Operation Mercury (28 page)
Authors: John Sadler
Not all were willing to give up and stories abound of desperate and heroic attempts to find small boats and chance the hazard of the 200 mile journey to North Africa. Such a group discovered one of
Glengyle
's boats abandoned near the port, which they pulled under cover.
On the night of 1 June they began their attempt. Hit by German fire and later damaged when it ran ashore, the flimsy craft continued to float, though ten volunteers had to be left behind to improve buoyancy. After the fuel was exhausted they rigged a sail which was soon flapping listlessly in dead calm. Food and water dwindled, but on 8 June they sighted land and they eventually drifted to landfall near Sidi Barrani.
Despite the success of Admiral King's final effort, Cunningham had decided that this was all that could be done. London continued to press for one last effort but the Admiral was unshakeable:
I was forced to reply that Major General Weston had returned with the report that 5,000 troops remaining in Crete were incapable of further resistance because of strain and lack of food. They had, therefore been instructed to capitulate, and in the circumstances no further ships would be sent.
10
This was clearly the correct decision; the Navy had kept its promise.
Glad to have seen the day â Occupation and Liberation 1941-1945
An island with as long a history of occupation and revolt as Crete was bound to have developed an instinctive belief in merciless treatment for traitors. Collaborators knew they could expect no mercy if caught. One German agent captured by andartes begged to be allowed to commit suicide. They broke his legs with heavy stones some way from the edge of a cliff so he had to crawl the rest of the way to push himself over.
1
The Germans anticipated that they could cow the population simply by a ruthless application of brute force and largely indiscriminate violence. They did not begin to understand the character of the people whose island they were presently occupying. The Cretans knew all about occupiers; theirs was a long history of occupation and resistance to the occupier. Every man they shot sparked another vendetta.
Crete was a pyrrhic victory for the Axis, the battle cost them a total of 6,580 dead, missing and wounded; of these 3,352 were dead and a large proportion of the loss was borne by the
Fallschirmjäger
â as Student later admitted: âFor me ⦠the Battle of Crete ⦠carries bitter memories. I miscalculated when I suggested this attack, which resulted in the loss of so many valuable parachutists that it meant the end of the German airborne landing forces which I had created.'
2
In this he was correct. Hitler was appalled at the scale of loss and concluded that the day of the paratrooper was over. Student's dream of vertical envelopment was a further casualty of the fight. The dust had barely settled when all eyes were turned eastwards and to the invasion of Russia. With Barbarossa under way, the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East slipped down the strategic agenda. For the rest of the war the island was a backwater â as a crowning irony it was perhaps beneficial to the Allied cause in that the garrison which, at its height, comprised some 75,000 men, tied down a large number of Axis troops.
No grand strategic design followed from the capture; the idea of moving on to attack Cyprus disappeared in the wake of Barbarossa. The function of the battle in Hitler's eyes had been, in part, to add to the deception surrounding the overall build-up for the attack on Russia and to provide a secure back door in the Mediterranean. Beyond this the Führer had no interest in further operations.
The idea of deception was played out by Goebbels and even Goering, who informed a conference of his own Luftwaffe commanders in Paris that Merkur had been a full dress rehearsal for a reinvigorated invasion of England. ULTRA, of course, informed the British to the contrary and Bletchley was aware of the reasons for the build up along the Soviet frontier. The Russians, however, proved disinclined to accept the validity of the subsequent warnings.
None of this was of particular interest to the Cretans who were solely interested in driving out the invader. In the course of the struggle some 3,474 islanders were killed, many of these in the course of the final German entrenchment around Chania when hostages were murdered almost as a matter of course.
Once the main Axis forces had retreated from mainland Greece in 1944, the island's shrunken garrison was effectively abandoned and withdrew to a fortified enclave around the capital. Here they survived in a state of siege until the last gasp of the Reich when Admiral Dönitz, as Hitler's successor, formally ordered their capitulation in May 1945.
To accept the surrender of the German governor, the RAF flew him to Heraklion â the aircraft landed initially at Maleme; a highly symbolic reversal. David Hunt, who had been with Creforce HQ four years earlier, recorded the moment with some understandable satisfaction:
It was an agreeable example of the wheel turning full circle. At that time the Germans were all concentrated at the west end of the island, and our main concern was to keep the Cretans from falling on them. The solution was to move them all into the Akrotiri Peninsula, where I had watched the gliders landing four years earlier, and put a cordon of British troops across the neck. From there they were taken away by ships and sent to Souda Bay. I was glad to have seen the day.
3
General Kurt Student was one of those German officers charged with war crimes. He was probably never an ardent Nazi but clearly empathised with the National Socialist dream of a strong Greater Germany and was, at best, prepared to play along to achieve his career goals. Many others, of course, fitted in with this acquiescence.
Student's trial took place on Lüneburg Heath in May 1947 and, whilst he was acquitted on the majority of counts, was convicted on others. There has to be a question of the soundness of the verdict for there was no evidence of him having specifically ordered acts which would constitute war crimes. Still plagued by the effects of his old head injury, the architect of Germany's airborne elite was subsequently freed on medical grounds and sank quietly from view.
It was upon the necks of his former subordinates that the axe fell most heavily; three of the island's military governors, Andrae, Muller and Brauer, were put on trial for their lives in Athens. The first escaped with life imprisonment when the sentences were handed down in December 1946 but the other two were both hanged on 20 May 1947 â symbolically on the anniversary of the battle. This was felt, certainly in Brauer's case, to be both distasteful and unfair, smacking more of retribution than due process.
The Battle for Crete effectively ended Wavell's active career as it had done Student's. His position, already weakened by reverses in the Western Desert, became untenable in the wake of the failure at Crete. Churchill was only seeking an excuse to rid himself of Wavell whom he clearly disliked, and the victor of Beda Fomm found himself shunted sideways into obscurity.
Public opinion in the USA seemed largely unaffected by this further Allied reverse and Vichy continued to glower in hostile neutrality. There was an inevitable backlash from the Antipodes. In Australia the disaster hastened the government's fall and, from New Zealand, Prime Minister Fraser journeyed to London, demanding a fuller explanation as to why the Dominion troops had been left with what was now perceived as an impossible situation. Before doing so, on 7 June, he penned a highly critical cable:
Operations in Crete seem to have been largely the result of chance. The driving from the Greek mainland of various forces (including New Zealanders) with different degrees of equipment but on the whole ill supplied and to some extent disorganised, with an embarrassing number of refuges, seems to have found them on the island, which it was then decided to hold. As you know we had no previous knowledge that it was intended to defend it, and it seems clear to me now that the island was, in fact, indefensible with the means at Freyberg's disposal against the scale of attack which eventually developed. It seems to me also that it should have been as clear before the decision to defend Crete, as it is now that troops without adequate air protection (which it was known could not be provided) would be in a hopeless position, though it is obvious that the scale of the German air attack was larger and more intense than was foreseen.
4
Freyberg became the main target for his political master's wrath. This was blatantly unfair, for the General had been placed in an impossible position, his loyalty split between the normal chain of command and the demands of the home government. For a professional soldier such as he, there could be no question of refusing Wavell's orders to accept command of Crete; that would have been unthinkable and rightly so. The full position should have been disclosed to the Dominion government by the War Cabinet whose stance was, at best, misleading.
The meeting became very heated with Fraser exhibiting the full wisdom of hindsight:
No matter who your Commander-in-chief or what his rank may be, [the Prime Minister thundered] it is your duty to keep us in touch with the situation ⦠when you are ordered to take part in operations you will personally find out whether there is air cover for operations anticipated and you will communicate with us and tell us you are satisfied; and secondly your troops will not be exposed without tank support to hostile tank attack.
5
As a sop the Dominions were granted an additional, if largely token, presence in the councils of the War Cabinet but two precepts were identified and agreed:
(1) No further operations of a similar nature were to be mounted unless the Dominion troops taking part could be guaranteed adequate air cover and (2) they would not be expected to take on mechanized opponents with nothing more than âtheir rifles and their courage'.
6
The defeat had actually cost the Allies some 1,750 soldiers killed, as many wounded, and over 12,000 marched into captivity. The Royal Navy lost something in the order of a further 2,000 men during the course of the various battles at sea. For that vast, motley horde left on the shore at Sphakia, capitulation meant a further, grinding march back up the steep, broken defile of the Imbros Gorge, over the furnace bowl of the Askifou, the long descent to Vrysses and, eventually incarceration in a makeshift POW pen on the site of the No. 7 General Hospital. And here they languished. Conditions were primitive, supplies irregular and sanitation uncertain. The stench of decaying flesh clung, cloying and sickly, to the heavy, heat-laden air. From the surrounding districts sporadic bursts of fire echoed as the Axis âdealt' with suspected partisans. Other troops, deployed as the Sonderkommando von Kuhnsberg, tracked Allied survivors and escapees hiding in the hills.
Despite the savagery of reprisal, many locals risked the German bullets to bring food to the prisoners, a number of whom, inevitably, succumbed to dysentery. In time most were transported, firstly to the mainland and then to camps far away to the east. In defiance of convention some 800 were forced to work on the repair of Maleme airstrip.
The story of the resistance on Crete is a heroic one. A series of rather swashbuckling characters such as Paddy Leigh Fermor, W. Stanley Moss, Jack Smith-Hughes, Xan Fielding, Tom Dunabin and Ralph Stockbridge worked with local guerrilla bands in conditions of great hardship and danger. Coming in by caique and submarine, the raiders teamed with partisans for selective sabotage and intelligence gathering. Offensive operations were fraught with risk, not just for the initiators but also the populace who could expect no mercy from the murderous ruthlessness of the occupiers.
Pendlebury had died during the fight for Crete; others followed. Mike Cumberlege was captured in 1942 off the mainland coast and, after three years in the dreadful confines of Flossenburg concentration camp, was executed with three others only four days ahead of the liberation.
Gunner D.C. Perkins, whom the Cretans christened Captain Vassilios, escaped from Galatas prison camp and, with a fellow NCO, Tom Moir, crossed to the south coast to look for a boat. The pair were assisted and sheltered by locals. Moir succeeded in getting away in a stolen boat; Perkins had to wait to be taken off by submarine. Both returned, Moir to look for other escapees â after a number of exploits he was finally recaptured â Perkins, now trained in sabotage, attached to Xan Fielding's cadre. From July 1942 the pair were firmly established in the White Mountains, working with local guerrilla bands. An attempt at a concerted rising, orchestrated by Mandli Bandervas, proved abortive and brought down a hurricane of reprisals. Perkins reformed the survivors into a company-sized unit which operated from the village of Koustoyerako.
Perkins, Captain Vassilios, became the stuff of local legend, leading his andartes in a dazzling series of raids and ambushes. On one occasion the partisans surrounded a German patrol of twenty men who barricaded themselves in a stone hut. Perkins went forward and winkled them out with Mills grenades. Half the Germans were killed in the attack, the rest were simply shot out of hand. For all the romantic dash this was a bitter war of close quarters and no mercy. Perkins himself was wounded in the spine by a German bullet â the local butcher acted as surgeon, without the benefit of anaesthetic.
Operations on Crete were supported by a host of buccaneering small boats and by air drops of arms and ammunition. The Allies and andartes lived hard in the arid mountains in cold winters and baking summers. They went in fear of betrayal by German sympathisers, of whom, even on Crete, there were many, and in the knowledge their actions could bring down fearful wrath on innocent civilians. One of the effects of this close cooperation was to avoid the pernicious polarisation between partisans from the left and right which scarred the resistance effort on the mainland, and lit the fuse for the bitter civil strife that followed the German withdrawal.
The purpose of the resistance was primarily intelligence gathering, sabotage and low intensity operations. There was not the intention to arm the populace for a general rising. This was a prudent and highly effective policy for the andartes were able to tie down a very large number of Germans and their despised Italian allies. Although the Cretans were intensely anti-royalist they were equally opposed to Communism and the left was never able to gain an effective toehold. As a result the island was spared the two years of murder and strife that wasted the nation as a whole.
Perhaps the most celebrated guerrilla action on Crete, and that which guaranteed lasting fame for both W. Stanley Moss and Patrick Leigh Fermor, was the spectacular abduction of the island's governor, Major General Heinrich Kreipe. A veteran of the Russian front, the General must have viewed his posting to the island as something of a âcushy number'. The preferred, initial target had been the detested General Muller who had a particularly savage reputation.
On 26 April 1944, as the General's gleaming staff car swept from the impressive gates of his official residence at the Villa Ariadne, Moss and Leigh Fermor, both dressed as Wehrmacht, were waiting to flag down the vehicle. Both Kreipe and his driver were abducted; the latter being surplus was, subsequently, quietly done to death. With one of the kidnappers at the wheel the British drove confidently through the streets of Heraklion, the governor's official pennants deterring any check.
