Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (50 page)

The scorn with which their diminishing claims were treated must have rankled, and this may help to explain their rash behaviour in the weeks to come.

An insurrectionary momentum was in any case building up as Cretans sensed the beginning of the end, now that the advance of the Red Army into Roumania threatened German lines of communication.

Revolt took many forms, the most common the sudden attack on a lone soldier or a small detachment.

And a slight incident could easily escalate into an unplanned battle. On the morning of 7 August, Feldwebel Olenhauer, accompanied by seven men from the small garrison at Yeni Gave, came up to the town of Anoyia, Xylouris's home and a deep reservoir of anti-German sentiment. Olenhauer, although apparently liked by the villagers near his post, was loathed by their enemies at Anoyia. In the main street he began waving his whip and demanding labourers. There were few volunteers, so he ordered his detachment to round up any men they found as well as some women and children. These prisoners were then made to march off along the road towards Rethymno.

A group of seven ELAS 'reserve
andartes'
— locals with a gun hidden away as opposed to members of a permanent band in the mountains — ambushed this column. They were joined by another five non-ELAS locals. They began by firing in the air to warn the hostages to throw themselves flat. The Germans made no attempt to resist. Two men escaped, and Olenhauer, his dog, and the rest of his detachment were taken up into the Mount Ida range. The ELAS
andartes
had some idea of proposing to exchange their captives for a large number of Cretan prisoners in Ayia jail. Not surprisingly, this came to nothing, and the
andartes
shot all their captives, including Olenhauer's dog.

After the confrontation on the road, the townspeople of Anoyia feared the worst and, having packed a few valuables and some food, abandoned their houses. The men armed themselves with ancient guns and talked of resistance. A number of them had come to the Xylouris hideout, and Billy Moss decided that 'the stage was patently set for action'. If the Germans were about to destroy Anoyia, then he and his band could ambush their column on its approach.

Moss set out with his own nucleus of Cretans, the Russians and half a dozen of Xylouris's band, altogether about fifteen men armed with automatic weapons. They passed through the abandoned streets of Anoyia and pushed on over the hills and down to the main Rethymno—Heraklion road along which the Germans would come. A good ambush site was chosen near Damastas at a point where the road curved over a small bridge which they mined with Hawkins grenades.

Preparations for the ambush became chaotic. First they had to hustle local villagers and their flocks out of the way. Then they shot up a single German truck carrying labourers, then a larger army lorry which the trigger-happy members of Xylouris's band fired at out of range, necessitating a wild chase across country to catch the occupants, and then several other vehicles. At last the real force sent out to deal with Anoyia was sighted. It consisted of a truck full of infantrymen backed up by an armoured car. Fifteen Sten guns soon dealt with the soldiers, but the armoured car struck down both an Anoyian guide with an ancient rifle who stood in its path methodically reloading, and one of the Russians.

More would have fallen had not Moss made his way round and, climbing on from the rear, dropped a grenade down the hatch. Altogether nearly thirty Germans were killed, including the dozen prisoners killed later by Xylouris's men. In the usual Cretan practice, their bodies were dropped down a pothole.

Moss's hopes that the attack at Damastas might have saved Anoyia were vain. The Germans simply waited five days until they had assembled a much larger force. 'Since the town of Anoyia', ran the proclamation of its destruction, 'is a centre of English espionage in Crete, since the Anoyians carried out the murder of the sergeant of the Yeni Gave garrison, since the Anoyians carried out the sabotage at Damastas, since the
andartes
of various resistance bands find asylum and protection in Anoyia, and since the abductors of General Kreipe passed through Anoyia, using Anoyia as a stopping place when transporting him, we order its razing to the ground and the execution of every male Anoyian who is found within the village and within an area of one kilometre round it. Müller, Commander of the Garrison of Crete. Canea, 13 August 1944.'

Virtually the whole town was burnt, and thirty inhabitants were shot together with another fifteen men caught nearby. Another account claims that over a hundred houses in Damastas were destroyed and thirty people shot there, but that only fifteen died in Anoyia.

The same day that Moss was fighting at Damastas, Tom Dunbabin, accompanied by Antoni Zoidakis and two others, set out for Kyparisses to meet Group Captain Kelaidis, the representative of the government-in-exile. But as the party emerged from a vineyard and crossed the Armenoi—Rethymno road, two Germans, their suspicions aroused, opened fire without warning. Zoidakis, the last to cross, fell badly wounded. Dunbabin, turning back, killed one of the Germans with his revolver and hit the other. The almost instantaneous arrival of German reinforcements left the three survivors with little alternative but to run for cover. The Germans tied Zoidakis to their vehicle. They drove off, dragging him along the road until he was dead. At Armenoi, orders were given that his body should be left there unburied for several days as a warning. But his horrific fate, especially since he was 'a true pallikari'

in the Cretan phrase, only hardened hearts.

The purpose of Dunbabin's meeting with Group Captain Kelaidis was to prepare for their discussions with the leaders of EAM. This took place at Melidoni on 17 August. The intention was to find some sort of common policy between the Nationalist EOK bands and the Communist-led ELAS groups which followed EAM's political direction, but mutual suspicion put paid to any agreement. The Communist-controlled EAM distrusted the British government, and above all its commitment to reimpose the King without a plebiscite, while Dunbabin knew better than most Cretans of the Communists' ruthless attempts to monopolize power on the mainland. Dunbabin's unease at the threat of civil war can only have been heightened during his trek south from Melidoni afterwards. An ELAS

detachment surrounded his party and menacingly demanded news of the conference.

Even a successful agreement at Melidoni could have done little to prevent the next phase of destruction and slaughter. Five days after the meeting, several battalions of German infantry moved into the Amari valley. The Amariots were taken utterly by surprise. Over the next eight days — from 22 until 30 August — the Germans destroyed 9 villages and shot 164 of their inhabitants, 43 of them from Yerakari alone. The houses were stripped of valuables, which were piled on army lorries and taken to Rethymno, then set on fire. Livestock was also confiscated for German use.

Local bands and the ELAS group from the province of Rethymno offered little resistance. The size of the German forces deployed throughout the area would have made any attempt to intervene suicidal.

Petrakageorgis later complained bitterly to Colonel Tsiphakis that the ELAS detachment led by Limonias and Veloudakis had failed to warn or help him when a German column passed them on its way to attack his position. But resistance flared again during the last few days of the operation when a dozen Germans were killed.

A number of cases were influenced by chance, or perhaps the whim of a German commander. Some villages were destroyed without reason and some were inexplicably spared. How Asi Gonia, of all the centres of resistance, escaped remains one of the mysteries of the occupation. Villagers believed that their patron saint, St. George, who had saved them from the Turks, must have interceded once again.

An element of revenge must certainly have influenced the German operation, but in military terms its purpose was clear in spite of declarations similar to those at Anoyia — to cow the main area of guerrilla activity on the flank of the planned line of withdrawal from Heraklion. That it failed in this purpose was demonstrated recklessly soon.

Prompted by the news that the Germans were sending their nurses home and starting to bring in outlying garrisons, Tom Dunbabin called a conference of liaison officers at the monastery of Arkadi on 8 September. An instruction arrived from Cairo to 'cease sabotage or any act which might bring harm to the civilian population'. Dunbabin circulated this message to all guerrilla bands, but ELAS

had no intention of following British orders, and even some of the Nationalist bands linked to EOK

chose to ignore it.

The ELAS group, which called itself the 44th Battalion although only some fifty strong, moved to the Amari valley within two weeks of the Germans' passage. Their plan was for a small operation which might win support in this generally Nationalist area. They would capture the German outpost of only three men controlling the agricultural school at Asomaton, and distribute the produce and livestock amongst the neighbouring villages.

On the morning of 11 September, the ELAS detachment took the place without bloodshed. This move infuriated the local Nationalist kapitans. Having heard of ELAS's intention, they had specifically warned against any action in the area. Their men surrounded the building and forced the ELAS group to release their prisoners and withdraw.

But the incident could not be effaced so simply. A few hours later, a large part of the '44th Battalion'

saw two lorries full of soldiers sent from Rethymno on the road which snakes up the valley towards the watershed ridge on which the village of Apostoloi stands. Whether they were coming in response to the incident or to evacuate the soldiers as part of the general withdrawal of isolated outposts is uncertain.

At a point now marked by 'a bas-relief of a moustachioed
andarte,
the ELAS group ambushed these vehicles. The sound of firing drew almost every armed Cretan within earshot whatever his political loyalties. (Later, when Colonel Tsiphakis heard details of the action, he was beside himself with exasperation at such irresponsibility.) Nationalist
andartes
carried off Germans wounded in the ambush and they were well treated. The other prisoners seem to have been taken off by ELAS and shot later.

The battle escalated as German reinforcements arrived up the valley from Rethymno, only twenty-five kilometres away. They even brought a couple of field guns which were used to bombard the Amari valley and the village of Pandanassa over the ridge where some of the
andartes
had withdrawn. One of the shells killed Dr Stavroulakis who had been tending the German wounded.

Once again, grossly inflated figures of enemy dead were claimed by the
andartes:
one source says that the Germans lost around a hundred men. In fact German figures show that only sixteen or seventeen died as a result of this action. The ELAS execution of prisoners increased the figure of German dead to about twenty-six.

A far more efficient ambush, although mounted in even more flagrant disregard of Cairo's order, took place a few days later when, on 15 September, the Xylouris band of Anoyians wiped out a German patrol of fourteen men on the Heraklion side of Psiloriti.*

* Altogether 23 Germans are recorded as having died on 15 September. The balance presumably consists of the prisoners taken by ELAS near Apostoloi and executed later.

To the Amariots' surprise and relief, the Germans announced that they would not exact reprisals for the Apostoloi ambush. (And yet the execution of fifteen hostages in Ayia jail on 16 September has been linked to this fighting in the Amari.) Nationalist sources claim that their villages were spared a second wave of destruction because of the good care given to the German wounded. But the real reason may well have been more down to earth. German officers did not want to stir up any more hornets' nests at such a moment. The withdrawal from outlying posts prior to the complete evacuation of Heraklion had started, and German troops were becoming severely demoralized.

The rate of desertion alarmed German commanding officers. (Soldiers who received a posting to the mainland were apparently the most likely to desert: a flight across the Aegean in the face of Allied air power was by then regarded as almost a death sentence.) As an indication of the scale of the German command's problem, out of five hundred prisoners in Ayia jail, approximately one hundred and fifty were Italians and one hundred and fifty Germans, together double the number of Cretans. The balance consisted of about fifty Russian prisoners of war undergoing punishment. There would have been even more desertions if German soldiers had felt more confident of becoming prisoners of the British.

They knew that Cretans had killed a number of genuine deserters out of hand following Schubert's attempts to trick information out of villagers with his roving stool-pigeons.

The Allied Military Mission's campaign of propaganda on Crete was more extensive and elaborate than is generally realized. Both the American Bill Royce in the region of Heraklion, and his counterpart in Canea, Stephen Verney (later Bishop of Repton), were attached to the Political Warfare Executive, SOE's sister organization. Verney, at first a conscientious objector with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, later joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private in Cairo. But his former headmaster at Harrow, Paul Vellacott, the Director of Political Warfare Middle East, met him at a party. Not wanting to waste a promising Balliol classicist, Vellacott promptly recruited him.

Verney was trained and sent into Crete on 20 August with a German Jew, Corporal Cohen, to act as interpreter. His mission was to cause disaffection in the German army. The heads of PWE had their eyes set on the mutinies of November 1918 in Wilhelmshaven, Kiel and Munich which caused the abrupt collapse of German resistance and shortened the First World War by up to six months.

Verney, guided by his Cretan guardian angel, Marko Drakakis, concentrated on three categories: Germans who disliked the Nazi regime; 'Nationals' such as Poles or Austrians in Wehrmacht uniform; and Germans in love with Cretan girls. Costa Mitsotakis, his first contact in Canea, was an invaluable guide to which Germans he should approach. One of the anti-Nazi officers, a former member of the Reichstag, said that he hated himself for talking to one of his country's enemies, but Hitler's regime left no alternative. Corporal Cohen meanwhile tried to identify secret Communists and socialists to recruit from German ranks, a hazardous operation which later led to the arrest of many in the network.