Cruiser (32 page)

Jim Nelson helped
Perth
's doctor and Sick Bay attendants to treat the wounded:

Perth
collected exactly 911 men that night, most from Navplion and some from a little further down the coast at a place called Tolos.
Stuart
evacuated 109. The soldiers found what comfort they could in the mess decks and passageways, glad to be alive but falling asleep almost as soon as they had eaten. They sailed well before dawn and were back in Suda the next morning, in time for yet another two air raids, which Reg Whiting recorded:

Not everyone made it. One of the troopships at Navplion, an old Dutch passenger liner, the
Slamat
, sailed after the 3 am deadline. She had been taking men on board all night and her master had lingered on, not having the heart to turn his back on the hundreds more waiting ashore. He did not sail until 4.15 am. It was a disastrous mistake. The bombers found her
not long after dawn, zooming out of the rising sun. Within minutes, they had scored direct hits and she was on fire and sinking, men tumbling from her into the sea, searching frantically for rafts or anything that might help them stay afloat.

The
Slamat
's wireless operator got away a distress call, and two destroyers, HMS
Diamond
and
Wryneck
, were ordered to help. But now tragedy piled upon disaster. The Luftwaffe returned.
Diamond
reported that she had picked up most of the survivors and was heading for Suda. Then
Wryneck
requested fighter protection. It was the last ever heard or seen of all of them. All three ships were sunk by the bombers. Another destroyer, searching the next day, found a pathetic handful of wretched figures clinging to each other amidst the wreckage in the oily water. Of perhaps 700 men who had sailed the night before, exactly one officer, 41 ratings and eight soldiers were saved.

For
Perth
's ship's company, there was no time to grieve. By this stage of the war, death was a commonplace. It touched you, and when there was some particularly atrocious piece of news you thought ‘There but for the Grace of God …', but in the end you just got on with it. The luxury of thought, of contemplating the crudities and the terrors of the life they were leading, was simply not an option. Exhausted resignation was the name of the game. Other sailors were dying; other Australians were dying. You hoped you would not. But if the bomb or the torpedo had your number on it, there was nothing you could do about it. The only link with normality now was mail from home, which everyone from the Captain down looked forward to with a longing that was almost physical. Sometimes, there would be bags of it when they arrived at Alexandria; sometimes not. But you couldn't do anything about that, either. When letters did arrive, precious as they were, they were often weeks and even months old.

April had begun cruelly and it would end that way. On the night of the 28th,
Perth
and another cruiser, HMS
Phoebe
, and
a squadron of destroyers were off the little port of Kalamata, on the Peloponnese Peninsula, to evacuate more men by night. Bowyer-Smyth, as the senior officer, was in command of the operation afloat. His ships were known as Force B.

Waiting ashore was what the army would probably have called a collection of odds and sods – some 8000 men, many of whom were more or less lost and leaderless. There was a battalion of New Zealanders, and a mixed bunch of Australian gunners and transport drivers, and about 300 men from a British cavalry regiment – the 4th Hussars, who had fought alongside the Australian 6th Division. These men were hungry and exhausted but retained their military discipline. The others were Greek and Yugoslav soldiers, Palestinian and Cypriot labourers, and Asian seamen from various sunken ships who, in the words of the official Australian Army history, were ‘now officerless and disorganised, and there was evident danger of a panic among them'.
²⁰

That afternoon, the Hussars were sent to patrol north of Kalamata to search for the advancing enemy. They were ambushed and either killed or captured to a man. Two companies of German infantry, with two field guns, then drove into Kalamata itself and onto the small quay where the Allied soldiers were grouped in the gathering dusk to embark. In a fierce melee, the Australians and New Zealanders fought them off, killing around 40 and capturing another hundred.

But, at that point, the fog of war descended. At sea, Bowyer-Smyth sent the destroyer HMS
Hero
on ahead to assess the scene before the rest of his ships arrived. By this time, it was 8.45 pm. Someone on land signalled to
Hero
by lamp that the Germans were in the town, and on board the destroyer they could hear furious gunfire and see the arcs of tracer bullets.
Hero
sent her First Lieutenant ashore to find out what was happening, and then signalled
Perth
: ‘Harbour occupied by Germans. British troops south-east of town.'

Bowyer-Smyth was still some 12 kilometres out to sea. He too could see tracer fire and large explosions on the horizon.
Pacing his bridge, the decision was his and his alone. It was, perhaps, the loneliest moment of his command so far. There were thousands of men awaiting salvation. But, for all he knew, they had already been killed or captured by the Germans. Should he risk his ships close inshore, on a dark and hostile coast, when the reason for their being there had evidently vanished? And, worse, what if he was attacked from seawards by an enemy naval force? The decision preyed on his mind as he drew closer to Kalamata, where he could still see the occasional sudden ball of flame and smoke. As he would write four days later:

Bowyer-Smyth decided to withdraw. At 9.29 pm, he signalled his squadron to head back to Suda at 28 knots, ordering
Hero
to rejoin him. Tragically, it was the wrong decision. Even as his ships were turning out to sea,
Hero
radioed again that the beach was now clear and that the evacuation could go ahead. But some fault in
Hero
's wireless meant that
Perth
did not receive that message until after 10 pm. By then, Bowyer-Smyth decided it was too late to turn back, and he pressed on for Crete. ‘It was a regrettable result,' Brian Sheedy noted. ‘
Perth
's people felt they had let the army down.'
²²

Sheedy was right. They had indeed let the army down. Bowyer-Smyth should have drawn closer to Kalamata to assess the situation for himself, or perhaps have sent in another destroyer to support
Hero
before committing the rest of Force B. And it is difficult to see why he feared an attack by sea. The Germans had no naval force in the Mediterranean. The Regia Marina was still licking its wounds after Matapan and had
shown no stomach for a fight since. Kalamata lay at the head of a long and narrow bay – exactly the sort of place the Italian Navy would have been most unwilling to enter.

There was no question of a lack of courage. Bowyer-Smyth had endured his time in the Mediterranean with the same fortitude as his men, bearing in addition the heavy burden of command. In all that has been written about him by his shipmates, both officers and men, there is only respect, no hint of a lack of resolve. In the end, he had just called it wrong, as a man in his position, under such stress and strain, might easily do.

Cunningham, though, was not forgiving. In his memoirs, he labelled the decision ‘unfortunate', which is an admiral's way of expressing considerable displeasure.
Hero
did bring off a few hundred men that evening, and so did a couple of other destroyers quickly despatched to Kalamata over the next couple of nights, but 6000 troops were left ashore to surrender. It was a melancholy postscript to a campaign that had been dogged by failure from its very beginning, less than a month before.

The swastika was hoisted in triumph over the Acropolis on 28 April. Operation LUSTRE had been a disaster. It cost the British and Commonwealth Armies some 12,000 men, of whom 9000 were taken prisoner. The Australian contingent alone, infantry and gunners of the 6th Division, lost 320 men killed, and 2030 men into German captivity. But, in six days, Operation DEMON had evacuated more than 50,000 troops from mainland Greece. Beaten and battered, with much of their equipment left behind, about half regrouped on Crete. Their rescue had been a remarkable achievement by the navy, assisted by the Luftwaffe's inexplicable reluctance – this time anyway – to bomb at night. But Churchill's obsessive adventuring in the Balkans had served only to turn the tide of war against Britain and the Commonwealth.

As April turned to May and spring came at last to the Mediterranean, the year that had begun with such hope was now turning sour and infinitely dangerous.

Perth
emerged from the Greek debacle in one piece, but she was battle-scarred and unmistakably shabby, salt-stained and patched with rust. The paint on the barrels of her guns was blackened and peeling from constant firing, and her boilers and engines were worn from endless steaming at high speed. Her very being, from her mastheads to her bowels, had been wrenched beyond her designers' imaginings by the enormous strain of her violent twists and turns to avoid the bombs directed at her. But she was tougher than ever now, seasoned and still seaworthy, and the same went for her crew.

Her men had taken everything the enemy and the weather had thrown at them and they had come through, when other ships and crews had not. Many of them thought they had seen it all, that not much worse could fall upon them in this war, and, stoically, they told their families so in letters home. Every so often, a buzz would go around the mess decks – they were heading back to Australia any day now, at the end of the week, the end of the month. They prayed for each new rumour to be true, but it was not. All the trials they had endured since Christmas were but a prelude to the onslaught to come. The Allied defeat had fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Mediterranean. The weights were heavily against them.

Adolf Hitler followed the war in Greece from his private train, which he had ordered to the small Alpine resort of Mönichkirchen, in southern Austria. He remained obsessed by Operation BARBAROSSA – the onslaught upon Russia planned for the coming summer – but the scale and speed of his victory in the Balkans surprised and pleased him. He did not take much convincing to press on in both the Mediterranean and North Africa. Rommel and the Afrikakorps clearly held the upper hand in their desert offensive. And members of his inner circle were urging him to strike again at the Allies on Crete.

Goering was especially insistent that the capture of Crete should begin without delay. The
Reichsmarshall
was still smarting from his failure to crush the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and fretting, too, that BARBAROSSA would be primarily an army affair with only a subsidiary role for his air fleets. The Luftwaffe had proved its value in Greece, he argued, and would do so once more against Crete. There was some opposition to this within OKW, which was arguing for an attack on Malta to take the pressure off Rommel's supply routes, but Goering produced a masterstroke and the man to effect it.

Generaloberst (Colonel General) Kurt Student was the Commander of Fliegerkorps XI, the Luftwaffe's elite parachute forces. They were known as the Fallschirmjäger, which translates into English as the ‘Parachute Huntsmen'. They had fought well in the blitzkrieg through the Low Countries of Europe, and Student, an able officer, was passionately convinced they could now take Crete from the air. The RAF in the Mediterranean, weak and divided, would put up negligible opposition, and the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet could be bypassed. Goering seized the idea and, with Student in tow, took it to Hitler on 21 April, the day after the Führer's 52nd birthday. Hitler mulled it over for a few days and then, on 25 April, he issued Führer Directive No. 28, for Operation MERKUR, or Mercury, which began with the words:

Student swung into action. He flew first to Berlin and then on to Athens, where he set up his headquarters in the crumbling white splendour of the Hotel Grand Bretagne – only newly abandoned by the fleeing British commanders – and began to assemble an air armada. There would be 600 Junkers JU52 transport aircraft, some of which would tow 80 gliders, all packed with parachute troops. These would be supported by heavy bombers, Stukas and fighter aircraft based in mainland Greece and on the islands of Scarpanto and Rhodes in the Aegean, north-east of Crete.

MERKUR would be launched on 17 May. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe would intensify its attacks on the Royal Navy both at sea and in harbour at Suda and Alexandria. After the paratroop landings, there would be a seaborne assault on Crete by some 6000 troops carried in two fleets of caiques. Hitler's only caution to his commanders was that MERKUR must not divert resources from the coming Russian campaign. Well pleased, he returned to Berlin. On 4 May, he delivered a gloating speech to the Reichstag, which began with the usual rant about the international Jewish conspiracy and Germany's sincere desire for peace, and then turned to a savage sneer at Churchill:

Hitler himself was about to commit the mother of all strategic blunders, in BARBAROSSA. But there was some truth in his boast about Churchill's conduct of the war in the Balkans and the Middle East. Britain was now on the back foot, reeling beneath the onward march of a Germany rampant on two fronts.

At Alexandria, Cunningham was counting the cost of the withdrawal from Greece and balancing that against the tasks that lay ahead. The toll was appalling. In all, 26 ships had been sunk in less than a week, including five hospital ships. Most of them were Greek, but five were British. Cunningham's warships and transports were being depleted by attrition. They were overworked and worn, in urgent need of maintenance, and their crews were exhausted. Yet he now faced a daunting array of obligations.

The troops who had regrouped to Crete, and the garrison already there – a total of some 40,000 men – had to be supplied by sea. So, too, the island of Malta and the beleaguered defenders of Tobruk. The Suez Canal had to be kept open. And Churchill and the Admiralty were also pressing him, with mounting urgency, to interrupt the German and Italian convoys from Sicily carrying supplies and reinforcements to Rommel through the Libyan port of Tripoli.

Relations between Cunningham and his masters in London became strained and tetchy as Churchill once again began to meddle. At one point, the Prime Minister suggested scuttling the battleship
Barham
to block the enemy's entrance to Tripoli harbour – a hare-brained idea that Cunningham angrily rejected. The Admiralty, too, was quick to offer unwanted advice. As Cunningham wrote later in his memoirs:

Cunningham made constant pleas for more air support, for reconnaissance aircraft to inform him of the enemy's whereabouts and movements, for bombers that would take the fight to the Luftwaffe's air bases in Italy and later in Greece, and for shore-based fighter aircraft that could help protect his ships from air attack. The RAF in the Middle East and the Mediterranean did its best with the scant resources available, but these were pathetically inadequate for the task.

Churchill had decreed that the bombing of Germany was to have top priority. Cunningham and the RAF Commander-in-Chief in Cairo, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, were sent a few more fighters, but, otherwise, they would have to make do.

There was better news in reinforcements for the fleet. In early May, a big new convoy, code-named TIGER, was passed eastwards through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar. It comprised five merchant ships laden with tanks and crated fighter aircraft, accompanied by the battleship
Queen Elizabeth
– a sister ship to
Warspite
– with a substantial number of additional cruisers and destroyers. Cunningham sailed from Alexandria to meet it. The convoy was attacked by the Luftwaffe, but heavy weather helped shield the ships. One of the five transports was sunk by a mine, with the loss of 57 tanks and ten crated Hurricane fighters on board, but the rest got through to Alexandria on 12 May. This was a fillip for morale. As well as deploying
Queen Elizabeth
, Cunningham could now call on fresh cruisers and an additional flotilla of six destroyers based on Malta and commanded by none other than Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the King. Two brand-new Australian destroyers, HMAS
Napier
and
Nizam
, were also sent to him.

Perth
had been with the escort for the TIGER convoy, and the day after its safe arrival on 13 May she sailed again with
the newly strengthened 7th Cruiser Squadron to take up the fight once more, with a bombardment of the port of Derna on the Libyan coast, west of Alexandria. That day, Reg Whiting's diary recorded the new ferocity of the attack from the air:

Jim Nelson wrote of that nightmare as well:

Alexandria had once provided a haven of sorts, a rest from the dangers at sea, but the German advance had brought the city within easier range of the Luftwaffe. The occasional desultory raids by the Regia Aeronautica gave way to a concerted German attack. Air raid followed air raid, by day and night. Roy Norris and a mate were caught in one as they returned to the ship after an evening ashore. As the sirens wailed, they scrambled for shelter behind a low wall, the only protection they could find. Searchlights on the ships in the harbour pierced the sky, hunting for the bombers through a storm of anti-aircraft fire. The noise split the heavens. Norris watched as the searchlights locked on to one of the attackers: