Ill Met By Moonlight...

[TheGreenGoblin]

Watching this film, unbelievably, for the first time and am delighted to learn that the story is not fictional!

Ill Met By Moonlight



Patrick Leigh Fermor was an amazing character. I remember reading "A Time to Keep Silence" as a schoolboy...

[TheGreenGoblin]

"Epimenides the Cretan says, 'that all the Cretans are liars,' but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar.

Well I have only known one Cretan in my life, the son of a murderer who was released at the time of the German invasion and who was so good at butchering Germans that he was pardoned and became a father after the war to two sons, each of whom, in their own way, took after their father. The one emigrating to Australia where he was eventually incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane while his brother Stelios, who I knew, became a gangster, moved to South Africa where he set up a cocaine business, importing and refining the highest quality drug and indulging in a foul life of violence and crime that ended violently for him last year when he himself was shot dead at the age of 67 by one his ex henchman...

"omnes enim, qui acceperint gladium, gladio peribunt".

[TheGreenGoblin]

Film watched. Book being ordered. Must read!

Can anybody suggest anything else they enjoyed by Fermor?

[TheGreenGoblin]

I suppose I should really have raised a hat tip to W.S. Moss who actually wrote Ill Met by Moonlight and led the raid. I went off on a Leigh Femor hagiography...

W S Moss

The whole operation was less successful than the film led me to believe it seems...

The success of the operation was put into question several months after its conclusion. The outcome came to be seen as a symbolic propaganda victory rather than a strategic one. The relatively harmless Kreipe was replaced by Müller who ordered a series of large-scale reprisals against the civilian population of the island known as the Holocaust of Kedros. The operation entered popular imagination through the biographical works of the several of its participants, most notably Moss's book Ill Met by Moonlight.

from Wiki...

Kidnap of Heinrich Kreipe

All the Müllers I have met in my life to date have been bastards...

[TheGreenGoblin]

Not one comment...no naysayers, not one bloody opinion pro or con... We live in a savage world that cares not for men like Eric Newby or Wilfred Thesiger etc..

Therefore I give you...

[OFSO]

Thesiger was a giant among pigmies.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Thesiger was a giant among pigmies.

A squeak, a voice that will be amplified by the truth of history ...

[TheGreenGoblin]

Britain has lost men like this and she is worse off for it...

[Karearea]

Thank you for mentioning this film, have just enjoyed watching it. Stirring stuff.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Just finished a biography of Alan Watts, 'Zen Effects, The Life of Alan Watts' very well written by Monica Furlong. Watts and Patrick Leigh Fermor had been classmates at The King's School, Canterbury where Fermor had been expelled for the heinous class treason of holding a local greengrocer's daughter's hand.

Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde in the film and he was altogether too oily to be a good Fermor I thought.

[Ex-Ascot]

We have read the book, copy on Amorgos. Given to us by an archaeologist who we used to work with (British) who was based in Crete and knew Sir Patrick.

Downloading the film now. Don't think that we have seen it. Thanks for the reminder GG. Amazing guy.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Hope you enjoy it Ex-Ascot. It is a cold miserable evening here and it was on TV so I watched it again.

[Seenenough]

"Epimenides the Cretan says, 'that all the Cretans are liars,' but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar.

Well I have only known one Cretan in my life, the son of a murderer who was released at the time of the German invasion and who was so good at butchering Germans that he was pardoned and became a father after the war to two sons, each of whom, in their own way, took after their father. The one emigrating to Australia where he was eventually incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane while his brother Stelios, who I knew, became a gangster, moved to South Africa where he set up a cocaine business, importing and refining the highest quality drug and indulging in a foul life of violence and crime that ended violently for him last year when he himself was shot dead at the age of 67 by one his ex henchman...

"omnes enim, qui acceperint gladium, gladio peribunt".

Gob,I was at Fingers Disco at the Hyde Park Hotel one night when Stelios and Geoffrey Anthony had a dispute.It was very ugly.

Some years later Stelios and his gang also destroyed the Hard Rock Cafe (I think it was called)in Illovo when they got onto a turf war dispute.The manager at the time who I knew well spent the rest of his life trying to avoid the two gangs but sadly they got him and killed him at the Bryanston Shopping Center in the late 90s if I recall.

[TheGreenGoblin]

"Epimenides the Cretan says, 'that all the Cretans are liars,' but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar.

Well I have only known one Cretan in my life, the son of a murderer who was released at the time of the German invasion and who was so good at butchering Germans that he was pardoned and became a father after the war to two sons, each of whom, in their own way, took after their father. The one emigrating to Australia where he was eventually incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane while his brother Stelios, who I knew, became a gangster, moved to South Africa where he set up a cocaine business, importing and refining the highest quality drug and indulging in a foul life of violence and crime that ended violently for him last year when he himself was shot dead at the age of 67 by one his ex henchman...

"omnes enim, qui acceperint gladium, gladio peribunt".

Gob,I was at Fingers Disco at the Hyde Park Hotel one night when Stelios and Geoffrey Anthony had a dispute.It was very ugly.

Some years later Stelios and his gang also destroyed the Hard Rock Cafe (I think it was called)in Illovo when they got onto a turf war dispute.The manager at the time who I knew well spent the rest of his life trying to avoid the two gangs but sadly they got him and killed him at the Bryanston Shopping Center in the late 90s if I recall.

Sounds like the Stelios I knew. He pulled a knife on me once. Long story, best told over a beer.

If I remember Anthony had a wife (girlfriend) called Kathy. If I remember right. Didn't he shoot himself?

PS - All this talk of old Johnnesburg haunts got me to looking at checking online on their status and I came across this sad story... like you I think I have seen enough.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... rtner.html

[Seenenough]

I cannot remember how Geoffrey Anthony died but I do recall he died young.He was Lebanese and a bit of a loner who was more interested in women.

I searched the web regarding those days but there is very little to be found.

Sadly , I read the article you posted which just shows that you can stand for all the liberal causes in the world but in the end thugs that are allowed to operate unhindered and without opposition have little care for what you stand for if they want to take something from you.It is why I have deep concern for what we are seeing go on in so many US cities as I have 'Seenenough' of it in South Africa and what it likely leads to.

[TheGreenGoblin]

I cannot remember how Geoffrey Anthony died but I do recall he died young.He was Lebanese and a bit of a loner who was more interested in women.

I searched the web regarding those days but there is very little to be found.

Sadly , I read the article you posted which just shows that you can stand for all the liberal causes in the world but in the end thugs that are allowed to operate unhindered and without opposition have little care for what you stand for if they want to take something from you.It is why I have deep concern for what we are seeing go on in so many US cities as I have 'Seenenough' of it in South Africa and what it likely leads to.

Yes, the Geoffrey Anthony I am thinking of was Lebanese. I knew his daughter, by Kathy, who came to London. There is some doubt as to the reason for what happened, but the narrative is that he put a gun to his head, most likely in a show of bravado and anger, although he may have meant to kill himself. Anyway the gun went off and the Levant was out of the game...

As for Greece and Stelios (aka Stanley) things became too hot even for him after 1994 when the Moroccans, and then the Russians, muscled in on his world. By that stage he was flying in chemists, the Johannesburg police well in his pocket, from Argentina and staging a chemical pipeline from Angola using bush airfields in Unita occupied territory and paying them off to turn a blind eye, until it all went wrong, they probably didn't put enough money in the brown paper envelope or the local commander was bribed by one of his enemies. Whatever the case one of the aircraft was fired on while taking off, killing all on board. What with that and the pressure from his opponents, he too decided to get out and spend some time with the family in Greece, stopping off in London en route where he met one of my best friends and his girlfriend, another very good friend of mine and now happily rid of the contagion of Stelios, and invited them out to the Greek islands where by guile and charm, Stelios like many psychopaths was extremely intelligent, well read and could be overtly charming, wooed J and split up the relationship, and married her soon thereafter. Never was a woman more Ill Met by Moonlight!

As for the tragedy involving the Falklands veteran in the link I posted, you choose to turn this into a morality tale, liberality versus whatever you believe in, but sadly your analysis is very wide of the mark and sadly, I fear in your very understandable hope for stability and peace for yourself and your family, without understanding of the real issues, you have simply jumped from the frying pan into the fire in the USA.