of adventure, often recurs in Tom’s memories. For instance in connection with the boots problem.
Soon after Paddy had landed a conference was arranged. It was to be held at Yerakari – ‘Lotus-Land was the best place for a conference’; and Xan Fielding (whose name also one can still hear spoken with respect in Crete, especially in the White Mountains where he was stationed) ‘came gladly from his rugged and hungry western hills to spend a few days in this leafy valley’. Whether he had durable footwear of his own the story does not say; boots at that time were more precious than gold, and the few the British brought in went nowhere among their helpers. At any rate Tom and Paddy between them had only one sound pair which they took it in turns to wear. ‘I crippled myself over those boots, marching in a pair too small for me when Paddy borrowed the good pair.’
In spite of the bad news from North Africa the meeting seems to have been a happy occasion. It was the season for Yerakari cherries. The visitors as they went through the orchards were offered handfuls of fruit, and they carried on their discussions sitting under the trees with huge baskets beside them. Only long afterwards did Tom hear what had been going on in the village. The rumour was that the British were meeting to discuss giving themselves up. Had it come to that the schoolmasters of the region were resolved themselves to shelter the three officers, passing them if necessary from village to village, house to house.
No wonder that Tom would always look back with nostalgia on the Amari country and the slopes of Kedros which shaded the valley and ‘the hundred and one springs, a hundred known to men and the hundred and first, if one could find it, the water of immortality’. Amusing to note that whatever he may have thought about Zeus’s cave on Ida he could not, even in the years of his dangerous wanderings, neglect the antiquities of his lotus-land. Most of the known archaeological sites may have been, as he says, discovered by Pendlebury or by that distinguished native of Yerakari, Manolaki. But long afterwards Tom was to write in a learned periodical:
It is ill gleaning after Pendlebury, but I had the opportunity during the war of seeing a number of unrecorded sites and casual finds. These I put on record as a small contribution to the archaeology of Crete, and as a token of gratitude to my hospitable Amari friends.
And amidst his archaeological preoccupations he was still recalling the cool shade of the villages with their crop of apples and cherries; and ‘the cheeses of Ida and Kedros, second to none in Crete’; and the charm of Yerakari and of that Ano Meros of which in his earlier, pencilled account he had written that
… the houses had handsome balconies and vine-covered arbours, and the villagers were so hospitable that they plucked you by the sleeve as you walked down the narrow street, to come in and drink a glass of wine with them. I think it was the most beautiful village in Crete. Certainly it was at sunset on a long summer evening, sitting outside the doctor’s house, drinking his wine called Satanas (because it was so insidious) and watching the last rays fade on the bare summit of Ida which rose immediately opposite.
Some months after their first conference in Amari Tom and Paddy and Xan Fielding were together at Yerakari again. It was the Christmas of 1942. The news from North Africa was by now more encouraging. Anyway the Germans were busy celebrating their own Christmas, and the British party could relax some of their security precautions and take a holiday. They made their way ‘village by village and house by house’ from Yerakari to Ano Meros, where they slept and where by day they went about calling on their friends. The visit turned into a four-day feast which ‘called for great strength of digestion’ and ended at the priest’s house with the singing of the British, Greek and French national anthems, the Red Flag and, in lieu of the American anthem, which nobody knew, ‘John Brown’s Body’ ‘with variations’.
That was the best, the gayest, perhaps the most carefree display of Amari hospitality.
Two years later all these beautiful villages were a heap of ruins. The Germans destroyed them a little before they withdrew, and killed many of our friends.
ii
At the time with which Tom’s fragmentary manuscript deals life for the British mission in Crete, in spite of occasional feasting, was pretty Spartan. In a country where rumour has wings indeed and may fly into the wrong ears they could not risk staying for long in one place. They had to move often and choose not the well-known hiding places but caves within caves, clefts in the gorges known only to the shepherds.
Once with winter coming they contrived a wall to enclose the space under an overhanging rock. The doorway was just big enough to crawl through, and the last man in shut it by pulling a thorn-bush after him. Snowed up for three days, they were sustained by visits from shepherds and friendly villagers who came to bring gifts of food and drink – and to hear what news there was. The messages over the radio were nearly all the cave had to offer. There was not much the British could do that year. They could collect information about the enemy. And they could spread the news from outside; ‘it gave everyone a thrill to handle a forbidden news-sheet, ill-copied through many hands’. But at least the British were there, present.
The mere knowledge that, somewhere in the mountains, there were English in the island was of great encouragement to all good Cretans, whether they saw us or not, whether we did much or little or nothing; we were surely credited with powers and activities which greatly surprised us when we heard of them.
Though life was Spartan it was also quiet, for the British at any rate. There might be an occasional excitement. An enemy search-light, for instance, was installed at Tymbaki, not far from the spot where a British submarine was that very day expected to call; waiting for the rendezvous and eating a picnic lunch brought by the local women, Tom and his party learned that the German commander of Tymbaki airfield had invited himself to a picnic lunch with the mayor (a British supporter) on the other side of the village. But for the time being the mountains, and Tom was chiefly concerned with mountain areas, saw little of the enemy.
The German soldier peopled the high mountains, and many of the mountain villages, with regiments of British and partisans. If he had to go there, he let off a volley to warn these dangerous people to get out of the way.
The terrible punitive expeditions which stained the island with fire and blood came later; Tom’s manuscript breaks off before they took place.
Meanwhile the servants of the Villa Ariadne were scattered. Maria was at Katalagari; beyond Arkhanes and the German military headquarters, it was the village to which Manolaki had sent his family for temporary safety. Kosti had withdrawn a few miles farther south to Alagni, where he had property. Manoli had gone to his home in the Lasithi district, which at the start had been mainly Italian-occupied, and there he waited with his wife Ourania for better times. Not that he was inactive. He served as a liaison man. Once, carrying a message to a hide-out in a cave and finding Tom there, he fell on his knees and kissed the well-remembered hands. He told me long afterwards that he would have joined the guerillas, but he was gent
ly refused. In the mountains, Tom had said to him (and Manoli quoted the phrase), ‘You are hunted as the dog hunts the hare.’ Ourania, naturally enough, was anyway against the idea. ‘What was I to do,’ she said, smiling comfortably in the days of peace, ‘what was I to do, a woman all alone?’
For three years the Villa surrendered its quiet to the invaders. The German general in residence drove up in the morning to his headquarters, drove back in the evening to dine at home. It is unlikely that he suspected with what curiosity and precision his timetable was noted and checked.
It was in Cairo during the winter of 1943–44 that an impudent plan was hatched by Patrick Leigh Fermor, on leave after eighteen months in the Cretan mountains, and a young captain in the Coldstream Guards who had never been in the island, William Stanley Moss. Obviously it is not for me to write in more than bare outline about the Kreipe episode; the actors themselves have that copyright. Patrick Leigh Fermor, while his books on the mainland are known to everyone concerned with literature about Greece, has not yet told his own Cretan story. Stanley Moss, however, would write in Ill-Met by Moonlight a personal account, and on his book I gratefully rely for the main part of my recapitulation.
The story has a peculiar irony: the central figure was not the one originally intended. The character cast by the British for the rôle was that General Müller whose involuntary hospitality Micky Akoumianakis had briefly enjoyed. Much decorated by the Nazi hierarchy, he was hated in Crete; he had been guilty of many of the atrocities inflicted on the population during the Occupation. By the beginning of 1944 the Allies had encouraging news to report, and the Cretans could no longer feel, as they had felt when Tom was making his first contacts, that Hitler was having things all his own way. Still, the Germans were in military control of the island and a successful local uprising was out of the question. In concert, then, with Cretan patriots Leigh Fermor and Moss decided to make a show. They would prove that the enemy hold was weakening. They would abduct General Müller.
Paddy parachuted back into Crete two months before his partner who, having made no fewer than twelve abortive attempts by air, finally came by sea; like nearly all the British and Greeks who came secretly into Crete by water, he landed in the south. Along the coast from Sphakia to Tsoutsoura at the eastern end of the Asterousia Mountains small beaches had been marked down, rocky, isolated, unguarded; Micky Akoumianakis, who with Cretan helpers was involved in the choice, says that about one hundred landings were safely made during the Occupation. ‘We never’, he writes of this extraordinary Anglo-Greek co-operation, ‘had a failure in that kind of work.’ Meanwhile the organisation of Stanley Moss’s reception, as of Paddy’s, was the responsibility of A. M. Rendel. In civilian life since the war Sandy Rendel has been diplomatic correspondent of The Times; but then, with the Lasithi area as his province, he was engaged in the same kind of activities as Tom and Xan Fielding and the rest of the British mission.
A disappointment awaited Stanley Moss. The date was April 4; there had been a change in the enemy dispositions. General Müller had been replaced, and the plan for his capture could not go through. A substitute, however, was available. General Kreipe had just come from the Russian front. He was a regular soldier; he was innocent of the atrocities which marked the career of his predecessor. Otherwise circumstances had not changed. Like Müller, General Kreipe lived in the Villa Ariadne, like him drove up every day to the headquarters in Arkhanes and drove back in the evening to his living quarters. The psychological value of the Leigh Fermor-Moss operation would be to demonstrate that a German general, any German general, could be snatched from the garrison of Hitler’s Fortress of Crete.
The operation concerned not only Paddy and Stanley Moss as chief kidnappers, not only Sandy Rendel as reception organiser, but various others among the British in Crete. Xan Fielding, as it happened, was absent from the island at the time. Whether Tom Dunbabin approved of the plan I very much doubt; level-headed, he may have feared the consequences for the Cretans; but his name, at any rate, recurs in the story. Without their Cretan supporters the British would have been helpless; and here the Akoumianakis family come once more into the record.
As British agent in Herakleion Micky was essential to the abduction party; and since he lived at Knossos he could watch at close quarters the comings and goings at the Villa. He provided the disguises – the uniforms of a couple of German military policemen – necessary for the plan; he brought along his second in command, Elias Athanasakis (nephew of Maria from the Villa) with a signalling scheme which made the whole adventure practicable. He was not the only member of the Akoumianakis family to take part. Phyllia, who three years earlier had climbed the hill to find the body of her father, was a courageous observer; gossiping with the German soldiers at the Villa, she gleaned information; she it was who noted the timetable of the General’s car. But the catalogue of helpers is too long for this summary. I must keep as far as I can to the names and the stories of people I know.
General Kreipe was usually driven down from Arkhanes between eight and nine o’clock in the evening. Two or three miles south of the Villa Ariadne the Arkhanes road joined another road running north to Herakleion; here embankments and ditches gave cover, and the intersection compelled any driver to slow down.
On April 26, 1944 Paddy and Stanley Moss, both in the uniform of German military police, together with a group of Cretans hid at the junction. A few hundred yards up the Arkhanes road there was rising ground. Here Micky and Elias Athanasakis were posted. They were to signal to the main position with a torch when they saw the General’s car coming; to make sure, another man was to pass on the warning by flashing a second torch. It was eight o’clock when the party took up their stations. The spring night was cold; it grew dark. By nine o’clock there was still no sign; anxiety mounted. Then at nine-thirty the torch flashed. Paddy and Stanley Moss climbed out of their hiding-place and stood in the road. The car, headlamps blazing, came down the slope and paused at the junction. Moss held a traffic signal; Paddy, flashing a red lamp, cried Halt!
The car stopped. We walked forward rather slowly, and as we passed the beam of the headlamps we drew our ready-cocked pistols from behind our backs and let fall the life-preservers from our wrists.
As we came level with the doors of the car Paddy asked ‘Ist dies das General’s Wagen?’
There came a muffled ‘Ja, ja’ from inside.
In a few minutes it was all over. The doors of the car were pulled open. The struggling General and his chauffeur (who was coshed as he tried to reach his gun) were dragged out. Moss jumped into the driver’s seat; the General, with three Cretans holding him, was shoved into the back; Paddy, wearing the General’s hat, sat in the passenger’s front seat; and off they drove, leaving the rest of the Cretan party in charge of the chauffeur. Micky, not a bloodthirsty man, has more than once told me with an expression of horror that the unfortunate man was killed; how, I have never liked to ask.
For the kidnappers the dangers were only beginning. To get past the Villa Ariadne, where the sentries were starting to open the gates for the General’s return, was easy; Moss sounded the horn and without slackening pace drove on amidst startled salutes. But Herakleion itself had to be crossed. It is a fair-sized town, and there were the control posts along the road to be negotiated. Cretans telling me about the exploit have given numbers ranging from thirteen to thirty. Actually, Moss writes, there were twenty-two. He drove up to each slowly to let the sentry recognise the official car, then accelerated. Paddy in the General’s hat smoked a cigarette in the front seat; the three Cretans crouched in the back; and the General at critical moments was hidden on the floor. A few times a bar across the road forced a halt. But nobody ventured a challenge; on the contrary, the car was everywhere saluted. There was a tense moment when at the approach to the city exit by the western gate with its anti-tank blocks the man on duty instead of stepping aside stood his ground and came towards the passenger’s window. Paddy forestalled him. In German ‘The Ge
neral’s car!’ he called out. And the kidnappers drove on: out of Herakleion, westward across the coastal plain, uphill through the moonlit night along the twisting highroad towards Rethymnon.
They were about twenty miles from Herakleion when they stopped. It was time for the party to split up. Paddy with one of the Cretans was to drive on, ditch the car and leave in it a letter saying that reprisals would be unjustified since the capture had been carried out by ‘a British raiding force’. Moss and the two remaining Cretans set off on foot with the General. Stumbling in the dark, struggling all night across trackless country, they made their way southwards towards their first objective, the village of Anoyia in the northern foothills of Mount Ida.
Moss says that the next stage of the abduction was hampered by ill-luck. Pamphlets in Greek and German were to be dropped in Crete saying, like the letter left in the car, that the General’s capture was the work of a British party. The weather was bad and the pamphlets were not dropped.
German threats of reprisals were prompt; if the distinguished victim was not returned in three days all ‘rebel villages’ in the Herakleion district would be razed to the ground. A few days later, however, Micky, rejoining the main party, was able to report that the villages were still standing; it was two months later that Anoyia was murderously destroyed – as a result, it has been said, of some quite different action. Indeed it has been maintained that the Kreipe kidnapping did not bring retribution on Cretan heads, that it was to that extent innocent. Not all the islanders were convinced. ‘Someone had to pay,’ a taxi-driver in Herakleion once said to me – though he laughed as he described the exploit itself. ‘If such things are done someone must always pay – not those who do the deed, but the women, those who are left behind, they pay. Someone must always pay.’