The Allies in Crete and the Peloponnese

At the turn of September and October 1944 the Germans were leaving Greece – first the south and the islands, then the mainland. War chronologies often state under 2 October that “the Allies landed on Crete”, and under 10 October that “combined Allied forces took Corinth”. The first of these statements needs clear correction: Crete was not taken by a landing, and the German garrison did not surrender in the autumn of 1944. The Germans withdrew to the western end of the island, into the so-called fortress around Chania, and held it until May 1945. The towns they abandoned – above all Heraklion, which the Germans left on 11 October – were entered by Cretan partisans accompanied by a handful of British officers. In the Peloponnese, on the other hand, a small British force really was in action, and within a fortnight or so it advanced from Araxos airfield through Patras to Corinth, clearing the way for the main forces bound for Athens.

The Germans leave Greece

The position of the German forces in Greece changed radically at the end of August 1944. After the coup in Romania and the coup in Bulgaria, the Red Army stood on the Danube, and the Bulgarian divisions that had been occupying eastern Macedonia and Thrace went over to the Allies. The German forces in the southern Balkans were in danger of being cut off: their only lines of retreat ran through Macedonia and Serbia, where Tito’s partisans were operating, while Soviet and Bulgarian troops were approaching from the east.

Greece and the Aegean islands were held by Army Group E of Colonel General Alexander Löhr, which was subordinate to Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs’s Commander-in-Chief South-East. At the turn of August and September Hitler agreed to a gradual evacuation of the islands and southern Greece. The withdrawal proceeded in stages: troops were moved from the smaller islands and the Peloponnese to the mainland, and then north towards Salonika and on into Yugoslav Macedonia. A large part of the Crete garrison was taken to the mainland by night, in transport aircraft and small craft; well over ten thousand soldiers nevertheless remained on the island.

The British, who by then commanded the air and the sea in the eastern Mediterranean, hampered this evacuation only to a limited extent. Some Greek historians see in this a tacit understanding between London and the German command – the Germans were supposedly to withdraw without destroying the towns and hand them over to the British rather than to the ELAS partisans. The thesis is disputed and there is no unequivocal documentary evidence for it; what is certain is that the British command cared above all that, when the Germans left, it should be British troops and the government of Georgios Papandreou, and not units controlled by the communists, that were in Athens.

The political framework for the entry into Greece was laid down by the Caserta Agreement, signed on 26 September. Under it all Greek partisan forces – both the communist ELAS and the republican EDES – placed themselves under the Government of National Unity, which in turn put them under the orders of the British Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie. In Athens no action was to be taken except on his direct orders. Scobie’s troops – designated Force 140 – came under the Allied Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean, General Henry Maitland Wilson. The whole undertaking was code-named Operation Manna.

Bucket Force in the Peloponnese

Before the main forces could move into Greece, airfields and ports were needed. As early as mid-September a small British detachment occupied the island of Kythira off the southern coast of the Peloponnese without a fight, and a forward base was set up there. The next step was the formation of a group called Bucket Force. It was commanded by the 26-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Jellicoe, son of the admiral of Jutland and commander of the Special Boat Service (then the Special Boat Squadron). The group comprised an SBS squadron, patrols of the Long Range Desert Group, a company of the Highland Light Infantry, a Royal Marines commando detachment and a squadron of the RAF Regiment – in all, according to British accounts, about 450 men.

On 23 September a party of paratroopers landed south-west of Patras and seized Araxos airfield, at the north-western tip of the Peloponnese, without opposition. The next day men of the RAF Regiment and the LRDG were put ashore at the port of Katakolo near Pyrgos. Jellicoe’s force was too weak to take towns by storm, and Patras itself held a German garrison supported by the Greek Security Battalions, the collaborationist formations raised by the government of Ioannis Rallis. ELAS units had also taken up positions outside the town, determined not to let the collaborators slip into British protection without a reckoning.

For several days the British carried out feints around Patras, giving the Germans the impression that much larger forces were on the way. During the night of 3–4 October word reached Bucket Force headquarters that the Germans were leaving the town, evacuating by sea across the Gulf of Corinth. On 4 October Jellicoe’s men entered Patras. The members of the Security Battalions left behind by the Germans surrendered to the British, which saved them from the ELAS partisans but, in the eyes of the left, tainted the British presence from the outset. Patras was one of the few towns where the British and ELAS worked together to protect the port and infrastructure from destruction.

Corinth

From Patras the group moved east along the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, through Aigio and Kiato, on the heels of the retreating Germans. Captured vehicles gave the advance its speed, and in places so did caiques – Greek fishing boats used to ferry men along the coast. On 7 October the leading units reached Corinth. A German rearguard was still on the far side of the Corinth Canal; shots were exchanged, and in the town itself another battalion of Greek collaborators laid down its arms. Over the following days the Germans withdrew across the isthmus towards Megara and Athens, and the whole Corinth area passed into Allied hands. Chronologies give 10 October as the day Corinth was taken, whereas the accounts of British participants speak of reaching the town as early as 7 October. The discrepancy most probably arises because the later date refers to full control of the isthmus area after the last Germans had gone, and not to the first entry of patrols.

The phrase “combined Allied forces” is apt to the extent that it was not only British units that took part in operations in the Peloponnese and the islands. In the Aegean, soldiers of the Greek Sacred Band were in action – an elite unit made up mainly of officers of the Greek army in exile, under British command and working with the SBS; in October its detachments landed on one island after another as the Germans left them. Warships of the Greek navy in exile escorted Force 140’s convoys. On land, however, the numerically decisive force remained ELAS, which controlled most of the interior of the Peloponnese and occupied the towns the Germans were leaving.

The capture of Corinth opened the way to Attica. Jellicoe’s next objective was the airfield at Megara, where a British parachute battalion was to land on 12 October – the beginning of the entry of Operation Manna’s main forces into Athens.

Crete: a fortress instead of a landing

Crete had been in German hands since the Battle of Crete in May 1941. Throughout three years of occupation it was one of the most heavily garrisoned areas of Greece – at the peak, in 1943, some 75,000 troops were stationed there according to German figures. The island also became one of the centres of Greek resistance. Cretan partisans, supported by British SOE officers – among them Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in the spring of 1944 abducted General Heinrich Kreipe from the island – attacked airfields and outposts, and the Germans retaliated with punitive operations against villages, especially around Viannos and the Kedros massif.

When the decision to evacuate Greece was taken in the autumn of 1944, the Crete garrison was only partly shipped to the mainland. The remaining forces, some 12,000 men, together with several Italian battalions that had gone on fighting on the German side after Italy’s surrender, withdrew from the central and eastern parts of the island to the west, into the area around Chania and Suda Bay. Command of “Fortress Crete” (Festung Kreta) was taken over on 9 October by Colonel, later Generalmajor, Hans-Georg Benthack. The Germans pulled out of the eastern prefectures, Lasithi and Heraklion, gradually; the last units left Heraklion on 11 October, and according to Cretan accounts the rearguard was accompanied by British liaison officers to prevent clashes in the town. As soon as they had gone, the partisans entered Heraklion, welcomed by crowds of inhabitants.

There was thus no Allied landing to liberate Crete on 2 October – or on any other day that autumn. The British sent only small forces to the island, which together with Greek units formed a weak, mixed garrison in the east of Crete; the main burden rested on the Cretan resistance. The date of 2 October may refer to the arrival of the first such detachments or to the partisans’ entry into places the Germans were abandoning, but no known source describes that day as the start of a landing operation. An informal truce settled in between the Germans in Chania and the British and Greek forces, broken by skirmishes with the partisans. The fortress garrison, cut off from supplies and, like the civilian population, suffering from food shortages, held on in this way until Germany’s surrender. In May 1945 Benthack surrendered the German forces on the island to the British Major General Colin Callander, and on 23 May the Germans left Chania – one of the last towns in Greece to be freed.

Significance

The events at the turn of September and October 1944 showed what the liberation of Greece looked like: not a great battle, but a race for towns abandoned by a retreating enemy. The Germans, threatened with being cut off by the Red Army in the Balkans, wanted above all to get their troops away to the north. The British had only small forces in Greece – a few battalions and special units – and their aim was not so much to destroy the Germans as to seize key points before ELAS did. The EAM partisans, who in the spring of 1944 had set up the Political Committee of National Liberation, controlled most of the country and had accepted the Caserta Agreement, but they watched with growing distrust as British soldiers accepted the surrender of the collaborationist battalions.

On 12 October the Germans left Athens, and over the following days British troops and the Papandreou government entered the city. Army Group E continued its retreat through Macedonia; the last German units left mainland Greece at the beginning of November. On Crete, Rhodes, Leros and several other Aegean islands German garrisons held out until the end of the war in Europe. After leaving Athens, Jellicoe pursued the retreating Germans through Thessaly and Macedonia. Meanwhile the fragile agreement on which the British entry rested collapsed at the beginning of December 1944: a dispute over disarming the partisans led to fighting between ELAS and British troops in Athens and, in the longer run, to the Greek Civil War.