NIGHT, 21 MAY
‘Our attention in the quarry’, wrote one of Freyberg’s staff officers, ‘in this counter-attack was overshadowed by an impending event closer at hand. The seaborne invasion was under way.’
Freyberg’s idée fixe had retained its grip to such an extent that he misread a crucial Ultra signal on the afternoon of 21 May and believed that an enemy fleet was heading straight for Canea. This signal, like all the other intercepts, was for his eyes only, so he could not discuss it with anyone. In any case he does not appear to have been in a mood to listen. Freyberg would not accept the assurances of Captain Morse RN, the Naval Officer-in-Charge at Suda Bay, that the Mediterranean Fleet was indeed capable of dealing with any seaborne threat.
The only description of this threat in Ultra messages – ‘Fourthly. Arrival of the seaborne contingent consisting of anti-aircraft batteries as well as of more troops and supplies’ – did not suggest a beach-storming operation with tanks. And apart from the confusion, described in Chapter 8, over the number of troops involved, no hint of an invasion fleet had been made in Ultra signals – the only specific reference had been to ‘sea transport’. Finally, there had been no indication from any intelligence source that the Germans or the Italians possessed assault ships or landing craft. Wavell, as has already been pointed out, informed the War Office on 1 May: ‘Our information points insufficient sea-going shipping left Aegean for large-scale sea-borne operations.’ Leaving aside the question of the unsuitable coastline round Canea, it should have been hard to imagine an enemy risking an opposed landing when he could bring ashore reinforcements and stores behind his own lines.
On the first night of the battle, Freyberg had been most excited when Geoffrey Cox had discovered amongst a mass of papers taken from enemy dead the 3rd Parachute Regiment’s operation order. This revealed their objectives and added that the Light Ships’ Group would land west of Maleme. But he must have pushed this from his mind when on 21 May, the following signal, OL 15/389, reached Crete:*
|
Personal for General Freyberg |
Most Immediate |
On continuation of attack Colorado [Crete], reliably reported that among operations planned for Twenty-first May is air landing two mountain battalions and attack Canea. Landing from echelon of small ships depending on situation at sea.
Freyberg appears to have confused the two sentences. One can only suppose that it did not occur to him that ‘attack Canea’ might refer to a proposed attack from the south-west by paratroopers in Prison Valley or an air raid. In his fixation with a seaborne assault, he seems to have seized upon the words ‘Canea’ and ‘Landing’ while forgetting the full stop between them. The idea that an ‘echelon of small ships’ intended to land a large force with tanks on a hostile coast or storm Canea harbour proved a serious mistake. It was clearly the main element in the disastrous train of events which befell the counter-attack on Maleme planned for the same night. Soon after receiving the Ultra signal, Freyberg issued the following order:
Reliable information. Early seaborne attack in area Canea likely. New Zealand Division remains responsible coast from west to Kladiso River. Welch Battalion forthwith to stiffen existing defences from Kladiso to Halepa.
Not only did Freyberg keep the Welch Regiment, his largest and best equipped battalion, in Canea to man the seafront, he would allow no more than the 20th Battalion out of Inglis’s 4th Brigade to join the counter-attack on Maleme, and then only after it had been replaced by an Australian battalion from Georgioupolis. The counter-attacking force was both too small and too late when in fact Freyberg could have spared five battalions with ample time to crush the enemy at Maleme.
Even after the war, Freyberg never realized that the German flotilla had been heading for Maleme, not for Canea. ‘I could not leave this covering position near Canea unheld’, he wrote of the tardy release of the 20th Battalion, ‘because had the Germans landed as they planned, we should have lost all our supplies and ammunition; besides the enemy lodgement would have cut the whole New Zealand Force off from Suda Bay. I gave the order; neither Puttick nor Inglis was responsible for the delay.’
• • •
Far from an invasion fleet, the First Light Ships’ Group proved to be a collection of nineteen caiques and two rusty little steamers escorted by an Italian light destroyer, the Lupo. It transported only the III Battalion of the 100th (Reichenhall) Mountain Regiment with heavy supplies, especially ammunition, and flak batteries. A second Schiffsstaffel escorted by another light destroyer, the Sagittario, had also assembled to carry the II Battalion of the 85th Mountain Regiment to Heraklion.
These two flotillas had been laid on as a back-up to the airborne invasion on the assumption that the defenders would render the airfields unusable. General Ringel, to emphasize the expedition’s low priority, asserted that for navigation the caiques only had ‘a 1/500,000 map and a pocket compass’. Soldiers later claimed to have seen their caiques as ‘death-traps’ even before they set off. But this may have been hindsight, for during the crossing most of them sang ‘Marching against England’ lustily enough, played concertinas and waved enthusiastically as German aircraft on their way to attack the island came down low over the water to greet them.
After loading in the Piraeus, this improbable armada had set out for the island of Milos, the largest of the south-westerly islands in the Cyclades and half way to Crete. The plan was to cross the last stretch of the Aegean during daylight on 21 May under the protection of the VIII Air Corps which was ready to attack any Royal Navy ship which showed itself, and reach the coast of Crete by nightfall; the caiques would use their sails as well as engines.
An Italian escort vessel was necessary since the German surface fleet could not pass the guns of Gibraltar. Mussolini had claimed the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, a point Hitler had to concede, yet when Operation Mercury was prepared, the Italian admiralty in Rome refused German requests for their capital ships to put to sea. The Battle of Cape Matapan was too fresh in their minds.
Admiral Cunningham’s problems were the opposite. The British Mediterranean Fleet enjoyed supremacy on the surface of the sea, yet without aircraft carriers – HMS Formidable had lost most of its Fulmar fighters – his ships were vulnerable to bombing attacks from the Greek mainland and island bases. The only solution was to sweep the Aegean by night with ‘light forces’, mainly mixed groups of destroyers and cruisers, and withdraw them at dawn to less dangerous waters beyond the Kaso strait to the east of Crete and the Antikithera strait to the west.
Cunningham, determined to fulfil the Royal Navy’s role of defence by sea, had first dispatched three task-forces to sweep the Aegean on the night of 16 May. A further force, the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Barham with five destroyers, stayed to the west of Crete in case the Italian fleet emerged. A relay was established over the next few days, with ships returning to Alexandria to replenish, while others took their place.
As soon as news of the airborne invasion reached Alexandria on 20 May, Cunningham ordered his task-forces to prepare to sweep the Aegean again that night. His heavy group, now based on the battleship Warspite, remained to the west of Crete. To the east of the island, the destroyers Jervis, Nizam and Ilex went to bombard Skarpanto airfield, which the VIII Air Corps used as a base for Dornier 17s and about fifty of its Stukas.
During the morning of 21 May, the groups of ships seeking safer waters after their night sweep in the Aegean found themselves heavily attacked. Rear-Admiral Glennie with the cruisers Dido, Orion and Ajax and four destroyers faced bombing attacks over four hours. They were extremely fortunate to escape with little damage. Admiral King’s force to the east lost the destroyer Juno which was hit by three bombs at once. The ship listed and broke in half. The bow rose vertically then sank, all in less than two minutes. A petty officer suffered appalling burns as he swam into an expanse of hot oil to rescue a seaman. The destroyer Nubian picked up most of the survivors.
At dusk, three of Cunningham’s task-forces steamed back into the Aegean. Signals intelligence had identified the convoy and its course from Milos to Maleme. Following the rules to protect ‘most secret sources’, Admiral Cunningham had sent a single Maryland aircraft out to make a ‘chance sighting’ of the flotilla, which it duly picked up in the afternoon. The two cruiser squadrons were greatly helped by a lower-grade version of signals interception than Ultra, each flagship having a ‘Y officer’ on board. Rear Admiral Glennie later claimed that his best way of keeping track of the other British squadron was through sightings reported in German wireless traffic.
Glennie’s Force D, using radar, closed on the First Light Ships’ Group some eighteen miles north of Canea. Glennie in HMS Dido had two other cruisers, Orion and Ajax, and four destroyers, Janus, Kimberley, Hasty and Hereward. At 11.30 p.m., Janus signalled a warning to the flagship. Captain H.W. McCall of HMS Dido gave the order ‘On searchlights!’ The beams revealed the Italian light destroyer Lupo, freshly painted and flying the Italian ensign. The Lupo did not abandon its charges, and steamed with great bravery past the cruisers firing torpedoes at them. The cruisers immediately turned to starboard ‘to comb the tracks, and close and engage’ the Lupo. Dido scored two hits, then Ajax blasted the Lupo with a broadside at close range.
For the mountain troops on the caiques, the sound of heavy marine engines, then the searchlights on the Lupo followed by the devastatingly brief fight, was a terrifying experience. Some soldiers had the presence of mind to haul down sails to reduce their profile. (They were still at sea during the dangerous hours of darkness because the wind had failed during the day.) Men hid irrationally below the level of the gunwales, as if planks of wood could protect them from the warships’ guns. Yet it was the fingers of blinding white light which inspired the greatest fear.
The twenty-inch searchlights of the cruisers soon picked out the caiques. German soldiers stood up and began waving handkerchiefs and white towels in surrender. The captain of Dido gave the order to fire. According to one eyewitness (a yeoman of signals on the bridge), the commander protested that to open fire on unarmed caiques would be murder, but the captain pushed him aside to shout the order down the speaking-tube himself: ‘Guns, open fire!’ Perhaps he remembered the German dive-bombing of a hospital ship, to whose aid Dido had sailed during the evacuation from Greece. All the ship’s light armament – Oerlikons, pom-poms and Hotchkisses – opened up.
Using radar, the destroyers hunted down any caiques which tried to escape their searchlights. As the destroyers twisted and turned after their prey, like wolfhounds amongst dazed and helpless rabbits, this confusion nearly led to collisions. All this time gunnery officers screamed themselves hoarse with fire orders for the main armament. Machine guns and pom-poms fired ceaselessly at any target that presented itself whether caique, lifeboat, rubber dinghy or even, according to German sources, groups of men in their life-jackets either swimming in the water or clinging to spars. Cunningham’s report states that the engagement lasted for two and a half hours. No mention is made of the depth-charges, which according to British rumour although not German accusation, were used to kill soldiers in the water with shock-waves. Despite all this gunfire only 327 men were killed: the rest were picked up by German vessels and Arado seaplanes in the morning well after Glennie’s ships had left the area.
A single caique reached Crete unharmed. Early in the voyage, the Greek crew had abandoned ship, so the soldiers took over. This caique became separated from the rest and reached Cape Spatha to the west of Maleme with its full complement of 3 officers and 110 men. The only other soldiers from the convoy to reach the coast of Crete landed in a cutter on the unfriendly shore of the Akrotiri where a fighting patrol from the Northumberland Hussars soon cornered them.
• • •
At Creforce Headquarters, the tension leading up to the engagement had been high. Just before 11.30 p.m., a runner arrived from Captain Micky Sandford, the Australian intelligence officer who decoded each Ultra signal, showing the message to Freyberg and then destroying it. That night Sandford’s signals group above the quarry was listening in to radio traffic at sea. The Royal Navy had located the convoy and was about to engage. Coastal defence batteries were also ready to fire. The heaviest were the two pairs of 6-inch guns manned by the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, B Battery at Khelevis at the entrance to Suda Bay, and Y Battery on the top of St John’s Hill, behind Canea. Their contribution was not needed.
‘Suddenly’, wrote Geoffrey Cox, ‘on the horizon away to the north came the flash and thunder of guns, and the dull red glow of burning vessels.’ Freyberg and his staff officers watched in great excitement. David Hunt remembers Freyberg ‘bouncing up and down’ at the destruction of the caiques with schoolboy enthusiasm, then addressing him by his Christian name for the first time.
Cox happened to notice Colonel Stewart make ‘some remark to Freyberg which I did not hear. But I heard his reply. “It has been a great responsibility. A great responsibility.” His tones conveyed the deep thankfulness of a man who had discharged well a nightmarishly difficult task. His comment indicated, I believe, that he felt now the island was reasonably safe.’
Freyberg and most of his staff then went to bed. ‘I for one’, added Cox, ‘climbed into my sleeping bag with a feeling of profound thankfulness – indeed almost of disappointment that it had all been over so quickly.’ Before going off to sleep, Freyberg did not even ask for news of progress on the counter-attack preparations for Maleme. He clearly thought the battle was as good as won.
General Freyberg’s behaviour that night entirely contradicts the revisionist theory that although he knew that Maleme was the key to the battle, the secrecy rules surrounding Ultra frustrated him. Freyberg was a very brave and greatly liked man, but unimaginative. Having grasped the wrong idea about the ‘seaborne invasion’ he could not let go.
His fundamental misunderstanding still permeated defence orders even after the reality of the situation had become clear next morning. Officers and soldiers of the Sherwood Rangers manning the 6-inch guns on St John’s Hill found it ‘torture to watch the fat cluster of Germans on Maleme aerodrome enjoying comparative peace’ over the next two days. The battery commander sought permission to traverse their guns and engage the airfield, but this was refused on the grounds that coastal artillery was strictly for defence against sea invasion. Only in the early hours of 24 May, two days after the destruction of the convoy, were they told that they could engage enemy concentrations to the west. By then Maleme was far behind enemy lines, and the Germans were within five kilometres of Canea.