I finished working through my screenplay where I left off at the end of the first act. It took me awhile to figure out what I had been doing those four years ago and where to pick up. I had forgotten that the main plan for the story line came from the book Ten Days to Destiny by Kiriakopoulos, a very in-depth look at the campaign from all sides. The history reads much like a story, and that is more the job of a historian today, telling stories. There are elements to a story that have to be in place before it can succeed and I like the story woven in the history of this battle.
My dilemma is how to treat the Cretan partisans. When we think of resistance movements in WWII we think of the French Underground, or the Dutch, or the Russian, or the Yugoslavs under Tito. But, are they the innocent doves we have been treated to in television and movie? They are innocents compared with the occupying Germans who are the villains in any story. That is not history, at least not complete history. It is public consumption history, trite and lacking in the complexity that is reality.
Our own history vaunts the Minuteman militia companies that met the British at Concord Green. A long tradition of militia service formed our frontiers and acted as a protection from marauding Indians and enemy colonial empires. But, if it were not for the Continental Army would we have won our independence? Our own Civil War had but few examples of disorganized volunteer formations beating formations of regulars, like the battle for Val Verde ford on the Rio Grande in New Mexico. If not for the few regular regiments left in New Mexico and the largely un-reliable New Mexican volunteer formations the Confederate invasion might have been beaten. Yet, there is still a world of difference between a volunteer formation and a militia one.
What is my dilemma? Should the act of sabotage or murder be condoned by merely the target of such activity? Is not terrorism an act perpetrated by irregular formations without legal sanction? Are the Sadrist militia formations in Iraq freedom fighters or terrorists? How about Al Queda? Is there a popular uprising in Iraq or a conflict fueled by adherents to Islam from foreign lands who want to kill American soldiers? Are the resistance movements from WWII on the same par as the Viet Cong? Unfortunately these are not apples to apples comparisons. The French Underground became useful tools to the Allied command, but were they really trusted?
The problem with popular uprisings is they are not affiliated with any ideology save for resistance to the dominating force thrust upon them. They can and did just as easily oppose and become problematic for those they allied themselves with, for the absence of a common enemy can lead to the weapons once supplied being turned upon you. Ho Chi Mhin was once an ally only because we were at war against the Japanese.
The Cretan civilians who fought against the German Fallschirmjaeger and Gebirgsjaeger who took Crete did so out of a long tradition for being independent and ungovernable. Some practiced wonton acts of murder in cold blood against troops who refused to see them as anything other than civilians. This is the problem when factoring in the irregulars who roamed the Cretan hillsides "poaching" at isolated Fallschirmjaeger. Soldiers kill other soldiers, but what is it when a civilian, a non-combatant does it? For our own part, we have called them heroes because they fought the Hun who took their land. But, is it heroism? Sadam's Fedayeen were irregulars, not soldiers paid by their government.
This is going to be the challenge in this script, to depict the Cretan irregulars in a proper but truthful light. I do not want to portray them as angels forced to do it, but as men and women who acted upon their cultural heritage of intransigence. I also have the telling of history to adhere to, for terrorist or freedom fighter history has classified all resistance movements against German or Japanese occupation as such. But, the things happening in Iraq beg the question of activity alone. Are irregulars, no matter who they are fighting, to be treated as combatants or as terrorists?
2 comments:
I spent seven years researching my novel, set in present time on Crete, with a backstory from the time of the andartes and the Nazis, examining the ethical issues of loyalty to blood or to Crete ... or to survival. It is a complex situation, all right, and my solution was that no andarte was pure white or deep black. They were doing what seemed necessary. Honorable if possible. Essential.
And in fact, that's close to what happened then and in the Greek civil war that followed WWII. Each person followed his/her own direction, some with great courage, and some not. It's a deep and powerful subject. Good luck.
This is one battle where one has to address the presence and actions of many Cretan civilians in the larger aspect of the actions of the beligerents because they added to the very difficult time the parachute battalions had in securing thier objectives. Coupled with the "hunting" that many Cretan men did was the compassion many of the women had for the wounded Germans in the midst of the fighting, taking in both allies and germans without prejudice.
There is an anectdote noted in the book Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed by Hadjipateras and Fafalios that describes (at the time of its writing) how the German cemetery on Crete is tended by a Cretan man and how Cretan women would light candles at the gravesides of thier former enemies, noting that they too had mothers who lost sons just as they themselves did.
That's what I hope to capture in the screenplay, that sense of honor.
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