Operation Mercury (26 page)

While his commanding officer and IO were engaged on their largely fruitless tour of senior officers, Graham began to organise an initial deployment. The signs were not auspicious, the coast road was jammed with a chaotic muddle of formless troops falling back in disorder, ‘dirty, weary, hungry – a rabble. One could call them nothing else.' The retreat was beginning to look like a rout.

Far to the west the defenders of Kastelli who had acquitted themselves so well on the first day had enjoyed a brief interlude of relative calm. Cut off from events to the east they could only await further developments. The fall of Maleme sealed their fate. By the 23rd patrols from 95th Engineers Battalion of the Mountain Division were probing their defences.

Coming across the bloated corpses of Muerbe's detachment left where they'd fallen in the earlier fight, the Alpine troops, under Major Schaette, concluded their fallen comrades had been mutilated after death by Cretan irregulars and this belief coloured their attitudes to those considered to be partisans. No quarter would be shown.

Next day the Luftwaffe paid the town a visit, sowing the seed of death and destruction through the streets. One bomb struck the gaol where Muerbe's survivors were still being held, which facilitated a mass breakout. The paratroopers took advantage of the confusion to raid Bedding's HQ and take him prisoner. This neat reversal prompted a swift attempt at rescue but this failed and cost Lieutenant Campbell who, with Lieutenant Yorke, had led the mission, his life.

As the bombers flew off the assault began. Artillery blasted the gallant defenders who, their ammunition exhausted, launched several spirited but doomed charges; some 200 fell. By the early afternoon much of Kastelli was in German hands. Bedding's ‘B' battalion had dug in around the western flank of the harbour and held out grimly for a further two days of sporadic fighting, while the Axis guns systematically levelled the approaches. For a further four days, by which time the overall battle was irretrievably lost, the defenders clung on until the few survivors made good their escape into the sheltering hills.

Despite pleas from the captured Bedding, corroborated by Muerbe's survivors, that the civilian population had not indulged in any wholesale mutilation of German corpses, Schaette was determined that the Cretans should be made to understand the price of defying, and worse, humiliating the Luftwaffe. Over 200 male hostages were taken and summarily shot; thus did the people of Crete gain a first acquaintance with the brutal creed of Nazism. If the invaders thought that mere savagery and indiscriminate butchery could cow the islanders, then they were to be proved very much mistaken.

While the situation on Crete began, from 26 May, to unravel and Freyberg lost confidence in any prospect of hanging on, the demands from London for the island's continued reinforcement reached a new stridency. Churchill had, by now, become utterly fixated on a successful outcome and hurled fresh imperatives at Wavell, urgings that were not, in any way, rooted in the realities of a fast deteriorating situation.
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On the morning of the 26th General Freyberg sat down to write the cable he must have been dreading:

To Wavell and his colleagues at GHQ in Cairo it seemed impossible that the situation could have collapsed so comprehensively. In his reply the Commander-in-Chief urged Freyberg to consolidate, to hold on. Like General Ringel he assumed the Allies could fall back toward Rethymnon and Heraklion and bring up the reserves, largely unscathed, from both.

By now, however, Freyberg had already formulated and begun to implement his plan for a retreat southwards, over the mountains, to pray for evacuation from the tiny port of Sphakia. On the afternoon of the 27th he again cabled Wavell to admit the plan for a hoped for evacuation was already in hand.

The Commander-in-Chief now appreciated that the day was irrevocably lost and that all that could be done was to save as many as possible. He, in turn, cabled London to request confirmation that he should now proceed along this course. In the circumstances it was not possible to refuse. All thoughts turned to escape.

With a final bitter irony, the New Zealanders, on the morning of the 27th, afforded the Germans yet another reminder of their mettle. With Force Reserve outflanked and decimated, the 141 Mountain Regiment collided with the defenders of the 42nd Street Line.

The Maoris once again charged the advancing Germans who were taken completely by surprise:

This spirited intervention left 121 of the Alpine troops dead on the field but nothing could now check the momentum of defeat which gathered like a leaden pall around the exhausted defenders. If gallantry had been enough then the outcome would have been a very different one:

By the evening of 27 May Creforce HQ had evacuated Souda and was on its way to Sphakia. No possibility of stemming the tide of the German advance now remained and Weston was left in local control. Laycock and Waugh were not alone in having formed a rather poor opinion of the general. Such was the magnitude of doubt that neither Hargest nor Vasey was prepared to await orders that might never come or would come too late.

Accordingly, with the fear of an outflanking move from the south, the surviving Australians and New Zealanders slipped away from the 42nd Street line during the evening, as their Commander-in-Chief and his HQ motored over the barren strip of the Askifou Plateau. The attack the Maoris had put in that afternoon had given the pursuers a sufficiently bloody nose and the withdrawal was not contested.

Another was to follow. The objective of the Allied withdrawal was the village of Stilos which lay on the northern approaches to the Askifou Plateau. As dawn broke on the 28th and the warm sun began its ascent toward the midday furnace, the Alpine troops renewed the chase.

Two companies of the 23rd, who were sleeping like the dead, had to be robustly roused by their officers when the German scouts were glimpsed. The New Zealanders crowded behind a dry stone wall, a perfect fire position and, as the Axis thundered on, began shooting at point-blank range. Many casualties were inflicted in the hot exchange and Sergeant Hulme earned his VC. Again the biters had been bitten.

While this action was being fought another engagement flared up further to the north, where the coast highway met the road heading at right angles southward toward Askifou, at Megala Khorion. Here the commandos, now dubbed Layforce, together with the Maoris, took on a mechanised column surging eastwards.
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The 28th, as ever, gave a good account of themselves but the commandos, who comprised Republican remnants from Spain's civil war, serving with Young's ‘D' Battalion, proved less enthusiastic.

Colvin's ‘A' Battalion fared even worse. A number of the men were taken prisoner in the course of a couple of rather confused skirmishes around Souda. Their commander's performance was so dismal Laycock sacked him and amalgamated the rump of the battalion with Young's.

As the 28th drew on into the afternoon, the long, normally languid hours where the great heat lay like a stifling blanket, the commandos who had now fallen back to a second line at Babali Hani came under renewed pressure. Layforce was stiffened by the 2/8th Australians and, later, by two Matildas from Heraklion. The late but timely arrival of the armour helped the composite force see off an attack put in by two of Ringel's alpine battalions.

Laycock, who'd narrowly avoided capture, managed to get through from Stilos to establish an HQ at Babali Hani. With due deference to their general's injunction that ‘Sweat saves Blood' the mountain troops, once they'd probed a position, would then simply attempt to achieve fire superiority from the flanks, typically by seizing whatever high ground offered as a base for their machine guns and mortars. An eminently sensible tactical doctrine, and the mountainous terrain of the island provided ample scope.

With the Alpine troops edging around their flanks the Australians and commandos fell back, immobilising the two tanks which had run dry and a third which had appeared later. As light thickened in the thyme scented dusk, the sweet smells of the East Mediterranean spring tarnished by the tang of cordite, burning metal and rubber, the defenders slipped free to begin the long slog up toward the northern rim of the plateau. Ahead of them tramped the mass of the Allied survivors, ragged, weary, hungry and dispirited; an army that had coalesced into something very much resembling a leaderless mob, the stink of defeat hard upon them.

As a line of retreat, the road to Sphakia was far from being an ideal choice. From Vrysses the road climbed upward in a series of relentless hairpins, all signs of cultivation withered from the barren rock and scrub. There was no water, the stiffness of the climb a torment for a parched and exhausted man who stumbled along in a daze with his tattered footwear further disintegrating. The Stukas were frequent visitors, swarming like angry bees around the stricken carcase of the Allied Army:

Lawrence Pumphrey, struggling up the hard, steep ascent, was finding the going murderously tough. His own boots had been with the local cobbler on 20 May and he'd been marching in a pair of desert boots he'd found chucked in a ditch. He soon realised why the previous owner had cast these aside so disdainfully. By now his feet were badly blistered and each step was agony. He made it as far as Sphakia only because his brother, John, managed to liberate a motorcycle with sufficient fuel still in the tank.

Bad as the roaring Me109s were, there were actually less of them; the relentless timetable for Barbarossa had denuded the available aircraft – Russia's impending misery at least partially spared the survivors on Crete as they wound their grim and weary passage up the mountain.

Although the rearguard and the fighting troops were able to maintain their morale, the less cohesive units, British and Middle Eastern support personnel, were disintegrating, plundering such dwindling stockpiles of foodstuffs as could be found. The Australians and commandos, being the last, thus fared badly. Freddie Graham, the brigade major, performed miracles of logistics but even so, hunger began to bite.

Kippenberger saw the padre, heavy laden with water bottles which he carried to sustain his flock, his own lips dry and cracked. Other survivors remember the endless, cruel succession of hairpin bends, each one promising the summit, only for the corner to reveal yet another, uphill and ahead. Vehicles which ran out of fuel or broke down were ruthlessly trundled over the edge to crash, tumbling and spinning, down the steep, rock strewn slopes. Graham recorded his own view of the march:

Desperate for food the men resorted to foraging, some living like outlaws in caves and abandoned farmsteads; the Spanish Republicans, survivors of three brutal and hungry years of bitter civil strife, proved particularly adept, even inviting Laycock and Waugh to an impromptu feast. When men did lie down to snatch a few hours or even minutes of rest, they sank into such a stupor of exhaustion they could not, even by the most robust methods, be roused.