Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (49 page)

They moved in the direction of the beach near Saktouria, but bad news awaited them at Ayia Paraskevi. German troops had swamped the area and a strong force occupied the exit beach. Paddy Leigh Fermor immediately headed for Dick Barnes's hideout to the north to arrange another spot. But that this was a 'hideous coincidence' did not become clear until next day. The Germans had only just heard that an arms run had been made by caique on the night of 20 April, and that thirty mule-loads of weapons had reached band in the interior of the island. German anger had also been roused by Petrakageorgis's attack over Easter, which killed eight of their men.

In horror, the party listened to the dull explosions of dynamite and watched the palls of black smoke as four villages were destroyed during those first four days of May 1944. These reprisals were not in fact connected with the Kreipe operation, as the proclamation published on 5 May in the German-dominated newspaper
Paratiritis
makes clear. Kreipe's abduction was only mentioned in another article as part of a catalogue of crimes committed against the occupation forces.

NOTIFICATION

The villages of Kamares, Lokhria, Margarikari and Saktouria and the neighbouring parts of the Nome of Heraklion have been destroyed and extinguished. The men have been taken prisoner and the women and children moved to other villages.

These villagers had offered shelter and protection for months to Communist bands under the leadership of mercenary individuals. At the same time the peaceable part of the population is equally guilty because they failed to report these treasonable practices.

Bandits frequented the Saktouria region with the support of the population and transported arms, supplies and terrorists, and concealed them there. Kamares and Lokhria gave refuge and food to the bandits. At Margarikari, which also supplied them with shelter and supplies, the traitor and agitator Petrakageorgis celebrated Easter without any interference from the inhabitants.

Cretans listen carefully! Know your real enemies! Defend yourselves against the murderers of your compatriots and the robbers of your flocks. For some time the German Armed Forces have been aware of these rebellious acts, and the population has always been warned and informed of this.

But our patience is exhausted. The blade of the German sword now strikes the guilty ones, and in future will smite each and every person who is guilty of links with the bandits and their English instigators.

According to another statement German troops had searched the village of Lokhria on 14 March and found ammunition and weapons including an American machine gun. Kamares had been 'the refuge and shelter for hundreds of armed men', while Margarikari, 'the home of the arch-bandit Petrakageorgis', had demonstrated its anti-German sentiments by turning out
en masse
when 'the funeral of the arch-bandit's mother, conducted by five priests, took place with great pomp'.

The unfortunate coincidences had been been more extensive than Leigh Fermor and his companions realized. On 29 April, a German patrol from the small coastal garrison of Plakias (less than twenty-five kilometres west of Saktouria) arrested three shepherds for grazing their flocks within the forbidden coastal strip. The local band of
andartes
from Rodakino ambushed the Germans escorting the three shepherds, two of whom were immediately shot by their captors. In this short, but bloody action, the
andartes
killed five soldiers and captured the other two. According to German records these two soldiers were shot the next day. A Cretan source claims that they were sent to Egypt as prisoners by boat two days later, but this seems unlikely considering the failed attempts to get General Kreipe off the island at that time.

The Kreipe party had no option but to strike back inland away from such commotions, and they took the General to a sheepfold above Yerakari. They then proceeded westwards across the waist of Crete, moving from one mountain hideout to the next. The going was slow, for the General had fallen from his mule down a rock-face and had hurt his shoulder.

On 7 May contact was finally made with Barnes and Stockbridge. Signals were sent to Cairo, and next morning a runner brought a message back from one of the wireless sets to say that a covering force from the Special Boat Squadron led by George Jellicoe would land to cover their evacuation.

The very last stretch of the journey almost resembled a triumphal procession.
Andartes
and villagers alike lined the sheep path to see the General. Literally hundreds knew of his whereabouts, yet the Germans never received word through their spies. An eleventh-hour complication occurred when a detachment of soldiers occupied the beach at Limni chosen for the embarkation. Fortunately, Dennis Ciclitira had moved closer with his wireless set, and details were rearranged for the beach near Rodakino.

Finally, at eleven o'clock on the night of 14 May, a motor launch commanded by Brian Coleman nosed its way in towards the beach in answer to their Morse recognition signal. The SBS covering force commanded by Lieutenant Bob Bury sprang into action, ready to take up defensive positions, and were crestfallen when told there was little prospect of a rearguard battle. And since a large number of
andartes,
including Petrakas's band from Asi Gonia, had gathered to see the party off, any German detachment in the area would have encountered a fierce reception. Following the usual practice, before embarking, everyone left behind their weapons and boots and spare rations, all of which were quickly shared amongst the large crowd on the beach.

The party, including Miki Akoumianakis and Elias Athanassakis, and joined by Dennis Ciclitira, went on board where they were greeted with lobster sandwiches and Navy rum. At Mersa Matruh a reception committee headed by Brigadier Barker-Benfield waited with a guard of honour ready to pay compliments before the General was taken into dignified captivity. Kreipe, at last accepting his fate, became almost jaunty. Paddy Leigh Fermor, on the other hand, felt the opposite of jaunty. During the last few days, he had begun to suffer attacks of stiffness. On arrival in Cairo, he collapsed with an almost fatal and temporarily paralysing bout of rheumatic fever. The immediate Distinguished Service Order which he received for his leadership of the operation had to be pinned to his pyjama jacket in hospital.

The Kreipe operation has often been criticized on the grounds that it caused unnecessary suffering to the Cretan population, but Professor Gottfried Schramm's study of the German Command's files would indicate that this is a canard. There was no connection with the destruction of Kamares, Lokhria, Margarikari and Saktouria, as has been shown. And the most serious wave of reprisals, the destruction of the Amari valley villages, took place in late August. Since they were intended to teach the local population a lesson, the essence of German reprisals lay in their rapidity: a delay of nearly four months is therefore highly improbable, whatever the catalogue of crimes listed by the military authorities in their proclamations. The Amari operation was essentially a campaign of pre-emptive terror just before the German forces withdrew westwards from Heraklion, with their flank exposed to this centre of Cretan resistance.*

* When Tom Dunbabin and Patrick Leigh Fermor were made honorary citizens of Heraklion in 1948, Leigh Fermor's

'care and foresight' to avoid giving 'the conqueror any excuse to carry out reprisals' were specially mentioned in regard to the Kreipe operation.

The other argument that General Kreipe's removal was of little military significance is of course true.

But the blow was aimed not at German strength but at German morale and their claim to mastery of the island. German officers may have made a show of jokes about Kreipe afterwards, but the audacity of the coup clearly rattled them. The effect was increased quite fortuitously when, within a few days of the abduction, a German garrison commander was killed in a train blown up near Patras.

The boost for the Cretans was very important at a time when the Eastern Mediterranean had been entirely bypassed. 'Everybody felt taller by two centimetres the next day,' observed Manoussos Manoussakis, who had been in Canea. And even if morale fluctuated in between, as was inevitable in those times, his joke that 'out of 450,000 Cretans, 449,000 claimed to have taken part in the Kreipe operation', indicates the immense pride aroused.

Afterwards, as a final propaganda twist, Dunbabin's team began a whispering campaign that Kreipe had planned his own escape. Handbills were stuck up round barracks with the words:
'Kreipe Befehl:
Wir Folgen!' —
'Kreipe commands: we follow!'

27

The German Withdrawal

Three days before the Allies landed in Normandy, a small party from the Organization of Strategic Services — the American equivalent of SOE — reached Crete. They came on the same boat which brought in another British officer to join Dunbabin's command: Lieutenant Hugh Fräser of the 7th Hussars. The purpose of this three-man mission led by Colonel MacGlasson was to 'gather political and military intelligence'. They insisted on being independent of the British and spent only a few weeks in the western end of the island.

A more lasting form of co-operation followed with the arrival of another American, Major Bill Royce.

He landed on 13 July, and Dunbabin's organization became the Allied Military Mission.

Summer also brought the annual visit from the SBS. Sandy Rendel received a warning order in June to assist a raiding force due to arrive by sea. The main difference from previous attacks was that this time petrol dumps formed the SBS's primary target, not airfields. The idea was to force the Germans to send a tanker, by then in desperately short supply, into an ambush by submarine. These attacks were timed to coincide with others all over the mainland.

On their arrival at the beginning of July, the SBS advance party led by Ian Patterson found not just Sandy, but a crowd of helpers (Vassili Konios and a group of cousins) with twenty-three mules to carry their kit. The SBS never quite got used to the Cretan contempt for security precautions. The main party landed some ten days later and the different groups headed off towards their objectives —

Kastelli airfield, Heraklion, a dump south of Neapolis and another near Armenoi.

The Armenoi group, led by Dick Hardman of the SBS and guided by Hugh Fräser and George Psychoundakis, then heard from their main informant, one Psaroudakis, that the fuel reserves had been evacuated. Psaroudakis in fact misled them: he is said to have wanted to avoid trouble with the Germans. So instead of a dump, the group blew up a bridge near Kouphi and ambushed a truck, killing five soldiers of whom a couple may have been Italians. In an attempt to avoid reprisals, Fräser allowed no Cretans to accompany them and left a note and items of kit, such as a beret, to convince the Germans that it was a purely British operation.

A number of other actions took place that night, 22 July, to increase the effect. Mikhali Xylouris, the sturdily pro-British kapitan from the Anoyia region, took his relatively untried band to take on a German outpost near Daphnes and they succeeded in killing fifteen soldiers. The main attacks are said to have destroyed 165,000 gallons of fuel, but two SBS members were captured. Both men, Captain John Lodwick and Bombardier Nixon, later escaped when the train taking them to Germany was ambushed by Jugoslav partisans. When they returned after numerous adventures, their commanding officer Lord Jellicoe remarked: 'Ah, you're back. Damned slow about it, weren't you?'

With news of Russian advances on the eastern front, and the opening of the second front in Normandy, the bands in the mountains and the numbers of reserve
andartes
in the towns greatly increased.

Everybody wanted to become a member of the resistance before it was too late.

Attempts were made by both sides to keep the Nationalist EOK and the Communist-dominated ELAS

from fighting each other. ELAS knew that it did not have the strength or popular support to take on EOK with any hope of survival. And fortunately EOK had received no news of events in mainland Greece where ELAS had set about eliminating its rivals one by one with a crude version of the

'salami-tactic', otherwise its groups might have attacked ELAS pre-emptively.

An attempt to foster ELAS—EOK friendship was organized in the region of Viannos. As might be expected, this gathering, which took place in a bowl in oak-covered hills, was a curious affair. The Communists were led by a local doctor. A small group of German deserters formed another delegation. Bandouvas's younger brother Yanni had brought his band; so had Colonel Plevres from Neapolis, the EOK leader for the province of Lasithi.

Altogether groups numbering nearly 300 men collected there that day. First, a priest provided by the Communists — a paradox typical of ELAS — blessed their cause, then goats were slaughtered for a meagre feast, which was followed by speeches of interminable rhetoric.

Billy Moss had returned to Crete on 6 July. His official mission was to mount a diversionary action with a force of escaped Russian prisoners to help the SBS in their co-ordinated attacks of 22 July. But Moss harboured a private scheme which he had not disclosed to Brigadier Barker-Benfield or anyone else. He had hatched a madcap plan to kidnap General Kreipe's replacement.

For this Moss attempted to reassemble the Kreipe abduction gang. He based himself with Mikhali Xylouris on the northern slopes of the Ida range above Anoyia. He may have deliberately kept away from Tom Dunbabin, who landed on 13 July, because Dunbabin would have vetoed the plan if he had known what was afoot.

Moss's idea proved impossible quite simply because General Kreipe had not been replaced: the only general on the island was Müller, the Commander of the Fortress of Crete. Time was wasted and the important night of 22 July came and went. Moss returned to Xylouris's hideout, having augmented his force with a handful of escaped Russian prisoners whom he armed with Sten guns. There was little to do but await a suitable opportunity for action.

Not to be outdone by the British raiding forces, one of the ELAS Rethymno groups cordoned off the village of Margarites in the early hours of 1 August to trap two German motor-cycle crews spending the night there. Having blocked the road by felling a tree across it, they moved in to capture the four men, whom they later shot. A German force intent on reprisals reached the area, between Perama and the monastery of Arkadi, and the ELAS band withdrew losing two men. At first they claimed to have killed forty Germans, then reduced the number to twenty and finally to five, which was still a slight exaggeration, since German records show that only four of their men died between 2 and 4 August.