Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (2 page)

On 28 October 1940, Sir Michael Palairet, the British Minister, was cheered on the balcony of the British Legation by opponents and supporters of the regime alike. The Legation, a large pink and white mansion on Kifissia Avenue, had belonged to Eleutherios Venizelos, the great liberal statesman of the First World War, whose pro-Allied stance had helped depose the pro-German King Constantine, the father of George II. In Venizelos's native Crete, the outburst of patriotism nearly led to the destruction of the fifteenth-century Morosini fountain in Heraklion because it was Venetian and therefore 'enemy'.

Reservists did not wait for call-up papers, they reported immediately. Wildly enthusiastic soldiery piling into troop trains fired an estimated million rounds into the air. Many units set out for the front on foot, since motor transport barely existed in the Greek army. In the Pindus mountains, men, women and children offered themselves and their pack animals to carry ammunition and supplies across the wild and roadless terrain. Within a few days the Italian advance came to a halt.

In the belief that the campaign would be little short of a triumphal march, the Italian army in Albania had not been provided with engineer units. The lack of strategy — a futile push into the mountain mass of Epirus instead of cutting across towards the key port of Salonika — exasperated Hitler as much as the incompetence with which the campaign was executed. He pretended to have had no prior knowledge of the whole venture.

Instead of a short sharp campaign which would have barred the enemy from the continent of Europe, Hitler found that Mussolini's action had triggered the British guarantee of Greek independence given in April 1939 after the Italian invasion of Albania. In Salzburg on 18 November the Führer made the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, understand that the arrival of Royal Air Force bombers in the region of his main fuel supply, the oilfields of Ploesti, was Mussolini's fault.

Hitler's concern for the oilfields increased further when it became clear that his attempts to lull Soviet suspicions aroused by German troops in Roumania had failed. On 5 December 1940, he finally decided on the invasion of Russia. The threat now of a second front on his right rear became a major preoccupation.

The original staff plan to invade Greece (Operation Marita) and Gibraltar (Operation Felix) as part of the 'peripheral strategy' against Britain's Mediterranean and imperial power had to be revised. General Franco's bland intransigence made 'Felix' impossible, and in any case Hitler, with his ambition fixed on Russia, had lost interest in the Mediterranean. 'Marita', on the other hand, had become more important than ever. He had to secure his flank for the coming advance eastwards.

Hitler's fears were exaggerated. The RAF's presence in Greece was much less of a threat than he imagined because Metaxas's government refused to allow the British to threaten the Roumanian oilfields. An improvised collection of squadrons under Air Vice Marshal D'Albiac — at first mostly Blenheims and Gladiators — was sent from Egypt to support the Greek army on the Albanian front.

To avoid provoking the Germans, the bombers could not be stationed any further forward than Eleusis and Tatoi, both close to Athens.

For the advance party — who had been casually told in their mess tent in the desert, 'You're off to Greece tomorrow' — touching down in a Sunderland flying-boat at the naval air station of Phaleron near Athens was a moving moment. They were the first British forces openly back on European territory since the fall of France.

The young pilots who followed had the happy-go-lucky attitude of the time. In 211 Squadron, a number were motor-racing enthusiasts who had known each other from the paddock at Brooklands.

Nicknames were compulsively applied to everything and everyone, with 'kites' called 'Bloody Mary'

and 'Caminix', and pilots known as 'the Bish' Gordon-Finlayson, 'Twinkle' Pearson and 'Shaky Do'

Dawson.

They soon settled into their new life. By day they carried out bombing raids on the Albanian ports of Durazzo and Valona — a dangerously repetitive pattern known as 'same time, same place' jobs. And by night they enjoyed themselves in Athens, starting at Zonar's, then going on to Maxim's or the Argentina night-club, where they rubbed shoulders, and occasionally came to blows, with unconvincing German 'holiday-makers'. At the Argentina, they used to chat up a blonde singer and dancer called Nicki after the show, unaware that she was the girlfriend of a member of Section D

(another forerunner of Special Operations Executive) working under cover in the Legation.

As a further gesture of support, and to provide 'close-up information about the relative merits of the two armies', Churchill had demanded the dispatch of a British Military Mission to the Greek army.

GHQ Middle East received this instruction within a few days of the Italian invasion, and at the end of the second week of November, Major General Gambier-Parry was sent from Egypt, followed by a skeleton staff.

Although the Military Attache, Colonel Blunt, was put in a difficult position, he and Gambier-Parry got on well. But Gambier-Parry was recalled towards the end of the year for a short-lived appointment as commander of British forces on Crete. His replacement was Major General T.G.

Heywood.

Heywood had been Military Attache in Paris prior to the fall of France. His refusal to acknowledge defects in the French army was an inauspicious qualification. Harold Caccia, the First Secretary at the Legation, considered him 'intelligent, but not very wise.' Heywood was a fastidious man. He had a muscular military face, with moustache, hard, narrowed eyes and a monocle. Ambitious and

'politically minded', he increased the size of the British Military Mission from little more than half a dozen officers to over seventy at one point, a growth which convinced many in the Greek army that his organization was destined to form the nucleus of an expeditionary force.

Heywood also put his fellow gunner, Jasper Blunt, in an intolerable position. Blunt, a perceptive man, had accumulated an excellent knowledge of the Greek army. He was also the only British officer in Athens who had managed to reconnoitre the threatened north-east before the Greek General Staff vetoed further visits. Colonel Blunt, with his superior local knowledge, should have joined the mission as the senior intelligence officer, but Heywood had brought in his own man, Stanley Casson

— Reader in Classical Archaeology at New College, Oxford — who although brilliant and a veteran of the Salonika front in the First World War, was rather out of touch. Perhaps the most eccentric addition was Colonel Rankin of the Indian Army in a curiously cut pair of jodhpurs and a long cavalry tunic which stuck out so much at the sides that he was known as 'the Indian evzone'.

Most members of the British Military Mission were either picked regular officers, or wartime volunteers with knowledge of the region. The chief staff officer for operations was a well-known Coldstreamer, Colonel Guy Salisbury-Jones. His number two was Major Peter Smith-Dorrien, later killed by the terrorist bomb at the King David Hotel.

The ranks of young captains and subalterns included Charles Mott-Radclyffe, a diplomat turned soldier who had served
en poste
in Athens only a few years before; Monty Woodhouse, a 23-year-old Wykehamist of stern looks and rigorous thought who a few years later in the rank of full colonel played a large part with Nick Hammond in thwarting the Greek Communists' attempt to suppress rival guerrilla groups; Michael Forrester, who was soon to distinguish himself in Crete as an almost mythical leader of irregulars in the battle against German paratroopers; and Patrick Leigh Fermor, described as 'an avatar of Byron' by Woodhouse because he had attached himself to a Greek cavalry regiment during the Venizelist revolution of 1935, and who later gave substance to the label with guerrilla adventures that were amongst the most romantic of the war.

Leigh Fermor's early career of itinerant delight has been well-chronicled in his books, yet
en route
to Athens his power of charmed survival almost failed. Coming from Alexandria, the cruiser
HMS Ajax
stopped off at Suda Bay on the north coast of Crete. He and Monty Woodhouse went into the old Venetian city of Canea for a drink and to smoke a narghile.

Afterwards, a private in the Black Watch driving a ration lorry stopped to give them a lift back to Suda, but he proved to be drunk and drove without care on roads which had 'gone artistically to ruin', in Pendlebury's phrase. The truck overturned in the ditch and Leigh Fermor, who received a head wound, had to be left behind in hospital when the
Ajax
sailed. He finally reached Athens a week later.

The mission's liaison officer with the Greek government was Prince Peter of Greece, King George II's young cousin and an anthropologist who had spent a long time in the Himalayas. As a thoroughgoing Anglophile, with 'an astonishing repertoire of bawdy songs', he was greatly liked by British officers.

The mission was hardly in a position to proffer useful advice on mountain warfare. 'The Greeks were certainly brave,' observed one war correspondent, 'but mountain warfare was in their view not suited to modern methods, and they reverted almost automatically to the tactics of a century ago.' Forrester, who worked for Salisbury-Jones, described the conflict as 'like one of the Balkan wars with somewhat updated weapons.'

The nebulous task of the British Military Mission was not made clearer by the unreal environment in which it lived and worked. Immediately after the Italian invasion, the Greek government had requisitioned the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Constitution Square as its General Headquarters: it was one of the largest buildings in Athens and had extensive cellars ready to serve as air-raid shelters.

General Metaxas took over the manager's office, the King was allotted a private drawing-room, and the reputation of 'Jimmy', the barman, as the best informed man in Athens increased still further when General Mellisinos, the Deputy Chief of Staff, set up his desk opposite the rows of bottles.

'The prize show of the building', wrote Colonel Blunt in his diary, 'was Maniadakis, the public security chief. He had a huge mahogany table matching his vast bulk. On it was an outsize photograph of General Metaxas in a massive silver frame, and a battery of telephones that would not have disgraced the office of any police chief of thriller fiction or film. Maniadakis would seize a telephone receiver in his huge fist and bellow for some distant provincial prefect or police chief, shouting not only to drown the typewriters, but also because he liked to shout. While this performance was going on, all his intimate circle of officers and friends who were clustered and seated round him, would hang on his words and try to hear what was coming through from the other end.'

During the Greek army's astonishingly successful campaign against the Italians, the Joint Planning Staff and the Chiefs of Staff in London did not want British aid to go beyond the fighter and bomber squadrons already committed. One way of helping both the Greeks and British interests in the Eastern Mediterranean was to take over responsibility for Crete, which the Italians wanted to occupy as a naval and air base. Metaxas suspected the British of having their own designs upon such a strategically important island, but at that time they were clearly the lesser evil. Despite the surge of pro-British feeling, Greeks did not forget Venizelos's phrase describing their country as 'the beggar of the Great Powers'.

In London, the views of admirals, generals and air marshals were for once in agreement, and Churchill concurred. With resonances of the Grand Fleet in 1914, he demanded that the large natural harbour of Suda Bay on the north coast of Crete should be turned into 'a second Scapa'.

Admiral Cunningham, the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, had already planned, with Greek approval, to establish a naval base there. The first British troops to be sent, the 2nd Battalion, the York and Lancaster Regiment, received their warning order to move within forty-eight hours of the Italian invasion. The 2nd Battalion of the Black Watch, also part of the 14th Infantry Brigade, followed in the next few days.

The dispatch of British troops to guard Suda Bay allowed the Greek government to bring the Cretan V

Division across to the mainland. Harold Caccia, deputizing for Sir Michael Palairet, passed on the categorical assurance to the Greek government: 'We will look after Crete.'

This decision — a perfectly logical move providing the British fulfilled their pledge — was later lamented by the Cretans with justifiable bitterness. 'If only the Division were here!' became an almost universal cry when the German airborne invasion of their island took place just over six months later.

The Cretan Division landed at Salonika in the second week of November 1940. Due to lack of transport, it had to march across most of Macedonia to Kastoria, some seventy kilometres south of Lake Prespansko where Greece, Albania and Jugoslavia meet. The Cretans formed part of the reserve to the Greek army's ten divisions on a front stretching south-west across the Pindus mountains to the coast of Epirus opposite Corfu.

During the second half of November and for most of December, the Greek army advanced valiantly against the Italians, pushing them back into Albania in spite of the wild terrain, bad weather and their deficiency in aircraft and armoured vehicles. By 28 December their right flank was established at Pogradets on Lake Ohridsko.

In this mountain war, only those used to the harshest conditions survived. British officers marvelled at the resilience of the Greek soldiers, equipped with First World War weaponry — much of it taken from the Austrian army — and 'clothing and footwear of a deplorable quality'. Many were bundled in rags. During the march to the front, the luckier ones had been given civilian overcoats by pitying onlookers. It was the worst winter in living memory. Casualties from frostbite far exceeded those from enemy action. Only walking wounded stood a chance of survival. Stretcher cases were almost impossible to evacuate. Resupply, both of rations and ammunition, was erratic since virtually everything had to come up by mule-train. Pack animals that went lame were shot and their carcases stripped of flesh by the ravenous troops. On several occasions, RAF Blenheims had to drop sacks of food to starving, snow-bound units. Even water was a problem, since there was no fuel to melt the snow.