The Second World War (34 page)
Watching this naval action on the northern horizon, Freyberg became carried away with excitement. One of his staff officers remembered him jumping up and down with schoolboy enthusiasm. When it was over, Frey-berg’s remarks indicated that he thought that the island was now safe. He went to bed relieved, having not even asked about progress on the counter-attack against Maleme.
The attack was due to start at 01.00 hours on 22 May, but Freyberg had insisted that the 20th Battalion should not move until it had been replaced by an Australian battalion from Georgioupolis. Lacking sufficient transport, the Australians were delayed, and as a result the 20th Battalion was not ready to join the 28th (Maori) Battalion in the advance until 03.30 hours. The precious hours of darkness had been wasted. Despite the great bravery of the attackers–Lieutenant Charles Upham won the first of his two VCs, Britain’s highest award for bravery during the battle–they stood little chance against the reinforced paratroopers and mountain battalions, to say nothing of the constant strafing from Messerschmitts once the sun rose. The exhausted New Zealanders had to pull back in the afternoon. They could only watch in fury as the Junkers 52 troop carriers carried on landing at a terrifyingly impressive rhythm of twenty planes an hour. The island was now doomed.
Disaster also extended to the war at sea that day. Cunningham, determined to hunt down the second Light Ships Group which had been delayed, sent Force C and Force A1 into the Aegean in daylight. Finally, they sighted the group and inflicted some damage, but the intensity of German air attack led to greater and greater losses. The Mediterranean Fleet lost two cruisers and a destroyer sunk. Two battleships, two cruisers and several destroyers suffered heavy damage. The navy had not yet learned the lesson that the age of the battleship was over. Another two destroyers, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s HMS
Kelly
and HMS
Kashmir
, were sunk the following day.
On the evening of 22 May, Freyberg decided not to risk a last all-out counter-attack with his three uncommitted battalions. He clearly did not want to be remembered as the man who lost the New Zealand Division. The anger among the Australians at Rethymno and the British 14th Infantry Brigade at Heraklion can be imagined as they thought that they had won their battles. A terrible withdrawal began over the rocky paths of the White Mountains as the footsore, thirsty and exhausted members of Creforce made their way to the port of Sphakia, where the Royal Navy was preparing yet again to take off a defeated army. Brigadier Robert Laycock’s commando brigade, arriving as reinforcements, landed at Suda
Bay only to hear that the island was being abandoned. They watched in disbelief as stores were burned on the quayside. An unamused Laycock found that his men were to form the rearguard against Ringel’s mountain troops.
The Royal Navy never flinched despite its heavy losses around Crete. The 14th Infantry Brigade was evacuated on two cruisers and six destroyers after a brilliantly concealed withdrawal to Heraklion harbour on the night of 28 May. Officers thought of the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna, a poem about the most famous evacuation in the Napoleonic Wars which they had almost all learned to recite at school. But everything had gone too well. Slowed by a damaged destroyer, the ships had not cleared the channel round the eastern end of the island as the sun began to rise. Stukas attacked after dawn. Two of the destroyers were lost and two cruisers badly damaged. The squadron limped into Alexandria harbour piled with dead. A fifth of 14th Brigade had been killed at sea, a far higher proportion than in the fight against the paratroopers. A Black Watch piper, lit by a searchlight, played a lament. Many of the soldiers wept unashamedly. The Germans saw the losses inflicted on the Royal Navy during the Crete campaign as revenge for the sinking of the
Bismarck
(see next chapter). Richthofen and his guest General Ferdinand Schörner toasted the victory with champagne in Athens.
The evacuation from the south coast also began on the night of 28 May, but the Australians at Rethymno never received the order to withdraw. ‘
Enemy still shooting
,’ the German paratroopers reported back to Greece. In the end, just fifty of the Australians got away by crossing the mountains, and they were not taken off by submarine until some months later.
At Sphakia there was chaos and disorder caused mainly by the mass of leaderless base troops who had swarmed ahead. The New Zealanders, Australians and Royal Marines who had retreated in good order set up a cordon to prevent the boats being rushed. The last ships left in the early hours of 1 June as the German mountain troops closed in. The Royal Navy had managed to take off 18,000 men, including almost all the New Zealand Division. Another 9,000 men had to be left behind and became prisoners.
Their bitterness is easy to imagine. On the first day alone, Allied troops had killed 1,856 paratroopers. Altogether, Student’s forces suffered some 6,000 casualties, with 146 aircraft destroyed and 165 badly damaged. These Junkers 52 transports would be sorely missed by the Wehrmacht later in the summer during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Richthofen’s VIII Fliegerkorps lost another sixty aircraft. The Battle of Crete represented the greatest blow which the Wehrmacht had suffered since the start of the war. But, despite the Allies’ furious defence, the battle had then
turned into a needless and poignant defeat. Bizarrely, both sides drew very different lessons from the outcome of the airborne operation. Hitler was determined never to attempt a major drop again, while the Allies were encouraged to develop their own paratroop formations, with very mixed results later in the war.
FEBRUARY–JUNE 1941
T
he diversion of Wavell’s forces to Greece in the spring of 1941 could not have come at a worse time. It was another classic British example of stretching insufficient resources in too many different directions. The British, and above all Churchill, appeared to be incapable by character of matching the German army’s talent for ruthless prioritization.
The opportunity for the British to win the war in North Africa in 1941 was lost as soon as forces were withdrawn for Greece and Rommel landed in Tripoli with leading elements of the Afrika Korps. Hitler’s selection of Rommel was not welcomed by senior officers in the OKH. They would have far preferred Generalmajor Hans Freiherr
von Funck
, who had been sent out to report on the situation in Libya. But Hitler detested Funck, mainly because he had been close to Generaloberst Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, whom Hitler had dismissed as head of the army in 1938.
Hitler liked the fact that Rommel was no aristocrat. He spoke with a marked Swabian accent, and was something of an adventurer. His superiors in the army and many contemporaries considered him an arrogant publicity seeker. They also distrusted the way he exploited the admiration of Hitler and Goebbels to bypass the chain of command. The isolated campaign in Africa, as Rommel quickly sensed, presented the perfect opportunity to ignore instructions from the OKH. In addition, Rommel did not make himself popular by arguing that, instead of invading Greece, Germany should have diverted those forces to North Africa in order to seize the Middle East and its oil.
Hitler, having changed his mind several times about the importance of Libya and the need to send troops to North Africa, now felt it essential to prevent the collapse of Mussolini’s regime. He also feared that the British might link up with French North Africa and that the Vichy army, influenced by General Maxime Weygand, might rejoin the British. Even after the disastrous Dakar expedition the previous September, when the Free French and a British naval squadron were repulsed by Vichy loyalists, Hitler greatly overestimated the influence of General Charles de Gaulle at this stage.
When Rommel landed in Tripoli on 12 February 1941, he was accompanied by Oberst Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s chief military adjutant. This
greatly increased his authority both with the Italians and with senior German officers. The day before, the two men had been amazed when the commander of X Fliegerkorps on Sicily told them that Italian generals had beseeched him not to
bomb Benghazi
, as many of them owned property there. Rommel asked Schmundt to telephone Hitler immediately. A few hours later, German bombers were on their way.
Rommel was briefed on the situation in Tripolitania by a German liaison officer. Most of the retreating Italians had thrown away their weapons and seized trucks to escape. General Italo Gariboldi, Graziani’s replacement, refused to hold a forward line against the British, by then at El Agheila. Rommel took matters in hand. Two Italian divisions were sent forward, and on 15 February he ordered the first German detachments to land, a reconnaissance unit and a battalion of assault guns, to follow. Kübelwagen cross-country vehicles, the much heavier German equivalent of the Jeep were disguised as tanks in an attempt to deter the British from advancing further.
By the end of the month, the arrival of more units from the 5th Light Division encouraged Rommel to start engaging the British in skirmishes. Only at the end of March, when Rommel had 25,000 German troops on African soil, did he feel ready to advance. Over the next six weeks, he would receive the rest of the 5th Light and also the 15th Panzer Division, but the front was 700 kilometres east of Tripoli. Rommel was faced with a huge logistical problem, which he tried to ignore. When things became difficult, he instinctively blamed jealousy within the Wehrmacht for depriving him of supplies. In fact, the crises usually came when transports were sunk in the Libyan Sea by the RAF and Royal Navy.
Rommel also failed to realize that preparations for Barbarossa made the North African campaign even more of a sideshow. Other problems arose due to reliance on the Italians. The Italian army was chronically short of motor transport. Its fuel was of such low quality that it often proved unsuitable for German engines, and Italian army rations were notoriously bad. They usually consisted of tins of meat, stamped AM for Administrazione Militar. Italians soldiers said the initials stood for ‘
Arabo Morte
’ or ‘Dead Arab’, while their German counterparts nicknamed it ‘Alter Mann’ (‘Old Man’) or ‘Mussolini’s ass’.
Rommel was lucky that the Allies’ Western Desert Force was so weak at this point. The 7th Armoured Division had been withdrawn to Cairo for refitting and was replaced by a very reduced and unprepared 2nd Armoured Division, while the newly arrived 9th Australian Division had taken the place of the 6th Australian Division sent to Greece. Yet Rommel’s demands for reinforcements to advance into Egypt were rejected. He was told that a panzer corps would be sent that winter as soon as
the Soviet Union had been defeated. He should not attempt a full-scale offensive until then.
To the horror of General Gariboldi, Rommel soon ignored his orders and began to push the 5th Light Division into Cyrenaica, exploiting the weakness of the Allied forces. One of Wavell’s greatest mistakes was to replace O’Connor with the inexperienced Lieutenant General Philip Neame. Wavell also underestimated Rommel’s determination to advance straight away. He assumed he would not attack until the beginning of May. The midday temperature out in the desert had already reached 50 degrees Centigrade. Soldiers in steel helmets suffered from splitting headaches, largely brought on through dehydration.
On 3 April, Rommel decided to push the Allied forces from the bulge of Cyrenaica. While the Italian Brescia Division was sent on to take Benghazi, which Neame evacuated in a hurry, Rommel ordered the 5th Light Division to cut the coastal road short of Tobruk. Disaster rapidly overtook the Allied force, and Tobruk itself was cut off. The weak 2nd Armoured Division lost all its tanks in the withdrawal because of breakdowns and lack of fuel. On 8 April, its commander, Major General Gambier Parry, and his headquarters staff were taken prisoner at Mechili along with most of the 3rd Indian Motorized Brigade. The same day, General Neame, accompanied by General O’Connor who had come forward to advise him, were both captured when their driver took the wrong road.
The Germans rejoiced at the quantity of stores they found at Mechili. Rommel selected a pair of British tank goggles, which he wore up on his cap as a sort of trademark. He decided to seize Tobruk, having convinced himself that the British were preparing to abandon it, but he soon discovered that the 9th Australian Division was not about to give up the fight. Tobruk was reinforced by sea, giving its commander, Major General Leslie Morshead, a total of four brigades, with strong artillery and anti-tank gun units. Morshead, a forceful character, known to his men as ‘Ming the Merciless’, hastily strengthened Tobruk’s defences. The 9th Australian, although inexperienced and ill disciplined to a point which left British officers almost speechless with rage, proved to be a collection of formidable fighters.
On the night of 13 April, Rommel began his main assault on Tobruk. He had no idea quite how strongly it was defended. Despite heavy losses and a repulse, he tried again several times to the dismay of his officers, who soon came to regard him as a brutal commander. This was the perfect moment for an Allied counter-attack, but the British and Australians were persuaded by clever deception that Rommel’s forces were far larger than they really were.
Rommel’s calls for reinforcements and increased air support exasperated
General Halder and the OKH, especially since he had ignored their warnings not to overreach himself. Even now, Rommel sent ahead some of his exhausted units to the Egyptian frontier, which Wavell defended with the 22nd Guards Brigade until other units arrived from Cairo. Rommel sacked Generalmajor Johannes Streich, the commander of the 5th Light Division for being too concerned with preserving the lives of his troops. Generalmajor Heinrich Kirchheim who replaced him was equally disen-chanted with Rommel’s style of command. He wrote to General Halder later in the month: ‘
All day long he races
about between his widely scattered forces, ordering raids and dissipating his troops.’