P eter Everest, the sixteen-year old boy seaman who had just joined Gloucester, awoke early on the morning of Monday l9 May to discover the the ship had left harbour in the night and they were at sea. Peter was perplexed in his new home. He knew nobody else on board and had difficulty finding his way around the ship. When he was given his action station on a machine gun on the aft starboard side he was unsure of exactly what he was supposed to do.
At 0800 on Tuesday 20 May, Operation’Mercury’, the German codename for the invasion of Crete began when the Luftwaffe discharged parachute troops in the Canea area. It was the first airborne invasion in history. The Germans planned to drop 23,000 troops, from 500 troop carriers, during the first three days. The Luftwaffe’s principal strike force, Fliegerkorps VIII, was under the command of General Wolfram von Richthofen and was made up of bombers, dive bombers, fighters and reconnaissance aircraft, totalling 710 planes.
It was an awesome force, much of which would be directed against the British navy in the days ahead. Many of Richthofen Fliegerkorps pilots had gained experience in the Condor Legion during the Spanish civil war, over Poland and France and later in the campaigns in the Balkans. The ships of the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet therefore were about to encounter a large air force, with experienced pilots, but with no support from the handful of British aircraft, which by now had been withdrawn to Egypt.
During the afternoon of 20 May, allied reconnaissance aircraft had located a flotilla of twenty-five enemy caiques travelling from Piraeus towards their advance base of Milos. By late evening the caiques had overcome strong headwinds and heavy seas to reach Milos, from where they would sail to Maleme on the north-west coast of Crete.
Cunningham’s strategy for the prevention of a seaborne invasion on Crete was to divide the fleet into separate forces, each with its own part to play in the seas to the north of Crete. Force B, made up of Gloucester and Fiji and the destroyers Greyhound and Griffin were ordered to carry out a sweep, during the night of Tuesday 20 May, between Cape Elephonsi and Cape Matapan. At 0700 on Wednesday 21 May, having sighted nothing, they joined Force A1 which was then in a position fifty miles west of Crete.
Rear Admiral Rawlings, commanding Force A1 from the battleship Warspite, also had Valiant and the destroyers Napier, Kimberley, Janus, Isis, Imperial and Griffin under his command. With the fleet now covering the seaways to Crete, the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet awaited the anticipated invasion flotilla.
As Cunningham was taking steps to intercept the flotilla between Milos and Maleme, reports were received that dive bombing raids and machine gunning had taken place at Suda Bay, throughout the afternoon and evening. At Heraklion, the Naval Officer in charge reported more attacks in the late afternoon and estimated that in three hours no less than four hundred German aircraft had taken part in the raids. In addition to the earlier parachute drops around Maleme, more drops were made at Heraklion and Retimo. The German assault on Crete was an indication of the force of the Luftwaffe and an ominous indication to Cunningham of the precarious position of his fleet.
Rear Admiral Rawlings’ A1 Force was sixty miles west of the Anti Kythira channel by dawn on Wednesday 21 May and proceeding south-east to join up with Rear Admiral Glennie’s Force D, made up of the cruisers Dido, Orion and Ajax and the destroyers Hasty, Hero and Hereward. With the Luftwaffe enjoying supremacy of the air, Cunningham’s directions were that the British fleet should retire south of Crete by day, thereby reducing the threat from the air. Furthermore, with the naval forces joined together better protection could be given by a concentrated anti-aircraft barrage.
During the forenoon and afternoon of Wednesday 21 May, the fleet suffered many intensive attacks from the Luftwaffe. Gloucester and the rest of the ships under Rawlings’ command were attacked in the morning and for two and a half hours in the afternoon. Although there were no casualties, the intense barrage put up by the ships had expended a considerable amount of ammunition. The question of ammunition supplies for the ships was giving so much concern to Rawlings that he sent a signal to the ships under his command, warning them of the need to conserve their supplies of high-angle ammunition.
The other forces at sea around Crete also suffered intense attacks by the Luftwaffe, but with the policy of concentrating the ships to throw up an intense barrage, the bombers and dive-bombers were held at bay. The cruiser Ajax, in Force D, suffered some damage during the morning but by afternoon Force D had joined with Force A1 in order to concentrate the anti-aircraft defences.
At 1300, Force C, patrolling east of Kythira and under the command of Rear Admiral King, lost the destroyer Juno, after enduring three hours of heavy attacks. Juno, was the first casualty in the sea battle for Crete and after being hit by three bombs, she sank in only two minutes. Considering the number of ships at sea and the intensity of the air attacks, the loss of only one ship was indicative of the effectiveness of the strategy of concentrating the ships to give mutual support against air attacks. Force A1, Force B, which included Gloucester, and Force D, destroyed at least three enemy aircraft and damaged another two on 21 May.
Force A1, and Glennie’s Force D, had assembled in an area to the south-west of the island of Kythira. The strength of this force was considerable: it was made up of the battleships Warspite and Valiant, the cruisers, Gloucester, Fiji, Ajax, Orion and Dido plus eight destroyers. The group offered considerable mutual protection whilst at the same time being in a position to intercept any attempts by the Italian fleet to defend the seaborne invasion of Crete. The Germans had tried to get the Italian fleet to put to sea in order to draw the British ships away from the seaborne routes to Crete. It would have been a logical strategy for the axis powers to put further pressure on the British, yet the Italian fleet did not put to sea.
Several reasons have been put forward by Commander Bragadin, the Italian naval historian, for the failure of the Italians to put to sea; the strained relationships between the axis powers; a shortage of fuel for the ships; the Luftwaffe’s belief in its own invincibility. Whatever the reasons, it is probable that the crushing defeat at Matapan, only a few weeks earlier, had made the Italians very reluctant to meet the Royal Navy in a further encounter.
Whilst the British forces at sea were enduring relentless attacks from the air, the Germans had captured the airport at Maleme. To reinforce their foothold on Crete, they had organised two flotillas of commandeered Greek caiques and small coastal steamers to transport arms and supplies to their troops on the island. Each vessel carried about 100 German Mountain Troops and a few Italian marines in addition to the equipment aboard. The first of the two convoys which had made its way from Piraeus to Milos, set off on the final seventy mile journey to Crete in the early hours of 21 May.
The Italian battle fleet remained in harbour, although a few small ship were released for escort duty to the seaborne invasion of Crete. The destroyer Lupo was in charge of the Milos to Crete flotilla. Commander Mimbelli, the ship’s captain, had the unenviable task of escorting the flotilla: Lupo was armed with only three 3.9 inch guns and four 18-inch torpedo tubes, and the flotilla could sail at a speed of only four knots to Crete. The Royal Navy dominated the approaches by night, therefore it was imperative that the convoy should arrive at Canea Bay before nightfall.
At 1000, Commander Mimbelli received instructions to turn the flotilla and return to Milos. These instructions were based on German reconnaissance reports that British warships were operating in the flotilla’s direct line of approach to Crete. After returning to Milos, further reconnaissance from the Luftwaffe reported the seas to be clear of Royal Navy ships to the north of Crete and so the flotilla left Milos once again.
The slow speed of the heavily laden caiques meant that they would take over seventeen hours to travel the seventy miles to Crete and it was therefore impossible to reach their destination before dark. Allied reconnaissance soon reported the flotilla’s slow progress and Cunningham ordered the ships of Forces B, C and D to close in and intercept the invasion flotilla, under cover of darkness.
At 2330, Admiral Glennie’s Force D found the luckless convoy when it was just eighteen miles north of Crete. The flotilla, defended only by Lupo, was hopelessly outgunned against the cruisers Dido, Orion and Ajax and the destroyers Janus, Kimberley, Hasty and Hereward.
As soon as the searchlights picked out the caiques, Commander Mimbelli laid a smoke screen to hide his charges and then engaged the British ships with gunfire and torpedoes. Despite his bravery, and the fact that Lupo was hit by eighteen 6-inch shells during the next two hours, Commander Mimbelli was unable to prevent the routing of the convoy and only a few of the original twenty-five ships in the convoy escaped destruction. Greek crews who had been pressed into service by the Germans manned the caiques, which were carrying German Mountain Troops. Despite waving white sheets, the caiques were blown apart by Glennie’s ships and many of their passengers drowned.
Admiral Glennie found the sinking of the Greek caiques unpleasant and in his report on the destruction of the flotilla he later wrote;
‘When illuminated they were seen to be crowded with German troops and to be flying Greek colours. The crews, obviously pressed men, were standing on deck waving white flags and it was distasteful having to destroy them in company with their callous masters’.1
At the time it was believed that some 4,000 German troops had been killed when the convoy was destroyed. On Friday 23 May, the Evening Herald, Plymouth’s local newspaper, carried the headline;
‘Captain Tells How Cruisers
Smashed Nazi Crete Sea Convoy’.
followed by a sub-heading;
‘Ships Rammed: Water Full of Thousands of Germans’.
A Press Association Special Correspondent who had interviewed the captain of one of the cruisers in Alexandria wrote the report. The unnamed officer described to the Press Correspondent how Glennie’s ships had destroyed the invasion force and the report said;
‘Large numbers of caiques were sunk by ramming’.
The news of the destruction of the invasion flotilla was also given to the nation in a radio broadcast given by Commander Anthony Kimmins in which he described how the enemy vessels had been sunk by torpedoes and gunfire. The Daily Express later printed the story;
‘Hun soldiers came tumbling up from between decks and leaping overboard. They were all in their full heavy equipment. In several cases these caiques were rammed. There’s many a ship in the Mediterranean Fleet with a proud dent in her stem, and so the whole of that first German landing force was sent to the bottom while our ships came away unscathed’.2
The destruction of the invasion convoy did not, in fact, account for as much loss of life as was first thought. Research has since shown that the actual number of troops being transported was 2,331 and the final casualty list, issued by the German 12th Army, amounted to 311 officers and men. Whatever the numbers of casualties, those who were fortunate enough to have been picked up by the badly damaged Lupo, or by an air-sea search, told stories of being rammed and run down in the sea. The accounts of German soldiers who were aboard the small boats in the flotilla are of crucial importance in understanding events that took place later in the day. These accounts were fed back to the Luftwaffe pilots who then sought revenge.
A German Officer who was aboard one of the vessels said that morale on all the ships was good and the men were singing the, ‘England Song’, accompanied by men playing concertinas. Suddenly his caique was hit, followed by another broadside; it then sank in a huge tongue of flame. Some of his men had jumped overboard and some had been blown into the sea by the explosion before they managed to get to a dinghy.3
Joseph Wuerz, a paratrooper, recalled how the Greek crew had sabotaged the engine of the caique shortly before the British ships attacked the convoy. His caique had therefore become detached from the convoy and he saw the destruction of the other invasion vessels;
‘We could neither shoot nor help; we just stood by, looking on in helpless rage. One of my dearest friends was found dead after sixteen hours, floating in the sea. Sixty of my company drowned. The survivors were brought back to Athens’.4
Following the decimation of the invasion flotilla, the Germans held an enquiry and evidence was heard from men who had survived the ordeal.
Lieutenant Walter Henglen said that the crew of the caique he was on had attempted to surrender by waving a white towel and signalling with white handkerchiefs. He added that as the British ships were only two hundred metres away they must have seen them through their binoculars, but the next thing he knew was that between ten and fifteen shells hit the craft. Once in the sea, Lieutenant Henglen said;
‘Machine gun bullets splashed in a semi-circle around me’.5
Ernst Stribny, also a survivor, said that a British cruiser had repeatedly passed through the wreckage, firing at the soldiers in the sea and many men had drowned by being sucked under by the ship’s propellers.6
Corporal Grimm also gave evidence of being machine gunned in the sea and of seeing at least ten men die in this way. He added, ominously, that the revenge for this act was then already in the making.7
Notes
1. Letter of Proceedings: Crete, 19-23 May 1941, Rear Admiral Glennie, June 4th 1941 PRO ADM 199/810 110319.
2. Daily Express 30.6.41.
3. Hadjipateras C N and Fafalios M S, Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed, Efstathiadis (Athens) 1989. p.123.
4. Ibid p.125.
5. The Lost Battle of Crete p.240.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.