Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (32 page)

* Tanner, who described himself as Waugh's 'cushion-bearer' since he carried his pillow for him throughout the battle, found Waugh most considerate. Regular officers, disconcerted by Waugh's irony, seem to have harboured a strong dislike.

While Laycock and Waugh visited the generals in search of instructions, Graham organized a rudimentary deployment of the two commando battalions. He was appalled at the image of retreat which greeted them: 'the road was jammed with troops in no formed bodies shambling along in desperate haste. Dirty, weary and hungry — a rabble, one could call them nothing else. It was a sight I was to become only too familiar with in the next days, and I shall never forget it.'

Yet, as the Germans found to their cost, not all units were in a state of collapse. At about eleven in the morning of 27 May, the 141st Mountain Regiment, having bypassed Force Reserve, came up against the Australians and Maoris on the 42nd Street line. The mountain troops advanced, never expecting an attack from exhausted troops. When the Australians and Maoris charged, they scattered most of the regiment's I Battalion. In this action the Germans admitted to losing 121 men killed, over half their casualties for a day which saw a total of 220 men killed, 50 more than on 25 May, the day of the Battle of Galatas.

That afternoon, nearly thirty hours after his original signal declaring the inevitability of defeat, Freyberg finally received agreement from Wavell to a withdrawal over the White Mountains to Sphakia, a small fishing harbour on the south coast. Wavell had wanted him to withdraw to Rethymno and link up with the Heraklion brigade, just as General Ringel had expected, but Freyberg had been right in his original assessment and Wavell was forced to agree. He gave his consent without waiting any longer for confirmation from the War Cabinet. That evening, Creforce Headquarters set off southwards by car and truck over the mountain road towards Sphakia.

18

South from Suda Bay

28-30 May

After Freyberg's departure to Sphakia, command of the withdrawal was left to General Weston. But Weston's unreliable leadership, not helped by false rumours and bad communications, prompted Hargest and Vasey to formulate their own orders. Having seen mountain troops moving round to their south, well beyond the Malaxa escarpment, they withdrew their New Zealanders and Australians from the 42nd Street line on the evening of 27 May. They marched through the night to Stylos, which lay to the south-east on the route to Sphakia. Fortunately, the mountain troops stopped for the night, and only resumed their eastward advance shortly before dawn.

Hargest's men reached Stylos just in time. At daybreak on 28 May, two companies of the 23rd Battalion were roused from where they had lain down to sleep. Two of their officers, on a tour of inspection before lying down themselves, had spotted the renewed advance of the 85th Mountain Regiment. The exhausted New Zealanders rushed forward to a dry-stone wall curving over the top of a hill. The leading Germans, advancing up the other side, were within twenty metres when the New Zealanders' helmets appeared above them. Sergeant Hulme, who sat on the wall firing, won a Victoria Cross in the brief but highly successful action which followed.

To the north of them at Megala Khorion above the turn-off from the Canea—Rethymno road, a troop of Spanish Republicans from George Young's battalion became engaged in Layforce's first rearguard action. Laycock had rightly objected that it was a bad position to defend, but he was overruled. They were joined by two companies of Maoris. Soon an impressive procession of vehicles led by motor-cycle troops came in view advancing east from Suda towards Rethymno. Only a small proportion of this force turned south to attack and, in the scrub and broken terrain, the Maoris managed to delay them until midday.

Most of the Spanish Republicans, regarding their mission as unnecessarily suicidal when everyone was in retreat, fell back to Babali Hani where the rest of George Young's battalion had been sent ahead to prepare another stop line. Meanwhile Colonel Colvin's battalion of commandos, left behind to delay the enemy at Suda, was in some disarray after two confused engagements in which many men were captured. Waugh describes Colvin's conduct in scathing terms in his memorandum on Layforce; in fact he had started to crack up so obviously that Laycock relieved him of his command and amalgamated the two battalions under George Young.

Laycock and his brigade major, Freddy Graham, were nearly captured by mountain troops who had cut the road between Stylos and Babali Hani. The arrival of two of the Matilda tanks brought round from Heraklion saved them. These tanks also helped stiffen the resistance at Babali Hani where George Young's battalion backed by the remainder of the Australian 2/8th Battalion faced two battalions of mountain troops later that day. Laycock set up his brigade headquarters in a house on the edge of the village so that he could stay close to the fighting.

The tactics of the mountain troops were to advance to contact then, once the enemy positions had been identified, to send machine-gun and mortar groups off to climb prominent features on each flank.

This took time and effort, but 'Sweat saves blood!' was General Ringel's maxim.

Young's battalion and the Australians fought back until dusk, when it was clear they were being outflanked to the west. The two tanks had run out of petrol and were destroyed. A third Matilda was fixed across the road in a crater, prematurely blown by a party of sappers, the oil and water were drained and the engine set racing until it seized completely. The commandos and Australians pulled out after nightfall, marching as fast as they could southwards to the Askifou plain where the Australians set up another defence line.

All this time, ahead of the rearguard, a mass of soldiers trudged forward, first across the Apokoranas foothills then, after Vrysses, up into the White Mountains. Olive groves became rarer as the ground became rockier, with ilex and scrub oak or pine and gorse, and the 'treadmill' of the climb began under the strong sun. Higher still, there were only prickly little bushes to break the sterile expanse of shale and limestone outcrops. For fresh, well-nourished troops with good boots, the worst part of the journey — the twenty-four kilometres from Stylos up to the Askifou plain — would not have caused great hardship. But most of those on this retreat were exhausted before they started, they had little food and water, and their boots were falling to pieces.

'I found it hard to realize', wrote Theodore Stephanides of the early stage, 'that I was taking part in what would probably be a historical event. It seemed somehow more like a crowd leaving a football match and finding the trains were not running, than a retreat.'

During this retreat, a number of curious sights and encounters took place. One of the RAF officers who remembered Nicki Demertzi from the Argentina night-club in Athens suddenly spotted her in khaki uniform. So did Geoffrey Cox who had run the newspaper
Crete News
from the SOE base at Fernleaf House. Her long blonde hair looked very fetching against this informal attempt at camouflage. Ian Pirie was wearing a major's crowns: he apparently had a habit of producing different badges of rank out of a pocket. On arrival in Cairo he became one of SOE's political advisers. His colleague in subterfuge, Bill Barbrook, escaped from Canea with a young English schoolteacher from the Dodecanese who had been helping him as an interpreter. Barbrook told him to put on uniform just in case the Germans took him for a spy. Others in borrowed battledress and steel helmets included a couple of Greek hospital nurses adopted by a company of New Zealanders: they tramped along with them joking in broken English.

Two encounters involving Bob Laycock, one by night and one by day, seemed somehow typical of the British abroad in unusual circumstances. Myles Hildyard, a subaltern from the Sherwood Rangers, heard Laycock's voice in the dark and recognized it immediately: he knew him from parties in Nottinghamshire. Laycock's brother was serving in the Sherwood Rangers, the local yeomanry regiment. They had a brief chat about him and mutual friends at home, then went on their way. On another occasion, Monty Woodhouse and Colonel Guy Salisbury-Jones, while resting by the roadside, saw Laycock in a staff car. Laycock stopped to chat to Salisbury-Jones, who had been in the Coldstream Guards. After he had driven on, Salisbury-Jones turned back to his companion. 'Funny thing,' he said. 'Last time I saw him he was riding up the Mall at the head of a Sovereign's escort of the Household Cavalry.' Woodhouse agreed that it was indeed a funny thing.

Lighter moments such as these were rare. At Stylos, the rows of wounded on stretchers at the dressing station reminded a New Zealand colonel of a scene from the film
Gone with the Wind.
Signs of stress and demoralization were almost everywhere. Kippenberger noticed one of his officers 'walking very fast with odd automaton-like steps and quivering incessantly'.

Whenever a Messerschmitt roared over, strafing at low altitude, its tracer bullets liable to start brushwood fires, there would be some hysterical cries of 'Take cover!' as well as the more relaxed

'Here comes Jerry!' Everyone froze face down. Evelyn Waugh's batman, Private Tanner, remembered an Australian voice screaming, 'If anybody moves, I'll shoot them!' Yet although the fighter sorties unnerved those severely strained by exhaustion as much as battle shock, they were far less intense than earlier in the battle. Tuesday, 27 May, had been the last day of heavy air attacks before most of the VIII Air Corps was pulled back to prepare for Operation Barbarossa.

Members of the rearguard suffered more than most from lack of food simply because they came last.

Creforce was retreating away from its depots, and there had not been enough time or transport to prepare proper dumps along the route. Those which had been established were raided by the
bouches
inutiles
who had set off for Sphakia well ahead of the fighting troops. This mixture of British, Cypriot and Palestinian servicemen had few officers and little discipline. Many lived like outlaws, sheltering in caves along the way and raiding the food stockpiles for cigarettes and luxuries such as tinned salmon and pineapple chunks which made such a change from the salty monotony of bully beef.

As a result, the daily ration was soon down to a quarter of a tin of bully beef with one and a half hard tack biscuits each. In Layforce, those lucky enough to get a tin of thirteen sausages had to share it among twenty-seven men. That they received anything was largely thanks to the efforts of Freddie Graham, the brigade major. At the end of the hardest stretch of the march, Sergeant Stewart's troop of A Battalion found Graham and two men waiting for them with tins of M & V (a mess of meat and vegetable) and Army hard tack biscuits. 'After drawing water with the help of some Staff officers, we ate our rations as quietly as a female pig after suckling her young.'

The shortfall could only be made up by foraging, a skill at which the Spanish Republicans proved themselves the most experienced. Waugh's Catholic prejudices evaporated when they invited him and Laycock to a meal of roast sucking pig and rice. The Cretans were remarkably forgiving as the passing of thousands of desperate troops emptied their wells and stole eggs, chickens and even sheep.

Thirst led to terrible scrambles round wells as soldiers lowered water-bottles or steel helmets on webbing equipment. Those without either lowered a field dressing, then sucked the water from it as from a sponge. Some men found wine on the way and drank themselves into oblivion.

British troops were small and scrawny-chested in comparison to the Australians and New Zealanders.

Wiry was, the best that could be said for many of them, and they could not keep up. In contrast to the unshaven and dishevelled rabble, infantry battalions, although down to company strength, marched in a body, forcing their way through the crowd and halting for the regulation ten minutes every hour.

By day the litter of retreat marked the way: abandoned vehicles pushed over the side, gas-masks, rifles, webbing equipment, kitbags, blankets, cartridge boxes, even officers' suitcases, the few remaining contents strewn about by passers-by rummaging for anything useful or valuable. The instinct to scrounge for its own sake, Stephanides observed, was astonishingly deep-rooted.

By night the pale dusty road was easily visible in the starlight, and on either side the lighted tips of cigarettes brightened and dimmed as resting men smoked. At other times, the scene was less relaxed.

Colonel Kippenberger, halting his men at one point, took out a torch to study the map. This provoked threats and curses from stragglers afraid of air attack. One man leaped at him and kicked the torch from his hand. Kippenberger grabbed him by the throat and nearly throttled him, then warned the audience in the surrounding dark that he was going to use the torch again and if anyone objected he would shoot.

'It was pitiful', wrote Sergeant Charles Stewart of Layforce, 'to see the state and marching of the British soldiers, some lacking rifles, or equipment; discipline seemed to have left them, (I do not blame the men altogether), and they had sore feet through sweat and marching, the skin peeling off their shoulders with carrying extra ammunition and their comrades' rifles.'

Even the recently arrived commandos were soon tired, as Stewart found.' "Keep moving lads, change over those Brens and keep closed up" were the orders given out. But physical endurance can reach its limit, and within the next hour I was forced by the appeals of the men to ask my captain to give them a rest every twenty minutes. The halt was passed along the line, some of the lads lay down on the road and were asleep in a few minutes. Twenty minutes up, it was nigh impossible to waken some.' Often during night halts men fell instantly asleep, or rather into a state of exhausted unconsciousness, and could not be woken even by prods and kicks from their sergeants. Others, unnoticed, woke up several hours later and found their comrades gone.

When the order to withdraw over the mountains to Sphakia had finally been issued on 27 May, Kippenberger, as he later admitted, was 'unashamedly pleased'. The New Zealand Division, after the withdrawal from Galatas, had no further illusions about the outcome of the battle. Yet at Heraklion the troops had scant idea of the state of affairs to the west. They still thought the Germans were as good as beaten.