Knossos, the largest archaeological site on the Mediterranean island of Crete, was the mythical home of King Minos. It was also home, it is said, to the Labyrinth, the maze-like structure that held the Minotaur. Half man, half bull, this creature, which had been devouring a regular tribute of Athenian youths, was finally killed by the Greek hero Theseus with the aid of Ariadne, Minos’ daughter: to help his escape, Ariadne gave Theseus a lifesaving thread to play out during his descent and lead him to safety when the deed was done. Today, a stone’s throw from Knossos sits a pale-bricked property built in the early 1900s by Sir Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist who had pioneered excavations nearby. Quiet, airy, shadowed by trees and shrubs, the house had been Evans’s home. It is still called the Villa Ariadne.
In the spring of 1944, at the height of the Second World War, with Evans long gone and Crete under German occupation, the Villa Ariadne was the requisitioned residence of the commander of the garrison’s principal division. The forty-eight-year-old son of a pastor, Generalmajor Heinrich Kreipe was a career soldier who had served in the German Army since 1914. During the First World War he had fought on the Western Front as well as against the Russians, been wounded and won two Iron Crosses. Between the wars he had risen in rank to lieutenant colonel. In 1940 he had fought in France as commander of the 209th Infantry Regiment. The following year he had led his men to the outskirts of Leningrad and won the Knight’s Cross, the highest decoration in Nazi Germany for battlefield bravery and leadership. Promotion to general and command of his first infantry division — the 79th — had come in 1943.
Kreipe had been posted to Crete, to command the Wehrmacht’s 22nd Airlanding Infantry Division, in early 1944. He had been on the island a matter of weeks when, late one April evening, he left his headquarters in the hillside village of Archanes and, sitting in his chauffeured staff car, began the short, unescorted drive back to Knossos and the Villa Ariadne. A few minutes into the journey, at a lonely junction on the road ahead, red lamps loomed suddenly out of the dark. Kreipe’s car was waved to a halt. Lit by the headlights, two figures in German uniform approached . . .
What happened next — and the relentless drama of subsequent days — was later immortalised on screen in Ill Met By Moonlight, a 1957 war film produced by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell. The film was based on a book of the same name by William Stanley Moss. [1] In 1944, ‘Billy’ Moss — as friends knew him — had been one of a pair of British army officers working clandestinely in Crete who, with a small party of Cretan guerrillas, carried out Kreipe’s abduction. Time magazine, reviewing Moss’s fast-paced account of the action, called it one of the most ‘audacious’ of the war. [2]
Moss, twenty-two years old in 1944, had been the junior of the two British officers. A captain in the Coldstream Guards, he had been put ashore on Crete less than a fortnight before. Though hardened by front-line fighting in North Africa, he had never, until that moment, set foot on enemy territory. He knew little of Crete or Cretans. He spoke no Greek. But the skills and experience of Moss’s friend and colleague — whose role in the film would be taken by the actor Dirk Bogarde — were quite different.
This officer, a major in the Intelligence Corps, twenty-nine at the time of the kidnapping, had spent the best part of eighteen months on the island, hiding with the locals, speaking their language, disguising himself as Cretan townsman or shepherd, dedicating himself to intelligence-gathering, sabotage and the preparation of resistance. Attached, like Moss, to Britain’s Special Operations Executive, a top-secret set-up tasked with causing trouble in enemy territory, he had already been rewarded with an OBE. The name of this young officer was Patrick Leigh Fermor.
The tale that follows this Introduction is Leigh Fermor’s own account of the abduction of General Kreipe. It is published here, in its entirety, for the first time. When he wrote it, in 1966–7, Leigh Fermor was already on the path to great acclaim as a writer. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the classic chronicles of his journeys as a young man traversing pre-war Europe, were still some years away, but in 1950 he had published The Traveller’s Tree, an award-winning account of his recent travels in the Caribbean, and, three years after that, A Time to Keep Silence, an impression of monasteries and monastic life in England, France and Turkey. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese appeared in 1958 and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece in 1966. A novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, was published in 1953.
It may seem strange that a man of Leigh Fermor’s experience and literary flair should not have written sooner about the kidnap. But he and Moss were friends and seem to have agreed early that the latter — who, unlike Leigh Fermor, had kept a diary of the operation — should tell the story first. Back in England in early 1945, Leigh Fermor had actually acted on Moss’s behalf during an initial search for a publisher (a search that the War Office terminated on security grounds when it emerged that many of Moss’s cast of British officers, mentioned by name in his text, were still engaged in behind-the-lines warfare). [3] It is certainly likely that Leigh Fermor had no desire to steal his friend’s thunder; and it may be significant that he finally put pen to paper only after Moss’s early death in 1965.
Leigh Fermor began writing his version at the request of Barrie Pitt, editor of Purnell’s History of the Second World War, a mass-market anthology published in weekly editions in co-operation with London’s Imperial War Museum. The idea behind the series, which was overseen by the military historian Basil Liddell Hart, was to produce rounded and respected studies of different aspects of the conflict that would add something significant to the historical record. Contributors ranged from modern historians to soldiers who had taken part. Articles were feature-length.
When giving Leigh Fermor the commission in the spring of 1966, Pitt had asked for 5,000 words deliverable by November. Not a man who always made editors’ lives easy, Leigh Fermor penned over 30,000 and submitted them in instalments. The last of these reached Pitt nearly eleven months late. Pitt was pleased with neither the delay nor the length. Constrained by his own deadlines and a strict word limit, he brought on board a journalist to cut the text down to the requisite size. The reduced version that duly appeared in Purnell’s History of the Second World War was, as a consequence, dramatically shorter: 25,000 words had gone. Much of the style and colour had been stripped away, too, replaced by a businesslike prose. In a brief editor’s note, Pitt introduced Leigh Fermor as ‘that most talented and charming of poets’, commented that ‘the Gilbert and Sullivan strain still runs strongly in the British ethos’, and, quoting Kreipe, called it the story of the ‘Hussar stunt’ in Crete. [4] Leigh Fermor is said to have been unhappy with the changes. There was little he could have done to prevent them.
The restored manuscript, reproduced here, is important. Leigh Fermor had been asked to write an account of Kreipe’s abduction. That was what was commissioned and, once the cutting was done, that was what was printed. But what he had produced — the original text — had been much more than that. As his biographer has written, the story he told in ‘Abducting a General’, the title he gave his piece, was ‘not so much an adventure as a confession, a tribute, a plea for understanding . . . above all, a paean of praise to Crete and the Cretans’. [5] To explain that, it is necessary to acknowledge the strength of his connection to the Cretan people and place the kidnapping against the backdrop of his wider experiences on the island. It is essential, too, to recognise the link — direct or not — between the abduction of General Kreipe and the barbaric murder, months later, of hundreds of Cretan villagers at the hands of the German garrison.
In December 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor had left London to walk to Constantinople. It took him over a year to reach it. By then, the Continent had become more or less his home. During the next four years he spent only a scattering of months in England. Charismatic and well connected, he eked out his existence with some inherited money here, some translation work there, making friends easily, staying with them frequently, and travelling widely. In 1939, when news reached him that Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany, he was living in Romania. He returned directly to join up.
At first Leigh Fermor was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the Irish Guards. Sudden illness stalled the process, leading to a long and boring sojourn at the Guards Depot at Caterham. Then the Intelligence Corps stepped in. Impressed by his languages — his pre-war wanderings had honed his French, German, Romanian and Greek — it offered a fresh path to a commission and the likelihood of a quicker route into action. With Axis pressure threatening to spread the war to South-east Europe, where he had so recently lived and travelled, Leigh Fermor shared the assessment that he might prove useful.
Officer training followed, then courses in military intelligence and interrogation, which he completed just in time to be dispatched to the Mediterranean as a member of the British Military Mission sent to help the Greeks, whose country the Italians, in October 1940, had invaded. Lieutenant Leigh Fermor was attached as a liaison officer to the Greek Third Army Corps. That contact did not last long. In April 1941, a savage German blitzkrieg swept through the Balkans, knocking Greece out of the war and driving the last British troops from mainland Europe. Remnants of the latter managed to scramble their way to Crete, the largest of Greece’s islands, and bolster the British garrison there. Among them was Leigh Fermor.
Crete, too, was soon under attack, as the Germans, seeking to press their advantage, launched a major airborne assault. The fighting lasted days, the defenders included Cretan men, women and children, but the likely outcome was never much in doubt. Leigh Fermor, who had been attached as an intelligence officer to the British infantry brigade positioned around the capital, Heraklion, was one of the survivors whom the Royal Navy managed to evacuate to Egypt before Crete finally fell.
It was in Egypt that Leigh Fermor joined the Special Operations Executive, the unorthodox organisation whose task was to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage behind enemy lines. It is not difficult to see why he appealed as a recruit. Worldly, well travelled, confident and independent — ‘Leigh Fermor does not submit willingly to discipline,’ a staff officer would write of him stuffily, ‘and I think requires firm handling’ — he was just the type who seemed suited to SOE’s irregular line of work. [6] His first job was as an instructor at a training school in Palestine, teaching students bound for enemy territory how to handle weapons. Then, in the spring of 1942, fresh orders came through: he was to return to Crete to work clandestinely as an SOE agent.
By 1942, to be sure of holding the island against any Allied attempt to wrest it back, a strong Axis force was in occupation: tens of thousands of troops, rising to a peak of 75,000 in 1943, overlording a local population of just 400,000. Not without reason, the Germans came to call it Festung Kreta: Fortress Crete. In the mountains, a few guerrilla bands were active. So were a scattered handful of British officers sent in to lend support, gather intelligence, spread propaganda, harass the garrison and attempt, under the enemy’s noses, to round up and evacuate Allied stragglers left stranded when Crete was captured. Landed, covertly, by a British-crewed Greek fishing boat, Leigh Fermor joined them in June 1942. He was to remain on the island for the next fifteen months.
During that period, the tide of war in the Mediterranean turned decisively in the Allies’ favour. In North Africa, the victory at El Alamein and major landings in Morocco and Algeria were the catalyst for advances that, by the spring of 1943, had seen the Allies secure the Mediterranean’s southern shores. That summer, Allied armies overran Sicily. In September, when a war-weary Italy surrendered, major landings in southern Italy saw the Allies return in force to mainland Europe for the first time in two and a half years. But in Crete not a great deal changed. The island remained firmly in the enemy’s grip. The population stayed mostly compliant, hating the occupation but incapable of doing much to throw it off. Hopes of Allied landings ebbed and flowed but no liberation came.
On the rare occasions when British raiding parties went ashore to attack the island’s airfields, terrible reprisals wreaked by German troops were graphic reminders of the risks of resisting. Two attacks by British special forces, the first in June 1942, the second in July 1943, led the Germans, on both occasions, to execute fifty Cretan hostages in response. Many more were murdered in September 1943 after one guerrilla leader, Manoli Bandouvas, who had been encouraged by news of the Italian surrender to believe that the Allies might finally invade, decided suddenly to fight the Germans in the open. His men killed several before he saw his mistake and pulled back. German retaliation was swift and brutal. Seven villages south-east of Heraklion were burned to the ground and over five hundred Cretans, including women and children, shot. Generalmajor Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, Kreipe’s predecessor as commander of the 22nd Airlanding Infantry Division, was the officer who issued the orders. His actions earned him the nickname, ‘The Butcher of Crete’.
SOE personnel at large on the island were well aware of the perils of working clandestinely. They also appreciated the extent to which their own presence and activities put the Cretans, too, in danger. The Germans knew that the British had men on Crete engaged in subversive warfare. From time to time, drives were launched into the mountains to catch them. Homes were burned. Local helpers and couriers were run to ground and killed. But though SOE, too, suffered casualties (among them Leigh Fermor’s wireless operator, a young Greek from the Dodecanese, who, in late 1942, was captured, tortured and shot), most emerged unscathed. Their survival, they knew, was due in no small part to the selfless protection and assistance they received from the Cretan population. Inevitably, strong and lasting bonds of mutual respect and affection developed.
‘For purposes of movement he adopted simple disguise, dying [sic] his hair, growing a beard and wearing Cretan dress,’ reads a no-nonsense debriefing report of Leigh Fermor’s experiences. Declassified only after his death in 2011, it provides a bracingly matter-of-fact glimpse of some of the risks he had run:
He spoke to no-one except his trusted staff as his accent would have given him away at once. He had numerous false identity cards, and if stopped by the Germans he would have claimed to be a Cretan from the village named on the card. Had he met a German patrol with an anti-British interpreter this cover would not have held . . . Had he been taken back to the village by a German patrol, there would have been no hope of his cover withstanding enquiry. [7]
Most British personnel faced such dangers. But as one SOE colleague remembered, Leigh Fermor had fitted Crete well. ‘His pre-war experience of Greece combined with an instinctive philhellenism gave him an immediate grasp of local problems even though he had just arrived.’ [8] His manner, too, was right. Warm, caring and courageous, a lover of language, dance and song, fascinated by other cultures, he forged life-long friendships with the Cretans, winning their trust and keeping it. ‘He is still in Crete,’ wrote the officer who recommended him for the Distinguished Service Order (he received an OBE) in April 1943, ‘where his determination, devotion to duty and steadfastness of purpose have been invaluable in helping the local population to retain their faith in their allies. He is constantly hunted by the occupying troops.’ [9]
‘On looking back,’ Leigh Fermor wrote that month, ‘my [first] six months seem to have been one long string of [wireless set] battery troubles, faulty [wireless] sets, difficulties about transport, rain, arrests, hide and seek with the Huns, lack of cash, flights at a moment’s notice, false alarms, wicked treks over the mountains, laden like a mule, fright among one’s collaborators, treachery, and friends getting shot.’ [10] The quotation comes from one of several reports for SOE headquarters in Cairo that Leigh Fermor penned while on the island. Most were drawn up in mountain hideouts, then couriered to the coast, to be sent out aboard small British boats and submarines that came quietly at night to drop off fresh men and supplies and embark evacuees. Original copies survive among Leigh Fermor’s private papers. Providing hitherto hidden flashes of his characteristic writing style, they are markedly unmilitary in composition. A selection of extracts are reprinted here, after the text of ‘Abducting a General’, to underline the gruelling range of his experiences in Crete and the fact that they went far beyond kidnapping. They include his deeply personal account of what was undoubtedly one of the worst moments of his life: the tragic death of his guide and great friend, Yanni Tsangarakis, killed accidentally by Leigh Fermor’s own hand.
Leigh Fermor’s first mission to Crete ended in September 1943. He had started out in the western part of the island, working in the mountains where the principal guerrillas lurked. From February 1943 he had had charge of Heraklion, further east, where his role became more political: here, communists with complicated postwar ambitions were among the Cretans with whom he needed to deal. But it was not all politics. In the days after Italy’s surrender, Leigh Fermor was able to help spirit to safety an Italian general before the Germans could get their hands on him. This was General Angelo Carta, the commanding officer of a division of 30,000 Italian soldiers. Leigh Fermor had not intended to leave the island with him. While assisting the Royal Navy with Carta’s clandestine escape, however, he found himself stranded aboard a motor launch by a worsening sea and, as a result, was withdrawn to Egypt too.
It was back among his SOE compatriots in Cairo that Leigh Fermor tabled the plan for him to return to Crete with a handpicked fellow officer — the choice fell eventually on Billy Moss — and kidnap a German general. Later, and, indeed, in the story he tells in these pages, he would trace his idea’s inspiration to the autumn of 1943 and the successful evacuation, if not the abduction, of General Carta. In fact, the germ of a plan had been in place much earlier than that. Declassified SOE documents show that British officers had considered the wisdom and possibility of capturing a senior German officer as early as November 1942, when Xan Fielding, a close colleague of Leigh Fermor’s in Crete, had had the idea of abducting General Alexander Andrae, Festung Kreta’s commander-in-chief. That plan was short-lived: Andrae was posted away. By the following summer, Fielding was thinking about seizing his successor, General Bruno Bräuer, while Tom Dunbabin, the senior SOE officer on the island, was wondering about kidnapping Generalmajor Müller in a coordinated operation. The latter, it was thought, might be especially vulnerable in or around his Cretan home: the Villa Ariadne. ‘It should be easy to kidnap Muller,’ Dunbabin wrote at the time. ‘One of our agents is on good terms with his chauffeur, and he might be abducted on the road. Alternatively it sounds easy to break into the Villa Ariadne with a strength of about 20.’ [11]
When Leigh Fermor drew up his plan, Generalmajor Müller was his intended target, too. By then, following the atrocities he had ordered in September 1943, ‘The Butcher of Crete’ was especially hated. Seizing him, so the reasoning went, was intended to deal a blow to German morale, while encouraging British missions on the island and the Cretan population to believe, at a time of fading hopes of liberation, that Crete’s resistance remained effective. But the care that Leigh Fermor takes in ‘Abducting a General’ to explain the grounds for the planned kidnap, stressing, too, the steps taken to obviate the risk of enemy reprisals, is significant. By the time he came to write his account, he knew very well that the operation — which in the end saw Kreipe seized, not Müller — had been linked to a terrible event that occurred in Crete some weeks afterwards.
In August 1944, German troops swept through the Amari valley in the mountains of western Crete, burned a series of villages to the ground and killed over 450 people. ‘[C]omplete surprise was achieved,’ recorded Tom Dunbabin, a helpless witness to the aftermath.
The inhabitants of the raided villages were caught in their beds and a given number of hostages was taken in each village. These were selected either because of their relationship to some known person on the wanted list or because they looked sturdy fellows who would make good guerrillas. They were shot two by two and their bodies thrown into a building which was then blown up. One man escaped wounded from Kardaki to tell their story. The more attractive young women and a few men who were wanted by name were taken to Rethymno — the men succeeded in escaping en route. The remainder of the population were allowed to take one sheep or goat and as much as they could carry and were given two hours to get out. Much unnecessary suffering was caused — for instance one man of 73 had to carry his mother on his back for over three miles and pregnant women with a string of young children are [now] a common feature of the countryside. The enemy then began to plunder and loaded up everything in the village — sheep and cattle, food (the year’s harvest had just been gathered in), furniture and clothes. As each house was gutted it was blown up or set on fire. This work is still going on and I can see the fires and hear the explosions as I write. [12]
Some inhabitants of the Amari, according to German communiqués, had invited that punishment for the assistance they were known to have given to General Kreipe’s kidnappers four months before.
Dunbabin, who knew the Amari well, felt that the ‘actual reasons’ were more to do with a recent flare-up on the island of guerrilla fighting and British raiding, which had left dozens of German soldiers dead, coupled with a consequent German desire to retaliate and prevent further attacks, and the fact that the Amari valley had been known for years as a hotbed of support for the resistance. [13] Later, from Cretan friends, a distraught Leigh Fermor would hear similar explanations. Whether he ever accepted them is hard to know. ‘These were consoling words,’ he writes here; ‘never a syllable of blame was uttered. I listened to them eagerly then, and set them down eagerly now.’
Considering the possible cost, it may also be wondered if Leigh Fermor was always convinced that the abduction was worth it. If he had doubts, he has not been alone. Concerns about the wisdom of kidnapping any German general were seemingly expressed at SOE headquarters even before Leigh Fermor’s plan received the green light. Bickham Sweet-Escott, a senior and respected staff officer in Cairo at the time, would write in his own memoirs that he had considered the risk of German reprisals far too great to make an attempted abduction worthwhile, even with the hated Generalmajor Müller as the proposed target. ‘I was asked whether I thought we should let this operation go ahead,’ Sweet-Escott would recall.
I made myself exceedingly unpopular by recommending as strongly as I could that we should not. I thought that if it succeeded, the only contribution to the war effort would be a fillip to Cretan morale, but that the price would certainly be heavy in Cretan lives. The sacrifice might possibly have been worthwhile in the black winter of 1941 when things were going badly. The results of carrying it out in 1944, when everyone knew that victory was merely a matter of months, would, I thought, hardly justify the cost.
‘In spite of my pleadings,’ Sweet-Escott went on, Leigh Fermor and Moss duly set off and ended up going for the ‘comparatively harmless’ Kreipe. ‘I still have to be convinced that it was really worth the cost.’ [14]
Today, the story of the kidnapping endures as a symbol of the spirit of Cretan resistance and as a tale of cloak-and-dagger buccaneering and wartime derring-do. At the time, British newspapers and radio broadcasts trumpeted details as propaganda. It remains difficult to attach much value to the operation otherwise. It had no strategic or tactical value: by 1944, when the Germans were expecting major Allied invasions at various points on the European mainland, Crete was a backwater. Abducting Kreipe may have embarrassed the island’s German garrison and, by underlining the fact that a British-backed resistance existed on Crete and illustrating its capabilities, caused some to feel more vulnerable, but the blow to enemy spirits can be exaggerated. [15] Also, nothing useful in the way of intelligence was gleaned when the captive was eventually quizzed. ‘Kreipe is rather unimportant,’ reads a report by British interrogators after he landed in their lap. ‘Anti-Nazi, possibly because events are trending that way. Rather weak character and ignorant.’ [16] Certainly Kreipe was no monster, unlike Generalmajor Müller, who, taking command of Crete in July 1944, underscored his murderous reputation by razing the Amari villages in August. At least one experienced officer at SOE headquarters — Jack Smith-Hughes, who had spent time as an agent in Crete and had been running Cairo’s Cretan desk until shortly before the kidnap took place — felt sure of a definite link between the kidnapping and the fate of those villages, noting that Müller had known the abduction had been meant for him.
Readers who compare Leigh Fermor’s tale to Ill Met By Moonlight might find they identify more with young Billy Moss, who, fresh to Crete and clandestine warfare, finds himself suddenly ashore in a foreign land, dangerous, exciting and new. ‘Abducting a General’ is the perspective of a man of a different stamp. He knows the terrain. He speaks the language. He has networks of trusted contacts. While not careless of the risks, he is clearly accustomed to them: a few days before the kidnap, lunching in a Cretan house close to Knossos, Leigh Fermor, with moustache carefully bleached and hair darkened with burnt cork, cavorts happily with Cretan friends in the presence of three drunken German sergeants: ‘attempts, bearishly mimicked by our guests, to teach them to dance a Cretan pentozali’. A host of Cretan guerrillas, guides and friends come and go in Leigh Fermor’s text; all are testament to an emotional investment born of months of living among them, and to a belief that the full Cretan contribution to the Kreipe kidnapping — and to the war — demanded recognition and respect. This is the account of a sensitive man still bound to the island and its people.
Roderick Bailey
Oxford, June 2014
1. W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met By Moonlight (London: Harrap & Co., 1950). A reprint by the Folio Society in 2001 included a fresh afterword by Leigh Fermor. For more on Moss, his life and his wider wartime service, see his subsequent memoir, A War of Shadows (London: Boardman, 1952), reprinted by Bene Factum in 2014 with a new introduction by Moss’s daughter, Gabriella Bullock, and a brief biographical essay by Alan Ogden.
2. Time, 4 September 1950.
3. While corresponding with SOE about the manuscript, Leigh Fermor expressed uneasiness with aspects of Moss’s portrayal of Crete and Cretans. ‘It is not a very good book – too much is made of too little,’ he cautioned, ‘and there are too many clumsy literary references and insistence on a socially O.K. background at home; and an attitude of patronage to the Cretans that hints that they were only fairly gentle savages . . . However, Hamish Hamilton [the prospective publisher at that moment] is going to make pretty drastic editorial revisions, so it may eventually emerge as what it should be: a young man’s unpretentious account of an exciting adventure.’ P. Leigh Fermor to Colonel D. Talbot-Rice, 9 April 1945, TNA HS 9/507/4. Moss had his own reservations, too, and did make subsequent revisions. But, as he explained in the preface when his book was eventually published, he was also convinced that his version ought to remain loyal to the perspective of the young man who wrote it.
4. P. Leigh Fermor, ‘How to Steal a General’, in Purnell’s History of the Second World War, Vol. 5, No. 7 (c. 1969–70).
5. A. Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (London: John Murray, 2012), p. 340.
6. ‘Major Leigh Fermor DSO’, Lieutenant Colonel E. G. Boxshall to SOE’s Security Section, 29 March 1945, TNA HS 9/1068/1.
7. Report by Captain Burr on debriefing of Major Leigh Fermor, c. December 1944, TNA HS 9/507/4.
8. X. Fielding, Hide and Seek: The Story of a Wartime Agent (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954), p. 87.
9. Recommendation for the award of the Distinguished Service Order, April 1943, TNA HS 9/507/4. Kreipe’s kidnapping would earn Leigh Fermor an immediate DSO. Moss received the Military Cross.
10. ‘Report No. 2’ by Captain P. Leigh Fermor, 27 April 1943, Leigh Fermor Archive, National Library of Scotland.
11. ‘Report No.1 (New Series)’ by Lieutenant Colonel T. J. Dunbabin, covering period 8–23 September 1943, TNA HS 5/723.
12. ‘Report No. 4 (Third Series)’ by Lieutenant Colonel T. J. Dunbabin, covering period 20–30 August 1944, TNA HS 5/724.
13. Ibid. Indeed, the Kreipe abduction was only one of several reasons put forward formally by the Germans to justify the reprisals of August 1944; others included the local murder of a German soldier, known British links to the valley, and the degree of local protection offered to various guerrilla bands. The long time lag between the kidnapping in May and the death and destruction meted out in August – uncommonly long by German standards – may also indicate that the abduction, while undoubtedly offering a convenient excuse, was not the principal precipitant of the Amari reprisals.
14. B. Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 197–8.
15. With the invasion of Europe expected in the west and the tide of the war flowing firmly in the Allies’ favour, German morale across the Mediterranean was already low by 1944. It also seems that Kreipe, once seized, may not have been especially missed, as one of his own officers, Ludwig Beutin, wrote to Billy Moss after reading his book. The soldiers were ‘very surprised’ that Kreipe had been kidnapped, Beutin recalled, but not particularly downcast: ‘he was too little liked for that . . . It was much discussed in the officers’ mess at that time, and many rakis were drunk to your health.’ Beutin added, intriguingly, that one source of Kreipe’s unpopularity was his impatience at roadblocks. ‘He was very rude if his car was ever stopped as he considered the Divisional flags [displayed on his car] enough indication. People said – after the Abduction – that, shortly before, he had impatiently asked a soldier in Heraklion: “Don’t you recognise your General’s car?” After that, everyone took care not to examine it too closely . . .’ Translation (1993) by Patrick Leigh Fermor of letter from Dr L. Beutin to W. S. Moss, 27 September 1950, Leigh Fermor Archive, National Library of Scotland. Long after the war, from ‘a banker friend of mine in Hamburg’ who had been on Kreipe’s staff in Crete, Bickham Sweet-Escott would also hear the story of mess celebrations at the General’s abduction (though in that version a German officer called for champagne). B. Sweet Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 198n.
16. ‘Additional Note by 2X’, 23 May 1944, TNA WO 204/4208.