Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (9 page)

During the course of the day, the
Julia
was bombed five times without receiving any direct hits.

Seaweed was blasted up on to the deck, and the crew, determined to make the most of their troubles, netted up some fish killed by the shock-waves. After sheltering in a little cove off the island of Cythera throughout the next day, they finally reached Crete on the morning of 25 April, and sailed into the immense natural harbour of Suda Bay.

The
Julia
had indeed been lucky. In all, twenty-six vessels were sunk including two hospital ships, and over two thousand lost their lives. Virtually all the civilian refugees and wounded Greek soldiers on the ferry
Hellas
were burnt to death. For those who dropped the bombs, the horror below remained distant, if not abstract. 'A sunny day,' recorded the pilot of a Junkers 88 on 25 April, 'and we were sent to look for ships embarking British troops in the Athens, Corinth and Nauplia areas.' He tried to identify Mycenae. 'I told my crew that we were passing over a territory which had seen at least 3,000

years of Greek history . . . The villages and the little towns looked like a playground of white dots.'

Over Nauplia harbour, 'everything looked peaceful and untouched. But there was something which made my heart beat faster'. A passenger liner at anchor — a 'fascinating sight' — offered 'a unique target'. The bomb-aimer prepared as the aircraft banked, then dived. The pilot lifted the aircraft's nose at the crucial moment and pushed the red button. The radio-operator and the gunner, craning their heads, spotted the explosions. 'We've hit her! Two full hits, two bombs near misses. Water cascades and high flames. What did I feel? Relief after maximal tension, pride that a junior crew had been successful. Sorrow, that a beautiful ship was gone. Satisfaction that she would no longer transport British Forces, and that was all that counted on this day.'

The worst disaster of the evacuation also began at Nauplia. A Dutch merchantman, the
Slamat,
continued to take on troops until four in the morning in spite of warnings that she would never clear the Antikithera channel by daybreak. Caught by dive-bombers at seven o'clock and badly damaged, she sent out distress signals. The destroyer HMS
Diamond
went to her rescue and picked up survivors.

But
Diamond
was sunk, so HMS
Wryneck
went to help and was also sunk. Altogether 700 men were lost from the three ships. Fifty survived, including some wounded sailors from the
Wryneck
whose whaler was rescued by Nick Hammond's group.

Hammond, Pirie and Nicki had sailed from the yacht harbour of Tourkolimono to the Peloponnese, where one of their two caiques had been sunk by air attack. In the second boat, the one carrying Hammond's plastic explosive and Pirie's stock of German uniforms, they had reached the uninhabited islands of Anana. There, they had found the sailors, and took them on to hospital in Crete.

Leigh Fermor's caique party, having had the
Ayia Varvara
with Jumbo Wilson's kit bombed from under them, bought another. They carried on round the Peloponnese to the island of Antikithera, picking up stragglers on the way including a dozen New Zealanders in an open boat and later ten Australians. The second caique proved a bad buy. The engine failed after leaving Antikithera to cross the channel to Crete, and they had to turn back, improvising desperately. At Antikithera they found the
Amalia,
a three-masted schooner which a Greek infantry officer had taken from a fellow-countryman 'of doubtful loyalties' at pistol-point. They sailed, this time without trouble, to the north-west tip of Crete, where they landed at the old Venetian harbour of Kastelli Kissamou.

Michael Forrester, who set sail at about 8 p.m. on a caique with a mixed cargo of civilians and soldiers from Monemvasia, should have followed a similar course. He awoke in the early hours of the morning with' the sensation that something was wrong. Checking his prismatic compass, he found they were sailing due east. The captain and owner of the caique, whom the beach-master at Monemvasia had recommended as a thoroughly reliable fellow, turned out to be so drunk that his hold on the wheel was all that kept him upright. Forrester called a couple of Australians to help him, and they secured the man safely in the hold. Unable to make more than the roughest guess at how far they had gone in the wrong direction, Forrester turned the ship about and, using his prismatic compass, hoped to reach the island of Kithera.

During daylight, they heard aero-engines. Forrester told all the soldiers to hide below deck or under tarpaulins and asked the women to sit at the front of the boat and wave. A Messerschmitt 110

swooped over the masthead, taking a close look, then banked and turned back as if on a strafing run.

The Greek women never flinched. They waved as hard as they could. The pilot swooped round once more, waved back from his cockpit, then set off after other prey.

The British Legation's steam yacht, the
Kalanthe,
with its distinguished yet very assorted passenger list, had left the Piraeus at dusk on 24 April. Through the night they steamed towards the small archipelago of Milos. There, they sheltered for the next day in the bay of an uninhabited island called Poliaigos, because any ship or small boat on the open sea would soon attract the attention of German aircraft.

The passengers were rowed to the beach where they spent a happy carefree day, with the Blunt and Caccia children playing together so rowdily that Nanny Blunt threatened to give notice. The Greek crew remained on the ship to carry out repairs and keep up steam in case of attack. They were protected by Lewis gun teams from Yak Mission. Eating omelettes from the large supply of eggs purchased that morning and drinking gin and lime on the bridge in nothing but a pair of shorts, Peter Fleming spent almost as pleasant a day as the party on shore. Late in the afternoon, the
Kalanthe
was sighted by three Junkers 88 bombers. Someone sounded the siren to warn those on land, and three gun teams went into action — Mark Norman and Oliver Barstow on either side of the bridge, each with a soldier servant, and Fleming in the stern with a Guardsman.

But the bombers were not deterred by the three Lewis guns blazing at them, and after several near misses, one of them scored a hit amidships. The
Kalanthe
blew up, killing nine of those on board, including Nancy Caccia's brother Oliver Barstow, and wounding six. Mark Norman was severely injured and Peter Fleming concussed. Harold Caccia and Norman Johnstone, the Grenadier subaltern in Yak Mission, rapidly rowed out to the blazing wreck — with munitions exploding in the heat, it was a courageous act — to take off the wounded. Burnt and blackened men were saved by the prompt action of the three women in the party with VAD experience. They tore up their shirts to clean the wounds and burns. For Nancy Caccia, who by then knew for certain that her brother was dead, the urgency of the work at least forced her to concentrate on other things.

Helped by the nearby islanders on Kimolos, and picked up three days later by a caique brought to their rescue from Crete, the party set off again.* But headwinds and the slowness of the caique forced them to make for the volcanic island of Santorini. A minor eruption just after their arrival made them think they were being bombed again. Mark Norman, who was still in great pain from his wounds, later claimed that at Santorini he had been laid on the altar steps of the little church and fed communion wine as a substitute for anaesthetic.

* According to Harold Caccia, the surname of Rodney Bond, their rescuer and a member of the Secret Intelligence Service, was later suggested by Peter Fleming to his brother Ian when he was searching for a name for his fictional secret agent.

Fortunately, at Santorini there lay a small cargo boat which a detachment of military police had commandeered. Twice as fast as the caique, it could reach the coast of Crete in the course of a night.

The following morning at daybreak they saw the snow-capped peak of Mount Ida off the starboard bow and a couple of hours later entered the harbour of Heraklion, the city the Venetians called Candia.

On the quayside, Colonel Jasper Blunt waited for them, having been warned of their arrival. Doreen Blunt's fellow passengers tactfully moved aside, expecting a poignant reunion after all she had been through, but the first thing her husband demanded was what on earth she had done with the key of the piano before leaving Athens.

After the evacuation from the Greek mainland, Churchill signalled to Wavell, 'we have paid our debt of honour with far less loss than I feared.' The loss of men was indeed mercifully lighter than it might have been: 2,000 had been killed or wounded and 14,000 made prisoner out of the 58,000 troops sent to Greece. But the loss in
materiel
was disastrous: 104 tanks, 40 anti-aircraft guns, 192 field guns, 164

anti-tank guns, 1,812 machine guns, about 8,000 transport vehicles, most of the signals equipment, inestimable quantities of stores and 209 aircraft — of which 72 were lost in combat, 55 on the ground and 82 destroyed on evacuation.

Was such a heavy cost worth the salvation of Britain's bad conscience at having let down allies in the past? From a purely military point of view the decision to dispatch an expeditionary force was calamitous.

Metaxas once said to Colonel Blunt: 'Few realise how easy and how dangerous it is to mix sentiment with strategy.' Even the comforting myth that the Balkan campaign delayed the launch of Operation Barbarossa with fatal consequences has at last been laid to rest.* And Churchill's idea that supporting Greece influenced the United States was more wishful thinking than fact, even though Greece's heroic resistance to the Italian invasion had helped sway opinion before the Lend-Lease debate on Capitol Hill.

* Operation Barbarossa was not delayed by the redeployment of formations after Operation Marita, but by the remarkably slow distribution of mechanical transport, much of it captured from the French the year before, to units destined to lead the advance into Russia. The subject is most thoroughly and convincingly covered in Martin Van Creveld's book
Hitler's
Strategy 1940—1941
—
The Balkan Clue.
The Balkan campaign and the subsequent invasion of Crete helped confirm Stalin's false sense of security by giving him the impression that Hitler was aiming for the Suez Canal, not Russia.

Whatever the arguments against sending an expeditionary force, it is hard not to sympathize with Geoffrey Household's verdict. 'I am proud,' he later wrote, 'and I was proud then that we had permitted generosity — whether real or a political gesture to overcome common sense.' Monty Woodhouse, acknowledging the benefit of hindsight, has argued that without British intervention, the Greek government — as opposed to the Greek people — might have given in to the Germans without a fight, and the Communist hegemony over the resistance would have been complete.

For the Cretans, the disaster was more personal. Their division, with sons, husbands and brothers, had been trapped on the Albanian front. General Papasteriou, commanding the division, managed to escape to Crete, but his salvation was short-lived. He was assassinated in Kastelli Kissamou by a sergeant of gendarmerie during a violent protest at his desertion.

The Battle of Crete

6

'A Second Scapa'

For those exhausted evacuees from Greece heading towards Crete, the White Mountains just above the horizon provided a first sight of the island. The vast majority of vessels with troops on board sailed into Suda Bay, a natural harbour eight kilometres long guarded on the north by the rocky hump of a large peninsula, the Akrotiri, and on the south by the great Malaxa escarpment.

At the mouth of the bay stood the ruins of a Venetian castle, but the evacuees' attention was more likely to focus on the hulk of a small steamship, bombed by the Luftwaffe. This was merely a foretaste of the scene within — the funnels and masts of sunken vessels, always one or two ships burning steadily after an air raid, and damaged superstructures on most of the rest. The cruiser HMS

York
lay beached, stern awash, after a daring attack by the Italian navy using six small motor boats loaded with explosive. The quay-front village of Suda, a row of low houses, bombed and abandoned, was not an encouraging sight.

Four battalions of the 2nd New Zealand Division arrived at Suda Bay on 25 April: Anzac Day twenty-six years on. The memory of British planning at Gallipoli could not have been encouraging for Dominion troops. They had come from Porto Rafti on HMS
Glengyle,
a combined operations troopship, and the cruisers
Calcutta
and
Perth.

Activity on the quay had a nervous air since bombers were likely to return at any moment. A British staff officer on a launch came out to their ships yelling instructions that all weapons apart from rifles and sidearms were to be piled on the jetty. Brigadier James Hargest, the commander of the 5 th New Zealand Brigade, knew very well that they would never again see all this equipment which they had brought with such difficulty out of Greece, and refused point-blank. The staff officer screamed back that he was in charge of this base area and insisted on his orders being obeyed. 'I am not surprised', retorted Hargest, 'that you are in charge of a
base
area if this is the way you go on. I tell you my men will retain their weapons.' In spite of Hargest's refusal, a detachment of British Military Police on the jetty still managed to relieve many companies of their heavy weapons. The New Zealanders were not alone. Nearly all units, British and Dominion, disembarking at Suda were greeted with this memorable lesson to soldiers that to care for their weapons during a withdrawal was not worth the effort.

Companies were formed up on the quayside, then marched off, but after starting in 'fairly good order', the attempt at smartness collapsed. Men still exhausted from Greece fell out and took off their boots at the side of the road. Inland towards Canea, away from the harbour area and the smell of burning oil, the troops found trestle tables set up where British troops already on the island doled out bars of chocolate, tea and packets of biscuits.