Love's Obsession (9 page)

The Cyprus Regiment was an odd beast, a hybrid born of a marriage between uneasy partners, and it is wonderfully ironic that one section of the regiment was a mule pack-transport company. As an English colony, Cyprus was drawn into the war, although the island itself was never attacked. The natural tendency for many Greek and Turkish Cypriots, however, was allegiance not to Britain, but to Greece or Turkey, countries with opposing attitudes to the war. Fascist Italy had invaded Greece in October 1940 but Turkey remained neutral until the last throes of the war. Some volunteers undoubtedly supported Britain's battle with the Nazis, but pay and health benefits were equally important incentives. The English authorities carefully vetted applicants; those with criminal or political backgrounds were rejected. Communists and nationalists were the least desirable, although after the invasion of Russia large numbers of Communists did enlist. Even so, a lot of applicants were rejected. By the beginning of 1941, over 15,000 men had been interviewed and only 6000 accepted. It does not say much for the standard of English administration that, after sixty years of English rule, 4000 men who applied for enlistment failed on medical grounds. After March 1941, authorities relaxed standards and recruits were accepted even if they had committed one theft or one ‘unnatural offence', which included wounding, malicious injury, murder or attempted murder, rape, up to six convictions for drunkenness and three for gambling. It was a rag-tag band of men who served in the Cyprus Regiment.

The number of recruits in the regiment mirrored the ethnic balance on the island: four-fifths of all recruits were Greek Cypriot and one-fifth Turkish Cypriot, with Britain ensuring that the ratio was maintained. Although the commanding officer and most other officers were British, commissions were granted to Cypriots over time, although the vetting of Cypriot officers was even more rigorous than for other ranks and the final decision remained the governor's. Detailed reports on political affiliations, particularly communist or union associations were compiled by the British authorities: ‘due to his influence a lot of trouble took place at the mines'; ‘he is a member of AKEL
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but I do not think that need be held against him'. Also personal characteristics were noted: ‘[he] is unfortunately married to a woman who was formerly a common prostitute.
'
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The comments reflect the paranoia of an English administration uneasily governing a population grown weary, often downright outraged, with colonial rule.

Jim's opinion of the regiment was more sanguine. After the war he argued that any blame for the regiment's activities should rest with their officers. Commissions were, he argued, often granted to men from Greece or elsewhere, a ‘mercenary' class only attracted by higher pay and prestige.

There was thus introduced an element which had no vested interest in Cyprus and the Cypriots, and no prior acquaintance with the island and its people … The majority of British N.C.Os attached to the Regiment were rejects from line battalions [and] … if unsuited for their rank in British units, they were doubly unsuited for what could only be a more difficult task.
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While he acknowledged that the rank and file were also attracted by money and ‘volunteered for the high pay or because their own employment—especially mining—had been obliterated by the war', Jim did not hold this against them. These men may have had little incentive beyond personal gain, but in the absence of ‘inspiration from their officers' they should not, he felt, be unfairly criticised.

The Pioneers were stationed in Egypt and Jim joined them at Alexandria. The mood of the men was poor and morale low. After many months in Libya their promised leave in Cyprus had evaporated, and instead they were being sent directly to Greece. Jim was appalled that so many regimental officers remained in Cairo or manoeuvred for ‘safe jobs' in the Sudan or Somaliland, although much of this bitterness reflects his experience of events that followed.

Italy invaded Greece in October 1940 and ‘few military campaigns have been undertaken so carelessly'.
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Sloppy military actions were not, however, exclusive to the Italians and the Allied campaigns in Greece proved disastrous.

Britain's support for Greece was born partly of sentiment and partly of strategy. The code breakers of Bletchley Park warned Churchill about German military movements to the north of Greece, as Hitler moved to protect German oil supplies in Romania. Churchill attached a British Military Mission to the Greek Army, but Major-General T.G. Heywood, whose reputation was built on his failure to recognise the defects in the French armies, now refused to see any weakness in the Greek defence. The Byzantine nature of Greek politics did not help. Although the right wing Greek dictator Metaxas famously said ‘No' or ‘Οχι' to the Italians in October 1940, only three months later he was dead of throat cancer. The Greek King George was a political actor and Royalists, Venezelists,
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Fascists, and Communists would all play out their animosities over the next few years, while divided resistance organisations, an alphabet soup of acronyms—EDES, EAM, ELAS, EKKA—waged war against the invaders and each other. Ordinary Greek soldiers, on the other hand, fought with determination and courage. In November they defeated the Italian 9th Army in fighting as fierce as that year's winter in the mountains of northern Greece.

In Egypt, General Wavell was preoccupied with Rommel's movements in North Africa and thought Greece an unwelcome distraction. But Churchill's promise to the Greeks must be honoured. Together with thousands of other troops, mostly from the Dominions of New Zealand and Australia, Jim embarked ‘for an unknown destination' on 5 March 1941. A month later on 6 April, Germany invaded. Greece would be the only country in Europe to fight both Axis powers on its own territory.

For nearly two months Jim served in Greece. In Thessaly he found time to collect pottery sherds at Volos and Pherae, which he deposited at the British School at Athens.
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In Athens he caught up with archaeological colleagues—Young who had dug at Curium on Cyprus, his old lecturer Alan Wace, Monty Woodhouse and others. Wace had returned to Greece in 1939 to resume excavations at Mycenae and to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. With war looming, he had helped to safely store material from the National Museum and ostensibly joined the British legation, although he was probably, even at this stage, working for MI6.
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Monty Woodhouse, younger than Jim and a classical scholar, was also attached to the British legation and would end the war as a full colonel. After the fall of Crete, both Wace and Woodhouse worked for Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Egypt.

At the same time that Jim volunteered, a raft of British archaeologists prepared to leave for Greece. As early as 1938, a special department in the War Office sounded out dons and archaeologists with a view to using their linguistic skills should war eventuate. Officials understood that when war spread to the Mediterranean, language skills would be vital and they hoped that ancient Greek might be a short cut to the modern language. And so it proved. The archaeologist John Pendlebury, who, together with Jim, had received £50 from the Cambridge Classics Board in 1939 for research, had spent the mid-1930s as curator of Knossos on Crete and was almost more Cretan than the locals. Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge don, and the archaeologist, David Hunt from Magdalen College in Oxford, were both recruited. Hammond, Pendlebury and Hunt flew to Greece as the English expeditionary forces began evacuating Dunkirk. Unable to enter Greece, Hammond and Hunt continued to Egypt, where they joined the Welsh Regiment at Alexandria. All three were to play important roles in the course of the war in Greece.
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Tom Dunbabin, an Australian classicist and two years older than Jim, would end the war as a Lieutenant-Colonel and worked on Crete with SOE. With few linguistic skills and a personality disinclined to follow orders, Jim Stewart was never approached.

As the Germans thrust southwards into Greece, chaos ensued. Allied troops who had assumed they would be marching north were in retreat almost as soon as they landed in Greece. German Panzer units smashed through defences and the Australian and New Zealand divisions pulled back to Thermopylae, the pass held heroically by Athenians during the Persian Wars over two thousand years earlier. The Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis shot himself on 18 April and two days later Allied forces made the decision to retreat. Evacuation plans were ill prepared and sketchy. When the Greek division surrendered at Epirus, Germans skirted Thermopylae and advanced on Athens. The king and his household, complete with English mistress and pet dachshund, flew to Crete, where they installed themselves in the city of Canea, which they declared the new capital of Greece. On 25 April final evacuations took place. In all, twenty-six vessels were sunk during the evacuation and over two thousand troops died. Jim only ever wrote briefly of his Greek experiences:

Most of the Pioneer companies were captured in Greece. Largely through no fault of the Regiment individual units had a very bad time, and were left in the lurch by the Area HQs … The wreckage of two companies and one more or less intact company got away to Crete, with the rest of a rather dazed ‘Lustre Force', and were incorporated into ‘Crete Force', but only after an appalling experience of sea-evacuation. It was a miracle that any degree of organization or discipline was maintained, but in both the standard was not lower than that of other units from Greece, and was rather better than that of some British units.
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Later Jim itemised the personal possessions he had lost in Greece and Crete, including a kitbag, pullover, leather gloves, heavy boots, rubber shoes, wash stand, army blankets and two pairs of silk pyjamas.
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Over twenty-five thousand exhausted and traumatised soldiers arrived on Crete in the course of a week. They dispersed along the coastal strip from Heraklion west to Canea, camping in olive groves and living off the land. Cretans offered bread and food but it was the local wine—
krassi
—for which most troops hankered. Locals were shocked at the amount of wine the men drank, especially the Australian and New Zealand troops. The New Zealand commander, General Freyburg, arrived on 19 April and Churchill gave him command of Creforce, making him the seventh commander of British forces on Crete since their arrival in November the year before.

Freyburg was briefed by Wavell. Their intelligence came from Bletchley Park's code breakers but its import was misunderstood.
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Intercepts from the German command indicated that an invasion of Crete was planned for 17 May and would come by air and by sea. Freyburg got it wrong. The Germans planned a paratroop invasion, with wave after wave of parachutes raining from the skies. It was the first and only invasion of its kind and it should have failed. But Freyburg's failure to understand the intercepted intelligence and his delay in protecting airfields turned possible victory into certain defeat. Jack Hamson, sent to Crete and working closely with John Pendlebury later put it bluntly, his disillusionment and disgust honed by years as a prisoner of war:

The battle of Crete was lost because Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Freyberg (as he now is—he got his knighthood for Crete) V.C., D.S.O. and the rest, was a fool, a blind fool and a vain one. Predominantly a fool, relying on the blindness of fools … the battle of Crete was lost before the battle was joined.
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Troops were thinly strung out along the northwest coast of Crete. The New Zealand Division was sent to guard the coast between Canea and the Maleme airbase to the west and to await the invasion. Jim's No. 6 company was stationed at Galatas, to the west of Canea. On the first day of the invasion, 20 May, hundreds of parachutes drifted down onto the coastal strip, and waves of German paratroopers landed. Many were bayoneted as they fell, or were simply shot from the sky as they hung from their webbing. Fighting was brutal and at close range. Jim's company took twenty prisoners and killed forty Germans, but the company had little training, only sixty rifles amongst 280 men, and most of the rifles were locked away. Ninety-eight men died within the first few minutes of battle, but Galatas held and the Germans were unable, on that day, to take the Maleme airbase.

By the time the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry arrived, Jim's company was down to 120 men. Twenty more died before the company withdrew and only sixty-eight men remained at the final surrender. ‘A notable point in the final scenes in Crete,' said Jim, ‘was the behaviour of some officers who deserted their companies and secured their own evacuation'.
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This bland recount tells nothing of the horror Jack Hamson later described:

Not of fright or terror or panic, though it may be connected therewith, but of horror more purely. Not the horror of the sight of a disembowelled horse or of a mangled human being—that kind of horror, however shocking is, I suspect, but slight; and we accommodate ourselves thereto without enormous discomfort—but of horror more simple and more absolute.
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Jim stayed with the men of his company. It was a story told and retold and no doubt embellished, but it ensured that Cypriots would love him. Yiannis Cleanthous, who worked for Jim years later, was told the story many times.

A lot of the Cypriots remained up on the mountain with him in Crete … and there were orders from Alamein: ‘anybody that can escape, we need every soldier here.' They sent this message to the officers. So Stewart got them all together. Do you want to see your families again? You have to stay with me. We are doing a better job here than the thousands in the desert … Some of them of course decided to go to the south coast of Crete … they were taken by boats to a ship about a mile out and of course they were watching from the top of the mountain and as soon as the ship went half a mile out it was torpedoed and they were killed. He says to them ‘that's why I didn't want you to go, there is more danger between here and Egypt, than there is up here in these mountains'. So they got to love him because of that.
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