31 MAY AND 1 JUNE
On the night of the large operation at Heraklion, the Royal Navy embarked the first thousand evacuees at Sphakia in four destroyers. Fear of being left behind was the best spur to the weary troops. Feet burning, they slogged up the mountain road from Vrysses. One false ridge followed another as the route twisted up above the line at which the hardier vegetation gave way to grey shale. To the west, the view was dominated by the snow-capped peaks of the White Mountains, including Mount Venizelos.
Finally, their efforts were rewarded by an unexpected sight beyond the pass. Below them lay the Askifou plain, a fertile flat-bottomed bowl (troops dubbed it ‘the saucer’) of meadows, orchards, small tilled fields and streams. Stephanides thought this heaven, only a few kilometres across, too idyllic for war. ‘The Luftwaffe’, he noted, ‘even went out of its way to shoot up a derelict and dilapidated farm tractor.’
The two Australian battalions under Brigadier Vasey and the last three light tanks of the 3rd Hussars took up position round Askifou itself. The New Zealand 23rd Battalion manned the pass. Next morning, mountain troops came into view again. But when they found that the position was well defended their advance slowed. The action at Babali Hani the previous day had discouraged them from taking risks.
With the end of the battle in sight, these Bavarians and Tyroleans from the 100th Mountain Regiment of Bad Reichenhall had adopted a light-hearted approach. Their dress had become very informal. Many, jettisoning their winter-weight jackets and trousers, wore oddments of captured British tropical uniform; this inevitably caused some confusion. The most bizarre variation occurred after they had taken the village of Askifou. There they looted the richest house, which belonged to a newly married couple, and seized the wife’s trousseau. The Tyrolean soldiers decided to wear her delicately embroidered knickers and petticoats on their heads like the neckcloths of Foreign Legion képis as protection against the sun. They looked, with their shorts, muscular thighs and boots, more like a chorus-line in a regimental concert than fighting troops.
• • •
At the southern end of the Askifou plain lay the Imbros gorge, a deep ravine of great beauty. Waugh compared its natural rock terraces, with Aleppo pines growing precariously, to a seventeenth-century baroque landscape. The first-comers had not realized that this ravine offered a much safer and easier descent to the coast.
The road from the north continued on a few kilometres more, then came to an abrupt end on a massive bluff overlooking the Libyan Sea. There, amidst the heady scent of pine and wild thyme, the sight of the sea evoked powerful yet mixed emotions: relief that the journey was over, fear that after such a purgatorial experience they might still not get off, and dismay at the last precipitous stretch of the way, little more than a goat track down a steeply sloping rockface. Abandoned vehicles lay wrecked all around. Never was the failure of the military authorities to connect the road to the port so bitterly felt.
The Australians made the descent to Komithades, the village next to Sphakia, into a ‘sheep-race’, so that ‘once a man got into the flow of traffic he just could not (and was not allowed to) stop’. But for the wounded and the lame, or even just the bootless, the descent was alarming and painful. One party of wounded descending by daylight were surprised by an air raid. Fortunately, they had been told to discard their helmets to look less like a fighting unit, and a brave Royal Army Medical Corps corporal advanced in front waving a red cross flag. The Messerschmitt pilots spotted the flag in time, waggled their wings in recognition or waved from the cockpit, and turned away.
Creforce Headquarters, from where Captain Morse communicated with Alexandria while organising the evacuation, was established in the rockface below the end of the road in a cave which Geoffrey Cox described as ‘like a setting for the legend of Cyclops’. There, Freyberg summoned Puttick to tell him to leave the island, since Weston’s command of the rearguard made a divisional headquarters redundant. Puttick arrived with his officers at last light on Thursday, 29 May. He saluted Freyberg and said ‘We did our best. We did all we could’.
• • •
Freyberg had also decided to send off his own staff. But that morning, a messenger with orders for Brigadier Vasey commanding the Australian rearguard had to be found, so junior officers in Creforce Headquarters drew lots. The loser, Geoffrey Cox, felt certain he was doomed to a prisoner-of-war camp, but thanks to a helpful Australian on the ‘top storey’, as the escarpment was known, he found a vehicle which still worked. He was therefore able to make the return trip to the Askifou plain, hand over the orders and obtain a receipt, and return just in time to embark with his colleagues and members of the British Military Mission on the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth.
That night, 29 May, saw the largest evacuation. Rear Admiral King had arrived in HMS Phoebe with the cruisers Perth, Calcutta and Coventry, three destroyers and the commando troopship HMS Glengyle, whose landing craft were invaluable. Over 6,000 men were embarked.
Among others who boarded the Perth that night were Stephanides and Michael Forrester. Six months later, they heard of its destruction with all hands off Java after an attack by Japanese bombers. Below decks, the New Zealand officers found to their disgust some of the commandos who were supposed to be forming the rearguard. But the issue of who had been ordered to stay and who had been authorized to leave became very complicated and muddy.
Freyberg himself with the remaining staff officers from the different headquarters were taken off in two Sunderland flying-boats the following night.
• • •
When the 5th New Zealand Brigade descended the escarpment on the morning of 30 May, Brigadier Hargest, who like Puttick and Freyberg himself had shown more determination and sound judgement during the retreat than during the battle, was appalled by the wretched state of the stragglers below. Starving and thirsty base-area personnel still several thousand strong were living without any pretence at military order in the ravines in rows of caves like colonies of sand martins. They were panic-ridden by day, especially at the approach of aircraft, and raided the dwindling food dumps and water supply by night. When the wounded were evacuated on the first night, 28 May, some of these men tried to join them, having tied field dressings round uninjured heads, but the genuine casualties shouted at them and most were shamed away. The order had gone out that only formed bodies of men would be embarked, so stragglers begged any spare officer passing by to form them into a group and march them in for embarkation. The New Zealanders had set up a cordon with fixed bayonets to ensure that fighting troops left first. ‘My mind was fixed,’ wrote Hargest later. ‘We had borne the burden and were going aboard as a brigade and none would stop us.’
In spite of Hargest’s determination, the choice of who was to stay and who was to go was not so simple. Priority would be given to officers on the grounds that they were needed to re-form battalions on their return to Egypt. And an order was issued early in the afternoon that the ‘HQ of each unit must be embarked tonight’. Numbers of NCOs and soldiers were then allocated by battalion.
Later in the afternoon, there was a sudden outbreak of firing. A detachment of mountain troops, twenty-two strong, had penetrated the Sphakia gorge on the west side of the escarpment. A company of New Zealanders pinned them down while Charles Upham, although seriously weakened by dysentery, worked his way up with his platoon round the feature opposite, then annihilated the enemy below.
When night fell, stragglers tried to slip down in the dark past the armed pickets posted to prevent attempts to rush the boats. And when the formed bodies of men authorized to embark were marched down, the last part of the route was lined with the unsuccessful. ‘Some begged and implored’, wrote Kippenberger, ‘most simply watched stonily, so that we felt bitterly ashamed.’ A few tried to force or infiltrate their way into a column but were pushed away with rough outrage. The Maori detachment had a rearguard armed with Thompson sub-machine guns and a Luger ready to shoot if necessary. A number of officers behaved little better, even if their tactics were more sophisticated. Myles Hildyard heard the unmistakable voice of a contemporary from Eton claiming to be an ‘embarkation officer’ and demanding to be let through.
In contrast to the self-serving, some soldiers defied an order that stretcher cases must be left behind and went to great lengths to smuggle wounded comrades past the cordon.*
• • •
From the beach next to the little harbour of Sphakia, the queue for the landing craft stretched back a considerable way. Hopes and fears rose and fell as the thick shuffling line advanced or halted in the dark. Two of the destroyers had been forced to turn back, so fewer men could be taken off. One New Zealand officer described the welcome sound of ‘Navy voices in cultured Dartmouth accents’ shouting in the darkness, ‘Come on, come on! Get a move on!’ But only 1,500 men were embarked that night.
After the chaos on land, everyone greeted the efficiency of the Navy with profound relief. Calm orders from naval officers instilled a forgotten confidence, and for many, the Army suddenly appeared amateur alongside. Exhausted and famished soldiers had great difficulty climbing the scrambling nets, so sailors lent over to grab their shirts to haul them up.
Some found themselves on board the same ship on which they had gone to Greece or left it. Ratings handed out mugs of cocoa and bully beef sandwiches just as they had in the earlier evacuation. Kippenberger, on HMAS Napier, noted that an Australian commanding officer and his adjutant came aboard, but on discovering that their battalion had not embarked, they hurried ashore again.
But for those who left, the danger was not entirely over. Michael Forrester, who was on board HMAS Perth when she was hit on 30 May, suddenly understood what aerial attack meant to those in a ship at sea. ‘My God, the faces of those sailors down below,’ he remarked later. And Kippenberger ‘formed the opinion that it is nicer on land than aboard ship’.
At dawn on 31 May, Rear Admiral King sailed again from Alexandria with two cruisers, Phoebe and Abdiel, and two destroyers. After a meeting with Wavell, Cunningham had decided to risk another sortie to Crete even though the Mediterranean Fleet had already been severely diminished while helping to defend the island. ‘It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship,’ he had declared. ‘It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.’
The Royal Navy was justifiably proud of its work. A favourite toast in the wardrooms of the Mediterranean Fleet was ‘To the three Services, the Royal Navy, the Royal Advertising Federation and the Evacuees.’ In that last effort, Admiral King’s force left at three o’clock on the morning of 1 June with nearly 4,000 men. They returned safely, but the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Calcutta, sent out to cover them, was sunk within a hundred miles of Alexandria.
On arrival in Egypt, most of the men shambled down the gangways of their ships, still exhausted from their ordeal over the mountains. But some battalions fell in on the quayside, right markers and all, then marched off refusing to look like a defeated army.
More troops probably could have been taken off, but that is apparent only with hindsight. The Navy had thought that, under a strong moon, ships would be vulnerable to dive-bombers at night as well as during the long days approaching mid-summer. But Cunningham, in spite of Ultra, did not know that the risk to his ships had decreased sharply in this the last stage of the VIII Air Corps’s withdrawal for Operation Barbarossa.
• • •
Much has been made of the facts that out of 5,000 troops left behind, there was no officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel, and that a far higher proportion of officers got away than men.
Jack Hamson, captured with a party of the Argylls near Tymbaki, vented the understandable frustration of a prisoner of war. ‘One of the worst episodes in that affair’, he wrote, ‘was the notion that superior officers were specially valuable, that there was an obligation upon them to save themselves, that they were not finally and personally committed in the issue of the operations they were conducting, that they were merely to do their best and would have an opportunity to try again another day. Although the cases are not wholly comparable, the naval tradition that the commander is the last person to be saved out of the catastrophe is, I think, perhaps the sounder one. There were some honourable exceptions, much too conspicuous in their rarity, but for the most part we witnessed not so much a sauve qui peut as a damnable and disgraceful scramble for priority, a claim to the privilege of escape based on rank and seniority.’
Freyberg, the general who had stayed until the last in Greece to make sure his men got away, again remained as long as he could. His return to Egypt was essential if only because he was Ultra-indoctrinated. And to have left a figure of his renown in German hands would have added an unnecessary propaganda defeat. Brigadier Inglis offered to stay but Freyberg ‘sharply overruled’ that idea. Whether Weston or Laycock should have stayed is a difficult question. There was clearly little point in giving the enemy the satisfaction of capturing senior officers; and the British Army’s equivalent of a ship’s captain is the commanding officer of a battalion or regiment, not a formation commander. But the moral question still hangs unanswered, especially since the self-centred actions of some were thrown into contrast by the selflessness of those regimental officers, NCOS or soldiers who volunteered to stay behind in the place of others.
Mainly due to the diaries of Evelyn Waugh (Layforce’s intelligence officer) and his novel Officers and Gentlemen, interest in this issue has tended to focus on Colonel Laycock as commander of the rearguard. On the evening of 30 May, just before he left the island, Freyberg told Laycock, ‘You were the last to come so you will be the last to go’. At the final conference held by General Weston on the afternoon of 31 May this was reaffirmed. Evelyn Waugh recorded this meeting in Layforce’s war diary: ‘Final orders from CREFORCE for evacuation (a) LAYFORCE positions not to be held to last man and last round but only as long as was necessary to cover withdrawal of other fighting forces. (b) No withdrawal before order from H.Q. (c) LAYFORCE to embark after other fighting forces but before stragglers.’ But later that day Laycock told Freddie Graham, his brigade major, that General Weston had said to him: ‘You and your staff and as many of your troops as you can get away must go tonight – my staff will see to it.’ He claimed that this had come after a staff officer had intervened to point out that ‘Laycock still had two battalions of his brigade in Egypt’. One can hardly imagine one of Weston’s staff speaking up to give priority to Layforce when they had their own Marine battalion to get off.
A more likely version is that Laycock collared Weston some time in the early evening, long after the conference in the cave, and persuaded him to allow Layforce Brigade Headquarters to leave. Waugh in his private account wrote, ‘[Weston] first charged Bob with the task [of surrender] but later realized that it was foolish to sacrifice a first-class man for this and chose instead [Colvin].’
Soon after dusk, Graham reported to Creforce cave on Laycock’s instructions. There he found General Weston and Colonel Colvin.
General Weston asked me if I had paper, pencil and carbon paper – quite remarkably I was able to reply in the affirmative thanks to that old friend Army Book 153 which was in my haversack. On my reply General Weston said ‘Sit down on that suitcase and take this letter to my dictation. Make three copies.’ He then proceeded to dictate the capitulation of Crete! The letter was written in the form of a short operational instruction addressed to the officer whom I have already said shall remain unidentifiable [i.e. Colvin] instructing him to go forward at first light to capitulate to the enemy. General Weston took two of the copies I had made, handed one to the officer concerned, put the other in his pocket and with the words: ‘Well gentlemen, there are one million drachmae in that suitcase, there’s a bottle of gin in the corner, goodbye and good luck.’ He walked out of the cave and down the hill into the darkness. Later he was flown out by a flying-boat which had been sent to fetch him.
Graham was left despondently gazing ‘at the miserable little piece of paper’. It confirmed his worst fears that there was to be no further evacuation after that night. He roused himself and called the brigade sergeant major. They would secure one of the landing craft and try to escape in it later.
Laycock and Waugh must have arrived soon after. They swept Graham and any other Layforce personnel they could find down to the beach at Sphakia to join the queue for landing craft out to the destroyers. Evelyn Waugh made the following entry in the war diary for 2200 hours.
On finding that entire staff of Creforce had embarked, in view of fact that all fighting forces were now in position for embarkation and that there was no enemy contact, Col. Laycock on own authority, issued orders to Lt. Col. Young to lead troops to Sphakion by route avoiding the crowded main approach to town and to use his own personality to obtain priority laid down in Div. orders.
This version, although closer to the truth than Laycock’s, was still disingenuous. Laycock knew perfectly well from the afternoon conference that Weston and the rest of Creforce Headquarters were leaving. There was no enemy contact at that moment only because the Germans did not fight at night: detachments of mountain troops had by then surrounded the beachhead and Waugh himself had recorded firing at dusk. The key point – the claim that all fighting troops were in position for embarkation – was definitely false. The Marines and the 2/7th Australian Battalion had not arrived, and Layforce’s orders were to stay in position until they were safely away.
Laycock did not send the message to Young until about 11 p.m., by which time he was waiting on the beach with brigade headquarters staff for a landing craft to take them out to one of the warships. He called for a volunteer, but most of the soldiers present muttered that their boots were not up to the journey. Private Ralph Tanner, Evelyn Waugh’s batman, was chosen for the job because he did not object. Nobody could tell him where George Young’s headquarters were, so he scrambled up towards the start of the Sphakia ravine. Although only about a mile away the ground was very difficult in the dark, and he wandered about shouting for Layforce. Eventually a member of D Battalion led him to their headquarters cave, where Young gave him some sherry to drink which he gulped down after delivering his message. Young said he would try to bring in his men, but he must have guessed that there was not enough time for those in forward positions to reach the beach. Tanner left bearing this reply for Laycock. Outside the cave, he thought better of the sherry he had consumed on an empty stomach and forced his fingers down his throat. When he got to the beach there was no sign of Laycock. Tanner was so weak that when he was taken out on the last landing craft to a destroyer, he could not climb the scramble net. A sailor reached down to grab the waistband of the unusually tall Tanner, saying, ‘Come on, Lofty, for fuck’s sake,’ and heaved him over the bulwarks on to the deck. Laycock later awarded Tanner a Mention in Dispatches for his efforts.
There is no question of cowardice in the behaviour of Laycock and Waugh. Both men amply demonstrated their fearlessness – in Waugh’s case virtually a death wish – during the retreat. But in another context Graham suggested that Waugh perhaps ‘had a personal horror of being captured’. This seems highly possible and is perfectly compatible with the degree of courage, astonishing to others yet matter-of-fact to himself, which Waugh displayed on Crete.
Laycock, too, had every reason to believe that he would be of more use to the war effort in Egypt than staying to be captured, but his own words on the subject of the surrender do not help his case. ‘My orders were to go with the men, but I am not sure that in cases like that the Commanding Officer should behave in the same way as the captain of a ship and be the last to leave. I attribute the fact that so many were left behind to bad beach organisation, or rather to the entire lack of organisation.’ In this account of events on Crete, Laycock was right when he argued that the commandos were not suitable troops for a rearguard. Yet they had been given the job because they were the only fresh troops available, and a lack of suitability is a poor excuse for arrogantly disregarding orders.
In the end Colvin did not carry out the surrender. He seems to have left that night with Laycock, Graham and Waugh although they make no mention of him. At the last moment, Laycock somehow managed to send Weston’s surrender instruction back to George Young. He had crossed out Colvin’s name and inserted ‘Senior officer left on the island’ in its place.
Young, who stoically accepted his fate as a prisoner of war, never blamed Laycock. And the suggestion of another officer that Young was left behind because he ‘wasn’t one of the White’s Club gang’ is mistaken. Few members of ‘the smart set’ or ‘dandies’ as Waugh called them were on Crete: they were mostly in B Battalion, formerly 8 Commando, then in an advanced state of decay at Sidi-Bishr camp near Alexandria.
Evelyn Waugh depicted the collapse in Crete as symbolic of the collapse of the British ruling class. In a letter to Diana Cooper some months afterwards, he wrote: ‘The English are a very base people. I did not know this, living as I did. Now I know them through and through and they disgust me.’ A dozen years later, when writing Officers and Gentlemen, Waugh made Ivor Claire, the Household Cavalry officer who deserts his soldiers in Crete, the personification of this betrayal. When the book was published in June 1955, the dedication read: ‘To Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CB DSO. That every man in arms should wish to be.’ On seeing this, Ann Fleming sent Waugh a telegram which read: ‘Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.’ Waugh’s reply she thought ‘violent indeed but not wholly simulated’.
‘Your telegram horrifies me,’ he wrote. ‘Of course there is no possible connexion between Bob and Claire. If you suggest such a thing anywhere it will be the end of our beautiful friendship . . . For Christ’s sake lay off the idea of Bob=Claire . . . Just shut up about Laycock, Fuck You, E Waugh.’ In his diary, he wrote: ‘I replied that if she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact it will be the end of our friendship.’
The term ‘cruel fact’ does not exactly dispel the suspicion. And even if the character of Ivor Claire represents not an individual, but Waugh’s sense that his myth of their gallant company had been betrayed from the start, he and Laycock were the only officers from the original band in 8 Commando who went to Crete. In Officers and Gentlemen, Waugh saves Tommy Backhouse (the character bearing the closest resemblance to Laycock) from the moral mess by making him fall down a ship’s companionway on the voyage to Crete. Waugh subsequently claimed that officers had behaved disgracefully in Crete, with many of them taking places in the motor transport and leaving the wounded to walk. The degree of disgrace is, of course, hard to assess. In the almost total disintegration of the retreat there were undoubtedly pathetic and shameful spectacles, but the proportion probably remained small, especially amongst regimental officers. In Layforce, although Colonel Colvin went to pieces, and according to Sergeant Stewart’s account a subaltern in his battalion cracked up with ‘a severe recurrence of chronic neurasthenia’, many more officers appear to have performed well, especially George Young and his adjutant, Michael Borwick of the Greys, and Colvin’s second-in-command, Ken Wylie, who in Waugh’s own words had ‘redeemed the Commandos’ honour by leading a vigorous and successful counter-attack’. (Both Young and Wylie received the DSO.) Freddie Graham clearly made great efforts for the men and Laycock’s leadership during the battle had been admirable. But the passing on of the surrender order and the departure of brigade headquarters raised more than a doubt in Waugh’s mind. His cataclysmic view of the débâcle on Crete certainly seems to contain a streak of self-loathing.
• • •
Out of all of those left behind, the Australians of Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker’s battalion, the 2/7th, had the right to feel the most bitter. Assured places on the ships, they had marched down to the beach having maintained the perimeter on ‘the top storey’ until the last moment. They had the longest and most difficult route in the dark of all the troops due to embark that night. On the way, they were delayed by bolshie stragglers refusing to clear a path and by resentful officers who, pretending to be in charge of movement control, demanded that they identify themselves and their authority. It is curious that the Australians showed none of the ruthless determination of the New Zealanders the night before.
Unaware that over two hundred men from Layforce had slipped in ahead of them, they waited patiently in line on the beach. ‘Then came the greatest disappointment of all,’ wrote their second-in-command later in prison camp. ‘The sound of anchor chains through the hawse.’
Many of the others left behind believed the Navy would return again the next night. They did not realize that surrender was imminent. Some were misled during the night. An embarkation officer on the beach told Jack Smith-Hughes not to worry because ‘they’re coming back tomorrow’. When Smith-Hughes finally escaped from the island several months later by submarine, he happened to see this major again in a restaurant in Cairo and achieved a measure of satisfaction in expressing what he thought of him.
Some of Walker’s Australians would not accept the idea of surrender. When they saw soldiers displaying white flags next morning, they asked him whether they should shoot them. But already orders were being shouted from the beach for all troops to remove magazines and bolts from their rifles. The men were told that there would be no further evacuation and were advised to display as much white cloth as possible. Most wandered off in search of food and water. A group of Australians killed a donkey, and began to roast hunks of meat on the fire.
George Young refused his adjutant’s offer to accompany him on the surrender. He told Borwick to tell the men. But when Borwick assembled them, his voice broke, he was so close to tears. ‘It’s all right, sir,’ a corporal said, putting a hand on his arm. ‘We know it’s not your fault.’ Young set off alone in search of a German officer to whom he could offer the surrender. Instead, he encountered Colonel Walker and, discovering him to be senior, handed over the order addressed in Laycock’s correction to ‘Senior officer left on the island’. Walker followed the track up to the village of Komithades and found an Austrian officer of the 100th Mountain Regiment there.
‘What are you doing here, Australia?’ the Austrian said in English.
‘One might ask what are you doing here, Austria?’ Walker replied.
‘We are all Germans,’ he said.
• • •
After the surrender had taken place, many of those left climbed back up the hill from the beach. ‘There’, Myles Hildyard of the Sherwood Rangers recorded in his diary, ‘they proceeded to cook the little food they had, and they were sitting around doing this, thinking themselves prisoners and perfectly safe, when German planes came over and machine-gunned them. One of our men was killed outright. The wounded were in a little church, and among them was our sergeant-major Fountain with twelve bullets in him. We heard later that he died. Three Germans who ran out shouting and waving to the planes to clear off were also killed.’
Before the mountain troops began rounding up their captives, commando officers warned their men to get rid of their ‘fannies’ (a knuckle-duster cum knife which had become the emblem of the Middle East Commandos) in case the Germans felt like executing members of special forces. Most were thrown down a well.
For the Spanish Republicans, the prospect of capture was especially grim. The Germans would almost certainly return them to Franco’s Spain where they would be shot like all the other Republicans they had handed over, from militiamen to former ministers in the Popular Front government. Fortunately, the battalion medical officer, Captain Cochrane, who had served in Spain with the International Brigades, had the idea that they should pretend to be Gibraltarians when interrogated.
Some soldiers, horrified by the prospect of imprisonment, tried to escape inland up the gorges. Several died in the attempt. Years later, the skeleton of a soldier who had attempted to scale a cliff was discovered in an inaccessible spot by one of the most famous guerrillas of the resistance, Manoli Paterakis, when illegally hunting an ibex. Others, with equally desperate courage but more success, set off across the Libyan Sea in unsuitable boats. A landing craft moored inside a grotto all day after the surrender left soon after dark with sixty-three men on board. Mountain troops opened fire from the escarpment but missed.
• • •
From Rethymno and then Heraklion the advance of General Ringel’s mountain regiments, led by tanks and motor-cycle troops, continued across the island. Beyond Ayios Nikolaos at Pahia Ammos the point detachment sighted some light tanks ahead. These vehicles appeared to be abandoned, so a German officer went forward to investigate. He claimed to have found their Italian crews crouched behind them trembling with fear, but German stories about their allies must always be treated with caution.
This Italian force had taken part in the unopposed landings at Siteia starting on 28 May. The Italian occupation of the eastern provinces of Siteia and Lasithi was made the responsibility of General Angelo Carta’s Siena Division, which had fought rather unsuccessfully against the Cretan 5th Division on the Albanian front.
• • •
For those captured at Sphakia nothing was crueller than the march back to Canea over the same painful route, a double ration of the ‘via Dolorosa’. The only consolation for the Welch Regiment captured on the north coast was that they were spared this return journey.
A German propaganda photograph shows a millipede of men in single file snaking as far as the eye can see. Many of those whose boots had given out had nothing more than soles of cardboard tied to their feet with strips of cloth. There was little food to eat except what Cretan villagers offered along the way. Many men had eaten no more than a tin of bully beef and a few biscuits in the course of a whole week.
On the way, outbursts of firing in the distance gave heart to those who had been with the 50th Middle East Commando in Heraklion the year before and had worked with John Pendlebury. Not knowing of his death they were certain that this must be his work, but it was probably German execution squads carrying out reprisals against Cretan francs-tireurs.
Prison camp conditions on the site of the field hospital west of Canea were deplorable, mainly due to the German authorities’ lack of interest. The paratroopers detailed to guard the prisoners, while their officers toiled over casualty returns and letters of condolence to next-of-kin, preferred to spend their time on the beach sunbathing, their bodies glistening with olive oil. Their naked bathing scandalized the socially conservative Cretans, for whom the display of nudity was insult piled on injury. Fortunately for British prisoners, the guards’ insouciance allowed them to slip out of the camp to forage for food with the help of villagers, and in some cases recover their belongings abandoned at the start of the retreat.
Among the wounded, survival depended on the speed with which they were flown back to Athens for treatment. Sandy Thomas, who was hit at Galatas, had to be moved away from the other patients because of the gangrenous stench from his leg. To everyone’s astonishment, he never lost it. Thomas reached Athens in time for it to be saved because the shuttle of Junkers 52 transport aircraft worked so well from Maleme.
Many prisoners escaped, swelling the number of stragglers sheltered in mountain villages by Cretan families. Myles Hildyard and a brother officer from the Sherwood Rangers, Michael Parrish, decided instead to make their way by caique across the Aegean to Turkey. By an extraordinary coincidence they came to the uninhabited island where the Kalanthe sank, arriving the day after fishermen had recovered two bodies and a tin box containing the correspondence between Sir Michael Palairet and King George II. Hildyard buried the two skeletons, one of which wore the remnants of British uniform and a signet ring. Nearly fifty years later he met Harold and Nancy Caccia, and they concluded that he had indeed buried Nancy’s brother Oliver Barstow, whose body was never found after the explosion. When Hildyard and Parrish finally reached Turkey, they delivered the box of papers to the Embassy.