Mixed Fortunes: I
NOW PUSHED BACK into the mountains of Albania, the Italians were continuing to struggle, fighting a war not only against the Greeks but also against the conditions and their own inadequate supply chain. Gino Cappozzo, aged twenty-three, was a gunner in 17th Battery of 3rd Alpine Artillery Regiment Julia. Ever since they had come under surprise attack at the end of December, he and his comrades had been on the back foot, battling to escape the Greeks as they pressed forward and losing mounting casualties. They were also largely rudderless as too many officers and senior NCOs had been lost; in early January, they had even lost Colonnello Tavoni, shot dead during yet another engagement. In early February, they were withdrawn from the front line and given fifteen days’ rest. ‘By now,’ noted Cappozzo, ‘we were reduced to extremes: barefoot, ragged, puttees wrapped around our feet rather than boots, hungry and deathly cold.’ Their brief respite over, they were sent back – still without their new allocation of boots.
Towards the end of February, they crossed the Plain of Tepelenë, then climbed a 1,300-metre peak, carrying the guns, ammunition and supplies with them. There they would remain for the next thirty days. ‘It was a month of hellish fights,’ noted Cappozzo, ‘at all hours of the day and night. The mountain resembled an erupting volcano.’
Others were returning home, albeit briefly. Pace Misciatelli-Chigi was absolutely horrified to see the state of her husband when he appeared one day in February at their home in Siena, on leave from the Albanian front: he was gaunt, ill and depressed. She also worked twice a week in the military hospital in Siena, writing letters for them and reading aloud. ‘They had lost all that was most in life,’ she noted, ‘in a cause for which they felt nothing.’
Meanwhile, more recruits were being processed through the training camps, most of which continued to be poorly equipped and run. Giuseppe Santaniello was a twenty-year-old law student who had been called up and posted to a recruitment barracks near Naples. He arrived with a sense of pride at joining the Italian Royal Army and was excited by the prospect of serving his country; war, he had thought, was rather a glorious business. He was, however, in for a devastating shock at what he found there. His things were stolen, and the barracks were filthy and squalid. ‘The worst place,’ he noted, ‘was the lavatories. A choking, foetid stench provided an advance warning of their state, the floor covered in a layer of stinking piss smeared with excrement on which sandals slipped and slithered all too easily. An inventor of tortures could not have dreamed anything worse.’ Nor did any of the uniforms they were given fit. Santaniello was desperate. ‘Very soon,’ he added, ‘our hopes and dreams crumbled, replaced by the awful reality of having to live in the midst of this filth and surrounded by criminals.’
Conditions were far more savoury in the Regia Marina, however, which, despite its humbling at Calabria and during the attack at Taranto, still boasted a good number of modern warships. Now serving on one of its biggest was Walter Mazzucato, aged nineteen, who had joined the battleship Vittorio Veneto at La Spezia back in January after two years’ training as a naval cadet. ‘It made my heart thud seeing such a vast ship for the first time,’ he noted. Mazzucato had joined the Navy at seventeen; sailing the seas and serving his country was something he had set his heart on ever since he was a boy. In February, he’d sailed on his first trip out to sea on the mighty battleship, taking his position as an anti-aircraft gunner on one of the ship’s twenty 37mm cannons.
Putting to sea had been prompted by news that Force H, the Royal Navy’s force based at Gibraltar, had moved into the Mediterranean. Amiragglio Iachino, the admiral commanding the Italian Fleet, had done so in an effort to confront the British, but Force H had evaded the Italians and gone on to bombard Genoa and Livorno and mine the entrance of La Spezia. In terms of material damage, the attacks had not achieved a great deal, but they had further dented the morale of the Italians.
The Admiral’s failure to intercept the British had not gone down well with the Germans and particularly with the naval staff. In March, with the Royal Navy responsible for ferrying British forces across the Aegean, they put renewed pressure on the Italians to act and take the offensive. Finally, on 26 March, they put to sea, with a force that included the battleship Vittorio Veneto, the heavy cruisers Trento, Trieste and Bolzano, and seven destroyers.
The aim was to try and disrupt British shipping to Greece, but unbeknown to Amiragglio Iachino, his counterpart, Admiral Cunningham, had got wind of this move. Having been spoiling for a battle at sea ever since the brief engagement off Calabria the previous July, ABC immediately put to sea.
This intelligence had come from the decrypts of German Enigma machine traffic carried out by the code-breakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Many of these decrypts, codenamed ‘Ultra’, were cracked too intermittently and slowly to be much use, but in this case, however, news of the movement of the Italian Fleet had been picked up swiftly and the decrypts relayed to Cunningham. The Admiral was one of just a very few of Britain’s war leaders to have been given clearance to receive Ultra decrypts.
In order to ensure British knowledge of Enigma traffic remained secret, the RAF then flew reconnaissance missions to give the impression that these were the source of the intelligence. Still flying from Malta were Adrian Warburton and his fellow photo reconnaissance crews of 69 Squadron. Warburton was sent to take photographs of the Italian Fleet, which he duly did, and then, while he and his crew were still flying high above them, he tried to relay the information back via radio. However, because of the numerous naval ships at sea, his message could not be received. Warburton eventually used a high-priority prefix, which indicated the sender was an air marshal, not a junior officer. This did the trick and the reply then asked him to try and identify as many Italian ships as possible. This Warburton did by flying so low the aircrews could read off the names.
Admiral Cunningham thus had a very clear picture of both where the Italian Fleet was and also its size and precise numbers. The nub, however, was how to force an engagement, because he was pretty certain Amiragglio Iachino had no intention at all of picking a fight, and that, rather, their putting to sea was more about paying lip service to their ally. Slipping out of Alexandria with his flagship, Warspite, Cunningham agreed to rendezvous with his second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Pridham-Wippell, and his cruiser force the following morning, by which time he would have assembled his battle fleet, along with a further force of destroyers.
Despite this, ABC had bet one of his staff officers ten shillings they would not even spot the enemy, so he was delighted when, the following morning before they had met up with Pridham-Wippell’s force, he received a signal from his second-in-command saying he had sighted the Italian Fleet. Pridham-Wippell was now trying to lure it towards Cunningham and the battle fleet. This was a dangerous game because the nine 15-inch guns of the Vittorio Veneto had the power to make short work of Pridham-Wippell’s cruiser force. The key was to draw the Italians to Cunningham without getting blasted themselves.
On board the Vittorio Veneto, the crew were all now at battle stations, Walter Mazzucato included, as the cruiser force chased its British counterparts and tried to bring them within range of the Vittorio Veneto. Eventually, the battleship was close enough to open fire, her huge 15-inch guns firing their shells from some fifteen miles.
On Warspite, Cunningham realized his cruiser force was now in dire need of help and so ordered off the torpedo-bombers from Formidable to attack and harry the Italians and the Vittorio Veneto especially. By the time these aircraft attacked, the Italian battleship had already fired ninety-four shells, although none had hit their target, and as Walter Mazzucato fired away at their aerial attackers, the big guns fell silent and the battleship began to withdraw. This was just what Cunningham had feared, and now he knew that the only chance of catching the Italians was if more aerial attacks could slow down their retreat.
While the Fleet Air Arm attacked twice more, so the cruiser force also continued to lob shells. At 3.19 p.m., Mazzucato was still firing when he saw three torpedo-bombers release their missiles. ‘The aircraft that was almost aligned with the bow of the ship,’ he remembered, ‘attacked with extreme resolution and a spirit of self-sacrifice in the face of a hail of anti-aircraft fire. Hit by it, the plane fell into the sea and disappeared.’ Moments later, however, Mazzucato was jolted as the torpedo scraped the stern and exploded outside the housing of the steering gear. Suddenly, water was pouring in, the helm became useless and the ship came to a halt. Mazzucato felt utterly bewildered as the ship began to lean, then looking up at the sky was absolutely convinced he then saw an image of the Madonna. ‘I was speechless,’ he wrote. ‘I stood looking at it for a few moments, then suddenly it disappeared and the light went, leaving behind a light grey cloud that slowly dissolved into the air.’ Whatever it was he had seen, he felt reassured that the ship would be saved. Sure enough, her engineers soon managed to get her going again, although using just one screw, which meant sailing at half-speed.
Cunningham now gave chase, conscious he had no chance of catching them before nightfall and that by the following morning the Italian Fleet would be within range of its own air forces. This meant that his only chance of a fleet engagement was to launch a night attack, a notoriously difficult and high-risk tactic. ABC’s staff officers were against it – the risk of collision and battle damage at a time when there were so many other demands on them seemed too great. ‘You’re a pack of yellow-livered skunks,’ he told them. A night battle was on.
Whether the Madonna had come to the rescue of the Italian battleship or not, she most certainly had deserted the cruiser Pola, which had been hit and stopped in the water. Amiragglio Iachino had not anticipated that his adversary would possibly attempt such an action, so while the Vittorio Veneto sailed on to Taranto, his two other cruisers and their destroyers were ordered to remain with the stricken Pola. These were picked up on Pridham-Wippell’s radar, so the British battle fleet was able to stealthily close in to about 4,000 yards – effectively point-blank range – and then swing around their mass of heavy guns. ‘Director layer sees target,’ Cunningham heard from the director tower. ‘Never,’ he wrote, ‘have I experienced a more thrilling moment.’ They opened fire moments later, as searchlights were turned on and lit up the Italian ships like rabbits in headlights. It was a massacre; all three cruisers were sunk. By morning, all that remained was a mass of debris, bobbing corpses and a film of oil, while the British fleet had picked up 900 Italian sailors. The Battle of Cape Matapan, as it quickly became known, had ensured that the threat of the Italian fleet was finished once and for all. For Mussolini, it was yet another humiliating blow.
None the less, however much the British might have been whipping the Italians, the Germans were now moving into the theatre. Over Malta, the Luftwaffe was hammering the tiny RAF defences, while, in Libya, General Rommel had launched a limited offensive, ignoring, in traditional Prussian style, the orders from his superiors to provide a blocking force and no more. With their forward positions weakened, the British had hastily withdrawn, first from El Agheila and then to Agedabia.
Meanwhile, as the two fleets had been chasing around the Mediterranean, extraordinary events were taking place in the Balkans. On 25 March, Yugoslavia stunned the free world by joining the Axis, but then in a coup two days later by a group of Air Force officers, Prince Paul, the Regent, and the Government were overthrown and the pact was revoked.
Hitler was already becoming increasingly frustrated and agitated by developments in the Balkans, which were proving a worrying distraction and diversion from his plans for invading the Soviet Union. On 30 March, Feldmarschall Erhard Milch, the deputy chief of the Luftwaffe, had been in Berlin to be harangued by Hitler. The Führer had given him and other generals a classic three-hour rant, in which he had repeatedly argued that the Western theatre – that is, the war against Britain – was still the most important one, and that the attack on the Balkans was, unfortunately, a vital prerequisite to the defeat of Britain. Also witness to this growing agitation was Major Gerhard Engel, his OKH Adjutant. Already, the Balkan situation had forced the Führer to accept postponement of BARBAROSSA. ‘By themselves,’ jotted Engel in his diary, ‘a couple of weeks earlier or later are not necessarily so bad, but we do not want to be surprised by the Russian winter.’ This was Warlimont’s concern too; already the Wehrmacht was spread so widely that logistical issues and the problems of supply, and the vast geographical range, meant that it was too late to change strategy in any way; thus any new problem had to be dealt with by being slotted into the existing strategic framework.
The news of Lend-Lease added further to German agitation and the grating sense that the clock was ticking. Britain was getting stronger; America was hovering in the shadows; they couldn’t get into Russia soon enough. Hitler was incensed and prone to go off repeatedly on long tirades against the Americans, Roosevelt in particular, and American Jewish high finance. His only solace was that it gave him the excuse to declare war, should he feel like it – as if he didn’t have enough enemies to contend with already.
So news of the Yugoslavian coup on 27 March 1941 went down particularly badly with the Führer. His response was to order the immediate invasion and crushing of the Yugoslavians. Again, it was left to the Army – and General Halder and his staff – rather than the OKW to devise a plan of action in lightning-quick time. Fortunately for them, this was more straightforward than it might have been: with Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania all now in the Axis camp, and with planning for Operation MARITA, the invasion of Greece, at an advanced stage, the forces needed were pretty much in position. The German 2. Armee, already in Austria, swiftly moved south into Hungary and, with the Italians on its right and the Hungarian Third Army on its left, on 6 April struck with a Schwerpunkt of three large mechanized columns, all driving towards the capital, Belgrade. This was following the classic Prussian principle of Bewegungskrieg: to head towards an objective the enemy simply could not afford to lose and would therefore have to defend. At the same time, a further mechanized force headed to Zagreb, while in the far south General von Kleist’s panzer group drove north from Bulgaria.
The Luftwaffe crushed the Yugoslav Air Force, mostly on the ground, in about twenty minutes, losing just two aircraft itself in the process. Meanwhile, the Yugoslav Army, a million strong but stretched around an impossibly long border of nearly 2,000 miles, and badly short of modern equipment, crumbled in just a few days under this clinical perfection of what had become known to the wider world as ‘Blitzkrieg’: lightning war.
On the same day that the Germans stormed into Yugoslavia, they also struck Greece, attacking with 12. Armee from Bulgaria and then splitting, with one force striking west then south from Yugoslavia and another bludgeoning its way towards the Aliákmon Line. Among those storming into southern Yugoslavia was Günther Sack, now a Feldwebel and in charge of ten men and a quick-firing light flak gun of 86. Light Anti-Aircraft Battalion. ‘I started this morning!’ he scribbled breathlessly in his diary. ‘We crossed the border at the craziest speed I’ve ever seen. We saw our Stukas, about thirty planes, accompanied by twenty fighters flying towards the enemy. Then we heard their detonations in the distance and saw them circle over the enemy. It was a fantastic image of modern war.’ The following day, they reached Skopje, and Sack was shocked by the levels of destruction caused by the Luftwaffe. ‘Our population at home should be very thankful that they do not have to experience a war in their own country. We are seeing horrible pictures here.’
Air power was once again leading the way for the Germans. The battle for Yugoslavia had begun with the almost instant obliteration of the Air Force, but in Greece it was not the Stukas Sack had been watching, but a Luftwaffe strike on the largest port, Piraeus, which did untold damage to the Allied cause.
Among those attacking Piraeus that night were Ju88s of ‘Adlergeschwader’ III/KG30, based at Gerbini in Sicily on the plain of Catania. One of the Gruppe’s Staffel commanders was Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, who had recovered from his injuries at Schiphol and been based in Sicily, attacking Malta and British targets in Cyrenaica, for the past couple of months.
Their task that night was to lay mines at the narrow entrance to the harbour with the hope that they would sink ships as they entered and then block ships trying to both go in and out. Each Ju88 was to be loaded with two mines each, but, during his recent operations against Malta, Herrmann had surreptitiously ordered his ground crew to increase the bomb load as well. Now, as he sat beneath the olive trees early that evening listening to the sound of his aircraft being warmed up, it occurred to him that two parachute mines seemed a bit feeble. With this in mind, he told his ground crew to add two 250kg bombs to the payload in addition to the mines.
It was around 450 miles to Piraeus, and with the extra load they would have enough fuel for 900; so it was cutting it a little tight, but Herrmann was confident it would be all right. Heading over to his aircraft, he watched the ground crew putting the bombs in place and then discussed with the other crews the plan of attack; they had done many such minelaying operations by moonlight before and this latest one was nothing for them to be overly concerned about.
Herrmann had hoped that darkness would fall before the commander, Major Arved Crüger, would come around and see the bombs hanging under each wing, but his hopes were in vain. ‘I thought as much,’ Crüger told him. ‘I’m telling you – take them off! You know very well what the weather’s like: heavy cumulus over Greece up to a great height. We’ll have to overfly them, and it can’t be done with the extra load.’ Reluctantly, Herrmann told his chief mechanic, Oberfeldwebel Lorenz, to take off the bombs. Then, once Crüger had gone, Lorenz stood there looking at Herrmann, not moving. There was clearly a choice to be made: Herrmann could defy his commander or do as he had been ordered. Silently, he stared at Lorenz, and, as he put his foot on the first rung of the ladder up into the aircraft, a moment of silent understanding passed between them. The bombs would stay.
They took off shortly before sunset, at intervals of a minute or two, and headed due east to avoid any night Beaufighters from Malta, climbing to around 2,500 feet. Crüger had suggested that because of the predicted cloud, once over Greece they should climb above it and fly directly to Piraeus using the light of the half-moon, but Herrmann, with his heavier load, decided to opt for a low approach beneath the cloud and through the Gulf of Patras and the Isthmus of Corinth. In any case, he always preferred a lower approach if at all possible; he disliked wearing an oxygen mask and nor did he like wearing the heavy overalls and fur boots needed for higher-altitude flying: they made him sweat during take-off, which then turned icy cold once aloft.
Key to their chances of safely negotiating this lower route and not flying into a mountain was going to be hitting the coast at a precise point, and, despite Herrmann’s mounting anxiety as they crossed the sea, they managed it perfectly, although they immediately hit a thunderstorm as a blinding flash of lightning lit the sky. Of course, Herrmann thought to himself: they were in the land of the ancient Gods. They flew on, across the isthmus and over Plataea and Marathon, and then there was Athens in the pale moonlight. For the first time in his life, Herrmann was looking at the places so familiar to him from his schoolboy studies. ‘Wonderful scenes,’ he noted, ‘made living by youthful memories.’
They circled low, then turned towards the harbour, knowing there was no better navigational aid than the enemy’s displays of searchlights and flak. The key was to weave from side to side and constantly adjust speed. And because the harbour entrance was so narrow, they had to fly low to drop the mines: the trick was to head straight in then perform a breakneck half-turn, and all at the reduced speed of around 200 mph to ensure the parachute mines opened as planned.
Herrmann turned the aircraft and prepared to make his run. As they approached the harbour entrance, they were bathed in light as searchlights hit them from ahead and both sides. Tracer and rapid-firing flak were flashing past them, glowing chunks of metal. Then the mines were dropped, as the crew’s machine-gunners fired for all they were worth. Someone said, ‘Whose idea was this operation anyway?’ as Herrmann put them into a full-throttle climb. They were out over the harbour again. Herrmann knew he now had to wait until the rest of his Staffel finished the mining job before he could return and use the bombs he had added. They could see a long line of ships moored alongside the quay, and agreed that a low horizontal approach gave them the best chance of hitting a target. After the navigator had made his careful calculations, Herrmann circled them out over the island of Salamis and then made his approach. As they got closer, flying in softly towards the west, the flak and searchlights had become more subdued, but they were still there. Herrmann reminded himself that it was not the red glow of tracer lines they needed to worry about but the afterglow left on the retina; if you were hit flying through flak, it was just bad luck. One had to be fatalistic; the more one was, the less one had to draw on reserves of courage.
They dropped low, now flying straight and level towards the harbour. ‘Ten seconds to go,’ said Schmetz, the observer and bomb aimer. Herrmann flattened out some more, opened the throttles a fraction and gave his instruments one last brief glance. His mouth was dry. Then the bombs were released, the Ju88, suddenly lightened, rose up, and Herrmann put the aircraft into a steep turn to port, waiting for the fifteen-second delay until the bombs detonated.
Suddenly, there was a massive bright flash, then a further explosion, and wild gusts of turbulence hurled the aircraft about violently. Rapidly regaining control, Herrmann turned out to sea and below in the port they could see yet more explosions and white glowing masses hurling themselves into the night sky. What had happened? They had merely aimed for the largest ship; never had they seen a couple of bombs have such a devastating effect.
As they were escaping the fray and setting a course for home, a lone light anti-aircraft gun hit them with a hefty thump. Moments later, coolant began to leak and the temperature in the port engine began to rise. Herrmann cut the engine immediately to stop a possible seizure or, worse, a fire, and they had to continue on their way with just one engine, no easy task in a Ju88. ‘Gloom took over,’ Herrmann wrote, ‘but the best way to get rid of it was by activity. So: throttle back. Ignition off. Propeller feathered, and press on one engine.’
After a long and fraught journey, they eventually made it to Rhodes, an island in the Dodecanese seized by the Italians back in 1912, and their prearranged emergency landing strip. It was also in completely the opposite direction, lying as it did just off the coast of Turkey. By the time they finally touched down, Herrmann had been struggling with cramps in his right leg for much of the journey. It was hardly a smooth landing: visibility was minimal, and they had no idea when the field might run out, but at last they came to a halt – alive and in one piece. For a moment, no one spoke. Herrmann just sat there then switched off the ignition for the starboard engine. In all his many combat operations, he had never felt happier to be back on hard ground. Then eventually he said, ‘Out you get, men.’
Little did they realize it at the time, but the last-minute decision of Oberfeldwebel Lorenz and Herrmann to fly with those two bombs effectively sealed the fate of the Greeks on that opening night of the German invasion. The bombs struck the 12,000-ton freighter Clan Fraser, which had just arrived with a convoy and was carrying 350 tons of explosives. Only a hundred had been offloaded at the time it was hit. The explosion shattered windows in Athens seven miles away, Clan Fraser was obliterated and ten other ships totalling 41,000 tons were also destroyed in the massive explosion. Even worse, this almost seismic explosion wrecked the port so that no further ships could use the harbour for several months. In one chance strike, Greece’s main port and the only one that could feasibly be used to supply the British was wiped out. No other single attack of the war had so far caused such astonishing levels of destruction.
It was a blow from which the British, and the Greeks, would not recover in Greece, and came just as British fortunes were turning against them in North Africa as well, where Rommel was refusing to be tamed. Once again, German commanders were ignoring the orders of their seniors. On that night in Piraeus, such insubordination had paid off spectacularly.