This was Hitler’s nightmare: invisible agitators who could stir the entire island into revolt. So Hitler decided to beat Churchill to the punch. Soldiers who were desperately needed in Russia were flown to Crete instead, boosting the on-ground strength to a combined German-Italian force of more than eighty thousand. Bunkers were dug, bridges were wired with explosives, access to the southern coast was triple-fortified, and a warning shot was fired from behind the walls of Fortress Crete, the impenetrable garrison in western Chania: “We will in the event of an invasion,” German command announced, “defend Crete to the last man and the last round.”
Now there was one last thing to do: exterminate the rats in their holes.
Shortly after New Year’s Day, George Psychoundakis was hiking toward the village of Alones when he heard the thump of gunfire. “I crept behind a rock, and looking down, saw that the village was full of Germans. Just below me, about ten were climbing up the slope towards my vantage-point,” George recounts. “I hid like lightning.” Fading into the trees, George circled around Alones until he found someone who could fill him in. The news chilled him.
The Germans went straight to the priest’s house and began tearing it apart, a villager told him. They knew.
The Germans discovered a British radio battery buried in the priest’s garden, and a note to the British radio operator in his son’s pocket. If they’d arrived a little sooner, they’d have found the radio operator himself. Luckily, and unbeknownst to the stool pigeon who’d led the Germans there, the Brits had abandoned Alones right after Christmas. But the Germans knew they couldn’t be far, and they got right to work. The priest’s son, his face battered and bloody, was dragged off to be tortured for information while troops surrounded the valley and began marching uphill in an ever-tightening noose.
Typically, that meant a remarkable number of locals would suddenly be welcoming family. Our in-laws are arriving, they’d call out. Others were vexed by livestock problems. Watch out for your black sheep! They’re in the wheatfield again, they’d complain—loudly and repeatedly.
The alert spread until it reached Paddy, a few miles away. He and four of George’s cousins put together a team to spirit away the bulky wireless radio set, hoisting it on their backs along with the big batteries and that brute of a charging engine. “Shifting our base had now become a feat of endurance,” Xan explained, since any reasonably walkable trail had to be avoided. Paddy and his gang “had to carry the cumbersome gear piecemeal on their backs over trackless slopes at dead of night.”
Freezing rain fell all night, slickening the snowy mountainside and doubling the weight of their packs. It took twelve hours, but by daybreak they’d climbed high enough to stash the radio and cut back to the rendezvous spot with Xan. Paddy’s gang was ready to sink down and rest, but first they climbed a nearby peak for a last look around—and spotted dozens of dark helmets trudging through snow straight toward them. “As though they had got wind of our movements,” Xan would exclaim, “the Germans had transferred their attention from Alones.” Whoever was feeding the Germans information was becoming deadly accurate.
The morning mist gave Paddy’s gang just enough of a head start to vanish before being spotted. By the time the sun burned through, most of the Cretans had bolted into slit caves in the cliffs. Xan hid in an old stone hut, while Paddy scrambled into the branches of a big cypress. Tromping boots soon approached … paused … faded away … and then returned, over and over again, as searchers crisscrossed the grove. Paddy was soaked and shivering; he’d barely eaten and hadn’t slept, his body was stiff and aching from the all-night radio portage. He forced his body to freeze as the Germans passed back and forth beneath his feet.
And by the time the sun was setting and it was finally safe for him to slide down, one thing was clear: the playboy who’d shown up six months ago could now run and crawl and think and persevere like a Cretan. Maybe he couldn’t pass for one just yet—but for what he had in mind, he might just be close enough.
CHAPTER 23
Suddenly the firing stopped, brought to an end not by a Cease Fire order but by a sound far more blood curdling….
—XAN FIELDING
“BLACK SHEEP!”
A few months after their near miss with the radio, Paddy and his gang were just settling down for the night when they heard a lookout calling out a secret warning. Germans were on the move, three hundred or more, still a good way off but coming fast. Paddy grabbed his rifle and was stunned when it suddenly fired. A few feet away, Yanni Tsangarakis—Paddy’s closest Cretan friend—dropped to the ground, bleeding. Paddy’s bullet had smashed through Yanni’s hip and ricocheted up through his guts. Paddy and the others desperately shoved their hands down on the wounds, but it was no use. Yanni whispered his farewells and died.
Paddy was horrified. He knew what he had to do: as soon as they were clear of the Germans, he’d go to Yanni’s family and put himself at their mercy.
Terrible idea, Yanni’s friend argued. What good are two corpses? Some fool will say you did it on purpose, and someone will believe him. Yanni didn’t blame you, but his family will. We’ve got to say the Germans shot him. It’s the best thing for Yanni. He’ll be remembered as a patriot. You’ll get the chance to die like one.
Paddy churned over his dilemma as they slipped Yanni’s body off to safety and buried him in the shade of two holly oaks. His gang was right about one thing: island chatter was notorious. “No news? Then tell me a lie” was a favorite Cretan joke. Okay, then—Paddy agreed to lie and pretend Yanni had been killed in a firefight. “I want to say that I did not agree to this hateful fiction out of a wish to shirk my responsibilities, but for the sake of Yanni and his family, and our work on Crete,” a miserable Paddy would explain. But whether Yanni’s clan would believe it was another story. They’d be aching for details; they’d want to know who else was injured, and why was Yanni cornered when he’d escaped so many times. Tell us again, how many Germans were killed in this fight that killed our Yanni? The second they smelled something fishy, they’d come looking for answers.
Paddy was still in the dumps over that disaster when he was tapped to perform a bit of street magic. The Allies had invaded Sicily, and the Italians, fed up with Mussolini, had tossed him out of office. Hitler would soon toss Mussolini right back in again, but in the meantime, German command was giving Italian forces two ugly options: they could be folded into the German army or locked up in a German labor gang.