Kidnaping a General

by MAJOR JOHN NORTH

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TO THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES IN CRETE

GENTLEMEN:Your divisional commander KREIPE was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH raiding force under our command. By the time you read this he and we will be on our way to CAIRO.
We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried through without the help of CRETANS or Cretan PARTISANS, and that 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 due his rank. Any reprisals against the local population will be wholly unwarranted and unjust.
Auf baldiyes Wiwdersehen!
(sgd.) P. M. LEIGH-FERMOR Major, Commanding Raiding Force
(sgd.) STANLEY MOSS Captain, Coldstream Guards
P. S. We are very sorry to leave this motor car behind.

IT WAS in this fashion that, in the early summer of last year, General Kreipe, commander of the 22nd Panzer Grenadier (“Sevastopol”) Division and holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, after service in France and on the Leningrad and Kuban fronts, took his leave of this war.

He was destined to hold his command in Crete for little more than a month. Doubtless he had arrived there with every expectation of having a restful time, for he would be some 750 miles from the nearest fighting front. However, two British officers — Major P. M. Leigh-Fermor, commander of the raiding force, and Captain Stanley Moss of the Coldstream Guards — were ordered to make sure that he would not be disappointed in his expectations; they removed him to Cairo.

In 1940-1941, Major Leigh-Fermor had been British Liaison Officer to the Royal Greek Army in Albania and in Greece. Since the summer of 1942 he had been British Liaison Officer in German-overrun Crete. It was therefore no new experience for him to “drop” into the island in the literal sense of the word. For this particular operation he dropped in the first week of February, 1944. His second-in-command, Captain Moss, was prevented from landing at the same time because of a sudden clouding of the sky. During the next two months he returned on seven nights and made several sea attempts; but the weather was consistently bad. Meanwhile Major Leigh-Fermor steadfastly pursued a purely bucolic existence. In this kind of operation, patience is all.

When, after two months, the two officers at last joined up, their party was nine strong. They struck north across the island to establish their headquarters among the mountains in the neighborhood of Herakleion. General Kreipe had selected as his villeggiatura the Villa Ariadne, within sight of the famed ruins of Knossos. His divisional headquarters were established at Arkhanes. Major Leigh-Fermor, with a shepherd’s cloak thrown over his shoulders, set out to reconnoiter.

At the junction of the Herakleion and the Arkhanes roads, the road to Knossos takes a sharp twist which will force any vehicle to slow up considerably. Reconnaissance over a period of several days showed that the General invariably left his headquarters sometime between dusk and nine o’clock. Major Leigh-Fermor therefore resolved to carry out the operation on this return journey, under cover of darkness.

There were three difficulties to be overcome. First, the raiding party had to be sure of not mistaking another car for the General’s. One of the party, from a vantage point in a ditch, therefore devoted his evenings to a minute inspection of the General’s car as it flashed past him on the road to the Villa Ariadne. He was very soon able to recognize it from its blackout slits alone.

The second difficulty was to dispose of any other vehicle and its occupants should it come along while the “operation” was in progress. Suitable arrangements were therefore made for the removal of the passengers and the ditching of their vehicle.

The third difficulty was to avoid bringing down reprisals on the local population. It was met in the only possible way — by telling the local German command the simple truth of the matter: that no civilians had taken part in the operation. The services of a Partisan band, under a good Patriot, from Asia Minor, which had been evoked under the original plan, were dispensed with at the last moment. The operation was actually carried out by a party of nine picked men.

The final hide-out of the party was established among the trees and reeds of a dried-up river bed within twenty minutes’ march of the proposed site of operation. For four days — days of growing anxiety — they lay up and waited for the moment to strike; each of these four consecutive evenings General Kreipe changed his routine, and returned before dusk, as though he had wind of the plan. But on the fifth evening, towards nightfall, he was still at his divisional headquarters; and every member of the party braced himself for action.

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AS SOON as it was dusk the two British officers boldly took up their positions at the road-fork. Each carried a red torch and adopted the pose of a German military policeman on traffic duty. Their men were hidden in the ditch alongside the road. One member of the party was stationed near Arkhanes to signal one torch flash at the approach of the car — two flashes if the car was accompanied — to a scout posted near the road-fork. This scout was to signal down half a kilometer of cable to an electric bell, beside another scout, whose job it was to flash the final signal to the supposititious traffic policemen.

At half past nine a warning flash reached the roadfork. Three minutes later the car came slowly round the bend. The two officers waved their red lamps up and down. The car stopped and they walked towards it, drawing their pistols. Major Leigh-Fermor flashed his torch inside the interior of the vehicle and saw the General sitting beside his chauffeur. He was easily recognizable by his tabs, medals, and Iron Crosses. The major demanded his papers — in German.

While the General was protesting this quite unnecessary intrusion, Captain Moss flung open the side door of the car, gave the driver a tremendous wallop on the head with a blackjack, grasped him by the shoulders, dragged him out of the driver’s seat, and handed over the bundle to those members of the party who had already emerged from the ditch. In a few seconds the driver had been disarmed and was on his way to the hills. Captain Moss then jumped into the driver’s seat.

Meanwhile Major Leigh-Fermor and the rest of the party had been attending to the General, whom they dumped in the back of the car. Three of the stoutest members of the party covered him with a couple of fighting knives and, in order to be ready for all eventualities, stuck three sub-machine guns through the windows of the car. The major then put on the General’s formidable hat and got in beside the new driver. Captain Moss at once started the engine and headed straight for Herakleion. The whole halt had taken just over a minute. Two minutes after starting they were passed by three troop-trucks.

The car, with two pennants streaming in the wind, flashed through Herakleion and out along the Retimo road. Twenty-two road-blocks were passed in all. At one the sentry attempted to stop the car by waving his torch up and down; but the driver drove on at a steady speed. Other sentries saluted or stood to attention when they saw the two pennants on the car. The most dangerous route, as had been anticipated, had aroused the least suspicion.

After an hour and a half’s journey the car came to a stop. The General gave his word of honor that he would not attempt to escape or draw attention to himself if any Germans showed up. After the first shock he had appeared to accept the situation in a fatalistic mood; and Major Leigh-Fermor informed him that, as a prisoner of war captured by British officers, he would be honorably treated. Captain Moss and the majority of the members of the party then set off with the General for the foothills of Mount Ida. Major Leigh-Fermor, with the rest of the party, drove off in order to reconnoiter a suitable submarine beach.

At some distance from their destination the car was abandoned. It was not destroyed; and a British overcoat was left inside it as corroborative evidence of the fact that the vehicle had actually been used by British officers and not by local “bandits.” A sealed letter, addressed to the German authorities in Crete, and designed to exculpate the Cretans living near the scene of the abduction, was also left inside the car. Major Leigh-Fermor and his party then proceeded in the direction of the beach on foot.

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BUT the “German authorities in Crete” had been stung into activity at once. During the first afternoon, German aircraft constantly patrolled the coast, and a Fieseler Storch hovered for three hours over every peak and ravine in Mount Ida. It dropped villainously printed leaflets which stated that General Kreipe had been captured by bandits, that his whereabouts could not be unknown to the local population, and that, unless he was surrendered within three days, all the villages of Herakleion province would be razed and the “sternest measures brought to bear on the local population.”

At that time, however, the Germans were still without knowledge of the tactful communication in the abandoned car; and it is satisfactory to be able to record that the German threats turned out to be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is not less satisfactory to be able to record that, although some hundreds of Cretans shortly heard of the General’s “whereabouts,” they loyally kept the secret. Indeed, through village after village, the progress of the General and his captors became a “kind of royal procession of enthusiasm and congratulation.”

At nightfall the first day, the two parties joined up and were escorted by a band of local Partisans to their lair on the steep northern slopes of Mount Ida. The next day they marched right over the top of the mountain, through deep snow. Halfway across they exchanged bodyguards, another local band of Partisans taking over. Advance scouts sent down the southern slopes of the mountain lit a series of beacon fires to show that the way was clear; for now rumors were beginning to come in of German concentrations in the plain below. That night the party fetched up in a labyrinthine cave which the Minotaur himself would hardly have disdained. They remained in it the whole of the following day.

It was here that trouble began. A carefully arranged rendezvous with another British officer in the

island fell through. This officer, they were afterwards to learn, had been struck down with malaria, and the charging-engine of his radio set had gone out of action. Runners were sent to three other British radio sets known to be working on the island. But communications were very long, and many days passed before an answer was received from one of them. By this time events had outrun the plans outlined.

Finally, by following an intricate system of Partisan posts along the foothills, the party managed to slip their now heavily armed caravan through the German cordons along the coast, and arrived within a day’s march of the beach from which they were hoping to effect their escape. But the day after their arrival the village itself was burned to the ground and the majority of the male population were arrested — by way of reprisal for a gun-running operation three weeks before in which no fewer than thirty mules laden with rifles had fanned out all over central Crete.

The party moved on.

Intensive air activity and patrolling continued all along the south coast of the island, making it hopeless for evacuation purposes. Major Leigh-Fermor therefore decided to push northwest with a few of his “henchmen” and personally operate one of the radio sets in order to establish direct communication with the “Office.”

That “Office” — some five hundred miles away — did its stuff. One morning — a fortnight after the General’s abduction — a runner brought a message that a rescue party had received orders to make contact with the raiding force at all costs at a specified beach. It was bad luck for the Office that, hot on the tail of this runner, there followed another, who had already been sent out to reconnoiter this particular beach. He reported that it was now “pullulating with Germans.”

Again the two parties joined up and began to trek westwards, in the hope that they might ultimately find a place where they could slip through the German net. Again the Office had done its stuff: a British officer in another part of the island had been ordered to make contact with them. A reconnaissance party was sent out to a second beach; and on the assumption that it would be found to be clear of Germans, a suitable evacuation date was suggested.

In reply, a radio message came through confirming the date, time, place, and the signals to be used for the operation; and the party started to cross the last barren mountain between themselves and the selected beach. The agreed signals went back and forth across the dark waters; and half an hour before midnight the party had set sail for Mersa Matruh.