The evacuation from Crete

On the evening of 28 May 1941, eight days after German paratroopers landed on Crete, British warships approached the island’s coast from two sides. Off Heraklion on the north coast, the cruisers and destroyers of Rear Admiral Bernard Rawlings waited for the garrison that had been holding out, surrounded, for a week. To the small harbour of Chora Sfakion on the south coast, at the foot of the Lefka Ori (the White Mountains), came four destroyers to take off the first soldiers of the columns that for two days had been marching over the mountains from the area of Chania and Suda Bay. So began the last phase of the Battle of Crete: for four nights Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet, a month after the evacuation from Greece, was once again carrying a defeated army away from under German bombs. It saved some 17,000 men, but paid for it with losses of ships greater than in any earlier operation of the war.

War chronologies associate three items of news with these days: under 24 May they record that the Greek government leaves Crete for Cairo, under 28 May that British and Dominion troops begin to evacuate the island, and separately they mention the losses of the Royal Navy. The first of these needs to be made more precise. King George II and the Prime Minister, Emmanouil Tsouderos, had sailed from Crete as early as the night of 22–23 May and were in Alexandria by the evening of 23 May. On 24 May, therefore, the Greek leaders were already in Egypt, and only the last members of the government were leaving the island: during the night of 24–25 May the minelayer Abdiel took four Greek ministers off from Suda Bay.

The King in the mountains

George II and Tsouderos had moved to Crete on 23 April, as the Germans approached Athens. As long as even a scrap of Greek soil remained free, the lawful government was to remain on it – so both the Greeks and the British cabinet reasoned. In May, when it was already clear that the Germans would strike at the island, the King and the Prime Minister themselves preferred to leave before the attack, since departure would then look less like flight. Major General Bernard Freyberg, who commanded the island’s defence, supported them, but General Archibald Wavell and the Foreign Office judged that the King’s presence on Crete mattered to the Greeks and to opinion in neutral countries. The King stayed, and in case of invasion an escape route was prepared for him across the mountains to the south coast.

On the morning of 20 May paratroopers landed less than a kilometre from Tsouderos’s house near Chania, where the King was staying. The party – the King, Prince Peter, the Prime Minister and a dozen or so civilians – set off hurriedly into the mountains, escorted by a platoon of the New Zealand 18th Battalion. For two days it climbed shepherds’ paths up the slopes of the Lefka Ori, spent a night by a shepherd’s hut above the snow line, and then descended through the Samaria Gorge to the village of Agia Roumeli. There the British minister, Sir Michael Palairet, was already waiting with his staff. At about one o’clock in the morning of 23 May the destroyer Decoy answered signals from the shore. Embarkation was completed at about four in the morning, and Decoy and the destroyer Hero sailed for Alexandria. From Egypt the King and Tsouderos’s government moved to Cairo, and later also to London, and until 1944 they functioned as the Greek government-in-exile recognised by the Allies.

The fleet under the bombs

Before the fleet began taking off troops, it had fought for a week to prevent the Germans from bringing reinforcements to Crete by sea. Cunningham sent cruiser and destroyer forces into the waters north of the island, sweeping the sea by night and withdrawing southwards at dawn, and a battleship force to the west of Crete. During the night of 21–22 May Rear Admiral Irvine Glennie’s force broke up, north of Cape Spatha, a convoy of caiques and small steamers carrying soldiers of the 5th Mountain Division. According to German reports more than 300 men were killed, and half of the roughly 2,300 aboard never reached the island. On the morning of 22 May Rear Admiral Edward King’s force turned back a second convoy. Until the battle was decided, the Germans did not manage to bring any substantial forces to Crete by sea.

The fleet paid the price. The ships were operating within range of the airfields of VIII Air Corps on the mainland and in the Dodecanese, without fighter cover, and for whole days they fought off attacks by Ju 87 and Ju 88 dive bombers. On 21 May Italian bombers sank the destroyer Juno. 22 May was the worst day: in the Kithira Channel, west of the island, the destroyer Greyhound went down, in the afternoon the cruiser Gloucester, on which more than 700 of her 807 men were killed, and in the evening the cruiser Fiji, which had fired off all her anti-aircraft ammunition. Bombs also hit the battleships Warspite and Valiant. On the morning of 23 May, south of Crete, Ju 87s sank within a few minutes the destroyers Kelly and Kashmir, on which roughly half the crews were killed. The flotilla commander, Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, survived, and the story of his ship served a year later as the basis for Noël Coward’s film In Which We Serve. On 26 May aircraft from the carrier Formidable attacked the airfield on Karpathos, and a few hours later German dive bombers badly damaged the carrier, which was out of action for many months.

From Maleme to Galatas

On land the battle was decided in the first three days. When during the night of 20–21 May the New Zealanders abandoned Hill 107 above the airfield at Maleme, the Germans began landing Ju 52 transport aircraft there with battalions of General Julius Ringel’s 5th Mountain Division. A counter-attack to retake the airfield was prepared for the night of 21–22 May. It was to be carried out by the New Zealand 20th Battalion and the 28th (Māori) Battalion, but the 20th Battalion had to wait until it was relieved by an Australian battalion, which arrived very late. The attack went in several hours behind schedule and at dawn on 22 May it stalled under the fire of dug-in paratroopers and under air attack. From then on the Germans flew new battalions into Maleme every day, and the New Zealand 5th Brigade fell back eastwards towards Chania.

On 25 May the Germans attacked the village of Galatas, a key position west of Chania, and took it in the evening. Colonel Howard Kippenberger, commanding the New Zealand 10th Brigade, gathered two companies of the 23rd Battalion and the remnants of the 18th Battalion and at about 8.10 p.m., behind two light tanks under Lieutenant Roy Farran, led them in a bayonet counter-attack. With a battle cry they burst into the village and drove the Germans out in hand-to-hand fighting. The position could not be held, however, and that same night the line was pulled back. For the fighting on Crete from 22 to 30 May Lieutenant Charles Upham of the 20th Battalion was awarded the first of his two Victoria Crosses.

The decision

On the morning of 26 May Freyberg concluded that Crete was lost. At 9.30 a.m. he sent Wavell a signal: the troops had reached the limit of their endurance, and the position was hopeless, whatever the commanders in Cairo decided. If withdrawal and evacuation were decided on at once, part of the force, though not all of it, could be saved. If, however, the situation in the Middle East required that every hour count, he would fight on.

In London Winston Churchill would not accept defeat. At 1.35 a.m. on 27 May he cabled Wavell that victory in Crete was essential and that fresh reinforcements must keep being thrown in. That same night the minelayer Abdiel and two destroyers landed some 750 commandos of Colonel Robert Laycock’s Layforce at Suda Bay. On the morning of 27 May, however, Wavell reported to the Prime Minister that the battle was lost. The Chiefs of Staff ordered an immediate evacuation, with the saving of men taking priority over equipment, and at 3.50 p.m. Wavell reported to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that he had ordered it. Freyberg, who in view of the collapse of the front had already had to direct units southwards even though he did not yet have formal approval for an evacuation, moved his headquarters to Sfakia.

On 27 May, on the road from Suda to Chania, at the spot the soldiers called “42nd Street”, the Māori and the Australian 2/7th and 2/8th Battalions launched a bayonet charge against an advancing regiment of mountain troops and threw it back with heavy losses. This check gave time for the retreat to begin. The columns, in which formed brigades marched alongside thousands of stragglers from rear units, often without weapons or officers, set off along the road through Stylos, Askyfou and Imbros southwards, over the pass in the Lefka Ori, to Sfakia. The retreat was covered in turn by the rearguard of the New Zealand 5th Brigade, the 2/7th Battalion and Layforce. On 28 May at Stylos two Māori companies under Captain Rangi Royal routed an attacking German battalion. Layforce, which was to have been a reinforcement, became the rearguard and paid the highest price for it: of the roughly 800 commandos sent to Crete, fewer than two hundred returned to the ships, and Laycock himself, together with his intelligence officer, the writer Evelyn Waugh, broke out of encirclement in a tank. On 28 May, when the issue had been decided, some 3,000 Italians from Rhodes landed unopposed at the eastern end of the island near Sitia.

The night off Heraklion

The first night proved the costliest. The Heraklion garrison – the British 14th Brigade of Brigadier B. H. Chappel with the Australian 2/4th Battalion and Greek units – had been fighting off paratroopers since 20 May, but it was cut off from the rest of the island and had no hope of relief. Rawlings’s force – the cruisers Orion, Ajax and Dido and six destroyers – was under air attack from five in the afternoon of 28 May. The damaged Ajax turned back to Alexandria, and the remaining ships arrived off Heraklion at 11.30 p.m. By three in the morning they had taken off some 4,000 men, practically the entire British and Australian garrison.

On the return voyage, at dawn on 29 May, the force had to pass through the Kasos Strait, within range of the airfields in the Dodecanese. Half an hour after sailing the destroyer Imperial, damaged the previous day by a near miss, lost her steering. Her crew and troops were taken off by Hotspur, and the ship was sunk. Because Rawlings had slowed down to wait for her, the force was still close to Crete at sunrise. The destroyer Hereward, hit by a bomb, fell behind and sank off the island’s coast; Italian warships picked up the survivors and took them prisoner. For several hours dive bombers attacked the cruisers. Dido and Orion were hit; on Orion, crammed with troops, bombs exploded in the spaces below deck, and her captain, Captain G. R. B. Back, was mortally wounded. Orion reached Alexandria with ten tons of fuel and two rounds for her main guns. According to the New Zealand official history, of the roughly 4,000 soldiers taken off, some 600 were killed or captured and 280 were wounded. 3,486 men went ashore at Alexandria.

The garrison of Retimo (Rethymno) never received the evacuation order at all. Coded signals did not get through the mountains, and an order dropped from an aircraft never arrived. Lieutenant Colonel Ian Campbell’s Australians, who for ten days had defended the airfield and taken hundreds of prisoners, were surrounded on 30 May by German columns advancing from Chania and had to surrender.

Sfakia

On the south coast the embarkation looked different. The beach at Chora Sfakion was small, and by day the soldiers had to hide from aircraft in the caves and ravines above the village, coming down a steep path to the shore at night. The ships could stay there only a few hours after dark and had to leave before dawn. During the night of 28–29 May four destroyers under Captain S. H. T. Arliss took off, according to various tallies, between some 700 and 1,100 men. The next night Rear Admiral King’s force arrived with the cruisers Phoebe and Perth, two anti-aircraft cruisers, the landing ship Glengyle and three destroyers. It took off some 6,000 soldiers, although on the return voyage a bomb hit Perth. During the night of 30–31 May some 1,500 men were embarked on the two destroyers that reached Sfakia.

After the losses off Heraklion, the commanders in Cairo and Alexandria wondered whether it made sense to go on risking the fleet. Cunningham is said to have replied: “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It would take three hundred years to build a new tradition.” The evacuation would continue. During the night of 30–31 May Freyberg, on orders from Cairo, flew to Egypt in a Sunderland flying boat, handing over command to Major General Eric Weston of the Royal Marines.

On 31 May Cunningham decided that this night would be the last. The fleet was at the end of its tether: after King’s force returned, he would be left, as he reported to the Admiralty, with two battleships, one cruiser, two anti-aircraft cruisers, a minelayer and nine destroyers fit for action. Under pressure from the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser, who was in Egypt and fighting for his soldiers, he nevertheless told King to take, beyond the previous limit, as many men as the ships could hold. During the night of 31 May – 1 June King’s ships took some 4,000 soldiers off from Sfakia, including most of the New Zealand 5th Brigade and some of the Australians who had held the rearguard to the end. Weston flew out by Sunderland. In London Cunningham’s decision caused consternation, but the admiral replied that there were no more ships and that the men left behind would have had to surrender anyway. The war at sea claimed one more victim: on the morning of 1 June, not far from Alexandria, German bombers sank the anti-aircraft cruiser Calcutta, which had been sent out to meet the convoy.

Weston left a written surrender order on the shore. On the morning of 1 June Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker of the Australian 2/7th Battalion, the senior officer remaining at Sfakia, told the men to destroy their weapons and save themselves if they could, and then surrendered to an Austrian officer of the German mountain division. How many were left is hard to establish: those on the spot estimated about 5,000, while on 2 June the Germans reported 6,500 prisoners. Some took to the mountains. Hidden by Cretans, who paid for it with burned houses and their lives, over the following months they made their way to Egypt in boats, caiques and submarines.

The toll

According to the New Zealand official history, after deducting those killed on the way and errors in counting, some 17,000 soldiers were evacuated from Crete; other tallies give figures from 16,500 to 18,600. Of the roughly 32,000 British and Dominion soldiers who defended the island, according to British tallies some 1,750 were killed and nearly 12,000 were taken prisoner. Of more than 10,000 Greeks, more than 5,000 were captured. The Royal Navy lost three cruisers and six destroyers, while the battleships Warspite and Barham, the carrier Formidable and several cruisers and destroyers went into the dockyards for long months. Some 1,800–2,000 sailors were killed, roughly as many as the soldiers who fell on land. On the German side, a report by Luftflotte 4 from November 1941 listed 3,986 killed and missing. The British official historians gave a total of some 6,100 men, including the wounded; wartime Allied estimates speaking of well over ten thousand were exaggerated. The Luftwaffe lost, or had to write off, some 280 aircraft, many of them Ju 52 transports.

Place in the war

On 1 June Crete was in German hands. The victory, however, cost the elite 7th Air Division so much that Adolf Hitler drew far-reaching conclusions from it. In July 1941, as General Kurt Student related after the war, Hitler told him that Crete had proved that the days of the paratrooper were over, because airborne landings had lost the element of surprise. The Germans never again carried out a major airborne operation, and from then on the paratroopers were used mainly as elite infantry. The British, for their part, concluded that airfields had to be defended like fortresses, which in 1942 led to the creation of the RAF Regiment.

For the British, Crete was the latest in a series of evacuations – after Norway, Dunkirk and Greece – in little more than a year, and a painful defeat which, in the eyes of the public, was partly overshadowed by the sinking of the Bismarck on 27 May. The Mediterranean Fleet emerged from it so weakened that for months afterwards it struggled to supply Tobruk and Malta. Fears that the Germans would use the island as a springboard for a leap to Cyprus, Syria or Egypt proved unfounded: a few weeks later the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union, in accordance with Directive No. 21, and Crete became for the Germans above all a shield for their southern flank. Historians generally reject the view that the fighting on Crete delayed the attack on the USSR, but the losses in men and transport aircraft made themselves felt by the Luftwaffe at the start of that campaign.

For the Cretans the end of the evacuation was the beginning of occupation. Civilians who had taken up arms against the paratroopers were, in German eyes, outlaw partisans. On 31 May Student ordered “punitive expeditions”. On 2 June paratroopers at Kondomari shot 23 men according to German documents, and some 60 according to other sources, and on 3 June German soldiers razed Kandanos to the ground, killing some 180 inhabitants (the massacres of Kandanos and Kondomari). These were the first in a long series of reprisals that accompanied the struggle of the Cretan resistance throughout four years of occupation. Many British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had failed to get away owed their lives and their escape to the Cretans. The memory of this help, like that of the help given by the Greeks on the mainland, became a lasting part of the history of this war in Australia and New Zealand.