Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (47 page)

In the same period, twenty-four of their soldiers were killed.

Perkins by now had a very effective guerrilla force. They were well armed after three parachute drops, and strengthened by men from the destroyed villages: the Selino district became dangerous for the Germans that autumn. Skirmishes, following the ambush of patrols, continued into the second week of October. They culminated on 18 October with a battle at Akhlada.

Akhlada is a tiny plain in the mountains two hours above Koustoyerako. The shepherds from the village had cheese-making huts there, solidly built in stone and without windows. The place had been used for some of the parachute drops and so German patrols visited it frequently.

Kiwi Perkins had an inspired idea for an ambush. Having picked his ground with great care, he and the Seliniots waited in position for an approaching patrol to enter their trap. Antoni Paterakis manned the Bren gun, a weapon with which he achieved fame, and on Kiwi's signal opened fire as the patrol of nineteen Germans and three Italians reached the cheese huts.

The immediate reaction of soldiers coming under fire is to seek cover first and fight back later. Since the cheese huts offered the only protection from the bursts of fire, they threw themselves inside, forgetting that these huts had no windows. Perkins, while the rest of the band took aim on the entrances, slipped from hut to hut rolling a grenade into each. He waited after pulling out each pin, so that the Germans inside would not have time to throw them back, and any who tried to escape were cut down by the Seliniots. Only two members of the band were wounded: Perkins, who had a bullet lodged beside a shoulder-blade, and another member of the band, Manolis Tzatzimakis, more seriously hurt.

The soldiers who surrendered fared no better than their dead comrades. They were taken to the band's hideout. There was no chance of sending this batch of prisoners out by sea to Egypt: after such a large engagement the Seliniots expected the whole area to be sealed off. Next morning the band drew lots.

It fell to Antoni Paterakis and one other to deal with them.

They took the prisoners further up the mountain to a pothole at a place called Tafkos. Antoni Paterakis steeled himself with memories of how ruthless the Germans had been to captured
andartes.

The prisoners tied together in a line realized what their fate was as they shuffled forward to the edge of the drop. Paterakis intended to shoot them there, then roll the bodies in afterwards, but the first German to be shot staggered backwards and fell into the hole. He dragged the next man with him, and so on until all had disappeared.

Although the hole was well over a hundred feet deep, some of the Germans survived the fall. Perkins, in spite of the wound received the day before, volunteered to go down to finish them off, but Antoni Paterakis insisted on doing it himself. He was lowered down on a rope improvised out of parachute tapes, but it broke and he too fell. Paterakis's fate appalled all those at the top. His father broke into lamentations until it became clear that he was still alive, albeit with a damaged back. Trapped in this human snakepit of his own making, he heard one of the Germans whisper to him: 'And now, Greco, we will die together.'

Perkins finally persuaded the others to lower him down. He reached the bottom safely, finished off the surviving Germans and, with Paterakis strapped across his own wounded back, had himself hauled to the surface. Afterwards the bullet was removed from Perkins's back with a large Cretan knife. This act of rescue made him a national hero. From then on he was known as 'the unforgettable Vasili'. Antoni Paterakis survived his injuries. He was evacuated by motor launch and treated in a Cairo hospital. But Manolis Tzatzimakis had to be smuggled into Canea for treatment where he was betrayed to the Germans and shot.*

During the course of the year the military hierarchy on Crete was formalized. Tom Dunbabin became a lieutenant colonel commanding the British Military Mission. Xan Fielding, responsible for the west of the island, was promoted to major at the age of 25. Not long afterwards, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who was in charge of eastern Crete, was also promoted to major; he was 28. This was part of Keble's ambitious plan which created almost eighty SOE missions in the Balkans by October 1943.

The original SOE officers scattered around the Balkans thus found themselves reshuffled and upgraded. Their only consolation was rapid promotion. This rank inflation was intended mainly to give them weight in dealing with local guerrilla groups, and partly to increase the rank pyramid from below, thus raising Keble on the freshly crowned and pipped shoulders of others.

* Another action, carried out by another band, must have taken place at about the same time because forty-two Germans died between 18 and 22 October.

The over-rapid growth in British Military Missions had not been matched by a similar increase in the number of cypherenes. Only the Cretan section managed to cope because Jack Smith-Hughes and his officers took over the decoding work when the quantity of messages increased. For the Greek section, on the other hand, the situation became disastrous. Officers in the field were furious. They found it almost impossible to extract replies, and they suspected that any attempt to pass back information was a waste of time. The cypherenes, mainly South Africans renowned for their glamour — this was not just the fantasy of men too long in the field, staff officers in Cairo admitted that they were picked for their looks — bore the brunt of the outraged and often obscene messages.

Nobody with any experience of Keble could trust a distant headquarters run by such a man. Anyone who stood in his way or objected to his methods was either bullied into submission or, in one or two cases, such as Arthur Reade, subjected to a campaign of vilification. Eventually Bolo Keble picked on the wrong man. Furious that Churchill had appointed Fitzroy Maclean to head the British Military Mission to Tito without reporting to him, he resorted to a campaign of lies that Maclean was an untrustworthy, drunken homosexual. When news of this attempt to blacken Maclean's character reached General-Wilson, Keble's extraordinary career with SOE came to an abrupt end.

The other contribution to that year's annual upheaval was the political row building up with the Foreign Office over mainland Greece. This burst upon a remarkably ill-informed and unimaginative officialdom when Brigadier Myers, the leader of the British Military Mission in Greece, brought a delegation of
andartes
back to Cairo. EAM—ELAS and non-Communist representatives alike emphasized in blunt terms that King George II should not consider returning to Greece without a plebiscite on the future of the monarchy. The Foreign Office and the Greek government-in-exile were furious that such an embarrassing revelation should have been allowed to take place.

Myers was made the scapegoat for this contradiction between ossified assumptions and the political reality within Greece. The story on the mainland that the British had parachuted left-footed boots to the left-wing groups of ELAS and the right foot to EDES to cause trouble is appropriate, however apocryphal. British policy towards Greece was less a Machiavellian conspiracy than a sequence of blunders resulting from ignorance, arrogance, muddled thinking, lack of imagination and refusal to listen.

The head of SOE Cairo, Lord Glenconner, also suffered from the effects of Myers's unwelcome honesty and Keble's flagrant dishonesty, when General 'Jumbo' Wilson decided that SOE Cairo was

'rotten to the core'. Keble was returned to 'routine duties' and after a short interregnum under Major General W.A.M. Stawell, Brigadier Karl Barker-Benfield took Keble's place.

The new military director, a decent and guileless man with a quiet manner, could hardly have been more different from his predecessor. The Greek Communists on the mainland identified his character with hawk-like accuracy when he made a tour of inspection the following year and they played him accordingly. In Crete there was less of a political trap, so section officers regarded him more with amusement than exasperation.

Barker-Benfield, who had in Monty Woodhouse's description 'a shiny round head, almost completely bald, and a strangely Teutonic accent', inspired in Jack Smith-Hughes the whim that his real name was Barcke von Bohnenfeld. This later developed into a running joke based on the notion that the German Colonel Barge (pronounced Barcke) who took command of Festungsdivision 133 in Canea was really the long-lost twin brother of Brigadier Karl Barker-Benfield, the commander of Force 133.

In Crete, British officers were determined to maintain a
modus vivendi
with EAM—ELAS which would prevent civil war. On the night of 7 November, Xan Fielding set up the first major meeting between representatives of EAM and EOK since the row at Karines in the spring. This took place in the hills behind Canea near Therisso, where Venizelos had set up his revolutionary headquarters in the rebellion of 1905. Fielding arrived escorted by his guide and valued counsellor, Pavlo Vernadakis.

The Mayor of Canea, Nikolaos Skoulas, led the EOK delegation and General Mandakas and Miltiades Porphyroyennis were the EAM—ELAS representatives.

Fielding, having set the agenda, claims to have drifted off to sleep from exhaustion after the march across the mountains, but he has always played down his role in the non-aggression pact which was eventually reached. Skoulas, who had made a dramatic scene before the meeting demanding 'What will history say if I sign an agreement with the Communists?', then told the colonel of gendarmerie to sign on his behalf along with Constantinos Mitsotakis. The agreement, once signed, was generally kept, unlike on the mainland. And many Cretans believe that this first step helped save the island from the worst effects of civil war. After fourteen months in the field Xan Fielding went back to Cairo.

During his time in Egypt, he came to the conclusion that there would now never be an Allied invasion of Crete. Since he was bilingual in French, having been brought up in France, he would be of more use there.

Fielding's replacement, Dennis Ciclitira, a captain in the South Staffords, arrived just before Christmas. Ciclitira had been Jack Smith-Hughes's very competent staff officer on the Cretan desk since October 1942, but so far the nearest he had come to work in the field was as conducting officer on clandestine crossings from Derna. Tired of the sneers which Cairo-bound officers tended to receive from their operational counterparts, Ciclitira had volunteered to take over from Xan Fielding when he next came out for a rest. A short time after the handover, his appointment was made permanent by Fielding's transfer.

Although his family was of Greek origin, Ciclitira played it down mainly because Cretans instinctively distrusted Greeks from outside. But Ciclitira did not warm to the Cretans, and his rather scathing tongue did little to conceal the fact.

The western area of Crete which he took over had two radio sets: one down in the Selmo area with Kiwi Perkins, and the other at Asi Gonia, which was to be his base for the first few months. Ciclitira's relationship with Perkins was not an easy one. He was amazed that the Cretans should regard the New Zealander as a hero, mainly as a result of his rescue of Antoni Paterakis from the pothole, and he found it difficult to accept that they should consider a sergeant as their natural leader.

A clash of wills followed. Ciclitira believed that Perkins was causing 'more trouble than it was worth'

down in the south-west, and gave orders for his return to Cairo. Perkins, determined to fight on until the end with the Seliniots, refused to leave the island. The dispute was resolved in a tragic manner at the end of February 1944. Perkins, on his way to see Ciclitira near Asi Gonia, met his death in a German ambush.

26

The Abduction of General Kreipe

Just before the end of 1943, Sandy Rendel in the Lasithi mountains received a message from Tom Dunbabin that Paddy Leigh Fermor would be dropping by parachute into his area with a team. They were coming from Brindisi to kidnap a German general.

The idea had first been raised in June 1942 when General Andrae, the Commander of the Fortress of Crete, following the example of General Ringel, had ordered Manoussos Manoussakis to take him on an ibex hunt in the White Mountains. Manoussakis had tipped off Marko Spanoudakis, the leader of the Quins network, and he had discussed plans with Xan Fielding. SOE Cairo had approved the project, but even with Manoussakis's help it was virtually impossible to organize. In any case the expedition was called off halfway through when news of Jellicoe's raid arrived and Andrae's authority was required for the execution of the prisoners in Heraklion. Now the kidnap idea was raised again.

After several postponements, the drop was fixed for the night of 4 February 1944 on to the Katharo plateau, Leigh Fermor was the first to jump, but then as the aeroplane made a wide circuit — the dropping zone was too small for more than one at a time and Leigh Fermor was to signal the all clear with a torch for the second run — the clouds suddenly closed in. The watchers below could hear the aeroplane continuing to circle in vain, then finally fly away southwards over the sea.

Paddy Leigh Fermor holed up with Sandy Rendel in his cave above Tapais. The next few weeks became an infuriating sequence of confused signals to and from Cairo. Seven drops were aborted at the last moment. Inevitably, this activity and the overflights soon attracted German attention. On the assumption that a strong raiding force had landed in the area, the fifty-strong garrison at Kritsa was doubled. It was some consolation when two German patrols encountered each other in the dark and fought it out, leaving two of their number dead and several wounded.

Soon after Leigh Fermor's arrival, an anti-traitor squad from Bandouvas's gang — the one with the fair-haired young Cretan in German uniform — turned up very pleased with themselves. They had caught a notorious traitor with the same old tactic, and flourished the paper from the German authorities which their prisoner had promptly handed over. In the absence of their kapitan in Cairo, they sought out Rendel and Leigh Fermor, who consented to the execution but sent some of their own men along to ensure that there was no unnecessary suffering. This was a bad time for traitors in Crete.