Authors: Rick Stroud
Invisible among the unkempt civilians were resistance fighters, watching the progress of the car as carefully as they watched all the comings and goings of the invaders, noting the badges of identity on their uniforms, the regimental plates on their vehicles, the positions of guard posts and the routine of the soldiers that manned them. The information was recorded, collated and analysed, turned into lists, drawn into maps and sent by radio and motor launch to SOE Balkans office, known as Force
1
33, in Cairo. One of the key figures in this work was Mihalis Akoumianakis (codename ‘Minoan Micky’), who had been recruited to Force 133 SOE as head of counter-intelligence. He was the son of the caretaker of the archaeological dig at Knossos; his father had been killed in the first three days of the German invasion.
Covert operations had been conducted on Crete since before the first German soldiers arrived on the island, and coordinated by British SOE officer John Pendlebury. The networks he started had grown in size and efficiency, sending back information that had helped the Allies defeat Rommel in the Western Desert. Many of the Desert Fox’s supply ships were sunk in the Mediterranean, depriving him of petrol, ammunition and reinforcements, because of intelligence gleaned by the men and women whom the Germans dismissed as disorganised peasants. Members of the resistance risked their property, their lives and those of their families; many had already been caught, tortured and executed; whole villages on the island had been destroyed in reprisals.
The general’s car stopped at the Kreiskommandantur, a large administration building on the edge of Heraklion’s Liberty Square, where he was to take his lunch. He stepped inside and was met by a pretty young Cretan woman who greeted him with a warm smile and offered him real coffee. She too was an undercover agent who for months had been smuggling secret documents out of the building to be photographed; the pictures were sent to Cairo and the documents returned to the files from which they had been taken.
In the afternoon Kreipe continued on his journey to the Villa Ariadne, next to which stood the small house where Akoumianakis’s late father had lived. Micky stood in the garden, talking to his sister – another valued member of the resistance, though the soldiers guarding the villa thought she was just a charming flirt. The security measures round the villa itself were impressive: barriers, layers of coiled barbed wire, some of it electrified, machine-gun nests, armed guards. Kreipe was greeted by a soldier-servant who fussed with the general’s luggage and ordered it to be taken to the ground-floor bedroom of the villa, where his new master was to sleep. Kreipe was pleased to see that the only staff allowed to work inside the building were German soldiers. He was shown through the cool hall and into his study. Another servant brought him more coffee. Tomorrow he must go to his headquarters in Archanes to meet and take charge of his new command.
Through the open door of the study he heard his staff talking quietly and the front door closing. Outside a guard patrolled in the dusty garden which was scattered with carved stones and excavating equipment from the now abandoned archaeological dig. Everything was in order, quiet and safe. The general took off his heavy uniform jacket and sat in a chair beside the desk, sleepy from the journey. As a schoolboy he had attended the Latin School at Greussen in Thuringia; he had enjoyed learning about the classical world, and now looked forward to visiting some of the island’s ancient sites. He sat drowsy and musing, happily unaware that he had entered a trap that in less than five weeks would spring shut, ruin his career, destroy his reputation and nearly cost him his life.
1
The general’s new home was then, as it is still, a land of contrasts: violence and feuding coexist with passionate friendship and overwhelmingly generous hospitality. Cretan mountain men have been described as living ‘in a past where a young man only attains his majority when he has stolen his first goat or abducted a girl or drawn blood in a family feud’. Blood vendettas over family honour or sheep can go on for decades. Cretans, especially those who live in the mountains, have an inbuilt distrust of authority; they have a saying: ‘Prison is a place for heroes.’
Crete has been populated since Neolithic times, when settlers are thought to have come from Anatolia. The island is dotted with ancient Iron Age palaces, the biggest and most magnificent of which was excavated at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans at the beginning of the twentieth century. Evans named the culture responsible for building the palaces ‘Minoan’, after the mythical King Minos, son of Zeus and the island’s first ruler; Minos founded the Cretan navy and sacrificed boys and girls to the Minotaur. Minoans were farmers, and counted bull leaping among their sports. The civilisation was destroyed by a combination of invasion and the eruption of a volcano on Santorini, one of the most violent cataclysms in the history of the Western world. In Roman times the island’s forests provided wood for the ships of the Mediterranean and when there were no more trees left, the people grew olives and reared sheep and goats on the denuded hillsides. No animal dangerous to man is to be found on Crete. One legend claims this as a legacy of Hercules, who wanted to make the birthplace of Zeus safe for humans.
For centuries Crete has been a stepping stone between Europe, Asia and Africa, and for nearly a thousand years has been fought over and occupied by Muslim pirates, Venetians and Turks. In the thirteenth century the island was taken over by the Venetians, whose harsh regime caused a revolution. Crete seized its independence and declared itself a republic; it took five years of armed struggle before the Venetians once again ruled the island. In the seventeenth century, the Turks took Crete away from the Venetians and it became part of the Ottoman Empire. There followed
20
0 years of conflict between the Christians and the Muslims. At the end of the nineteenth century, world powers intervened: the Turks were finally expelled and in 1897 Crete achieved (temporary) independence.
Any story about Crete will be dominated by a set of four silent, brooding characters, as dangerous as any islander – the mountains. They run the length of the land, crisscrossed by steep gorges watched over by birds of prey, eagles, falcons and kestrels. The highest peaks carry snow all the year round. On the lower slopes, in the warm, fertile valleys, rosemary, sage, oregano and thyme scent the hillsides growing among daisies, poppies, wild orchids and cyclamen, shaded by chestnuts, oaks, olives, pines, plane trees and tamarisks.
In the west are the White Mountains, containing some of the wildest terrain in Europe. The peaks rise to
8
,
0
00 feet and were a refuge to desperate men fleeing from the Turks with a price on their heads. To the east of the White Mountains a low rolling valley leads to the colossal heights of Mount Ida, whose summit reveals a panorama of the whole of the island. South-west of Ida stands Kedros in solemn isolation and to the east of Kedros towers the last of Crete’s great mountain characters, Dikti.
The mountains hide a series of high upland plains, surrounded by hills and accessible only to shepherds on foot. Winter snows can make even these impossible to reach. For hundreds of years bandits and vendettas made moving around the mountains dangerous. The locals went armed and almost every man on the island possessed some sort of weapon, even if it was an ancient and unreliable gun inherited from a great-grandparent.
Nestling in the White Mountains is the plain of Omalos, the subject of a violent resistance song dating back to the battles against the Ottoman Empire.
When will we have a clear starry night?
When February arrive?
So I can take my rifle
and my bandolier
and descend to Omalos
on the road to the Mousouro clan.
I will then deprive mothers of their sons,
I will deprive wives of their husbands,
I will leave motherless babies behind,
Babies that cry because they’ve lost their mothers,
Babies that cry out for water in the night,
Babies that cry out for milk at dawn,
Babies that cry out for their mothers when the morning comes.
Oh when will we have a clear starry night!
Oh when will we have a clear starry night!
To the south-west of the White Mountains, and protected by them, is Sfakia, one of the few places on the island never to have been occupied by a foreign power. Its people are renowned for their ferocious spirit and their hospitality. Sfakia was a centre of resistance against both the Greeks and the Turks. The legendary Cretan resistance fighter Daskaloyannis came from Sfakia. In 1771, after a long struggle, he was finally captured, and was then sentenced to be skinned alive inside the city of Heraklion. He is reported to have endured the ordeal in silence. Before the Second World War it was possible to say: ‘the men of Sfakia, those champions of the Cretan Revolution, are still a race apart’.
Mount Ida is the home of legend. Hidden below its peaks lies the great plateau of Nida and the cave of the God Zeus, a deep, mournful fissure approached up a steep path and across a frightening ledge. Tracks from Nida lead down to the town of Anogia, a village which for centuries has been a refuge for resistance fighters. South of Ida is another sheltered and remote fertile plain, the Amari valley. For a while in the Second World War the valley became such a place of refuge and safety to British agents that they gave it the name
Lotus Land.
The invasion of the island in the Second World War was unlike anything that had been known before. By the end of 1940 Hitler’s armies had swept across Europe and were about to enter the war in North Africa. General Franz Halder, chief of the German general staff, argued that: ‘The mastery of the Eastern Mediterranean is dependent on the capture of Crete’ and that ‘this could best be achieved by an air landing.’ On 28 April 1941, from his
Führer
headquarters, Hitler issued ‘Directive No. 28’, ordering the occupation of Crete, ‘in order to have a base for conducting the air war against England in the Eastern Mediterranean’.
One man who tried to prepare the island for its next invasion was an Englishman, John Pendlebury. In 1929, at the age of twenty-five, Pendlebury was appointed curator of the archaeological site at Knossos, Crete, and director of excavations at Amarna, in Egypt. Winchester School and Cambridge University educated (Classics tripos with a distinction in Archaeology), Pendlebury was unconventional, sharp, possessed of a beguilingly playful nature, and passionate about Crete. Over six foot tall, he was a formidable athlete: he fenced, held international high-jump records and could clear hurdles ‘with the speed of a cheetah’. His fitness levels were staggering: in one archaeological season alone on Crete he is said to have walked more than a thousand miles.
All who met John Pendlebury seemed to fall under his spell. ‘He made a wonderfully buccaneerish and rakish impression, which may have been partly due to the glass eye,’ wrote a future fellow Special Operations Executive agent, Patrick Leigh Fermor. (Pendlebury had lost the eye as the result of a childhood accident; during the war he would take out his prosthetic eye and leave it on his desk as a signal to his colleagues that he was away on a mission.) Manolaki Akoumianakis recalled that Pendlebury’s ‘companions were shepherds and mountain villagers. He knew all their dialects’; he could drink and walk the legs off any Cretan. Of hosting celebrations for the saint’s day of Saint John, Pendlebury wrote: ‘It was the best we have had up to date. I really felt the village father! – Pretty near
10
00 people and dancing from 9-3! Total cost of making the whole village tight £7!’ Pendlebury’s home on Crete was the Villa Ariadne, a large, low, square building, constructed of yellow and brown stone which had for years been the centre of the archaeological work at Knossos.
When he was not moving around the island, Pendlebury would hang around the cafés and restaurants of Heraklion’s Lion Square – a market area dominated by the Morosini Fountain, a series of huge white marble bowls supported by lions, and once home to the biggest slave market in the Eastern Mediterranean. Pendlebury would sit, eating sweet cakes and drinking coffee in the Patisserie Reginaki – known as ‘High Life’, or drinking wine at Maxim, a restaurant built into one of the Byzantine arches that surrounded the fountain. As he sat, he listened to the conversations going on around him. He became aware of a discreet net of Nazi sympathisers who were quietly gathering intelligence and names that would be useful after the German invasion.
One, an Austrian woman called Frau Myro Bauritz, taught foreign languages and freelanced as a commercial ‘letter writer’ for the Greek companies with contracts in France. When not teaching, Frau Bauritz was hard at work making lists of German-speaking students in the city. Jan Knoch was a German tourist whose pleasure it was to wander about the island making drawings. He based himself in Pitsidia near the south coast in an area called the Mesara Plain. Knoch became quite well known to the locals and had a favourite spot on a hill, from which he would spend hours sketching the landscape. In front of him lay Timbaki, destined to turn into the biggest German airfield on the island. Knoch vanished just before the invasion, but reappeared in
1
942 working as a Wehrmacht engineer with the rank of major. A third spy was Hans Kruger, who also disappeared immediately before the invasion. He taught languages at the exclusive Commercial School in Heraklion. After the war his name was found on orders discovered in the German Kommandantur.