Free Kidnap in Crete by Rick Stroud Page B

particularly hot and dry, and was followed by a long hard winter. Conditions for ordinary Cretans deteriorated very quickly. Giorgios Psychoundakis returned home from shepherding Allied soldiers to discover that his father’s entire flock of sixty sheep had been stolen: a terrible blow. A flock of sheep could mean life and death to a family, especially when the occupying forces were requisitioning foodstuffs. There was nothing Psychoundakis could do: under the Germans the Cretan state, always prone to lawlessness, had ceased to exist. The philosophical Giorgios left his revenge in God’s hands.
    By the winter of 1 941/42, food was becoming scarce all over Crete and even basic supplies, such as shoe leather, ran out. Soon old car tyres were being cut up for footwear: a skilled man could get a dozen pairs out of a single tyre. In the mountain areas, the people fell back on subsistence living – grass soup, wild herbs, snails. In the towns, the population was on the verge of starvation. On the Greek mainland the situation was worse: it was estimated that in Athens, by Christmas 1941, a thousand civilians a day were dying of starvation. The Greeks call this period ‘The Great Famine’. In February 1942, Hermann Göring wrote in his diary: ‘The inhabitants of occupied areas have their fill of material worries. Hunger and cold are the order of the day. People who have been this hard hit by fate, generally speaking, do not make revolutions.’
     
    See Notes to Chapter 7

8
    Ungentlemanly Warfare
    British wartime policy in Crete was dominated by political as well as military objectives. In 1943, John Melior Stevens, in charge of the Greek desk at SOE Cairo, stated in a report: ‘As I understand it, the aims of the British Government in Greece are twofold: first to obtain the greatest military effort in the fight the Axis, and, second, to have in post-war Greece a stable government friendly to Great Britain, if possible a constitutional Monarchy.’ Stevens was right, Churchill wanted Greece to remain a monarchy and did not want the communists to gain political power. The resistance movement on Crete, therefore, needed to be directed by the British. Special Operations Executive officers were briefed to prevent any communist-inspired groups from getting a foothold on the island and to disrupt the use of Crete as a staging post in the supply chain to the Axis armies in North Africa.
    SOE was a shadowy affair. Few of the officers working in the field can have had a clear idea of the structure of the organisation in which they served, and neither were they meant to. The organisation had its roots in the pre-war intelligence services. In July 1939, Neville Chamberlain signed a document that was to become SOE’s founding charter. ‘A new organisation shall be established forthwith to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas,’ the paper stated. ‘This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive . . . It will be important that the general plan for irregular offensive operations should be in step with the general strategic conduct of the war.’ A Foreign Office paper defined the methods of SOE as including ‘Industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist attacks against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots . . . We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities and complete political reliability’. Churchill described the organisation as being ‘The ministry of ungentlemanly warfare’.
    In the early years of the war in the Middle East SOE was still finding its way. Agents going into the field were largely untrained amateurs, making things up as they went along. One Agent remembered that the course placed emphasis on unarmed combat and the use of explosives for sabotage, which one officer said ‘anyone with an ounce of schoolboy left