Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (43 page)

Although EAM—ELAS enjoyed nothing like the following it achieved on the mainland, as much through coercion as conviction, on Crete it grew surreptitiously in the larger towns an&, ih .several isolated and impoverished areas of the countryside. Crete- v&totHd be spared the worst ravages of the Greek civil war largely because EOK (the National Organization of Crete), which Xan Fielding had encouraged Nikolaos Skoulas and others to set up, succeeded in bringing together the various non-Communist resistance groups into a surprisingly effective alliance. On Crete, the Communists never managed to employ 'the salami tactic' of slicing off one rival after another.

24

The Year of Change

After the great advances of 1942 to the Volga and deep into Egypt, German self-confidence suddenly flagged following the reverses of Alamein and Stalingrad. A fear that Greece and Crete would be invaded arose in January 1943, some five months before the final surrender of Army Group Afrika in May. The island was reinforced with tanks, motor transport and men at a time when the Russian front was in desperate need of them. Lieutenant Tavana, the Italian counter-espionage officer who later defected to the British, put the figures at 45,000 Germans and 32,000 Italians.

The German command on Crete ordered the mining of bridges and the construction of underground command bunkers. Ammunition stocks were increased. The defences to Suda Bay were further improved. Units were put through street-fighting courses combining infantry, tanks and artillery. The Askifou garrison was trebled to defend the passes from Sphakia. Counter-invasion manoeuvres were practised with mobile columns ready to reinforce threatened sectors. General Bräuer announced: 'We will in the event of an invasion defend Crete to the last man and the last round.'

Bräuer's cliches did little to rouse his men. The innermost German terror was of a Cretan rising in their rear. 'They know the Cretans hate them', wrote one British officer in his report to Cairo, 'and are living for the moment to dig up their rifles and say it with bullets.' And yet at the same time 'the Germans are hurt and puzzled at not being loved, and are constantly asking why'. This accurate observation is astonishing when one reads German regulations for requisitioning and forced labour.

They paid 700 drachma for a day's work, a sum insufficient to buy two eggs, and most scandalously of all, 120 drachma for a cow, just enough to buy a couple of cigarettes. They also resorted to sheep-stealing on a massive scale. No basic provisions came from Germany, so they lived off the captive population.

General Müller, the young and brutal commander of the 22nd Bremen-Sebastopol Division, established a policy of aggressive patrolling to intimidate the population, but German patrols were more frightened than ever in the mountains.

In one village a Cretan who had a German lieutenant billeted on him for the night brought some washing water at dawn, as he had been instructed the night before. When he tried the door there was a clatter as a mug and an enamel basin fell off a chair propped against the door as an alarm. The lieutenant was sitting bolt upright in bed, 'clutching his submachine gun, his eyes popping out of his head'.

Apart from snap arms searches carried out by detachments 50 strong, the Germans mounted cordon and search operations using between 200 and 500 men. They would surround a village during the night, then move in at dawn. The population would be locked in the church or school while floors and gardens were dug up. Many of these raids followed tip-offs from spies, but with merciful frequency their information was not sufficiently detailed or fresh.

In a raid on Alones during the first week of January 1943, they found a wireless battery in the garden of its priest, Father John Alevizakis, a much-loved figure in the resistance. He escaped into the mountains, following the example of the two British wireless operators, but his son was arrested with two compromising letters on him. Meanwhile, Father John's parishioners wasted no time in hiding the charging engine and all the other equipment which the Germans had missed on their first search.

A few days later the Germans raided Asi Gonia in search of George Psychoundakis. This time they brought their informer to the edge of the village hidden in a raincoat.

Another denunciation triggered a German drive in the Apokoronas region round Gournes. Troops surrounded the cheese-hut known as the Beehive which a large group — Paddy Leigh Fermor; Arthur Reade; Sergeant Alec Tarves, the wireless operator; and the two guides, Yanni Tsangarakis and George Psychoundakis — had abandoned only the day before.

From the opposite mountain, the British and Cretans spied the detachments, altogether around two hundred men, searching the area. They decided to split up. Later that morning, Leigh Fermor, Arthur Reade and Yanni Tsangarakis climbed a large snow-laden cypress tree to escape a patrol and had to remain hidden in its branches almost until nightfall, such was the activity of mountain troops around them. This day, 25 January, became known as 'oak apple day' in memory of King Charles IPs rather similar experience, although he had not suffered from such intense cold.

One of the most serious betrayals occurred in the south-west of the island in March. The Germans received word of a caique carrying Cretan officers on their way to join the Greek forces in the Middle East. A patrol craft intercepted and sank it with gunfire some distance off the coast.

With German morale so vulnerable in the early spring of 1943, Dunbabin, Leigh Fermor and Fielding did not let the opportunity to undermine it further slip past. They prepared flysheets to play upon the homesickness and sense of isolation of soldiers.

A particularly ingenious touch was to have these German-language leaflets stamped with swastika-bearing eagles, and messages in Greek asking anyone who found them to hand them immediately to a German soldier. This ensured distribution, protected the local population and enraged officers, who knew they were being made to look foolish.

A graffiti campaign was also mounted. Slogans in German suggestive of a discontented soldiery were painted at night around barracks and guard-posts: 'Scheiss Hitler!'; 'Heil Stalin!' accompanied by a hammer and sickle; 'We Want to Go Home!'; and 'The Führer is a swine!'

Leigh Fermor proposed another leaflet:

Germans!

You have now been two years in our island and your rule has been the blackest stain on the pages of your already besmirched history. You have proved yourselves unfit to be considered as a civilized race, and infinitely worse than the Turks, who were noble enemies and men of honour.

You have proved yourselves savages, and as such you will be treated.

But not yet.

Wherever you go, Cretan eyes follow you. Unseen watchers dog your footsteps. When you eat and when you drink, when you wake and when you sleep, we are watching you.

Remember!

The long Cretan knife makes no sound when it strikes between the shoulder blades. Your time is running out.

The hour of vengeance is drawing near.

Very near.

Black Dimitiri Archegos of Central Crete

The Germans, on the other hand, realizing that propaganda could not win Cretans over, tried at least to achieve a degree of neutrality in the event of a British landing. Diatribes were aimed less at the British and concentrated instead on Communists as the enemy of all true Cretans.

The German command, influenced by events in Russia, may well have seen ELAS as the greater long-term threat; it must also have realized that to try to turn the Cretans against the British was a waste of time. In any case, it clearly hoped to create a split in the resistance movement.

After the war, a conspiracy theory developed in left-wing circles that the British officers in Crete had set out to destroy the Communists from the beginning. In fact British officers on numerous occasions had done their best to prevent an open breach between Venizelist groups and EAM—ELAS. They did not really dislike General Mandakas, the most senior Cretan officer to throw in his lot with the Left.

One British officer thought Mandakas, whose character combined great caution and great ambition, 'a nice old boy': his great problem was that he thought he could bend ELAS to his own will.

Nick Hammond, who later encountered him on the mainland when he became 'minister of war' in the stalking-horse government set up by the Communists, described him as 'large, bluff and ponderous in conversation'. Mandakas was almost certainly telling the truth when he said he was not a Communist himself, although he collaborated closely with the Party. (The Greek Communist Party's surprisingly effective fiction on the mainland that EAM and ELAS were independent coalitions was never repeated very seriously on Crete.)

The Communists, realizing that General Mandakas, although a valuable prize, would never make a sufficiently charismatic leader, decided to win over to their cause Manoli Bandouvas. Bandouvas already had a large popular following in the mountain villages of Heraklion province and amongst those peasants most likely to distrust EAM-ELAS.

On the surface his recruitment appeared a likely way of increasing Communist influence, but outsiders picked and promoted in this way tended to turn against the Party later with embarrassing results. The British Military Mission was, nevertheless, disturbed at this development.

'By dint of hard work, clever guidance and unscrupulous methods, the LOLLARDS [informal code for Communists] have succeeded in playing a far larger part in Cretan affairs than their numbers entitle them to. They have succeeded in hooking a General and Crete's one guerrilla leader — both of them large fish — and have thrown up a smokescreen of high military sponsorship in the one and patriotic peasant support in the other.'

The British, ironically, were then wrong-footed by Bandouvas, not by the Communists. Hoping to appeal to his vanity, they said that GHQ Middle East wished to consult with him. This, it was thought, would give him a breather away from Communist influence, and in any case he had requested a break in Egypt not long before. But Bandouvas smelt a rat: he had quarrelled bitterly with Dunbabin the previous year over the distribution of weapons, and he no doubt sensed that Leigh Fermor was about the only British officer who had a soft spot for him. (The jealousy of Petrakageorgis, his rival kapitan in the region, is said to have caused a good deal of the trouble.) Bandouvas accordingly set up a meeting to ensure that this proposal was repeated in front of key witnesses. He then refused the offer with a grand declaration that his place was with his men in the field. He turned to the Cretan officers present and asked whether they did not think so too. They had no alternative but to agree. Bandouvas, who made sure that the story spread rapidly, no doubt with a few dramatic embellishments, secured himself a triumph in the eyes of his peasant supporters: the British generals in Cairo waited upon his every word, yet he preferred to stay on the island with his fellow Cretans.

But the British Military Mission did not give up. To wean Bandouvas away from Communist influence, they then bestowed upon him the grandiloquent title 'Chief of
Francs-Tireurs
of the Province of Heraklion'. (Bandouvas dropped the last part to make it sound pan-Cretan.) This new nomenclature appealed to him so much that when King George of the Hellenes, the Communists' favourite figure of hate, sent a message of greeting to the Cretan resistance on the prompting of SOE Cairo, Bandouvas (the Communists' great hope) immediately prepared a loyal reply in his new dignity. 'As Chief of
Francs-Tireurs,
I ask you to forward our thanks by telegraph and say that we are inseparably bound to him, grouped spiritually and materially at his side with all our might to strike the satanic wolf.'

In April, the Communists committed their greatest political blunder of the whole occupation. They summoned a pan-Cretan conference at Karines to which they invited representatives of all the Cretan groups, but no British officers.

On discovering this exclusion, Major Christos Tsiphakis, the Cretan officer who had directed the defence of Rethymno, promptly refused to take part and left. None of the other groups boycotted the meeting, which was fortunate for the British as things turned out: otherwise they might have missed the Communists' greatest political gaffe of the war.

Amongst the resolutions to be debated, two in particular were ill-chosen. The first was roundly anti-British; the second read: 'That Greece renounces all claims to Northern Epirus, Thrace and certain parts of Macedonia as they are not ethnically Greek.'

For patriots, this avowal of the international Communist policy of a separate state of Macedonia (something EAM on the mainland wisely did not mention) was outrageous treason. The meeting ended in uproar, and Communist hopes of an alliance with the Nationalist EOK — which they presumably intended to manipulate and one day dominate — were irretrievably broken.

After the Communist debacle, the Nationalist EOK was able to hold its first pan-Cretan meeting at Prines on 15 June in an optimistic mood. Political representatives and military commanders were appointed for the four main provinces — Canea, Rethymno, Heraklion and Lasithi.

The resistance in the Canea area lacked a military leader but had an administrative structure. Many of its members already held official positions under the German authorities while secretly assisting the Allies. This made them a sort of local government-in-waiting. Their most prominent figure was Nikolaos Skoulas, the Mayor of Canea: he would soon have to flee into the mountains despite his advanced age. And amongst the younger generation, Constantinos Mitsotakis, Manoussos Manoussakis and Mikhaili Botonakis worked with the Quins' intelligence network run by Marko Spanoudakis.

At that time, there were no guerrilla groups operating in the immediate vicinity of Canea — a deliberate policy to avoid reprisals — and the bands soon to form in the south of the province would be too far away for any form of effective liaison.

In the province of Rethymno, Major Tsiphakis had set up a resistance network, bringing together very different political tendencies — Venizelist, Communist and monarchist — almost immediately after the fall of Crete. But the Communists' blunder at Karines led to their exclusion.