Ill Met by Moonlight

'Courage, mes braves!' We've travelled this road before. But if there are any new recruits in the ranks, let me reassure them from the outset that once the title's been tackled (a clumsy Shakespearean reference), we're over the worst of it. Because the rest of this book is a rollicking read from start to finish, dealing as it does with the true story of the kidnap during WWII of the German General Kreipe by a group of Cretan partisans under the leadership of two British commandos, William Stanley Moss, our narrator, and Patrick Leigh-Fermor - widely believed to be the blueprint upon which Ian Fleming based his James Bond character. ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT is better known as a film in which the young Dirk Bogarde defeats the Wehrmacht with a withering glance that predated Roger Moore's raised eyebrow by twenty years or more. By way of contrast, though, W. Stanley Moss and Paddy Leigh-Fermor are tough as old boots and utterly fearless. But even so, they leave us with the distinct impression that they bring to their particular field of irregular martial endeavour the benefits of a liberal education - which makes a very refreshing change from reading about SAS hooligans, the sum total of whose emotions might be tattooed in their entirety (all eight letters of them!) on the knuckles of each hand. Similarly, there is in MOONLIGHT a sort of bubbly undercurrent which suggests that, though these two young men are at present totally immersed in WWII, this is not what they are really and truly about. What they really want to be doing is getting on with their lives and doing whatever it is that young men want to be doing. (Nowadays they'd be taking a year out and bumming around Oz perhaps.) There are, be it noted, some absolutely mind-boggling statistics attached to this tale of German deviltry and British derring-do. In the film version one of the characters comes by water, the other by air; whereas in real life the one who comes by air has to make as many as fourteen sorties before encountering weather conditions suitable to a parachute jump. Then, with General Kreipe their prisoner at last, our heroes drive unscathed, albeit at a fair lick, through as many as 37 German checkpoints assisted by just two words of German, authoritatively spoken. (`General Wagen!' is the password that is repeatedly proclaimed thus.) And, with the sounds of battle raging all around them, there is just one killing in the entire story: that of the General's driver, unwisely left to the undisciplined attentions of the partisans - with whom our boys are very far from pleased when they get to hear of it. General Kreipe's capture may well have saved the man's life. Because his superior officer, General Mueller, was sentenced to death and shot when hostilities ceased. There is, too, a very moving part of the story where the General expresses his regret that his capture bodes ill for his extended family for whom, risen above his station in life, he has been the breadwinner. And there

I read this when I was, like, 10, in about 4 hours. That should be enough to suggest its page-turnability. I also read it on Crete while on holiday which was unsurpassable. Even if you head to Crete now, and read it there, i still did it first. For the mature, thoughtfull reader, pair this with one of Michael Herzfeld's first two monographs about the place of the peasanttry in the cultural nation of Greece, and competing notions of masculinity bound up with these questions.

This is a really fun to read book. Its about an actual behind the lines mission carried out by the author of this book. It is about a mission to capture a Nazi general and deliver him to captivity. The story of how they captured the general and then evaded the efforts of the German occupational forces to find them makes for thrilling reading. This is a book that is very hard to put down and as such is heartily recommended.

Stanley Moss must have been an interesting man. He obviously was an erudite individual, in that he was able to write this marvelous book, in spite of not being an author or anything like that. He was instead a soldier, a wartime one who had an office job before the war, but left to try and kill Germans, and win the war for the Allies. This book covers his account of his attempt (with one other British officer and a band of local partisans) to capture the commander of a German division in Crete, and spirit him back to Egypt via torpedo boat.The book is very British. There's a marvelous sense of the British civilian upper class at war, bunglingly incompetent but amazingly brave, and very good-hearted. The bungling is strange in that the author clearly was an effective soldier (an afterward by Moss's partner, Leigh-Fermor, in my addition tells how Moss led a partisan detachment that killed 75 or so Germans several months after the events in the book) but he manages to convey that he's not very good at this war stuff. In one scene, he lets one of the Partisans examine his submachinegun ,and is then nervous because "I never know which buttons on these things to push" and sweats until the gun is given back to him. There's marvelous banter, slang, and nicknames (one of the Cretan partisans is called "Wallace Beery" because of his supposed resemblance to that actor) and even the torpedo boat captain is colorful, as he should be.I was impressed with this book. The plot moves right along, doesn't get bogged down with too many details, doesn't try to portray what was done in a particularly brave or skilful way, just tells you the results, I would recommend it highly.

There were many interesting little incidents in World War II that are almost, if not completely, unknown today. This book recounts one of those types of incidents, the kidnapping and removal from the island of Crete of a German general. It's a first person narrative, written contemporaneously with the action, by one of the British leaders of the raid. Told with typical British understatement, nevertheless it's possible to read between the lines and discern the true courage of the team members, and the terrible danger in which they were placed. The writing is excellent, even poetic at times, considering the conditions under which it was written. Like any diary, there is not a lot of background detail included, which sometimes leaves the reader wishing for more information, but that's the nature of this type of writing. Read it for what it is, and you come away admiring the bravery of the men, both British and Cretan, who carried out this mission. With men such as these, it's possible to see why the Allies won the War!