Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (35 page)

A more likely version is that Laycock collared Weston some time in the early evening, long after the conference in the cave, and persuaded him to allow Layforce Brigade Headquarters to leave. Waugh in his private account wrote, '[Weston] first charged Bob with the task [of surrender] but later realized that it was foolish to sacrifice a first-class man for this and chose instead [Colvin].'

Soon after dusk, Graham reported to Creforce cave on Laycock's instructions. There he found General Weston and Colonel Colvin.

General Weston asked me if I had paper, pencil and carbon paper — quite remarkably I was able to reply in the affirmative thanks to that old friend Army Book 153 which was in my haversack. On my reply General Weston said 'Sit down on that suitcase and take this letter to my dictation. Make three copies.' He then proceeded to dictate the capitulation of Crete! The letter was written in the form of a short operational instruction addressed to the officer whom I have already said shall remain unidentifiable [i.e. Colvin] instructing him to go forward at first light to capitulate to the enemy.

General Weston took two of the copies I had made, handed one to the officer concerned, put the other in his pocket and with the words: 'Well gentlemen, there are one million drachmae in that suitcase, there's a bottle of gin in the corner, goodbye and good luck.' He walked out of the cave and down the hill into the darkness. Later he was flown out by a flying-boat which had been sent to fetch him.

Graham was left despondently gazing 'at the miserable little piece of paper'. It confirmed his worst fears that there was to be no further evacuation after that night. He roused himself and called the brigade sergeant major. They would secure one of the landing craft and try to escape in it later.

Laycock and Waugh must have arrived soon after. They swept Graham and any other Layforce personnel they could find down to the beach at Sphakia to join the queue for landing craft out to the destroyers. Evelyn Waugh made the following entry in the war diary for 2200 hours.

On finding that entire staff of Creforce had embarked, in view of fact that all fighting forces were now in position for embarkation and that there was no enemy contact, Col. Laycock on own authority, issued orders to Lt. Col. Young to lead troops to Sphakion by route avoiding the crowded main approach to town and to use his own personality to obtain priority laid down in Div. orders.

This version, although closer to the truth than Laycock's, was still disingenuous. Laycock knew perfectly well from the afternoon conference that Weston and the rest of Creforce Headquarters were leaving. There was no enemy contact at that moment only because the Germans did not fight at night: detachments of mountain troops had by then surrounded the beachhead and Waugh himself had recorded firing at dusk. The key point — the claim that all fighting troops were in position for embarkation — was definitely false. The Marines and the 2/7th Australian Battalion had not arrived, and Layforce's orders were to stay in position until they were safely away. Laycock did not send the message to Young until about 11 p.m., by which time he was waiting on the beach with brigade headquarters staff for a landing craft to take them out to one of the warships. He called for a volunteer, but most of the soldiers present muttered that their boots were not up to the journey. Private Ralph Tanner, Evelyn Waugh's batman, was chosen for the job because he did not object. Nobody could tell him where George Young's headquarters were, so he scrambled up towards the start of the Sphakia ravine. Although only about a mile away the ground was very difficult in the dark, and he wandered about shouting for Layforce. Eventually a member of D Battalion led him to their headquarters cave, where Young gave him some sherry to drink which he gulped down after delivering his message.

Young said he would try to bring in his men, but he must have guessed that there was not enough time for those in forward positions to reach the beach. Tanner left bearing this reply for Laycock. Outside the cave, he thought better of the sherry he had consumed on an empty stomach and forced his fingers down his throat. When he got to the beach there was no sign of Laycock. Tanner was so weak that when he was taken out on the last landing craft to a destroyer, he could not climb the scramble net. A sailor reached down to grab the waistband of the unusually tall Tanner, saying, 'Come on, Lofty, for fuck's sake,' and heaved him over the bulwarks on to the deck. Laycock later awarded Tanner a Mention in Dispatches for his efforts.

There is no question of cowardice in the behaviour of Laycock and Waugh. Both men amply demonstrated their fearlessness — in Waugh's case virtually a death wish — during the retreat. But in another context Graham suggested that Waugh perhaps 'had a personal horror of being captured'. This seems highly possible and is perfectly compatible with the degree of courage, astonishing to others yet matter-of-fact to himself, which Waugh displayed on Crete.

Laycock, too, had every reason to believe that he would be of more use to the war effort in Egypt than staying to be captured, but his own words on the subject of the surrender do not help his case. 'My orders were to go with the men, but I am not sure that in cases like that the Commanding Officer should behave in the same way as the captain of a ship and be the last to leave. I attribute the fact that so many were left behind to bad beach organisation, or rather to the entire lack of organisation.' In this account of events on Crete, Laycock was right when he argued that the commandos were not suitable troops for a rearguard. Yet they had been given the job because they were the only fresh troops available, and a lack of suitability is a poor excuse for arrogantly disregarding orders.

In the end Colvin did not carry out the surrender. He seems to have left that night with Laycock, Graham and Waugh although they make no mention of him. At the last moment, Laycock somehow managed to send Weston's surrender instruction back to George Young. He had crossed out Colvin's name and inserted 'Senior officer left on the island' in its place.

Young, who stoically accepted his fate as a prisoner of war, never blamed Laycock. And the suggestion of another officer that Young was left behind because he 'wasn't one of the White's Club gang' is mistaken. Few members of 'the smart set' or 'dandies' as Waugh called them were on Crete: they were mostly in B Battalion, formerly 8 Commando, then in an advanced state of decay at Sidi-Bishr camp near Alexandria.

Evelyn Waugh depicted the collapse in Crete as symbolic of the collapse of the British ruling class. In a letter to Diana Cooper some months afterwards, he wrote: 'The English are a very base people. I did not know this, living as I did. Now I know them through and through and they disgust me.' A dozen years later, when writing
Officers and Gentlemen,
Waugh made Ivor Claire, the Household Cavalry officer who deserts his soldiers in Crete, the personification of this betrayal. When the book was published in June 1955, the dedication read: 'To Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CB DSO.

That every man in arms should wish to be.' On seeing this, Anne Fleming sent Waugh a telegram which read: 'Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.' Waugh's reply she thought

'violent indeed but not wholly simulated'.

'Your telegram horrifies me,' he wrote. 'Of course there is no possible connexion between Bob and Claire. If you suggest such a thing anywhere it will be the end of our beautiful friendship . . . For Christ's sake lay off the idea of Bob=Claire . . . Just shut up about Laycock, Fuck You, E Waugh.' In his diary, he wrote: 'I replied that if she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact it will be the end of our friendship.'

The term 'cruel fact' does not exactly dispel the suspicion. And even if the character of Ivor Claire represents not an individual, but Waugh's sense that his myth of their gallant company had been betrayed from the start, he and Laycock were the only officers from the original band in 8 Commando who went to Crete. In
Officers and Gentlemen,
Waugh saves Tommy Backhouse (the character bearing the closest resemblance to Laycock) from the moral mess by making him fall down a ship's companionway on the voyage to Crete. Waugh subsequently claimed that officers had behaved disgracefully in Crete, with many of them taking places in the motor transport and leaving the wounded to walk. The degree of disgrace is, of course, hard to assess. In the almost total disintegration of the retreat there were undoubtedly pathetic and shameful spectacles, but the proportion probably remained small, especially amongst regimental officers. In Layforce, although Colonel Colvin went to pieces, and according to Sergeant Stewart's account a subaltern in his battalion cracked up with 'a severe recurrence of chronic neurasthenia', many more officers appear to have performed well, especially George Young and his adjutant, Michael Borwick of the Greys, and Colvin's second-in-command, Ken Wylie, who in Waugh's own words had 'redeemed the Commandos' honour by leading a vigorous and successful counterattack'. (Both Young and Wylie received the DSO.) Freddie Graham clearly made great efforts for the men and Laycock's leadership during the battle had been admirable. But the passing on of the surrender order and the departure of brigade headquarters raised more than a doubt in Waugh's mind. His cataclysmic view of the debacle on Crete certainly seems to contain a streak of self-loathing.

Out of all of those left behind, the Australians of Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker's battalion, the 2/7th, had the right to feel the most bitter. Assured places on the ships, they had marched down to the beach having maintained the perimeter on 'the top storey' until the last moment. They had the longest and most difficult route in the dark of all the troops due to embark that night. On the way, they were delayed by bolshie stragglers refusing to clear a path and by resentful officers who, pretending to be in charge of movement control, demanded that they identify themselves and their authority. It is curious that the Australians showed none of the ruthless determination of the New Zealanders the night before.

Unaware that over two hundred men from Layforce had slipped in ahead of them, they waited patiently in line on the beach. 'Then came the greatest disappointment of all,' wrote their second-in-command later in prison camp. 'The sound of anchor chains through the hawse.'

Many of the others left behind believed the Navy would return again the next night. They did not realize that surrender was imminent. Some were misled during the night. An embarkation officer on the beach told Jack Smith-Hughes not to worry because 'they're coming back tomorrow'. When Smith-Hughes finally escaped from the island several months later by submarine, he happened to see this major again in a restaurant in Cairo and achieved a measure of satisfaction in expressing what he thought of him.

Some of Walker's Australians would not accept the idea of surrender. When they saw soldiers displaying white flags next morning, they asked him whether they should shoot them. But already orders were being shouted from the beach for all troops to remove magazines and bolts from their rifles. The men were told that there would be no further evacuation and were advised to display as much white cloth as possible. Most wandered off in search of food and water. A group of Australians killed a donkey, and began to roast hunks of meat on the fire.

George Young refused his adjutant's offer to accompany him on the surrender. He told Borwick to tell the men. But when Borwick assembled them, his voice broke, he was so close to tears. 'It's all right, sir,' a corporal said, putting a hand on his arm. 'We know it's not your fault.' Young set off alone in search of a German officer to whom he could offer the surrender. Instead, he encountered Colonel Walker and, discovering him to be senior, handed over the order addressed in Laycock's correction to

'Senior officer left on the island'. Walker followed the track up to the village of Komithades and found an Austrian officer of the 100th Mountain Regiment there.

'What are you doing here, Australia?' the Austrian said in English.

'One might ask what are you doing here, Austria?' Walker replied.

'We are all Germans,' he said.

After the surrender had taken place, many of those left climbed back up the hill from the beach.

'There', Myles Hildyard of the Sherwood Rangers recorded in his diary, 'they proceeded to cook the little food they had, and they were sitting around doing this, thinking themselves prisoners and perfectly safe, when German planes came over and machine-gunned them. One of our men was killed outright. The wounded were in a little church, and among them was our sergeant-major Fountain with twelve bullets in him. We heard later that he died. Three Germans who ran out shouting and waving to the planes to clear off were also killed.'

Before the mountain troops began rounding up their captives, commando officers warned their men to get rid of their 'fannies' (a knuckle-duster cum knife which had become the emblem of the Middle East Commandos) in case the Germans felt like executing members of special forces. Most were thrown down a well.

For the Spanish Republicans, the prospect of capture was especially grim. The Germans would almost certainly return them to Franco's Spain where they would be shot like all the other Republicans they had handed over, from militiamen to former ministers in the Popular Front government.

Fortunately, the battalion medical officer, Captain Cochrane, who had served in Spain with the International Brigades, had the idea that they should pretend to be Gibraltarians when interrogated.

Some soldiers, horrified by the prospect of imprisonment, tried to escape inland up the gorges.

Several died in the attempt. Years later, the skeleton of a soldier who had attempted to scale a cliff was discovered in an inaccessible spot by one of the most famous guerrillas of the resistance, Manoli Paterakis, when illegally hunting an ibex. Others, with equally desperate courage but more success, set off across the Libyan Sea in unsuitable boats. A landing craft moored inside a grotto all day after the surrender left soon after dark with sixty-three men on board. Mountain troops opened fire from the escarpment but missed.