Kidnap in Crete (29 page)
Authors: Rick Stroud
In the morning General Kreipe was surprised to see Leigh Fermor, and greeted him, saying, ‘Good Morning Major, we’ve missed you.’
22
Later in the morning Dick Barnes’s messenger, Kostas Koutelidakis, arrived to tell them that the Jellicoe raid had been postponed until the night of the 11/12th. Koutelidakis confirmed that the beach at Keramia was guarded by German patrols. There was nothing to do but go further west, which meant looping north-west towards the village of Fotinou, after which they had to face a stiff climb over another mountain before once more dropping down south to the coast.
The Germans were hard on their heels: the group learned that they were raiding Yerakari, where the kidnappers had hidden only the day before. Other villages in the valley had also been raided. It was even more dangerous to move about in daylight. Yet again they were forced to wait until dark. Members of Giorgios Harokopos’s family arrived with food, including a lamb which they roasted on a spit. One was Giorgios’s uncle Eleftherios, a retired soldier and a member of the armed National Organisation of Crete, the EOK. Eleftherios had persuaded a friend in the village to lend the group a mule, one of the strongest around and capable of taking the general’s weight.
At midday a wonderful lunch was laid out for the kidnappers. Kreipe was once more amazed at the generosity which the Cretans showed towards the British. A few days before he had seen an example of how thoroughly the occupying forces had been subverted: a member of the resistance had needed some false papers to travel to Heraklion; to the general’s amazement, not one, but three sets were immediately produced for him, all bearing the distinctive thin red line across the top. Kreipe requested Leigh Fermor to ask Harokopos’s sister why they were treating the British with such kindness and affection. ‘It is because the British are fighting for our freedom,’ she replied, ‘while you Germans have deprived us of it in a barbarous way.’ The SOE officers told Giorgios Harokopos’s father that they were planning to take his son to Cairo. In compensation for the loss of the boy the British offered the old man some of the gold pieces. With great dignity he refused to take anything even though he was very poor.
Darkness fell, they heaved the general onto the mule and set off, leaving the nearby village of Patsos and the Harokopos family behind. By the end of that night’s march they needed to reach the village of Fotinou. They walked towards the rising moon, now bright and more than half full. In their propaganda the Germans called the resistance fighters ‘Men of Darkness’; young Giorgios pointed at the moon and said ‘Our sun is rising!’ They passed a spring whose freezing water was supposed to give the gift of immortality. They all drank, including the general, who asked for a second cup.
The jolly mood brought on by the prospect of eternal life was soon spoiled. The caravan passed a village recently burned to the ground by the Germans. The ruins of the buildings stood like skeletons in the dark; dead animals and pet dogs scattered in the main street. At the next village, Karines, they were met by ‘Uncle’ Stavros Zourbakis, his wife Kiria Eleni and their daughter Popi. Kiria Eleni was a formidable woman and a crack shot with a rifle. She greeted them with a welcoming tray of raki, wine and dishes of peeled walnuts.
They pushed on down a steep valley, the mule slipping and sliding; Kreipe swaying ‘like a bride’ on the animal’s back, and four guerrillas walking alongside to stop him falling. At the bottom of the valley ran the main north–south road, which connected the two enemy garrisons at Spili and Armeni. Even at night military traffic on the road was heavy, made worse by the troops searching for the kidnappers. Taking no chances, the party hid on the east side of the road checking that the coast was clear. Then they crossed two at a time, running crouched, covered by the guns of the others. Kreipe dismounted to be escorted over the obstacle. The mule followed, a guerrilla thrashing its hindquarters.
On the approach to Fotinou, guerrilla fighters appeared at regular intervals. They could be heard whistling signals to each other, shepherding the caravan on its way. These men were under the command of an eighty-year-old, whose fighters were his sixteen sons and twenty-eight grandsons. The noise of the whistling changed, and became more urgent. A guerrilla scrambled down to the party, a German patrol was heading straight for them.
The group fanned out behind a ridge, vanishing into the darkness, weapons cocked, ready for a fight. Kreipe was dragged off the mule and flung into the heather. Other men headed for higher ground, spreading out in an ambush. Everyone peered into the darkness, gently easing off their safety catches, trying to spot the bobbing steel helmets of the Wehrmacht soldiers.
They heard the crunch of boots on the gritty track. A guerrilla clamped his hand over Kreipe’s mouth to stop him shouting. The noise of the boots got louder. Then a shrill whistle echoed round the moonlit hills, followed by another, then another, and finally a voice shouting in Greek followed by laughter. The German patrol was a party of guerrillas who had come to escort the group into the village. They were now under the guardianship of Kapitans Andreas and Sifis Perros, both members of the Tzsangarakis family.
At last the tired band walked into Fotinou, where the villagers could not take their eyes of the high-ranking prisoner. Leigh Fermor thought it was as though the Sheriff of Nottingham was being led bound into Robin Hood’s lair in Sherwood Forest.
They spent the next day in an olive grove, an idyllic but not very hidden setting, which they were assured was safe. Guerrillas flitted, shadow-like, between the trees, constantly vigilant. The quiet of the morning was broken by gunfire coming from the nearly village of Armeni, where there was a German fuel dump. Flares wobbled into the air, burning bright against the blue sky and trailing orange-grey smoke; nobody knew the reason for the commotion. Lunch was brought to them by a little man who was a shepherd. He and his wife had been forced to marry to resolve a long-standing feud that had its roots nearly a century in the past; Billy Moss renamed them Mr Montague and Mrs Capulet.
In the afternoon, the group was joined by four Russian POWs. They were engineers who had broken out from a cage at Rethymnon barracks. They were in bad shape, starving, with ragged clothing and worn-out boots. One of them, Peotr, was very ill with a stomach complaint. It was decided that Chnarakis would take most of them to Kastamonitsa, where they could join another small band of escaped Russians who Moss hoped would form a fighting force for future escapades. The Russians were given money, food and weapons and sent off with a distraught Chnarakis, who did not want to leave the main party and who had to be persuaded that his was a job of great importance. As they left the Russians raised the two fingered ‘V’ for victory sign. Peotr was left behind with the kidnappers. Too ill to walk, he lay on the ground writhing, groaning and retching. Now a second mule was found to carry him.
The route then took them to a tiny remote village, Alones, where Kapitan Yannis Katsias waited to rejoin them. With him were wild young fighters, mountain men, who shared Katsias’s familiarity with every twist and turn of the tortured terrain. One of them was the son of the village priest, Father John, a brave supporter of the andartes and whose other son had been executed by the Germans. They were to guide the kidnappers to the village of Vilandredo. Yannis himself went ahead to warn of the group’s progress. The escort that had led them so safely from Fotinou shook hands and said their farewells; the work done, they returned to their villages.
The mule clambered and lurched from perch to perch, jolting and jerking the German general. Suddenly the leather girth snapped and the saddle slid down the animal’s flanks, sending Kreipe tumbling into a ravine. A rock caught his arm, wrenching it back, making him scream in agony. He landed on his shoulder, bellowing in pain, and lay clutching his arm, crying out that he was dying. After a while he began to thrash about like a baby, rolling from his back onto his stomach and shouting blasphemies at his captors. Then he began to whimper: ‘I’ve had enough, why don’t you shoot me and get it done with.’ Eventually he stopped and allowed the guerrillas to help him to his feet. They pulled the heavy man back onto the path and improvised a sling for him, bodging a repair to the girth strap.
Kreipe could now only hold on with one hand and needed someone constantly by his side to stop him tumbling off again. He winced every time the mule stumbled or heaved itself onto another ledge. The groaning and retching figure of Peotr, on another mule, was becoming an unpopular liability. Moss took a deep dislike to him, and later wrote scathingly in his diary that Peotr was a typical prejudiced product of the Russian proletariat. He resented the Russian’s tiresome claims that life under the Soviets was a form of paradise compared to what he imagined life in England to be like. Paterakis nicknamed the Russian ‘Pendamorphi’ (‘the five times lovely one’ – a princess in a Greek fairy tale). His personal habits, though probably caused by stomach illness, were considered so repulsive that at one point the guerrillas suggested leaving him behind or pushing him into a gorge.
Very behind schedule, they reached Vilandredo, where they were greeted by Leigh Fermor’s godbrothers Stathis and Stavros Loukakis, carrying their baby sister, Anglia, another of Leigh Fermor’s goddaughters. The group was led to the base of a cliff face, halfway up which was their next hideout, impossible to reach from below. They were forced to climb above it and then lower themselves down, using branches and roots as handholds, manhandling Kreipe as they went.
After an hour of scrabbling they reached a tiny ledge at the mouth of a cramped cave. From the dark silence came the sound of deep snoring. In the cave’s gloom they made out the outline of a man sleeping against one wall. He slowly woke and disentangled himself from the stinking goatskin cloak that was his blanket. The man was heavily built, with swarthy dark features, black eyes and a huge black beard which he began to stroke, staring at his new-found companions. Then he said, in perfect English, ‘I wondered when you two schoolboys were going to appear.’ This was Major Dennis Ciclitira, the man Ralph Stockbridge had recommended Leigh Fermor link up with. Ciclitira had heard of their predicament from Stockbridge and had come to find them.
Ciclitira was a businessman of Greek origin, brought up in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex, and had connections in the olive oil trade on Crete. After serving with the South Staffordshire Regiment at the start of the war, and on SOE’s Crete desk in Cairo, Ciclitira had spent the last five months on the island. During this time two of his men, sergeant majors, one a New Zealander and the other from the Coldstream Guards, had been captured and killed by the Germans.
The group breakfasted on searingly strong cheese and sour milk, talking about how they were going to get General Kreipe off the island. Ciclitira, who was himself due to leave in a week, said he would go back to his wireless station and ask GHQ if his pick-up launch could come earlier and take them all off, although exactly where the rendezvous would be was still not known. He then left for the two-hour walk back to his radio base at Asi Gonia, where he was scheduled to make a transmission to Cairo that afternoon. The kidnap group felt relief, delighted that they might soon be back in communication with Cairo.
At noon Leigh Fermor’s godbrother Stathis reappeared and insisted they move thirty fleet further up the cliff face to a better spot. Kreipe did not want to move: he complained that he was very happy in the cave and that his shoulder was shattered and causing him great pain. It took six men half an hour to haul the general to the new hideout. When they arrived they found that the area had been prepared for a feast. Cushions and coloured blankets had been spread on the ground; a suckling pig was slowly roasting on a glowing red fire and the aroma of cooking meat filled the air.
The men examined the general’s shoulder. It was badly bruised, but not in nearly such a bad condition as he claimed. They bathed it and wrapped it in a sling made from handkerchiefs, mollycoddling their prisoner, telling him how brave he had been and congratulating him on his uncomplaining stoicism. The general, looking a bit shame-faced, apologised for his behaviour, excusing himself by saying that he thought his shoulder blade was broken and had been in such great pain that he had no idea what he was doing. After eating, most of the men dozed. Some stayed on guard, scanning the hills for German patrols and watching over Kreipe snoring in the afternoon sun.
The tensions of the last ten days eased. The coast was only a few hours’ walk away and they could relax until they heard from Ciclitira that he had received confirmation of the arrival of a boat at the rendezvous beach. For two days they waited in the sunshine, guarded by Katsias and his men. For the first time in weeks they felt safe, soothed by the sound of crystal-clear water rushing down the mountain, sleeping on comfortable cushions, their heads pillowed by Malotira plants, the soft springy source of Cretan mountain tea, their noses filled with the scent of wild oregano which the ancient healer Hippocrates regarded as a valuable medicine. As darkness fell they sang songs in harmony, including ‘Good Night Ladies’, which they repeated over and over again. When their voices failed and sleep overtook them, nightingales began to sing, while the Milky Way twinkled in the deep blue sky above their heads.
On 13 May the quiet was shattered by the shouts of Kapitan Katsias’s men. Lorries full of German soldiers were arriving in the vicinity. More trucks were heading for Vilandredo. The cushions and blankets were cleared and wine poured on the fire, which went out in a billow of steam. Then the kidnappers made the laborious descent down the cliff face to the safety of the first cave.
