Chapter Twelve
The aftermath of the invasion of Crete was bloody. The Cretans, who had spontaneously joined the fighting and had given little quarter to the enemy, were the first invaded people to actively resist the Germans. Retribution was severe from the outset. This was justified in their eyes, by accusations of atrocities.
Crete has a long tradition of resistance and guerrilla warfare in the rugged terrain of the island’s mountains. Old weapons came out of hiding, soon to be supplemented by drops of modern equipment and ammunition, organised by SOE agents who were sent anywhere where they could ferment or enhance resistance to the Germans. The enemy responded with the full panoply of Nazi retribution; torture, executions, destruction of villages and mass murder. By 1944, the cycle of attack and response was following its familiar pattern. SOE sought to raise the stakes by abducting the commanding general of 22nd Infantry Division, which formed the majority of the island’s garrison. General Muller was the original target. His HQ and residence, both south of Iraklio, in the area of the ancient Minoan palace of Knossos, were vulnerable to the kind of operation SOE and partisans could mount.
On 4 February 1944 Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Captain Bill Moss and two Cretan SOE agents, Manoli Paterakis and George Tirakis planned to jump into the island, contact partisans and set-up the abduction but the weather was poor and only Major Leigh-Fermor was able to drop in a fleeting gap in the clouds. The other three made fourteen attempts to join him over the next two months but they were unsuccessful and eventually had to be inserted by boat on 4 April. However, by this time, General Muller had been replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe, who had been transferred to a ‘quiet post’ from the Eastern Front.
Landing on a remote beach on the south coast the party made their way by night across the island to the target area south of Iraklio, using a combination of safe houses and caves to lie up by day. The Germans, alerted to the presence of what they erroneously calculated, from the aircraft noise of the abortive attempts to drop Bill Moss and the two Cretan agents, to be forty parachutists, were actively hunting British agents.
Despite the threat, General Kreipe kept to his routine of travelling to and from his divisional headquarters in the village of Archanes to Villa Ariadne at Knoossos. It was this predictable routine that Major Leigh-Fermor and his group planned to exploit. Observing his routine the partisans worked out that he would travel unescorted by car to his HQ at around 0900 hours and return to his villa for lunch at 1300 hours. At 1600 hours the General would be driven to his HQ and return to the villa around 2000 hours for dinner. However, occasionally he played bridge at his HQ Mess until late in the evening, which was the only regular variable to his routine.
General Heinrich Kreipe.
With sunset at 1945 hours during April, his normal return journey would be in the gathering gloom and this would be the ideal time to ambush his car. It was also reasoned that his house staff at the Villa Ariadne, would assume that the General had stayed at the Mess for dinner and a game of bridge, and would not raise the alarm if he were late.
While awaiting the arrival of the rest of the team Major Leigh-Fermor identified the ideal spot for the abduction on the route between HQ and residence; a T-junction where the General’s road from Archanes joins the Iraklio to Peza road near the village of Patsides. Here with a slope down to the main road, a car would have to slow down to make the turn and would consequently be easy to stop and the banks and ditches on either side would give cover for the waiting men.
One of the local partisans, Ellias, spent days spotting the General’s Opel staff car, complete with its pennant, so that he could positively identify it as it approached in the dark. He would alert the ambush that the General was on his way by means of a simple switch, battery, 300 metres of cable and buzzer system. As recalled by Bill Moss:
… we thought it advisable to detail somebody to the specific job of “buzzer man”, who would listen for the signal and at the critical moment flash a torch at Paddy and me, who would be standing by in a ditch.
Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Bill Moss were to stop the car by pretending to be a German check-point. For this they needed uniforms, which were procured by the partisans from Iraklio, without the bloodstains being too obvious. The other SOE agents and the partisans would be deployed in the ditches on both sides of the road, all with specific tasks such as holding up any other traffic. Bill Moss recorded in his personal diary the detail of the plan:
In the guise of German police corporals, equipped with red lamps and traffic signals, Paddy and I were going to stand in the centre of the road as the car approached and signal it to stop. We would then walk towards it, Paddy on the left side and myself on the right and make certain that the General was inside; then, on a given word, we would rip open the doors, Paddy hauling out the General while I dealt with the chauffeur. Eiles had told us that the General usually sat in the front seat of the car beside the chauffeur, so we felt safe in basing our plan of action on this supposition.
Bill Moss and Patrick Leigh-Fermor disguised as German military police corporals.
On 26 April 1944 the plan was ready for execution and at 2000 hours, the group was in position. During the hour’s wait, there were five false alarms as German trucks and motorcycles passed. Bill Moss commented that the German figures ‘were silhouetted against the night sky. It was a strange feeling to be crouching so close to them … while they drove past with no idea that nine pairs of eyes were so fixedly watching them’.
An hour after the General’s normal time for making his return journey, the group were begging to wonder where he was. Shivering with cold, Bill Moss continued:
I remember Paddy’s asking me the time. I looked at my watch and saw that the hands were pointing close to half-past nine. And at that moment Mitso’s torch blinked.
‘Here we go.’
Scrambling out of the ditch on to the road, Major Leigh-Fermor switched on the red lamp and Moss held up a traffic signal, and together they confidently stood in the centre of the road. ‘In a moment – far sooner than we had expected – the powerful headlamps of the General’s Opel swept round the bend and we found ourselves floodlit.’ The driver, as predicted, was already slowing down as he approached the junction.
See page 274
According to General Kreipe, who wrote well after the event:
…in the afternoon I was at Divisional HQ at Archanes. I spent the evening in the officers’ mess and at 9 o’clock I drove home. There was a machine pistol in the car and my driver was armed with a pistol. We were alone… Suddenly a red light appeared in the darkness in front of us, approximately on the bend. The driver asked ‘Shall I stop?’ We were accustomed to traffic control points, and I answered ‘Stop’. As the car drew to a halt two Germans in the uniforms of Oberschütze stepped forward. The older one, Leigh-Fermor, demanded to see my travel document. As I did not have one – it was not normally required – I said ‘Don’t know about that.’ ‘In that case the password please.’ Then I did something foolish. I got out of the car and said “What unit are you? Don’t you know your General?” Leigh-Fermor in his German soldier’s disguise, said ‘General, you are a prisoner of war in British hands.’
Bill Moss took on the driver. His account written up the following day:
As we came level with the doors of the car Paddy asked, Ist dies das General’s Wagen?
There came a muffled Ja, ja from inside.
Then everything happened very quickly. There was a rush from all sides. We tore open our respective doors, and our torches illuminated the interior of the car – the bewildered face of the General, the chauffeur’s terrified eyes, the rear seats empty. With his right hand the chauffeur was reaching for his automatic, so I hit him across the head with my cosh. He fell forward, and George, who had come up behind me, heaved him out of the driving-seat and dumped him on the road. I jumped in behind the steering-wheel, and at the same moment saw Paddy and Manoli dragging the General out of the opposite door. The old man was struggling with fury, lashing out with his arms and legs. He obviously thought that he was going to be killed, and started shouting every curse under the sun at the top of his voice.
The engine of the car was still ticking over, the hand-brake was on, everything was perfect. To one side, in a pool of torchlight in the centre of the road, Paddy and Manoli were trying to quieten the General, who was still cursing and struggling. On the other side George and Andoni were trying to pull the chauffeur to his feet, but the man’s head was pouring with blood, and I think he must have been unconscious, because every time they lifted him up he simply collapsed to the ground again.
Fortunately at this critical moment, no other traffic came along the road and Major Leigh-Fermor, Manoli, Nikko, and Stratis carried the General towards the car and bundled him into the back seat. The three Cretans, ‘one of the three holding a knife to the General’s throat to stop him shouting’ handled the General roughly. Kreipe claims that he was beaten to the ground:
I was belaboured with gun-butts, tied up and gagged and I am afraid, called ‘you damned German pig’. I was thrown into the car and two partisans lay on top of me, threatening me with a dagger. ‘If you move we will kill you!’
In front sat the two ‘Oberschütze’, that is to say the British officers.
Bill Mose’s version is:
Paddy jumped into the front seat beside me. The General kept imploring, Where is my hat? Where is my hat? The hat, of course, was on Paddy’s head.
We were now ready to move. Suddenly everyone started kissing and congratulating everybody else; and Micky, having first embraced Paddy and me, started screaming at the General with all the pent-up hatred he held for the Germans. We had to push him away and tell him to shut up. Andoni, Grigori, Nikko, and Wallace Beery were standing at the roadside, propping up the chauffeur between them, they waved us good-bye and turned away and started off on their long trek to the rendezvous on Mount Ida.
The car was a brand new Opel, and the tank was full. They had been driving for a minute when they passed a convoy of German infantry travelling in the opposite direction. They ‘thanked our stars that it had not come this way a couple of minutes sooner’. When the convoy had passed Major Leigh-Fermor ‘told the General that the two of us were British officers and that we would treat him as an honourable prisoner of war’. The General, unsurprisingly, ‘seemed mightily relieved to hear this’. His chief concern apparently was the whereabouts of his medal.
The first opportunity for the enemy to realise that something was wrong, was when rather than turning into the gates of the Villa Ariadne, the car accelerated along the road past the Villa’s gate and the in surprised sentries. This either didn’t excite suspicion or the passage of information was too slow to alert the check points in the area. It was not long before they saw a red flashing lamp of the first of the military check posts through which they would have to pass. Expecting this, ‘the plan had contained alternative actions which we had hoped would suit any situation, because we knew that our route led us through the centre of Iraklio…’
A German sentry was standing in the middle of the road. As we approached him, slowing down the while, he moved to one side, presumably thinking that we were going to stop. However, as soon as we drew level with him – still going very slowly, so as to give him an opportunity of seeing the General’s pennants on the wings of the car – I began to accelerate again, and on we went. For several seconds after we had passed the sentry we were all apprehension, fully expecting to hear a rifle-shot in our wake; but a moment later we had rounded a bend in the road and knew that the danger was temporarily past. Our chief concern now was whether or not the guard at the post behind us would telephone ahead to the next one, and it was with our fingers crossed that we approached the red lamp of the second control post a few minutes later. But we need not have had any fears, for the sentry behaved in exactly the same manner as the first had done, and we drove on feeling rather pleased with ourselves.
It was a similar drill as they passed through no less than twenty-two such checkpoints announcing themselves as ‘General’s wagen’ and cheekily offering ‘Gute Nacht’ as they accelerated away. One of the tenser moments, however, was when in the centre of Iraklio they drove through a crowd of Germans leaving a cinema. They had the satisfaction of sending them running for safety, no doubt cursing senior officers and their drivers!
Near a beach, widely known to be used in the past by British submarines, they abandoned the car to begin their long journey over the mountains to the south coast, leaving a message designed to throw the Germans off the scent and to avoid bringing reprisals down on the local population.
TO THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES IN CRETE
April 23, 1944
General Kreipe with his SOE captors in the Cretan mountains.
GENTLEMEN
Your divisional Commander General Kreipe was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH raiding force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to CAIRO.
We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans and the only guides used were serving soldiers of HIS HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us.
Your General is an honourable prisoner of war, and will be treated with all the consideration owing to his rank.
Sufbaldiges Wiedersehen!
PS. We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful car behind.
The latter was added to give the message that inescapably British authenticity. Even so threats of ‘the severest measures of reprisal’, scattered by air dropped leaflet, were made to the populace. The Germans must have doubted Cretan involvement, as they were not carried out. Also arranged was a radio broadcast along the same lines, with the addition of a phrase in the report that the General was ‘already in Cairo’ but when it was read the wording had been changed to ‘is on his way to Cairo’. Heading across the mountains, the group, with their prisoner riding much of the way on a donkey, only evaded capture by dint of luck, resourcefulness, skill and tenacity. In an epic seventeen-day march, they crossed Mount Ida and narrowly avoided disaster several times, before reaching their beach on the south coast, from which they were picked up on 14 May 1944, successfully ending one of the most audacious SOE operations of the war.