Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (7 page)

Disengagements, when possible, were made by driving through the night. Tiredness, with drivers frequently falling asleep at the wheel during night moves, produced its own form of casualties to both men and vehicles. When the convoy came to a halt, the drivers would fall asleep so soundly that officers behind could only wake them up by firing a revolver past the cab window. Even those who stayed awake might wonder if they were dreaming, so strange were some of the sights during the retreat. A Belgrade playboy in co-respondent shoes accompanied by his mistress in an open Buick two-seater incongruously appeared in the military traffic jam. And one night, an officer of the British Military Mission saw by moonlight a squadron of Serbian lancers in long cloaks pass like ghosts of the defeated in wars long past.

Routes became clogged by broken-down vehicles, carts, horse-drawn artillery and the weary, trudging remnants of the Greek army from Macedonia. Bomb craters had to be filled in and obstructions pushed or winched off the side of the road. For one unit, a stretch of twenty-three miles took nine hours.

General Wilson realized that, with the bulk of the Greek army cut off in Albania — due to what he called 'the fetishistic doctrine that not a yard of ground should be yielded to the Italians' — all hope of holding the Germans north of Larissa had gone. Signals intelligence warned of the threat of encirclement from the west. Wilson therefore gave orders to fall all the way back to the Thermopylae line. Larissa itself was a dangerous bottleneck: already ruined by an earthquake at the beginning of the winter, it had been crushed anew by the Luftwaffe. Disengagement was difficult, particularly with the German threat to the left flank, but the real danger came on the right near Mount Olympus. The 5th New Zealand Brigade managed to hold the Vale of Tempe, the River Pinios gorge which led to Larissa, for three days against heavy attacks by the 2nd Panzer Division and the 6th Mountain Division.

Commanded by General Blarney, who was greatly liked by British officers, the newly named Anzac Corps — the 6th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division — pulled back to the line at Thermopylae. Through a disastrous oversight, a large supply dump at Larissa fell intact into the hands of the German mountain troops, giving the enemy the means to continue the advance without pause.

Determined attacks by German panzer units, and the warning from signals intelligence of a German flanking movement down the Adriatic coast and along the Gulf of Corinth, soon made the Thermopylae position untenable. On 18 April, the Prime Minister, Alexandros Koryzis, shot himself.

Nobody in Athens believed the story of 'heart-failure'. Wavell flew in the following morning — his staff officers had been told to bring revolvers this time because of the uncertainty of the situation —

and at another round of meetings at the Tatoi Palace, the decision to evacuate British and Dominion forces was made on 20 April.

The King had invited to this meeting General Mazarakis, a leader of the republican opposition. He wanted him to join the government, whose direction he had personally assumed after Koryzis's death.

But the republicans refused to have any part in it if the hated Maniadakis remained in office. General Wilson successfully resisted their demand, arguing that no change in the direction of security matters could be contemplated at such a critical moment. The point is only important because these details were later used by the Communist Party in its contention that the British had supported 'Metaxist collaborators' from the beginning.

The same day, a
coup d'4tat
took place within the Army of Epirus, an act partly prompted by a perverse streak of vanity. General Tsolacoglou, the new, self-appointed commander, wanted to negotiate terms with the SS commander General Sepp Dietrich, and not with the despised Italians.

'On the Führer's birthday,' recorded the Waffen SS divisional staff, 'at about 1600 hours, two Greek officers with white flags approached our front line.'* But Tsolacoglou failed to achieve his objective.

Mussolini was outraged to hear of such manoeuvres which flouted the Axis understanding that Greece belonged to the Italian sphere of influence. Although Hitler sympathized both with Sepp Dietrich and his army commander, Field Marshal List, an argument over protocol did not merit a breach with his ally. The terms accorded to Tsolacoglou were cancelled and the Italian General Ferrero was allowed to take the formal surrender alongside General Jodl two days later.

* Thanks to an Ultra intercept (OL 2128) — 'Commander of unidentified Greek Army believed ready to capitulate' — the British were forewarned.

Jumbo Wilson, one of the few senior British officials to regard'the Metaxist regime as truly Fascist, suspected 'fifth-column work' by 'certain individuals in Athens who had been highly placed in the late Government': there had indeed been a series of feelers put out towards the Germans since a month before the invasion. But Wilson, even less politically sophisticated than most officers of his generation, failed to see this irony in the light of his opposition to Maniadakis's removal.

For RAF squadrons, the retreat was depressingly reminiscent of the fall of France. Often the ground-crews had hardly finished pitching tents when orders — or counter-orders — came through to pull back to yet another improvised landing ground. Due to lack of spare parts, aircraft had to be cannibalized ruthlessly in their task of 'patching and dispatching', and several times a day they would be harried by Messerschmitt 109s and the twin-engined 110s on strafing missions. For anti-aircraft defence, there was only the odd Lewis gun mounted on what looked like an exceptionally tall music-stand. In most cases, ground-crews had nothing but rifles. At Eleusis aerodrome, between Athens and the isthmus of Corinth, three 'erks', as aircraftmen were known, managed to down a Messerschmitt 109, but that was a fluke. And later at Argos, Air Commodore Grigson was seen

'standing in the centre of the field with rifle to shoulder. An aircraftman loaded for him, and they stood there as calmly as if they were on the grouse moors.'

The last major air battle took place on 20 April, Easter Day in the Greek calendar, when fifteen fighters — all that remained of the three Hurricane squadrons — took on over 120 German aircraft above Athens and Piraeus. Between them, pilots such as 'Timber' Woods, 'Dixie' Dean and 'Scruffy'

Dowding — shot down twenty-two enemy machines for the loss of ten of their own. In Athens, once the sirens fell silent, there was a curious air of normality. Optimistic rumours circulated that the Thermopylae line would hold. On the evening of 21 April, Theodore Stephanides, an Anglo-Greek doctor serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps — also a writer and friend of Lawrence Durrell from Corfu — had dropped in at the Officers' Club, just opposite the Hotel Grande Bretagne, then dined at Costi's restaurant with hardly a care in the world. Next morning, the order for evacuation was given.

The news came as a shock. Stephanides was not alone in assuming that a stand would be made in the Peloponnese. Yet the British civilian community in Greece had few illusions. A crowd of them had virtually tried to storm the Legation gates as early as 17 April, demanding to know the plans for their evacuation. According to the correspondent Clare Hollingworth, it was 'not an impressive sight'.

Over the next two days W Force withdrew, screened by a strong rearguard. Under cover of dive-bombing attacks, the German armour made probing attacks on the Thermopylae road. The 5 th New Zealand Artillery and the Northumberland Hussars between them knocked out sixteen tanks on 24 April. Only their well-sited positions saved them from the full effect of the Germans' skilful combination of synchronized air and ground attack.

That night the rearguard pulled out. They reached Athens the next morning 'having driven with the devil at their heels'. The last defensive position of the anti-tank guns was next to the house of the First Secretary at the American Embassy. He offered the officers drinks on his veranda, but said he could not invite them inside without compromising United States neutrality. Soon afterwards, a senior police officer from Athens arrived to ask the detachment to move on since resistance so close to the capital might provoke German reprisals. They immobilized their guns near the Palace at Tatoi, removing breech-blocks and sights, then followed on to the evacuation points.

Once again, touched and embarrassed by the embraces, flowers and gifts of wine from those they were abandoning, the departing troops were cheered on their way: 'Come back with good fortune!

Return with victory!'

5

Across the Aegean

For the British and Dominion forces, the need to escape before the Germans arrived produced a form of waking anxiety-dream: a school-corridor fear of being late combined with a child's fear of being left behind. At the camp at Kokinia, outside Athens, 'lorries were being hurriedly packed, stores and equipment were flung about anyhow, officers' valises and suitcases were lying open with their contents scattered around as if the owners had made a hasty choice of their more valuable belongings at the last moment'.

The surrender of the Army of Epirus allowed the Germans to push round the Thermopylae line from the Adriatic coast, and advance on Athens along the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. To protect the Peloponnese, General Wilson moved two squadrons of the 4th Hussars to Patras to oppose any attempt to land on the southern shore. And to delay the enemy's right hook on Athens, he sent Yak Mission to block the road along the north side of the Gulf between Naupaktos and Missolonghi. By then Fleming's band had run out of explosive, so they had to fetch some 5001b. bombs from a dump just across the isthmus at Corinth and sail them to their target by caique (the classic fishing or trading schooner of the region with an engine added in case the wind failed). This improvised demolition, although not wholly successful, was enough to slow the German advance from that direction while the evacuation proceeded apace.

The main harbour of Piraeus was filled with blackened wrecks, and the houses along the waterfront were little more than burnt-out shells. Only the surrounding docks were fully serviceable. Early in the evening of 22 April, about forty German prisoners, mainly Luftwaffe pilots, were marched on board the SS
Elsi
and put in the hold. The Australian soldiers, who guarded them from above, had grenades ready to lob down if there was trouble. Amongst the civilian passengers, Professor C.R. Burns of the British Council and his wife welcomed the presence of the enemy in their midst. So certain were they of the fifth column's efficacy in Athens that they believed Goering would know immediately and give orders to spare the ship. The
Elsi
crossed the Aegean, and everyone disembarked safely at Suda Bay before the Luftwaffe sank her there on 29 April; so their faith was not confounded.

The same day, most of the Royal Household — not forgetting Otto, the royal dachshund — boarded a Sunderland flying-boat at Phaleron. The ship on which they had been due to leave the previous day had been sunk at its moorings. The party included Crown Princess Frederica, her two children, Constantine, who later lost the throne of Greece, and Sophia, the present Queen of Spain, together with their Scottish nanny. King George's mistress, the admirable Mrs Britten-Jones, was designated lady-in-waiting to the Crown Princess Frederica.

Joyce Britten-Jones was one of the very few royal mistresses in history for whom no one seems to have had anything but praise. Harold Caccia described her as the very best sort of Army wife, thoroughly sensible, never involving herself in intrigue and excellent in a crisis. Her husband, a captain in the Black Watch who drank too much, had been ADC to the Viceroy when the King of the Hellenes visited India not long before his restoration to the throne. A close relationship had soon developed, and in 1936 Mrs Britten-Jones had rather appropriately acted as the King's hostess when entertaining Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson during their summer cruise on the
Nahlin.

Joyce Britten-Jones's steadying effect on King George had prompted Eden to demand in March that her air passage from London to Greece, via Cairo, should be facilitated in every way. But the attempt to keep her journey secret had foundered on her arrival at Heliopolis aerodrome, when General de Gaulle, arriving on the same aeroplane, had insisted that she should precede him, just as the band struck up with the Marseillaise. Sir Miles Lampson, the proconsular British Ambassador to Egypt, entertained her discreetly. By chance, he had known her father-in-law, 'Jerky' Jones, the manager of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Yokohama. Finally, she had reached Athens at the beginning of April, only a few days before the German invasion of Greece.

Crown Prince Paul ('Palo') watched the flying-boat containing his family take off from Phaleron. He left for Crete the next day, with his brother the King on another Sunderland accompanied by Emmanuel Tsouderos, the Prime Minister, Sir Michael Palairet and Colonel Blunt, the Military Attache.

The British Legation and the Hotel Grande Bretagne reeked of burnt paper — that unmistakable smell of retreat — as diplomats and staff officers hurriedly destroyed documents.* Officers of W Force later complained that the only records brought out of Greece had been their mess bills. But the 1st Armoured Brigade's signal squadron, based alongside the Palace of Tatoi, made up for this disadvantage. The royal chamberlain telephoned the King in Crete to ask for instructions, and was told to distribute wine from the cellars, two bottles for each officer and one for each soldier.

* Ultra signal OL 2142 of 22 April ordered: 'take greatest care to burn all deciphered material this series. Vital security our source.'

The evacuation date for most of the Military Mission and headquarters staff still in Athens was 24

April. The chief intelligence officer of British Air Forces Greece, Wing Commander Lord Forbes, accompanied by David Hunt, waited at the aerodrome in the early hours of the morning. He had been asked by the Greeks to fly one of their Avro Ansons on to Crete. Forbes waited his turn to take off at dawn, but an unusually early Luftwaffe strike forced them to throw themselves into a slit trench, from where they watched the destruction of their aircraft.