Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (31 page)

had to be avoided at all costs. 'You're to be put on the next ship back,' Morse told him. The ship turned out to be the
Abdiel,
and one of the first members of Layforce Wilkinson spotted in the light from a burning tanker was George Young.

Evelyn Waugh commented that Young 'was unimpressive in appearance but proved to be a good officer.' Young was indeed a good officer, and D Battalion, an amalgamation of the two Middle East Commandos, was its best unit thanks to his training. Waugh's depiction of the debacle on Crete, both in his diaries and in his novel,
Officers and Gentlemen,
is more vivid than anything else written about those last few days, but the novel in particular must be seen more as a projection of a personal sense of disillusionment than as an objective depiction of events.

His feelings about the commando force which Laycock had raised in Britain the previous year were very mixed. The commando, which he joined at Largs in Scotland, was recruited from the Household Cavalry, the Foot Guards and line cavalry regiments, especially the Royal Scots Greys. Although he loved being with 'the smart set' who 'drink a very great deal, play cards for high figures, dine nightly in Glasgow, and telephone to their trainers endlessly,' he disapproved because they did not take their responsibilities as officers seriously. 'I saw few symptoms of their later decay,' he wrote. 'They had a gaiety and independence which I thought would prove valuable in action.'

Layforce, since its arrival in the Middle East, had not been fortunate. So many operations were cancelled that it became known as Belayforce, and in the troopdecks of their assault ship, HMS

Glengyle,
someone had scrawled: 'Never in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many.' They had set out for Crete in the belief that their objective was to 'raid enemy aerodromes and seaports etc., from which bombers were sent out to bomb our troops on the island'. They were also given a completely false idea of the state of affairs they would find on arrival.

Randolph Churchill had been telling them that the battle was as good as won. And their orders issued in Alexandria had 'stated that the situation in Crete was "well in hand", only that "the Maleme aerodrome garrison was hard-pressed", suggesting wrongly that the aerodrome was in our hands and was being attacked from outside'.

Their arrival, an introduction to what the brigade major described as 'a nightmare of unreality and unexpectedness', dramatically disabused them of the idea that things were well in hand.

No sooner had the ship anchored [wrote Graham in 1948] than boats from the shore began to come alongside and, just as the Brigade Commander, myself and other officers were bidding farewell to the captain of the minelayer, the door of the latter's cabin was flung open and a bedraggled and apparently slightly hysterical Naval officer burst in. In a voice trembling with emotion he said 'The Army's in full retreat. Everything is chaos. I've just had my best friend killed beside me. Crete is being evacuated!'

Cheerful to say the least of it and something of a shock to the little party of Commando officers, armed to the teeth and loaded up like Christmas trees, who stared open-mouthed at this bearer of bad news.

'But we are just going ashore,' I faltered.

'My God,' he cried. 'I didn't know that. Perhaps I shouldn't have said anything.'

Too late now, old boy,' I said. 'You can at least tell us what the password is.' But he had forgotten it.

From the deck they saw lighters coming out from the mole loaded with wounded. The scene became chaotic with commandos pushing forward trying to disembark as they arrived. Somebody gave the order to throw all equipment except personal weapons, ammunition and food over the side. Several wireless sets, desperately needed only a week before, were dropped in Suda Bay. prates of food and ammunition boxes were broken open. Men filled the pockets of their battledress with loose clips of .303 rounds and stuffed tins of bully beef inside their shirts. Ammunition boxes for the Thompson submachine guns and Brens were piled on to stretchers, which pairs of men carried away from the quayside. Once ashore on the Canea—Georgioupolis road, Laycock 'noticed that all the troops we met seemed to be going the wrong way.'

The troops going the wrong way were mostly stragglers from the rear echelon and dispirited elements from the second line round Canea who had broken away prematurely. Defeat could not be concealed and word of the decision to evacuate troops from Sphakia on the south coast had somehow got out.

Confusion had increased throughout that night of 26—27 May. A German breakthrough was expected at any moment from the foothills round Perivolia where the 2nd Greek Regiment had disintegrated. To emphasize the danger, tracer bullets from the mountain troops' Spandau machine guns on the southern flank were curving over Puttick's headquarters.

Inglis had been appointed to command the 1,200-strong Force Reserve — 1st Welch, the Rangers and the Northumberland Hussars — which was to relieve the exhausted New Zealanders on the coastal strip west of Canea. But General Weston kept control for himself, and Inglis, to avoid confusion, did not attempt to intervene. Nobody seemed to know which formation came under which headquarters.

Brigade commanders, without wireless or field telephones, resorted to walking around in the dark in search of one another.*

* Freyberg had the "best means of transport. Despite his huge figure, he rode pillion behind Second Lieutenant M.B.

Payne of the Northumberland Hussars, an amateur trick motor-cyclist who had performed at Olympia.

At first, nobody could find General Weston who had established his headquarters in a peasant's house near '42nd Street', which was a sunken track running south from the Canea end of Suda Bay. Named after the 42nd Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, based there before the invasion, 42nd Street was to be the next line of defence. Having ordered Force Reserve forward to replace the 5th New Zealand Brigade in front of Canea, Weston fell asleep on the earth floor of his 'hovel in an olive grove', as Laycock described it. He had sent no orders to the New Zealanders to withdraw when replaced, and does not appear to have known that the Australian Brigade to their south was by then outflanked, and so would have to fall back.

Puttick and Hargest became exasperated by the lack of orders. During the crucial part of that night, Freyberg was away from his headquarters and could not be contacted. For some of this time he had been on the quay at Suda Bay, not to meet Layforce, although he spoke to one of their officers, but to check that a landing craft carrying supplies and, most important of all, a message warning about the imminent evacuation reached Campbell's force at Rethymno. It says much for Freyberg's humanity, although less for his generalship, that at such a critical point of the battle he should have spent a considerable time walking up and down with a young lieutenant of the RASC, Jack Smith-Hughes, agonizing over the chances of the craft getting through safely. Unfortunately, the message had already gone astray, and the commander of the landing craft had left without knowing of its existence.

Puttick sent Captain Robin Bell, one of Freyberg's intelligence officers, to explain in person to Weston the gravity of the situation, but Weston's staff officers prevented Bell from disturbing their chief. Puttick, with uncharacteristic decisiveness, countermanded Freyberg's order that the Australians should stand firm come what may and told both Vasey and Hargest to withdraw to 42nd Street while they still had the cover of darkness. Thus Force Reserve was left to advance unsupported against a vastly superior enemy.

When Weston was woken at about one in the morning (possibly by the arrival of Laycock and Waugh) he finally learned of the disaster about to befall the Welch Regiment, the Rangers and the Northumberland Hussars. Orders to Colonel Duncan of the Welch Regiment to turn back were sent by two dispatch-riders. Weston then went back to sleep on the floor, but he was soon woken again, this time by Puttick in search of an explanation of what was going on. But Weston appears to have been almost incoherent from exhaustion.

Force Reserve meanwhile advanced towards the enemy through a deserted and devastated Canea. In the early hours of the morning, it fanned out beyond in an eerily empty countryside. More than one Welsh wag remarked 'Here we go for Custer's last stand.' A group with the quartermaster came upon a New Zealander fast asleep. 'We told him to hop it. His lot had pulled out long ago.' They also found a young sapper who had been left to blow a bridge, something he had never done before. 'He was a brave boy to have stayed there,' remarked a Welshman who helped him detonate the charge with the battery from their fifteen-hundred-weight truck.

Towards dawn, patrols were sent out to the south to make contact with the Royal Perivolians of the recently formed 'Suda Brigade', but both they and the Australians on the left flank had withdrawn the evening before. The patrols never returned. Soon after dawn on 27 May, Force Reserve heard firing well to their rear on the road to Suda. The implication was plain.

To their front were ranged Ramcke's paratroopers still following the coast and the 100th Mountain Regiment advancing over the Galatas—Daratsos hills. The majority of the German mortars and light artillery were concentrated on them. Heidrich's 3rd Parachute Regiment, although down to battalion strength, was at last able to advance out of Prison Valley and encircle them from the south, and the firing on the Canea-Suda road to their rear had come from the advance of the 141st Mountain Regiment.

When the German attack began at 8.30 a.m. with a heavy mortar bombardment, Force Reserve was already cut off. Part of it managed to fight a desperate rearguard action on to the neck of the Akrotiri, but most of it was trapped in front of Canea, with even the Welch Regiment's commanding officer, Colonel Duncan, manning a Bren gun. Their bitter resistance continued in pockets until the afternoon, in one case until the next morning. Seven officers and about two hundred and fifty men managed to fight through in small parties to rejoin the main force to the east: one group charged a road block in a lorry.

This sorry blunder had thrown away nearly a thousand of the fittest troops left. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Force Reserve was to have had its moment of action preserved until this futile hour, and not to have been sent into the counter-attack five days earlier. The squabbling of senior officers afterwards over who was to blame is reminiscent of the unseemly wrangles that followed the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava. Puttick strongly believed that Weston was at fault, Weston found Puttick's countermanding of orders unbelievably cavalier, and Freyberg was convinced that Inglis had evaded his responsibility to command Force Reserve. Once again, orders which had not been thought out, bad communications and in this case complicated alterations to the chain of command had made chaos virtually certain.

The remnants of the 3rd Parachute Regiment swung round Canea with orders to advance on the Akrotiri. With Heydte's men leading, they passed empty trenches behind barbed wire, deserted command posts, abandoned equipment and field guns with their breech-blocks removed, still pointing westwards. They advanced through orange plantations, vineyards and olive groves to the Canea-Suda road.

Fearing that his men were too tired to deal with pockets of resistance on the rocky peninsula, Heydte switched his line of advance to enter Canea through Halepa from the east. He ordered them to display every recognition flag they had to avoid another accidental attack by German aircraft. 'Anyone watching us on this march', he wrote of his unshaven and tattered band, 'might well have taken us for a band of medieval mercenaries rather than a modern military formation.'

In the deserted, rubble-strewn streets rats dived out of sight at their approach. The odd fire still burned and beams smouldered from the air raid of three days before. The smell of olive oil drained from smashed vats and wine run from broken casks mingled with that of decomposing corpses. Venetian facades in the narrow alleys stood with the guts of the houses destroyed and the upper windows showing only blue sky.

On reaching a square, the paratroopers were greeted by wounded comrades, captured at the beginning of the battle then left behind in a makeshift hospital by the retreating British. The Mayor of Canea arrived, wanting to surrender the town to ensure there would be no further civilian casualties. Captain von der Heydte was much amused when he refused to believe that this filthy and unshaven scarecrow, with only a knotted handkerchief for headgear, was a battalion commander in the conquering army.

The swastika flag was hoisted on the minaret of the old Turkish mosque in the centre of Canea.

Heydte then set up his headquarters in the British Consulate in the suburb of Halepa beyond the east wall of the town. Meanwhile General Ringel's mountain troops marched on in pursuit of Freyberg's retreating force.

Ringel assumed that Freyberg was withdrawing along the coast, first to Rethymno, then to join up with the strong garrison at Heraklion. This misapprehension was fortunate for the retreating troops, otherwise he might have made a more determined effort on the southern flank. As it was, Freyberg's force had already been saved from almost certain encirclement and a humiliating surrender by that astonishing feat of resistance near Alikianou by the 8th Greek Regiment and Cretan irregulars.

In the early hours of 27 May while Force Reserve was still advancing to its undeserved fate, Laycock and Waugh went first to see General Weston, then to the headquarters of Colonel Co]vin who commanded the advance guard, and then to General Freyberg whom Waugh described in his diary as

'composed but obtuse'. He was ruder about General Weston the next evening: 'General Weston popped out of the hedge; he seemed to have lost his staff and his head'. (This cannot be attributed merely to Waugh's aggravation: his 19-year-old soldier servant, Private Tanner, was taken aback by the sight of a general 'flapping about on his own'.)* Even an air attack did not escape Waugh's scathing flippancy: 'it was like everything German — overdone.'