The Cretan Runner (Penguin World War II Collection)

Product Information

The Holocaust of Kedros was an operation involving 2,000 Axis soldiers who targeted Anogeia and Damasta. A total of 900 houses were burned, 50 civilians were shot and 3,500 became internally displaced. In the following days the operation expanded to other villages, men were executed, houses were looted and then burned or dynamited regardless of their involvement in resistance activities. [40] Local resistance bands could do nothing but watch, being vastly outnumbered. [41] Biographical works [ edit ] Dillon, John, "The Cretan Runner: George Psychoundakis story", Battle of Crete, UK: My Crete, archived from the original on 3 March 2016 , retrieved 16 February 2009 This reads very much as a journal chronicling everyday events as well as an uncommon time. This means that parts are repetitive (think about your own daily life—many people get up, go to work at various but similar tasks, and then go home each day). George was a messenger who hiked through rugged country carrying notes, sometimes without incident, sometimes encountering danger. He was not the commander writing these messages and his understanding of the overarching Allied forces strategy was limited. Koliopoulos, Ioannis (1977). "Η στρατιωτική και πολιτική κρίση στην Ελλάδα τον Απρίλιο του 1941"[The Military and Political Crisis in Greece in April 1941] (PDF). Mnimon (in Greek). 6: 53–74. doi: 10.12681/mnimon.174 . Retrieved 15 November 2020.

The potential for organized resistance was impacted by five significant factors, under-emphasized or omitted in the book. First, Cretan society was characterized by the presence of a collection of local Kapetanioi, leaders of armed bands formed on a local, clan basis. They were concentrated in the mountainous massifs of Lassithi in the east, Psiloritis and Kedros in the center, and the White Mountains in the west. Second, when the German invasion took place, the vast majority of Cretan men of fighting age were away with the 5th Cretan Division chasing the invading Italians, the despised Makaronades, out of Epirus in Northwestern Greece and deep into Albania. This is a memoir from the conflict in Crete during WWII after the Germans invaded and occupied the island. The author was a runner and message bearer for English spies and local underground. He talks about running messages and literally running from pursuing Germans shooting at him. The occupation was oft times pretty brutal and a good example of how not do win a population over to your side. There is not a lot of urban cloak and dagger stuff here. They lived out in the woods/hills/caves and often went hungry. The author had an opportunity to go to Egypt and he talks about all the guys with him gorging themselves until they threw up because it had been so long since they had good food. Ogden, Alan (2012). Sons of Odysseus, SOE Heroes in Greece. London: Bene Factum Publishing. ISBN 978-1-903071-44-1. I found the huge array of different characters to be a little confusing however this did not hamper my enjoyment of this guileless account of a courageous and extraordinary resistance fighter.

Become a Member

Psychoundakis, Georgio (1991) [1955], The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation, Fermor, PL transl, ISBN 0-7195-3475-5 [6]

George Psychoundakis BEM ( Greek: Γεώργιος Ψυχουντάκης, 3 November 1920 – 29 January 2006) was a member of the Greek Resistance on Crete during the Second World War and after the war an author. Following the German invasion, between 1941 and 1945, he served as the dispatch runner for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) operations on Crete, as part of the Cretan resistance. During the postwar years he was at first mistakenly imprisoned as a deserter. While in prison he wrote his wartime memoirs, which were published as The Cretan Runner. Later he translated key classical Greek texts into the Cretan dialect. I was unfamiliar with pretty much everything that was happening during WW2 in Crete, so I appreciated this perspective. It is complete with petty arguments, daily routine, local culture, and mildly comic insights about the Allied forces the author (a local Cretan resistance member) encounters. It is refreshing and not smoothed to align with a victorious narrative, although I am still interested in reading some of the available accounts written by the translator and other British men who are mentioned in this account for another perspective.The book has at once a calm of a race which takes it for granted that life is full of death, and the excitement of a fighter who wildly enjoys his own part of the dangerous business. It is full of jokes and full of pride. Missing from the book is the overall outcome of the successes that the work of the runner George Psychoundakis and his countrymen achieved. The most celebrated act of resistance in Crete – the capture of the German local leader Kreipe is described. Yet there were many other successes in sabotage achieved on raids conducted not by SOE but by the Special Boat Service (SBS) of the Royal Marines (SBS), which made incursions into Crete in coordination with SOE. The SBS raids, targeting German military infrastructure, became regular. The first raid on 9 June 1942 targeted the German airfields at Kastelli, Heraklion, Maleme and Tymbaki, and in the first two instances recorded success in the destruction of aircraft, albeit at the cost of the life of one saboteur and the freedom of three others. A second raid on the same airfields (with the exception of Maleme) was staged in July of the following year, while the third and final raid, distinguished by closer collaboration between SBS and SOE, took place in July 1944. There was skepticism about the value of the raids and the Cretans, too, felt at best ambivalent about this form of Allied intervention. The second of the SBS raids brought a round of reprisals. Among the reprisal victims were most of the small Jewish colony in Heraklion. Find sources: "George Psychoundakis"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( January 2013) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The book did provide a good flavour of what it must have been like to a) live in a Nazi occupied country b) how ordinary folk rallied to the cause and c) how the British by and large co-ordinated much of the resistance effort. Moss, William Stanley (2014) [1950]. Ill Met by Moonlight. London: Orion Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-78022-623-1.Plowman, Jeffrey (2013). War in the Balkans: The Battle for Greece and Crete 1940–1941. Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military. ISBN 978-1-78159-248-9. Psychoundakis’s effortlessly poetic account reflected a passionate love of his homeland and its people, a geologist’s and botanist’s eye, chortling bemusement at the habits of the upper-class British agents, and deep comradeship with his fellow resistance fighters. When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki down his throat with the words Another drop of petrol for the engine, and loped towards the gap in the bushes with the furtiveness of a stage Mohican or Groucho Marx. He turned round when he was on all fours at the exit, rolled his eyes, raised a forefinger portentously, whispered, "the Intelligence Service", and scuttled through like a rabbit. A few minutes later we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey. [2]

As written the reader does get a flavour of the danger that surrounded George and colleagues at all times, the boredom and shortage of food that they must have suffered much of the time, whilst at other times there were feasts, wine and laughter.

Postwar life [ edit ] Book covers of Psychoundakis' translations of the Iliad and Odyssey to the Cretan dialect. Any fresh volume on the subject would need to be exceptional. The Cretan Runner not only competes but transcends; it is not exceptional, it is unique. Beevor, Antony (2005). Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0-7195-6831-2. Koukounas, Demosthenes (2013). Η Ιστορία της Κατοχής[ History of the Occupation] (in Greek). Vol.II. Athens: Livani. ISBN 978-9-60-142687-7. From 1974 until his retirement, Psychoundakis, together with another fighter in the Greek resistance, Manolis Paterakis, were caretakers at the German war cemetery on Hill 107 above Maleme. George Psychoundakis buried Bruno Brauer when he was re-interred on Crete later in the 1970s. [5] Sources [ edit ]