I thought you folks might be interested in the exploits of Patrick Leigh Fermor who died a few days ago. What follows is taken from a newspaper article written following his death. I love the photo taken just before he set off to kidnap General Kreipe. Leigh Fermor is on the right. I expect the uniforms are captured and I notice he has awarded himself some decorations too.
In 1944, as a 25-year-old agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Major Leigh Fermor parachuted into occupied Crete on a mission of his own devising to kidnap the brutal German military commander of the island. That mission would earn him the DSO, the first flush of fame and a film, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), in which he is played by a black-shirted Dirk Bogard.
Patrick Leigh Fermor lived on to the ripe age of 96, but back in the spring of 1944 his life expectancy was close to nil, as he tried to pull off a secret mission that could only have sprung from a writer’s vivid imagination.On the outbreak of war he had enlisted in the Irish Guards before transferring to the Intelligence Corps. As a fluent Greek speaker, he became liaison officer working with the Greek army.
After the fall of Crete, he was sent there to organise resistance to the Germans. For two years, disguised as a shepherd and using the name Mihali, he lived in the mountain caves, part of small SOE unit.Leigh Fermor cut a distinctive figure, clad in Cretan bolero and corduroy breeches, with a silver dagger and revolver in his cummerbund — aaparently normal Cretan shepherd attire.
Back in Cairo in late 1943, Leigh Fermor proposed an extraordinary plan: to capture General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, the despised German military commander of the island, and transport him to Egypt. Müller had a reputation for extravagant cruelty, and his kidnapping would raise morale among the Cretans, Leigh Fermor argued. Astonishingly, the British authorities approved the scheme.
Leigh Fermor later called the mission “a symbolic gesture, involving no bloodshed, not even a plane sabotaged or a petrol dump blown up; something that would hit the enemy hard”.
On February 4, 1944, Leigh Fermor parachuted into Crete. Two months later he was joined by Captain William Stanley Moss and two Cretan SOE agents. In the meantime, General Müller had been replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe. They decided to attempt the operation anyway.
On the night of April 26, disguised as corporals in the German military police, the two British officers intercepted the general’s car near his home, the Villa Ariadne, in Knossos. The driver was coshed; a knife was held to the general’s throat in the back seat, while Leigh Fermor climbed into the front and put on the general’s hat This death-defying impersonation had required him to shave off his moustache. He looked, wrote Moss, “so much the dashing Teuton that beside him one felt uncomfortably close to the real thing”.
They then passed through 22 separate checkpoints, saluted by unquestioning Germans at each one. Leigh Fermor abandoned the car, leaving documents showing that the kidnapping was the work of British commandos to prevent reprisals against the Cretan population, and then reunited with the group. Pursued by German patrols, with the grumpy captive general in tow, they made their way across the mountains to the south side of the island, where they were picked up by a British motor launch on May 14, and taken to Egypt.
In A Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor described how he and the classically educated German general waited for the launch as dawn broke over Mount Ida. “Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself, ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte’.” It was the opening of one of the Horace’s odes. “I continued from where he had broken off . . . the general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine — and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ ” It was very strange. As though, for a moment, the war had ceased to exist.” Leigh Fermor would not publish those words for two decades, but the Cretan adventure may have formed the foundation for the great writing career to follow.
As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker, “The war lent as much purpose to his life as it did to thousands of others’, whetting the edge of his sympathies and skills.”
Kreipe would spend the rest of the war as a PoW, before being released in 1947, and although the hated Müller would return to wreak havoc on the island, the kidnapping undoubtedly lifted the spirits of the occupied Cretans.
Even the Germans could not fail to be impressed by the audacity of the kidnapping. In Cairo in the War, Artemis Cooper describes how the news was greeted with a stunned silence in the officers’ mess at Heraklion, followed by the words: “Well gentlemen, I think this calls for champagne all round.”
In 1944, as a 25-year-old agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Major Leigh Fermor parachuted into occupied Crete on a mission of his own devising to kidnap the brutal German military commander of the island. That mission would earn him the DSO, the first flush of fame and a film, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), in which he is played by a black-shirted Dirk Bogard.
Patrick Leigh Fermor lived on to the ripe age of 96, but back in the spring of 1944 his life expectancy was close to nil, as he tried to pull off a secret mission that could only have sprung from a writer’s vivid imagination.On the outbreak of war he had enlisted in the Irish Guards before transferring to the Intelligence Corps. As a fluent Greek speaker, he became liaison officer working with the Greek army.
After the fall of Crete, he was sent there to organise resistance to the Germans. For two years, disguised as a shepherd and using the name Mihali, he lived in the mountain caves, part of small SOE unit.Leigh Fermor cut a distinctive figure, clad in Cretan bolero and corduroy breeches, with a silver dagger and revolver in his cummerbund — aaparently normal Cretan shepherd attire.
Back in Cairo in late 1943, Leigh Fermor proposed an extraordinary plan: to capture General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, the despised German military commander of the island, and transport him to Egypt. Müller had a reputation for extravagant cruelty, and his kidnapping would raise morale among the Cretans, Leigh Fermor argued. Astonishingly, the British authorities approved the scheme.
Leigh Fermor later called the mission “a symbolic gesture, involving no bloodshed, not even a plane sabotaged or a petrol dump blown up; something that would hit the enemy hard”.
On February 4, 1944, Leigh Fermor parachuted into Crete. Two months later he was joined by Captain William Stanley Moss and two Cretan SOE agents. In the meantime, General Müller had been replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe. They decided to attempt the operation anyway.
On the night of April 26, disguised as corporals in the German military police, the two British officers intercepted the general’s car near his home, the Villa Ariadne, in Knossos. The driver was coshed; a knife was held to the general’s throat in the back seat, while Leigh Fermor climbed into the front and put on the general’s hat This death-defying impersonation had required him to shave off his moustache. He looked, wrote Moss, “so much the dashing Teuton that beside him one felt uncomfortably close to the real thing”.
They then passed through 22 separate checkpoints, saluted by unquestioning Germans at each one. Leigh Fermor abandoned the car, leaving documents showing that the kidnapping was the work of British commandos to prevent reprisals against the Cretan population, and then reunited with the group. Pursued by German patrols, with the grumpy captive general in tow, they made their way across the mountains to the south side of the island, where they were picked up by a British motor launch on May 14, and taken to Egypt.
In A Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor described how he and the classically educated German general waited for the launch as dawn broke over Mount Ida. “Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself, ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte’.” It was the opening of one of the Horace’s odes. “I continued from where he had broken off . . . the general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine — and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ ” It was very strange. As though, for a moment, the war had ceased to exist.” Leigh Fermor would not publish those words for two decades, but the Cretan adventure may have formed the foundation for the great writing career to follow.
As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker, “The war lent as much purpose to his life as it did to thousands of others’, whetting the edge of his sympathies and skills.”
Kreipe would spend the rest of the war as a PoW, before being released in 1947, and although the hated Müller would return to wreak havoc on the island, the kidnapping undoubtedly lifted the spirits of the occupied Cretans.
Even the Germans could not fail to be impressed by the audacity of the kidnapping. In Cairo in the War, Artemis Cooper describes how the news was greeted with a stunned silence in the officers’ mess at Heraklion, followed by the words: “Well gentlemen, I think this calls for champagne all round.”