As the end of the war came in sight in the autumn of 1944, authorities from outside the island began to take precedence over those in the field. It was the inevitable triumph of the staff officer over the fighting man.
Instead of the rank inflation of Bolo Keble’s day, there was rank escalation. On the Greek side, Colonel Nathenas had been superseded by General Papadakis, and Tom Dunbabin had to welcome Brigadier Barker-Benfield in his new guise as the commander of Creteforce. Barker-Benfield, an over-optimistic man whom ELAS had managed to impress, really could have come straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh. His refusal to listen to the warnings from both Woodhouse and Hammond in Greece about Communist ruthlessness was almost as disastrous as the obstinate support of Churchill and the Foreign Office for the widely unpopular King.
Attempts to prevent a breach between ELAS and the Nationalist forces continued. On 25 October, a meeting took place between the senior Greek officer on the island, General Papadakis, and the commander of the rather optimistically designated ELAS 5th Division, Colonel Kondekas. Dunbabin also sent one of his most experienced officers, Terence Bruce-Mitford, as liaison officer to ELAS now that his work in heavy weapon training was done. Bruce-Mitford, with his red hair and new appointment, rather predictably was nicknamed the ‘red Major’. His job was not only difficult from a political point of view. On 12 November a German force attacked ELAS headquarters at Panayia, directly inland from Canea. After fierce fighting, they withdrew having lost about twenty men.
In theory, the ELAS troops were under the Allied command of General Papadakis, a fiction which the Communists hardly bothered to acknowledge. They had a wireless set in direct contact with EAM–ELAS headquarters on the mainland, where General Mandakas was now supposedly in charge. And since the Communists had managed to infiltrate National Army headquarters in Athens, Colonel Kondekas in Crete learned of decisions made by the Greek government and by General Scobie on the mainland before Dunbabin received any notification. Kondekas used this advantage without scruple.
• • •
The idea began to set in that the war was as good as over. On 19 November the RAF arrived to take over the airfield at Kastelli Pediados, and soon afterwards Hugh Fraser was sent down to Sphakia where, from 3 December, Royal Navy launches began a regular daylight service, shipping in stores and taking off prisoners – one of whom was shot dead by a Cretan quite casually in front of him. On 15 December, Allied Forces Headquarters declared Crete a ‘liberated area’. But with a fully armed German division still holding the island’s capital city, this was rather premature. Only a week before, as if to remind everyone that things were not quite over, the Germans had launched a dawn attack on the British headquarters.
The German pocket ran from Georgioupolis, in the east, to the end of the coastal plain at the far end of the Gulf of Canea. Its depth varied; curiously it was at its shallowest behind Canea. Six main bands of andartes, whose combined maximum strength was less than 3,200 men, contained 11,000 German and Italian soldiers within a perimeter some 70 kilometres in length.* With a no-man’s-land between them about five kilometres deep, both sides had settled down to a waiting game.
British headquarters at this time was most appropriately based in Vaphé at that refuge of 1941 and 1942 known as ‘the British Consulate’ – in other words, the house of Niko Vandoulakis. George Psychoundakis records arriving one day to find Dunbabin, Smith-Hughes, Ciclitira and ‘the high-spirited Mr Leigh Fermor’ all drinking and singing round a table. ‘Mr Mikhali’, Psychoundakis explained, ‘was in an exceptionally happy mood for he had just returned to Crete after six months.’
During his long recovery from the paralysis brought on by rheumatic fever, Leigh Fermor spent some of his sick leave in Beirut staying at the Mission with General and Lady Spears. Billy Moss joined him there a few weeks after the Damastas episode until recalled to Cairo to be sent into Macedonia, not back to Crete as he had hoped. Leigh Fermor, frustrated by his weakness, returned to see him off. Still convalescent, he then hung around in Cairo until the medical authorities agreed that he had recovered enough to return to Crete. He had finally reached the island on 28 October.
In Heraklion with Sandy Rendel, Paddy Leigh Fermor embarked on a lengthy round of meetings with Colonel Nathenas, the military governor of the province, and Petrakageorgis, the town commandant, and an even lengthier round with old friends who wanted to celebrate his return and his recovery.
He then went to Vaphé as Tom Dunbabin’s second-in-command. Their curious existence there besieging the Germans could have led to a lack of watchfulness. Fortunately, Vaphé was exceptionally well-sited with its magnificent view across the Apokoronas plain south-east of Suda. At eight o’clock in the morning on 8 December, a German force led by several armoured vehicles smashed through the barricade across the road below the village. Perhaps most fortunately of all, Antoni Paterakis was on hand with his famous Bren gun. This gave the andartes in the village time to gather for a rearguard action.
Someone stuck their head round the door to yell to Paddy Leigh Fermor that the Germans had attacked, and that everyone was pulling back to the heights behind known as Vothonas. Leigh Fermor grabbed the supply of sovereigns and all the secret papers he could find, and ran as directed. But the retreat was by no means a rout, largely thanks to Antoni Paterakis and his Bren gun. The andartes fought back so well from the heights round the village that the Germans withdrew late in the afternoon, having lost about five men and many wounded.
• • •
Shortly afterwards, following a visit to Asi Gonia, Leigh Fermor was walking back along the hills inland from Lake Kourna when he saw a slim young man who looked familiar. Xan Fielding had returned to the island almost without warning. The resistance work in France for which he had sought a transfer at the beginning of the year had soon turned into a nightmare. He had been travelling by car with a fellow SOE officer, Francis Cammaerts, and a French officer when they were stopped at a road-block near Digne. They were arrested and taken to the local prison. A few hours before they were due to face a firing squad, he and his companions were rescued by a fellow agent in one of the greatest acts of nerve and courage in the war. Christine Granville, the Polish Countess Skarbeck, who had operated behind enemy lines longer than any other member of SOE, approached a Gestapo liaison officer, told him that she too was a British agent, and offered both money and a safe-conduct from the advancing Allies if he helped his prisoners to escape.
Paddy Leigh Fermor left Heraklion on 23 December aboard HMS Catterick. He reached Cairo just in time to join the others for a last Christmas back at Tara. Xan Fielding, who stayed on the island another month, missed an extraordinary celebration: somebody had even crumbled Benzedrine tablets into the stuffing of the turkey to make the party last longer. It was the last one. Most of Tara’s inhabitants went off to the jungles of South East Asia, still under the command of SOE, there known as Force 136. Fielding, after leaving Crete on 1 February, was sent first to Saigon and then to Phnom Penh. When the fighting came to an end, he set off on a journey he had longed to undertake to Kalimpong and the Tibetan border.
Leigh Fermor returned to England where he joined SAARF – Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force. Mainly a group of SOE veterans rapidly recruited and based at Sunningdale golf course, they stood by to drop on Oflag IV C at Colditz Castle to rescue important prisoners – Prominenten – liable to be made hostages in the closing phase of the war. Fortunately, the recently repatriated Miles Reid who had commanded the Phantom Reconnaissance Group in Greece, warned SAARF command that such an operation would end in disaster. The whole plan was cancelled. So too was a project to rescue the inmates of Flossenburg concentration camp: time had run out. An idea that Mike Cumberlege, the gold-earringed commander of the Dolphin and the Escampador, might have been saved became one of many retrospective reproaches which can do little good. He and the others captured with him in 1943 in a raid on the Corinth Canal were taken out and shot two days before the German surrender.
• • •
The liberation of Greece and the increasing traffic between Crete and the outside world meant that events on the mainland at last began to have an influence. Yet Cretan politics were by no means an automatic reflection. Their pattern, balance and nature were all different. Perhaps one of the most significant contrasts to emerge was an ethical one. On the mainland, the government in its struggle with the Communists resorted to the hated Security Battalions formed by the Germans, and to the extreme right-wing ‘X’ forces, which were little better than death squads. In Crete, there had been hardly any collaboration in an organised form, only individual acts.
Five days after the Germans left Athens and an advance party of British troops arrived, the ‘Government of National Unity’ led by George Papandreou but paid for by the British was rather unconvincingly installed. George Seferis, the poet and diplomat attached to Papandreou’s administration, said its ministers ‘looked like boarders of an orphanage in their new winter outfits’. The government survived mainly because the Communists suffered from internal splits and uncertainty. Moderates believed that they could win power peacefully, and so should not alienate support, while hardliners such as Aris Velouchiotis argued that they should use ELAS to seize power before the British imperialists crushed them and handed everything to the ‘monarcho-fascists’.
The question of guerrilla bands surrendering their arms to the National Army brought a crisis in late November. Mutual suspicion had led inevitably to a vicious circle of pre-emptive bad faith. But in a curious way, the worst example of bad faith was Stalin’s towards the Greek Communist Party. He never told them of his ‘percentage’ agreement with Churchill, discussed in May and confirmed in October, dividing up the Balkans into spheres of influence. He had even given his blessing to the deployment of General Scobie’s force – Operation Manna – more than three weeks before its arrival. Much bloodshed and misery over the next few years might have been avoided on both sides if the Greek Communists had known where they stood from the beginning.
Siantos, one of the ELAS leaders, began moving andarte divisions towards Athens on 1 December. Other Communist leaders, having at first agreed with this offensive, then began to have second thoughts. The Party’s uncharacteristic indecisiveness proved fatal. When the Communist-inspired demonstration which triggered the preliminary phase of the Greek civil war took place in Constitution Square on 3 December, Communist and ELAS leaders still hesitated over the best course to follow. Although ‘the Greek gendarmerie on the corner lost their heads and fired into the crowd’ and thus technically started the bloodshed, the demonstration had been clearly ‘aimed at a political solution’: the Party euphemism for a putsch.
Communist disarray gave General Scobie’s troops and their Greek allies, both honourable and dishonourable, a chance to recover. On 12 December, an advance party of the British 4th Division arrived crammed into Wellington and Liberator bombers. And by 7 January 1945, after a month of sporadic fighting, ELAS was forced to flee Athens and sue for peace. This was formalized with the Varkiza agreement, but the struggle was far from over.
In Crete, the main unrest in 1945 perversely followed the peace moves on the mainland. ELAS bands took up position round Rethymno on 17 January and cut the main Canea–Heraklion road on both sides. They refused entry to anyone they suspected of supporting EOK. Lieutenant Colonel Pavlos Gyparis, the Nationalist commander and an old Balkan War guerrilla fighter in Macedonia, sent them warnings to disperse. ELAS commanders agreed to discussions, but none took place and Gyparis, suspecting stonewall tactics, sent in some men. There were several outbreaks of firing and a number of casualties. By next day ELAS groups were in flight and the town had returned to normal. EOK andartes who captured some Communists wanted to kill them on the spot, but apparently a British liaison officer suggested instead that they make them go round with buckets and brushes and scrub their slogans off the walls. This fortunately appealed to their captors even more. The most serious incident took place in the south of the province, when EOK bands retaliated against the Communist stronghold of Koxaré and killed many ELAS men including their leader Limonias.
Just over ten days later, on 29 January, clashes occurred in Heraklion between ELAS and Bandouvas. This time it is hard not to suspect that personal pride was more at stake than political principle, but the casualties were just as real. They included a British officer and his driver: Captain Clynes of the Special Boat Squadron and Private Cornthwaite who were hit by an ELAS sniper in their jeep on the road to Rethymno.*
In the province of Canea the presence of the common enemy did not diminish tensions between ELAS and the British. Even the disarming of Axis prisoners and deserters had political implications: ELAS would demand the weapons for themselves, and the British would refuse.
This happened after one of the most successful mass desertions of the occupation: that of an Italian battalion forced to soldier on by the Germans. Stephen Verney, after various indirect contacts with the Italian commanding officer, slipped into their camp hospital for a meeting. Verney lay disguised on an operating table while the colonel sat beside him hunched forward, almost as if hearing his confession. They discussed plans in a murmur while another officer played the part of surgeon.
Verney sought Xan Fielding’s advice first, and the night was chosen. One company was taken off the beach near Maleme by caiques while the rest were led up into the hills. The Germans had no inkling until the last moment when the Italian colonel panicked and drove his staff car out with the headlights full on. A great deal of wild firing ensued in the dark and one of the Cretan andartes helping in the operation was killed.
After the Italians had been relieved of their weapons, they were marched down to Paleokhora and embarked in a Royal Navy warship for Egypt. Their armament meanwhile was stored in a garage in Kastelli Kissamou. ELAS wasted no time in demanding this large haul for themselves, but the British refused and once again suspicions were confirmed.
Kastelli Kissamou had been liberated by Major Digridis, a fearsome EOK leader who insisted that Jack Smith-Hughes accompany him into the town on horseback at the head of his andartes. Smith-Hughes, who had never enjoyed an affinity with horses, was obliged to overcome his alarm and hold on to the saddle with both hands when his mount caracoled nervously at the cheers of the crowd.
Dennis Ciclitira of SOE and John Stanley of ISLD set up their bases at Kastelli Kissamou, but the Communists were strong in that area and minor incidents could trigger a general mobilization on both sides. Ciclitira had a dozen men billeted in a school, mainly members of the Selino band including Antoni Paterakis. ELAS meanwhile requisitioned another school for a group of their men. The bulk of their volunteers, several hundred reserve andartes, could be summoned at short notice from the town and surrounding area.
On one occasion Antoni Paterakis encountered an ELAS guerrilla openly bearing arms in the street, which he considered a personal affront. In a flash he brought his own weapon to bear and disarmed the andarte in full public gaze. To a Cretan, this was a mortal insult. The ELAS andarte raced back to his base and within an hour, less than twenty miles from the German lines, both sides were ready for battle.
John Stanley sought out Father Spyrou, a prominent ELAS sympathizer, to find a formula to prevent a futile bloodbath. The two of them had to go to the ELAS strongpoint, ‘a hair-raising walk’, to discuss terms. Stanley, who was unfairly nicknamed the Red Captain for his efforts to keep the peace with ELAS, later advanced the view that in a curious way the Cretan tradition of family vendetta was an important influence in preventing civil war. The blood feuds engendered would have been so appalling that the very idea acted as a primitive equivalent of nuclear deterrence.*
• • •
An island with as long a history of occupation and revolt as Crete was bound to have developed an instinctive belief in merciless treatment for traitors. Collaborators knew they could expect no mercy if caught. One German agent captured by andartes begged to be allowed to commit suicide. They broke his legs with heavy stones some way from the edge of a cliff so he had to crawl the rest of the way to push himself over.
In Heraklion after the liberation, five collaborators were tried for having betrayed the assassins of a journalist who was a prominent German stooge. When only two received death sentences – the other three, younger and apparently influenced by their elders, were given long terms of imprisonment – armed andartes took over the court, hauled the prisoners into the prosecutor’s office and began to hack off their heads, with only limited success. The bodies were then thrown through the window to the crowd outside.
Young bloods from mountain villages also made desperate attempts to prove themselves before the war ended. In Halepa, a few yards from General Benthag’s residence, a shepherd boy shot down an officer. He spared two soldiers who rapidly raised their arms in surrender. The boy seized the officer’s ceremonial dagger and ran. Later that day he swopped the dagger for ten sheep. No doubt the new owner developed a good story about how he had killed the officer himself in single combat.
Another incident in the final week of the war (fourteen Germans died in the last ten days) involved two boys from the village of Asi Gonia. They too longed to seize the weapon of a German officer. In Ayios Ioannis on the edge of Canea, they grabbed a captain in the street to seize his Luger. During the struggle they shot him with his own gun. A German vehicle appeared, so they leaped over a wall and escaped. The locals when they heard of the incident were angry and grief-stricken: the officer killed by the boys was a German doctor much loved in the neighbourhood for having treated Cretan patients whenever possible.
A rash of spurious groups without political purpose suddenly emerged towards the end. These self-proclaimed andartes tried to pass themselves off as members of the resistance, partly for prestige, but also because there was the hope of a pension once peace came. Yet the ignoble opportunism of a few and several incidents of ferocious excess must be seen against a background of the Cretan resistance as a whole. Few other populations in occupied Europe had demonstrated such unity in the face of oppression. The courage of the real andartes, the saintliness of characters such as Father Ioannis Alevizakis and Alexandros Kokonas, and the brave generosity of villagers sheltering and feeding strangers – British, Dominion and Greek troops after the battle, fellow Cretans fleeing from other provinces, and members of the Allied Military Mission – rightly form a far more enduring memory.
• • •
The stalemate on Crete, having looked as if it could last indefinitely, suddenly came to an end because of events elsewhere. On 8 May, Dennis Ciclitira in Kastelli Kissamou received a signal telling him to contact the German commander to make arrangements for a formal surrender. Ciclitira did not speak German, but fortunately Costa Mitsotakis, a good linguist, was with him. Dressed in suits, not uniform, they approached the nearest German outpost and sent forward a messenger to the Kriegsmarine sentries.
After a long wait in the sun, a car arrived from headquarters. Ciclitira and Mitsotakis were driven to the Venizelos house in Halepa where Mitsotakis had been lectured by General Bräuer after his first release from prison. They were escorted to General Benthag’s office where he awaited them flanked by Colonel Barge, his chief of staff, and Captain Wildhage, the officer in charge of counter-espionage.
All three were in their best uniforms and very stiff in manner. General Benthag, a tall, heavily built officer, announced that he had just received orders from Admiral Dönitz at Flensburg to surrender to Allied Forces Headquarters. Ciclitira confirmed that they were official representatives and began to discuss arrangements. Benthag then asked how they were going to contact the authorities in Heraklion. Ciclitira replied that this presented no problem. For some time their wireless had been operating secretly from an apartment next to his headquarters where the volume of signal traffic had concealed their own messages from German direction-finders.
The next day, a light aircraft flew from Heraklion to Maleme to collect the General. This was done with great secrecy to avoid a rush of last-minute attacks by Cretan irregulars. Benthag landed at Heraklion airport hatless and in a coat without insignia. From there he was driven to the Villa Ariadne where the proceedings – they were too brusque to merit the term ceremony – took place in Sir Arthur Evans’s long dining-room. Major General Sir Colin Callander, the new GOC of the 4th Division, ordered to Greece during the Athens fighting the previous December, had sent Brigadier Dick Kirwan in his place. Benthag was shaken to find there were no terms, only unconditional surrender. He asked whether that meant commanders could be shot. Yes, if found guilty of war crimes, came the reply. Benthag flew back from Heraklion to Maleme looking ‘very dejected’. The Villa Ariadne and the airfields at Maleme and Heraklion formed a fitting triangle for this last act.
Whatever Benthag’s fears after his return from the Villa Ariadne, the Germans in the Canea area suffered no ill-treatment. Kirwan authorized them to keep their personal weapons for self-defence until British troops arrived to guard them, and told General Benthag to continue to administer German military discipline. Benthag ordered the execution of a soldier who raped and murdered a Cretan woman. In a tangle of military justice, General Benthag was charged some months later with the crime of having a soldier shot after the surrender. Fortunately, Kirwan, by then Deputy Director of Military Operations in the War Office, heard of this and exonerated Benthag.
With Germans still in possession of formidable firepower yet deeply frightened of the Cretan population, the interregnum had a curious air of unreality. On the evening of Benthag’s secret surrender at Knossos, British officers in the Canea area such as Ciclitira, Stanley and Verney entered the city. In an aberrant mood, they invited the German officers, who had been trying to track them down for so long, to a party in a café before their disappearance into captivity. The idea of introducing themselves, both by their code-names and their real names, held an irresistible appeal. A jazz band was furnished by the German garrison. The guests included several of the most hated members of the occupying power – Captain Herbert Glembin of the Feldgendarmerie and Sonderführer Emil Grohmann, who had interrogated Geoffrey Barkham. Grohmann, a mining engineer, was another German guerrilla-hunter who had lived most of his life in Greece. Schubert, although reputedly still in Canea at this moment, was not present, nor were any members of the Gestapo since they had left the island in September 1944.
The next morning, once more in uniform, the British took part in the unforgettably spontaneous celebrations eclipsing even those which had taken place in Heraklion the previous October. Crowds from the surrounding villages and towns converged merrily on Canea. Rival bands of andartes raced to be the first into the town, and rumours spread that fighting was inevitable between ELAS bands and the National Army troops under Colonel Gyparis. But the mood of shouting and chanting and singing was too strong that day. People danced everywhere: in the streets, in cafés and in private houses.
Verney, whose work switched to propaganda for the Allies, set up an office in Canea, this time openly. Within the next couple of days he received copies of the very first photographs taken in liberated concentration camps. He immediately organised an exhibition, but it provoked disbelief and outrage amongst the fully armed German soldiers, one of whom placed a grenade under his car.
On 13 May an advance party of ‘Presforce’, a battalion of the Royal Hampshires under Brigadier Patrick Preston, left Piraeus in a destroyer for Canea. Ten days later, the disarmament of German troops took place. The main body of the Hampshires marched up the road from Suda Bay in parade order: a very different sight from those exhausted and filthy soldiers who had retreated from the paratroopers and mountain troops almost exactly four years before.
The German troops, who had withdrawn for self-defence on to the Akrotiri, were held behind a protective cordon until shipped out from Suda Bay. According to Dennis Ciclitira, they were allowed to take all their booty home with them. They had so much that the captain said he could have taken twice as many British troops with full equipment. ‘The Cretans’, records the Hampshires’ regimental history, ‘strongly resented the restraint of the British troops towards their hated and conquered foes.’
• • •
After the shouting came the tidying up. Ralph Stockbridge’s main priority was to single out Major Kleinschmidt of the Abwehr and fly him off to Athens for interrogation. As an extension of his propaganda activities, Verney set up an English school. This was taken over by the British Council and transferred to the former German Consulate. There one of its members discovered a hoard of silver bricked up at the end of a corridor.
For the SOE officers who stayed on for the next few months, the main task was to compensate those who had helped the British and to settle claims. But the flow of sovereigns from Cairo had ceased and local currency had become worthless: in Athens one sovereign bought 64 billion drachma. The price of expensive items was fixed in okas of olive oil and smaller items such as newspapers were priced in cigarettes.
Dennis Ciclitira, who came from a family of dried fruit traders, decided that the only way to settle SOE’s obligations was to resort to commodity speculation in olive oil. He asked the Royal Navy to blockade Canea to prevent exports to Heraklion, and having thus driven down prices at one end of the island and raised them at the other, he rapidly borrowed, bought and sold to raise the sums required.
For many Cretans, victory over the Germans did not bring release from suffering; in fact times grew even harder. Many young resistance fighters soon found themselves drafted into the army to fight the civil war on the mainland which erupted again in July 1946 and lasted until the end of August 1949. Ralph Stockbridge, then a regular MI6 officer, became Vice-Consul in the Salonika Consulate-General to report on intelligence aspects of the conflict in the region.
Once again Cretans did not follow the mainland Greeks – ‘those from above’ as they were sometimes called. Venizelos would have approved: the island underlined its unusual, yet entirely coherent, position by rejecting the monarchy in the referendum of September 1946, while also decisively rejecting Communism.
Cretan politics were too trenchant. The Communists had never been able to manipulate the question of the monarchy and the Metaxas regime on an island as avowedly republican as Crete. Accusations of collaboration against Cretan conservatives and the centre-right fell flat because so few were tainted. Deprived of this handhold on the tail of their rivals, the Communists could not twist issues as they had on the mainland.
The other difference was that on the mainland the awe-inspiring eastward advance of the Red Army gave a much stronger impression of inevitability – that Marxist-Leninist argument which appealed to the visceral emotion of excited dread.
The island of Crete and the sense of individuality it engendered in the vast majority of its inhabitants also formed a fortress against internationalism, whether the New Order of Hitler or Russian Communism masquerading as a universal brotherhood. And the outcome of the civil war on Crete, although it dragged on until 1948, led relentlessly to the defeat of ELAS as even Cretan Communists must have known in their hearts.
Yanni Bodias, the ELAS renegade from Bandouvas’s band, met the traditionally savage end of an outlaw. Having successfully evaded army units on Psiloriti, he was tracked by Bandouvas and his band in what was perhaps an inevitable finale to their curious relationship. But it was a gendarme who spotted Bodias hiding in a tall ilex tree in the foothills. He killed him with a single shot. The body fell across a branch, and hung there bent double. The gendarme went off to tell his superiors.
A shepherd, attracted by the shot, spotted Bodias’s body and his binoculars swinging gently on the neckstrap. He climbed the tree to retrieve them and carried his booty away proudly. Bandouvas encountered him shortly afterwards and immediately recognized the binoculars, which he had given to Bodias before their split in 1943. The shepherd had no alternative but to lead him back to the corpse. One of Bandouvas’s men was told to climb the tree and bring down the body, which was taken to his brother at Ay Varvára. There, the head and one hand were severed for identification. Next day, Bandouvas’s men returned to Heraklion through the Canea Gate to carry the head in triumph on a stick through the streets. Bandouvas, who in his memoirs pretended rather unconvincingly to have been deeply shocked at such barbaric behaviour, claimed on other occasions to have fired the fatal shot.
Apart from the Mount Ida range, the main area of Communist resistance was around the gorge of Samaria where an ELAS unit several hundred strong held out until 1948. Eventually, National Army troops advanced from both ends in force, certain that they had the ELAS andartes trapped, but most managed to scale the cliffs and escape into the White Mountains. There, a number of them lingered on as outlaws, surviving off stolen sheep. The last two, Spyros Blazakis and Giorgios Tzobanakis, came down in the autumn of 1974 after the fall of the Colonels’ regime.
• • •
One of the least deserved fates of the post-war years awaited George Psychoundakis. He first had to endure the squalid indignity of imprisonment as a deserter from the Greek army, because of a bureaucratic blunder over his papers. This injustice did not spare him from two years’ active service in Northern Greece against the Communist forces there. On his return to Crete, he had to work as a navvy building mountain roads to provide for his family, all of whose sheep had been stolen in the war. Fittingly, it was during this period of purgatory that he wrote his masterpiece of the resistance, The Cretan Runner.
Many years later, in 1974, the Germans established their war cemetery on Hill 107 above Maleme. Psychoundakis, with a good dash of Cretan black humour, applied for the job of keeper. There, he was to bury the man who might be called the last German of the island’s occupation.
In 1946, the Greek government demanded the return of generals in command of Axis occupying forces to stand trial for war crimes.* The accusation that government forces had depended on collaborators to crush the Communists still rankled.
The first two German commanders on Crete to be sent back to face trial in Athens were General Müller, notorious for his brutality, and General Bräuer, the least culpable of all. Both were condemned to death.
Paddy Leigh Fermor, who happened to be in Athens at the time, was taken to the last day of the trial by Greek friends. Afterwards they insisted on his visiting the two generals behind the scenes. Leigh Fermor was uneasy about the idea, but the German generals behaved as if it were a perfectly ordinary social occasion. When he was introduced as the captor of General Kreipe, Müller laughed. ‘Ach, Herr Major. Mich hätten sie nicht so leicht geschnappt!’ – ‘You would not have captured me so easily!’
Bräuer’s execution was delayed, with distasteful symbolism, until 20 May 1947, the anniversary of the airborne invasion. His death shocked international opinion so much that Andrae and other senior officers, who were far guiltier, escaped with prison sentences. Few protested on behalf of Müller.
Many years later, at the request of the Association of German Airborne Troops, General Bräuer’s body was brought from Athens to the cemetery overlooking Maleme where he was reburied by George Psychoundakis.
• • •
During the 1970s George Psychoundakis and that other hero of the Resistance, Manoli Paterakis, worked in the German cemetery together. When taking a break from work, they would chat in the shade of a tree, looking out over Maleme to the sea. One afternoon, over thirty years after the war, an elderly visitor limping from an old injury, clearly a former German officer, suddenly came to a stop and began to stare at Manoli Paterakis with a disturbing intensity. His features – Paterakis had the profile of an eagle – were unmistakable.
‘I have seen you before,’ he said with a smile of grim certainty. Paterakis searched the German’s face and his own memory. He was sure that he had never laid eyes on him in his life.
‘You never saw me,’ the German confirmed, ‘but I saw you. You were with a man who had lost one hand, and rested his rifle on the stump of his forearm.’ Amazed, Paterakis agreed that this was so. The German went on to explain that he had been lying hidden under a bush when the two of them had stopped next to it.
On the very first morning of the battle for Crete, severely hit soon after his descent by parachute, he had dragged himself out of sight like a wounded animal. His battalion had almost been wiped out, and Cretan irregulars were searching for survivors. The arrival of German reinforcements had then appeared a forlorn hope. In the end, he had lain there for three days without water before being found. He had never forgotten Manoli Paterakis’s face.