Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (11 page)

The bulk of the Australian troops were moved eastwards to Georgioupolis, Rethymno and Heraklion.

The New Zealanders, on the other hand, marched westwards to take up positions along the coast between Canea and the airfield of Maleme, where the Blenheims of 30 Squadron were now based to fly shipping patrols over the Aegean to chase off Stukas.

The Maori battalion set a cracking pace which some officers found hard to follow. In the village of Platanias the mayor and his daughters welcomed them with tables set out offering bread and white goat's cheese and red wine. A young woman holding a child began to weep when she saw the soldiers.

A New Zealand subaltern asked a Cretan why she cried. Her husband and brothers had been among those trapped in Epirus with the Cretan V Division.

Few of those marching out to their positions had been impressed by the preparations they had seen from the moment they landed. The dockside at Suda was a shambles. Only two small ships could be unloaded at the same time, so the rest had to wait at anchor in the bay, easy targets for air attack as the half-sunken wrecks testified. Churchill's call the previous November to turn Suda Bay into a 'second Scapa' had not been taken seriously by GHQ Middle East at a time of more urgent demands on other fronts.

Churchill's phrase had not been a mere figure of speech. He believed strongly in the importance of turning Suda into 'the amphibious citadel of which all Crete is the fortress' and had not forgotten the task during the winter. But the emphasis on Suda allowed Wavell to believe that, with all his other commitments, he could get away with reinforcing only the port area.

The most recent commander of the island, Major General E.C. Weston, had arrived in Crete at the end of March. His command, part of a Royal Marine formation known as the Mobile Naval Base Defence Organisation, consisted mainly of anti-aircraft and searchlight batteries. Before the German invasion of Greece, the raids were carried out by Italian torpedo bombers. Almost every gun on every ship in harbour banged away at them, the civilian gunners on merchantmen and Royal Fleet Auxiliaries perhaps even more enthusiastically than the Royal Navy. But the scream of Stukas, once the Luftwaffe took over from the Italians, announced a far more frequent and less sporting event.

The Palestinian Pioneers and a misnamed Dock Operating Company which consisted of shipping clerks in uniform, not stevedores, had the worst job, unloading ammunition and fuel from the ships in Suda Bay under one air attack after another. The red warning flag hoisted over naval headquarters on the quayside could not be seen from the hold of a ship, so often there was no warning of a raid until the Bofors guns opened up. The lack of warning made dockyard parties nervous, which did not help productivity. And the officer in charge of unloading foolishly refused to allow them to take cover, saying that they must consider themselves front-line soldiers. Not surprisingly, a very high proportion began to report sick.

Harold Caccia, having arrived at Heraklion with the other survivors from the
Kalanthe,
moved to join a skeleton version of the British Legation transposed to Halepa, next to Canea. On the way he saw what appeared to be one group of soldiers repainting a bridge and another preparing to demolish it.

For him this typified the appalling lack of preparation. 'We'd been there for six months. What had we been doing?' The strength of his feeling stemmed from the failure of the British to honour their assurance that they would look after Crete which he had delivered to the Greek government when the Cretan Division was sent to the mainland.

While the old city of Canea consisted of narrow streets and tall Venetian houses each topped with a Turkish
hayäti
(a wooden extension with shuttered windows), Halepa, extending on its east side towards the Akrotiri, had spacious villas with gardens of palm trees, Persian lilac, bougainvillea and oleander. The British Legation was installed not far from the former residence of Prince Peter's father when he had been Governor-General. And alongside the residence stood the house of the Venizelos family.

Caccia, whose clothes had gone down with the
Kalanthe,
received some replacements when Peter Wilkinson of SOE arrived on Crete. Wilkinson, mainly responsible for Poland and Czechoslovakia, had come to see if an 'underground railway' into Central Europe was still possible up through the Balkans. He was also on the island to watch the parachute invasion, whose imminence had been confirmed by Ultra, and report back to Colonel Colin Gubbins at SOE's Baker Street headquarters.

SOE at that stage was examining the wild idea of parachuting large formations of Pole and Czech forces back into their countries without any hope of being able to support them.

From Suda Bay, Wilkinson hitched a lift to Canea and searched for the British Legation. To his surprise, he found Harold Caccia clipping the hedge. Even more surprising was his attire: patent leather shoes with rubber soles, striped morning-coat trousers, a black cycling jacket and a Panama hat with the ribbon of the Eton Ramblers. They went off for lunch at a good restaurant, then Caccia proposed a walk to Venizelos's birthplace — a respectable distance. They soon found themselves passing 'some extremely bolshie Australian troops'. Wilkinson, in uniform, was a little uneasy about the reception that 'this fairly improbable Englishman' beside him might receive, but Caccia was unruffled by the barracking, and they strolled rather than ran the verbal gauntlet.

As well as trousers for Harold Caccia, Wilkinson had also brought a wireless set for Ian Pirie, the less respectable face of British diplomacy. Pirie and Barbrook had established themselves in another, even grander, villa not far away in a street lined with Persian lilacs then flowering luxuriantly. Pirie, as Nicholas Hammond observed, was 'a great chap for getting good accommodation.' This centre for secret operations, dubbed Fernleaf House, was filled with wireless sets, the German uniforms brought over from Athens in the caique and crates of machine guns humped about by Greeks in and out of uniform. Pirie's and Barbrook's piratical crew included a former rum-runner and a warrant officer with waxed moustache, a Mauser pistol in his belt and a Browning in a shoulder holster. The thoroughly irregular set-up was completed by the blonde Nicki, who although newly married and stand-offish with RAF pilots in slit trenches, had not lost any of her unselfconscious sexuality. It left the local Cretan women, young and old alike, 'speechless with amazement'.

They were joined at Fernleaf House first by Wilkinson and then by Geoffrey Cox, a foreign correspondent turned subaltern in the New Zealand Division, who had been told to establish a daily newspaper for the troops called
Crete News.
Wilkinson's interest in the undergound route into the Balkans soon dwindled when it became clear that Pirie's fleet of clandestine caiques organized by a shadowy figure called Black Michael owed more to imaginative optimism than reality. So while waiting to study the parachute invasion at first hand, Wilkinson decided that the most useful and entertaining employment open to him was to sit on the terrace with a selection of rifles from the armoury which littered the house and, comfortably installed with a loader, take pot shots at the Stukas as they climbed, belly exposed, from their dive-bombing attacks on Suda Bay just over the hill.

Wilkinson's running commentary on his shooting — 'made that blighter turn' — was on one occasion accompanied by a rather wistful sigh from the fearless Nicki on the balcony above as she watched the unopposed bombing. 'No good RAF. Come along Hurricanos.'

Nick Hammond, having left Ian Pirie and Bill Barbrook in Canea, had signed on with a character whose exploits soon became legendary in the Eastern Mediterranean, Mike Cumberlege. Cumberlege, a bearded naval officer with a gold ring in one ear, commanded a caique from Haifa renamed HMS

Dolphin
and fitted with a two-pounder gun and a pair of Oerlikons for defence against aircraft. The rest of the crew consisted of Cumberlege's cousin, Cle, a major in the Royal Artillery, who had demoted himself to gun-layer on this extraordinary vessel, a South African private in the Black Watch called Jumbo Steele, and Able Seaman Saunders. The
Dolphin
sailed to Heraklion, where Hammond met up with John Pendlebury for the first time since their separation in Athens the previous summer.

He found Pendlebury in his element. Apart from his swordstick, he had learned a form of stave-fighting in Egypt at the archaeological dig at Tel el-Armana. He half-pictured himself as a sort of Cretan Lawrence of Arabia, but lacked Lawrence's disturbing tenacity.

After the Italian invasion, and with British troops welcomed on Crete by the government in Athens, Pendlebury no longer had to play the part of Vice-Consul. He took out his captain's uniform, and became liaison officer between the British forces and the Greek military authorities. His real interest was the creation of a force to replace the Cretan V Division sent to the Albanian front. At that time there were less than four thousand Greek soldiers left on the island, and fewer than one in five of them was armed.* Pendlebury therefore requested 10,000 rifles in November 1940 from GHQ Middle East in Cairo. He did not seem to realize that he was echoing the Prime Minister.

* The Communists in 1946, during the Civil War, tried to exploit the dispatch of the Cretan Division to the mainland in November 1940 as a plot by the 'Fourth of August' regime of General Metaxas to crush the Cretans
(Voice of the People,
Canea, June 1946).

Churchill had recently told the CIGS: 'Every effort should be made to rush arms and equipment to enable a reserve division to be formed in Crete. Rifles and machine guns are quite sufficient in this case. To keep a Greek division out of the battle on the Epirus front would be very bad, and to lose Crete because we had not sufficient bulk of forces there would be a crime.' This order was not ignored, nor did it sink in the bureaucratic morass of GHQ Middle East, as many seemed to think. Although the Metaxas regime, with the Cretan revolt of 1938 in mind, can hardly have been keen to rearm a population from whom it had recently confiscated all arms, it appears to have accepted the idea. 'The Greek General Staff, wrote Colonel Salisbury-Jones in his subsequent report on the Battle of Crete,

'agreed to raise a reserve division, requesting us to provide the equipment. The provision of complete equipment was, of course, impossible but it was agreed that 10,000 rifles should be provided.' Only 3,500 American carbines arrived because German air raids on the Midlands had destroyed small arms factories, and production did not recover until late in 1941. Such practical considerations did little to moderate Pendlebury's righteous enthusiasm.

Pendlebury had not confined his activities to Crete. He had worked closely with 50 Middle East Commando, sent to the island in December to bolster the garrison after the departure of the Cretan Division and to carry out raids on Italian-held islands in the Dodecanese, first Kasos and then Castelorizzo. Early in the year, SOE Cairo sent two younger officers to help him: Terence Bruce-Mitford and Jack Hamson who, by a curious coincidence, had a glass eye like Pendlebury's.

Bruce-Mitford, a lecturer in classics at the University of St Andrews, with an academic air and thinning sandy red hair, was austere and very tough. His idea of fun in Cairo was to go out into the desert and spend the night in the sand dunes. Hamson, who later became Professor of Comparative Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, was very different if only because of his exotic background. He came from a Levantine English family, jewellers in Constantinople who lived in princely style on the island of Prinkipo. Their well-connected Catholicism even brought Hamson a beautiful new pair of boots after his capture in Crete: his mother managed to send them via Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.

Both took part in one of the raids on the Dodecanese. Hamson described the scene of embarkation on a moonlit night: 'past the Venetian fort and down to the water ... as we went in silence with equipment and rifles and bombs and knives through the ruins of other wars: a scene in a boy's story-book.' But then he went on to blast the 'confusion, incompetence, ineptitude and mess'. The debacle was not entirely the fault of 50 Middle East Commando, but they were soon withdrawn to Egypt.

Pendlebury's life of relished contrasts continued. Having organized an Old Wykehamist dinner in Heraklion, Pendlebury, accompanied by his faithful muleteer and bodyguard Kronis Vardakis, set off into the mountains wearing a black patch, having left that glass eye on the table in his room to warn friends who dropped by that he was away on guerrilla work.

The room itself was truly chaotic: rifles, not brooms, fell out of cupboards, and secret papers spilled on to the floor. After his execution by paratroopers, a German report — which insisted on calling him

'Pendleburg' — stated: 'In his house in Heraklion documents concerning his organisation were found, the financing and the arming, as well as the names of his assistants. Arms, munitions and explosives were found there in a considerable quantity.' But John Pendlebury had accepted his death in advance: not in any way as a suicide, but with his heart set on an exultant finale of self-sacrifice. On 17 March, over three weeks before the German invasion of Greece, and two months before the invasion of Crete, he had written his last words to his wife: 'love and adieu'.

7

The Spear-point of the German Lance'

For British and German planners alike, study of a map of the Eastern Mediterranean in the autumn of 1940 led to two conclusions: Crete was a key air and naval base for the region; and the Axis could only capture it with airborne forces. The strength of the Royal Navy made a seaborne assault too dangerous.

As soon as plans for the invasion of Britain were set aside, General Haider suggested on 25 October that 'mastery of the Eastern Mediterranean was dependent on the capture of Crete, and that this could best be achieved by an air landing'.

General Jodl, the architect of the 'peripheral strategy' — to throttle Britain in the Mediterranean —