‘Someone,’ Babington said, ‘boobed badly. We’ll end up losing both Greece and North Africa. We’re short of pilots, aeroplanes, weapons, radios, mechanics, vehicles and petrol, and because of that the Italians, whom we’d fought to a standstill, are beginning to recover their spirits.’
Arriving in Athens via the Middle East as senior administrative officer to the air vice-marshal in command of the RAF in Greece, the first person Dicken had met was his senior signals officer who turned out to be Babington, by now a flight lieutenant. His warrant officer was Handiside.
‘It’s like an old comrades’ club,’ he said.
The first thing he had seen as he landed was a shuffling procession of Wolves of Tuscany, Indomitable Centaurs, or other bombastically labelled members of Mussolini’s vaunted Army of Victory, but there were also dozens of legless Greek soldiers, evidence of frostbite during the fighting of the severe winter. After eighteen months facing the Germans across the Channel, it was also strange to be passing the German Legation – lying arrogantly side by side with the American Legation – every time he left the Hotel Grand Bretagne to go to headquarters, and stranger still to meet German officers at Greek tea parties.
But the war in Greece was officially against the Italians and didn’t concern the Germans and every British serviceman arriving at the Piraeus by sea from North Africa was greeted by the swastika flying over the German consulate, while it took only twenty-four hours to discover that the Germans were deliberately flaunting themselves in the bars that were popular with the RAF. Despite the fact that Britain was supposed to have gone to the aid of the Greeks, there were many influential Greeks who were clearly unfriendly and Babington pointed out that their attitude varied according to the news, and warned of Fascists who waylaid British airmen who strayed away from the main streets.
‘It’s because they know damn well the Germans will be joining in before long,’ he explained.
Drawn from the Desert Air Force, the RAF consisted of Blenheims and Gladiators, together with one squadron of Hurricanes. Other aircraft were constantly arriving but it was very clear there would never be enough when the Germans attacked. There were eight headquarters and maintenance units and a total strength of over 4000, but because a headquarters in Greece had never been contemplated, what existed consisted of officers drawn from a variety of other headquarters who had never before worked together. Operations were being conducted by a wing in the north-east and a wing in the north-west, and the overburdened senior administrative officer was trying not only to run his own organisation but also to co-ordinate the activities of other administrative departments. With a routine of early-morning conferences where instructions were given and difficulties were ironed out, there was little time for pleasure flying, because the shortcomings arising from the hasty entry into the campaign were becoming daily more obvious and Babington’s complaint had clearly not been a frivolous one. There were not enough airfields and landing grounds and there was a complete lack of aerodrome defences because there were no spare weapons and no personnel to man them. There were also no blast pens and nobody to construct them, fitters were in short supply and there were not enough vehicles, aircraft or spare parts.
Babington was working overtime as impassioned signals flashed to Air Headquarters, Middle East, begging for supplies. The replies were always disappointing because there was fighting in Eritrea and Abyssinia and in the Western Desert where recent victories had suddenly gone into reverse, and, because of the need to show an aggressive face to the Continent of Europe, none whatsoever available from Britain itself. In Cairo there was even a tendency to regard Greece as a sideshow.
They still had the whip hand over the Italians, however, and had destroyed ten times as many aircraft as they had lost, but it was obvious it wasn’t going to last, if only from the influx of war correspondents and the arrival in civilian clothes of a large portly gentleman with a sharp sense of humour who spoke down his nose as if he had permanent catarrh – the general who was to be in command if and when British troops arrived.
‘Goddab silly,’ he claimed. ‘I bet the Gerbads dow I’b here eved if dobody else does.’
A Blenheim was available for Dicken’s use but when he had to visit tricky landing grounds near the Albanian or Yugoslav borders, he landed at a neighbouring aerodrome and had himself flown in by someone familiar with the terrain because the unpredictable Greek flying conditions were among the worst in the world.
He found Larissa in ruins, not from bombing, but from an earthquake which had occurred the week before. The whole town looked like a house of cards which had collapsed on itself and police and soldiery were still digging out the bodies. Heading for Paramythea and Yannina on the Albanian front, he had to fly along the Gulf of Corinth and up the coast to Corfu before swinging in to land. As he descended he found himself over a lush green valley flanked by snow-capped mountains. The airfield looked like an English meadow carpeted with spring flowers, the grass kept short by a flock of grazing sheep. There were no runways and no hangars, and aeroplanes were hidden among the bushes and undergrowth. A mud-spattered bus took the pilots to their billets in the town.
Enormous numbers of Greek soldiers were moving northwards through the cobbled streets, all bearded and all dirty, with thousands of mules carrying heavy packs. The RAF men had had a terrible time during the winter, the pouring rain making the town’s main street a river and the temperature dropping several degrees below zero. Fresh crews and aircraft parts were being flown in by ancient Junkers of the Pan-Hellenic Airlines but they were still having to fill tanks from drums when the bowser was out of action and only the fact that the Greeks were in worse condition had kept their spirits up. The Greek wounded were housed in appalling conditions and all the doctors could do was try to prevent the spread of infection and disease. The town had been badly hit by Italian bombing and there were still the rusty remains of cars and lorries in the streets and buildings scorched by blast.
The aerodrome lacked facilities but the field was covered with thousands of alpine flowers with a tremendous range of mountains in stark silhouette to the east. The airmen were living among the olive groves, alongside a fast-moving stream which had been blocked so they could bathe. There was no restaurant in the town and for a mess the officers sat on wooden boxes, eating rations cooked inside a tent. As Dicken arrived a pair of Greek PZLs, obsolete high-wing monoplanes, came in to land, one of them from the wrong direction so that they met in an abrupt halt in the middle of the field. Neither pilot was hurt but both were shouting and gesticulating in rage.
The RAF men were experimenting with whistles. They had attached them to their bombs to create panic among the Italians as the Junkers 87s had in France, and were even wondering if they could attach them to their aircraft for ground-strafing.
‘If you drop a bottle it sounds like a bomb,’ one of them said.
‘So why not drop a latrine bucket?’ another suggested. ‘That ought to make ’em jump.’
Flying back to Athens, Dicken was enchanted by the beauty of the country under the cloudless sky. He could see all the way from snow-covered peaks to indented rocky coasts with a sprinkling of white dolls’ houses and the green of olive groves running down to blue waters which seemed to be clear for a hundred feet down. As he appeared in his office, he was greeted by Babington with a long face.
‘It’s starting, sir,’ he announced. ‘We’ve just received information that the Germans are massing on the Greek frontier. A British Expeditionary Force’s on its way.’
The first convoy of troops arrived at the Piraeus two days later and it was clear that nobody was deluded about what they were facing. As the soldiers marched from the transports, the sailors shouted their farewells. ‘See you again,’ they yelled. ‘On the way out.’
Babington was as cynical as everybody else as he thrust a signal flimsy into Dicken’s hand. ‘They’re planning to build us up to twenty-three squadrons,’ he pointed out.
Dicken’s eyebrows rose. So far they had nine, of which only two flew machines modern enough to handle the German fighters. ‘I hope they’re not Blenheims and Gladiators,’ he said.
There was little to give much cheer as the British troops moved to their positions and nobody was kidding themselves that the crisis was far away. For the life of him Dicken couldn’t see the thinking that had enabled anyone to believe that a campaign in Greece could be anything but a disaster. Everything for its support would have to come across hundreds of miles of sea, while the Germans would have no difficulty in advancing by road all the way down the Balkan peninsula.
His flights to the outlying aerodromes intensified. The strain on the faces of the pilots was obvious as they begged for more vehicles, more materials, more men, more machines, which Dicken was well aware he couldn’t provide. When he returned to Athens early in April he was tired enough to drink a large whisky and to flop into his bed exhausted. He seemed to have been asleep no more than a few minutes when he was wakened by his batman with a cup of tea.
‘A fine morning, sir,’ he announced. ‘We’ve just heard that the balloon’s gone up. German troops have crossed the border.’
Swallowing the tea as he dressed, Dicken headed for Babington’s office. Babington arrived at the same time and Handiside gave them the news together.
‘They’ve also gone into Yugoslavia,’ he said. ‘And the Luftwaffe’s bombing Belgrade. It’s Rotterdam all over again.’
The news was grim. The Germans had 33 divisions, six of them armoured, and the Yugoslavs were trying to oppose them with men on horseback. The Luftwaffe seemed to be having it all its own way, while along the Greek border the dispositions of the Greek and British forces were thrown off balance by the collapse of the Yugoslavs. The main body of the Greek army was facing the Italians in Albania, with the British army and three Greek divisions deployed on a line between the Aegean Sea and Yugoslav frontier. Three more Greek divisions watched the Rupel Pass.
‘It’s a bloody long front,’ Dicken growled.
They had learned that reinforcements of Hurricanes were aboard a ship in the Piraeus, and the AOC was understandably worried. Apart from Kalamata in Morea, Pireaus, eight miles to the south, was the only port of any consequence and its importance was paramount. Inevitably the Germans would try to bomb it and during the morning Dicken drove down to find out what had happened to the aeroplanes.
The harbour was congested to the point of chaos. Nobody had thought to appoint a British naval officer in charge and the port captain was struggling on his own to clear the congestion. Certain the Germans would bomb the place, he had already ordered all ships to clear the harbour but an ammunition ship, Clan Fraser, was still lying alongside. The decks had been emptied of the motor vehicles and stores she had carried but her cargo of explosives had been only partially cleared into lighters which still lay alongside, and there were still 250 tons of TNT aboard.
Another ammunition ship, Goalpara, lay alongside the Sea Transport Office and City of Roubaix, also carrying ammunition, lay with Clan Cumming near the Custom House. Outside the harbour, in the calm of a fine evening, lay the cruisers, Perth, Calcutta and Coventry, and several destroyers.
‘We all know what’ll happen,’ the captain of Clan Fraser said. ‘As soon as the air raid alarm goes the stevedores’ll bolt.’
Before the morning was out it was clear the Germans were trying to cut the Allies in half by isolating the troops in Albania. At the same time they were attacking Salonika and trying to cut off the Greeks in Eastern Macedonia. The Greeks were withdrawing from Thrace and the Germans were breaking through the Rupel Pass and the Monastir Gap, while the British troops, barely settled into their positions, were already moving into reverse under fierce air attacks. Intelligence showed that the Germans had around 800 aircraft against which the British Air Force, Greece, could put up only eighty machines out of the total of 150, the rest unserviceable for lack of spares.
Air raid warnings kept sounding but no German aircraft appeared. Early reports indicated that Blenheims had made successful attacks on German armoured columns and motorised units heading south while Wellingtons were bombing strategic targets. They all knew the success was only temporary, however, because, as soon as the Germans seized the Salonika Plain, they would establish landing grounds south of the mountains and fly in fighters.
The operations room in Athens had been dug out of the rock near the crest of Mount Lycabettus in the centre of the city, and when the air raid sirens went for the fifth time that night, instead of heading for the shelter everyone moved on to the terrace to see what was happening. The night was pitch dark but they could see one or two searchlights probing the sky and could hear aircraft droning above.
Almost immediately, there was a series of explosions to the south and it became obvious at once that the Germans were trying to neutralise Piraeus harbour. In silence they saw anti-aircraft tracers stabbing upwards and the flickering lights of their shells bursting. Then, as they watched, there was a tremendous explosion from the south-west. The whole sky went red and in the glare they could see a mounting cloud of black smoke lifting in the form of a mushroom as it reached the upper air and began to spread. More explosions followed so that the windows shook and the blast seemed to stagger them, even though they knew it came from eight miles away. Then, as the glare changed to a variety of colours, the telephone behind them jangled. Babington snatched it up.
Jerry’s hit Clan Fraser,’ he said. ‘When she went up she set off other explosions. She’s now a wreck and adrift with the lighters still alongside.’
When they arrived at the harbour, it was a scene of devastation and confusion. One bomb had crashed on to Clan Fraser’s foredeck, a second into the engine room, and a third had struck aft. The bridge and upperworks had vanished, showering debris over the ship and injuring the master. Nearby, City of Roubaix and Goalpara were also ablaze, their cargos in imminent danger of exploding. Clan Cumming, so far undamaged but berthed near City of Roubaix, was clearly also doomed.
A naval officer trying to organise tugs was in a fury of frustration. ‘The only bloody way we can avoid the complete destruction of the harbour and the installations,’ he stormed, ‘is to tow the damn ships out!’
Soon afterwards they saw a tug threading its way through the glare of flames, the naval officer and two of his men in the bows, half obscured by the smoke, the drifting dust and the glittering fragments of burning material drawn up by the fierceness of the blaze. They had just reached Clan Fraser when there was another colossal explosion. Diving behind the stone-built building, Dicken saw the car he and Babington had used flung end-over-end and the next moment they were surrounded by falling fragments of stone, iron, steel and wood. His lungs emptied as the blast drew air from them and his cars filled with sound. When he looked up all that remained of Clan Fraser were two shattered ends. The lighters alongside had erupted and the tug, empty of life, lay wrecked and drifting alongside. All round them buildings and small craft had been ignited by blazing debris. Warehouses had been reduced to rubble and red hot corrugated iron sheets were skating down through the flames and smoke like huge razor blades.
Almost immediately, another violent explosion convulsed the harbour as Goalpara blew up, and a few minutes later a third giant explosion tore City of Roubaix apart. As she settled by the quayside, flames erupting from her decks, alongside her, her bridge and upperworks damaged by the blast, Clan Cumming began to blaze.
They found themselves trying to organise ambulances and dragging away charred and bleeding dock-workers, their clothes blown from their bodies. Everywhere among the smoking debris were the mutilated remains of men, women and children. Bloodstained people were being carried away on blown-off doors, and others, shocked by the destruction, were screaming and tearing at their hair. Cars, twisted out of shape, had been flung against buildings that were nothing more than piles of rubble, their white walls splashed with blood.
Eleven ships totalling more than 40,000 tons had been lost and the damage was enormous. Not a building had any glass in its windows and dozens of the small houses surrounding the area had been flattened. The Pireaus had ceased to function. Communications had vanished, seven of the twelve berths were useless, the port’s administration had collapsed and the twenty merchantmen still waiting outside the harbour were unable to take on water and fuel. The Greek harbour pilots, like the stevedores and dockyard workers, had fled inland for safety.
When they returned to headquarters, it was to find that the Germans had pushed through the Rupel Pass, that fighters were beginning to operate from the Salonika Plain, and that British troops in the north were already under fierce and unrelenting air attacks. Blenheims were still trying to get at the German columns but now they were facing Me109s and they were being shot out of the sky by the faster German machines from airfields supplied by transport aircraft. Greek morale had plunged.
‘We’re pulling out of the Vardar front to Mount Olympus and the Aliakman River,’ the AOC said.
Only the Hurricanes had the slightest chance against the German fighters and there were too few of them, while every one of six Blenheims sent to bomb Monastir failed to return. It seemed to Dicken that with the resources at their disposal they were not going to be able to hold on and if retreat were left too late they could lose everything, and he began to organise the withdrawal of the squadrons further south before they were overwhelmed.
Preparing an administrative instruction for a redistribution of units, he was about to issue it to unit commanders when it occurred to him he had better show it to the Air Officer Commanding. To his surprise the AOC was not alone. In the corridor outside his room were several parachute bags and inside a group of officers. Their uniforms were neat and, unlike most of the men struggling to keep things going in Greece, they did not look tired or harassed.
‘Dick,’ the AOC said. ‘We’ve been sent help. You know Air Commodore Diplock, I think. I believe you’re related, in fact, aren’t you?’
‘We’ve come to organise the situation,’ Diplock said coldly. ‘We were sent out from England to try to see things clearly. We arrived yesterday by flying boat.’
Dicken pushed forward the plan he’d written. ‘Doubtless you’ll wish to see this then,’ he said. ‘It’s an instruction for the redistribution of RAF units. In case of withdrawal.’
Diplock gave him a contemptuous look. ‘We’re not here to retreat,’ he said. He took the sheets of paper, glanced at them, then let them skate from his hand to the desk. ‘We’ll start worrying about retreating when we have to. At the moment we need to maintain a measure of secrecy, and plans to stay where we are are better than panic plans for a withdrawal.’
As Dicken silently filed the report, Babington looked up.
‘Aren’t we issuing it, sir?’
‘Not now.’
‘But, sir–’
‘Dry up, Bab!’
Babington frowned and said nothing. A moment later Dicken looked up. ‘Sorry I was rude, Bab,’ he said. ‘It isn’t your fault. It’s just that there seems to be an unnecessary obsession here with secrecy that doesn’t seem to have much point.’
By this time the retreat was increasing in momentum, and it was clear that even when they were established on their new line it was going to be almost impossible to hold it because whole battalions and brigades of Greeks were already surrendering and another retreat had started from the Olympus Line to the Thermopylae Line.
‘Isn’t that where Leonidas and the Spartans held the Persians in 480 BC?’ Babington asked. ‘I seem to remember reading about it at school.’
Dicken frowned. ‘They all died,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope our people aren’t all going to die.’