Kidnap in Crete : The True Story of the Abduction of a Nazi General

This is the story of how a small SOE unit led by Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general on the Nazi-occupied island of Crete in 1944. For thirty-two days, they were chased across the mountains as they headed for the coast and a rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch waiting to spirit the general to Cairo. Rick Stroud, whose Phantom Army of Alamein won plaudits for its meticulous research and its lightness of touch in the telling, brings these same gifts to bear in this new project. From the adrenalin rush of the kidnapping, to the help provided by the Cretan partisans and people, he explains the overall context of Crete's role in World War Two and reveals the devastating consequences of this mission for them all. There have been other accounts - notably Ill Met By Moonlight by William Stanley Moss (Leigh Fermor's second in command), which was later made into a Powell and Pressburger film, starring Dirk Bogarde - but Kidnap in Crete is the first book to draw on all the sources, notably those in Crete as well as SOE files and the accounts, letters and private papers of its operatives in London and Edinburgh. On a moonlit night in April 1944 a small band of fearless partisans, led by the British SOE agent Patrick Leigh Fermor, kidnapped a high-ranking Nazi general on the German-occupied island of Crete. In 1941 the German army invaded the strategically important Mediterranean island with the largest airborne force in history. The years of Nazi occupation that followed saw mass executions, widespread starvation and the brutal destruction of homes - but amid the horror, the Cretan resistance, the Andartes, with the support of a handful of British SOE agents, fought on heroically. In Cairo, Patrick Leigh Fermor came up with a plan to avenge the islanders' suffering. Under cover of darkness on 4 February 1944, he parachuted onto Crete's deserted Mount Dikti in preparation for his secret and high-risk mission. This is the story of the abduction of General Kreipe by Leigh Fermor, his second-in-command William Stanley Moss and their tight-knit group of partisans; of the midnight ambush of the general's car and the perilous drive through the garrison town of Heraklion and twenty-two heavily guarded roadblocks; of their epic, dangerous journey on foot and mule across rocky peaks, hiding from their German pursuers in mountain caves and ditches, towards the coast where a Royal Navy launch was waiting to spirit the general to Egypt. But success came at a price for the islanders left behind: German reprisals were swift, unsparing and devastating. With unprecedented access to first-hand accounts of the Cretan guerrilla fighters themselves, as well as SOE files, Leigh Fermor's own account and other private papers and diaries, this astonishing true story of daring in the battle against Hitler is told in full for the first time