Patrick Leigh Fermor - World War II

World War II

As an officer cadet, Leigh Fermor trained alongside Derek Bond (actor) and Iain Moncreiffe, and later joined the Irish Guards. Due, however, to his knowledge of modern Greek, he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German Commander, General Heinrich Kreipe. The Cretans commemorate Kreipe's abduction near Archanes.

Moss featured the events in his book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). It was later adapted as a film by the same name, directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957. In the film, Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde.

The Cretan resistance movement had the support of the British while Crete had strategic importance for the North Africa campaign. However once that campaign had been successful, British activity in Crete focused on the second plank of its policy in Greece, which was to undermine the left-wing resistance movement. Leigh Fermor set up an alternative movement in 1943, the National Organization of Crete or EOK, funded and supplied by the British.

Among other sources, Sanoudakis refers to a secret report by British agent in Crete Jack Smith Hughes on the actions of the SOE in Crete, 1941–45, in which Smith Hughes revealed that Leigh Fermor was present at the EOK's first meeting in February 1943 Cretan writers such as Mihalis Kokolakis have suggested that the killing of two German soldiers in EAM territory by the EOK was at the direction of British agents, who may have hoped that the ensuing bloodbath of German reprisals (the Holocaust of Viannos) would deal a blow to the left-wing movement. Kimonas Zografakis, who took part in the abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe later averred that the kidnapping was carried out for the same reason.

Sanoudakis argues in his article "Leigh Fermor was a classic agent" that "Leigh Fermor was neither a great philhellene, nor a new Lord Byron for Greece who fought and loved at the same time. Fundamentally he was a classic agent who served faithfully the interests of Britain and as a cultivated gentleman wrote good travel books. Anything else that the people of Greece attribute to him derives from either ignorance or innocence or anglophilia, ignoring the terrible sufferings he caused our country at that time..."

In fact, Leigh Fermor’s strategy for the kidnapping of Kreipe was to undertake a bloodless operation that would be attributed to British forces alone in order to avoid direct reprisals being meted out against the Cretan population. In this, he was successful.