Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (34 page)

Finally, their efforts were rewarded by an unexpected sight beyond the pass. Below them lay the Askifou plain, a fertile flat-bottomed bowl (troops dubbed it 'the saucer') of meadows, orchards, small tilled fields and streams. Stephanides thought this haven, only a few kilometres across, too idyllic for war. 'The Luftwaffe', he noted, 'even went out of its way to shoot up a derelict and dilapidated farm tractor.'

The two Australian battalions under Brigadier Vasey and the last three light tanks of the 3rd Hussars took up position round Askifou itself. The New Zealand 23rd Battalion manned the pass. Next morning, mountain troops came into view again. But when they found that the position was well defended their advance slowed. The action at Babali Hani the previous day had discouraged them from taking risks.

With the end of the battle in sight, these Bavarians and Tyroleans from the 100th Mountain Regiment of Bad Reichenhall had adopted a light-hearted approach. Their dress had become very informal.

Many, jettisoning their winter-weight jackets and trousers, wore oddments of captured British tropical uniform; this inevitably caused some confusion. The most bizarre variation occurred after they had taken the village of Askifou. There they looted the richest house, which belonged to a newly married couple, and seized the wife's trousseau. The Tyrolean soldiers decided to wear her delicately embroidered knickers and petticoats on their heads like the neckcloths of Foreign Legion kepis as protection against the sun. They looked, with their shorts, muscular thighs and boots, more like a chorus-line in a regimental concert than fighting troops.

At the southern end of the Askifou plain lay the Imbros gorge, a deep ravine of great beauty. Waugh compared its natural rock terraces, with Aleppo pines growing precariously, to a seventeenth-century baroque landscape. The first-comers had not realized that this ravine offered a much safer and easier descent to the coast.

The road from the north continued on a few kilometres more, then came to an abrupt end on a massive bluff overlooking the Libyan Sea. There, amidst the heady scent of pine and wild thyme, the sight of the sea evoked powerful yet mixed emotions: relief that the journey was over, fear that after such a purgatorial experience they might still not get off, and dismay at the last precipitous stretch of the way, little more than a goat track down a steeply sloping rockface. Abandoned vehicles lay wrecked all around. Never was the failure of the military authorities to connect the road to the port so bitterly felt.

The Australians made the descent to Komithades, the village next to Sphakia, into a 'sheep-race', so that 'once a man got into the flow of traffic he just could not (and was not allowed to) stop'. But for the wounded and the lame, or even just the bootless, the descent was alarming and painful. One party of wounded descending by daylight were surprised by an air raid. Fortunately, they had been told to discard their helmets to look less like a fighting unit, and a brave Royal Army Medical Corps corporal advanced in front waving a red cross flag. The Messerschmitt pilots spotted the flag in time, waggled their wings in recognition or waved from the cockpit, and turned away.

Creforce Headquarters, from where Captain Morse communicated with Alexandria while organizing the evacuation, was established in the rockface below the end of the road in a cave which Geoffrey Cox described as 'like a setting for the legend of Cyclops'. There, Freyberg summoned Puttick to tell him to leave the island, since Weston's command of the rearguard made a divisional headquarters redundant. Puttick arrived with his officers at last light on Thursday, 29 May. He saluted Freyberg and said 'We did our best. We did all we could.'

Freyberg had also decided to send off his own staff. But that morning, a messenger with orders for Brigadier Vasey commanding the Australian rearguard had to be found, so junior officers in Creforce Headquarters drew lots. The loser, Geoffrey Cox, felt certain he was doomed to a prisoner-of-war camp, but thanks to a helpful Australian on the 'top storey', as the escarpment was known, he found a vehicle which still worked. He was therefore able to make the return trip to the Askifou plain, hand over the orders and obtain a receipt, and return just in time to embark with his colleagues and members of the British Military Mission on the Australian cruiser HMAS
Perth.

That night, 29 May, saw the largest evacuation. Rear Admiral King had arrived in HMS
Phoebe
with the cruisers
Perth, Calcutta
and
Coventry,
three destroyers and the commando troopship HMS

Clengyle,
whose landing craft were invaluable. Over 6,000 men were embarked.

Among others who boarded the
Perth
that night were Stephanides and Michael Forrester. Six months later, they heard of its destruction with all hands off Java after an attack by Japanese bombers. Below decks, the New Zealand officers found to their disgust some of the commandos who were supposed to be forming the rearguard. But the issue of who had been ordered to stay and who had been authorized to leave became very complicated and muddy.

Freyberg himself with the remaining staff officers from the different headquarters were taken off in two Sunderland flying-boats the following night.

When the 5th New Zealand Brigade descended the escarpment on the morning of 30 May, Brigadier Hargest, who like Puttick and Freyberg himself had shown more determination and sound judgement during the retreat than during the battle, was appalled by the wretched state of the stragglers below.

Starving and thirsty base-area personnel still several thousand stroifg were living without any pretence at military order in the ravines in rows of caves like colonies of sand martins. They were panic-ridden by day, especially at the approach of aircraft, and raided the dwindling food dumps and water supply by night. When the wounded were evacuated on the first night, 28 May, some of these men tried to join them, having tied field dressings round uninjured heads, but the genuine casualties shouted at them and most were shamed away. The order had gone out that only formed bodies of men would be embarked, so stragglers begged any spare officer passing by to form them into a group and march them in for embarkation. The New Zealanders had set up a cordon with fixed bayonets to ensure that fighting troops left first. 'My mind was fixed,' wrote Hargest later. 'We had borne the burden and were going aboard as a brigade and none would stop us.'

In spite of Hargest's determination, the choice of who was to stay and who was to go was not so simple. Priority would be given to officers on the grounds that they were needed to re-form battalions on their return to Egypt. And an order was issued early in the afternoon that the 'HO of each unit must be embarked tonight'. Numbers of NCOs and soldiers were then allocated by battalion.

Later in the afternoon, there was a sudden outbreak of firing. A detachment of mountain troops, twenty-two strong, had penetrated the Sphakia gorge on the west side of the escarpment. A company of New Zealanders pinned them down while Charles Upham, although seriously weakened by dysentery, worked his way up with his platoon round the feature opposite, then annihilated the enemy below.

When night fell, stragglers tried to slip down in the dark past the armed pickets posted to prevent attempts to rush the boats. And when the formed bodies of men authorized to embark were marched down, the last part of the route was lined with the unsuccessful. 'Some begged and implored,' wrote Kippenberger, 'most simply watched stonily, so that we felt bitterly ashamed.' A few tried to force or infiltrate their way into a column but were pushed away with rough outrage. The Maori detachment had a rearguard armed with Thompson sub-machine guns and a Luger ready to shoot if necessary. A number of officers behaved little better, even if their tactics were more sophisticated. Myles Hildyard heard the unmistakable voice of a contemporary from Eton claiming to be an 'embarkation officer'

and demanding to be let through.

In contrast to the self-serving, some soldiers defied an order that stretcher cases must be left behind and went to great lengths to smuggle wounded comrades past the cordon.*

* On the first night, 28 May, HMAS
Napier
reported her 'haul' as 36 officers, 260 other ranks, 3 women, 1 Greek, 1

Chinaman, 10 distressed merchant seamen, 2 children and 1 dog.

From the beach next to the little harbour of Sphakia, the queue for the landing craft stretched back a considerable way. Hopes and fears rose and fell as the thick shuffling line advanced or halted in the dark. Two of the destroyers had been forced to turn back, so fewer men could be taken off. One New Zealand officer described the welcome sound of 'Navy voices in cultured Dartmouth accents'

shouting in the darkness, 'Come on, come on! Get a move on!' But only 1,500 men were embarked that night.

After the chaos on land, everyone greeted the efficiency of the Navy with profound relief. Calm orders from naval officers instilled a forgotten confidence, and for many, the Army suddenly appeared amateur alongside. Exhausted and famished soldiers had great difficulty climbing the scrambling nets, so sailors lent over to grab their shirts to haul them up.

Some found themselves on board the same ship on which they had gone to Greece or left it. Ratings handed out mugs of cocoa and bully beef sandwiches just as they had in the earlier evacuation.

Kippenberger, on HMAS
Napier,
noted that an Australian commanding officer and his adjutant came aboard, but on discovering that their battalion had not embarked, they hurried ashore again.

But for those who left, the danger was not entirely over. Michael Forrester, who was on board HMAS

Perth
when she was hit on 30 May, suddenly understood what aerial attack meant to those in a ship at sea. 'My God, the faces of those sailors down below,' he remarked later. And Kippenberger 'formed the opinion that it is nicer on land than aboard ship'.

At dawn on 31 May, Rear Admiral King sailed again from Alexandria with two cruisers,
Phoebe
and
Abdiel,
and two destroyers. After a meeting with Wavell, Cunningham had decided to risk another sortie to Crete even though the Mediterranean Fleet had already been severely diminished while helping to defend the island. 'It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship,' he had declared. 'It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.'

The Royal Navy was justifiably proud of its work. A favourite toast in the wardrooms of the Mediterranean Fleet was 'To the three Services, the Royal Navy, the Royal Advertising Federation and the Evacuees.' In that last effort, Admiral King's force left at three o'clock on the morning of 1

June with nearly 4,000 men. They returned safely, but the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS
Calcutta,
sent out to cover them, was sunk within a hundred miles of Alexandria.

On arrival in Egypt, most of the men shambled down the gangways of their ships, still exhausted from their ordeal over the mountains. But some battalions fell in on the quayside, right markers and all, then marched off refusing to look like a defeated army.

More troops probably could have been taken off, but that is apparent only with hindsight. The Navy had thought that, under a strong moon, ships would be vulnerable to dive-bombers at night as well as during the long days approaching mid-summer. But Cunningham, in spite of Ultra, did not know that the risk to his ships had decreased sharply in this the last stage of the VIII Air Corps's withdrawal for Operation Barbarossa.

Much has been made of the facts that out of 5,000 troops left behind, there was no officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel, and that a far higher proportion of officers got away than men.

Jack Hamson, captured with a party of the Argylls near Tymbaki, vented the understandable frustration of a prisoner of war. 'One of the worst episodes in that affair', he wrote, 'was the notion that superior officers were specially valuable, that there was an obligation upon them to save themselves, that they were not finally and personally committed in the issue of the operations they were conducting, that they were merely to do their best and would have an opportunity to try again another day. Although the cases are not wholly comparable, the naval tradition that the commander is the last person to be saved out of the catastrophe is, I think, perhaps the sounder one. There were some honourable exceptions, much too conspicuous in their rarity, but for the most part we witnessed not so much a
sauve qui peut
as a damnable and disgraceful scramble for priority, a claim to the privilege of escape based on rank and seniority.'

Freyberg, the general who had stayed until the last in Greece to make sure his men got away, again remained as long as he could. His return to Egypt was essential if only because he was Ultra-indoctrinated. And to have left a figure of his renown in German hands would have added an unnecessary propaganda defeat. Brigadier Inglis offered to stay but Freyberg 'sharply overruled' that idea. Whether Weston or Laycock should have stayed is a difficult question. There was clearly little point in giving the enemy the satisfaction of capturing senior officers; and the British Army's equivalent of a ship's captain is the commanding officer of a battalion or regiment, not a formation commander. But the moral question still hangs unanswered, especially since the self-centred actions of some were thrown into contrast by the selflessness of those regimental officers, NCOs or soldiers who volunteered to stay behind in the place of others.

Mainly due to the diaries of Evelyn Waugh (Layforce's intelligence officer) and his novel
Officers
and Gentlemen,
interest in this issue has tended to focus on Colonel Laycock as commander of the rearguard. On the evening of 30 May, just before he left the island, Freyberg told Laycock, 'You were the last to come so you will be the last to go'. At the final conference held by General Weston on the afternoon of 31 May this was reaffirmed. Evelyn Waugh recorded this meeting in Layforce's war diary: 'Final orders from CREFORCE for evacuation (a) LAYFORCE positions not to be held to last man and last round but only as long as was necessary to cover withdrawal of other fighting forces, (b) No withdrawal before order from H.Q. (c) LAYFORCE to embark after other fighting forces but before stragglers.' But later that day Laycock told Freddie Graham, his brigade major, that General Weston had said to him: 'You and your staff and as many of your troops as you can get away must go tonight — my staff will see to it.' He claimed that this had come after a staff officer had intervened to point out that 'Laycock still had two battalions of his brigade in Egypt.' One can hardly imagine one of Weston's staff speaking up to give priority to Layforce when they had their own Marine battalion to get off.