Cruiser (35 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
Perth
crept through the boom at Alexandria in the middle watch of Saturday 24 May, only to be met by yet another air raid just after she tied up alongside her familiar berth at No. 46 Shed. It was almost, but not quite, the final straw. Some of her men were so traumatised by all they had been through that they were unable to speak. But the spirit was still in them. In the forenoon,
Kipling
limped in with the survivors of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla â men still blackened and sodden with oil fuel lining her decks as she passed alongside
Perth
. Ray Parkin noted the scene:
Lord Louis was on the bridge giving a thumbs-up signal, as was every other man visible on the ship. They berthed across our stern. We all crowded aft on our quarterdeck and gave her a heartfelt cheer. There was not one order given, we all just went and did it. They cheered us back by name, standing there in a motley of rags and lifebelts all oil soaked, and their faces gleaming dark bronze, Lord Louis as dishevelled as the rest. Throughout the day other ships followed, each with its own particular woe. Admiral Cunningham made a signal: âThe battle for Crete can and must be won. There is evidence that the enemy is straining his resources. We must outlast him. We have got to stick it out.'
20
Privately, Cunningham knew that his fleet and his men had sustained an incomparable disaster. Ever the realist, he shared none of the delusions of Freyberg on Crete or of Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff in London. Despite the success in destroying or turning back the German seaborne troops, he feared that the battle for Crete had been lost and that still worse was to come when the island would have to be evacuated. The implacable truth was that ships could not operate in waters where an enemy had unchallenged superiority in the skies. Yet the Admiralty in Whitehall continued to send him infuriating signals urging him onwards â one of them, with purblind stupidity, informing him that:
If the Fleet can prevent seaborne reinforcements and supplies reaching the enemy until the Army has had time to deal successfully with all airborne troops the Army may then be able to deal with seaborne attacks. It is vitally important therefore to prevent a seaborne expedition reaching the island during the next day or two, even if this results in further losses to the Fleet. Their Lordships most fully appreciate the heavy strain under which your fleet is working.
21
To which Cunningham, exasperated beyond measure, replied
with an icy blast of realism:
Their Lordships may rest assured that determining factor in operating in Aegean is not fear of sustaining losses but need to avoid loss which, without commensurate advantage to ourselves, will cripple Fleet out here ⦠Surely we have already sufficient experience of what losses are likely to be. In three days two cruisers and four destroyers were sunk, one battleship is out of action for several months and two other cruisers and four destroyers sustained considerable damage. We cannot afford another such experience and retain sea control in Eastern Mediterranean.
22
In fairness to their Lordships, they may well have been distracted by another epic naval drama unfolding far from the Mediterranean. The battleship
Bismarck
and the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
had broken out into the Atlantic, and on the evening of 23 May they were detected by two British cruisers patrolling the lonely Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. They posed a dire threat to Britain's lifeline of supply convoys across the Atlantic, and the Admiralty pulled out all the stops to destroy them.
In the hazy dawn next morning, the Germans saw the pride of the Royal Navy racing towards them: the battlecruiser HMS
Hood
, and a brand-new battleship,
Prince of Wales
.
Hood
fired the first shots just before six o'clock, but soon after she herself was a blazing wreck, hit in her magazines by a lethal 15-inch shell from
Bismarck
. In a catastrophic explosion, she split in half and sank in three minutes, leaving only three survivors from some 1500 men. It was a savage blow to British prestige and sea power.
For the next four days, until
Bismarck
was laid by the heels and sunk on the morning of 27 May, nothing else mattered. The gathering disaster in the eastern Mediterranean had become a distraction, a distant sideshow. On the very day of
Bismarck
's destruction, London was still persisting in the
delusion that Crete could be won. Churchill sent Freyberg another of his florid herograms:
Your glorious defence commands admiration in every land. We know enemy is hard pressed. All aid in our power is being sent.
And, to the Commanders-in-Chief in the Middle East â Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore â he signalled:
Victory in Crete essential at this turning-point in the war. Keep hurling in all aid you can.
It was all too late. All was lost. That night, from his headquarters in Cairo, Wavell sent to his prime minister the fateful news:
Fear we must recognise that Crete is no longer tenable and that troops must be withdrawn as far as possible. It has been impossible to withstand weight of enemy air attack, which has been on unprecedented scale and has been through force of circumstances practically unopposed.
Student's paratroops, so close to defeat, had turned the tide. The seaborne invasion had failed, but the capture of the Maleme airfield had opened the way for sending in fresh battalions by air â an opportunity the MERKUR command seized and exploited. Creforce, divided and in something close to chaos, with units out of touch with each other, was battered by unending bombing and strafing raids. Freyberg, finally comprehending that the battle was lost, ordered a fighting withdrawal and the inevitable evacuation.
The ashes of retreat were cold and bitter. Escape from Suda and other ports to the north of the island was now impossible â except, perhaps, from Heraklion. For most of Creforce, the only way out lay across the central spine of the White Mountains and steeply down towards the craggy south coast,
where there was nothing that could be called a port.
Some units did not make it even that far, for they never received the order to retreat. They fought and died where they stood, or surrendered when further resistance became pointless. A few officers, such as the Commander of the Australian 2/11th Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Raymond Sandover, offered their men the choice of going into captivity or of taking to the mountains and forcing their way to the sea. They took their chances, in good spirits, but other men simply turned and fled. Leaving their dead and seriously wounded behind, thousands of exhausted soldiers began a ghastly trek of two and three days through rocky mountain passes, down steep ravines and crumbling cliffs, harried all the way by the Luftwaffe. Sometimes there might be a cave to shelter in, at other times they were caught and killed in the open. Food had to be foraged from Cretan villages. Water was drawn from wells if they could be found, scooped up in steel helmets or sucked from moistened field dressings. Some units, well-disciplined infantry platoons and companies marched in good order. Many stumbled along in a rabble, wild-eyed men shedding their equipment and even weapons on the way. There were men who dropped off to sleep and woke to find their companions gone. Sergeants literally kicked others to their feet and forced them onwards.
The objective was Sphakia, a small fishing village on the south coast with a curving shingle beach no more than 200 metres long. The narrow mountain road to the village ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff, from which a rock-strewn pathway tumbled down the 500 metres to the shoreline. The only hope was that the navy would be there. There was more chaos â a nightmare born of fear, hunger, and mental and physical exhaustion â as the troops began to converge on the cliff top. James Hargest, a New Zealand brigadier who tried to bring about some order, described the scene:
There were hundreds of loose members, members of non-fighting units and all sorts of people about â no formation, no
order, no cohesion. It was a ghastly mess. Into all this I was hurtled with no knowledge of it and with my hands already full. What had happened was that men had straggled; small units like searchlight detachments had walked off when their job was done; isolated troops of gunners, engineers, field ambulance with no one to look after them. But the stragglers were the worst, lawless and fear stricken. At night they rushed for water and ravaged the food dumps and crept back into caves at dawn â a hopeless lot â Greeks, Jews, Palestinians, Cypriots helped to swell the total. My mind was fixed. I had 1100 troops â 950 of the [5th] brigade and 150 of the 20th battalion. We had borne the burden and were going aboard as a brigade and none would stop us.
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Back in Alexandria, 580 kilometres away, Admiral Cunningham and his staff shouldered once more the burden of an operation in which they had grimly become only too expert. The numbers were forbidding. About 22,000 men would be awaiting evacuation from Sphakia, with a few thousand more at a point of even greater danger: at Heraklion on the north coast, only 150 kilometres from the German air bases on the island of Scarpanto. There might also be more men further along the north coast at Plaka, although nobody knew for sure because Creforce had lost most of its radio communication.
Every available ship would be needed: cruisers, destroyers and whatever troop transports could be found. The logistics alone were prodigious. Dozens of vessels had to be refuelled and rearmed, and some of them, including
Perth
, were in urgent need of repair before they could sail. They had to be stocked with any extra food and medical supplies that could be scraped together and then despatched to get them to the Cretan coast in the dark of night. They would have to wait offshore while boats brought the troops from the beach, taking on board as many souls as possible before beginning the return to Alexandria no later than three o'clock the next morning. There was one bright spot: the RAF in Egypt had
offered a handful of fighters with long-range fuel tanks to provide some air cover over the sea. It was not much, but it was something.
To the doubters among his officers who feared a devastating loss of ships and sailors, Cunningham offered an elegant retort that has gone down in Royal Navy legend. âIt takes the Navy three years to build a new ship,' he told them. âIt would take 300 years to build a new tradition.'
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For a few brief days â all too brief â
Perth
's crew relaxed with a spell of leave in Alexandria while the ship was being patched together. There was a lot to be done alongside Shed 46. Her 4-inch gun barrels, worn from the thousands of rounds they had fired, had their liners replaced. There was rough patching for the shell and splinter holes that had spattered her hull and superstructure, and new radio aerials and signal halliards were fitted to her masts. The fierce working of the ship in her corkscrewing beneath the bombing had opened up some of the hull damage they had sustained in Malta â that now seemed ages ago â and there were steam leaks and ventilation blockages needing attention in her engine room. More critical still, some of the brickwork in one boiler had begun to crumble, but that could not be helped without a major dockyard job. The two Fire Control Tables for the guns also needed fixing. The hands were happy to leave the job to the dockyard mateys while they went for a run ashore, going to the pictures and searching out the ultimate prize: a cold bottle of Australian beer in the bars and service clubs. There was the occasional air raid, but after all they had endured they were hardly much to get excited about. The men laughed when they heard that a bomb had landed on Sister Street, the brothel district, much relieved that none of them had been there. And there was good news on 27 May when the BBC broadcast that the Home Fleet had found and destroyed the
Bismarck
. The loss of the mighty
Hood
had been avenged.
Repairs done, and with two landing barges hoisted on board to help ferry soldiers from the shore,
Perth
raised
steam and sailed at nine o'clock in the evening of Wednesday 28 May, in company with three other cruisers â
Phoebe
,
Calcutta
and
Coventry â
three destroyers and the troopship
Glengyle
. As an afterthought, Cunningham sent Hec Waller in HMAS
Stuart
, and two more destroyers, to chase after them for added protection. Every additional gun would make a difference.
A lone JU88 discovered the squadron the next morning and dropped two bombs not far from
Perth
, but the rest of the day passed quietly. By eleven o'clock that evening, they were off Sphakia, lowering their boats and boarding nets over the side to take the troops on board. The night was cloudy, with only a few stars. Absurdly, the men tiptoed about the upper deck and spoke to each other in whispers, as if Goering himself might hear them. Nerves as taut as guitar strings, they waited for the throb of engines on high and the hammering of the air-raid alarm. Across the bay, they could dimly see boats plying towards them from the beach and, to their wonder, men attempting to swim out. They welcomed the troops to their ship with a rough kindness, hurrying the wounded below to the doctor and the Sick Bay ratings in the cramped and stifling mess decks.
The unwounded men dropped where they landed, some falling instantly asleep. Filthy, unshaven and stinking, in tatters of uniform, some without boots, they looked not like men in the flower of their youth but like grisly spectres from hell. âThank God for the navy,' some of them said, attempting a grin. Others stared soundlessly into the distance. A few just sobbed, bodies quivering uncontrollably. In the galley, Roy Norris and his fellow cooks laboured over an endless supply of kye, soup and biscuits, but at first the soldiers wanted only water and more water: