At last, on the night of April 4th, the sound of a ship’s engine answered our third night of torch signals; soon a sailor in a rubber dinghy was sculling into the cove and throwing a rope . . . In no time our evacuees were aboard, the ship vanished into the dark, and there, on the rocks, almost unbelievably after all our troubles, were Billy, Manoli and George. We loaded the stuff on the mules, said goodbye to Vasili Konios, our protector in the area, and headed inland for the long climb to comparative safety; settling at last in a high ravine full of oleanders, with the sea shining far below.
There was little sleep for the remainder of the night, or next day: too much to talk about. Raki and wine appeared, two sheep were slaughtered and roasted. Spring had suddenly burst over the island and the aromatic smell of herbs had hit the newcomers miles out in the Libyan sea. As I hoped, Billy was amazed by the spectacular ranges all round, and becomingly impressed by the dash, hospitality, kindness and humour of the Cretans.
Our unwieldy caravan could only move by night. We left at dusk, and a long trudge up and down deep ravines, halting now and then at a waterfall or a friendly sheepfold, brought us to Skoinia, where we lay up in Mihali’s house. A day and a night were lost here, thanks to the visits of a string of our local leaders, including the huge Kapetan Athanasios Bourdzalis, who reappears later in these pages, and the arrival, in her mother’s arms, of a little goddaughter of mine. All this gave rise to a banquet and songs, this time with well-placed sentries, from which we rose for an all-night march north-east across half the width of the island and over the dangerous edge of the Messara plain; circling round garrisoned villages, and using the device, in unoccupied ones, of barking ‘Halt!’, ‘Marsch!’ or ‘Los!’ in the streets and raucously singing ‘Bomber über England’, ‘Lili Marlene’ or the ‘Horstwessellied’, to spread ambiguity about the nature of our party.
At one point light rain filled the lowlands with flickering lights: hundreds of village women were out gathering snails brought out by the shower. Before dawn we reached the lofty village of Kastamonitza and the shelter of the family of Kimon Zographakis, who had been with us from the coast; a young man of great spirits and pluck and a former guide on commando raids. The generosity and warmth of all his family was doubly remarkable, as an elder brother had recently been captured and shot for his resistance work. We had to stay indoors by day, as there was a German hospital in the village: enemy voices and footsteps sounded below the windows. The upper chamber became a busy HQ of sorting maps and gear and sending and receiving runners; being hopelessly spoilt all the while by our hosts and their sons and daughters.
High in the mountains above Kastamonitza, in a cyclopean cave among crags and ilex woods overlooking the whole plain of Kastelli Pediada, lived Siphoyannis, an old goat-herd and a true friend: the very place for the party to hide for a few days while I went to Herakleion to spy out the land. I reinforced the party with two additions here, both old friends, [1] older than the rest, tough, robust, cheerful and unshakeable: Antoni Papaleonidas, originally from Asia Minor, who worked as a stevedore in Herakleion, and Grigori Chnarakis, a farmer from Thrapsano, just beneath us. The year before he had saved, in spectacular fashion, two British airmen who had baled out of a burning bomber. [2] The party — Billy, Manoli, George, Grigori and Antoni, with Kimon as liaison with the village (and, by runner, with me in Herakleion), and with Siphoyannis’ vigilance up in those goat-rocks, near a good spring with a whole flock to eat — would be as secure as eagles. Everyone had taken to Billy at once, and he to them. He had abandoned his battledress with shoulder tapes for breeches and a black shirt and the cover name of Dimitri.
Meanwhile another runner — they usually carried their messages in their boots or their turbans — had brought Micky Akoumianakis hot foot from Herakleion. He was about my age, intelligent and well educated — none of the rest of the party were great penmen — and the head of our information network in Herakleion. By great luck, he lived next door to the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, just outside Herakleion; the large house, that is, built by Sir Arthur Evans for the excavation and restoration of the great Minoan site. Micky’s father, now dead, had been Sir Arthur’s overseer and henchman for many years. The villa was now the abode of General Kreipe.
My dress was readjusted by the family to look like a countryman’s visiting the big city: bleached moustache and eyebrows were darkened with burnt cork. Dye sometimes runs, striping one’s face like a zebra’s. There are many Cretans fairer than me, but Germans looked at them askance and often asked for their papers, thinking they might be British, New Zealand or Australian stragglers disguised. My documents were made out to Mihali Phrangidakis, 27, cultivator, of Amari. We said goodbye and set off, boarding the ramshackle bus from Kastelli; there were a few country people taking vegetables and poultry to market in Herakleion. The conductor was a friend. But my Greek, though fast and adequate, was capable of terrible give-away blunders, so I feigned sleep. The only other vehicles were German trucks, cars and motorcycles. We were stopped at one of the many road-blocks approaching Herakleion and two Feldpolizei corporals asked for our papers. About dusk, we were safe in Mihali’s house in Knossos, peering out of the window with his sister.
The fence began a few yards away, and there, in its decorative jungle of trees and shrubs, with the German flag flying from the roof, stood the Villa. Formidable barbed wire surrounded it. (I had been inside it once, during the Battle, when it was an improvised hospital full of Allied — and German — wounded and dying.) We could see the striped barrier across the drive and the sentry boxes, where the steel-helmeted guard was being changed. Enemy traffic rumbled past, to Herakleion, three miles away. Due south rose the sharp crag of Mount Jouchtas; to west and south soared the tremendous snow-capped massif of Mount Ida, the birthplace of Zeus. North, beyond the dust of the city, lay the Aegean sea and the small island of Dia. East of the road, on the flank of a chalk-white valley dotted with vines, the bulbous blood-red pillars descended, the great staircase of the Palace and giant hewn ashlars, slotted for double-axes, of King Minos.
After his first astonishment at the project, Micky was alive with excitement. At discreet intervals we explored all possibilities of ingress to the Villa in case we were reduced to burgling it, seizing the General, and whisking him away. It might have been possible; Micky had known the inside of the house since childhood. But the triple barriers of wire, one of which was said to be electrified, the size of the guard and the frequency of patrols offered too many chances for mishap. Besides, to avoid all excuse or pretext for reprisals on the Cretans, I was determined the operation should be performed without bloodshed. The only thing was to waylay the General on the way home from his Divisional Headquarters at Ano Archanes, five miles away, and, to gain time, plant his beflagged car as a false scent.
Micky summoned Elias Athanassakis, a very bright and enterprising young student working in our town organisation, and we reconnoitred the route together. There was only one good place for an ambush: the point where the steeply banked minor road from Archanes joined the main road from the south to Herakleion at an angle which obliged cars to slow down nearly to walking pace. Clearly, owing to the heavy traffic on the main road, the deed would have to be done after dark — and very fast — on one of the evenings when, as Elias learnt, the General stayed late at the Officers’ Mess in Archanes before driving home to dinner. This meant finding a hideout for us to lie up in near the road junction. Micky found it: the little vineyard cottage of Pavlo Zographistos outside Skalani, only twenty minutes’ walk from Ambush Point — ‘Point A’. When we asked him, he agreed at once to hide us.
The plan was beginning to take shape: Billy and I would stop the car, dressed up as Feldpolizei corporals. Sometimes, but seldom, there was a motorcycle escort: sometimes, other cars would accompany him. All this, assuming the ambush was a success, would land us with an unwieldy mob of prisoners, unless the attack could be launched or scrubbed in accordance with last-minute information. There was also the danger of stopping the wrong car. To avoid these hazards, Elias undertook to learn all the details by heart — silhouette, black-out slits, etc. — until the flags could clinch the matter at close quarters; and better still, he planned to lay a wire from a point outside Archanes to the bank overlooking Point A, along which an observer — himself — could signal with a buzzer the moment the General got into his car. A colleague on the bank would then flash the information to us by torch, and we, and the rest of the party who would be hiding on either side of the road, would go into action the instant the car appeared.
The risk from passing traffic still remained, possibly of trucks full of troops. Here we would have to trust to improvisation, luck, speed and darkness, and, if the worst happened, diversion by a party of guerrillas — un-lethal bursts of fire, flares all over the place, shoutings, mule carts and logs suddenly blocking the road to create confusion and cover our getaway with our prize. Still with reprisals in mind, we would only shoot to hurt as a last resort. It was vital for us to get into the mountains and among friends, away from the enemy-infested plain, and in the right direction for escape by sea, at high speed.
Micky and Elias were sorry to hear we couldn’t evacuate our prisoners by air, in Skorzeny style: the Germans had put all the big mountain plateaux out of action for long-range aircraft by forcing labour-gangs to litter them with cairns of stones; and the smaller ones, even had they been suitable for small planes, were far beyond their fuel range from the airfields of Italy or the Middle East. But they cheered up when I told them that the BBC had promised to broadcast, and the RAF to scatter leaflets all over Crete announcing our departure with the General, the moment we were safe in the mountains. This would call off some of the heat, and confusing phenomena — flares, fires, unexplained musketry in the opposite direction to our flight, cut telephone wires, whispering campaigns and contradictory rumours planted within informers’ earshot — could further perplex the hue and cry. Should our distance from communications delay action by the BBC and the RAF, it would be all-important, in order to exonerate the Cretan population, somehow to convince the enemy that their Commander’s disappearance was due to capture, not assassination, and by a force under British command.
Many gaps and problems remained. Sending letters back to our base to cheer up Billy and the rest of the party, I spent the next days inside Herakleion with Micky and Elias and our other old helpers, shifting from one friendly house to another, exploring the streets and entrances and exits of the great walled town between twilight and curfew. Vaguely, as yet, an unorthodox method of getaway was beginning to form . . . Between whiles, there were secret meetings, not directly connected with the operation, with the group who ran the resistance and the information network in the city — doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, headmasters, reserve officers, artisans, functionaries and students of either sex, shopkeepers and the clergy, including the Metropolitan Eugenius himself — and visits to other cellars, reached through hidden doors and secret passages, where a devoted team reduplicated the BBC news[3] for hand-to-hand distribution. After months in the mountains, there was something bracing about these descents into the lions’ den: the swastika flags everywhere, German conversation in one’s ears and the constant rubbing shoulders with enemy soldiers in the streets. The outside of Gestapo HQ, particularly, which had meant the doom of many friends, held a baleful fascination.
Back at Knossos, Micky and I were talking to some friends of his in a ‘safe’ house when three German sergeants lurched in, slightly tipsy from celebrating Easter. Wine was produced; Micky explained away the English cigarettes (brought in by Billy) which he had offered them by mistake, as black market loot from the battle in the Dodecanese. A deluge of wine covered up this contretemps, followed by attempts, bearishly mimicked by our guests, to teach them to dance a Cretan pentozali in which we all joined.
Before rejoining the others in the mountains, we were standing with a shepherd and his flock having a last look at Point A when a large car came slowly round the corner. There were triangular flags on either mudguard, one tin one striped red, white and black, the other field grey, framed in nickel and embroidered with the Wehrmacht eagle in gold wire. Inside, next to the chauffeur, unmistakable from the gold on his hat, the red tabs with the gold oak leaves, the many decorations and the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross round his neck on a riband — sat the General himself: a broad pale face with a jutting chin and blue eyes. I waved. Looking rather surprised at so unaccustomed a gesture from a wayside shepherd, the General gravely raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement and our eyes crossed. It was an odd moment, and, we thought as we watched the car disappearing, a good omen.
I got back to the hideout at last on April 16th, which was Orthodox Easter Sunday, the greatest feast of the Greek year. I had sent Billy warning before leaving (on foot this time) that our Herakleion agents had heard that the Germans suspected that a large body of parachutists had been dropped in the Lasithi mountains; a rumour due, no doubt, to the noise of the plane night after night; so it was best to keep a look out. But really it was all to the good: if they made a sweep, the enemy would find nothing; the Katharo was only twelve miles from our eyrie as the crow flies; but, in mountains like these, the distance could be multiplied many times; also, when our operation happened, there was a chance the enemy might think it was the work of this ghost commando.
Everyone was in high spirits; all the arrangements had worked perfectly. The party had been eccentrically increased by the arrival, escorted by a shepherd, of two Russian deserters who had been shanghaied into the German ancillary forces: a Ukrainian and a Caucasian, rather amusing scarecrows with whom Billy, whose mother was a White Russian, was able to converse. They could be incorporated into the guerrilla covering-and-diversionary force. For this, Bourdzalis’s band, which was lying up only twenty-four hours’ march away, was the obvious one. I sent Antoni — a great friend of the old giant and a fellow refugee from Asia Minor — to bring him and fifteen men as fast as possible. Their arrival would be the signal for our departure for the target area.
Meanwhile, there was a paschal lamb roasting whole and a demijohn of wine for us all to celebrate our reunion and Orthodox Easter with a feast and singing and dancing. Scores of hard-boiled eggs dyed red were clashed together like conkers with cries of ‘Christ is risen!’ and ‘He is risen indeed.’ Those left over were propped up in a row and shot down for pistol practice. When all of them were smashed, after every toast, pistol magazines were joyfully emptied into the air in honour of the Resurrection. Though all the canyons sent the echoes ricocheting into the distance, the noise was quite safe in this dizzy wilderness. Anyway, Cretans are always blazing away. Siphoyannis had brought several neighbouring shepherds, and the dancing, to our songs underlined with clapping, was nimble, fast and elaborate. I was sorry nobody had a lyra — the light three-stringed Cretan viol, or rather Rebeck, carved from beech and played on the knee with a semicircular bow — as George was an expert player.
Next day was given over to planning with Billy and Micky and Elias, who had both come with me for the purpose. (Apart from them, only Manoli and George, utterly discreet, had been told of our plan and sworn in; new initiates were only sworn in when it was necessary for each of us to know the parts we had to play. On each in turn the news had the same electric effect.) We decided that the General’s car should not only be used as a false scent, but a getaway device as well; it should whisk the General and some of his captors from the scene at high speed. Where? It would be tempting to drive due south across the Messara plain and embark at Soutsouro, or some other combe on the south coast. This obvious scheme had several drawbacks. Firstly, it would be obvious to the Germans too; they knew we used those waters; and the way back to the main party for our only driver — Billy — after planting the car far enough away, would be too long and dangerous. Secondly, we would be fast on the move, and thus off the air to Cairo, for some time. Thirdly, should the enemy pick up our scent, those excellent roads could transport the large garrisons of the plain to the empty forbidden zone of low hills along the coast in a couple of hours; if necessary, they could fill the region with all the Germans in the Fortress of Crete. A cordon along the waterline and another inland could prevent any craft putting in, and, by intercepting our runners, cut us off from our distant wireless links with Cairo. Finally, with our backs to the sea in that region of sparse cover, they could run us to ground.
Far better to let the car, like a magic carpet, deposit us close to high mountains, with friendly shepherds for guides and caves and ravines to hide in till the first furore should die down. Runners could move fast and freely there; we could pick up our broken links with Cairo, and, via SOE, with the BBC, the RAF and the Navy, and arrange an evacuation further west. Above all, even with a slow-moving General on our hands, we could move more quickly than enemy troops. We would find a mule for him and, if the country grew too steep, put together a rough-and-ready palanquin; and there was always pick-a-back . . . A glance at the map at once indicated the vast bulk of Mount Ida, sprawling across a quarter of the island and climbing to over 8,000 feet; a familiar refuge to most of us, but, to the enemy, a daunting and perilous labyrinth haunted by guerrilla bands and outlaws. Not even a garrison of 50,000 men could completely cordon off that colossal massif; there would be gaps. A single road ran westwards along the north coast, to Retimo and Canea. South of this, the foothills climbed abruptly to the famous guerrilla village of Anoyeia, above which the welcoming chaos soared. North of the road and a couple of miles further west, a footpath ran four miles down the Heliana ravine to the sea. The point of junction would be the perfect place to leave the car. The place sprang to mind as, last year, I had waited three days there for Ralph Stockbridge and John Stanley to land by submarine. (They had announced their safe arrival by releasing carrier pigeons.) We could indicate to the enemy that we had left with the General by similar means, and scatter the path with corroborative detail.
There was only one drawback to this — Herakleion is girdled by a high Venetian city wall — unless it was an advantage: the only road from Point A to this desirable region ran clean through the heart of the city. It had one way in and one way out; there was a huge enemy garrison and numerous road-blocks and checkpoints; Anoyeia was twenty miles the wrong side of the city. There was no way round. [4] But, we reasoned, after dark in the blackout, the occupants of the car would be dim figures; all that the people in the street could see, and then sentries and the patrols and the parties at the check-posts, would be the hats and two figures in German uniform in the front; and a shout of ‘Put that light out!’ would stop them from peering closer. Point A was only four miles from the town; with any luck we would be through it and away within half an hour of the capture; even less. The car would be observed driving normally in the streets, then leaving Herakleion westwards. Why not? By the time his staff began to grow uneasy, or the car was discovered — when, I hoped, the story of our submarine flight would come into play — we would have a long start up the side of Mount Ida.
Micky and Elias and I had discussed these possibilities in Herakleion; Billy’s thoughts, from poring over the map, had been heading in a similar direction; Manoli and George, when they were called in, leaped at the idea. Now that the scheme was decided, it seemed the only possible one. The results of a mishap in the town were too disastrous to contemplate; but a plunge straight into the enemy stronghold with their captured commander would be the last idea to occur to them. We were excited and hilarious at the prospect and Micky and Elias sped back to Herakleion.
Next day our wait was relieved by watching two squadrons of RAF bombers attacking Kastelli aerodrome. There was a lot of flak, but several large blazes and columns of smoke indicated heavy damage. Each explosion evoked delirious cheers and all the planes headed back for Africa intact. Next morning, after marching a day and a night non-stop, Bourdzalis arrived with his men. They were festooned with bandoliers and bristling with daggers ‘like lobsters’, as they say, but some of their arms were poor. (We could help here.) A few had been mustered in a hurry to complete the old giant’s nucleus. The oldest were white haired and heavily whiskered, the youngest had scarcely begun shaving. They were all in the hills out of pure patriotism and free of politics, and bent on striking a blow, whatever it might be. They refused the idea of a day’s rest. We had a meal under the leaves. Our own party, by slipping on battledress tops above their breeches and boots, and replacing their turbans with berets, assumed a semblance of uniform; each, beside his Cretan haversack, was slung with several Marlin guns. Billy and I made a similar change.
We waited for dusk to conceal our little column, now twenty-five strong, and moved off down the glen. I wanted to get them all to Skalani in a single giant stride, but it was too far over those rocks in the pitch dark. One or two of the elder guerrillas fell out, rather understandably. We just managed to reach Kharasso when the sky was growing pale; we hid all day in the lofts and cellars of two friendly houses, and set off again, wined and raven-fed, at nightfall; striking due west, over flatter and thus more dangerous country. We waded through streams noisy with frogs and passed through villages where the device of shouting in German again came to our help. Soon after midnight the guerrillas, the Russians and some of our party were safely hidden in a cave with a door containing an old wine-press. A little further down the dried-up river bed, Billy, Manoli, George and I were soon under Pavlo’s roof, only five miles from Herakleion and less than a mile from Point A.
1. Both became god-brothers of mine later. Such a relationship – synteknos in Crete, koumbares in Greece – is important and binding. There are several in this story. One becomes a synteknos by baptising or by standing best man, to somebody’s son or daughter.
2. One of them, Flight Sergeant Jo Bradley, DFM, MM, before he was evacuated, became my signaller for several months, after my former signaller, Apostolos Evanghelou of Leros, had been captured and executed by the enemy.
3. Ownership of an ordinary wireless set was punished by death.
4. There was a branch road, eight miles west of Herakleion, which turned left and ran through Tilisso to Anoyeia (and nowhere else), ending a mile short of the village. It was out of the question to take this; Anoyeia would have been hopelessly and glaringly compromised. Also, after the General and his escort had taken to the hills, the way back to the road fork and along the main road to the submarine path would be an extra twenty miles, too far for a non-driver (me). Something was sure to go wrong and wreck the whole scheme. Unfortunately I was the only one who knew the path to the submarine point; but I hoped I could get the car along a shorter distance without mishap.