THEY were angels of mercy who had stumbled into Hell – and Alf Smithard knows they saved his life.
He is convinced that without the aid of the band of brave Greek women who fed him as he was starving to death in a Nazi compound in 1941, his extraordinary story of survival and escape would have ended on the island.
For the past six decades the 84-year-old war veteran has urged the British establishment to recognise the islanders for their brave efforts to help him and thousands of other captives.
That battle has finally been won. The former Army warrant officer will next month present a letter from Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to the war museum on Crete, paying the "highest possible tribute" to the islanders.
Mr Smithard says the letter represents a long overdue thanks from this country's government, and only came after a personal meeting between the two, when the Cabinet Minister was visiting East Yorkshire, near the veteran's Cherry Burton home.
The war hero told Mr Hoon how he was stationed on Crete in 1941 during the German airborne invasion. Although assigned to working in stores, Mr Smithard personally manned a Lewis gun as the meagre Allied forces and the islanders attempted to hold back the advance.
As the Germans pushed onwards, the Allies fell back, scattering across the island. Cretan islanders, armed with knives, axes, pitchforks and stones, bravely put up a guerilla resistance, aided by some British and Allied officers and troops.
After days of fighting, and sabotaging German equipment, Mr Smithard was captured while under a flag of truce. German fighter planes strafed the troops as they prepared to board an evacuation vessel. Mr Smithard suffered a severe wound to the kneecap.
Eventually he and thousands more were marched by the Germans to a makeshift camp at Galatas on the island. Little more than a field behind coils of barbed wire, the men were left with no food or provisions under the scorching sun.
Mr Smithard said: "The Nazis were just animals but they made us live like dogs.
"We were starving, we were eating anything we could find as we were marched to the camp. Raw vegetables, a soup of boiled dandelion leaves; even a dead donkey that we managed to cut up. The islanders were being systematically killed if they tried to help us. People were being made examples of, by beheading. Houses were being burned to the ground.
"We were all at the lowest we could be. Then these angels appeared. This group of Cretan women turned up at the camp and started giving us crumbs of dried bread.
"They were being knocked about by the Germans, and being put down with blows from rifle butts, but it didn't stop them.
"The next day they came back. They would even send their children down to give us bread, because they felt the Nazis might not harm a child. They saved my life. They saved so many lives. They are the bravest women I have ever met. They are a brave and wonderful people. They were starving, but they fought, and they got us through."
Despite four years and two more stints in PoW camps, Stalags 7a and 383, in Germany, Mr Smithard escaped and was helped back to England by American forces.
After the war he was invalided out of the Army because of back injuries suffered through beatings by German soldiers. He later became an instructional officer, teaching new recruits how to drive, coming to East Yorkshire in 1977 when the driving school was established at Normandy Barracks, Leconfield.
Last year Mr Smithard returned to the island, and as he lay a wreath was approached by a weeping woman who had been born nearby but left for America and was returning to see her sisters. One, at six years old, had been shot several times by the Germans but survived.
Mr Smithard was introduced to the family members and enjoyed a tearful reunion with two women who, as children, had been among the girls who had saved his life.
"It was the most emotional day of my life," he said. "It just made me all the more determined to get some sort of recognition for them, and I feel as though I've finally done that.
"The New Zealand authorities have actually built the islanders a school as thanks for helping their soldiers, but at least this is a start."
dave.mark@ypn.co.uk