8
‘Most Secret Sources’
Major General Bernard Freyberg VC, the commander of the New Zealand Division, only reached Crete on 29 April. With characteristic determination, he had refused to leave Greece until the last moment to ensure that as many of his men were evacuated as possible. He looked forward to reassembling the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Egypt as a single formation. His 6th Brigade had gone on to Alexandria, and he assumed that the other New Zealand units evacuated to Crete would follow in the next few days. The possibility that he might be asked to stay to command the island’s defence never occurred to him. But for Churchill, Freyberg was the obvious choice. And Wavell was urged to appoint him – tantamount to an order in the circumstances.
Freyberg’s career was endowed with the muscular morality of the Edwardian hero. At school in New Zealand, he proved himself a champion swimmer, but his academic performance did not indicate a reflective or enquiring mind. He studied to be a dentist but, on the prospect of war in 1914, made his way to London to volunteer. He had no military experience other than as a territorial subaltern in New Zealand. The story that Freyberg, on his way to Europe, had joined Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico and ‘reached the rank of General’ was a preposterous exaggeration which Churchill helped circulate. This canard, which gave him ‘a certain amount of notoriety’, lasted until after the Second World War. ‘The truth is’, Freyberg said in 1948 when Governor-General of New Zealand, ‘I have never bothered to contradict it.’
Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, secured Freyberg a commission in the Royal Naval Division, and took pride in his deeds of cold courage – swimming by night to a hostile shore near Gallipoli with flares to confuse the Turks, and winning a Victoria Cross after leading the Royal Naval Division’s Hood Battalion to capture Beaucourt in Flanders.
Freyberg, who had been a slightly incongruous comrade of such aesthetes of the lost generation as Rupert Brooke, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Charles Lister, was lionized by hostesses after the Armistice. Fascinated by his lack of fear, Churchill describes in a curious paragraph how, during a country house weekend, he had asked Freyberg to strip to allow him to count his twenty-seven wounds. Freyberg modestly explained before taking off his clothes that ‘You nearly always get two wounds for every bullet or splinter, because mostly they have to go out as well as in.’
During the inter-war years Freyberg settled down. He married a remarkable woman, both well-connected and greatly liked, and left behind the ostentatious bravery of his youth when his ambition to win medals had been ingenuously proclaimed. He retired from the Army in 1934. Five years later, on the outbreak of war, Churchill lobbied on his behalf when the future command of New Zealand’s expeditionary force was discussed. But Churchill’s intervention made little difference to the deliberations: the New Zealand forces at that time had no other obvious candidate.
In the early days, Freyberg was not popular, especially with his staff officers. He had acquired the formalism of the British Army of that time and lost touch with the New Zealand of his youth. To the irritation of his officers, he busied himself with details which he should have left to them. But as the war progressed, they grew to admire his strengths: on top of his bravery he had a genuine interest in the welfare of his men and he was a first-class trainer of troops. And they developed a humorous, although occasionally exasperated, affection for his weaknesses.
These failings – chiefly obstinacy, muddled thinking and an extreme reluctance to criticize subordinates – became especially important in the circumstances of Crete. Freyberg was famous for his inability to sack a useless officer, even after promising his staff that he would go through with it. ‘He could not bear to be unkind,’ one of them wrote later. On numerous occasions he went to great lengths to avoid such a distressing duty. This was perhaps part of that soft-heartedness very often found in large men of prodigious physical courage.
Bernard Freyberg was indeed large, and the description barrel-chested for once fitted perfectly. Churchill called him ‘the great St Bernard’, which suggests also his rather endearing schoolboyish enthusiasms. When he wore his ‘lemon-squeezer’ hat, he really did look like ‘a huge scoutmaster’, as another of his staff officers remarked.
Freyberg provides yet another example of how storybook heroes seldom make good generals. A member of the War Cabinet staff felt that Churchill was too impressed by men of action. ‘Winston was a bad judge of character. He didn’t seem able to relate the task to the man needed to do it. He automatically went for men who had been tremendous fire-eaters in their youth, almost thinking “Who is most like I was then?”’
• • •
On 30 April, the day after he reached Crete on board HMS Ajax, Freyberg was summoned to a conference with his two immediate superiors, General Wilson and General Wavell. This meeting took place at Ay Marina in a large seashore villa with a rooftop balcony sheltered by an awning which flapped in the breeze.
The Commander-in-Chief arrived by car from Maleme airfield where he had landed after an uncomfortable flight from Egypt in a Blenheim. Churchill had sent the following signal two days before: ‘It seems clear from our information that a heavy airborne attack by German troops and bombers will soon be made on Crete. Let me know what forces you have in the island and what your plans are. It ought to be a fine opportunity for killing the parachute troops. The island must be stubbornly defended.’
Having accorded Crete the lowest priority possible for the last six months, despite Churchill’s instructions, Wavell was depressed by his renewed pugnacity. ‘Winston is always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats,’ he said to Chips Channon. Disastrous aircraft losses during the fall of Greece meant that there were not enough Hurricanes left to provide adequate fighter cover. As a result, both the Royal Navy and the RAF had rather lost interest in the island as a forward base. The opportunity to develop aerodromes for long-range bombing of the Ploesti oilfields seems to have slipped from strategic thinking at this stage. Meanwhile the Army needed every battalion and tank available to cope with Rommel’s advance in North Africa, and Wavell now had to put together a force to relieve British bases in Iraq besieged in an uprising which the Germans had promised to support.
First of all Wavell took Jumbo Wilson on one side and told him, ‘I want you to go to Jerusalem and relieve Baghdad.’ Then he called Freyberg over and, having complimented him on the performance of the New Zealand Division in Greece, said that he wanted him to command Creforce.
Freyberg did not conceal his dismay. ‘I told him’, he wrote later in a report to the New Zealand government, ‘that I wanted to get back to Egypt to concentrate the Division and train and re-equip it and I added that my Government would never agree to the Division being split permanently. He then said that he considered it my duty to remain and take on the job. I could do nothing but accept . . . There was not very much to discuss. We were told that Crete would be held. The scale of attack envisaged was five to six thousand airborne troops, plus a possible seaborne attack. The primary objectives of this attack were considered to be Heraklion and Maleme aerodromes.’
• • •
Freyberg was the seventh commander of British forces on the island since their arrival the previous November. He was appointed over Major General Weston of the Royal Marines, who had recently arrived to command the various elements of the Mobile Naval Base Defence Organisation. Weston, who had displayed considerable energy during his four days in office, believed that the appointment of General Officer Commanding had been offered to him, so he felt aggrieved by the abrupt change. This senior Marine officer was a curious mixture. He possessed an analytical mind and a much clearer view of enemy strategy than his successor, yet was self-important and liable to behave unreasonably over small incidents.
That afternoon Creforce Headquarters was established in a quarry above Canea on the west side of the neck of the peninsula that formed the shelter of Suda Bay. The site was perfect. It looked down the coast towards Maleme and, swinging a few degrees left, over the valley leading to Canea which Brigadier Tidbury had correctly identified six months before as the second enemy dropping zone in the area of Canea.
Weston jealously held on to his personnel so Freyberg found himself without a headquarters staff. ‘There weren’t even clerks and signallers,’ he later recorded, ‘only an officers’ mess.’ Freyberg, even though he was no prima donna, may well have been privately upset by Weston’s behaviour, but friction between them seems to have had little influence on events, perhaps because Freyberg backed away from any unpleasantness.
Freyberg clearly wondered what he had been landed with. In spite of Churchill’s command of November 1940 and repeated demands, basic measures for the defence of the island had not been taken. The subsequent excuse of GHQ Middle East that there were not enough resources to go round, although true, was also disingenuous. No effort was made to think things through: that fatal British vice of compromise, spreading the jam so thinly that it did no good anywhere, was all too evident. The will and energy for hard decisions were in even shorter supply than materials.
Peter Wilkinson, the SOE officer who had come to Crete to observe the parachute invasion, wrote in his report to Colonel Colin Gubbins at SOE’s headquarters in London: ‘Our staff appeared to suffer from complete inertia. Not even the most elementary preparations had been made. Although we have now been over six months in Crete, there is not a single road from Canea to the south coast that can be used for military transport – though there were only four miles to complete when they arrived here.’
Crete, with its mountain ranges like battlements facing Africa, could only be resupplied through ports on the north coast. With German airfields in Greece, this was a grave weakness, as the constant pall of black smoke over Suda Bay demonstrated: ten merchant ships totalling fifty thousand tons were sunk by air attack in under a month.
Only strong air cover could protect shipping, and Middle East command did not have enough Hurricane squadrons to allow them to be destroyed on pathetically vulnerable airfields. Nobody doubted the bravery of the RAF pilots. Soldiers watched in anguish at the odds they faced. One of the last Hurricanes at Maleme rose into the sky alone against a swarm of Messerschmitts which fell on it, in the words of a Bofors gunner, ‘like a horde of hawks on a single sparrow’. But tardy and half-hearted attempts to construct fighter pens and satellite airfields protected by the mountains attracted fierce criticism. ‘The attitude of the RAF beggars description,’ Wilkinson continued in his report to Gubbins. ‘Their excuses are not borne out by fact, and if the Germans can improvise aerodromes from which Junkers can take off six hours after landing, one feels something might have been done in six months of peaceful occupation. Because whatever the results of the Greek Campaign it must have been obvious to a schoolboy that Crete was the natural half-way house.’
Similarly, the courage of Royal Navy and Merchant Navy crews was not matched by administrative will-power on land. ‘There was no foam fire fighting apparatus in Suda Bay,’ Wilkinson continued, ‘although it had been a so-called naval base for six months.’
• • •
Freyberg, understandably concerned to discover the true state of affairs, sent a signal to Wavell in Cairo. ‘Forces at my disposal are totally inadequate to meet attack envisaged. Unless fighter aircraft are greatly increased and naval forces made available to deal with seaborne attack I cannot hope to hold out with land forces alone, which as a result of campaign in Greece are now devoid of any artillery, have insufficient tools for digging, very little transport, and inadequate war reserves of equipment and ammunition. Force here can and will fight, but without full support from Navy and Air Force cannot hope to repel invasion.’ On the same day he sent his own government a similar message: ‘There is no evidence of naval forces capable of guaranteeing us against seaborne invasion and air force in island consists 6 Hurricanes and 17 obsolete aircraft.’
The use of phrases such as ‘seaborne invasion’ assumed that the enemy intended to mount a beach-storming operation, rather than reinforce his airborne troops by sea on a part of the coast he had already captured. They were, of course, very different matters. So different were they in the context of the Battle of Crete, that this misunderstanding completely distorted General Freyberg’s view of enemy intentions to the point that he misread an Ultra signal on the second day of the battle with disastrous, and almost certainly decisive, consequences.
Wavell, with Admiral Cunningham’s assurance, replied that the Navy would support him and that even if the decision to hold Crete were reversed, there was little time left to evacuate the island. To judge by his signal to London of 1 May – ‘our information points insufficient sea-going shipping left Aegean for large-scale sea-borne operations’ – Wavell clearly did not share Freyberg’s concern with the sea. Churchill’s view of the threat was also different from Freyberg’s, as his signal to the Prime Minister of New Zealand on 3 May shows: ‘Our information points to an airborne attack being delivered in the near future, with possibly an attempt at seaborne attack. The Navy will certainly do their utmost to prevent the latter, and it is unlikely to succeed on any large scale. So far as airborne attack is concerned, this ought to suit the New Zealanders down to the ground, for they will be able to come to close quarters, man to man, with the enemy, who will not have the advantage of tanks and artillery, on which he so largely relies.’
As Wavell’s ADC, Peter Coats, observed, Freyberg was ‘a man of quickly changing moods, easily depressed and as easily elated.’ Only four days after his very pessimistic messages to Wavell and the New Zealand government, Freyberg signalled to London: ‘Cannot understand nervousness; am not in the least anxious about airborne attack; have made my dispositions and feel can cope adequately with the troops at my disposal. Combination of seaborne and airborne attack is different. If that comes before I can get the guns and transport here the situation will be difficult. Even so, provided Navy can help, trust all will be well.’
The Chiefs of Staff in London appear to have been disconcerted by Freyberg’s back-to-front analysis of the enemy threat. The following day this signal was sent to Cairo: ‘Please enquire from General Freyberg whether he is receiving Orange Leonard [Ultra] information from Cairo if not please arrange to pass relevant OL information maintaining utmost security.’*
• • •
Since Freyberg’s misreading of Ultra at the crucial moment of the battle has never before been fully explored, it is important to look closely at how it happened.
The invasion of Crete represented the first major test of Ultra in operational conditions. The possibility that the Germans were considering a Mediterranean island as a target for a major parachute assault was understood from signals intercepted in mid-April during the Allied retreat in Greece. An indication that the target was Crete came on 25 April, a few hours before Hitler’s headquarters issued the Führer Directive for Operation Mercury. Over the next few days, the enemy intention to invade from the air became increasingly clear: Mercury was a Luftwaffe operation and the Luftwaffe’s lax cypher discipline greatly helped Hut 3 at Bletchley. On 28 April, London arranged to send a resumé of relevant Ultra intercepts to the senior RAF officer on the island, Group Captain George Beamish, and then to Freyberg when he took command of Creforce two days later.
In the course of the meeting of 30 April, Wavell briefed Freyberg on ‘most secret sources’ or ‘most reliable sources’, as Ultra intelligence was euphemistically termed, but did not disclose exactly what this source was. He gave Freyberg the impression that the information came from a well-placed spy of the Secret Intelligence Service. (Freyberg’s son and biographer, Paul, the late Lord Freyberg, claims that his father knew from the beginning what the true source was, but his version is unconvincing. Yet whatever General Freyberg believed the OL or ‘Orange Leonard’ source to be, it will always be known as Ultra material here.)
The rules governing the use of Ultra material were unclear. Jumbo Wilson, presumably with Wavell’s blessing, used Ultra to avoid entrapment during the German advance on the mainland. It is thus very hard to imagine Wavell forbidding Freyberg to make use of it in Crete, especially after the Chiefs of Staff signalled on 9 May – ‘So complete is our information that it appears to present heaven sent opportunity of dealing enemy heavy blow.’ And on Churchill’s orders, a senior staff officer, Brigadier Eric Dorman-Smith, was flown to Crete on 11 May to brief Freyberg on the accumulated intelligence. Dorman-Smith was impressed by Freyberg’s courage but depressed by his tactical sense and ‘ruefully put him in his “Bear of Little Brain” category’. Dorman-Smith took back to Cairo a letter from Freyberg to Wavell which read: ‘If they come as an airborne attack against our aerodromes I feel sure we should be able to stop him if he attacks after the 16th. If however he makes a combined operation of it with a beach landing with tanks, then we shall not be in a strong position.’
• • •
Freyberg’s confusion about the relative strengths of the airborne and seaborne forces had begun at that first meeting with Wavell on 30 April. The figure of ‘five to six thousand airborne troops plus a possible sea attack’ appears to have been a rather conservative reading of a Joint Intelligence Committee report of 27 April which stated: ‘The Germans could transport up to 3,000 parachute or airborne troops in the first sortie or possibly 4,000 if gliders are used. Two or possibly three sorties per day could be made from Greece.’ Neither Wavell nor Freyberg grasped the point that this estimate of the Germans’ air transport capacity was merely for the first day. Wavell should have had a clearer idea since the first report on the airborne force initially allocated to the operation – the 7th Parachute Division and the 22nd Airlanding Division – reached Cairo on 26 April.
The first formal estimate arrived from London in Ultra signal OL 2167 on 6 May (see Appendix C). It gave the proposed invasion date of 17 May, and an enemy airlanding strength of two divisions plus corps troops and added elements. This was an accurate forecast. Confusion then arose from the Twelfth Army’s decision to keep the 22nd Division up in Roumania and send Major General Ringel’s 5th Mountain Division instead. And because of their heavy losses in the fighting at the Rupel Pass, part of a mountain regiment from another division was added to Ringel’s two regiments. Later the same day, a correcting signal, OL 2168, was sent to Cairo and Crete. ‘Flak units further troops and supplies mentioned our 2167 are to proceed by sea to Crete. Also three mountain regiments thought more likely than third mountain regiment.’
Somehow, this signal seems to have given the Directorate of Military Intelligence two wrong ideas: first, that three mountain regiments were now coming in addition to the 7th Parachute Division and the 22nd Airlanding Division; and second, that three mountain regiments were coming by sea. Wavell’s signal doubting the enemy’s ability to assemble sufficient ships does not appear to have had much effect. And the possibility of an airbridge by Junkers 52, like the one which brought General Franco’s Army of Africa from Morocco to Seville in 1936, does not seem to have been considered.
A much more detailed signal sent the next day, an accurate analysis by the Air Ministry (OL 2170), clearly indicated that the seaborne contingent represented a very minor element of the whole operation. But the damage was revived by a subsequent signal, OL 2/302 on 13 May, in which the compiler again assumed that both the 22nd Airlanding Division and the 5th Mountain Division were taking part. As a result Freyberg was told that the ‘invading force . . . will consist of some thirty to thirty-five thousand men, of which some twelve thousand will be the parachute landing contingent, and ten thousand will be transported by sea.’ As a comparison of the signals (in Appendix C) will show, this was a case of rearranging figures to fit a hypothesis. Little differentiation was made between speculation and hard intelligence.
Freyberg, the commander on the ground, did not spot that anything was wrong. Although he possessed an excellent memory (a useful talent since the messages were supposed to be burnt after reading) he lacked the analytical intellect and the scepticism necessary to identify inconsistencies. The notion of a seaborne invasion became fixed in his mind even though the information he received pointed only to the transport of reinforcements. Such was his preoccupation that he came to regard a maritime operation as a greater threat than all the airborne troops who, even in the figures of the mistaken report, represented a far more immediate and much greater threat.
Apart from the confusion over the 22nd Airlanding Division, few commanders in history had enjoyed such precise intelligence on their opponent’s intentions, timing and objectives. Churchill’s comment after the war, although magnanimous, is clear: ‘Freyberg was undaunted. He did not readily believe the scale of air attack would be so gigantic. His fear was of powerful organised invasion from the sea. This we hoped the Navy would prevent in spite of our air weaknesses.’ And Freyberg himself later acknowledged: ‘We for our part were mostly preoccupied by seaborne landings, not by the threat of air landings.’
Freyberg, having been misled a certain distance in one direction, was unable to see things in proportion. He firmly seized the stick by the wrong end and, as later events showed, he could not let go. His obstinacy and lack of comprehension were something of a joke amongst his fellow generals. General Sir Brian Horrocks, later Freyberg’s corps commander in the desert, told a friend that he used to put a couple of obvious but unimportant points into his orders which he knew Freyberg would contest, and which he could concede.
The revisionist theory of events propagated by Freyberg’s son, Paul, the late Lord Freyberg – that his father was deeply shocked to discover the true nature of the airborne threat on 7 May, but could not move any troops to reinforce Maleme airfield in case this betrayed the secret of Ultra – is hard to accept, if only because General Freyberg’s letter to Wavell on 13 May and his subsequent behaviour contradict it. His continuing preoccupation with invasion from the sea, his calamitous misreading of what turned out to be the most important signal of the battle, and his relative lack of interest in Maleme until the morning of 22 May (two days after the invasion, by which time the Germans had captured the airfield and landed reinforcements) do not suggest a man who had recognized the enemy’s intention, yet found himself frustrated by security precautions.
Most ironically of all, Freyberg appears to have helped preserve the secret of Ultra better by having misunderstood the contents than by his painstaking preservation of secrecy. The German report on the Battle of Crete, Gefechtbericht XI Fl.Korps–Einsatz Kreta, later recorded: ‘One thing stands out from all the information gleaned from the enemy (prisoners’ statements, diaries and captured documents) that they were on the whole very well informed about German intentions, thanks to an excellent espionage network, but expected that the bulk of the invasion forces would come by sea.’
• • •
General Freyberg’s misreading of the threat inevitably produced a damaging compromise both in the disposition of his troops and in his operational orders, which confused priorities. Brigadier Tidbury’s plan – to combat airborne assaults on the three north coast airfields of Heraklion, Rethymno and Maleme, and in the Ayia valley south-west of Canea – was adapted in the Maleme and Canea sectors to face an assault from the sea.
At Heraklion, Freyberg had Brigadier Chappel’s 14th Infantry Brigade with regular battalions of the Black Watch and the York and Lancaster Regiment reinforced by an Australian battalion, and a Greek regiment of three battalions. They were joined at the last moment by the 2nd Leicesters and, finally, by a battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who were landed on the south coast at Tymbaki (see Appendix B for full order of battle).
At Rethymno there were two Australian battalions and two Greek battalions guarding the airfield, and in the town a very effective force of Cretan gendarmes who were properly armed. Two main groups of reserves were organised: another two Australian battalions with most of the motor transport at Georgioupolis, between Suda and Rethymno, and the 4th New Zealand Brigade as well as the 1st Battalion of the Welch Regiment close to Canea and Creforce Headquarters.*
Along the crucial sector between Canea and Maleme, the New Zealand Division was deployed to defend the coast as well as the airfield and the valley. This allowed little depth to their defences. Also the divisional reserve, the 20th Battalion, and the main force reserve were both positioned close to Canea rather than near Maleme airfield, the enemy’s main designated objective.
Freyberg had jumped to the conclusion that he faced ‘a seaborne landing bringing tanks’, yet he ordered no study of likely beaches. A rapid examination of naval charts would have shown that in the Suda, Akrotiri, Canea and Maleme sectors, only the beach from Maleme to Platanias could have been considered possible for a landing in any strength, and then only if the Germans had assault ships and landing craft, which they did not.*
A number of regimental officers noticed this flaw in their orders. The Welch Regiment, which had been based on that stretch of coast since February, considered an ‘invasion by sea’ a ‘somewhat unlikely possibility’. But the only senior officer in the New Zealand Division to spot it was Colonel Howard Kippenberger, commanding the improvised 10th Brigade to the west of Canea, and he did not raise the question at the time: he just reduced his troops watching seawards.
Most astonishing of all, Freyberg’s extended line of defence came to a halt on the far edge of Maleme airfield, which General Wavell and intelligence reports had identified from the beginning as one of the enemy’s principal objectives. Brigadier Tidbury had pointed out over five months before, on 25 November, that the site of this airfield had been badly chosen because it was acutely vulnerable to attack. Brigadier Puttick, who had taken Freyberg’s place as divisional commander, soon became conscious of the threat to his flank. He asked for reinforcements to cover the river-bed of the Tavronitis on the west side of the airfield, since it offered an ideal assembly area for enemy paratroops.
Creforce Headquarters apparently applied for permission from the Greek authorities to move the 1st Greek Regiment from Kastelli Kissamou, but only received agreement on 13 May. (This seems strange since Freyberg had already been given full command of all Greek forces.) Freyberg then said that the airborne attack was imminent, so there would not be time for them to march to the Tavronitis and dig trenches. It is possible, but not probable, that he thwarted this move in the belief that it might betray ‘most secret sources’, a perhaps exaggerated fear since he already had one battalion round the airfield and two on the eastern side.
Freyberg spent little time studying the ground at Maleme. Colonel Jasper Blunt urged him to move more troops there, but Freyberg refused, either to safeguard the secret source of their intelligence, or because he did not want to diminish his coastal defences. In any case, he considered Heraklion a more important objective for the enemy, and he lacked confidence in the abilities of the commander there, Brigadier Chappel of the 14th Infantry Brigade. His reconnaissances were also limited ‘owing to policy matters holding me at HQ’.
One distraction was the question of whether the King should remain on Crete or leave before the German invasion began. Wavell, the Foreign Office and the War Cabinet in London believed he should stay as an example to neutral countries. General Heywood, on the other hand, argued that the indignity and danger of having to run away the moment the enemy landed should be avoided by his immediate withdrawal to Egypt. The King seems to have had little say in his own fate.
Freyberg was understandably dubious at the idea of the King remaining on the island, since defending a group of civilians against parachutists was the most uncertain calculation of all. He felt that they were far too exposed out at Perivolia, where they were staying in an old Venetian country house called Bela Kapina (a corruption of Bella Campagna), and invited them to move within the perimeter of Creforce Headquarters. But during their visit on 17 May to the building earmarked for them, a heavy air raid forced the King and his companions to take cover in slit trenches. King George decided to refuse the accommodation offered. Two days later, on the eve of the invasion, he moved instead with his entourage to another house near Perivolia, closer to the foothills of the White Mountains over which they would have to escape.
Freyberg’s responsibility for all the Greek forces on the island included feeding and arming them. Weapons were handed out in a random manner from the Greek army headquarters in Canea – Steyers, Mausers, Mannlichers, Lee Enfields and a few antiquated St Etienne machine guns; a handful of cartridges, often of the wrong calibre, was pushed across at the same time. Few men received more than three rounds apiece.
Freyberg did not share the prejudices of some of his officers who deprecated the worth of these Greek units, mostly withdrawn from the mainland and supplemented by ill-trained recruits. Kippenberger described those attached to his brigade as ‘malaria-ridden little chaps from Macedonia with four weeks’ service’. Freyberg appointed Colonel Guy Salisbury-Jones from the Military Mission in Greece to take over the task of organisation and liaison. Eight Greek regiments were formed from 9,000 men. Some of their battalions collapsed at the shock of battle, either due to poor leadership, or because their training and armament were inadequate to face determined attacks by German paratroop forces. But others astonished their detractors by their staunchness. In a fierce defence towards the end of the battle the 8th Greek Regiment, strengthened with Cretan guerrillas, saved the Commonwealth forces from envelopment at the most critical stage of their retreat.
It is greatly to Freyberg’s credit that he quickly recognized how ‘the entire population of Crete desired to fight’. Some British officers clung to the presumption that their regular troops would still perform better in an irregular battle than Cretans fighting in defence of their native land with an unbeatable knowledge of the ground and generations of guerrilla warfare behind them. Their least forgivable disservice to the Cretans was their failure to give volunteers some form of uniform and thus afford them an official status to protect them from being shot on capture as francs-tireurs. Even if they thought there were no weapons to hand out – in Canea, 400 Lee Enfield rifles remained locked up in the ancient Venetian galley sheds beside the harbour – the idea of handing over captured enemy weapons does not seem to have occurred to many officers until they saw what the Cretans could achieve with the crudest of weapons and virtually suicidal bravery.
• • •
Freyberg’s lack of confidence in Brigadier Chappel at Heraklion has never been satisfactorily explained. Chappel, a regular officer from the Welch Regiment of great experience, may not have been a very charismatic figure but he was by no means inferior to most of his New Zealand counterparts.
Distance, shortage of transport and the bad condition of the coast road between Heraklion and Canea made Chappel’s command there virtually independent. Installed in a quarry, like Creforce itself, 14th Infantry Brigade’s headquarters personnel were drawn mostly from the Black Watch which provided the defence platoon, the brigade major, Richard Fleming, and Lieutenant Gordon Hope-Morley, one of the two intelligence officers.
The other intelligence officer was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who spoke Greek as well as German. After his semi-piratical adventures on the island of Antikithera, Leigh Fermor had reached Kastelli Kissamou. Soon afterwards, he met up with Prince Peter of Greece and Michael Forrester, his fellow member of the British Military Mission. The three of them spent several days based at Prince Peter’s house on the coast north of Galatas. Then, when Leigh Fermor continued eastwards to Heraklion, Forrester acted as Colonel Salisbury-Jones’s liaison officer, checking on the needs of the Greek regiments. The two men met up for dinner in Heraklion on the night of 18 May when Forrester visited the two Greek regiments grouped within and without the town’s huge stone ramparts.
Another brief visitor to the British headquarters at Heraklion was John Pendlebury, still in search of spare weapons for the guerrilla kapitans. Leigh Fermor described how his ‘handsome face, his single sparkling eye, his slung guerrilla’s rifle and bandolier and his famous swordstick brought a stimulating flash of romance and fun into that khaki gloom’.
Even the sceptics among the regular officers of the 14th Infantry Brigade soon came to realize the fighting potential of ‘Pendlebury’s thugs’. There were three principal guerrilla kapitans with whom he worked in the region of Heraklion–Manoli Bandouvas, a rich patriarchal peasant of great influence who had moustaches like the horns of a water buffalo; Petrakageorgis, the owner of an olive-oil pressing business, lean-faced with deep-set eyes and a fearsome beak of a nose; and the white-haired Antonis Grigorakis, better known as Satanas, the greatest kapitan of them all.
‘Satanas’, wrote Monty Woodhouse, ‘owed his name to the general belief that nobody but the devil himself could have survived the number of bullets he had in him.’ But according to another version, this name dated from the day of his christening. The priest apparently was just saying ‘I baptize thee’, when the baby seized his beard, causing him to exclaim: ‘You little devil!’ Another of Satanas’s distinguishing features was a mutilated hand. Furious with himself at losing heavily at dice, having promised to play no more, he had shot off his rolling finger. In the heat of the moment he forgot that the offending object was also his trigger finger.
The subject of Pendlebury’s last days still attracts enormous interest. Many plans were discussed and he seems to have been in constant movement, although always coming back to Heraklion. He sent Jack Hamson with a hundred Cretan volunteers up to the Plain of Nida on the eastern flank of Mount Ida in case German paratroops dropped there, and with Herculean efforts they shifted boulders down on to its smooth areas to prevent aircraft landing.
Mike Cumberlege was asked to take his armed caique HMS Dolphin round to Hierapetra to see if a cargo of weapons and ammunition could be salvaged from a ship sunk in the harbour there. He found a sponge-diver from the east coast of the island, and arranged his temporary release from the Greek army. On the eve of their departure, Pendlebury gave a dinner at the officers’ club overlooking the harbour of Heraklion. Ignoring the club’s protocol of rank, he insisted that their crewman, Able Seaman Saunders, should also come. Over the meal, which consisted of fish concussed by German bombs that morning, they discussed a raid against the Italian-occupied island of Kasos for the night of 20 May, after the Dolphin returned. Cumberlege and his crew would ferry Pendlebury and his Cretans over to seize a few prisoners for interrogation. These guerrillas, known in Greece as andartes, were a fearsome bunch. Hammond recalled how they ‘breathed blood and slaughter and garlic in the best Cretan style’.
If the Germans overran Crete, Pendlebury was determined to stay behind to organise guerrilla warfare. He regarded himself as virtually a Cretan. Life for him at this time consisted of secret arms dumps, guerrilla groups, sites for ambushes and demolition targets. His pet project – a far-sighted one as events proved – was to convince the 14th Infantry Brigade of the need for snipers to cover springs and wells. Water was the first vital commodity the paratroopers would need to replenish. But it does not seem that the British followed his advice. For Cumberlege and Hammond, that evening at the officers’ club was their last sight of Pendlebury. They left on the Dolphin for Hierapetra the next morning.
• • •
In the last few days before the German invasion, Freyberg proved a perfect figurehead: his tours of inspection shortly before the battle were really an exercise in morale-boosting. He exuded a burly confidence, and his reputation for bravery gave him presence in the eyes of his soldiers, who referred to him with affectionate admiration as ‘Tiny’. With his rasping voice, he told them, ‘Just fix bayonets and go at them as hard as you can.’
But some officers suspected that his stirring words were not borne out in the Creforce operation order. Several inconsistencies made them uneasy. Freyberg himself had also advised troops ‘not to rush out when the paratroops come down’, and he had placed much emphasis on barbed wire as a defence. As most junior commanders and soldiers instinctively recognized, the only way to deal with an airborne assault was to counter-attack immediately. Much had also been made of the force reserves in the operational order, yet their deployment at the right time depended on several elements: accurate information; good communications; proximity to the objective; motor transport, of which there was very little; and the ability to move to the threatened sector without unnecessary exposure to air attack. The Luftwaffe’s superiority in fact restricted the movement of reserves to the hours of darkness, and any attack had to be completed by first light. That in itself should have cast doubt over the strategy of holding back a large proportion of the total force in a battle which was bound to be rapidly decided. But Freyberg’s eyes were fixed on the sea, not on the sky.
Creforce’s weakest link was its ramshackle communications. Field telephones depended on wires run loosely along existing telegraph poles: they were vulnerable to bombardment and to paratroopers dropping between headquarters. The wireless sets available, mostly those brought back from Greece, were unreliable and in short supply. Nothing had been done to ship or fly in enough replacements in the three weeks before the invasion. Freyberg did not even mention radios in his list of urgent requirements sent to Cairo on 7 May. Signalling lamps had no batteries, and those capable of working off mains electricity were of the wrong voltage. The possibility of using heliograph between the Maleme sector and Creforce Headquarters was apparently never considered.
The last RAF fighters had been withdrawn, yet Creforce Headquarters rejected recommendations to mine or block the runways, mainly because the Air Ministry had demanded that landing grounds should be kept operational for a sudden deployment from Egypt. The historian Ian Stewart (the Welch Regiment’s medical officer) has also suggested that because Freyberg believed that the troop-carriers would be able to crash-land almost anywhere, ‘he was not according supreme importance to the airfields themselves.’ However, the validity of this argument is hard to judge. Freyberg should have realized the importance of the airfields to the Germans, if only because Ultra signal OL 2167 warned that they wanted to use the runways at Maleme and Heraklion for their dive-bombers and fighters. Whatever the case, he appears to have been most reluctant to take any initiative.
Freyberg, as Churchill observed, was not downcast by the impending airborne assault. His secret signal to Wavell on 16 May hardly carries the tone of a man imprisoned in a decision he knew to be wrong – the failure to defend the ground to the west of Maleme airfield – in case such a redeployment betrayed the source of his intelligence.
Have completed plan for defence of Crete and have just returned from final tour of defences. I feel greatly encouraged by my visit. Everywhere all ranks are fit and morale is high. All defences have been extended, and positions wired as much as possible. We have forty-five field guns placed, with adequate ammunition dumped. Two Infantry tanks are at each aerodrome. Carriers and transport still being unloaded and delivered. 2nd Leicesters have arrived, and will make Heraklion stronger. I do not wish to be over-confident, but I feel that at least we will give excellent account of ourselves. With help of Royal Navy I trust Crete will be held.
Maleme, although officially taken over by the RAF, was a Fleet Air Arm station with a collection of unserviceable Fulmar fighters and Brewsters grounded by lack of spare parts. The two services co-existed quite happily. A ship’s bell serving as air-raid alarm hung outside the dispersal tent, while the deck-chairs belonged to RAF officers based there after the fall of Greece, when Maleme became the base for 30 Squadron’s Blenheims patrolling over the Aegean. A slightly anti-military insouciance amongst RAF ground-crew – they apparently took little interest in weapon training lessons – tended to exasperate the New Zealanders of the 22nd Battalion, especially after the surviving Blenheims and Hurricanes had left for Egypt.
In the Maleme sector, as elsewhere, troops dug their slit trenches as deep as the ground permitted. They did not spend the night in them in case lizards fell on their faces. Instead they rolled themselves in blankets, and slept in groups round the trunk of the nearest tree. By day, the men in greatest danger were the Bofors gunners round the airfield and those who drove the ration lorry, as the cloud of dust raised on the dry dirt-roads soon attracted a Messerschmitt or two.
Churchill had been right when he said in his telegram to the New Zealand government that the men of its division were keen to ‘come to close quarters’ with the enemy. Well-rested in the idyllic shade of olive groves, and invigorated by the spring sunshine and by frequent swims in the jade and cobalt-blue waters of the Aegean, they had recovered entirely from the effects of the Greek campaign.
The key commanders in the coming battle had not recuperated so easily. Veterans of the First World War, they were much older – Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Andrew VC, commanding officer of the 22nd Battalion on Maleme airfield, and one of the very few regular officers from New Zealand; Brigadier James Hargest of the 5th Brigade, a round-faced politician with toothbrush moustache and a tubby frame usually clad in pullover and voluminous shorts; Brigadier Puttick, the new divisional commander, loquacious and instantly recognizable by his red hair and thick black eyebrows; and finally Freyberg himself. All of them were brave men, but not one of them was bold any more. Several were apt to fuss over irrelevant details. Their notions of warfare had been formed by hard pounding in the trenches of Flanders. Yet the Battle of Crete, a revolutionary development in warfare, was to be a contest in which fast reactions, clear thinking and ruthless decisions counted most. The mentality of linear defence and holding on which lingered in some minds from the First World War was to prove a grave handicap. Of all the formation commanders, only Colonel Kippenberger of the 10th New Zealand Brigade and Brigadier Inglis of the 4th New Zealand Brigade, both lawyers, demonstrated a grasp of the essentials.
During the evacuation from Greece, Lieutenant Geoffrey Cox had been surprised to find Hargest, ‘a man who presented himself as a blunt, no-nonsense farmer’, reading War and Peace. Yet Hargest’s interest in the book was not out of character. ‘I’ve been reading about this fellow Koutouzow,’ he said. ‘He’s the kind of general to study. He knew that in war steadiness and endurance are more important than any amount of strategic flair.’
Soon after nightfall on 19 May – the eve of battle – when flames from a burning tanker in Suda Bay lit an area far beyond the Malaxa escarpment, Hargest confided in Cox again. ‘I don’t know what lies ahead,’ he said. ‘I know only that it produces in me a sensation I never knew in the last war. It isn’t fear. It’s something quite different, something which I can only describe as dread.’