Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (36 page)

From Rethymno and then Heraklion the advance of General Ringel's mountain regiments, led by tanks and motor-cycle troops, continued across the island. Beyond Ayios Nikolaos at Pahia Ammos the point detachment sighted some light tanks ahead. These vehicles appeared to be abandoned, so a German officer went forward to investigate. He claimed to have found their Italian crews crouched behind them trembling with fear, but German stories about their allies must always be treated with caution.

This Italian force had taken part in the unopposed landings at Siteia starting on 28 May. The Italian occupation of the eastern provinces of Siteia and Lasithi was made the responsibility of General Angelo Carta's Siena Division, which had fought rather unsuccessfully against the Cretan V Division on the Albanian front.

For those captured at Sphakia nothing was crueller than the march back to Canea over the same painful route, a double ration of the 'via Dolorosa'. The only consolation for the Welch Regiment captured on the north coast was that they were spared this return journey.

A German propaganda photograph shows a millipede of men in single file snaking as far as the eye can see. Many of those whose boots had given out had nothing more than soles of cardboard tied to their feet with strips of cloth. There was little food to eat except what Cretan villagers offered along the way. Many men had eaten no more than a tin of bully beef and a few biscuits in the course of a whole week.

On the way, outbursts of firing in the distance gave heart to those who had been with the 50th Middle East Commando in Heraklion the year before and had worked with John Pendlebury. Not knowing of his death they were certain that this must be his work, but it was probably German execution squads carrying out reprisals against Cretan
francs-tireurs.

Prison camp conditions on the site of the field hospital west of Canea were deplorable, mainly due to the German authorities' lack of interest. The paratroopers detailed to guard the prisoners, while their officers toiled over casualty returns and letters of condolence to next-of-kin, preferred to spend their time on the beach sunbathing, their bodies glistening with olive oil. Their naked bathing scandalized the socially conservative Cretans, for whom the display of nudity was insult piled on injury.

Fortunately for British prisoners, the guards' insouciance allowed them to slip out of the camp to forage for food with the help of villagers, and in some cases recover their belongings abandoned at the start of the retreat.

Among the wounded, survival depended on the speed with which they were flown back to Athens for treatment. Sandy Thomas, who was hit at Galatas, had to be moved away from the other patients because of the gangrenous stench from his leg. To everyone's astonishment, he never lost it. Thomas reached Athens in time for it to be saved because the shuttle of Junkers 52 transport aircraft worked so well from Maleme.

Many prisoners escaped, swelling the number of stragglers sheltered in mountain villages by Cretan families. Myles Hildyard and a brother officer from the Sherwood Rangers, Michael Parrish, decided instead to make their way by caique across the Aegean to Turkey. By an extraordinary coincidence they came to the uninhabited island where the
Kalanthe
sank, arriving the day after fishermen had recovered two bodies and a tin box containing the correspondence between Sir Michael Palairet and King George II. Hildyard buried the two skeletons, one of which wore the remnants of British uniform and a signet ring. Nearly fifty years later he met Harold and Nancy Caccia, and they concluded that he had indeed buried Nancy's brother Oliver Barstow, whose body was never found after the explosion. When Hildyard and Parrish finally reached Turkey, they delivered the box of papers to the Embassy.

20

Cairo and London

After Crete, to return to Egypt was to return to an unreal normality. It took many forms, both personal and official. Michael Forrester, arriving on the embattled
Perth
at Alexandria, caught a train to Cairo and that afternoon, surrounded by the well-tailored uniforms of GHQ staff officers known as the gaberdine swine, he had tea at the Gezira club. 'There was Cairo, just as I had left it.'

Stephanides soon found that the wheels of mindless military bureaucracy ran in the same grooves.

Those who had served in the expeditionary force in Greece and subsequently in Crete received notification that Colonial Allowance was to be docked from their pay for the full period of their absence from Egypt. Not surprisingly, there was a spate of black humour. The word went round that a special evacuation medal would be presented with the inscription EX CRETA.

In London, humour while dark was more flippant. The fashionable new word for coming unstuck was

'digommage',
and wits claimed that BEF, the initials for British Expeditionary Force, really meant Back Every Fortnight. But levity could not conceal a profound unease, even a fear that the war might be lost after all. Apart from the fall of Greece, London had been heavily bombed in April, the House of Commons hit on 10 May, and now Rommel threatened the whole of Libya. The popular press was full of scare stories that Hitler would attempt an airborne invasion of Britain. And the sinking of the
Bismarck
in the Atlantic by no means effaced the shock of the loss of the British battleship HMS

Hood.

The debacle on Crete had an effect out of proportion to the number of troops involved. And if one of Churchill's main objectives in supporting Greece was to appeal to American opinion, his attempt seems to have been counter-productive. 'The reaction of the US to our naval losses round Crete, and of the
Hood
has been very bad,' wrote David Eccles in Washington to his wife, Sybil. 'Why do they fear death more than the consequences of defeat?' She replied that the Crete episode had 'instilled a horrid doubt as to whether we've really got the hang of the thing'.

For Churchill, the most passionate believer in the defence of Crete, its fall was a bitter and personal blow. He also came in for a good deal of criticism. Harold Nicolson, then in the Ministry of Information, wrote in his diary: 'The public are in a trough of depression over . . . Crete feeling that we shall probably be turned out again. I must say that this 200-mile jump is terrifying. No wonder people say that if they can take Crete from 200 miles away, what will happen to Great Britain.' Churchill, to Nicolson's irritation, believed this mood to be 'purely a House of Commons anxiety'.

In Cairo, the British Ambassador Sir Miles Lampson, after talking to Wavell while the evacuation was in progress, wrote in his diary: 'I don't think I have ever seen our Archie quite so gloomy.' Wavell was especially saddened by the appalling casualties inflicted on his old battalion of the Black Watch during the return from Heraklion. And Wavell's ADC, Peter Coats, recorded Freyberg's desolation.

'As I write, General Freyberg is in my office, sitting opposite me. A crushed Goliath, and almost in tears. His stepson, Guy McLaren, has been reported killed in the desert. What a home-coming the poor man has had.'

One of Freyberg's most admirable qualities was his refusal to pass blame on to others. For him, the post-catastrophe atmosphere in Cairo was doubly unpleasant. The RAF attracted much of the obloquy.

It was a repeat, or rather an extension, of the recriminations which had followed the fall of Greece, when accusations flew back and forth between RAF and Army at all levels, and soldiers and airmen fought each other in the bars and streets of Alexandria. An air marshal described GHQ as 'a hum of splenetic activity, reminiscent of an overturned beehive'. 'Everyone', commented Peter Wilkinson more succinctly, 'was pouring shit all over each other.'

But for Freyberg worse was to come. Since he never attempted to shift any blame on to subordinates, he felt especially betrayed by Brigadier Inglis, who had returned to London immediately after the evacuation and had seen Churchill on 13 June. Most of Brigadier Inglis's verbal report to the Prime Minister was directed against the lack of preparation and hard thinking on the part of GHQ Middle East. But he also expressed his views on the handling of the battle.

I am far from reassured [wrote Churchill the following day to General Ismay for the Chiefs of Staff committee] about the tactical conduct of the defence by General Freyberg, although full allowance must be made for the many deficiencies noted above. There appears to have been no counter-attack of any kind in the Western sector until more than 36 hours after the airborne descents had begun. There was no attempt to form a mobile reserve of the best troops, be it only a couple of battalions. There was no attempt to obstruct the Maleme aerodrome, although General Freyberg knew he would have no Air in the battle. The whole conception seems to have been of static defence of positions, instead of the rapid extirpations at all costs of the airborne landing parties.

No mention was made at that stage of Freyberg's fundamental misunderstanding over the seaborne invasion that-never-was, although this was the main reason why he, Puttick and Hargest had held back. Churchill later realized that Freyberg's view of the airborne and seaborne threats had been reversed, but he never understood the extent or the exact consequences of this misunderstanding. And the enquiry set up under Brigadier Salisbury-Jones in Cairo, on Churchill's insistence, did not have access to the Ultra signals. Thus it was never aware of the futile defence of Canea on the crucial night of 21 May.

Inglis's 'betrayal' obsessed Freyberg for the rest of his life, no doubt partly because the criticisms had been delivered to Churchill, his own friend and patron. And when both coded and open criticisms of his handling of the battle appeared later, especially in Ian Stewart's
The Struggle for Crete,
Freyberg seems to have convinced himself that Inglis, virtually single-handed, had distorted posterity's view of his role in the battle.

For General Student, his 'disastrous victory' on Crete also led to a painful anti-climax. Along with his leading officers he was invited to Hitler's headquarters, the Wolfschanze, where congratulations were made with presentations of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Then, during coffee after lunch, the Führer abruptly turned to him. 'Of course, you know, General,' he said, 'we shall never do another airborne operation. Crete proved that the days of parachute troops are over. The parachute arm is one that relies entirely on surprise. In the meantime the surprise factor has exhausted itself.' Most of his men were then sent to Russia as ground troops. The irony of this outcome when London was panic-ridden at the idea of a parachute invasion and the British and Americans were developing their own airborne formations needs no underlining, except perhaps to add that Student was the general commanding the Arnhem front in the autumn of 1944 when the great Allied airborne opejation failed.

Every paratrooper who survived the battle received an Iron Cross, but for Student himself Crete always remained 'a bitter memory'. The Germans had lost 3,986 killed and missing and 2,594

wounded between 20 May and 2 June: paratroopers killed on the first day made up half of this total.

These heavy losses, 'particularly in missing', were 'attributed by the German Command to the considerable activity of Cretan
francs-tireurs.'1

The loss of 350 aircraft, especially the 151 Junkers transport planes, nearly a third of Student's fleet, was even more serious for the Nazi war effort. If Crete had an effect on the Russian campaign, it was that German production of transport aircraft never caught up in time for the Stalingrad airlift. As mentioned earlier, the notion that the battles of Greece and Crete delayed Barbarossa with fatal effect was nothing more than wishful consolation.

Freyberg was not the only one to acquire
idtes fixes
during his time in Crete. On the beach at Alexandria, shortly after his return to Egypt, Evelyn Waugh began an argument with Gerry de Winton and Randolph Churchill about the withdrawal. 'His attitude', de Winton recalled, 'was that everyone there had behaved in the most cowardly way.' He answered Waugh by pointing out that in Greece

'everybody kept their heads really to the last moment', because they had not suffered the combined effect of continuous bombing and extreme fatigue which eventually saps any courage. Waugh refused to take the point, and insisted that in Crete the lack of courage was shameful. 'I thought he was quite childish about it,' de Winton commented.

Waugh had arrived fresh with Layforce, while others had been fighting with little sleep for seven days and nights. Nor was he able to judge the full force of air attack, since it was much reduced in the last few days as the VIII Air Corps started to withdraw for Operation Barbarossa. And although Layforce's welcome to Crete had been demoralizing, it was still not as devastating a disappointment as that suffered by soldiers who, after a week of fighting, were convinced that they had beaten the enemy.

Laycock, rather surprisingly in the circumstances, argued: 'In my view the island should never have been evacuated at all, since the loss of shipping and of sailors' lives could not be balanced by the advantage of withdrawing some 15,000 soldiers who were already considerably demoralized after the evacuation of Greece.' But this advantage, the equivalent of a couple of divisions when the battle-experienced cadres were brought up to strength, was in crude terms worth far more at that moment of the war than all the cruisers and the destroyers lost, if only because warships alone could not stop Rommel's advance.

Hamson passionately argued that only will had been lacking. 'Our case was indeed not desperate; and a resounding victory over the Germans in the spring of 1941 was militarily of very great value.' His thesis, although wild at times due to the frustration of the prison camp, is more convincing than that of Chips Channon, for example, who dismissed the battle as a waste from the start.

Determination had not been lacking amongst the troops. Nor had it really been lacking amongst the commanders on the island, although one cannot help suspecting that the preoccupation with a seaborne assault also offered an excuse to postpone difficult decisions. What the commanders lacked, Freyberg above all, was clarity of thinking. The consequence of this failing was to be enchained by his own misconceptions. Every German account of the battle emphasizes that in spite of the handicaps, of which communication was the greatest, Freyberg undoubtedly had the means to win the battle during the critical period of the first forty-eight hours. But he did not win it, he could not win it, because his fatal misreading directed him in entirely the wrong direction.