Kidnap in Crete (8 page)

Next, it was the turn of Kandanos, where, during the invasion, a small detachment of German motorcycle troops, armed with MG34 sidecar-mounted machine guns, had tried to move through the village on their way south to secure the port of Paleochora. The villagers barred the way at Floria and the next day ambushed troops of the 5th Gebirgsjäger at Kandanos Gorge. Outnumbered and heavily outgunned, the villagers fought for two days before retreating to the mountains.

On 3 June soldiers from the 11th Battalion, 1st
Luftlande
Assault division, stormed into Kandanos, executed about 180 of men, women and children, slaughtered the livestock and burned down the houses. Other villages in the area, including Floria and Kakopetro, met the same fate. Kandanos was declared a ‘dead zone’ into which Cretans were forbidden to enter. Signs were put up on all the roads into the village saying: ‘Here stood Kandanos, destroyed in retaliation for the bestial ambush murder of a paratrooper platoon and a half-platoon of military engineers by armed men and women. Never to be rebuilt again.’

A few days later Göring awarded young Trebes the Knight’s Cross for ‘bravery on Crete’. Weixler was court-martialled for taking photographs and helping some of the Kondomari villagers to escape.

See Notes to Chapter 6

7

Fortress Crete

In June 1940, General Student left for mainland Europe and was replaced with General Andrae, a senior commander in the Luftwaffe and former head of the state police in Germany. Chania was chosen as the headquarters of ‘
Festung Kreta
’
–
Fortress Crete
–
with a divisional commander in Archanes, south of Heraklion, who was given the Villa Ariadne, sometime home of John Pendlebury. Control of the island was shared with their Axis partners, the Italians. The Germans held the most strategically important regions in the west – Chania, Rethymnon and Heraklion – while the Italians, under General Angelo Carta, were given command of the more minor eastern provinces of Sitia and Lasithi. All towns were heavily garrisoned and supported by a system of outposts. The Germans used two security forces: the
Feldgendarmerie
, military police, and the
Geheime Feldpolizei
, the field secret police. Later they were able to call upon the
Jagdkommando
Schubert – a paramilitary force set up by a German of Greek origin, Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Schubert, nicknamed ‘The Turk’. He recruited violent men – criminals and murderers – to terrorise the islanders using torture, rape, beatings and burning.

In the towns and cities the regime began to establish itself with increasing efficiency. In Heraklion, on the first day of peace, engineers retrieved a huge electric motor that had been used in the harbour and used it to pump the town’s water supplies. The streets were cleared of barricades, and the detritus of battle was gathered up. Hundreds of parachutes were retrieved and piled into the water of the Morozoni Fountain in Lion Square where they were washed by local women for reuse. Frau Bauritz presented herself to the German intelligence service and gave them her lists of German-speaking students. These young people were rounded up and pressed into service as translators. Frau Bauritz herself was recruited as a translator at the Kreiskommandantur, the German headquarters in the centre of the town.

While control of the towns and more accessible villages was comparatively simple, the wild mountains, populated by warriors whose ancestors had fought invaders for over three hundred years, were another matter. It was here that the resistance was born and operated. If the Cretans themselves found the mountains dangerous, even the toughest Axis paratroopers and Alpine soldiers would find them terrifying. For many months after the German invasion they avoided going near them, and when eventually they had to take the fight to the guerrillas, lodged in mountain eyries, they went in force, finding safety in numbers, brute force and firepower.

Although most of the Allied troops left behind became prisoners of war, about a thousand remained in hiding after the German victory. Most lived in the mountain areas and were looked after by the Cretans, despite the risks: anyone caught harbouring fugitives could expect the destruction of their houses and execution. In the high villages, it was possible for stranded Allied soldiers to move about, in uniform, carrying weapons. British soldiers could be seen sitting in cafés, smoking cigarettes and chatting up the girls, while their Cretan hosts plotted the overthrow of the Nazis. Acts of defiance surfaced at all levels: when the Germans issued new ID cards to the Cretan population, ‘the village policeman provided blank passes to British soldiers on the run, and even affixed their signature too’.

General Andrae, Commander of Crete, ordered leaflets to be dropped over the mountains proclaiming:

Escaping soldiers tried to make their way south where they hoped to find some sort of vessel to take them to Egypt. Many were led back across the mountains by Cretan guides to the region on the south coast by the Monastery of St John the Theologian at Preveli, where the men were hidden and, at night, flashed torch signals from the beach, hoping they might be spotted by Allied craft patrolling the coast. After a few weeks, with no sign of a submar­ine or motor launch, the Cretans decided it was too risky to go on using the monastery and sent the men back into the protection of the surrounding villages.

An engineer from Rethymnon, Dimitri Bernidakis, devised a new signalling system for the stranded soldiers: a red light to flash the message in Morse and a green light as a reference point. Both lights were set up in an open-fronted hut where they could be seen from the sea but not from the land. The signal the troops flashed was: ‘SOS we are British. Don’t answer. We are on the beach waiting for you. Take the green light as a guide. German coastguards 1000 metres either side.’ For nearly two months the message winked into the darkness, with no success. In the meantime some soldiers and Greek civilians managed to escape – in caïques, fishing boats, small abandoned naval craft – anything that seemed seaworthy. The lucky ones who made it to Egypt were sent to be debriefed by British intelligence officers at GHQ in Cairo, where it was decided to send a reconnaissance party to Crete to explore the possibility of rescuing more Allied soldiers. Former merchant seaman Commander Francis Pool, RNR, was sent to the island in command of HM Submarine
Thrasher
. Before the war ‘Skipper’ Pool had been in charge of the Imperial Airways flying-boat operation based at the former leper colony on the island of Spinalonga in north-eastern Crete, and the re-fuelling station at Elunda Bay; he knew the waters around Crete and spoke fluent Greek.

For fifteen nights
Thrasher
patrolled the south coast looking for any signs of life. At 22:00 hours on 26 July 1941, off the beach at Preveli, the crew spotted the green light and flashing red Morse signal. Pool was put ashore with his Cretan guide, Stratis Liparakis. Hours later the submarine commander was face to face with the abbot of Preveli monastery, Agathangelos Lagouvardos, an immense, heavily bearded, twenty-five-stone man in long black robes. They discussed how many soldiers there were in hiding, and how many Pool could take back with him. Just before dawn the next morning,
Thrasher
touched bottom off a small harbour at Limni. With the help of two commandos and a couple of naval officers, 78 Allied soldiers were guided down the beach and put on board the submarine, crammed in alongside the crew.

Thrasher
departed for Alexandria and Pool stayed behind on the island to continue gathering information. It became clear that the number of Allied soldiers requiring rescue was greater than anyone had thought. In the forests near St Apostoli Amariou, Pool and Lagouvardos established temporary headquarters. The two men set about meeting influential Cretans, including the kapitans who had been working with archaeologist John Pendlebury, and a key figure in the andartes, Colonel Andreas Papadakis. Papadakis had appointed himself head of AEAK, ‘the Supreme Committee of Cretan Struggle’, which he and six other patriots had formed in the ruins of Chania two weeks after the German invasion. AEAK’s aims were to organise an intelligence network and carry out acts of sabotage against the occupying forces. They counted among their number the chief of police in Rethymnon.

Colonel Papadakis was one of the many Cretans who offered sanctuary to stranded Allied soldiers. Among those sheltering in the colonel’s grand house, above the village of Kali Sykia, was an escapee from Galatas POW camp named Jack Smith-Hughes. Smith-Hughes a rotund, Greek-speaking British Army subaltern, had been a barrister before the war and was in charge of the Royal Army Service Corps field bakery in Chania. After making his way across the White Mountains in May, he became one of the thousands left behind on the beaches at Sfakia.

Smith-Hughes suggested that Papadakis accompany them to Egypt, to liaise with SOE Cairo about how the resistance on Crete should be organised and encouraged. On 9 August, Smith-Hughes, Pool, Abbot Lagouvardos and Colonel Papadakis met to discuss the possibilities. A translator, Manolis Vassilakis, minuted the meeting.

Papadakis asked Commander Pool if he had come to do more than rescue marooned British soldiers. Pool said that the main purpose of his expedition was to look at organising the Cretan resistance; he hoped Papadakis would accompany him to Cairo. Papadakis, who could be difficult, said he was not sure and would have to talk to his comrades. Then Pool asked if Papadakis had ever met Kapitan Satanas and if the kapitan could supply a radio to communicate with Cairo. Finally Pool asked who was going to be in overall charge of the resistance; he wondered about Nikolaos Plastiras, the much-admired war hero and republican who was living in exile in France.

The men talked on in the shade of an oak tree. When they finished, Commander Pool and Colonel Papadakis signed and approved the minutes. The men split up, having agreed to meet again on
1
9 August when the next British vessel was due to arrive and take Pool back to Alexandria. The link between Crete and the free world, broken on 2
0
May, had been restored, although weak and uncertain.

News of the Allied submarine rescues spread amongst the people of Crete and the work of gathering up the remaining stragglers began, fuelled by the rumour that the British might be back in a few months to liberate the island. The Cretan guerrilla leaders set about devising techniques for leading bands of soldiers across the mountains and the use of wireless sets to coordinate operations.

Soon runners became an important link in the chain, both for the resistance cells and future SOE operations. One of these, a young man called Giorgios Psychoundakis, became a part of the escape network, leading soldiers along routes from his village of Asi Gonia, handing them on in relays to other guerrillas who protected them and saw them safely on their way. Psychoundakis had a lively sense of humour and a winning personality. A former shepherd boy, he had an intimate knowledge of the west part of the island and of travelling across mountains and open ground by night. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who came to know him well, recalled: ‘When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki, a fierce and addictive clear spirit tasting of aniseed down his throat with the words, “Another drop of petrol for the engine,” and loped towards the gap in the bushes with the furtiveness of a stage Mohican or Groucho Marx. He turned round when he was on all fours at the exit, rolled his eyes, raised a forefinger portentously, whispered, “the Intelligence Service”, and scuttled through like a rabbit. A few minutes later we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey.’

Psychoundakis’s description of a journey from Vourvouré to the village of Platanos in the Amari valley gives some idea of the physical demands of the work. The outward journey took four nights. On the third night an exhausted Psychoundakis arrived at the house of Niko Souris, a Greek from Alexandria who was working for the British, rounding up stragglers. They talked for a bit and then Psychoundakis went to bed, ‘Tired to my bones’. The next day the two men set off at dawn and a strange thing happened, Giorgios could not recognise Niko as the man he had talked to the night before: ‘I gazed and gazed at him all the way but utterly failed to find even the faintest similarity . . . I understood that my great weariness the night before must have made me see him otherwise, and today, when I had recovered a little, I saw him as he really was.’ When he finally reached his destination he sat down to rest but when it came to setting off on the return leg, ‘We found walking afterwards all the harder . . . Finding two bits of wood we broke them and used them as walking sticks to hobble along . . . This was my first long march and it was a more exhausting one than any other I made. It was not really so long compared with others I undertook . . . but I was not used to it yet.’