Kidnap in Crete (35 page)

Colonel Michail Filippakis (
above, left
) helped the straw-hatted mayor of Heraklion surrender. Then he made his way to his village near the south coast from where he carried on the fight living as a poor civilian (
right
)
.
Filippakis was one of the first to make contact with the SOE in Cairo, sowing the seeds of the resistance.

The resistance grew. People of all ages joined the fight. The Germans executed ten islanders for every soldier killed.

Throughout the occupation civilians, including women and children, were used as poorly paid forced labour.

Mrs Hariklia Dramoudanis’s husband was a guerrilla leader, a kapitan. He was captured and executed forcing her to flee with her family into hiding in the mountains.

In the winter of 1943 British SOE agent Patrick Leigh Fermor came up with a plan to capture a German general and smuggle him off the island.

Leigh Fermor chose a young Coldstream Guards officer, William ‘Billy’ Stanley Moss, as his second in command.

In Cairo, Moss (
right
) and Leigh Fermor shared a house with other SOE agents and the glamorous Countess Sophie Tarnowska (
left
), who Moss was to marry. They nicknamed the house Tara and it became the unofficial headquarters for planning the kidnap.

Guerrilla fighters, the andartes, were a vital part of the scheme. They were organised into bands led by kapitans. This photograph shows members of the Veisakis family under Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi. The father, Emmanouil ‘Manoussomanolis’, stands on the right and his three sons are (
left to right
) Dimitris, Costas and Manoussos.

Two leaders who helped with the kidnap: Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi (
left
), in peacetime a successful businessman; and Kapitan Mihali Xylouris (
right, seated left
) who sheltered the abduction team at his secret hideout in the White Mountains.

The twelve-man kidnap team was supported by a bodyguard of men under the command of Kapitan Boutzalis. On 21 May both units reached the final hiding place, about one mile from ‘Point A’, the kidnap junction.

Three key kidnappers: Manolis Paterakis (
right
), Leigh Fermor’s right hand man; Giorgios Tyrakis (
left
), recruited from a parachute training course in Cairo; and Antonios Papaleonidas (
centre
), a stevedore from Heraklion.

Micky Akoumianakis (
right
), head of SOE counter intelligence, took a disguised Leigh Fermor (
left
) to a safe house in Heraklion to plan the escape route.