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The Ariadne Objective: The Underground War to Rescue Crete from the Nazis

By Wes Davis. 352 pp. Crown, 2013. $26.

Britian’s Special Operations Executive, set up to infiltrate German lines and support resistance movements—to “set Europe ablaze,” in Churchill’s famous words—has spawned more films and books than any other group of combatants from World War II. Yet debate continues to this day as to whether the SOE made a significant difference in the outcome of the war in Europe. In France, the most critical of the SOE’s theaters of operation, it certainly had a very mixed record. Through betrayal, amateurism, and public schoolboy ineptitude, many brave young agents of both sexes—3,200 women were among the SOE’s ranks— were captured, tortured, and killed. Elsewhere in occupied Europe, however, he SOE had a less blemished history and carried out notably worthwhile missions. The subject of this captivating new book is one of these: the kidnapping of the German general in command of Crete.

As one would expect, given the genre, Wes Davis’s main characters are straight out of central casting. Chief among the rugged and predictably eccentric band of SOE agents operating in Crete was Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, described by a colleague as a “Man of Action, the gallant swashbuckler and giant-slayer,” who had hiked all across Europe in the 1930s and would become one of the finest travel writers of his time. There is even a walk-on part for a magician with movie idol looks: Jasper Maskelyne, whom Leigh Fermor had first seen on stage before the war, placing ladies in boxes and sawing them in half. Instead of white rabbits, Maskelyne conjured up potions, such as Benzedrinelaced drinks to keep Fermor and his raffish pals awake, and poisons to be taken in the event that their mission failed.

Thankfully, no one had to swallow any bitter capsules. In April 1944, Fermor and his SOE brigands managed to abduct General Heinrich Kreipe and disappear into Crete’s mountainous hinterland. It was the start of an extraordinary relationship. Slowly, as they trekked across the island, Fermor and Kreipe realized that they had a great deal in common, sharing a passion for antiquity and literature, and soon were even reciting favorite lines from Horace to each other. “Under other circumstances,” Davis writes, “they might well have become friends.”

After a dramatic rendezvous with a British motor launch, Kreipe and his abductors made their way to Cairo. Although Kreipe believed the Germans would defend the island fiercely, he confided that they were badly led and had greatly underestimated the power of partisan forces. Two of Kreipe’s colleagues, who also commanded German forces on the island, were both executed in 1947 for their involvement in reprisals against the civilian population. Kreipe, however, was never charged with war crimes.

Davis’s book is not the first on the abduction. Ill Met by Moonlight, written by Fermor’s cohort, Captain William Stanley Moss, became a 1957 film; Fermor translated the wartime memoir of a Greek resistance fighter, George Psychoundakis, which contains another vivid account. But Davis uses both narratives to dramatic effect, and bolsters them with extensive archival research while also skillfully examining the abduction in the broader context of the partisan movement in Crete. His pacing is sluggish at the outset, and he devotes perhaps too much time to the characters’ undeniably exotic backstories. But once the mission begins, the book crackles to life, and Davis conjures up a wonderful climax.

Long before passing away in 2011 at the age of 96, Fermor reunited with Kreipe in Greece. Reporters tracked them down to a raucous restaurant, and asked Kreipe how Fermor had treated him during the abduction. “Ritterlich!” the general replied. “Wie ein Ritter!” Chivalrously. Like a knight. His abductor had not been a Nazi-hating peasant, bent on bloody revenge. Fermor was a true English gentleman, deserving of the praise one journalist paid by calling him “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene.” Kreipe had been lucky indeed.

 

Originally published in the February 2014 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.