Paddy L-F made his name writing this sort of prose. On Friday night there was thunder and lightning and rain. On Saturday morning it was windy with dark clouds over the mountains that threatened further rain, so we drove south away from the Cretan Sea to Paleochora on the Libyan Sea, where the sun was out.
Almost every village we drove through has a war memorial and memories of the Battle of Crete and its aftermath. The country is still scarred more deeply by the war than those on the western front that were also invaded. There was no collaboration. Cretan soldiers, civilians, women and children fought their invaders with the inadequate weaponry at their disposal.
The village of Koustoyerako had already been destroyed centuries ago by invading Venetians and Turks. In 1943 one of the villagers, Manoli Paterakis, was one of the Resistance fighters who abducted General Kreipe. The men left the village before German troops arrived. The women and children were rounded up in the village square.
They lined them all up, and, as they refused to speak, prepared to execute the lot. But, before they could press the trigger of their heavy machine-gun, ten Germans fell dead. For some of the village men – about ten – had taken up position along the top of a sheer cliff above the village, from where they could watch every detail, and, at just the right moment, had opened fire. Not a bullet went wide. Terrified, the Germans took to their heels … (The Cretan Runner, by George Psychoundakis, translated by PLF.)
The Germans returned the next day and the, by then deserted, village was again destroyed. This was when Crete was under the command of General Bruno Bräuer, so perhaps his execution was not as undeserved as Anthony Beevor suggests.