Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (6 page)

Preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the projected invasion of Russia, were set aside as a total of twenty-nine divisions and nearly 2,000 aircraft were designated for the Balkan campaign. This double assault, an exercise in conspicuous over-kill, would come under the direction of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch in Wiener Neustadt south of Vienna. In the event many of these formations were not needed, and one division never even knew it had formed part of the order of battle.

The sudden turn of events in Belgrade in fact suited the Germans. The conquest of Jugoslavia would make the conquest of Greece much easier. And for Hitler's peace of mind, the subjection of the

'southern Slavs' would prevent any alliance with their Russian kinsmen after the launch of Operation Barbarossa.

But the show of Jugoslav defiance, followed by the Royal Navy's successful fleet action against an Italian naval force south-west of Cape Matapan (the centre claw of the Peloponnese), led the British into a rush of false optimism. Churchill became quite carried away.

He cabled to the Australian government: 'Thursday's events in Belgrade show the far-reaching effects of this and other measures we have taken on whole Balkan situation. German plans have been upset, and we may cherish renewed hopes of forming a Balkan front with Turkey, comprising about seventy Allied divisions from the four Powers concerned.' His immoderate optimism was harshly exposed just over a week later.

Shortly before dawn on 6 April, the most devastating phase of the Balkan war began with the simultaneous invasion of Jugoslavia and Greece. The people of Belgrade paid for their foolhardy courage of ten days before. Several thousand died (estimates vary between three and seventeen thousand) when the city was pounded to rubble by relentless bombing, and the Jugoslav army's communication system collapsed. Later the same night, German raiders bombed the harbour of Piraeus and hit the
Clan Fräser.
Not knowing the nature of its cargo, Geoffrey Household and his sergeant major of field security went on board to inspect the blaze. They left just in time. Full of munitions, the ship exploded in the early hours, destroying most of the main harbour and sinking eleven other vessels. The effect on morale was considerable.

General Papagos's obsessive belief in a joint Greek—Jugoslav operation against the Italians in Albania proved to have been no more than a pipe-dream. The Jugoslav armed forces on which Papagos's plan had depended were found to be lamentably unprepared. Their army, almost a million strong, foolishly stretched round an immense length of frontier, managed to kill only 151 Germans in the whole campaign. Colonel Blunt's warning that the Jugoslavs would need at least a month to mobilize had been ignored amidst the official enthusiasm for the Balkan pact.

The Greek divisions on the Metaxas line, which ran along the River Nestos in the east then along the Bulgarian border as far as Jugoslavia, fought with great tenacity. Its forts were much less restrictive than the Maginot line, enabling its garrisons to sally forth unexpectedly. The German 5th Mountain Division, which later formed half the invasion force for Crete, was 'repulsed in [the] Rupel Pass despite strongest air support and sustained considerable casualties'. But the line was broken by the 6th Mountain Division: it managed to cross a snow-covered range over 2,000 metres high which the Greeks had considered impassable. One garrison fought so bravely that the Germans allowed the defenders to march out with their weapons and saluted them.

The German 2nd Panzer Division captured Salonika on 9 April and the Greek Second Army east of the River Vardar surrendered. Yet an even greater threat to the country's heartland was exposed by the Jugoslav collapse. In less than three days, the invasion route to Greece through the Monastir Gap lay open. This exposed the left flank of the Aliakmon line and the right rear of the Greek army in Albania.

General Papagos later described this disaster as the development of 'an adverse situation', and tried to lay the blame on faulty intelligence from the Jugoslavs and from the British.

W Force's most exposed formation was the 1st Armoured Brigade, which consisted of the light tanks of the 4th Hussars; the Matildas of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment; the 2nd Royal Horse Artillery with twenty-five pounders; the Northumberland Hussars, an anti-tank regiment; and the 1st Battalion of the Rangers, confusingly also known as the 9th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. From disembarkation, most of their vehicles had already covered nearly five hundred miles of bad roads to their positions between the snow-covered mass of Mount Olympus and the Jugoslav mountains. The tanks, already dilapidated and with a high track mileage, were taken by railway on flats as far as the junction at Amynteon. Centred initially on Edessa, less than thirty kilometres as the crow flies from the border, the brigade faced north-east, towards the Axios valley which led down from Jugoslavia to Salonika.

The bulk of W Force consisted of the New Zealand Division under Freyberg on the right between the sea and the Mount Olympus range, and Blarney's Australian Corps, now only a division strong at the hinge of the line south of Servia, just across the mountains from the New Zealanders. But a threat from the north through the Monastir Gap was considered so potentially disastrous that General Wilson, always dubious of Papagos's reliance on the 'Jugs', formed a composite formation under the Australian divisional commander, General Iven Mackay. Mackay Force, with two Australian battalions and part of the 1st Armoured Brigade, was pushed forward to form a line just south of Vevi to cover the exit from the Monastir Gap. The Australians especially, newly arrived from North Africa, suffered badly from the cold in their defensive positions above the snowline.

The absence of news from Jugoslavia was unsettling. Then confirmation of the German capture of Skopje arrived on the afternoon of 8 March. One commanding officer ordered to pull back rapidly to new positions felt tempted to ask, 'Facing which way?' German divisions would soon be advancing from the north and from the east. The heroic Greek defence of the Metaxas line had only slowed the German advance for a few days.

The other formations in W Force also had to adjust their positions. The New Zealand Division received orders to fall back from the coastal strip below the Aliakmon river to defend the Servia Pass, the Olympus Pass and the Vale of Tempe. Meanwhile to their north the Australian 16th Brigade manned the Veria Pass. W Force's weakest link was inevitably its connection with the Greek Central Macedonian Army, the right wing of the Greek forces on the Albanian front. Liaison and communications between British and Greek headquarters were not good enough to keep each other abreast of events. And when the German XL Panzer Corps began its rapid probes from the north, the Greek army's lack of motor transport prevented its divisions from retreating as rapidly as their allies.

Peter Fleming and Yak Mission on the Jugoslav frontier realized there was no time to accomplish their task of forming and training stay-behind groups. Deciding that withdrawal was better than a suicidal gesture on their own, they opted to become a free-lance demolition team at the service of any commander they encountered.

Starting with Mackay Force, the members of Yak Mission tackled a major bridge on the Fiorina road.

This they followed with the marshalling yard at Amynteon, where they destroyed twenty locomotives.

Driving trains and blowing them up — causing what Fleming later called 'havoc of a spectacular and enjoyable kind' — became their speciality on the retreat south from Macedonia.

Dick Hobson, the brigade major of the 1st Armoured Brigade, took little pleasure in such tasks. 'I must say as I sat in front of the wireless about to give the order for the demolitions I remember reflecting what a foul thing I was about to perpetrate. The Greeks had been wonderfully kind to us, and here we were about to lay waste their countryside and ruin their livelihood; and to run away apparently without a fight.' By chance, Hobson saw Fleming arrive at brigade headquarters near Ptolemais three days later: 'Who should turn up but Peter Fleming, immaculately dressed as a Captain in the Grenadier Guards straight out of Wellington Barracks, complete with walking stick and seemingly unmindful of what was going on.' (It should be said that Hobson greatly liked and admired Peter Fleming. One day shooting in England, he asked why Fleming was wearing hunting boots. 'I have to,' he replied. 'I broke my leg yesterday.')

On 11 April, a cold clear day, the first main engagement for the Australians and the 1st Armoured Brigade took place in the area south of Vevi. Gerry de Winton, who commanded the signals squadron, remembered the valley scene in the evening light as 'just like a picture by Lady Butler, with the sun going down on the left, the Germans attacking from the front, and on the right the gunners drawn up in position with their limbers'. However spectacular the scene, the resistance appears to have been effective. Ultra intercept OL 2042 reported, 'Near Vevi Schutzstaffel Adolf Hitler meeting violent resistance.'

In spite of bad communications, a change in the weather to freezing rain and flurries of snow brought in by the north-west wind known as the Vardar, W Force's withdrawal in the face of superior forces managed to evade enemy attempts at encirclement. These successes had little to do with brilliant intuition on the part of Jumbo Wilson, who hardly merited the description of a 'thinking general'.

Hut 3 at Bletchley Park, only established at the beginning of the year, was already providing decrypts of German radio traffic with remarkable speed, mainly thanks to the laxity of Luftwaffe radio procedure. This signals intelligence was never sufficiently immediate to lay elaborate traps for the advancing enemy — W Force in any case lacked the command and control, training and equipment to make the most of such opportunities — but it certainly helped save the British and Dominion forces from disaster. Security regulations surrounding Ultra material prevented the British from sharing this information with the Greeks, but since their army on the Albanian front was pitifully short of transport, it probably made little difference. Papagos did not begin the withdrawal across the Pindus mountains until 13 April. As a result the Germans managed to force an armoured wedge between W

Force and his right-hand divisions which soon led to their encirclement.

The enemy spear-point on the Monastir front, including the Adolf Hitler Liebstandarten, never slackened in attack, but the crudity of German armoured tactics revealed how little resistance they had come to expect. In the passes between the Vernion and Vermon mountain ranges, the guns of the 1st Armoured Brigade, including the 2nd Royal Horse Artillery's twenty-five pounders fired over open sights, inflicted heavy losses on a number of occasions, but the worn-out M.10 cruisers of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment were breaking down. Tracks designed for the desert came off regularly and spare parts generally were in depressingly short supply. With little time for anything except the simplest repair, mechanical casualties had to be abandoned at the side of the road and set on fire.

An effective holding action was fought just south of Ptolomais, where a troop of the Northumberland Hussars, with anti-tank guns mounted on the back of their portee lorries, knocked out eight panzers in

'quite a nice bit of shooting'. Nearby, a mixed force of New Zealand machine-gunners, a troop of the 3rd Tanks and a battery of the 2nd Royal Horse Artillery opened up. The weight of fire convinced the enemy that they were facing a whole armoured division. But this was a rare success. A leap-frog retreat from gorge to mountain pass developed. Sometimes German bombing blasted the road from the shale-covered hillside. Gerry de Winton remembered 'a hole twenty yards long in a hillside road which the command vehicle crew filled with dead mules rivetted with castaway Greek rifles.'

In retreat, rumours spread even more feverishly. Most were desperate attempts at optimism: a Canadian division had landed at Salonika to take the Germans in the rear, several hundred Spitfires had miraculously arrived. The Greeks were far more fatalistic, and also generous. British troops, touched and embarrassed, found themselves feted by Greek villagers each time they pulled out. The commanding officer of one regiment was held up when the priest insisted on blessing his staff car with holy water.

Greek feelings towards the enemy were often demonstrated in a less pacific manner. Gerry de Winton, on seeing a German pilot bale out from his aircraft and parachute into a copse just outside a village, went forward to take him prisoner. A group of civilian mechanics barred his way. 'You stay out,' they told him, brandishing heavy spanners. 'We'll settle this.'

Air attacks, few in number at first, had stepped up once the rain and snow cleared. Mark Norman of Yak Mission remembered how the clarity of the sky could produce a curious optical effect. Spotting a Stuka poised to dive, he had hurled himself from their truck into the roadside ditch. Glancing back at their attacker, he saw it flap its wings. In that brilliant light 'a hawk at two hundred feet looked just like a Stuka at two thousand'.

The other bird to cause confusion was the stork. Alighting in great numbers in the course of their northern migration, they provoked wild reports of parachute landings. Other birds caused only pleasure. A member of the rearguard described listening to nightingales in a wood near Atlante until two in the morning. He and his troop of anti-tank guns were waiting for part of the Australian Division to pull back through their positions. They discovered at dawn that the unit in question had left long before, and they were in danger of being cut off. British officers in Greece had a low opinion of this particular Australian formation: one remarked that Their great battle-cry in Greece was "We're getting out!" ' Others observed that they had suffered most from the cold in the mountains, and added that even if they pulled out suddenly, they were just as likely to turn back again and fight.

Air attacks became frequent after the first week, once Luftwaffe air groups began to operate from advanced fields near Salonika. Few British fighters were seen opposing them. New Zealanders began to say that the initials RAF stood for Rare As Fairies. (Only 80 of their 152 aircraft were serviceable when the Germans attacked.) General Wilson noted that his men were becoming 'bomb-happy' and would abandon their vehicles at the appearance of any sort of aircraft in the distance. Yet strafing and bombing attacks on convoys were, in the eyes of British officers, astonishingly light, considering the targets presented during the often agonizingly slow withdrawal. 'Well,' said Brigadier Rollie Charrington, observing the ten-mile-long military traffic jam from a mountain pass, 'if the Boche starts bombing, that's the end of our brigade.' But most of the 1st Armoured Brigade's cruiser tanks succumbed instead to mechanical failure and were abandoned on the way.