Operation Mercury (9 page)

Despite these encouraging factors, Churchill's vision of an impregnable island fortress was destined to be stillborn. The lack of air cover was a crippling limitation and Wavell, at the outset, saw the place as little more than a naval bulwark. The commander-in-chief was understandably preoccupied with operations in the desert and then, latterly, on the Greek mainland.

Churchill blindly maintained that Wavell had men to spare. He was obsessed by the view that the ratio of fighting troops to support personnel was disproportionate, failing to understand that the logistical demands of armoured warfare in desert conditions require a huge logistical effort. By November 1940, however, it all began to seem academic. Middle East Command was concentrating on the forthcoming desert offensive and the Greeks were more than holding their own against the crumbling Italian offensive. Both Wavell and Cunningham, fearful of overextending the slender resources, agreed that Crete should stay as a backwater.

Although plans were made to stiffen the garrison in the event Greece fell, and a Commando group was deployed on the tip of the east coast both to guard against Italian raids from Rhodes and mount a few of their own, the position largely remained static. The locally raised forces were now only a few thousand strong with a distinct paucity of serviceable arms. Tidbury had, from the outset, envisaged that the likely threat would come from the air and had therefore concentrated on digging in around Souda, constantly hampered by a lack of engineering tools and equipment. With so many young men away in distant Epirus, local labour was equally as scarce.

Tidbury was saved from further anxiety by his transfer; the first, but by no means the last, commander to arrive and depart in haste. In the following six months several officers were appointed and replaced in rapid succession. Major-General Gambier Perry followed Tidbury but was soon supplanted by Brigadier Galloway with a diminished brief to safeguard Souda Bay only.

His replacement, Brigadier Chappel, was the first to seriously question what he was supposed to be about. Was he supposed to formulate a comprehensive plan for the defence of the island? As the Axis was, by this point, poised to invade the mainland, there was a greater urgency to these considerations and Chappel deployed his existing, slender, forces as best he could with a series of anti parachutist exercises included in training.

Further confusion ensued. The demands of the looming Greek campaign prompted Wavell to consider consolidating the defences at Souda to provide Cunningham with a secure anchorage, at that time, beyond the German bombers based in Bulgaria. On 2 April Major General E.C. Weston commanding MNDBO was directed to take charge of Souda. The vulnerability of this key anchorage had been amply demonstrated a few days earlier when a daring raid by Italian light craft had decisively crippled the cruiser HMS
York
. Weston was sent immediately to Crete while his troops travelled more circuitously through Haifa but the matter of whether he or Chappel was to hold overall command remained unclear.

Before the position was clarified in Weston's favour on 27 April the general had already produced a detailed assessment. He submitted this on the 15th by which time the likelihood of a defeat on the mainland loomed large. He believed that the island could be attacked by both airborne and seaborne forces and that these attacks could occur in the east, the west, or at Rethymnon.

A greater measure of defensive capability was therefore required, to be dispersed to meet these numerous threats though he did feel the eastern end could be entrusted to Greek forces, provided sufficient were available. He stressed that more air strips, together with an adequate complement of fighters and bombers were an essential element in a successful defensive strategy. This in turn raised the necessity of greater AA cover.

These conclusions were substantively endorsed by the Middle East Joint Planning Staff on 21 April, by which time it was abundantly clear the fight for Greece had been lost. They decided that, in order to bring the island up to a proper state of readiness, three brigades would be needed with adequate air and anti-aircraft support.

Like Weston, they saw a major threat from the sea supported by paratroops – no one yet had considered the potential for vertical envelopment only, no one except General Kurt Student. This question of continued coastal defence was to become a kind of mantra which would bind the local commanders in a pernicious vice while the main struggle was being fought out around the airfields.

It was proposed that units evacuated from Greece would not be deployed as part of the defence plan, they would be withdrawn to Egypt to recuperate and refit. These two sets of recommendations were sound but circumstances and the increasing demands of a sector under threat from all sides, from Rommel in the desert to insurgents in Iraq, robbed Wavell of the opportunity to react accordingly.

At this point even Churchill did not appear to perceive Crete as a priority; his directive to Wavell of 18 April contains only a cursory and dismissive reference:

The suggestion that the defenders engaged airborne troops with their bayonets reflects the Prime Minister's romantic view of war – deeds of derring-do which contrast starkly with his acute grasp of political realities. His failure to realise that Wavell's ability to wage war successfully in the desert theatre without adequate support personnel stems from the same view, a harking back perhaps to the more chivalrous days of Victorian colonial wars.

Adequate air defence had been a key tenet of both Weston's and the Joint Planning Staff's reports. And here was the rub. The RAF was virtually bankrupt in terms of available aircraft and personnel. The demands of the desert war, Greece and the agonisingly slow re-supply left Air Chief Marshal Longmore with an empty cupboard. Greece had drained his slender resources for no appreciable gain.

During the winter of 1940/1941 activity on Crete had been limited to the strictly non operational – the construction of a series of new airstrips. By April only those at Rethymnon and Maleme, the latter in the extreme west, had been completed. Plans for additional facilities even further west at Kastelli, also at Pedalia and Messara Plain had not come to fruition, largely due to a dearth of labour and materials.

Even once completed these air fields were bare strips only, apart from Heraklion none had pens for the aircraft to be deployed, assuming any were to be deployed. The uncertain status of Crete in the overall strategic situation, the lack of detailed planning and interservices liaison was to bear bitter fruit. Radar was not available until April 1941 when one centre was set up at Maleme and a second was under way at Heraklion. Communications to the fire control room at Chania, which was to coordinate AA batteries, was via a single, vulnerable telephone line.

When the German threat to Greece first materialised there was a suggestion that the RAF should base its response in Crete. This idea, promulgated by Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, whist eminently sound, was abandoned in favour of a disastrous forward strategy, placing the available squadrons on the mainland. Once there the hopelessly outnumbered squadrons were decimated, mainly while still on the ground. Crete was defended only by elements of the Fleet Air Arm, equipped with a motley of obsolete and frequently unserviceable aircraft.

By the conclusion of the Greek debacle the RAF had lost 209 planes, seventy-two destroyed in combat, fifty-five shot up on the ground and the remainder wrecked during the evacuation.
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The rate of loss outstripped the supply of replacements. Longmore's frequent appeals for increased supply won him few admirers in the War Cabinet. The politicians, removed from the day to day realities, appeared unable or unwilling to separate ‘paper' planes from those able to fly! At the start of May he was recalled and Tedder, his deputy, was appointed. As ever, shooting the messenger did not solve the problem.
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By the middle of April Wing Commander G. R. Breamish had been sent to Crete to take charge of the air defences. His forces, at that point, comprised less than twenty personnel, though this meagre complement was boosted by the arrival of No. 30 Squadron with eighteen Blenheim bombers together with the remains of three fighter squadrons. After their dire losses on the mainland these, combined, could only show sixteen Hurricanes and six outmoded Gladiator biplanes; none in good repair.

Such depleted resources were insufficient to daunt the Luftwaffe and the continuing demands of North Africa meant that there was scant prospect these could be significantly boosted. Superiority in the air would therefore continue to lie with the Axis, effectively cancelling the strength of the Allies at sea and raising grave questions over whether the island could in fact be successfully defended at all.

The nature of the island's geography, the long exposed strand of the north coast, linked by only a single road, the airfields, basic and largely undefended and with no facilities for dispersal, would offer a tempting target for the Luftwaffe; likely a repeat of the experience on the mainland. Once the Axis had constructed its own strips in the Peloponnese the island would be in range of the dreaded Me109s with their lethal capacity for low level strafing.

Blame for the eventual defeat was shunted onto Wavell, tidily ignoring the immense practical difficulties confronting GHQ Cairo and disregarding the natural obstacles created by the topography. To establish a viable route to the south coast (the road to Sphakia was incomplete) would have been a major engineering feat, impossible in the time available and, even if completed, suicidal for convoys in the face of German air power. It can also be said that it was the decision to engage the enemy on the mainland that diverted attention away from Crete. Had the concept of the island fortress been actioned at the start of 1941 then history might have taken a different course.

Greece had eaten into Wavell's supplies, meagre at best, to an alarming degree:

With the mainland lost Churchill moved the island up to a higher slot in the list of priorities – the question was whether to seek to hold Crete or withdraw all units to North Africa. The Prime Minister had no doubts:

The decision was taken and he would not brook any contrary opinion; Cunningham was rebuked for expressing reservations. Wilson then sent his pessimistic but realistic assessment but the die was firmly cast. With ULTRA intelligence now playing a part,
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Churchill launched fully into bulldog mode: ‘It seems from our information that a heavy airborne attack by German troops and bombers will soon be made on Crete … It ought to be a fine opportunity for killing parachute troops. The island must be stubbornly defended.'
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Moreover, the PM knew just the man to exploit this heaven-sent opportunity for slaughtering the enemy.

General Bernard Freyberg was indeed a Herculean figure – physically imposing and utterly fearless, he had served with considerable distinction during the Great War and had won the Victoria Cross. Churchill regarded him with some reverence. Although born in New Zealand, most of his life and career had been in Britain. When the Prime Minister, meeting the General in the 1920s, begged him to ‘strip his sleeve and show his scars' , he counted no less than twenty-seven old wounds.

It was to this officer, the doyen of fighting soldiers, that Wavell turned at the end of April. He had lost confidence in Wilson who clearly had little confidence of his ability to hold the island. Flying to Maleme on 30 April, the commander-in-chief interviewed Wilson and informed him of his decision to post him to the Levant. Having disposed of one commander he then spoke privately to Freyberg who was nearby. After congratulating the General on the performance of his Kiwis in Greece he dropped the apparent bombshell that Freyberg was now to command in Crete.

Perhaps any general, on being entrusted with so difficult an enterprise, would baulk. Freyberg would naturally do his duty and obey orders but he was, of course, subject to separate political constraints in that he reported directly to the home government. Wavell was not to be deflected; he intimated that the decision emanated from Downing Street and could not be gainsaid. Freyberg, loyal and naturally chivalrous, could do no other than accept. Possibly, even at the outset, he felt his command to be a poisoned chalice.

The situation on the island was far from propitious. Since the British presence had first been established in late 1940 no clear vision for the defence had been realised. It was a case of ‘muddling through' and this lack of strategic overview and the absence of a coherent plan was palpably obvious.

SOE had sent Peter Wilkinson to observe the state of preparedness and his conclusions were far from encouraging. He reported on a state of ‘complete inertia' – a total lack of ‘elementary precautions'. He commented, tellingly, on the lack of any decent north/south road, despite the fact that there was only some four miles left to complete and the garrison had had six months in which do the job.