Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (54 page)

Whatever Benthag's fears after his return from the Villa Ariadne, the Germans in the Canea area suffered no ill-treatment. They were allowed to keep their personal weapons for self-defence until British troops arrived to guard them.

With Germans still in possession of formidable firepower yet deeply frightened of the Cretan population, this 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 cafe 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 cafes 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 organized 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 grdW

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 Varvära. 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.

* General Student's trial at Lüneburg had already collapsed. Colonel von der Heydte, inexplicably flown over from the prisoner-of-war camp at Colchester as a witness for the prosecution, caused consternation in the courtroom by stating that, along with Field Marshal Alexander, Student was the general he most admired.

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.

Psychoundakis and Manoli Paterakis worked there together, and during breaks they would chat, looking out over Maleme to the sea. One afternoon, over thirty years after the war, an elderly man 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.

He had dragged himself there like a wounded animal on the very first morning of the battle for Crete, severely wounded after his descent by parachute. His battalion had almost been wiped out, and Cretan irregulars were searching for survivors. His only hope had been to wait for reinforcements to land and find him. In the end, he had lain there for three days without water. He had never forgotten Manoli Paterakis's face.

Appendices

Appendix A: Secret Organizations

Military Intelligence (Research) was a War Office organization started in 1938 by Colonel J.C.F.

Holland and Major Colin Gubbins who later became the head of SOE. The main purpose of MI(R) was to raise, train and supply guerrilla groups behind enemy lines.

Section D was an offshoot of the Secret Intelligence Service, and therefore did not come under the War Office although it was headed by a regular officer, Colonel Lawrence Grand. Section D mainly recruited businessmen with knowledge of a country, because it specialized in the sabotage of industrial plant and communications.

Section D and MI(R), together with Electra House (a black propaganda outfit under Sir Campbell Stuart), were, amalgamated in the summer of 1940 into what was later known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and then split afresh between SOI and SO2. Both came under the Minister of Economic Warfare whose organization was renamed the Political Warfare Executive.

SOI was the black propaganda wing responsible to the Minister of Economic Warfare, the Minister of Information and the Foreign Secretary and later known as the Political Warfare Bureau (PWB). SO2, which concentrated on sabotage and the organization of resistance groups in enemy and enemy-occupied countries, was usually known as just SOE. Its regional groupings later took on other names. SOE Cairo and its assets became known as Force 133.

SOE had an intelligence-gathering competitor. This was the Secret Intelligence Service's military offshoot, the Inter Services Liaison Department (ISLD). Unlike in Cairo, or in the field in Greece where on one occasion the rivalry led to a fatal shooting, in Crete, SOE and ISLD personnel worked together very amicably.

Appendix B: The British and German Order of Battle

Creforce Order of Battle and Chain of Command

Crete Headquarters

Major General Freyberg VC

Colonel Stewart

1st Bn. Welch Regt.

Maleme and Galatas Sectors

2nd New Zealand Division

A/Major General Puttick

(HQ 1 km SW of Canea)

Lieutenant Colonel Gentry (CoS)